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[Guide] Boss Strategies

PostPosted: 31 Jul 2015, 09:44
by maxwell3094
So this seems like something this forum REALLY should have. In fact I actually expected it to already exist and was surprised to not find something similar when I tried to find advice for Satan. As the saying goes if you want something done right do it yourself so what the hell why not. No reason for me to not do all the others while im at it. Hopefully others will contribute and this thread can end up serving as a more or less comprehensive guide on how to deal with all the bosses.

Before I actually start off with my strategies 3 things to note. First is that all of mine are for ranged characters, specifically wands, (though to offset the poor early game I used bows too pre-seki) so if your a melee character I probably can't help you. Secondly these are all assuming solo play on normal mode without moon king (blasphemy im sure but ive never bothered to use it.) Lastly all my strategies for bosses before Plant are from back before I quit due to the horrid experience rates meaning I was totally under leveled for all of them. For that matter considering ive been doing the stuff from nakawhatever and edo while in the 80s I guess ALL my strategies involve me being under leveled huh? Tee Hee~?

Image Chief Daruma - Is mentioning this one even really necessary? Ah well. Just don't stand in front of him and shoot him while watching out for the smoke, kick, and bombs which are all a joke to avoid. And of course make sure to kill the little daruma he spawns to remove his invincibility.

Tiamat - Tiamat is pretty easy if your ranged. Just let it do its charge attack at you, move to the side, and blast it as its running past. Only thing to really watch out for is the fireball spray. Either get in close and stay on its side where you can take more shots at it without waiting for a charge or hang back leaving yourself plenty of room to safely dodge between the fireballs. Alternatively if your a bow you can just block them.

Image Momotarou - This one gets a bit trickier. You have to be more careful here since he moves pretty fast. Your best bet is to get him to do an attack and then take a potshot at him using a fast casting skill before rolling out of the way. Rinse repeat.

Ahriman - (Note that my info on this one may be outdated as ive heard of past bosses getting buffs and have yet to re-experience this one.) Simple and easy. Just run around him staying at about the very edge of the circle he spawns in. After he does the line of lightning strikes at you rekt him.

Statue (Yea I forgot its name. Sue me.) - This one can be nasty. Try to keep it at the VERY edge of normal fireball spell range and painstakingly pluck at it. You can also take shots at it after avoiding its sword dive but just make sure your not near where it stops. It likes to come out of that dive swinging and this dude has a CRAZY reach. Curse arrow works nicely to speed things up if you manage to debuff him with it since it lets you take more shots at him instead of taking one and running. Even if you don't have it yourself Kaguya is more than willing to apply it for you at times. Just out for when it ends so that he doesn't come flying at you with your pants down. Also another idea would be bright homing. I never had a chance to try it on him since that was back before it was added in but since it has a long range like ice needle you could get some distance, cast it early, and then let him walk into it. Of course don't try full casting it unless your suicidal or something.

Bel Bel~ - Things go back to being easy with this one. If your far enough away from him then he will try and tackle you. Rekt him while he recovers from it. Try to avoid staying near him because if your close but not in melee range he tends to do his "fly around and troll the player" move. Between dodging the flies spit out during it and avoiding where he lands you wont really have any time to do attacks of your own. When Bel Bel is in the air NOBODY is happy. Keep an eye on the baby flies throughout the fight. They should pose no threat to you on their own but nothing sucks more than having one of the little bastards sneak up on you in order to set you up for Daddy.

Image Benkei - Bel Bel may have been a nice breather but naturally it couldn't last. What you need to watch out for here is Benkei's electric ball spray. Tiamat's fireballs are one thing but these suckers are FAST and they HURT. My old trick for dealing with him is...interesting to say the least. Basically just get him stuck behind one of the pillars in the room and shoot him through it since they would block his electric balls of doom. As an added bonus while he is stuck there you can freely blast him with your best skills without worrying about him reaching melee range with you. If you were to ask me how to beat him without cheesing him like tell you good luck...IF you had asked me that back before wands became able to block that is. Now you can perfect guard the spray and laugh at him as you shoot him in response.

Image Odin - If you thought Benkei was bad ive got some BAD news for you. This guy is pretty fast, leaves few openings, and will most likely kill you with a single unguarded hit. Don't take any chances here. Just draw out his jump and dive attack, dodge, and hit him with something fast as he lands. Be careful to keep him at about the edge of fireball range because his Link sword spin around himself is DEVASTATING. Also keep an eye out for when he raises his sword up and back off. He has a pretty big aoe where he scorches the ground around him for quite some distance. (Though this move may have been removed or changed so that he only does it on hell at some point since I didn't see it last time I fought him). He also has a 2nd move that uses the same sword raising motion but in this case for summoning crystals at the edges of the field. These can be a giant pain in the ass since they take potshots at you. Even assuming you survive a hit from them getting staggered will almost certainly result in Odin killing you. Thankfully all the ones far away remain dormant for some reason and he wont replace them if you only kill 1 or 2. Just pick a corner, kill the 2 near it, and deal with him without straying too far from the corner.

Also he seems to have a new move since I last played where he jumps up but instead of doing the dive attack he shoots out some homing magic balls at you before gently landing. These things have some pretty good homing on them too so your best bet will be blocking. Watch out though because depending on the direction he jumps in these could be coming at you from behind.

ImageDeath Scythe - Debated not even including him but eh he shows up again in the Hades fight so might as well I guess. This is just a complete and total joke. This is not a fight but a brutal slaughter where he is the victim. His AI makes him stop just outside of fireball range. Once there he will proceed to do a darkness pillar sort of move that hits in an aoe around himself. Over. And over. And over again. Move forward that little bit so you can reach him with fireball range moves and start blasting. Alternatively summon a ranged companion like Loliratsu, hit him once, and then let her deal with him while you go fap to hentai or some shit.

Cerberus (all of them)(Possibly outdated yadayada) - Another joke. Blast him while he dances about from side to side. Don't risk any slow skills though. You want to stay moving as his attacks are rather sudden. Note that you fight one of them in that arena where you climb up to a small hill using stairs. For this one its entirely possibly to get him stuck on the ridge above you while you hang out on the stairs and shoot the shit out of him. Also note that they despawn and deaggro really easily to the point where its possible to deaggro them without your companion stopping their attack so the Loliratsu strategy mentioned for Death Scythe works here too. That hentai is calling for you...

Hades (This info apparently IS outdated according to a friend of mine. Hades seems to have a new move and it sounds like a KILLER while his small dark balls seem to move a hell of a lot faster. Ill still post my strategy but in this case I doubt its applicable anymore so you may want to get advice from others.) Hades may seem scary at first but this one is actually pretty easy. If you just run around him in a circle the small dark balls will be unable to turn enough to catch you and you can blast him with whatever as you do so. The larger dark ball has better homing but again just running around him should suffice to avoid it. Something to note is that the larger dark ball actually doesn't damage you either. Instead it applies a slow effect like the cursed arrow debuff. The only thing to watch out for here is when he flies up into the sky and starts trying to suck you in. When that happens you GTFO and fast (rolling works). You want to keep going until he no longer appears on your screen and then some. (note that my render distance setting is at its lowest cuz my laptop is bad and should feel bad.) This is a BEYOND massive aoe that will do no damage but will slow your ass to a crawl making dodging the small dark balls pretty much impossible. If your unlucky enough to get caught in it you have 3 options. The first and probably best is to quickly summon any partner. You need to make them body block the small balls. Your second option only works if he shoots a large ball at you right afterwards and its to gobble that shit down. The slow from the dark ball lasts less and should overwrite the aoe slow though I only ever had the balls to try it once. The last option is to pray he flies up and summons some Death Scythes which he does every so often throughout the fight. Well I suppose you always have the fourth option of rolling over and dying but something tells me you don't want that.

