Dire Foe tip

[Jameskb31™ ︻デ 一 DEAF]

how did i find them?

[Fel]

Fight, a lot.

To expand on that, it's based on a few things, but mostly high difficulties encounter them far more often, and the amount of Grade you receive in your fights in the area also affects it.

After the water temple (main story, you'll understand what it is if you get there), you unlock a power that gives you a multiplier on Grade if you do engage the next fight shortly after the previous one ended (resets if you get a KO, if you take too long or if you flee), maxing out at 2x after 10 consecutive fights.
If you continue to fight in the same zone with the 2x Grade multiplier and get decent fights (dark bottles help to get longer fights for more grade without making it much more dangerous), your chances of meeting a Dire foe will increase.

Each time you beat a specific Dire foe, he will power up (until a certain cap), and the same foe will appear in all the zones that are close to each others, so usually you would change to a different island if you wanted a different Dire foe.

[toasted]

use dark bottle and get ambushed by a mob attacking your back, I run into them a lot like this

[Fel]

That and dangerous encounters definitely help (because they boost the grade it gives you), but risky encounters, just like their dangerous counterpart, grants additionnal power to your enemies. So I would refrain from doing that unless you are confident you can beat them without much efforts, because a single death resets the Grade multiplier, and in case the Dire foe appears, you want to be in top shape (everyone at around max HP, and quite a few souls just in case).

An other thing to consider if you want to hunt for Dire foes, they will be acompanied by 2 of the monster you met on the field/dungeon's map, but powered up and invincible, so for best results you might want to avoid enemies that are real trouble for you.

[lelouiserui]

dark bottle has nothing to do with dangerous encounters though. it just adds more enemies to normal fights.

[Fel]

Yeah, they add more mobs in each fight, which means that you will use breaks more, inflict more status effects and stuns, all of which are the base on which you gain the most of your Grade.
More breaks also means more BG, so more fights where at least one enemy is killed with a mystic arte (more or less doubles the base Grade from breaks, stuns and statuses).

So in the end, dark bottles mean more Grade per (normal) fight, which is what influences the Dire foes in the first place.

Dangerous encounters are an other way to gain more Grade for similar reasons, but significantly more dangerous.

Risky encounters (enemy attacking you from the back) seem to be affected by dark bottles, and are a lot more tame than dangerous ones.


So yeah, Dangerous encounters are technically one of the best ways to get Dire foes because of the higher enemy levels and longer fights, but it's harder to farm them quickly, and for the less talented of us it can result in KOs (or fleeing and game over), which resets the Grade multiplier.

Normal fights with dark bottles only last a bit longer than a normal fight (1.5 times as long in case of those big enemies) are usually easy to chain one after an other really fast and without resetting the multiplier, and it can easily net you 6+ Grade per fight when at 2x multiplier.


It's all a matter of how you feel the most confident, but keeping the multiplier is a lot more significant than the base amount you get in a single fight, so unless you are confident about winning dangerous encounters without KOs on your side (and possibly on Intense or Chaos for the best effect), dark bottles are more or less the next best thing to hunt dire foes.

[patpatyos]

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