Bosses insane HP

[Lanzagranadas]

First playthrough, I'm on Nightmare, which isn't even the highest available difficulty. Bosses seriously take A LOT of hits to defeat, like anything I do other than super special moves just tickles them.

Is that normal or is there anything I can do to improve my damage input against them? I can defeat them, but it takes forever, these guys are way more spongy than DS3's Midir. One of the bosses even healed himself so the fight took like 25 minutes. I try to keep my characters well equiped and their weapons as upgraded as I can afford but still, their damage input is garbage against bosses.

Also, am I right to guess that all Paralysis, Poison, Burn, etc. upgrades are basically useless? since bosses seem to be immune to those effects, and regular enemies are just better to take down with raw damage.

[Gilgamesh, King of Heroes]

One of the bosses even healed himself so the fight took like 25 minutes.

You can interrupt the healing with X-Strikes, or Asuka's EX-Attack.

Other than that I'm not really sure what the problem is. If you use your X-Strikes/EX Attacks/X-Drive, and build your characters reasonably (gearing Kou for power attacks instead of ranged or whatever, etc) things really don't take too long to kill, even on calamity+no items. How long does it take you to kill bosses, and what are you expecting?

[Flariz]

To be fair, for the first 3 chapters or so on a first playthough, the bosses can feel a bit tanky, but thats mostly due to a combination of
1)You not being fully used to the combat yet
2)You dont have access to most of the combat features yet

Originally posted by Lanzagranadas:

Also, am I right to guess that all Paralysis, Poison, Burn, etc. upgrades are basically useless? since bosses seem to be immune to those effects, and regular enemies are just better to take down with raw damage.

No offense, but Status Effects being useless is pretty much what should be expecting in the first place. On a good 80%+ of games, they are only effective when used aganist you, never/rarely aganist the AI enemies lol. You should in fact be quite surprised if this isnt true.

[Rev]

That healing boss... you need to leave his minions live as far as I remember. Then it will heal them instead of himself. Or go with elixirs to overpower it.

Bosses are tanky, but they rarely take unreasonably long time to take down if you know that are you doing.

Paralysis/Poison/etc. can be useful to interrupt casts, but it rarely works cause you mainly do so with Asuka's Ex-Strike which "freezes" boss (it won't freeze it... or more like he will clear this status right away, but even if "freeze" works for nanoseconds it interrupts casting)

[Jupiter3927]

All bosses are immune to status effects.
Poison and burn deal a percentage of the max hp as damage so those would easily do more damage than you could.
Paralysis and freeze would be way too beneficial to you for the game to let you use them on a boss.
Burden is pretty lame since all it does is slow down the target.
Blind is sort of useful but not really since some attacks will miss (not all).

You're better off using status effects in the dungeon since every other enemy can take status effects.
They work best when characters that can put in a ton of hits quickly use them.
Kou has a pretty slow attack speed so he should not use status effects.
Sora is pretty quick so she could reasonably spam status effects for easy fights.

For actually dealing damage, you could have Asuka run around shooting the boss.
This will take a while.
You could have Kou run up and whip it to death.
Kou's attacks charge up the X-drive gauge faster so you could double team the boss to death relatively quickly.
Sora's power attack is ridiculously strong so you could do a hit and run strategy with that.
Don't forget to give your characters equips to buff up their strength.

Never leave any of your gauges fully charged during a fight.
They don't overcharge so leaving them at max is just wasting them.


Bosses will go down easier later when you get better stuff.

[Uzkniso o.o]

I do not recommend playing this game on max difficulty @1st playthrough.

Besides, on ng+ you can view all events and have ~6 new dungeons to explore.

[Uzkniso o.o]

I cleared it on Nightmare, which I found challenging and fun (except for those bosses that took forever to kill). But yeah, Calamity for a 1st playthrough sounds pretty insane for me so I'm leaving that one for another time, on NG+.

Exactly. On your first run you will have garbage gear, lack of skills and lack of good gems (elements). It's not much fun. It's better to focus on preparing for a ng+. Unfortunately, I think that is how this game was designed.

[Jupiter3927]

You only need three good sets of gear and a few good gems for most of the game.
Only three characters are in your party at any time and your team can share.

Gems are the hard part since they get better as you play.
Talk to npc's and do side-quests and you'll get easy gems.
That skateboarding minigame hands out rare and better gems like candy.
Your team can give the best gems to 3 characters for a boss fight.

NG+ is great because you can have characters dedicated to clearing dungeons and other characters just for bosses.

[Flariz]

Nah, not at all.
Calamity is perfectly doable even on a fresh new game file. It will take some effort for sure, but thats to be expected since its the highest difficulty...
I can agree with the first 2-3 bosses being very tanky. You dont have good enough gear available at the time
After that, if the bosses are still too tanky, thats entirely on you.

[Gilgamesh, King of Heroes]

I wouldn't say it's the bosses that are the problem in the first 2-3 dungeons - if anything, the problem are the minibosses in danger rooms. Like that one skeleton in the second dungeon, it has massive hp and you don't even have power attacks, EX-Attacks or X-Drive yet.

I'd really prefer if they gave you all of Ranged/Flying/Power by the end of the first dungeon, then idk X-Drive and EX-Attacks in the second. Tried making the game do that by editing scena files but couldn't figure it out, sadly.

Calamity is entirely doable on a first playthrough, even without using consumable items or grinding. Some of the sidestory bosses are pretty tough with no items (because only 2 party members = no support slot = no healing other than X-Drive = pretty slim margin of error, you can only get hit a few times), but the game gives you a lot of safety nets and tools. Too many, IMO. With Brave Soul + Auto Recovery you have a lot of 'get out of death free' cards, and X-Strike/EX-Attacks can be used often (and can clear screens of mobs / cancel boss attacks / allow you to iframes through dangerous situations). X-Drive with Asuka as partner is basically a huge free window to wail on a boss.

[Flariz]

I honestly just hate that guy who loves spamming lighting at I believe Side Chapter 2.
I dislike him even more than the Side Chapter 1 boss (I am actually okay with this fight now)

Both of them are probably very nasty for newcomers. Annoying patterns AND very tanky.
Even when you know how to play, its annoying to deal with them on a fresh NG file (Especially lighting spam guy).
These are some of the main reasons Calamity may seem overwhelming at first. But once you get past them there are no difficulty walls at all until Chapter 5, and then again at the very last boss of the game (Which makes perfect sense...)

In fact, Side Chapter 2 Boss is probably the worst boss among that set of bosses, with Chapter 7 Boss being the worst one of the "Original" set.

[he00754174]

[Kizuhara]

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