And now as I go through to add some random pictures I get to mention that you have a fifth option now too. Someone thought wands needed a block for some reason so now if you do happen to get slowed you can aim to block the small dark fireballs.

Ieyasu - (Possibly outdated.) Total joke. Pretty much all his moves leave him WIDE open to a counter attack so exploit them. Hell you know what screw this guy. His miniboss subordinate is harder them him and actually worth mentioning. Cheese the miniboss by hiding behind the barricade nearby.

Mitsunari - N/A. Well ive never actually fought him so idk. I mean come on what sort of savage would side against such a majestic being? Regardless I can't help here.

Image Nyarlathotep - Space CQC 2op4u! So the strategy for this one is...shit. Ive got nothing tbh. These are all supposed to be solo strategies but when I fought this boss I was in a party with a friend. That wouldn't normally stop me from figuring out how to take on a boss but in this case I just couldn't. Approaching from the side to avoid the tentacles got me rekt by that still repose super poison combo. In the end what we ended up doing was my friend would kill the tentacles on one side so I could approach in front of the boss and blast her with frost glaive before I ran back. Your going to have to ask other posters for advice on this one.

Veronica - Its a trap! Funny story this one was so easy and forgettable I almost forget to do it. I only remembered after finishing Typhon's. Basically just run around it and blast it during its moves. Just watch out for its move where it spins around. Since it doesn't spin directly towards you its possible for this move to cut you off while your running around if your not paying attention. With that said even if it does catch you if your only being hit by the last few ticks of damage it shouldn't kill you anyway. Only noteworthy thing about this boss is its annoyingly high amount of hp.

Image Oppenheimer - Laughable. Like Odin he is fast, hits hard, and leaves few openings...with one exception. He likes to taunt you while standing in place doing nothing every so often. He literally just stands there for about a little bit longer than it takes to full cast bright homing. Record yourself pumping him full of bright homing and then upload the video to a porn site so the entire world can laugh at how badly you raped him.

Typhon - Another scary looking but surprisingly easy one. This boss cant turn or reposition itself at all without flying up into the air. On top of that this boss has EASY to exploit blind spots. The four corners of the boss are super safe. From his back two corners he literally cannot hit you. Period. For his front two corners he does have a breath attack where he sprays the ground in front of him. The breath itself will do damage and the area where it hits will be hit by small ice bolts for a few seconds. Even though the breath can damage you it shouldn't kill you and there is enough delay to move away afterwards to avoid the ice spikes. It MAY be able to freeze you though. A lot of this bosses moves can freeze so I would assume the breath can too but it never happened to me. Its also possible for him to aim his breath up so he shoots along the air above you in which case icicles rain down along the breaths path after a brief delay although I don't think the breath actually directly damages you in this case. When he lands after his super jump him AND his tentacles can damage you but ive never once seen him actually try to land on the player. He also likes to summon three ice crystals that will be generally annoying by shooting out ice balls at you which will freeze you 9 times out of 10. Thankfully if you only destroy two he wont respawn more and the boss will hardly ever capitalize on you being frozen anyway. One thing to watch out for is when you get him down to about half his health he gets a new move which is a giant aoe ice tornado around himself. Its about fireball range but the animation (which looks similar to when he flies up so don't get them confused.) is slow enough that you have enough warning to get back.

Image Onmoraki - FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY DO NOT I REPEAT DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES REDUCE MORE THAN 1 OF THEM BELOW HALF HEALTH AT ANY GIVEN TIME!!!! These little guys work more or less exactly like normal kijimuna but! butbutbut! Once one of them drops below half hp it becomes a SCREECHING DEATH MACHINE! These little assholes have that one melee attack that normal kijimuna have (which you may not even know about considering you probably slaughter the normal ones easily.) where they try to go all kung fu on yo ass with a bunch of spin kicks. But THESE ones can and WILL use that move from outside of melee range and they will SPAM the SHIT out of it. To give you an idea while repeatedly using that move they can more or less keep up with your running. Dodging one or two of the little demons going batshit crazy isn't bad but if they are all doing it? Pray to whatever god you hold dear. Once you have dropped two of them the remaining two will start doing it regardless. After one of them spin kicks four (might have been three but I think it was four.) times in a row you have a moment to hit it while its recovering. Something interesting is that when you drop one to around like 5-10% hp they get knocked unconscious or something and just lay there. I have no idea if they can actually recover from this state but needless to say I didn't plan on testing that out. Because yes. I learned my lesson the hard way having been shooting all of them at once with frost glaive at first. Yes it was hell. *shudders*
Dark Deceiver wrote:I should have posted this years ago. Ah well, better late than never, but no, they never recover from being knocked unconscious once their health gets that low.
Thanks to Dark its confirmed that you can feel free to leave the demonic fur balls knocked out or whatever until you have managed to knock out all of them.

Image Tengu - This...this one hurts. First and foremost get a partner out. It doesn't matter who but get one out. Ill explain later. So moves of his to watch out for? Everything. You want to stay moving for this one and you want to avoid moving in a straight line as much as possible which can be annoying considering the normal mob spawns in the room. I have no idea if they respawn or not (Thanks to Dark Deceiver for the info that they don't respawn.) but it hardly matters because you almost certainly wont be able to kill them solo due to the bosses large detection range. To start with he has a move that calls a tornado on top of you. The aoe isn't too big but its fast. Fast enough that you probably wont avoid it unless your already moving or have some great reflexes. He starts moving again right after so no openings to be found here. Next up is his basic melee. It has a surprisingly long reach and hits multiple times. He may swing once or twice and the animation on it is slow enough that you can probably take some shots at him during it especially if he swung twice and whiffed. Moving on he also has a dash attack. This is like the tornado in how fast it is so you need to be careful of it. Once you've dodged turn around and blast him with something fast of your own while he recovers. He also gets a new move once weak enough just like Typhon. In this case he flies up and back a bit, creates a vacuum of wind that tries to pull you in like that one move where Hades flies up, and then unleashes a HUGE storm in an area about the size of Typhon's ice tornado moves. Really slow to cast and easy to avoid even while being sucked in. Even better if you catch him doing it in the wrong direction you can slam him with harder to get off spells like bright homing because he is a sitting duck in the air. He is still fast to recover from using it though. Lastly we come to the especially nasty move he has. For this one he flies up into the air, shoots out some kamaitachis, moves to a different spot in the air, and repeats about 3 or 4 times. One or Two wont kill you but altogether he shoots out six or eight in one go (Not counting the ones he tends to shoot straight into the ground.) and these bad boys will do about 800 damage a pop. Depending on the angles these come at you from this shit can be nearly impossible to dodge. You have basically two options. The first is what the partner is for. Just like with Hades your going to have them body block that shit for you. At the very least if they can block one it gives you a direction to roll in to try and avoid others. The second method is by far the better option though but its harder to pull off. You need to get your ass DIRECTLY below the boss. Depending on how far away he was when he first flew up or where he flies to while up there (You wanna chase him into the middle of all he normal mobs? Haha...didn't think so.) You may be better off not even trying and instead preparing your meat shield. The good news is that he tends to get stuck against the wall in the corner at the spawn point and if you DO manage to get below him you can take shots at him while he flies around. Don't worry about his landing doing any damage but clear the area anyway as just like with his other moves his recovery time is almost nonexistent. This will be a pretty intense one but as long as you manage to avoid getting shredded by the kamaitachis you should be all right.

