The collector is so broken

The collector in darkest dungeon 2 is so unfair.

I can go ahead and say it was probably a skill issue, but lost an extremely strong team to the collector because my team was a front rank targeting team with no back rank targeting—hence the skill issue—but I made up for this because my team could survive extremely long. Except, they could do nothing when we randomly encountered the collector who not only has life steal, but seemed to summon collection literally any time we got him to the second rank. We got him on death’s door, then he summoned his goons, got healed by them, then used life steal, and after a round of killing his goons, he’d immediately summon them again, rinse repeat. Survived till round 40, before I just gave up on it because literally nothing I did would stop him from just summoning again and being out of reach.

The worst thing about this is it’s a random encounter on the road. I had characters I could opt into back lane targets but I had no way of knowing that the random road battle would be the collector.

It’s just so frustrating. Is there any tips anyone has for him? Like, does losing a specific head cause him to use summon again, or is it random? It just sucks that in a game about turn based strategy, you can lose solely due to rng by encountering an enemy that isn’t optional like the lair bosses or the academic boss thing are. Sorry if this post breaks any rules, also…just wanted to vent a bit. It really sucks losing a team like that, and having no chance to actually counter play it.