Any tips for dealing with the Last Defender?

[TheUnchosen]

Most of my runs lately have been going through most of the floors relatively unharmed only to get severely injured in the disco room and blown up by the last boss. Any tips to beat the last room?

[yuzu]

one of its attacks are some weird fusion laser shotgun blast that slows you down, if you get hit by those you're pretty much done for imo
Most of its attacks hits like a tank but are sort of telegraphed well so you just have to make sure to stay on the move and dodge accordingly
Having some movement, dodge and max health body upgrades would be useful too

[Fodder]

Big thing is to remember that firing your weapon slows you down, so cease when he's close to you and firing his rapid lasers.

[Xaveth]

Just like in any other rogue-lite games and other bosses you've fought and conquered -- know its attack patterns and dance around it while shooting to the best of your abilities.

The first phase is simple enough as is. You start positioning at the furthermost side of the room while shooting the boss. Then start dashing on the other side if its blasters are about to reach you. The homing beams will also appear in a brief moment, so you'll have to be on the move as well.

Before you dash into the other side of its blaster. Make sure you're "hugging" the front fence and not shooting (unless you have Mael artifact) to cover enough dashing distance to pass through its other blaster. Otherwise, you'll end up dashing right into its barrel. Which then you'll have to center position between the blasters and start north/south strafing to avoid the beams as well until you can dash again on either side.

Later on, the fight becomes intense, and attacks more difficult to dodge. Disco tiles start appearing and this tactic becoming less effective, especially when they appear at the frontmost. I'd still suggest doing this and tank those disco tiles if you're going to pass through its blasters, then quickly move away from it.

Sometime later, its blasters will fire a barrage of missiles, but these are easy to dodge as their directions are straight-forward and predictable. Also, you may notice that a green tile suddenly appears. This is a "safe-zone" where anything that's not covered with a green tile gets exploded. I would NOT suggest going into that green tile and tank the explosion because you don't have enough space to avoid the homing beams (they'll hurt you more than the mortar damage does). Or worse, getting struck by the blasters as well.

Other phases will involve the Last Defender no longer firing its blasters, and missiles start appearing on each side of the room. These missiles are just reskinned Spiderbots, take them out first then the boss.

Lastly, be SUPER armed to the teeth. Your two primary weapons should be maxed out obviously. Cario artifact helps A LOT for the dash-through and mistakes. Refractor Crystal is a must when you can't dodge everything being thrown at you all at once. It's also important to kill the Last Defender as fast as you can as the fight gets more hectic and things spiral out of control very fast the longer you're in the fray (especially when the disco tiles have random patterns). Having a Twin Link II helps to boost your DPS substantially. Much better if you got a Brawndo as that boost your damage a thousandfold and you can easily kill the Last Defender in a couple of seconds.

Alternatively, if you don't want to read this whole thing. you can just watch this video instead and learn how the player beats Last Defender (with no guns as an extra challenge). Skip to 38:34.

https://youtu.be/f3sPyEHljaU?#t=2314s

[TheUnchosen]

Thanks for all the advice. Finally managed to rip the Last Defender to shreds with a significantly upgraded Battle Hymn.

[Enfild]

Originally posted by TheUnchosen:

Thanks for all the advice. Finally managed to rip the Last Defender to shreds with a significantly upgraded Battle Hymn.

Yeah, i found that although you can, and should use tactics as Xaveth said, in the end it only helps you so far.
Most of the fights success is down to if you had good RNG or not. If you didnt have enough firepower, you are screwed.
Kinda annoying, but i guess it is what it is, its the nature of this game.

[meatwater .k]

Good advice ITT. The other thing i'd mention is, depending on your build, to prioritize movement speed upgrades. LD hits so hard that health regen can only keep you in the fight so long; better to avoid damage altogether by upgrading yourself to be as mobile as possible by the end.
After good DPS, speed is what I find keeps you alive in this game.

[Thundercracker]

Originally posted by meatwater .k:

Good advice ITT. The other thing i'd mention is, depending on your build, to prioritize movement speed upgrades. LD hits so hard that health regen can only keep you in the fight so long; better to avoid damage altogether by upgrading yourself to be as mobile as possible by the end.
After good DPS, speed is what I find keeps you alive in this game.

i see LD as a hard check on movespeed and DPS. i have not yet managed to break both threshholds at once.

[Wild 7s]

Taking every Move speed upgrade available to you during the run is, by far, is the best way of improving your odds vs Last Defender. Any time you get an upgrade selection that includes move speed, take it, regardless of your other circumstances.

To put into perspective just how damned useful it is, I've taken LD down on 200% difficulty with nothing more than the blue pistol, a crossbow and ~650 movespeed.

Remain calm, and be prepared to evade his attacks. A decent long range weapon and short range weapon will suffice; you don't need legendaries or ULTRAs or whatever, though those weapons can certainly overpower LD if modded up.