So with wand blocking being a thing that exists now blocking the dreaded kamaitachis that he shoots out is a pretty good idea assuming you don't manage to get beneath him. No seriously though why can wands actually block now?

General note that starting at about this point in time you really should start looking up a bosses elemental weakness on the wiki and targeting it if able to so that you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble.

Image Gyuuki - Ah holy shit wtf is that quick kill it with fire! *Cough* Where was I again? Ah right. This one is standard run around it and blast it after it attacks. Hell the archers in the room are more dangerous than the boss. Thankfully they don't respawn though so wipe out the ones between you and the boss. Only thing to watch out for here is that the boss doesn't trick you. It has a move where it spits out poison at you from close range. Sometimes it spits out only once while other times it spits out four times. Don't start up something like bright homing until you know its the four times version. Oh and also watch out for pipes along the wall that can block your movement. I learned THAT one the hard way...

Image Shiraku & Yoshino - First and foremost do NOT attempt to fight them both at the same time. I guarantee you will die unless your really well geared and over leveled. Once your in travel along the wall in front of you and keep going until you pull the black frog. (Alternatively you could maybe pull the pink frog by heading right along the other wall but I never tried so I dunno.) Now comes the tricky part because you need to kill it while staying as close to the wall as possible to avoid pissing off pinky. In a 1v1 this is basically the same as the Oogama fight from FOREVER ago. Just take it slow and attack it when you can catch it during an attack. It will take a while but once you bring it down you can move on to pinky. Again its pretty much the same as the Oogama fight but this time your not stuck up against the wall so it should be much easier. Notice that pinky gets a breath pull move similar to the one that those worm nozichi or whatever had? THAT'S why you don't fight them both at once. Pinky can't really follow it up alone but its basically a death sentence because the other frog will slam you with something.

Image Hyakume - Horrifying to look at to the point of probably giving people nightmares but actually not bad compared to just about everything else in Edo. (Or even the rest of the game for that matter.) To start with the little eyeballs that chase you around are suicide bombers. These things move about as fast a glacier though and you can detonate them yourself by doing enough damage. You might as well kill them since the boss only spawns more when your pretty far from him. As for the boss itself the plan here is pretty simple. Stay close enough to the boss that you can stay behind it at all times. While behind it just shove bright homings up its ass for profit. It has a low damage aoe stun in the area around it kind of like what Gold Daruma do but its only use is to set you up for the bombers which you should have cleared out anyway. It can also do a laser in a straight line in the direction its facing but wtf do you care your behind the damn thing. The only move you need to watch out for is when it spits out slightly homing green poison bombs from the back of its head. Its easy to see coming and avoid as long as you keep your camera angled so that you can see when they come out. Its only noteworthy move is to shoot out lasers more or less covering 180 degrees in front of it. The beam sweeps from right to left if facing the boss head on. Needless to say this is why you want to be behind the boss. You should be able to make quick work of this one.

The Great Venomkabe - Eh whatever. The game wants to consider it a sort of boss so ill list it. Its pretty unremarkable except for its absurd amount of health. You have seen these things 100 times over by now. Deal with it and move on with your life.

Lightning Wheel - I don't really consider these sort of mini-bosses worth mentioning but they all take god damn forever to kill like normal bosses so here they are. Totally unremarkable except for its ability to chain multiple spin dashes in a row. If it has what seems to be a sort of desync issue though where it spins one way but actually went another causing it to teleport around and possibly get you killed you may be screwed. In that case screw going solo and just ask someone for help since there isn't really much you can do aside from just hope you get lucky about that not happening.

Lightning Cyclops - Same as the normal ones up until about 50% of its hp or so. Once it reaches that point it gets a new move which is a NASTY surprise. It will just out of nowhere sprint towards you while covered in lightning after which it will jump and slam down on its ass creating a MASSIVE aoe lightning shockwave. It has very little warning or buildup so once it starts doing this change up your strategy and only attack it while its in the middle of another attack.

Image Tentouki - Whoops I totally forgot about this dude and only noticed now that im editing in Elder. My subconscious must have been repressing my memories of this fight for the sake of my sanity. The fight itself is simple. Hit him with something, run back to the entrance to despawn and/or deaggro, and then repeat...a lot. This is so easy that I don't even need to bother mentioning his moves. What IS worth mentioning is god DAMN is this dude tanky. I didn't actually time how long it took me so I can't give an exact number but it probably took me somewhere between an hour and a half to two hours. The only danger here is you falling asleep at your keyboard. I sure as hell came close.
Heimarmene wrote:Oh yeah, I should probably mention there's a way to cheese the Tentouki so you don't have to spend an hour shooting him and running back every time. If you have Izuna, summon her and then shoot the Tentouki once before quickly rolling out of his aggro range. If it's done correctly, the Tentouki walks back to his place but Izuna starts to run towards him. When this happens, follow Izuna so that she's about 15-16 meters away from you and watch as she smacks the Tentouki to death while he's completely oblivious to being attacked.

It'll save A LOT of durability on your wands/bows

Turns out you can partner cheese this boss too. And holy hell you should unless you hate yourself or something. Fighting this guy manually is the equivalent of willingly subjecting yourself to torture. Even if you don't have Izuna it would presumably work with the other ranged partners like loliratsu.

Image Satan - Ah...haha...oh boy. So this. This is probably the single hardest boss up until this point. Asshole bosses like the Plant might as well be a god damn Daruma compared to this monstrosity. This boss is actually in an interesting situation for me. I eventually did figure out a way to fight it...but I fail at executing the plan. Even knowing how to deal with all his moves the boss still rekts my ass. I ended up having to party with others to do it and in the end my best solo attempt so far I got it to about 70% while managing to last 15 minutes or so. First things first get evade warp. It doesn't need to be on the wand(s) your attacking with but you make DAMN sure you have one. For reference mine is rank 3 and it lasts long enough to save my bacon. Now for the boss himself lets start by listing his moves.

1. The lightning wall. In this case he slams his right sword down which will create these long lasting pillars of lightning. Easy enough to avoid but they can make moving around a bitch. Make sure to try and keep the boss in the center of the arena so that you don't get trapped in a corner with these walls blocking your escape. In an emergency if your evade warp is high enough you can warp through a pillar but that should be a last resort since you need it for something else. If your on the bosses side or back when he slams down to make these you can take a potshot at him with something fast like fireball.

2. Aoe shock around himself. This is your hope. This is the beacon of light that just might guide you to victory. This is the main reason why your going to want to keep your range at about 6-8M away from the boss whenever possible. For this move he uses both swords to slam down and its the only move he uses his left sword for so its easy enough to see coming. Even better if it happens to hit you as long as your on the edge of it and you get out of the area quickly it will barely hurt. The range of it is JUST under fireball range so be sure to stand clear. The move is basically just like the rolling thunder spell that staffs have. What makes this move so beautiful that you should be crying tears of joy whenever you see it is that he sits there FOREVER to do it. While he is doing this your free to pop off a full cast of bright homing at this fucker. This is your best chance to deal damage and for that matter probably your ONLY chance to deal any REAL damage. Don't be afraid to blow evade warp on this one if your not sure you can make it out in time as his attack lasts so long that it will be off cd once he finishes. Note that ive never once seen him do this twice in a row so after the first one your probably safe to get in closer than usual if you need to in order to doge the probable sword slam follow up without risking the boss putting up a lightning wall between you two. The more times you get him to do this move the better your chances at winning so stay close.

