calling quits at the final boss o.o

[StrifeRaider]

This got to be one of the most annoting final bosses I have ever fought >.< Hes constantly healing himself off my characters whicch is pretty much impossible to stop unless you're lucky to have a character with 100CP+ and on top of that he can always insta use magic, whit his strongest art always insta killing my team which is level 70+.

How many more levels do I need to grind for his ♥♥♥? lol kinda sucks that your character wiht 11K+ HP get insta killed by a skill thats unstoppable. Just wasted 3 hours trying to fight against that thing... so for now i'm just calling it quits.

Any advice for maybe later on against him?

[Blood Flowers]

If you're having that much trouble, you can always beat this boss (Final Boss in Realm of Shadows) similar to how you would beat every boss in Trails in the Sky. Have 1-2 dedicated adamantine shield casters (which will block ALL of his attacks) and a dedicated offensive mage that has a target all spell. Have Fie with maxed out evasion gear (you can get 100% evasion) and then proceed to faceroll the boss.
It worked with my underlevelled party on Nightmare (Rean being my highest levelled in the low 60s). I think my starting party was Emma, Elliot, Fie, and Jusis (on Noble Command spam duty). Rean is sort of useless for this fight except for swapping in for an S-break once the boss gets low and you start chaining.

Originally posted by Stabbey:

Oh that boss.

First Tip: The only craft you ever want to use is Morning Moon, the evasion one.

Second tip: You need to attack points which give you a follow-up attack.

Until I realized that two of the poses are identical.

Third tip: Associate the sound cue with the vulnerable pose.

As for the final boss (Armored Knight), it's actually fairly easy to beat. First of all, if you only use Morning Moon, you will lose in Nightmare every time guaranteed. You just don't do enough damage with only Morning Moon (unless absurdly lucky with RNG counters/boss attack types). I recommend using Qingong before Morning Moon. Always attack when you have a guaranteed attack and then use the link attack/rush when available.

Poses:
Initial pose: attack the arms.
Holds weapon in front of body with circle underneath: attack body.
Weapon behind body: Either body or head. This is based off of sound cues, but I play on the Japanese audio and there doesn't actually seem to be sound cues in Japanese. If you're also stuck with that problem, the following is an effective method to still win this fight: Almost alwaysthe body is the critical the first time this pose comes out. Attack body first time then afterwards take this turn to use Qingong or Morning Moon or Heal.
Holds weapon in front of body with no circle: Don't attack. I almost always recommend using Morning Moon here. The follow-up attack after this move HURTS. You can optionally heal and tank if you don't have the CP for Morning Moon.

I just did this fight 4 times earlier (for various dance partners to have a clear file for each) on Nightmare. After I worked out the kinks a bit (since there is a lot less leeway compared to normal/hard) the 2nd-4th runs I won the fight on the first try each time following this method.

[Hagen2900]

Thanks for the Divine Knight strat. I will try it out once I reach that point.

Doesn't the final boss' kidnapping thing go through Adamantine Shield? I may be wrong.

[Blood Flowers]

Originally posted by Hagen2900:

Thanks for the Divine Knight strat. I will try it out once I reach that point.

It should work (with some leeway to spare) as I ended most of my fights with ~30-40% hp leftover (no heals remaining).

Doesn't the final boss' kidnapping thing go through Adamantine Shield? I may be wrong.

It does not. Every single one of the final boss' attacks counts as a physical attack/craft. Adamantine Shield blocks it (I tested this on my Nightmare run). Moreover, you don't need to put adamantine shield on Fie, since the kidnap release ability activation odds seems to be based off of the kidnapped character's evasion (For instance, if Fie gets kidnapped, most of the time she gets released before the boss even heals off of her even once with ~80% evasion).

[HunterRassius]

It should be noted that Rean's lvl plays a difference in how strong Valimar is. As Butter pointed out earlier and Blood kind of fails to mention double stacking Qingong is your best bet. You'll only have a ghost of a chance otherwise.

The battle should generally go like this:

-Build up for your first Qingong
-Use it and wait for the "opportunity" to use your heal (use it for maximum gain or below 50% HP)
-Let your first Qingong drift down to 1 turn remaining then rebuff for the 50% str + spd buff
-Rebuff it whenever it's about to fall off at 1 turn
-Try your hardest not to get nailed with Criminal Edge (his "third" attack). A couple bad procs on this one can turn a winning fight into a losing one. Morning Moon it.
-Finish him! Finish him NOW! OH GOD NOT THE FOURTH ATTACK!!

