Beating Ming

[firedog441]

Ok its bad enough she does major damage with each hit while I do minimal on her no matter which weapon I use. shes even imune to the flame thrower. then when I finaly get her health down to about half all of a suden she drops an arm off and it grows into another 1 of her. any idea how to beat her?

[Wesp5]

The flamethrower works, you only need to use small controlled bursts and then wait for them to bring her health down. Also at the beginning ranged weapons are better, because you actually cut her tentacles off with melee weapons, so avoid using them until she is about finished...

[firedog441]

Hmmmm I will have to give it another try

[Bloodartist]

Flamethrower definitely works, its just not enough to kill her. This fight depends a lot on how you developed your character over the course of the game. If you are not good enough in combat, this fight is probably hellish.

If your damage output is low, you probably have to kill her cut off larva tentacles asap before they develop into full copies of her. There are very few ways you can fight her that don't involve those tentacles being cut off, so :/ Hmm Im not sure does the sledgehammer do it.. If you can find ways to hit her that doesn't cut her tentacles off, do it.

In any case, duck her tentacle swings a lot, and sidestep the spitballs. Thats at least a must. Most of the fight you will probably spend in ducking position due to tentacles.

Note: if her tentacles develop into copies of her, you ONLY have to kill the real thing, then her copies will also die. Keeping track of that and surviving her copies is really hard though, so unless you have the damage output to kill her quickly you probably have to kill her larva before they mature.

note: shooting at her tentacles will also cut them off so ranged weapons are not automatically better. Flamethrower doesnt cut them off though.

[firedog441]

only probablem with the flame thrower is poof oh darn its empty
reload poof ooops empty again.

[scintillating luminescence]

I think there's a glitch with the flame thrower, where it uses ammo too fast if you just hold down +attack. I think it's something like...imagine shooting the glock once, and the ammo is reduced by 1 for every frame you hold +attack, but you only shoot a bullet on the first frame. That's why wesp said to "feather the throttle" so to speak. It will help preserve the flame thrower ammo.

[firedog441]

thanks I managed to beat her by staying low and backing into a corner by 1 of the budda statues where its harder for her to hit me and just keep shooting her with the 50 cal. pistol also being in the corner made it where her spawn could not get to me because she was in the way so it was just sort of stuck behind her. flame thrower did do a little damage but even using it in short bursts and having an extra cylinder it still uses too much amo to be really helpful. heh now to swat that giant bat.

[ᚣᛖᛁᎶ]

I think the Steyr AUG is the best weapon for this fight, if you have a high ranged feat. Fighting Xiao with a melee weapon is pretty darn difficult even with maxed out skills and the best equipment, since she hits like a truck and cutting off her bits only makes her worse. With 10 in ranged the Steyr AUG deals around 27 damage per bullet, which whittles down Xiao's health quickly. Just be sure to buy lots of ammo.

[firedog441]

nah tried using the steyr durring the quest where your against the vampire hunters trying to rescue the scientist I sold it after that. didnt care much for it. maybe my ranged was too low to use it effectivly but with the recoil I never could hit anything with it. and for some reason could not figure how to use the scope to try using it as a sniper rifle. which is why I wanted it in the first place.

[ᚣᛖᛁᎶ]

You use the scope with the alt-fire button (TAB by default). The same button can be used to switch the SPAS-15 to full auto, among other things. I had 10 in ranged and there was practically zero recoil, every shot went where I wanted it.

@AJ: True xD

[scintillating luminescence]

Ming Xiao is so fat when you fight her that it probably doesn't matter how much recoil your gun has, you're probably still going to hit her, haha.

[firedog441]

ha ha

[a trained kitten]

Need more info about your skills. From what I've seen this game has a good range of strats that only work if your skills are in line with the strat.

For example, I couldn't do much damage to Ming with ranged weapons due to a ranged skill of 4, but my melee is decent at 8 and I usually use a Katana (or Tal'Mahe'Ra blade, same stats). Still wasn't doing much damage to Ming but I noticed I had a bunch of unspent skill points so I got my melee up to 11 with a defense of 8 and was able to melee Ming down.

The key to my strat was actually to be as close to her as possible. When you're so close she doesn't swing her tentacles which is the most powerful attack. Mostly she'll just bash into you doing not too much damage.

After hacking on her for a while, most of her tentacles will be gone which means she can't use her most powerful attack, so then I ran around and tried to kill the mini-mings before they grew into a big one. I only had to hit them once with my sword to kill them. A few times they did morph into a large version, but those die very fast and it's worth killing them since they were doing a ton of damage to me. After about 6 - 10 swings they were dead and I would go back on Ming.

It took quite a few fights, maybe a dozen before I started getting a feel for it. The first few times I died so fast I figured I'd never be able to do it. The key was to try different ranges of weapons, seeing what kind of attacks she'd use at what range from me, etc.

The fight when I beat her I only I only used 1 elder blood pack and about 5 normal ones.

Skill seems to made a huge different in this game. Going from 8 in melee to 11 added about 5 - 10 damage PER SWING! Thinking about future play-throughs, it seems important to save up enough xp to get one combat oriented skill to around 10 in order to make this fight not something that makes you go insane.

Good luck!

[ArcticStan]

You don't need to run around avoiding every hit in this game. Just bump your dodge and dexterity along with melee/brawl, and use block button when opponents are about to hit you..

[Bumbles_Bounce]

Originally posted by ArcticStan:

You don't need to run around avoiding every hit in this game. Just bump your dodge and dexterity along with melee/brawl, and use block button when opponents are about to hit you..

People and some guides still say Dexterity is useless, even the guide that comes in Patch Extra's says it. Dexterity is not useless because it helps with defense.

Some of you pro-players might can ignore it, but my old a** is slow. I always build my characters with high defense. It is a must for me.

Unless you have Fortitude, But High Defense/Stamina/Fortitude 4 = Near invulnerable.

[clubcolours]

Originally posted by firedog441:

Ok its bad enough she does major damage with each hit while I do minimal on her no matter which weapon I use. shes even imune to the flame thrower. then when I finaly get her health down to about half all of a suden she drops an arm off and it grows into another 1 of her. any idea how to beat her?

I have just fought her in melee in both my runs. Gangrel claws and fortitude. Ventrue with katana, both have had fortitude...I think might use the chalice too. I pretty much ignore the other tentacles.