3. Spin kick around himself. With that said though don't stay TOO close. Much closer than 6M and this will slam you. Assuming it doesn't crit you should survive but its going to chunk around half your health. On the bright side just about everything else except the aoe shock wave will one shot you anyway so who the hell cares? You could be running this boss at one hp and it wouldn't make a god damn difference thanks to a wands lack of guard. Also note that he ends his spin facing a different direction so be careful you don't end up running out in front of him only for his sword slam to cleave you in half.

4. Lunge. Pretty standard boss dash attack. Its slower than most others that come to mind and doesn't go too far but because of how huge this boss is it can still be pretty tricky to avoid. Even more so when he does it from up close which is rare but not impossible. Dodging to the right should work fine as long as he isn't SUPER close to you when he does. If he is blow an evade warp and pray his next move isn't...

5. Lasers. This is the move that crushes dreams. He has two variations of it. The first is pretty simple and standard line beam. If you have trouble dodging the hell did you reach this far? The other one is your every hell ever imagined. For this one its another 180 attack just like the eye thing from before but trying to stay behind THIS boss is a nightmare. In all likelihood your not going to be behind the boss when this thing comes to bisect you. THIS is why you bring evade warp. THIS is why you keep your evade warp wand out at all times when not attacking. This shit does a whopping 14k or so damage without a crit so there is no way in hell your surviving the hit as a wand user with no guard. Thankfully he USUALLY gives you enough time between side lasers to recharge your warp ESPECIALLY if your managing to draw out other moves from him like the blessed shock aoe. Things don't always work out so well though. Sometimes he chains two laser attacks. Worst case scenario its two side lasers meaning your REALLY screwed now. For that matter if he leads with the normal line laser and you blow your load thinking its the side one well RIP you buddy. Aside from the side laser taking slightly longer to go due to him aiming over to the side first I find that the best way to tell which laser he is firing is to see how he aims at you. If he just snap turns right to your position even doing something like an instant about face its always line laser. If he turns normally its side laser. Now for the worst case scenario where a side laser comes while your pants are down fear not. There is hope. SLIGHT hope. Its apparently possible to dodge through the laser but the timing on this is STRICT. Ive only ever managed it by rolling right just as he aims to the side. Even then I usually botch it. Personally I can only pull it off probably about 50% of the time and only ever by rolling right. Never any other direction. Because of that I try to always be running counterclockwise around the boss because more than once ive seen a laser coming while running left, stopped and rolled right, only to roll my lame ass back into what was actually a freaking line laser. RIPs ensued. Because of the bosses size dodging the laser by getting REAL close to him may work too but in order to be close enough that you can make it in time your risking getting slammed by his melee or aoe shockwave.

And hey another small thing I can change around thanks to silly wand blocking. I can't change much here though. You either perfect guard the side laser or you die because it will still do enough damage to one shot you even through a normal guard. Honestly you might still be better off sticking to trying to evade warp through it and only trying to guard if warp is down because my (admittedly limited) experience with blocking leads me to believe that the timing on perfect guarding enemies is kind of wonky due to the servers. On the bright side I WAS able to kill it solo after the hp nerf to mobs when soloing. Granted it took all 5 revives but fuck it ill take my win.

Image The Elder - So this is probably the most interesting of all the bosses so far because of his use of different elemental forms. He is easily my favorite boss so far actually. At the very least he provides a nice breather after the hell that was Satan. You might want to be sure that you have enough weapons as this fight may take a while. For this guy ill go form by form before covering what he can do in all forms.

Fire form. The easiest and safest form to deal with. His first move is simple and consists of shooting fireballs up into the air that will fly out and land around him. These things are really slow and you can see a glow on the ground below them as they travel so avoiding these should be a piece of cake. His second move is a fiery aoe explosion around himself. The range on it is about fireball range so you can safely outrange it using bright homing. Just blast him with it while making sure not to stand where a fireball will land. He seems to do some sort of self buff in this form too but ive no idea what it does. I can only assume it raises his damage or something.

Ice form. This form is also pretty easy to deal with though in this case one of the moves he does in all forms becomes more dangerous but ill cover that later. This forms first move is a simple ice breath just like what those ghost things use. This one is much longer though so bright homing isn't a safe option here. For the next move he taps his cane and after a brief delay some ice spots will appear around him. Then after ANOTHER brief delay an ice spike will appear there and will last for a bit. The time it takes between the ice spots (which do nothing to you) and the actual ice spikes appearing is pretty big. You should be able to see these coming a mile away and avoid them easily. Since bright homing isn't an option here just circle the boss while blasting him between his attacks. He recovers pretty fast from the ice breath but it takes him forever to recover after making those ice spikes so you can even freely blast him with spells that take a long time to cast in that case.

Lightning form. This is his most risky form. His first move here is exactly the same as the ice spike one of the ice form but the lightning version goes off faster while lasting longer. Because this small storm goes off faster its actually worth worrying about unlike the ice one. His other move is to make lightning strike down multiple times in a ring around himself. This move is interesting as the lightning ring strikes down at about bright homing range so you can't snipe at him BUT it won't touch you if your inside the ring right next to him. The boss seems to have no melee whatsoever which makes this form interesting. You can hang out inside the ring with the boss so you can take shots at him but you risk him trapping you with the lightning storms as you don't get a lot of room to maneuver. Alternatively you can say fuck that shit and just hang outside his range waiting for him to change to a new form. Hanging out inside the ring was a little too intense for me personally but if you do opt to stay close note that the order of lightning strikes is always the same. The first strike comes down on the bosses front right and the following strikes circle around behind the boss before ending with a strike on the bosses front left. Approach from the bosses left side so that if he happens to use the skill while your trying to reach him you have a chance to get through without getting instantly fried by the first strike.

Those are the forms that he will switch between throughout the battle but as I mentioned earlier he also has some attacks he can use across all his forms. The main one is a teleport into fire/ice/lightning ball (matches current form) spread similar to what those three eyed mage dudes who shoot fireballs do. Even though its pretty telegraphed due to the bosses bow beforehand its the trickiest attack. Thankfully his differs slightly from the one the mage things have. Rather than teleporting around your character the boss can only teleport in a straight line and he will only teleport twice per use of the move. So if you see him warp straight once you know the next warp will be straight again. This makes it easy to see him coming as long as you can track what direction his first warp went in. So the further away you are the easier it is to dodge. The problem is when your in close and you CAN'T tell which direction he went in right away which will likely be the case while your dealing with his ice and lightning forms. (Assuming you stay in the ring for lightning form.) Running in one direction and eating magic balls because that happened to be the same direction he went in giving him a point blank shot at you is not pleasant to say the least. To avoid this just GTFO once you see him start to bow. Get far enough away in time and you should be able to catch which direction he is going in. Thankfully if only one ball from the spread hits you then you will probably survive UNLESS its the lightning ones. Speaking of lightning if he uses this while in lightning form to come at you its a good chance to enter the lightning ring without risking being fried. One thing to be careful of is staggering him when he bows to start the attack. Maybe its just my bad laptop but if he gets staggered before starting to teleport it won't cancel the move BUT it also won't show him actually teleporting. Instead he just appears at his location and fires which can be annoying. Ive also seen him fire off the magic ball spread without teleporting but VERY rarely. Something to be aware of though in case your getting REALLY close. His other move for all forms is thankfully much easier to deal with. For this he floats up into the air, creates an element ball matching the current form, and then drops it for a MASSIVE aoe. You want the boss to be at about the edge of your screen (again I use minimum render distance setting) because its just that big. It takes so long to go off that you could probably cover half the arena before it does though. He uses this move right before switching forms and you can use that chance while he does so to take a few shots at him. Interestingly enough if you stagger him you can totally cancel this move. Just throw a fireball or something at him as he floats up and watch him fall back down to earth. This probably won't work if the ball is already dropping though and be warned that bright homing DOES NOT stagger this boss. Even if you cancel the move he will still swap forms which gives you a nice opening to smack him around. Hell if your blasting him fast enough you sometimes can't even tell he tried to pull the move off. This may be a long fight but its plenty doable. One last thing to note about his forms:
Blazef2 wrote:I'll just say one thing the elder does have weaknesses depending on the element he switches to.
When it's fire use lightning, lightning use ice, and ice use fire.