(watch out for the big homing missiles he spawns from the sides of the arena; you need to shoot those down from a safe distance)

[TheUnchosen]

Originally posted by Wild 7s:

Taking every Move speed upgrade available to you during the run is, by far, is the best way of improving your odds vs Last Defender. Any time you get an upgrade selection that includes move speed, take it, regardless of your other circumstances.

To put into perspective just how damned useful it is, I've taken LD down on 200% difficulty with nothing more than the blue pistol, a crossbow and ~650 movespeed.

Remain calm, and be prepared to evade his attacks. A decent long range weapon and short range weapon will suffice; you don't need legendaries or ULTRAs or whatever, though those weapons can certainly overpower LD if modded up.

(watch out for the big homing missiles he spawns from the sides of the arena; you need to shoot those down from a safe distance)

Wait, you can shoot down homing missiles? I thought you had to dodge them.

[meatwater .k]

They're talking about the two big slow chonker nukes that spawn from the sides of the screen late in the LD fight. You want to shoot those.

[Simonsis13]

I haven't seen your question, so i hope this reaches you. Also, I haven't read these comments, so i hope I'm not just repeating something. The first part of the bossfight depends a lot on your dps. Ofc can just kill both bosses in a sec with a good gun, but that's not very likely to happen for you. You need to know that the right boss is the more dangerous one, while the left one has bigger range. 2 possible approaches: 1st: move inside the right tank and kill him from inside. Just keep in mind to dash out before he explodes. 2nd: hug the wall on the left side and kill the left boss. As long as you stay close to the wall, the right boss can't hit you, you can just outrange him.

[Simonsis13]

The Disco room is the hardest part of this bossfight. The spawning enemys are rng dependend and if you're unlucky, you get get 4 snipers. It's not possible to protect yourself from this case, all you can do is bringing a refractor crystal. Since the floor damages you, you need a huge shield and a way to recharge your shield. (Or just dash over them on commandos) Usually it's possible to move around/ dash over these fields without taking damage, because you don't take damage immidiatly, you have maybe 1 or 2 seconds before you have to leave. Still there is the option when all 4 tiles around a server are covered in damage tiles. Sounds like a big deal at the first glance, but there is a little trick you can use to work around this. As long as you stand in the middle of two tiles, you won't take damage. So all you need to do is hiding behind the servers between 2 tiles to avoid the floor damage and kill snipers whenever they spawn. One mistake i keep repeating is to kill myself with the tiles while wating for the gate to open. Just keep that in mind.

[Simonsis13]

The final fight, against Last Defender is not actually that hard as long as you know what you're doing. As you might have heard, a common and good strategie is to just move up to the cealing, allowing you to ignore his blue fusion lasers. The red lasers are not very fast, you can deal with them by constantly strafing left or right. Use your dash to move over big damaging field clusters and keep in mind that you have to repostition whenever he respawns them. He'll eventually spawn the big laser, you have to dash away from the point it will spawn on. Also, the range of that thing is much bigger then you might think, reason enough to take the dangerous route away from the ceiling in order to dodge it. When a green tile appears, he'll throw bombs on every tile but the green one. Commandos just i-frame(dash) the explosion, rogues pop smoke for dodge. Everyone has to be fast or use refractor. He spawns 2 types of homing missiles, the small versions are never a problem, the big ones(2 on each side) must be shot, or triggered and dodged just like doombas and spider mines.

[Simonsis13]

I usually just refractor or dash to trigger 2 of them, while shooting the 2 other ones. When you run out of ammo, you should lure him to one side and then run down to an ammo crate on the other side of the field. Again, movespeed rules. (smoke nade refreshes dash, just so you know) When you're playing demo this all get harder, cause you have to be careful to not blow yourself up. When playing sniper, keep in mind to not use the target laser, it's almost impossible to his that fat boss and you can't afford the speed decrease(only for bossfights). When you're using turrets, make sure you postion them in a way that keeps them from shooting you, that's very likely to happen during this bossfight. Once you kill him you get the usual bossloot. Keep in mind that you'll be teleportet away after some time, so be fast about upgrading/picking up items/weapons. Finally a little exploit: If you keep spamming UNSTUCK in the settings, you'll eventually be teleported into the LD room, allowing you to skip the disco room. But when you need tricks like these to beat this game, you're wrong here. Hope I was helpful, have a nice bosskill.

[Simonsis13]

Now that i read this tread i wnat to add some stuff: Congrats for your victory. At the start of the fight just move up until the can't advance anymore. At this point the blue lasers can't hit you whatsoever. All you need to take care of are the beamers. A general advice is that boss hp scales with terrorlevel. In my high terrorlevel run, where i ended up with over 2800 terrorlevel, i fought LD for about 20min. (Ultra Road Warrior, breacher, hyperfeed, akira). LD is not a dps check at all. It's a speed and refractor check. Finally, don't bother using 2 guns just in order to beat LD. You have enough ammo crates to use 1 gun over the whole fight. This does not mean that using 2 guns is a bad idea, I simply would not redcommend it in most cases, altough it's defenitly a good idea in some cases(eg. demo, or when using a red gun)