Final Fantasy Brave Exvius has had a litany of tough bosses throughout the game's history. As Power Creep has passed, some of these on the list can be beaten by one unit, but at one time, these bosses set a new standard for difficulty in the game.
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Story bosses
- Veritas of the Heavens loves to spam area-of-effect attacks, has ridiculously strong defense, and is one of the first foes that's completely immune to all status ailments. On top of that, he has many air-element attacks (which are very difficult to defend against unless you've opened the right chests)... and if you gave your tank the Golem esper (as its stat buffs are ideal for tanking), they'll be particularly vulnerable to his attacks. And finally, his first appearance is the only major boss battle in the game where you're not given an option to have a friend's character carry you through the battle if you're not strong enough.
- Veritas of the Earth buffs his defense, debuffs your offense, and hits pretty hard on top of that. The fight takes forever, even if you can manage to keep his defense broken. On top of that, the first time you fight him is after a challenging boss fight with Dark Fina in the same level, so you have to fight him partially exhausted. The second time you fight him, the game challenges you to beat him in six turns. Good luck.
- Sol isn't really that hard of a boss once you figure out what his deal is, but walking into him unprepared can be a real shock. By the time his boss fight was first released, the FFBE Meta Game had settled around "chaining": having multiple characters use multi-hit attacks with the same animations (if not necessarily the same names) so that the multi-hits would land simultaneously and amplify each other's damage. The undisputed king of that meta was, at the time, Final Fantasy Tactics's Thunder God Cid (AKA Orlandeau) wielding an Excalibur and casting Divine Ruination for a focused Holy-elemental barrage, often aided by a friend's Orlandeau or one's own Agrias (who has the same attack). Sol has 200% defense against Light attacks, resulting in said TG Cids doing Scratch Damage at best. Sol also attacks primarily with magic spells, which means that your physical tanks — which are more prevalent than magic tanks — provide less value. You can't use stat buffs, because Sol casts Dispelga if you try. Finally, Sol is immune to DEF and SPR Break spells, preventing you from brute-forcing your way through. Again, all of this can be solved — switch to non-elemental or dark weapons; find some equipment for your tank that increases their Magic Defense — but it was still startling to suddenly encounter a single-player boss who was, for all intents and purposes, tailor-made to defeat the multiplayer meta. (It should also be noted that though Sol is a Recurring Boss, he loses some of these qualities — particularly the immunity to Breaks — in his other appearances, and is significantly easier to deal with as a result.)
- The Shadow Bahamut fights in the Realm of the Dragon King are pushovers, but the actual Bahamut fight is as challenging as its predecessors in the original series. After giving you one turn to act, it casts Megaflare. The damage from this attack is so massive that it will likely kill anyone who isn't defending, and will definitely wipe out all your buffers because they buffed up everyone who was defending. Furthermore, the attack takes so long to complete that it will kill units even through Reraise, so you can't cheese it with Rikku. Every turn, aside from doing normal attacks, he has an AoE Paralysis move and a still-punishing AoE Lightning/Ice/Fire move (in that order). He then uses Megaflare every 4 turns after he used it, forcing you to restart the cycle. At 80%, he uses his Lightning move, at 60%, he uses his Ice move, and at 40% he uses his Fire move. At 50%, he uses Flare, and at 20% he uses a weaker Megaflare. In short, you are taking very high amounts of DPS throughout the fight. It's telling that the recommended ways to defeat Bahamut before AoE magic tanks were released all involved using chaining to build up an extremely punishing magic attack that kills him outright, such as a Dragon-killer stacked mage or Garnet with Bahamut equipped.
- With the addition of 3* espers, Shiva stepped up as a shockingly difficult boss even if you have decent gear. 3* Shiva starts with an AoE physical attack that debuffs your DEF and SPR. With her massive ATK stat (1150), this is enough to wipe nearly any party or tank it hits even if you manage to break her ATK. Your only recourse is a full evade cover tank. But that's just the start. For her normal turns, Shiva uses a combination of punishing AoE ice magic attacks that can't be broken, so you need a magic tank to absorb those, plus several normal attacks that require a provoke tank to absorb, pretty much forcing you to have Warrior of Light with evasion build in your party (Basch would work in a pinch, but is harder to build for provoke and dodge). Every three turns, Shiva will combine her physical and magical AoE, in that order, and since her ATK is sky high, your only choice is to absorb the physical AoE and have your party try to survive the magical AoE. This is survivable with buffs, but then you hit the thresholds. At 80/60/40%, she fires off a magic attack with a whopping -150% ice debuff to your entire party, so your tank has to be able to reach 250% just to survive it. Then you have to dispel, heal, and guard against the phys/mag combo, in at best three turns if you've timed it right. You can exploit the thresholds to avoid the combo, but if you can't kill Shiva in three turns after breaching 40%, it won't matter. Shiva is a boss where even the smallest mistake will get your party wiped, and makes her companion 3*, Ramuh, look like a cakewalk by comparison.
