1/5/2012

Maou Freulety Preparation

Been trying to put together equipment to face Maou Freulety, a super hard version of the lightning share boss, Freulety (pic1). You fight her as normal once, and then a sand version of that which is pretty beefed up and hurts a LOT. Mistakes there are not forgiven as most of her attacks will take off more than 4,000 health for most characters. That's not even the hard part, or maybe it is. After you defeat her sitting on her undead throne, she gets off the throne, sprouts wings, summons two succubi to help and comes at you on foot. This is the only time you can see her come down from her undead battle throne, and she can be comboed like normal. However, most of her attacks have super armor or evasion on them, cancelling the attack and teleporting a short distance away with a split second of invulnerability time if you hit her while she's doing the attack. This means you can't get hits in on her by the means which you're probably used to doing. For example, as the enemy does an attack that takes time, hit them with a long range attack so they'll most likely get downed when they come out of the attack, even if it has armor. In Freulety's case, hitting her during most of her attacks will cause her to teleport. She does have one opening on an attack, but she's high up in the air when she's vulnerable, and before she flies up there she creates a wide-area knockback field below her. The only way to take advantage of this opening is to dodge the initial knockback wave while still avoiding the outer ring of it because it will still hit you if you're dodging, and use an attack that has a high hitbox to knock her down, before she comes down and deadly circles the ground you're standing on. It's not a big opening by far, but it's the only solid one she has. Other than that your best bet is randomly hitting her when she's not doing an attack and hope she doesn't block, or there is at least one attack of hers which does not have armor or evasion. So her undead battle throne that has two arms that will swat at you and casts all kinds of annoying magic is, undead. So there I'm currently making a weapon with anti-undead 3 and 5 charge moves. However, when she gets off of the throne she herself is majin. Therefore I need two specially made weapons just to have a fighting chance here, because maou fights come with tons of health to whittle down. My anti-undead is the shield share dagger, Ghost Eater. Shield equipment takes time to craft, and can be difficult to gather ingredients, as well as the original weapon, but luckily there was a suitable weapon for lowest possible price at the time I wanted to make it. What luck. With the weapon having 65% vs undead and 25% STR/DEX, I have no complaints there. It should be finished tomorrow, with +10 to put it at level 70. My anti-majin weapon is the castle share sabre (pic2, enemy unrelated). Its water-element third charge hits high enough to knock Maou Freulety out of the sky, and has anti-majin 2nd and 5th charge attacks. I'm still a bit fuzzy on how best to combo with it, since after I do my fifth charge i'm more or less depleted of weapon meter, but I'm confident it's the best choice to use against her for now. Perhaps I should make up a combo using Accuracy, which cuts gauge consumption… If I have the MP to spare after all that. And this is all just so I can get lightning share gold coins to make a cool spear. I made two weapons, one of which cost quite a bit, neither of which were cheap, a piece of armor which thankfully was easy to make thanks to the quest system breaking rarity, and levelled Lindsey's Thief Class to 70 because it can use both daggers and sabres. Just to make something even bigger than all of that. But I guess that's how it is, and most of the fun is learning how to handle her. Each new boss presents a new challenge, and this may be the biggest one yet. This isn't a game where you can "tank" or "dps". You get hit that shit hurts, you need to be able to "survive". Sure you can cover for a lack of skill with strong equipment for a while, but that only works if you're playing with people that are better than you. If you can't learn spacing and be able to make quick decisions and be a team player you'll be seeing the mission failed screen more often than you'd like. As of now I can only get past her normal form when by myself, then when the battle throne goes golden and gets beefed up, I can't even take her below 90% health before I fall down. It was obvious I needed to equip myself better, even if the equipment I make only gets used here. For maou fights, that's pretty normal, and this is probably the only decent method of obtaining lightning gold coins. Still though, this is the hardest boss I've seen yet, and this game presented a steep learning curve from the get go. I hope to at least be able to get her to come off the throne by myself soon. And wow is she beautiful.

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