Arianrhod is actually impossible to beat near the end of chapter 3???

[Kaitenoss]

Near the end of chapter 3, after entering the shrine on the island that Millium flew off to, you end up fighting Arianrhod solo with Rean. This is after taking care of the three musketeers lead by Duvalie. This fight seems actually unwinnable on hard mode however. Regardless of the strat that I do, be it sledgehammer into helix into Kurt's Brave Order, or hit a couple of times and then 200cp S-craft, NOTHING can get her into either a break state, or straight up do enough damage to end the fight. My Rean has over 121 speed and over 1120 Attack, I am over leveled due to grinding, and I have completed every possible quest so far, so I am also overgeared. I have even tried the dodge tank strat with the Sirious master quartz, insight and a ton of evasion quartz with wrath. Nothing works before this iron maiden literally DESTROYS me because all it takes is like 3 hits. Any insight into this fight would help a lot. I don't want to turn the difficulty down for this fight, and I just kind of wanted to vent my frustration with how impossible it seems to be to beat.

[Histidine]

I won all the Rean duels on Hard by keeping Iron Will up and pounding the other guy till they stopped moving.

This actually isn't enough on its own against most S-crafts, but Arianrhod doesn't use hers in that match so you should be fine. Heal with items or Teara, cast Chrono Burst if you need to squeeze in extra turns at a particular moment.

[afterthought.btw]

Can't remember having massive difficulty with this on Nightmare - you could always use brave seeds and damage reducing orders. It's not like you really need to ration the items. If you are massively struggling you can always cheese it with copious amounts of Chrono Burst and EP restoring items. (As a general rule of thumb, Chrono Burst is the most useful action in the game in order to hog turn bonuses, and in non-solo battles is immensely cheese-y if you realise what synergises with it.)

Otherwise, if you're doing evasion strategy, make sure you have a couple of evergreens equipped. It can also be a good idea to have Earth Pulse available to keep yourself topped up and thus avoid instakill s-crafts and you can even go for overkill* and have Adamantine Shield on or use phys&/mag reflect foods to catch anytime you fail to evade. That's a key part of an evasion strategy, actually, as if your evasion is high enough only S-Crafts and magic can harm you and it has no expiry limit.

*If it's possible to overkill on defence. Wouldn't that be 'oversurvive'?

[Mistfox]

Instead of going overdamage, try going overbreak. One thing some people overlook is that Rean's Fatal Helix in Ogre mode is the game's no contest ultimate breaking move (SS rating), even on Nightmare with no Orders it can chop off Arianrhod's Break bar by about 2/3 (closer to 3/4). One of those and another hit or some Orders assist and you can put her into Break state almost immediately, then its how much damage you can do before she wakes up to another Fatal Helix.

Try spec-ing your quartz into Breaks instead of damage, battle control can make a lot of difference.

[Evil Gambio]

Equip Scorpio primary and Keeper secondary with as much hp as you can possibly stack. Then, do the fights as normal, and proceed to laugh in her face as Rean has a massive damage resistance to all her attacks and is immune to everything she can do.

Originally posted by Mistfox:

Instead of going overdamage, try going overbreak. One thing some people overlook is that Rean's Fatal Helix in Ogre mode is the game's no contest ultimate breaking move (SS rating), even on Nightmare with no Orders it can chop off Arianrhod's Break bar by about 2/3 (closer to 3/4). One of those and another hit or some Orders assist and you can put her into Break state almost immediately, then its how much damage you can do before she wakes up to another Fatal Helix.

Try spec-ing your quartz into Breaks instead of damage, battle control can make a lot of difference.

Due to how break damage works, this is incorrect.
Crafts add an additive bonus to break damage. In Fatal Helix's case, that's 350% break damage. Arcane Gale deals +150% break damage.
Since these bonuses are additive, the more break damage you stack on your orbment, the less your break rating on your craft matters. Skuld is singlehandedly a massive fu to anything that has high BRK rating, since you're going to end up at such a point of diminishing returns that you want to just do more damage. This is the case for Helix. Except that extra BRK comes way more easily than damage, so just use Arcane Gale stacked with break instead really.
If you stack Minotauros Pirmary and skuld secondary, you can just skip all the regular enemies everywhere and not bother ever even fighting them and just sweep through bosses with one arcane gale since it'll just insta-break when combined with sledgehammer.

Originally posted by afterthought.btw:

Can't remember having massive difficulty with this on Nightmare - you could always use brave seeds and damage reducing orders. It's not like you really need to ration the items. If you are massively struggling you can always cheese it with copious amounts of Chrono Burst and EP restoring items. (As a general rule of thumb, Chrono Burst is the most useful action in the game in order to hog turn bonuses, and in non-solo battles is immensely cheese-y if you realise what synergises with it.)

