How do I beat Geiseric on Cie'th Mission 12?

[76561198280069782]

First time I tried to beat him he literally killed off my HP. Is there any good tactic to beat him?

[tiornys]

There are several tactics that are useful.

Everything Geiseric does is at least partly physical, so physical damage resistance will help you survive. His most dangerous attack--Dominating Fist--is both physical and magical, so if that move is giving you trouble you can add magical damage resistance to further cut its damage. Besides the obvious Protect and Shell, you can also get physical resistance from Black Belts or General's Belts, and magical resistance from Rune Bracelets or Witch's Bracelets. If you use damage resistance accessories, it's best to upgrade them to max, and Black Belts and Rune Bracelets are very cheap to upgrade.

Another way to cut the damage you take is to deploy a Sentinel. Snow equipped with Umbra (to boost Fringeward) will do an excellent job of absorbing damage, although any SEN presence is very helpful against the single-target attacks and helps reduce damage from the AoE attacks.

Depending on your HP levels, you might be fine using just one of these ideas, or you might want to look at stacking them. I've done this mission with less than 1000 HP on my characters, just to give an idea of how much extra resilience you can get from stacking Sentinel on top of multiple sources of damage reduction.

If you're generally ok dealing with his standard attacks but have trouble with Dominating Fist, there are a couple of other tactics you can employ to avoid seeing that move. If you can stagger him quickly, launch him, and keep him juggled (if he falls, he'll get at least one attack in before you can launch him again), it's very possible to kill him before he ever uses Murderous Might and Dominating Fist. This generally takes at least a little bit of +Magic boosting; how much you need to boost your Magic depends on your level, and whether or not you can work the battle system to access other damage multipliers. Ideally, you want to get Deshell inflicted on Geiseric, buff your characters with Faith and Enfire, and have multiple Commandos casting Ruin at him post-stagger.

If you're having trouble with killing Geiseric before he gets to Murderous Might, it's also possible to kill the fist off before he uses Dominating Fist. This requires a quick target change to the Fist as soon as it spawns, and might need you to rapidly inflict Deshell. Again, having Faith and Enfire on your party will make it easier to rapidly kill the Fist, and you'll want to use COM-RAV-RAV for max damage instead of having multiple COMs (otherwise one of your COMs will attack Geiseric instead of the Fist).