How can you beat Barnabas at the Reverie?

[KotCR]

I have attempting the fight 7 times now. It's impossible to beat it. The most I got him down to was 20% HP, but then he uses his overpowered ability and you cannot progress any further.

Giving a boss the ability to crash the game completely and utterly breaks the balance and prevents any further progress, which is a huge disappointment because I had really been enjoying the game up until this point.

I thought I could cheat the system by lowering graphics settings to the lowest (though the game autodetects ultra), limiting FPS to 30, and turning all fancy GPU features off, but it didn't help. Infact, it actually at one point caused him to use his ability to crash the game in the first 30 seconds of the fight; Which is a blessing in disguise I suppose.

Anybody have any tips on how to beat this clearly untested and overpowered ability of his? Because nothing seems to work, and when all the cutscenes bar the first one are unskippable for this fight, it's even more frustrating.

EDIT: Nine times now. Every time.
https://imgur.com/a/l5tjVmK

Rebuilt shaders and tried again, same thing. 14 times I've tried to get past this boss now.
Games cannot afford to have boss fights this long-winded when they are this unstable.

[electricphoenix]

Have you updated the GPU drivers? set all the textures, shadows, and everything possible to low?

[dannyj147]

Check if your GPU is overclocked too and remove the overclock if it is.

[KotCR]

So I finally managed to get past this boss after 18 attempts at it, having to watch all the long-ass unskippable cutscenes over half those times. What a horrible experience.

What I did in the end:
- Rolled back the AMD GPU Drivers to the first version that specifically mentions fixes for FFXVI cutscene crashes in it's release notes. The crash didn't always happen during the cutscenes, they happened during the actual fight stages itself just as often, if not more often, but figured it was still my best shot. This in itself was a nightmare to get to stick because Windows kept automatically updating the drivers to the (clearly, faulty) latest version every time I tried to rollback. Stop taking control of my computer, dammit! Let me decide what to do. I hate modern updates so much.
- Just ran the in-game configuration on the autodetect settings for the most part (I had tried lowest everything numerous times and it didn't seem to make a difference, if anything crashes would happen sooner, so it didn't seem worth it), with some exceptions.
I forced it into full-screen mode, rather than windowed full-screen, and set the resolution to the now ancient standard of 720p. I also disabled v-sync in-game and let the GPU handle that, as I saw that recommended for similar crashes elsewhere.
- I disabled Steam and GPU overlays.
- Physically disconnected my additional monitors instead of just disabling them through display manager.
- Had to rebuild the shaders AGAIN seems as I was rolling back the GPU driver.

Should be noted with the exception of rolling back the drivers, I had tried all these other things before and the same thing still happened, so me making it through finally might have just been a fluke. If rolling back the GPU drivers is what did the trick, then is it possible whatever fix they put in in the ancient version of the drivers to fix FFXVI crashes has been removed in more recent versions of the AMD drivers? If it's true, that's so dumb, but it's the only explanation that makes any sense.

Guess I'll stay on the old drivers for now (though it has hurt my load times), until I finish the game, then once that's done I guess I'll have to avoid playing it ever again if I want to be able to freely get my GPU drivers back up-to-date for more recent releases.

Pity because while I did have some problems when I first started playing, the fix I had seen utilising Project Lasso seemed to solve those for me for the majority of my playtime, until I got to this point in the game. While I tried it various times both with and without the Project Lasso fix, the time I finally made it through the fight without a crash, was one of the times I was utilising Project Lasso. Just incase anybody finds that relevant.

[fartknocker]

what gpu?

[shadowpcgamer]

if you can't get past it there is always wemod