An easier way to beat Dark Matt?

[Lidoh]

I have started trying to beat the game on epic, and that actually seems easier compared to attempts to beat Dark Matt on an easier difficulty. Now, I have beaten Dark Matt before, but it was a battle harder than Godcat. I want to beat the boss marathon for the dark characters, but that one really concerns me. Unless I missed a male anti-dispel equip, I can find no way to simplify that battle down to the simplicity of the other dark character battles (because those were a lot easier, and most of them I did not bother buffing defenses, only attacks and evade). Any tips?

[Natzor]

Originally posted by Lidoh:

I have started trying to beat the game on epic, and that actually seems easier compared to attempts to beat Dark Matt on an easier difficulty. Now, I have beaten Dark Matt before, but it was a battle harder than Godcat. I want to beat the boss marathon for the dark characters, but that one really concerns me. Unless I missed a male anti-dispel equip, I can find no way to simplify that battle down to the simplicity of the other dark character battles (because those were a lot easier, and most of them I did not bother buffing defenses, only attacks and evade). Any tips?

Well bless status stops you from being dispelled if you have it up (unless you are benching Anna for some reason), Otherwise the Puppy Hat gives Dispel resist (should be somewhere on Battle mountain, usually somewhat early on) and the Heaven's Gate for matt also gives Dispel resist (which you start with so you don't need to look for it).

Optionally, Poisoning Matt for the rest of the battle could prove useful (since it does % Max hp damage).

[Chronos Notashi]

I honestly didn't think of the Puppy Hat option on my own playthrough. I'll have to try it. The poison tactic also helps, especially if Natalie's M-Atk isn't high enough to do significant damage. Best bet is to use Vines/Bamboo Trap on Dark Matt when neither Anna or Matt have anything better to do and no other statuses that need attention on their turn (though healing should always take priority, especially if you use the Casual Shirt or School Uniform for double HP/MP restoration with items).


But to add to that, another idea is to try stacking Tired (reduces Acc/Eva), Curse (reduces Def/M-Def, +50% Holy damage), and Weaken (reduces Atk/M-Atk) on DM as much and often as possible. He has the most HP of the four dark characters and has pretty good accuracy/Atk with some of his skills (most notably Swift Slash and Legend), so a brute force strategy won't be as effective as a DoT/buff/debuff strategy. These three status ailments help keep his stats low and can overall make it difficult for him to deal significant damage to you once you have your defensive buffs up (on that note, make sure you have ALL defensive buffs up (Protect/Barrier/Reflex/Guardian) and use Dispel/Siphon when needed for this battle, since the Monoliths aren't locked to physical attacks like DM is). Furthermore, afaik, while DM has a 50% chance to resist the status ailments, the debuff stacks applied by them IGNORE his debuff resistances, so even if you can't manage to land Solar Flare frequently, Tired will ensure he eventually hits -45%/50% Acc if you can stack it (which you likely will if you're wanting to make his backup less troublesome as well, and I'll explain why below).


As for HOW to apply these status ailments, this is what I suggest:

Tired: Have Natalie learn and max Gaia Blossom (and the single-target varient) and use it whenever she has the chance to (unless DM's Tired is at 5+ stacks, though use the single-target varient when he's alone if he's not at 5+ stacks yet). Not only will this let her apply Tired to DM, but it will also let you take advantage of the Earth weakness he and his backups share. A flair or weapon that inflicts Tired on enemies will also work if given to Anna or Matt and used with Combo Shot/Arrow Rain/Legend/Unleash (the latter for a chance at applying a larger stack with one attack). If you use the latter strategy with Legend for any status (for the most chances to land them), keep in mind that Matt will gain the Tired status for 2 turns afterwards, so be ready to compensate for the additional Acc/Eva degrading that will follow. You likely won't get many opportunities to clease it or the Acc/Eva loss, so best to bear with it as much as you can and reapply Reflex/Guardian if the Eva loss becomes too much.

