Help with the nightmare that is Spirit Cage?

[Jonny Friggin Panic]

This boss is AWFUL. I drove myself to the brink of madness making it to the top, and now I can't even get this beast of a boss down to 50%. I've tried leaving one add or the other up; debuffing it with slow, daze, harm power; buffing my group with armor up; opening with double Thunders from a Weaver/Wiz using Rune Bow, so many other approaches.

Absolutely nothing scratches this boss much.

Does anyone have some cheese that might help? If it matters, I still don't have Summoner, Mimic, or Beastmaster, don't have a Gold Quintar (I got up here using royal fish and owl), and I'm probably missing plenty of end-game gear.

Any tips that'd let me end this mess would be appreciated. It took me hours to get up here, and now I've spent a couple hours trying to kill this thing. I want to be done with it and never come back.

[Chii]

There's some endgame gear that will really help you take this dude on, I'm mostly thinking about a breastplate that gives a boatload of HP, making your tank far more resistant.

Assassin can be very useful with a bow, because it can debuff enemies for extra survivability.

Find something to remove buffs.

Also, he has limited MP.

[Hecabutter]

It's hard but manageable, to stabilize you need 1 main tank (I use valkyrie/beastmaster), 1 off tank(ninja/fencer) and 2 healers(warlock/nomad+quiet shoes, shaman/nomad).

First therapist stance/protector/spirit walker for aoe armor, use remedy on takeover target then burst down unrooted and make sure stump is alive or boss will just revive them. After killing unrooted, main tank takes aggro on spirit cage, off tank takes aggro on stump and it should be fine, in the end I just press z till the boss dead. You can use beastmaster or warlock to remove armor up on boss to speed up whole process but it's not really required.


I'm now stuck on the devourer for said strategy and it seemed impossible, I think it's time to make a boss rush or cheese comp lol

[Nphyx]

I cleared him on second try but I don't remember exactly what strategy I came up with. One thing is he's just going to res the adds shortly after you kill them, so it might be better to focus on suppressing them while you hammer the main guy than bother with burning them down.

Summoner helps a lot here if you've got all or most of the summons. In particular the shadow summon gives you two free perfect evasions on each character and these guys are mostly single-target so that can buy you a lot of time. Paralyze and sleep also keep them locked down for 2 rounds each, and the earth and wind summons do those.

The other thing is to remove their buffs when they get them. Warlock can doublecast dispel to get this done, and beastmaster has an attack that removes a buff. Both of those make a big difference, though again you mainly want to focus on suppression and burning down the boss.

Re: devourer, there's nothing you can do to stop him from killing people when he hits them. Just use auto-res and perfect evades from shadow summon and ninja. Stack as much of it as you can. Don't bother removing his debuff or trying to debuff him. He'll cleanse his own debuffs every round and reapply chum every second round. Don't bother with threat management either, since he resets threat every round. Just build everybody for high damage and bring a summoner for Juses and a couple valkyrie mains for additional auto-res. There are a couple other items that give auto-res worth having if you can get them - one is the master armor for valkyrie though so if you don't have golden quintar you can't get that one. Note that valk's class feature auto-res is a different status effect from the one applied by spells so you can have both at the same time. Make sure whoever has agro has auto-res on them, and then let them die when he targets them.

[Thundergod]

I had more trouble with him than most of the superbosses. I think I first used the paralyze + blind summons to give myself turns to setup and made sure to only kill the magic add(not the tree stump). From there, let my tank eat up damage from both the Spirit Cage and tree stump. The tank was able to stay alive most of the fight except somewhat near the end, but I was able to finish of the boss then. Also, an important note is that you will still have to kill the adds after you kill the Spirit Cage. I almost lost because I thought I could kamikaze the boss towards the end.

[Zelendes]

My strategy for him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8t_DIfcz2o

[Jack Sidharth]

Yeah he was the hardest boss for me too. My best advice is to keep your home point set to the top so you can teleport back and go grab summoner and get the summons. The utility provided by the class helps a ton in this fight.

[Now It's Shulk Time!]

