Need to understand Standard mode regarding scaling

[franzisbacon]

I bought this game yesterday on a whim as someone had mentioned it on an Astlibra forum (and I don't know why, they're not the same at all).

It's my first bullet hell game and I'm playing on normal/standard.
The bosses are giving me a real hard time but it's to be expected given my inexperience.

What I don't understand is this:
Standard scales the Boss level with your equipment and I read that you scale faster than the bosses so it's a good thing.
But just right now, I was fighting Pandora and I just couldn't get her below half health, I retried for half an hour and couldn't progress.

Then I remembered someone mentioning how Boss level changed depending on equipped badges so I just unequipped them all and then proceeded to clobber Pandora without any healing (well, not clobber but it was MUCH easier).

What's the point to equip badges in that case? In this particular case I don't think I outpaced the boss scaling.

Is there something I misunderstood?

[phenir]

Well, what was your badge setup?

[franzisbacon]

I just activated all the badges I had

Health plus - Max. Health +7.5%
Weaken - Reduce enemies' invincibility time after getting hit
Armored - Reduce knockback from attacks and reduce collision damage
ATK Grow - Attack damage output +1~2
DEF Grow - All damage taken -1~2

[phenir]

Well, you did only equip two offensive badge, which both are a pretty minor boost so I am not surprised she is a little easier to beat after unequipping them. However, I'm more inclined to believe you just got more familiar with the fight. I am pretty sure enemies don't gain defense from levels(otherwise 0% would be damn near impossible), just health and damage and bullet density. Additonally, the scaling is pretty minor. After a short test, the one boss I tested against went from 182 to 155 after unequipping 98 pp of badges on bex. I'm definitely gaining more than 20% power from my badges.

[franzisbacon]

Hmmm ok, I'll try experimenting more then!

[mldb88]

While bosses do scale with your items on Standard, as mentioned it's really not a huge amount. Messing with your item/badges to drop their scaling a bit might give you an extra hit or two of leeway (which on some fights where you're getting really close to winning could make enough difference to push it over the edge).

Pandora and the other bosses of that chapter are really the first big spike in difficulty though (especially if you did what I did and used Skullo to bump up the difficulty because of how easy the early game was), so it's pretty normal to get really stuck there as a new player. Pandora is one of the first bosses with patterns complex enough that you really need to learn your positioning and how to actually dodge them rather than just relying on pure reflex or just tanking through it. I had the exact same problem on my first playthrough, and you'll quickly learn bosses are where a good 85% of this game's difficulty comes from (the other 15% being those pain in the ass post game areas... not looking forward to doing those again on higher difficulty).

The best advice I can give is if you're really stuck (I know you already beat her, but I think the other two bosses of the chapter were kind of similar with the difficulty spike), explore a bit and see if there are any other items/badges you missed, pick up upgrades from the shop, or if there's a specific attack you're really struggling with, look up a no damage run and see how to handle it (I had to do it with one specific attack on the main post-game boss, never would have figured it out on my own otherwise). Also since most bosses only have windows of vulnerability where they're easy to hit and/or take more damage, sometimes it's better to go with a defensive loadout while you're learning the patterns and then switch to offensive once you've got most of it pretty much set.

Bosses are more about pattern recognition and learning bullet patterns so most bosses will usually take a lot of tries (hell there are a small handful like the post game boss that had me put the game down for over a year before coming back to beat it after three or four days of straight attempts).

Also the other thing to note, for bosses that you might fight with or without certain ability items depending on the boss order you take (air dash, double jump, etc), the patterns will change to accomodate whether or not you have the item. The extra mobility will usually make things easier overall though so it might not be something you pick up on right away (I know I didn't when I was facing Kitori in the graveyard/spooky area and I tried her with both, and I think same with Vanilla if I recall).