- The first floor of Madam's Manor in Paladia has Bennu, who puts most trial bosses to shame. At 100 million HP, it takes a long time to kill him, during which he'll make your life hell. Bennu goes through a four-turn rotation. Turn 1 is AoE physical and normal attacks. Turn 2 is an AoE status ailments attack (all of them) and normal attacks. Turn 3 is a self buff. Turn 4 is normal attacks and a single target magic attack. On top of that, on the first, third, fifth and tenth turns he'll summon one of two enemies: a yellow bird that counters abilities with unavoidable single target physical attacks, and a red bird that counters magic with unavoidable AoE fire magic. The latter is survivable with fire resistance, the former will kill any unit it hits unless you can manage to go the entire fight only using magic. He'll summon a total of five, and will replace any you kill. Furthermore, if you kill all of his summons after turn five, he retaliates with a punishing AoE magic attack that cannot be covered by tanks. And it gets worse. At 60% health, he throws in an AoE magic attack for Turn 1 and adds an additional single-target magic attack for Turn 4. At 20%, this is increased to two and three, respectively. Finally, he summons Bombs on his Thresholds which require 13 hits (or fixed damage) to kill and explode after two turns if not killed. Winning this fight requires preparing for a lot of variables, hoping the RNG favors you on his summons, and constantly maintaining buffs to survive his magic.
- 3* Alexander ramps up the esper difficulty considerably due to its specific pattern to defeat and punishing attacks. On the first turn, Alexander will cast a physical and magical barrier that negates 80% of damage received and can't be dispelled. This can be reduced down to 60% or 40%, depending on how many times you dealt dark damage and used a Limit Burst on every second and third turn (referred to as passing tests). Above 50% health, every three turns Alexander will cast Dispelga on your party, an HP barrier whose size depends on how many tests you passed on itself (which can be dispelled), and if you didn't pass its four tests, imbue your party with Light damage to disable physical attackers, on top of all its attacks. Surviving this nearly requires either having Manufacted Nethicite, Rena, or Celes. The latter is a mere 5* max unit and is likely to get wiped every turn unless you can stack her with a lot of HP/DEF/SPR gear on top of full Light resistance, so you're sacrificing a slot for a very squishy unit who at best can only do two things. The alternative is to burst Alexander below 50% before turn 3, but this poses its own problems. Below 50%, Alexander starts casting Divine Judgement every four turns, which hits your party with a 300% light debuff. You have to dispel your party to survive the next turn, which means resetting your rotation on a regular basis. If you want to complete the missions, you also have to stick around long enough to charge five limit bursts and evoke Anima, which renders whoever is using it even more vulnerable to light. All in all, not for the faint of heart.
- Asura, the final esper for Season 2, is explicitly designed for a fully-leveled 7-star team, and is on the level of high-end trial content. The majority of the fight, up until the final 20% HP, involves her switching between three different attack patterns. Her Face of Carnage pattern buffs her ATK and MAG, followed by three rounds of heavy physical attacks, finishing with a fixed Fire-elemental attack. Her Face of Rage pattern involves making herself nearly immune to attack, casting a ST Stop, and switching between one of two stances. Her Forsaken Stance requires doing no damage whatsoever and having no units guard. Her Retaliation Stance requires at least one unit to guard but allows you to do damage. The former is especially annoying, considering ability-based counters trigger her retaliation. Her Face of Penitence pattern involves her picking a stance with two elemental pairings. You have to hit her with one of the two elements she picked or she Imperils your team and uses her nuke. If you do it correctly, you still get hit with a massive elemental magic attack packaged with a significant imperil, in addition to her normal physical attacks. After 20%, she will enter her Vengeance Stance, buffing the rest of her stats and giving her a permanent 35% damage mitigation buff for the entire fight. After every second turn, she will then use an unresistable Death skill, killing a party member guaranteed. She will then proceed in an attack pattern, adding an unresistable Death skill on every third turn. This makes her a very, very tough boss to beat.