Image Aobozu - Boy I sure do hope you still have evade warp. While there have been plenty of difficult boss fights up to this point this is the first one that I would outright consider unfair. God fuck this asshole. Before you even attempt this I highly recommend having a good dark spell. As an added bonus dark will come in handy against Inugami too. The first half of the fight is pretty basic stuff by this point. Just circling him is enough to avoid the homing balls he sends after you and you can punish his attacks pretty easily. One especially punishable attack is his AOE holy aura thing around himself so it's worth staying a bit close to draw that out. Something important to note about his basic boss line laser attack is that while he is using it he deals damage to anyone around him too. It's hard to estimate since there isn't much of a visual indicator of it but id guess it maybe reaches about as far as the holy aura attack or maybe a bit less.

Once you get him down to half the REAL bullshit begins. You remember those 3 eyed onion head mage things that teleport around you before throwing a fireball at you? Well he does it too. The difference being that when his teleport finishes he instantly fires his fuck you laser because fuck you. Unless your lucky enough to already be moving in the right direction or have the reflexes of a god and can roll out of the way your probably getting nailed. This is what your evade warp will be for but even evade warp cheese can't fully deal with this nonsense. If your evade warp doesn't take you out of the laser expect to be nailed by the last few ticks of it. The laser happens to hit multiple times because who the fuck cares about balance I guess. Because of the way it hits multiple times I'm not sure if blocking works. Even if you manage the perfect guard the later ticks of damage will still slam you. Also when firing his laser like this he still deals damage in an AOE around himself so even if by some miracle you evade warp behind him guess what your still fucked. Your best bet is to lock on to him so that you can attempt to follow his teleport and then evade warp as he appears hopefully not in a straight line away from him. Once this phase begins its basically a damage race because the evade warp trick is not easy and your likely to make mistakes and die for them. If you weren't already drawing out the holy aura AOE move you really should be now as it's a lot like Satan's move where it gives you a really good chance to wail on the asshole. Good luck for this one. Your going to need it.

Oh and as an added insult to injury its possible for him to move outside his "active" radius while teleporting. This causes his move to stop, him to despawn and respawn, you to probably waste your evade warp, and gives him about a 99% to immediately use his teleport hacks laser again. Because just fucking fuck you.

Image Jorou Spider - Ever wanted to find out what the Bel Bel fight would be like if the flies could actually keep up with you and were capable of killing you? What's that? Your a sane human being who never wanted to experience such hell? Well too bad because the game has other plans. Turns out those little baby spiders found throughout this dungeon were there for a reason. Right from the start of this fight you will have three of them spawn in with the boss. Kill two of them ASAP and get ready for one hell of a stressful fight because you need to leave the third spider alive while being aware of where it is at all times. As tempting as it may be to blast the little fucker in its ugly face that would be the ABSOLUTE WORST thing you could do. If all the babies die the boss can spawn in more of them and ive seen her summon up to SIX of the damn things at a time. To make matters worse she tends to do it IMMEDIATELY after the last one drops. If your able to one shot all of them at once she might have to wait a while before spawning in more but I can't confirm this myself. As a side note I think the amount summoned has to do with how much hp the boss has remaining.

The boss herself isn't quite so bad thankfully. Honestly id say your more likely to die to the babies than her. To start with she basically has all of the moves of that boss Gyuuki from Edo. You have seen these before and honestly none of them should pose much of a threat. Its worth mentioning though that when SHE shoots out poison bombs they can go a hell of a lot farther than when that Gyuuki spat them out. If she shoots one as far as possible it can cover about a little over half the arena id say. She does get two additional moves though. The first one is to shoot out a cone of fairly slow moving webs in front of her. They should be fairly easy to avoid even if your a bit slow to react but sometimes if your unlucky she does it at a bad time where your stuck trying to double back on yourself to avoid the baby. Because of that I recommend having one of the melee partners out. They tend to eat the webs for you as soon as she fires them and you really want to avoid getting hit by one. The webs wont do any damage but they will slow you. The boss is generally pretty slow to follow up any of her moves but even if she doesn't do anything the slow practically serves you up on a silver platter to the baby hounding your ass. The second move is what she gets once you drop her below half. For this one she does a spin jump, moves very slightly, and when she lands sends out a wave of lava eruptions. She sends them out in a cone towards whichever way she's facing. It LOOKS pretty scary but its actually not that hard to avoid. The eruptions don't cover as much distance at the sides of the move as they do in a straight line away from her face. Hell if you can get behind her even better as your totally safe then. Even if you can't do that just backing off while staying on the side of her should allow you to easily avoid it.

Now that you hopefully know how to survive lets talk about actually killing her. Needless to say with a baby spider trying to take chunks out of your ass your going to need to stay moving. Because of that anything that doesn't cast near instantly is pretty much a no go. A quick check on the wiki confirms my suspicion that she is indeed weak to wind so kamaitachi will be your best bet here as even bright homing is liable to get you killed. In fact looking at the wiki she resists practically every other element anyway so yeah. Just keep blasting her with it as often as you can while circling her. As I said earlier this boss is quite slow to recover from her moves. In fact she even tends to just stand still doing nothing fairly often too. For the most part just shooting her and rolling right after should allow you to stay relatively safe provided you don't do something silly like roll towards the baby. Depending on how the baby moves it could force you into having to make some awkward movements though. Generally if you need to choose between moving towards the baby or the boss pick the boss unless she is in the middle of doing something that would hit you if you got closer. You never EVER want to be moving towards the baby throughout this fight as its MUCH faster to react than the boss herself. As long as your able to keep track of the baby and avoid it you should be able to eventually drop the boss.

Image Inugami - This one isn't too bad thankfully. Once again it's another boss where the first half is pretty simple. Like with Aobozu dark will be your go to element here. Seemingly it's only move for the first phase is to draw a fire symbol to create an eruption below where your standing kind of like what those Hidregami enemies can do but a bit bigger. Avoiding this is easy as long as your already moving in any direction. A word of warning though his act of drawing also doubles as a melee attack. Maybe because of that he mostly only seems to draw when he gets somewhat close to you. The 2nd phase is where things get interesting. After about half his health he adds a lightning and ice spell to his arsenal. The lightning one is also pretty simple though it can be annoying. This one spawns 3 orbs facing the direction he was facing that shoot out a line of lightning which lingers for a while. Avoiding the initial hit of them is easy enough but it blocks off areas for a bit and could result in your movement being sealed. The ice attack on the other hand is actually pretty scary. It basically fires off 3 homing ice shots and these suckers can track. If your close to him when he finishes drawing these you almost certainly won't be able to avoid them so when you see him start to draw ice take distance. With enough distance you can move out of the path of them without them zeroing in on you.