If you are willing to grind out some job points and don't mind breaking the game, here's what I did for this boss (and most other bosses for that matter):
1. Change main job to hunter on everyone except weaver.
2. Change your weaver into a scholar.
3. Get your scholar/weaver to learn sleep aura and overload
3.5 Get another scholar to learn sleep aura. Preferably a fast one.
4. Get your other members as hunter to learn quick shot, hunters mark, track, snipe, barrage, and take aim.
4.5 Get your other party members to go Assassin main class, subclass hunter. This helps you steal kills when you shouldn't through Assassin passive. If you do this learn all Assassin Bow Skills and Assassin's final weapon skill (the 4 point one).
4.6 If you really want to trivalise the fight, get the summoner crystal and beat the Shadow summon (in Shodu province) and Thunder summon (in Salmon Bay). These grant AOE easy, guaranteed dodge buff and a AOE paralysis respectively. This is as broken and useful as it sounds.
5. Buy four dream weaver bows from the Quintar in Quintar Reserve.Equip them.
6. Find the Undead Charm and the Fierce Stance accessories and equip them to your physically strongest characters.
7. Your team should look like this:
Weaver/scholar
Hunter/Scholar OR (Summoner/Scholar)
Assassin/hunter (undead charm)
Assassin/hunter (fierce stance)

Strategy:
Turn 1
- Hunter/Scholar puts the boss to sleep
- Weaver/Scholar uses Overload on every party member
- Assassin/Hunters use Quickshot, followed by Snipe (Use Hunters Mark first if suffering from accuracy issues)

Turn 2:
- Hunter/Scholar Quickshots into Snipe
- Weaver/Scholar attacks
- Assassin/Hunter uses Hunter skills

If you've done everything correctly, you should easily be doing around 10k damage in these two turns.

Turn 3-Infinity:
I can't predict what the boss will do but this is what you should do in response to certain situations
- Cast AOE dodge buff ASAP
- sleep/paralyse summoned mobs
- Time putting mobs to sleep with the Barrage attack on Hunters for extra damage
- Assassin should regularly apply power down to the boss

With some crits in your favor you should win.

[Jonny Friggin Panic]

I finally beat this stupid thing, but I DEFINITELY needed Summoner with paralyze, silence, and blink. Blind would probably have bought me some time, too, but I didn't have it. The group I ended up using was

Wizard/Weaver
Wizard/Weaver
Summoner/Weaver
Warlock/Weaver

but if you ask me how, I don't know. The fight was a crazy mess of debuffing, buffing, and mass nuking, and, in the end, I lucked out; the SC and stump were low hp, the Unrooted was dead, the Wizards were dead, the Summoner just had ice left, and the Warlock could only afford to cast Blaze. However, while Blaze healed the SC slightly, the DOT is non-elemental and pulled the SC's hp low enough that the ice summon killed them both. Yikes.

[cevgar]

Um... so I actually managed this pretty simply. After, y'know, banging my head on a wall using a totally wrong party composition against every endgame boss I could find.

Here's what worked for me for the entire rest of the game.

1x Hunter/Scholar.
3x Fencer/Hunters.
4x Dream Bows and Dancing Shoes (also 4x Rex Vests, an undead ring and a bone trophy)

Passives: Give everyone Eagle Eye, and Duel Ready. Give the Fencers Equip Bow and the Hunter Preemptive.

Strategy: Put Enemies to Sleep in the first move. Then go through the entire party using Pickoff with the always hit always crit bonuses from passives. Then use Quickshot + Snipe. Then Take Aim. Then improvise.

For me, Spirit Cage woke up with only enough time to summon it's minions before he died. I cast Sleep Aura again to knock them out, went through the roster firing Barrage and that was it.

Dream Bows are found in one of the Quintar shops at the south edge of the reserve.

Edit: Correction, they are called Dream Hunter. They do double damage to sleeping targets AND don't wake them up.

[Hex: Juicy Booty]

Originally posted by cevgar:

Um... so I actually managed this pretty simply. After, y'know, banging my head on a wall using a totally wrong party composition against every endgame boss I could find.

Here's what worked for me for the entire rest of the game.