Weaken: Natalie's Judgment has a chance to apply this, and it will be her primary form of dealing high damage to DM anyway (outside of Genesis, of course), so just have her use it when Tired stacks are good and the backup is dead/decently shut down. There's a chance you might not need weaken-applying weapons/Peace Sticker on Anna/Matt if Judgment's weaken applies frequently enough.

Curse: The only things I know of that will apply this reliably are weapons with Curse status, or the flair that applies it. However, if memory serves, the weapons that apply Curse all deal Dark damage, which won't help at all in this battle. Thus, your best bet is to give the Curse flair to whoever you feel will be able to make the most use of it, and try to get as many stacks on DM as possible to aid Natalie's Judgment.

[BORN 2 FROT FORCED 2 ROT]

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[popish10]

Dark Matt even at his normal strength on epic difficulty is no joke, so the best way is to debuff him immediately. Slowly waiting for the weak/curse to whittle him down works but that will take a long time.

I would suggest using Lance against Dark Matt. The reason is because he has the quake maker gun which can debuff Matt's physical attack along with the sand dune effect (50% accuracy debuff) as a bonus.

Equip Lance with weak/curse flair and just spam double shot on Dark Matt. At max equip level, one successful shot can immediately reduce Dark Matt's attack by 40%! This is very useful when he changed his sword and received a boost in damage.

If you lucky, you might be able to debuff his attack/accuracy and inflicts curse/weak in just one turn.

[Chronos Notashi]

Originally posted by popish10:

Dark Matt even at his normal strength on epic difficulty is no joke, so the best way is to debuff him immediately. Slowly waiting for the weak/curse to whittle him down works but that will take a long time.

I would suggest using Lance against Dark Matt. The reason is because he has the quake maker gun which can debuff Matt's physical attack along with the sand dune effect (50% accuracy debuff) as a bonus.

Equip Lance with weak/curse flair and just spam double shot on Dark Matt. At max equip level, one successful shot can immediately reduce Dark Matt's attack by 40%! This is very useful when he changed his sword and received a boost in damage.

If you lucky, you might be able to debuff his attack/accuracy and inflicts curse/weak in just one turn.

Well, I pointed out Tired, Weaken, and Curse as good means to reliably KEEP Dark Matt's stats low. As I implied with my comment about Solar Flare, while using debuffs and such DOES still work, the fact that every boss in the game has a 50% resistance too all debuffs (status ailments and debuffs are treated differently) means that if you're ONLY relying on debuff skills (or try to have one character maintaining the majority of the debuffing), you'll likely have a tough time reapplying them unless you're lucky. But as I pointed out, Tired, Weaken, and Curse's debuff stacks ignore debuff resistance, meaning that while the buildup for them is slow, they're guaranteed decreases (which also negate the natural debuff recovery, to add insult to injury) as long as you keep them maintained. And Weaken/Tired aren't that tough to maintain either, assuming you're using Judgment/Gaia Bloom/Gaia Blossom with Natalie.

As for using Lance, that strategy WOULD work in theory. But it assumes that you've made some decent stat investments into him rather than Anna. Which, itself, ALSO assumes that you're either prioritizing him over Anna for that third slot (and thus sacrificing Reflex and relying on Guardian/Energy Drinks for Eva buffs), OR have been distributing your stat-boosting items between all 4 characters* just to make sure he's battle-ready, will reliably hit his target WITHOUT having to have an Acc buff applied first, and WON'T die the moment Dark Matt so much as breathes on him (or the backup, for that matter, especially if Anna is the one with Syphon/Dispel). From what I can gather from the TC's first post, they likely haven't put much, if any, investment into Lance. The tips I gave work regardless of which of the two is taking up the third slot (especially if you ONLY use Lance for the Atk/Acc debuffing part and have Anna handle everything else support-related). Just have to replace "Anna" and related skills with "Lance" and related skills when not using Anna.