...or something like that.

Edit: Whoops. Yea as Blood above states when he's in his defensive stance NEVER attack him as he'll counter you.

[Blood Flowers]

Originally posted by HunterRassius:

As Butter pointed out earlier and Blood kind of fails to mention double stacking Qingong is your best bet. You'll only have a ghost of a chance otherwise.

I have never once won when double stacking Qingong at this fight (and only lost it the first two times when I was learning the stances) and have won it 6 out of 8 times on Nightmare with Rean in his mid/upper-60s each time. You only need one stack of Qingong to do solid damage, the second becomes pretty redundant (first stack gives almost double damage while the second stack is like 2.5x). Almost always better to use Morning Moon during your last stack of level 1 Qingong to "prolong" the effect. I've been reading that a lot of other people find this fight difficult and are "barely" winning it. I usually leave off with 30-40% hp when I win this fight so it's not cutting it too close. Oddly enough, the highest HP I ever ended this fight with was only using Qingong once towards the end of the fight and otherwise fighting without it. I think I had nearly 50% hp leftover at that time.

I'm not too clear on the damage calculations, but I think STR/ATS scales on a bell curve. Once you are at a certain amount of STR over the enemy DEF, you start hitting really hard. Once you are at a much higher STR compared to their DEF, you start to get diminishing returns. For instance, in the Realm of Shadow 3, Fie with ~1100 attack will do 0 Damage. With ~1200 damage you are hitting about 2,000. At ~1400 damage you are dealing about 3,000. Just food for thought.

[Hagen2900]

No, it's all perfectly linear. The damage formula is roughly (for its expected value):

Damage = 2.5*Strength - 1.25*Defense (if this value would be negative it gets set to 0 instead)

If you are close to the cut-off point additional strength will lead to much higher relative increases in damage. However, the absolute damage increase from additional strength is always
2.5 * Added_Strength, no matter what*.

*Well OK, if you are below the cut-off point initially than not, pedant.

[Blood Flowers]

Originally posted by Hagen2900:

No, it's all perfectly linear. The damage formula is roughly (for its expected value):

Damage = 2.5*Strength - 1.25*Defense (if this value would be negative it gets set to 0 instead)

If you are close to the cut-off point additional strength will lead to much higher relative increases in damage. However, the absolute damage increase from additional strength is always
2.5 * Added_Strength, no matter what*.

*Well OK, if you are below the cut-off point initially than not, pedant.

Ah, thanks. I didn't know that. Do you happen to have a source for this? I'm just curious as to how the damage calculations work in this game in general.

Anyways, even holding the linear increases to be true, double stacking Qingong forces you to tank 2 hits and it's not always a good idea to tank that second hit if it's not a "safe" attack. I will amend my prior call on double stacking Qingong to be better if you get that second stack during a "safe" attack (AKA, during Azure Knight with no stance or sword behind body).

[Hagen2900]

The source for this formula is my own testing and a link someone posted on reddit to a Zero/Ao screenshot (either an article or some of those strategy book thingies for console games). I can't find the link anymore. Probably didn't bookmark it because the info was on a pron site. ^^ So I can't give you an authorative source but I tested this VERY meticuously. Feel free to run some numbers yourself.

Attack = STRorATS * Att-Buff-Modifier * CraftArt-Modifier
Defense = DEForADF * Def-Buff-Modifier

The Buff-Modifiers are 0.5, 0.75, 1, 1.25 or 1.5 depending on buffs obviously. CraftArt-Modifier depends on the skill. For Crafts it's typically between 1.1 and 1.5. S-Crafts modifiers lie between 3 and 4 usually, Arts between 1.7 and 4.5.

FixedDamage = Floor(Attack*2.5 - Defense*1.25) * FullCP-Modifier
DamageRadius = Floor(FixedDamage/15)
DamageRange = [FixedDamage - DamageRadius, FixedDamage + DamageRadius)

FullCP-Modifier is 1.5 for 200 CP S-Crafts and 1 otherwise.

[HunterRassius]

Originally posted by Blood Flowers:

Originally posted by HunterRassius:

As Butter pointed out earlier and Blood kind of fails to mention double stacking Qingong is your best bet. You'll only have a ghost of a chance otherwise.

