Question about a boss in Chapter 6

[MabinoZerk]

The fight against Cid.

How are you meant to fight this boss without spamming S-Crafts? My physical attacks don't deal nearly enough damage for them to be viable when six enemies are on the screen, and Cid can cancel arts. The game is pretty much encouraging me to use S-Crafts like Phantom Raid and Spear of Loa. Did anyone do anything different for this boss?

[Mouse...]

what level are you on ? and what's your gear + party setup ?
i didn't remember having trouble fighting him on hard (he kept casting prominence like what he did on SC).
there's richard on your party right ? he should be able to juggle cid alone , keeping him on track, with 1.5~3k damage. i'm using hotarukiri katana from monster drop.

as for other guard/officer mobs, what's your caster/support doing ? have them equip anti-faint or freeze acc, and properly deploy earth guard/wall.
you don't need to use spear of loa as kevin, if any, you should turn it into grail sphere, save 200 CP before battle, use it as emergency wall.
idk about the other 2 party members, but i suggest bringing at least 1 caster with dark matter EX to gather mobs in 1 spot (suction+ MOV-2), and let other character (for example joshua, spam evil eye & delay their turn) do their jobs.

[Chester]

All his helpers are vulnerable to confuse. He is not the only boss with backup that can turn into your backup. Kevin's Grail Sphere can give you breathing room and suddenly 1-2 Silver Thorns later your team just got much bigger. If you can't slot Silver Thorn you can do it slower and manually hit people with Chaos Brand.

[Iridium]

Make sure to continuously Impede him every time you get the chance. Arc Prominence is really annoying, and while you can potentially block it (it's good to have Grail Sphere as Kevin's S-Break, rather than Spear of Loa, for this general purpose -- and not just here) it's generally better to just not deal with it at all.

[MabinoZerk]

I'm on normal and my party is Kevin, Richard, Joshua and Kloe. All characters are around level 125. None of my characters know Silver Thorn at the moment, but Joshua does know Death Scream and Abyss Fall. Unless it's for healing arts, I tend to equip quartz with stats in mind rather than for specific arts.

And to be honest I rarely bother with debuff/buff arts since they can take forever to cast and I'm conditioned to think that bosses are immune to status effects anyway, so I don't even try. Since the game doesn't give you a list of what status ailments a boss is susceptible to (during the fight anyway), I'm just not encouraged to debuff them. I just focus on dealing damage normally.

[GuppyForce]

Originally posted by MabinoZerk:

I'm on normal and my party is Kevin, Richard, Joshua and Kloe. All characters are around level 125. None of my characters know Silver Thorn at the moment, but Joshua does know Death Scream and Abyss Fall. Unless it's for healing arts, I tend to equip quartz with stats in mind rather than for specific arts.

And to be honest I rarely bother with debuff/buff arts since they can take forever to cast and I'm conditioned to think that bosses are immune to status effects anyway, so I don't even try. Since the game doesn't give you a list of what status ailments a boss is susceptible to (during the fight anyway), I'm just not encouraged to debuff them. I just focus on dealing damage normally.

See if you can get Zodiac on any of your casters, if not go with La Forte + La Crest. Use Richard to impede Cid and get Joshua to Att Delay and deal with his goons. Richard can probably hit some of the goons too given his near lack of craft delay (give him one of the gladiator items or seals). Kloe and Kevin can do healing and buffs and Death Scream once you're done or something (can't remember if the soldiers are vulnerable to KO). This isn't a hard fight--you're gonna be encountering much worse soon

[MabinoZerk]

Originally posted by Afezeria:

Originally posted by MabinoZerk:

I'm on normal and my party is Kevin, Richard, Joshua and Kloe. All characters are around level 125. None of my characters know Silver Thorn at the moment, but Joshua does know Death Scream and Abyss Fall. Unless it's for healing arts, I tend to equip quartz with stats in mind rather than for specific arts.

And to be honest I rarely bother with debuff/buff arts since they can take forever to cast and I'm conditioned to think that bosses are immune to status effects anyway, so I don't even try. Since the game doesn't give you a list of what status ailments a boss is susceptible to (during the fight anyway), I'm just not encouraged to debuff them. I just focus on dealing damage normally.