That being said, I'd still say that it's a good idea to gear him with at least the Atk/Acc debuff setup you suggested even if he's not the primary support, just in case he needs to be swapped in at some point.


*Pretty sure this is actually possible in a way that doesn't mess up everyone's damage/durability, but it would require farming enemies that drop buff items if you don't want to go past the third playthrough/farm insane amounts of gold to afford the ever-rising costs of the boosters in the rare shop. Only place I can think of for this right now is the optional/miniboss marathon on Easy if that works (since most of the optional/minibosses can drop the stat-boosting items at a 50% rate), but that requires being able to reach the top of Battle Mountain in the first place, which might be tough if you're wanting to get the Epic medals the FIRST time you go through Battle Mountain.

[Meddyan]

Someone mentioned brute force isn't a good way to tackle DM. I disagree, overwhelming power is exactly my preferred way of dealing the the solo DP battles. Here's how it goes:

Party is Anna, Nat, and Lance or Matt. Gear Anna and one of the boys defensively, they won't be attacking so just make sure they live. Give the boys a status inflcting weapon and override it with the Crossbone Pin to apply Curse instead. Gear Nat offensively, get her Magic as high as possible and equip her with a Holy-boosting staff. I hope you've done the sensible thing and given Nat every Cake stat boost you've found, but this will still be effective even if not. Nat and Anna will both need their limits ready to go.

Turn 1:
Matt/Lance uses Double Shot/Unload/Legend (not sure what has the best chances) to inflict Curse status. If this fails, run and try again.
Nat summons Evil Worm to apply Mag Defense debuff + poison. If you're not happy with the result (ie, it didn't put him down to -50%), run and try again.
Anna uses Mother Earth limit.This will give everyone Bless and add even more poison to the Dark player. Bless is going to prevent a lot of potential problems we'll soon face.

Here we just hope that whatever attack comes your way, everyone survives. If someone dies, flee and try again.It won't take long for all the cards to be stacked in our favour.

Turn 2:
Now we make our move
Anna uses Log (yes, Log) on the Dark Player. Log is a super underrated ability that inflicts Stagger with 100% accuracy. Almost nothing in the game is immune to Stagger (in fact, iirc only Monoliths are immune and literally everything else has 0% resistance). Stagger makes the next hit a guaranteed critical.
Matt/Lance uses Milk on Nat
Nat unleashes with Genesis. With her Magic buffed through the roof, the Dark Player's defenses cut and Curse+Stagger infliced this will deal a freaking enormous amount of damage, I'm talking like 70%+ of their HP gone in a single blow.

At this point, they will counter with their limit attack, but being under the effects of Auto-Revive and Bless you'll pull through ok. From here, you can go about the rest of the short battle as you please - the Dark Player won't get another limit before it's dead, it's minions are gone, it'll be taking serious damage from high poison stacks, you've still got a few turns safe under Bless and it'll only take another 2-3 Judgements to finish it off as it's still debuffed to hell for a few more turns too.

[Chronos Notashi]

Well, it's not that brute force is a BAD idea against Dark Matt or any of the other Dark Players, especially Dark Natalie since she's particularly frail and you WANT to kill her as quickly as possible regardless since she can hit HARD if you let her. But as you very clearly implied, it most certainly wouldn't turn out in your favor against Dark Matt (thanks to his high HP/Atk) if you don't:

1) have Natalie's Magic Attack boosted high enough through stat boosters and equipment for her to land significant damage with Genesis (pretty sure the magic-boosting flair is a MUST for your strategy, and you won't have it for the solo DP battles until at least the second playthrough due to it being a marathon reward, so it wouldn't work for TC if they're on the first playthrough and plan to do every battle on Epic),

2) have good enough HP/Def/MDef/Eva with everyone participating (ESPECIALLY Natalie since she's the key player in your strategy) to ensure that none of the dark characters or their supports outright kill someone or the whole team more than 50% of the time (since your strategy relies on them all surviving the first turn without defensive buffs, which can be difficult without a lucky Angel Pin/Pope Dress trigger turn 1 unless their defensive stats are high), and

3) have the patience to repeatedly reload until you get lucky enough that everything plays out in your favor, which CAN take some time depending on how nice the dark characters and their supports decide to be (for Dark Matt, all it takes is ONE Viking Monolith deciding to buff his Attack before he acts or an Ancient Monolith applying its Def/Mdef/Defend buff to send you running if the aim is to do as much damage as possible in one hit).