I have never once won when double stacking Qingong at this fight (and only lost it the first two times when I was learning the stances) and have won it 6 out of 8 times on Nightmare with Rean in his mid/upper-60s each time. You only need one stack of Qingong to do solid damage, the second becomes pretty redundant (first stack gives almost double damage while the second stack is like 2.5x). Almost always better to use Morning Moon during your last stack of level 1 Qingong to "prolong" the effect. I've been reading that a lot of other people find this fight difficult and are "barely" winning it. I usually leave off with 30-40% hp when I win this fight so it's not cutting it too close. Oddly enough, the highest HP I ever ended this fight with was only using Qingong once towards the end of the fight and otherwise fighting without it. I think I had nearly 50% hp leftover at that time.

I'm not too clear on the damage calculations, but I think STR/ATS scales on a bell curve. Once you are at a certain amount of STR over the enemy DEF, you start hitting really hard. Once you are at a much higher STR compared to their DEF, you start to get diminishing returns. For instance, in the Realm of Shadow 3, Fie with ~1100 attack will do 0 Damage. With ~1200 damage you are hitting about 2,000. At ~1400 damage you are dealing about 3,000. Just food for thought.

...And your Rean was what lvl exactly? I know from personal and painful experience that at a low enough lvl you will be dealing literally inconsequential damage to Ordine unbuffed. For me, at least, that first time was at lvl... 62? After more attempts than I care to admit to I ended up beating that fight for the very first time using a single buff Qingong strategy. It was not pretty. Unless they've changed the stats on Ordine for the PC version, the only real reason I believe you can do that is due to a high lvl. Coincidentally, that double Qingong buff strategy works wonders even for lowbie Rean lvls (though i'd recommend 65+). 90%+ of the time it's a win.

Wait... i'm missing something here aren't I? I think a more honest asessment is that Rean's stats effect Valimar. Rean's your physical nuker in the party isn't he?

[Blood Flowers]

Originally posted by HunterRassius:

Originally posted by Blood Flowers:

I have never once won when double stacking Qingong at this fight (and only lost it the first two times when I was learning the stances) and have won it 6 out of 8 times on Nightmare with Rean in his mid/upper-60s each time. You only need one stack of Qingong to do solid damage, the second becomes pretty redundant (first stack gives almost double damage while the second stack is like 2.5x). Almost always better to use Morning Moon during your last stack of level 1 Qingong to "prolong" the effect. I've been reading that a lot of other people find this fight difficult and are "barely" winning it. I usually leave off with 30-40% hp when I win this fight so it's not cutting it too close. Oddly enough, the highest HP I ever ended this fight with was only using Qingong once towards the end of the fight and otherwise fighting without it. I think I had nearly 50% hp leftover at that time.

I'm not too clear on the damage calculations, but I think STR/ATS scales on a bell curve. Once you are at a certain amount of STR over the enemy DEF, you start hitting really hard. Once you are at a much higher STR compared to their DEF, you start to get diminishing returns. For instance, in the Realm of Shadow 3, Fie with ~1100 attack will do 0 Damage. With ~1200 damage you are hitting about 2,000. At ~1400 damage you are dealing about 3,000. Just food for thought.

...And your Rean was what lvl exactly? I know from personal and painful experience that at a low enough lvl you will be dealing literally inconsequential damage to Ordine unbuffed. For me, at least, that first time was at lvl... 62? After more attempts than I care to admit to I ended up beating that fight for the very first time using a single buff Qingong strategy. It was not pretty. Unless they've changed the stats on Ordine for the PC version, the only real reason I believe you can do that is due to a high lvl. Coincidentally, that double Qingong buff strategy works wonders even for lowbie Rean lvls (though i'd recommend 65+). 90%+ of the time it's a win.

Wait... i'm missing something here aren't I? I think a more honest asessment is that Rean's stats effect Valimar. Rean's your physical nuker in the party isn't he?

My Rean level was mid-60s (I think 66-67 IIRC). Yeah, he was my primary physical nuker. I had Fie as glass cannon evasion tank, Emma for magic nuke, Elliot on heals, Jusis as buffer. I had literally no trouble against the Azure Knight, but Rean was stacked with pretty much the best possible STR equipment/quartz that I had (I don't remember exactly, but I think I'd ballpark at around 1300-1400 STR?).

[OnlyOffensive]

You mean shadow? You don't need to grind a single level on nightmare to beat it, use shields, use s-crafts to break siphon, but overall you should have enough hp on every character to survive his ultimate, i duno how you can't you must be very poorly geared or weird, single HP2 quartz and like 1 accessory with health for low health characters is enough, use seraphic ring after it and thats it. Unless they have buffed him in last year, which is unlikely, your doing something VERY WRONG, never had instakilled on any character by him.