Things get even MORE interesting in the 3rd phase because yes for once that's actually a thing. At about 25% hp he creates a shadow clone of himself which is seemingly invincible and has access to all of his moves. At this point I highly recommend taking advantage of the boss arena. Draw them over to the little area at the end of the bridge you entered on. The boss despawns around there but the clone doesn't seem to. This gives you a chance to head back into the arena and lay down some fire on the boss without the clone getting in the way. It may even be possible to draw the clone across the bridge but he always got stuck on a corner for me. Repeating this as needed should allow you to finish off the main body without too many deadly distractions.

Image Oboro Guruma - Finally a nice breather. First things first your go to element in this case will be water. Once you enter you ought to kill the flies hanging around. They do periodically respawn (I think it's on a timer.) but it takes them a pretty long time to come back so you might as well. As for the boss himself frankly he is pretty trivial. Once he gets close to you he starts spinning out of control. I've literally always seen him spin out to his right though and never towards you. He is 100% invincible during this move but once it ends he has a pretty long recovery time so you can use that chance to blast him. Once he gets to about half his health he just gets a basic flaming dash attack towards you. It goes pretty far but all you need to do to avoid it is not be moving in a straight line away from him. Just continue to circle him while drawing out the spin out move and blasting him at the end of it and you'll manage phase 2 perfectly fine. The only thing about this boss worth mentioning is he tanks the framrate something FIERCE on a low end computer. The flame dash especially reduced me to what was almost certainly single digit fps. The fact that I still managed to avoid it perfectly fine should tell you all you need to know about how easy this guy is.

Image Daiba Kaze - I'm skipping over most of this areas bosses. For the most part you can treat them exactly the same as you would their normal versions so it isn't really worth mentioning them here. Even those Edo "bosses" typically had some noteworthy move to change how you deal with them but not really for most of these. This statue fucker is a different story though. To start with you can either clear out the trash in the room with him or leave them. They won't respawn but even if left alive they won't really bother you that much. The boss himself is almost entirely the same as the statue you fought way back in Izumo but this time he spams kamaitachis like fucking crazy. They're slower than yours are but they have better homing so like with Inugami's ice balls your going to want to take distance rather than attempting to dodge them while staying close. In order to try and lessen the pain of his all day erry day kamaitachi spam I recommend you try to stay close to him when your able. Ideally you want to be baiting out the spinning sword dive as much as possible which is easy enough to avoid and allows you to hit him afterwards pretty easily unlike the kamaitachis which will force you to either take distance or risk going for a guard. Be carful not to get too close though. While he is a lot less willing to than his Izumo counterpart he does still have at least some of his melee swings.

Image Yamaoroshi - Like with the statue above he is mostly pretty similar to a normal hidregami but with one major exception. In addition to his usual moves he has a giant fucking meteor he chucks at you. It's worth mentioning that he is apparently really reluctant to use the eye laser move that you might have seen from base hidregamis before. While I never saw it user Miyano confirmed that he does still have it. My best guess for why I never saw it is that he either only uses it under specific circumstances (like distance from player character for example.) or maybe he only uses it on higher difficulties. Just like with the statue it's your choice if you want to clear out the trash in the room or not as again they don't respawn but they also don't have much impact on the fight. Killing them is easier here though since the boss stays mostly stationary. As for the giant fuck off meteor once again it's another homing projectile with some serious lock on to it. Like with the others mentioned above you will want to take distance from this before attempting to sidestep it. Or you could opt to block it. It's one of the single slowest projectiles in the game and it only has 1 tick of damage so if your good at perfect guarding you don't especially need to run from it. For reference it moves about as fast as the shadow ball skill we get. It hits really hard though even with a regular guard up with the distance from the center of the explosion seemingly affecting how much damage it does. As for the boss himself he takes quite a while to charge up the meteor so that's the best time to be blasting him. Even if your not aiming to block the meteor you could start taking distance when he releases it and still probably be fine.

Image Atake - And now for the pirate boss himself. As you would expect he has all the moves of his normal mob counterparts in addition to a few tricks up his sleeve. Once again it's another fight where your dealing with some trash in the room but in this case they do respawn periodically so I wouldn't really bother with them. Dealing with Atake himself is mostly pretty easy but he has 2 moves you need to look out for. The first and most important is his sort of earthquake ground slam. He will slam the ground with his claw 3 times before jumping up and coming down HARD. So hard that no matter where you are it will damage you and stun you for a very lengthy period which will likely be the death of you because he follows up on a stun with the basic crab attack where they slash in front of them while moving forward for a fair ways. Thankfully avoiding this almost certain doom is actually pretty simple. You just need to jump so that the shockwave doesn't affect you. Yes I shit you not the jump button is actually being put to practical use here. The timing seems to be a bit wonky perhaps due to ping issues but it seems like your supposed to avoid it by being in the air when he lands after his jump. Though maybe jump a second before that point just to be safe. His other noteworthy move is one of those dreaded 180 lasers this time of the water variety. He blasts it at you with pretty little warning and then spins in a half circle in whichever direction he feels like. Thankfully this isn't packing the power of Satan's but its harder to avoid and even though you will probably survive it's still going to chunk you for a fair bit. The good news is that he doesn't tend to use it that often. Either blocking (perfect or normal) or evade warping work fine for avoiding or at least reducing it so go with whichever you prefer. As for damaging him you should do fine just kiting him around and blasting him whenever he comes into range as long as he isn't in the middle of an attack you should be avoiding. With the exception of the water laser all his moves are easy enough to see coming and don't fire that fast so you can afford to be pretty aggressive here. Surprisingly no 2nd phase so with that done its onwards to the next region!

Continued in my post below.

Re: [Guide] Boss Strategies

PostPosted: 02 Aug 2015, 01:37
by maxwell3094
Image Dragon Ark - Woo boy after 2 fairly easy regions that made for a nice break after the hell that was Oshu the game decided to get serious again. The first half of this fight at least isn't bad. For this phase the Ark only has 2 attacks. The first is a sweeping breath attack done by both heads starting from different sides. One breath covers short range while the other covers long range. This is actually surprisingly easy to avoid. There's a dead zone between the 2 breath attacks at around 14m from the boss so as long as you stay within 1 or 2m of that neither breath attack will hit you. The next attack is to send out shockwaves in straight lines away from the boss. This one is also easy enough to avoid as they come out from the same angles each time so you can just pick a spot that's between the pathway of 2 of them. While there just move forward to blast the boss and fall back into the breaths dead zone when he goes to do that attack.

Come time for the 2nd phase he starts fighting back. After dropping him below 50% health his breath attack will do 1 of 2 things from now on whenever he uses it. The first is to cause icicles to erupt in a circle around him when the breath finishes. This one is kind of like that ice tornado move that Typhoon got in it's 2nd phase. The alternative is for ice spikes to erupt going in lines away from him like with the shockwave attack. Thankfully you can see the ground turn icy before the actual spikes pop up similar to the ice spike move that The Elder used. Still not too terribly difficult to avoid but the fight is no longer on auto pilot at this point. It's worth mentioning that his shockwave move maybe also gets a new effect? I say maybe because I only saw him do this the first time he used that attack after entering phase 2 and he never did it again afterwards. In this case shockwaves came in from the edge of the arena to the boss before he fired off his normal ones. Continue with the phase 1 strategy while paying attention and switching "lanes" as necessary to avoid the icicles and shockwaves.