And even if all three points are met, you still have to be able to knock off the rest of their HP, which CAN be difficult depending on the situation since by the time you start turn 3 (the point where your Auto-Revive has likely been spent surviving whatever Limit Break is used), the DP's HP is at the point where they become more aggressive and use their powerful attacks (and in Dark Anna's case, she'll be healing off some of the damage you dealt if she used Mother Earth). Dark Lance in particular can put an end to the "play how you like until they die" part of the burst strategy with a few well-placed applications of Unload's high damage and insta-kill effect (pretty sure Bless only protects from Doom in the case of insta-kill effects, while Dark Lance's bullet skills inflict Death), with the added insult to injury being that he doesn't suffer the Atk debuff that Lance usually earns with Unload. So it'd still be a good idea to at least have Matt or Lance's Limit Break ready (and/or use another Chili Sauce on Natalie if you can spare to use one mid-battle) to attempt to burst down the remaining HP before he gets a chance to use that. Oh, and while it's a non-issue by the 3rd playthrough, you'd need Chili Sauce to fill everyone's Limit gauges if you don't want to waste time getting beat up by enemies outside of Battle Mountain if using the strategy on every Dark Player.


So a successful brute force strategy on Epic can be very unlikely or even IMPOSSIBLE unless you've played the same file/farmed enemies that drop stat boosters enough times to make it viable. If you're at the 3rd playthrough and/or amassed a good quantity of stat boosters to manage a brute force strategy, then have at it. But if not, then a defensive/DoT strategy with occasional burst damage thrown in works much more effectively, especially against Dark Matt, as long as the equipment/skills you need are maxed.

[Meddyan]

You do raise a few points I neglected to address, true.

For one I forgot how you don't quite have full access to everything even by the end of PT1 so you're right in that it's not a first time through strategy, but from your 2nd on it'll be an option. You can take a bit of time waiting for things to go right, but I recently did ths on PT2+3 (on Epic too) and anecdotally can say it only took a few minutes max per player, with a little bit more to refill limits in between. However, once it does work the battle itself will be a fair bit shorter than a usual defensive slog so you do save a bit of time and it'll even out roughly.

For two, you might be underestimating a bit how much you stack super defensively stat-wise. You don't typically have cause to do this as usually you're looking for elemental resistances first off and also want to maintain some offensive ability that defensive pieces sometime take away, but you may be surprised. Through buffing Def/MDef/HP higher than you typically would, you can approach the level of defense you may normally achieve with a more offensive minded setup under the effects of Barrier/Protect. Also, Nat doesn't necessarily even need to be on the field for Turn 1, you can just have one of the boys out dressed like a tank and have them summon Evil Worm. Just swap in Nat for round 2's fireworks.

As for finishing off the battle, you can scramble a decent defense in just one turn. Pizza+Barrier/Protect (depending on the opponent)+Ancient Monolith+remaining turns of Bless give you a solid headstart, and next round you can add Morale, Regen and Barrier/Protect (whatever you left off) to further shore it up. Also, Bless does protect against Instant Death, which will give you some time to rebuild a defense without worrying about insta-kills ruining it.

I'll admit it's not the perfect strategy, and I don't have anything against a more buff/defbuff minded approach (coming up with your own strategies is the greatest part of this game), it's just immensely satisfiying to blow everything up with brute force, even things you don't think you could.