Event bosses
- The original release of Maxwell from the Brave Frontier crossover event was one of the hardest bosses during its release, even after its defense was heavily nerfed in Global to make up for being released months ahead of schedule. Golbez, Wiegraf, and Xande used powerful status effects to kill you, Antenolla used punishing DPS, but Maxwell's limited trial used both, armed with a wide variety of ways to kill you. She has punishing Holy-elemental attacks that she uses every fight, especially Genesis (which is an area-of-effect Holy-elemental attack that debuffs your party and can be cast multiple times in a single turn). The worst are her scripted attacks. At 60%, she has Meteor (which does a flat 4800 damage to one of your party members), and at 30% she has Endless. If you don't have a Holy resistance buff (like Cloud of Darkness's Omniveil or Tilith's Rainbow Veil), Focus, and Full Break up, this will probably be a wipe. Every fourth turn, she dispels your entire party and buffs herself with Rune, and then does massive damage to them with Sacred Song. Every fifth turn has her use Destiny, which targets one of your units by dispelling them and hitting them a massive damaging attack that ignores defense (and might still die from follow up attacks if they somehow manage to survive). And to top it all off, the mission to actually get Maxwell (who is a free 5-star unit) involves evoking Diabolos. This requires turtling, waiting to build up enough esper orbs before you kill her, and equipping Diabolos, who makes the unit you equip to him 50% weaker to Holy. Once you last through the onslaught of debuffs and attacks, then you can take your foot off the gas. Oh, and did I mention that she has twice as much HP as Golbez and Xande?
- Despite the first Final Fantasy XIV raid event being released months in advance, ELT Ifrit was overtuned far above what Global could do. While Gilgamesh was a bit of a Puzzle Boss and Maxwell involved careful turn-tracking and threshold monitoring, Ifrit just did lots of damage, paralyzed your party and debuffed your fire resistance. Despite being released a few months early, the boss was actually buffed, and Global's unit pool was drastically weaker. They did not have Warrior of Light and Tilith's 6-star forms, or (for the first week) Orlandeau. Ifrit's moves and stats were unaltered, but Gumi decided to add break resistance to it, giving it a 30% chance to outright nullify your break. With a boss with as punishing damage as Ifrit, the tools, and the addition of RNG elements to the fight, this is widely considered by the player base to be one of the worst-designed bosses in Brave Exvius history. A limited boss normally reserved for farming was considered to be one of the hardest boss to be released, and the RNG elements could waste your raid orbs if your luck wasn't right. In addition, Y'shtola, a free Dualcastable healer, was a reward from this event. It was very hard to beat him until the next week, when Orlandeau was released (and even then, you had to pull him). Any pre-Orlandeau clear required stacking one unit with physical evasion or Noctis (for his powerful damage) and Ling (for her breaks). People actually thought this boss was bugged because he was doing so much damage, and ELT Ifrit is widely accepted as one of the hardest bosses ever released in the history of the game.
- The True Titan trial from the second Final Fantasy XIV event fits this trope as well. While not as brutal as ELT Ifrit, it is still a challenging boss. He has a single-target Petrify, but it requires careful threshold monitoring. It uses Landslide every four turns, removing a random character from battle for the rest of the fight. Most players were annoyed with his random tendency to spam Tumult, a powerful AoE attack that can cripple your entire party if used over 5 times in a turn. While manageable in Japan, the lack of an AoE cover tank in Global made the boss much harder. It was recommended to bring two healers with Raise in case a healer died.
