Sorry for taking a while.
Yeah I quite like the game. It's quite a bit of a time sink though, wouldn't expect to be speeding through it. I usually will go do like one or two forays a day after I finish my HW or something then write down in a journal what my plans for the next day are. You can learn more about it
here, or just ask me stuff on my message wall as I'm available to talk about verses I like.
Firstly, everyone in the Courtyard is presumably a victim stemming from what the Ancestor did so long ago. Considering that
the courtyard is massive, that's gonna be quite a high number of individuals. The Courtyard doesn't ever seem to run out of bodies either, as even after killing all the bosses you can keep foraying into it deeper and deeper, encountering more abominations overcome by the crimson curse each time. Unlike the Farmstead, there's no weird temporal shenanigans going on to pull infinite enemies out of pasts and futures, the implication here is that there's just a looooot of victims here. Remember that all this originated with the Ancestor poisoning the alcohol at that one party, and that party members can chug vials of the blood which he used to do this no problem.
Now, a counter to this sort of absurd potency would be "but the plague can spread further without his influence, and as such the one vial of blood doesn't need to drive all those people mad" which would be right in its own, which is why we shall turn to the exact history of that curious blood. When the Ancestor consumed the blood, all he got was a fleeting vision of the Heart of Darkness, which is spoiler bait so if you're interested in the game and care about spoilers I won't really explain more than what is needed right now. This indicates the blood has some sort of connection to the Heart itself. Seeing the form of the heart later drove even the Ancestor into madness, who can handle his own stuff. It seems likely then that this insanity induced onto so many is caused at its core by the blood awakening them to the existence of the Heart, and their minds being unable to sustain this. Now, why is this important? Because you fight the heart immediately after the Ancestor and the Heart's madness stuff is only about twice as good as the Ancestors. Hell, one of the Ancestor's nastier moves is
on par with the heart's stuff. This more solidly backs the idea of the Ancestor having quite the penchant for the inducement of insanity.
Now, the resistances you posted are not unimpressive by any means, and I'm assuming the verse would scale with magical power judging by how you've described things. While your resistance scaling isn't the most quantifiable thing, my madness scaling isn't either, so there's that.
My assessment seems to be that the Ancestor's madness may not be a literal "one thought one win", but that it will still be an extremely important part of the battle and that he should be able to wear down even a resistant mind given the change. Almost everything he does has some form of this shit tacked on to it, even shifting into a weirder form. I do feel like singular usages should at least be enough to disorient, seeing as he has an attack that can shuffle party members even without hitting a stress check.