Otherwise, if you're doing evasion strategy, make sure you have a couple of evergreens equipped. It can also be a good idea to have Earth Pulse available to keep yourself topped up and thus avoid instakill s-crafts and you can even go for overkill* and have Adamantine Shield on or use phys&/mag reflect foods to catch anytime you fail to evade. That's a key part of an evasion strategy, actually, as if your evasion is high enough only S-Crafts and magic can harm you and it has no expiry limit.

*If it's possible to overkill on defence. Wouldn't that be 'oversurvive'?

Evasion is specifically not super effective against her since all of her crafts can't actually miss using the EVA stat. Only her regular attack can be evaded.

[Mistfox]

Originally posted by Evil Gambio:

Due to how break damage works, this is incorrect.
Crafts add an additive bonus to break damage. In Fatal Helix's case, that's 350% break damage. Arcane Gale deals +150% break damage.
Since these bonuses are additive, the more break damage you stack on your orbment, the less your break rating on your craft matters.

That's counting percentage wise isn't it? When taken as flat values, that is still a +350% break boost added to your damage.

[Evil Gambio]

Originally posted by Mistfox:

Originally posted by Evil Gambio:

Due to how break damage works, this is incorrect.
Crafts add an additive bonus to break damage. In Fatal Helix's case, that's 350% break damage. Arcane Gale deals +150% break damage.
Since these bonuses are additive, the more break damage you stack on your orbment, the less your break rating on your craft matters.

That's counting percentage wise isn't it? When taken as flat values, that is still a +350% break boost added to your damage.

Yes, except it's relative to damage which is a multiplicative bonus. You can't just look at the numbers and compare here, the damage still plays a role.
AG has 150% already, and deals an obscene amount of damage more than Helix, and can then be increased by quartz BRK. Increasing damage is a lot harder than increasing BRK%, and while that extra 200% may seem like a lot, closing that gap is tremendously easy, and doing the same kind of stacking you'd want to do for AG would lead to massive diminishing returns in Helix' case because the bonuses are additive, not multiplicative.

The flat values don't actually matter all that much.
The best setup for AG is a Minotauros (P) and Skuld (S) setup (due to availability and ease of use more than anything else)

At level 7, from this build, at max hp, we get +200% brk from Skuld, and an extra 90% from Minotauros. We can add a break 3 quartz (60%) which gives us a passive +350% break damage. At this point, AG has +450% break damage, and Fatal Helix deals +650%.

At this point, we're already running an overkill build that has made my point, but let's go higher.

Add Sledgehammer to it, and AG is at +750%, and FH at +950%. At this point, to deal more break damage, AG simply needs to deals around 25% more damage in a single hit to surpass Fatal Helix' break damage, which, guess what, it has an entire extra hit to do so that can potentially double its damage output. And the extra damage is around that of +20% extra STR, which, then again, still isn't enough to compensate for a second hit of gale.

BRK being additive, and not multiplicative, basically kills any chance it has of surpassing Arcane Gale for the most part in every way, including breaking despite its far better stats for doing so.

I could talk about how the damage formula interacts between these two, but I don't want to make an essay post about Trails damage formulas xD

Tl;dr: Use Arcane Gale for both breaking, damage, radius and utility.

If the flat value stacked multiplicatively, you'd be right that it

[Mistfox]

Originally posted by Evil Gambio:

........

I just tested it at the Fortress, you were right, the AG ripped through them all and one more hit put them under. FH "only" did 3/4.

[afterthought.btw]

Originally posted by Evil Gambio:

Evasion is specifically not super effective against her since all of her crafts can't actually miss using the EVA stat. Only her regular attack can be evaded.

That was a general comment on the Evasion strategy, not on this fight per se.

[afterthought.btw]

Okay, I just played this fight on my minimalist nightmare playthrough - basic weapon, armour/accessories from chests, avoiding all battles bar necessary ones (for reference the fight before this gave me a multiplier of x6.9 - that's how little damage my characters were inflicting.)

I intentionally didn't do anything specific for my equipment or quartz setup - my Rean has the kaleido and oberon quartz on currently, which needless to say he wouldn't have equipped had I been optimising him for this fight. Had a true gladiator headband and an evergreen, along with a quartz grid again not optimised for the fight (a smattering of evade quartz, an attack quartz, and perhaps most relevantly, an action 3 quartz that I had caught fishing).

The only 'preparation' I did for the fight involved giving him a basic earth pulse quartz rather than his septium vein. Didn't even give him chrono burst.

The fight wasn't a problem - with earth pulse up almost constantly and iron will active Rean gained health faster than he could lose it. Just basic attacked until CP200, used S-Break, rinse and repeated. Took me - with my supremely suboptimal setup - 4 S-breaks, I think, and that was mainly because I failed to snaffle a 10% HP bonus. (There was a flukey line of 3 in a row.)

So if you're having trouble, all I can suggest is equip Earth Pulse, go iron will, and be patient. There's nothing there to scare you - even her biggest moves were only taking about 1k off me and like I said, this is on Nightmare.