Lastly comes phase 3 which proves to be an especially nasty surprise. I've got BAD news for anyone who never wanted to find out what those suicide bomber eyes would be like if they were actually as fast you. At about 25% HP the boss will teleport back into the center of the arena and then fly up into the sky. Once there he will summon an element crystal and the aforementioned suicide bombers. These penanggalan bombers can haul some serious fucking ass too. There about as fast as you are. You need to destroy the summoned crystal hopefully while avoiding being nuked by one of these kamikaze assholes. The good news is that you can at least blast them yourself which seems to keep them from exploding. This buys you a few seconds to kill off the crystal while more bombers spawn in. Also keep an eye out for lightning strikes from the boss while your doing this. If you see the ground around you glow yellow you need to move because the boss can and will attempt to zap you while he sits up there. Once you finish off the crystal the boss comes back down and goes back to phase 2. If you can manage to avoid getting blow to pieces you should be able to wrap this up without too much more trouble. A word of warning though I don't know if that's just a one off thing he does or if at this point he may start repeating phase 3 should you take too long to finish him off.

Image Keiju no Kimi - Well this is a strange one. Rather than a fight this more or less ends up being a survival test. Various groups of tentacles will spawn in and after enough time passes they just roll over and die to be replaced by the next wave. Hitting them didn't really seem to do anything either. Since most of these were actually pretty easy to avoid by just doing something like circling the edge of the arena or blocking I'll just make note of some of the more threatening ones. The first one to watch out for is the 3rd fireball shooting tentacle you will see. These ones have top tier homing on them in exchange for being a little slower. You can outrun or block them but don't try to sidestep them no matter how far away they are because they can still turn enough to track you. Next up there's one that grows a bit and then tries to slam down on you. These guys have a pretty far reach so be sure to give them a wide berth if you don't trust your blocking ability. The last one that I consider worth mentioning is the one that just seemingly out of nowhere drops boulders on and around you. Since the last wave was more or less a clusterfuck with most of the different tentacles making an appearance I couldn't really follow whatever logic was behind that attack assuming there even was any. But then I revived after it killed me and they all gave up on life so *shrug*. I didn't think to try but if you do happen to die you might be able to just wait for them to die before reviving. I mean they almost certainly were smart enough to not let that work but it's worth a try I guess. Honestly you shouldn't have much trouble with this fight unless your spending all your revives during the actual dungeon.

Image Lunar Spirit Kaguya & Image Mass Produced Benkei - I sure do hope you've gotten good at dealing with the asshole Benkei clones otherwise you're about to have a very bad day. I had debated including the Mass Produced Benkei but originally decided they were more of a glorified mini-boss (with the appearance frequency of a normal enemy annoyingly enough...) only dangerous in packs and opted to not include them. At this point you may be wondering why I'm talking about them in what should be Kaguya's section. Unfortunately for you they make up at least 50% of her fight in another shining example after Jorou Spider of why boss fights with infinite deadly summons are hell.

Kaguya herself is thankfully even more of a non-factor than the Jorou Spider was. She can shoot some slow projectiles at you and she can slowly spin towards you while shooting the ground around her. The projectiles go far but they have no homing so unless your not paying attention to Kaguya at all they shouldn't be an issue. That's basically it and she has no 2nd phase either. Annoyingly though she is apparently totally invincible while flying around. In order to damage her you have to wait for her to fall down at which point she can be hurt. How long she stays down is seemingly random so sometimes she flies up before you can even reach her and others she lays there long enough for you to blast her 3 or 4 times. It's also worth mentioning that I think she only falls down after the spin attack as I'm fairly certain I never saw her fall after shooting.

As for the robots very early in the fight she will summon 2 of the accursed things and as you could probably tell from my earlier statement they do in fact respawn. Their respawn seems to be timer based in this case. If you're able to nuke them quickly enough you can earn yourself a safety period while they wait to respawn but if you're damage is more inline with what I was capable of doing then a bit before you manage to kill the 2nd one the 1st will respawn. Even though they respawn I'd still recommend killing them regardless of how quickly you're able to do so. It's not like you have anything better to do while Kaguya flies around due to her invincibility and one less gun trying to tear you apart goes a long way. Obviously prioritize hitting her over the Fuccbots when she falls though. After hitting her it would also be prudent to roll immediately because it's likely that one or both of the bots are going to attempt to melee smash you. Thankfully the range on their slam is short enough that rolling away from them after you have blasted Kaguya should be enough to save you.

Throughout the fight try to hang close enough to Kaguya that you can catch her when she falls without having to travel too far while focusing most of your attention on the bots. This should go without saying if you've managed to reach this point but their machine gun can fucking shred you. If you're too far away from one when it goes to spray and spin towards you be ready to block as the spin is more likely to catch you during your circling the farther away you are. As for the other version where they practically instantly unleash a barrage at you pray to whatever god you hold dear that none of them try it while you're attempting to blast Kaguya. Being caught in that is death and it shoots so many times that it will likely kill you even while blocking. Not to mention that in this case being locked down in that gives Kaguya a chance to actually do something for a change or for that matter the other Fuccbot. I seriously question why the deadlier version of their machine gun fire is also the version that fires near fucking instantly but this is C$ so who the fuck needs balance and logic I guess.


Image Raijin - Despite having a 2nd phase the 2 dangerous moves that you need to watch out for are ones he has from the beginning. The first scary move involves him shooting out an excessive amount of electric balls at you. Unlike a lot of the homing attacks I've been mentioning in this guide recently the trick to side stepping this one is actually to get CLOSER to the boss while circling instead of backing away. Unlike stuff like Inugami's ice balls the homing on these doesn't die down after traveling a certain amount of time (or well if it does they travel too fast for it to matter.) so trying to back away will lead to the whole wave curving into your face especially if your really far from him. The other move you need to watch out for is his melee sword attacks. These cover a pretty large area in addition to doing some serious damage and being hard to avoid. Thankfully he only uses this and his other melee attacks if you get too close to him. Ideally you want to keep him just inside the range of your skills and hopefully avoid seeing this at all. If your unfortunate enough to get too close I recommend blocking unless you've already started moving away from him that way you at least have a chance to survive. He gets a number of new moves once below half HP but none of them are actually all that noteworthy. For the most part they are just different dash attacks similar to the one he does from the start but frankly you can treat them the same as the basic one he has. Also something worth mentioning about his basic dash is that if he hits something he will move through what he hit, stop, and then kick behind him. Obviously you want to avoid being hit yourself but you can trigger that with partners too which can possibly save you the trouble of chasing him around the arena. As for damaging him your best times to attack are right after he finishes an attack or dash as he has a few seconds of recovery time on pretty much all his moves. Speaking of damaging him I should mention that he seems to be weak to wind as he apparently doesn't have a wiki entry yet. Because of that kamaitachi should serve you well here. He may have other weaknesses too but you will have to experiment to find them yourself as I'm unaware of them.
Miyano311 wrote:Raijin is weak against Mountain too. Also Fuujin is weak against Ice and Lightning.
Thanks to user Miyano you no longer have to resort to your own trial and error for either of these fights and can prepare accordingly.

Image Fuujin - This fight is pretty much identical to the Raijin fight so you can refer to that strategy. The only difference worth mentioning is that you avoid the wind projectiles by simply outrunning them as they are slower but have better homing than Raijin's shock balls.

Image Sleetsword Gargoyle - (Special note that this was done on hard instead of normal unlike usual as I'm past the point where normal would be challenging enough to warrant including in here.)
maxwell3094 wrote:No seriously though why can wands actually block now?
Well fuck me I got my answer. God did I get my answer...