One last note: this strategy can be roughly adapted to most Bosses in the game, just adjust the elemental limit and status effect to suit (if available) and you'll get pretty much the same kind of result. I've even killed a boss or two in a single blow on Epic (PT2/3 of course) in this manner.

[♥ Remi Kat ♥]

Originally posted by Meddyan:

Someone mentioned brute force isn't a good way to tackle DM. I disagree, overwhelming power is exactly my preferred way of dealing the the solo DP battles. Here's how it goes:

Party is Anna, Nat, and Lance or Matt. Gear Anna and one of the boys defensively, they won't be attacking so just make sure they live. Give the boys a status inflcting weapon and override it with the Crossbone Pin to apply Curse instead. Gear Nat offensively, get her Magic as high as possible and equip her with a Holy-boosting staff. I hope you've done the sensible thing and given Nat every Cake stat boost you've found, but this will still be effective even if not. Nat and Anna will both need their limits ready to go.

Turn 1:
Matt/Lance uses Double Shot/Unload/Legend (not sure what has the best chances) to inflict Curse status. If this fails, run and try again.
Nat summons Evil Worm to apply Mag Defense debuff + poison. If you're not happy with the result (ie, it didn't put him down to -50%), run and try again.
Anna uses Mother Earth limit.This will give everyone Bless and add even more poison to the Dark player. Bless is going to prevent a lot of potential problems we'll soon face.

Here we just hope that whatever attack comes your way, everyone survives. If someone dies, flee and try again.It won't take long for all the cards to be stacked in our favour.

Turn 2:
Now we make our move
Anna uses Log (yes, Log) on the Dark Player. Log is a super underrated ability that inflicts Stagger with 100% accuracy. Almost nothing in the game is immune to Stagger (in fact, iirc only Monoliths are immune and literally everything else has 0% resistance). Stagger makes the next hit a guaranteed critical.
Matt/Lance uses Milk on Nat
Nat unleashes with Genesis. With her Magic buffed through the roof, the Dark Player's defenses cut and Curse+Stagger infliced this will deal a freaking enormous amount of damage, I'm talking like 70%+ of their HP gone in a single blow.

At this point, they will counter with their limit attack, but being under the effects of Auto-Revive and Bless you'll pull through ok. From here, you can go about the rest of the short battle as you please - the Dark Player won't get another limit before it's dead, it's minions are gone, it'll be taking serious damage from high poison stacks, you've still got a few turns safe under Bless and it'll only take another 2-3 Judgements to finish it off as it's still debuffed to hell for a few more turns too.

Dude, I know this is a year late but thank you so much for this. I managed to somehow make it and beat them after so much pain (it took literally forever). Thanks to Lance's major defense and auto-revive constantly being put on him, he managed to always pull through to revive people with coffee. I scrapped by barely! Thank you so much, so satisfying oh my god.

[Meddyan]

Originally posted by ♥ Remi Kat ♥:

Dude, I know this is a year late but thank you so much for this. I managed to somehow make it and beat them after so much pain (it took literally forever). Thanks to Lance's major defense and auto-revive constantly being put on him, he managed to always pull through to revive people with coffee. I scrapped by barely! Thank you so much, so satisfying oh my god.

Haha, no problem, glad I managed to be of service =)

[♥ Remi Kat ♥]

Originally posted by Meddyan:

Originally posted by ♥ Remi Kat ♥:

Dude, I know this is a year late but thank you so much for this. I managed to somehow make it and beat them after so much pain (it took literally forever). Thanks to Lance's major defense and auto-revive constantly being put on him, he managed to always pull through to revive people with coffee. I scrapped by barely! Thank you so much, so satisfying oh my god.

Haha, no problem, glad I managed to be of service =)

Thanks once again. All I have to do is beat Boss Marathon 1 (I literally don't know how but I set it to hard and not epic so there went like 30 mins of my life oh man). Have a great year dude :)