1x Hunter/Scholar.
3x Fencer/Hunters.
4x Dream Bows and Dancing Shoes (also 4x Rex Vests, an undead ring and a bone trophy)

Passives: Give everyone Eagle Eye, and Duel Ready. Give the Fencers Equip Bow and the Hunter Preemptive.

Strategy: Put Enemies to Sleep in the first move. Then go through the entire party using Pickoff with the always hit always crit bonuses from passives. Then use Quickshot + Snipe. Then Take Aim. Then improvise.

For me, Spirit Cage woke up with only enough time to summon it's minions before he died. I cast Sleep Aura again to knock them out, went through the roster firing Barrage and that was it.

Dream Bows are found in one of the Quintar shops at the south edge of the reserve.

Edit: Correction, they are called Dream Hunter. They do double damage to sleeping targets AND don't wake them up.

How much are your pick offs doing? I tried this strat and for me they do roughly 3k-5k depending. I do not have Rex Vests though and I dont know about what growth levels to use so that could be it. But I run outta juice when the cage still has like 10k hp left

[cevgar]

Against the Level 60 Dummy, the Fencers with Bone Trophy and Undead Ring do 7K with Pickoff. The Fencer without is doing 5K, the Hunter does 3.6K. So that's 22.6K off the starting block. Though, figure the Spirit Cage (#242) defense is the the same as the Tomb Guards (#158) and that number is closer to 13K.

... that doesn't make sense. I'm pretty sure I was doing more damage. I need to double check some things.

Anybody know a way to respawn bosses?

[pseudo]

Originally posted by cevgar:

Anybody know a way to respawn bosses?

It's not possible, but I think the dev has the idea on note to add a boss arena of sorts so you can replay them.

[Hex: Juicy Booty]

Originally posted by cevgar:

Against the Level 60 Dummy, the Fencers with Bone Trophy and Undead Ring do 7K with Pickoff. The Fencer without is doing 5K, the Hunter does 3.6K. So that's 22.6K off the starting block. Though, figure the Spirit Cage (#242) defense is the the same as the Tomb Guards (#158) and that number is closer to 13K.

... that doesn't make sense. I'm pretty sure I was doing more damage. I need to double check some things.

Anybody know a way to respawn bosses?

Technically you can respawn one boss - Rexasaur

[Bigsnack]

Phew... just beat this on Hard.

Team comp:

Hunter/Aegis with Dream Hunter bow
Assassin/Hunter with Dream Hunter bow
Summoner/Wizard (only used shadow, wind, and ice summons, thunder summon would have made it easier but I don't have it)
Wizard/Scholar

Wizard/Scholar had Preemptive passive to open with Sleep Aura. She wore the Pointy Hat from the speedy octopus (there's a guide if you have no clue what I'm talking about) to make the sleep last 3 turns.

The two Hunters used those 3 turns to open up: lead with Pickoff thanks to 100% hit rate passive, then Quickshot/Snipe. Note that I didn't have the Duel Ready passive -- that would make the opening salvo even more consistent. Once the Spirit Cage was awake, Hunter #1 kept lower resist debuff up and used Cover as necessary. Hunter #2 threw everything she had at the boss.

Summoner/Wizard used the shadow summon while the boss was asleep, and the wind summon to delay the Raise Dead spell for one turn.

Once the adds were raised, everyone used a mix of single target and AoE to just barely kill the floating monster before it could act. Then the tree stump was left alone while everything else went into killing the Spirit Cage. Once the boss was low enough, the wizards wiped both enemies out with some Boltenas.

In all, a fun fight and definitely one of the hardest ones I've faced yet. Took a few nights of strategizing (and some hints about the Dream Hunter bow)

[Hosehead]

Just beat it today, and what I found to help a lot was that whenever Spirit Cage was going to use Raise Dead, I'd have a character Dualcast Life on both of the adds, rezzing them at <400 HP instead of the full 5k. This also wastes the boss' turn, and the adds can be quickly dispatched with about any multi-target of your choice. It was still a battle of attrition, but a lot lighter on resources without the enemies' additional damage.