Get ready because your in for a pretty rough fight this time. Right from the word go you've got some scary moves to watch out for. The first and by far the worst of all his moves is his dash attack. There are 2 variations of it. For the first one he ends it with a spear thrust. This one isn't too bad since it's a fairly narrow attack. With the second one though he ends his dash with a swing in an arc in front of him and this one is killer. The hitbox on this manages to reach all the way around to his sides and has some good reach on it too. If your just circling him normally expect this to slam you. Because of this when you see him start his dash attack animation back away while continuing to circle him and look at how he holds the spear to determine if he is using his thrust or swing attack. At the end of this dash will be your best chance to attack him as he has a very brief recovery period and will likely need to turn around to face you again. If you see a swing coming roll in whatever direction your going because that little bit of extra distance will likely save your life. Blocking is also an option but you need to be careful with your blocks in this fight. This boss is fucking relentless in melee and has a tendency to wombo combo your ass so avoid being closer than you need to be to hit him as much as possible. Another thing he has a tendency to do is try to impale you by chucking his spear. The homing on these isn't great so you should be able to avoid it well enough by just sidestepping it unless your both at opposite ends of the arena. Like with Raijin's lightning balls don't back away while dodging it though as that will put you right in the line of fire. The last of his first phase moves you need to watch out for is when he charges an ice ball in his hands and then slams it into the ground freezing everything. I hope for your sake that you've got some good blocking ability or an evade warp ready and waiting because you NEED to avoid this. The damage it does is negligible but if you don't perfect guard or evade it's a guaranteed freeze which is something you absolutely can not afford here. Unless you get lucky being frozen is a death sentence.

Come time for the 2nd phase things somehow get even more brutal. Once he hits this phase he gets 2 more tricks added to his move set. The first is a new dash attack. On its own this move isn't too bad but the problem is he uses it as a follow up to a lot of his other moves. Because of this blocking his original dash attack and his spear throw become a whole lot riskier as he could follow those up with this move. Thankfully he doesn't attempt to reorient himself before using this so as long as you managed to move at least a little bit to the side before blocking one of the lead attacks he should whiz past you. His other new trick is an upgrade to one of the moves in the first phase. Throughout the fight you've probably seen him fly up and shoot some balls with pretty poor homing at you while making ice spikes erupt around the arena. The only thing worth mentioning about this move at first is that he's invincible while he's up there. With it's upgrade though this becomes his 2nd worst move. Now he shoots out twice as many at you and the homing on these is top tier. You will NOT be able to dodge these at all so once again I hope you've got some good blocking skills. If you don't then your about to be very upset as evade warp can't save you here either. Also you NEED to perfect guard at least 1 of them. Even if you survive getting hit by the full volley you won't survive what comes next because if all of them hit you the last one leaves you stunned.

I'm making a bit of an edit here. It seems like I might have been wrong about the stun being caused by the full volley hitting you as in later fights with him despite making sure to perfect block at least 1 orb I've still been stunned by the final hit. I say might have because it's been inconsistent enough that I'm left wondering how it works. Sometimes after perfect blocking at least 1 shot the last shot will stun after hitting a normal guard and sometimes it won't. I have 2 potential conclusions as to how this works. First is that my above theory is right but you need to perfect block a different amount of the shots instead of just 1. Would explain the inconsistency too if this were the case as it's not like I negate the same amount each time. Second is that only the last orb matters but this wouldn't explain the inconsistency. Whatever the case may be this is speculation so to be on the safe side take my advice on avoiding the stun with a grain of salt and maybe aim to always negate the last shot no matter what as that seems to be a surefire way to avoid the stun no matter how many of the earlier ones hit a basic guard. And EDIT #2 as I think I've more or less figured out what's happening with this. I've noticed that sometimes 1 ball hits for 2 ticks of damage. I have no idea if this is intentional or unintentional but I'm guessing the latter because it's seemingly random when it happens so I can only chalk it up to lag for lack of a better idea. Presumably there's a limit to either how many ticks or how much damage you can take from one wave before being stunned and the fact that some of the balls hit you for their normal damage twice messes with that.

To make matters worse because the travel speed on these isn't very fast it's entirely possible for the boss to have landed and already started his next attack as your blocking the last orb. To try and avoid that situation when you see him fly up position yourself as far behind the boss as you can that way he needs to turn towards you while you finish dealing with the balls. Having him chuck a spear and then come dashing in at you before you have a chance to get moving again is VERY fucking unpleasant. Distance won't matter much for the spear throw but at least if he tries to dash at you before you can move again he hopefully can't reach you.

Image Crag Gargoyle - Functionally equivalent to the ice gargoyle minus the arena freeze and with no projectiles when he flies up in the air.

Image Infernal Gargoyle - Functionally equivalent to the ice gargoyle minus the arena freeze.

Image Levinlance Gargoyle - Mostly functionally equivalent to the ice gargoyle. Some small things worth mentioning. For starters his slam creates a small lingering shock AOE instead of an arena freeze. Should be easy to avoid. Secondly his spear throw apparently has the worst homing out of all the gargoyle spears to the point where it practically travels in a straight line. Last thing to bring up is the 2nd phase follow up dash attack. He can use it after making a shock AOE and he can follow up the dash with a slightly larger shock AOE.

I'll try to stay on top of keeping this guide updated with information from other posters but no promises.

Re: [Guide] Boss Strategies

PostPosted: 02 Aug 2015, 04:02
by Blazef2

Re: [Guide] Boss Strategies

PostPosted: 02 Aug 2015, 05:10
by Ryxa

Remember these for gargs as well.

Re: [Guide] Boss Strategies

PostPosted: 03 Aug 2015, 01:52
by maxwell3094
So the different forms change his weakness after all eh? I wondered if that might be the case and it did seem like my inferno damage to him in ice form was somewhat higher than normal but I couldn't really confirm it when inferno and bright homing are my only 2 good spells. Quoted in the op now.

Also ive started adding in boss "title card" (idk what to call it.) pictures to replace the boss names. Should hopefully make all this text easier on the eyes. Only the 2 I took while I had the opportunity to are up atm. Ill search around the internet for the rest and get around to adding them all eventually. Feel free to pm me links to any of the missing ones since it would save me some trouble. Worst case scenario ill just have to take them myself though if that happens ill probably skip over the Edo ones for now. Long ass dungeons 2op4me.

Re: [Guide] Boss Strategies

PostPosted: 03 Aug 2015, 12:31
by Blazef2
*cough* try the wiki *cough*

Re: [Guide] Boss Strategies

PostPosted: 03 Aug 2015, 13:37
by maxwell3094
Blazef2 wrote:*cough* try the wiki *cough*

Do you think I didn't attempt as much? I would have loved if I could considering google-senpai totally failed me for the 10 or so I checked. The wiki entries are all using a different pic than the one I want. I want that title card thing that plays in the mini-cutscene upon entering the boss room. The wiki uses what I think is the bestiary entries for its images.

Re: [Guide] Boss Strategies

PostPosted: 03 Aug 2015, 13:39
by Miyako Tachibana
Eye Monster = Hyakume

Re: [Guide] Boss Strategies

PostPosted: 04 Aug 2015, 07:51
by Miyako Tachibana
Ryxa wrote:Remember these for gargs as well.

*Reads It* Um yeah this wiki needs editing or somethings wrong here xD

Re: [Guide] Boss Strategies

PostPosted: 04 Aug 2015, 09:22
by Blazef2
maxwell3094 wrote:
Blazef2 wrote:*cough* try the wiki *cough*


Oh you meant that... Yeah, you might want to get them yourself... I'd do it, but i have no mouse to clear dungeons for those pics.