See if you can get Zodiac on any of your casters, if not go with La Forte + La Crest. Use Richard to impede Cid and get Joshua to Att Delay and deal with his goons. Richard can probably hit some of the goons too given his near lack of craft delay (give him one of the gladiator items or seals). Kloe and Kevin can do healing and buffs and Death Scream once you're done or something (can't remember if the soldiers are vulnerable to KO). This isn't a hard fight--you're gonna be encountering much worse soon

But Cid can cancel my artes before I can cast them so how am I supposed to do this?

[star_lightmeteor]

Is Cid's impede single target? If not, that's what Grail Sphere is for =p

[Atlanter]

If you use a Cast 2-quartz casting speed and a solid speed-stat the chance to cast between cid´s turn is not that bad. I´m using Cast 2 on every Ats-skilled character. And you can use Grail Sphere or Earth Wall to protect your characters sometimes. As long is a character is protected with the guard-status, the art can not be canceled by the enemy.

I gave one of my team the Zodiac and Death Scream arts. The soldiers are vulnerable to the KO of Death Scream.

Also at least +25% or +20% Str buffs are quite important in tougher battles to deal a good amount of physical damage. Buffs are definitive usefull.

[Erpy]

Use Action quartz and Cast2 quartz to speed your characters up. Even if he cancels you, keep casting. You'll get through eventually.

Don't omit buffs and debuffs. Whatever games conditioned you to think they're a waste of time, it wasn't the Trails games, where 95% of all bosses were vulnerable to debuffs. Likewise, buffs still make a good difference too.

[MabinoZerk]

I beat him. Once I discovered that the enemies are susceptible to Petrify, if was a matter of having Kevin use Gorgon Arrow whenever he can and hitting the enemies afterwards.

[Chester]

Most bosses are immune to Attack Delay crafts (which Joshua has easy access to), though their helpers often are not. However, except for a chapter's final boss, most bosses are not immune to any other kind of debuffs. It's often worth taking a turn and checking this out: Clock Down alone makes a HUGE difference. Want to do 5 times more damage? Buff a characters' strength then debuff the enemy defense. On a character like Richard this extra damage stacks up quick. Want to take half damage? Debuff enemy strength and buff your own defense. On harder difficulties/harder bosses this is necessary to allow you to do any significant damage/keep them from wrecking your face. And while chapter bosses usually prevent debuffing, nothing can keep you from Zodiac-ing and Clock Up Ex-ing your own team.

Remember, when in doubt: Sieg! Take 'em down!

[Mouse...]

and also don't forget battle formation, put them in the back left/right tile.
this is important on higher difficulty, you may avoid couple attack that normally should've hit you because the enemy can't reach you and have to move, therefore free casting/buff/debuff

[Snowflame]

If anyone is still playing this and wondering how to beat Cid on Nightmare super easily, equip Superior Gladiator belt and another CP recovery accessory like Lunar Seal on Kevin and spam his S-Craft, because of the amount of units in the fight, the S-Craft regenerates to 105 every single time with the accessories equiped. Makes the fight super trivial since when everyone but Cid dies, Cid's HP is low enough to kill with 2 more single target S-Crafts after you used the Kevin's S-Craft for the last time.

[Berahlen]

By chapter 6 you have pretty easy access to Zodiac. If you're trying to prosecute any credible physical offense by that point you really REALLY should be running that.

As for being impeded? That's actually something that works in your favor.

If you have pretty much any cast quartz equipped there's basically no way he's going to be fast enough to interrupt the same character twice in a row. Cast times are typically much shorter than the action delay from an impede craft, so just attempting to recast the same thing immediately will almost always work if you actually need the cast to go through.

But also consider that any turn where the boss uses a weak single-target impede is a turn where he didn't use something deadlier. If his AI actively prioritizes impeding anything mid-cast, you can have one character unequip their cast quartz and deliberately bait him into doing that on nearly all of his turns.

This is why interrupting bosses is only sometimes all that useful. Bosses like the SC Storm Bringer would only infrequently attempt their big nuke, and bosses like Cid have very long cast nukes with no cast reduction designed around organizing your whole party to keep him locked down. But against fast bosses with short casts like Lorence's heal spam in FC, you lose more ground trying (and eventually failing) to interrupt than if you just kept up pressure. Impedes are more often than not just to buy you one or two extra moves to make the kill, and they're not that much more useful against you either.