- The final Halloween boss trial, the Skeleton King, was considered to be on par with Malboro in terms of difficulty before his nerf. His main gimmick is that all of his magic attacks were calculated from his MP and not his MAG. In order to even have a chance at survival, you needed to drain his MP with some sort of Osmose ability (like Lance or Osmose Blade). He has a 99% chance to use Wailing Swipe, which does strong physical damage and debuffs your DEF and SPR, on any given turn. Break resistance is mandatory, considering how much damage he does. At 80%, he gains an AoE magic attack. Once he gets under 60%, however, he starts to use Horror, which debuffs your Dark resistance heavily and has a 50% chance to Confuse you. This adds another status to gear against to the pile. In addition, he uses Soul Siphon, which drains about half your party's MP, almost every turn. This is hard, but it starts to ramp up to another level after he hits 40% of his HP. Here, he gains access to a powerful AoE Dark attack. Most punishing ability of all was Eternal Torment, which debuffs your fire resistance, heals 3% of his HP, and 10% of his MP. In short, if he uses Eternal Torment early in his turn, he could spam his punishing attacks at high power freely. At that point, you were a dead man walking. It also slowed down your DPS to keep draining him to a manageable amount of MP. To make matters worse, it had three of the most painful missions: evoking 2 espers (which added even more luck to an already steeply Luck-Based Mission), no white magic (neutering your healing unless you had Tilith), and a 5-man mission. Like Malboro, it had rewards that were below the level of a high-difficulty trial. The original clear reward was a Fire/Dark dagger on par with other limited trials (which previously ranged from Breather Boss to challenging DPS race with some RNG), the espers reward is MAG+30% (a clone of Echidna's esper finish reward - which was easier to obtain), and the 5-man reward gives a paltry 18 ATK, DEF, and SPR accessory (compared to the 30 that Dark Ifrit/Siren give and the 30 SPR that True Titan gave). What frustrated players the most was that the trial was limited. Unlike Malboro, there is no future. You either have to beat it in the week it's offered or not beat it at all.
- The Nightmare Skeleton King was the only boss to be nerfed in the history of the game (most likely due to its limited nature). A day after its release, during maintenance, its fire/dark imperil abilities were nerfed from 80% to 50%. Most importantly, it was locked from using most of its DPS attacks after restoring his MP or draining yours. This brought him down to a less infuriating level of difficulty, but still had a large amount of RNG to it.
- Even more frustrating was a bug that gave an extra copy of the Serpent Mace, the Global-exclusive weapon reward from the last event. In short, this meant that you had a day to clear the original version to obtain it. If you did, you still got the Necro Dagger, but beating pre-nerf was challenging - especially if you wanted the missions too.
- Aranea from the FFXV Imperial Infiltration event is a pure physical attacker, which the game even recommends using a tank against. Sounds simple enough, but Aranea does punishing AoE damage which will strain the limits of even the sturdiest tank, and has a Gathering Steam mechanic that makes her do even more damage. At full steam, she can cut through a tank and slap them back down through Reraise. If you can't build for 100% evasion, which makes winning inevitable, then you have to go all in on tanking/attacking and hope you can knock down Aranea before she sweeps your tank and gets the rest of your team on the next turn.
- The fittingly named Incarnation of Hatred has surprisingly decent defense for a raid boss. This on its own is a nuisance, but becomes infuriating when combined with the fact that her opening round consists of: a spell that Petrifies your entire party, which can be a Total Party Kill right then and there if you don't have the right resistances; using Berserk on the unit with the highest SPR, which is a double-whammynote ; and sapping out the MP of everyone still standing. There are definitely units that can One-Hit KO this boss — usually powerful mages or hybrid units that aren't Jiraiya — but if you don't have one, the whole raid is a Luck-Based Mission where you simply have to pray that your critical unit didn't get Berserked.
- The limited boss fight version is even worse. Her first turn in the raid is now a preemptive strike, and all her elemental resistances are raised to 50% while Light is now neutral. Because the missions specify that both items and limit bursts are off-limits, you absolutely must bring a mana battery and they need to be able to tank the first hit so they can get your party back on its feet, or you won't be able to recover without losing out on some of the rewards.
- The Great Count from the Eerie Invitation limited trial takes the Incarnation of Hatred and dials it up a notch. He starts off with a preemptive mana burn, and with his higher stats he is much more likely to zero out your entire party before you even get a turn. Items and limit bursts are off-limits again, so you have to rely on abilities which won't work if he zeroes you out. If you can't recover on the first turn, your only hope is to guard and pray his next attack doesn't wipe you. Assuming you survive, you can get back in the fight, but you also have to worry about getting charmed. As if that weren't bad enough, his mana burn comes packaged with dispel, so he'll reset your team every few turns.
- Most bonus stages for story events are hard on their own merits, but Folka's bonus stage is on a different level. The first stage is a slightly modified version of the Ochu fight from Scorn of the Marching Beasts. The fight is simple enough, Ochu and the Microchus being relatively squishy and vulnerable to a good chainer. The catch is that you have to stick it out long enough to build three limit bursts, which can be hell due to Ochu's high, unbreakable attack and AoE physical moves that will wipe even a 7* tank, though this is easily solved with an evade tank. The second is a battle with all eight Bomb Kids from the Bomb Family trial, which is where things start to get difficult. Each Bomb Kid can only be harmed by its opposite element, possessing immunity to all others and non-elemental damage. Your units must be able to cover all eight elements with decent damage. On top of that, they get a preemptive attack where they imperil and hit with single-target elemental attacks, so you need a passive provoke tank to draw those. Finally, the bombs have a chance to ready a self-destruct each third turn, exploding the next. The third battle is a copy-paste of the Europa fight from the Scorn of the Marching Beasts trial. While the original Europa refight is a cakewalk due to being able to bring two non-elemental DPS units, this version forces players to either bring a solo DPS just for the Bombs or neuter their DPS for Europa. This requirement makes for an incredibly challenging fight that some players consider to be on the level of end-game content.
- The March of the Demons event features the Youkai Lantern, a boss with a truly ridiculous skillset. As a preemptive attack, Youkai Lantern hits your entire party with a physical attack so strong that a unit will need to be stacked with HP and DEF just to survive it, which is downright impossible on some units. This also inflicts a ten-turn damage-over-time effect that hits for the same amount of damage. About the only reliable way to survive is to either use evasion to dodge the initial hits, units/equipment with a Mirage effect to avoid the first hit, or use units/equipment with a Last Chance Hit Point effect. The latter is unreliable unless you're getting it from an STMR, so it's a dice roll most of the time. Once your turn begins, you have to heal your units and get mitigation up to prevent the DoT from killing your units at the end of the round, which has to be maintained every turn. Mercifully, if you survive the initial hit and can manage the DoT, fire resistance and an evasion tank will completely negate the rest of the Lantern's attacks. It's also vulnerable to sleep and paralysis, letting you lock it down with status ailment moves like Bad Breath and Toxic Rain. People thought the trial was broken at first glance, simply because of how ridiculous the opening damage is on a trial that has "do not die" as one of its missions.
Chamber of the Fallen bosses
- Starting the trend is Gilgamesh's Offensive. First and foremost, Gilgamesh has the same million HP that Maxwell did, while sporting significantly higher defenses to take punishment she couldn't. Gilgamesh also uses hybrid damage and is resistant to most Breaks, meaning he can't be mitigated by Full Break as Maxwell was. But the real meat of the trial comes from his thresholds and elemental attacks. Gilgamesh checks every turn if he has been hit by Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Light, and (after the halfway mark) Lightning hybrid damage, and for every element he has not been hit by, he uses additional attacks on the party that can inflict a variety of status conditions in addition to the damage. This means the party needs to hit him with these elements almost every turn to avoid being crippled by status effects, which requires some very specific units to fit in without Dual Wielding (Rain's Lava Floor can cover Fire/Earth plus an element or two for his weapon/s, for example). The party must also be able to sustain burning through his HP with these likely weaker than average moves, so something like Noctis's Cover ability is imperative for MP regeneration. The final trick up Gilgamesh's sleeve is Bushido - Freedom, which he will use when dropped below 80, 50, and 30% of his HP instead of his normal actions. Bushido - Freedom inflicts damage to the entire party, dispels their buffs, and is guaranteed to outright KO one targeted character unless they have an equipment piece that resists Death (like Safety Bit or Genji Shield). If not controlled using Provoke from Golem, this KO can make it frantic to stabilize a party since Gilgamesh will go right back to his elemental-seal pattern after doing so. The safest strategy is generally considered to be dedicating two to three characters to locking down Gilgamesh's elements using elemental weapons and the craftable hybrid moves like "Stone Blade" or "Water Blade" while using a Noctis friend for Cover and chipping away at Gilgamesh's health, but while reliable and accessible, this turns the fight into a Marathon Boss that can take upwards of 30 minutes for some parties. And this is before considering Missions such as using only 5 characters, killing him with a Limit Burst, and not using items, all with very desirable prizes.
- You know how Gilgamesh made the previous trials look like a joke? Aigaion makes Gilgamesh look like killing Dire Rats in the Earth Shrine. His body has 10 million HP, and two arms with 4 million HP. The right arm buffs and heals the main body for 500,000 HP with the occasional attack, unless the main body dies. The left arm does a very powerful ST attack that, without Provoke and Reraise, kills the unit with the highest attack. If you kill the Right Arm before the left, the left one blows up, snorting a character out of battle. It also does a strong Thunder-elemental attack that is likely to wipe your party out if you exploit its Thunder weakness. The main body does one AoE attack and then uses single-target attacks, and has a very powerful threshold attack that will kill you. This can be mitigated with water damage, but if you use water more than 3 times, it does another powerful Lightning/water attack. The real struggle is that it is also a Marathon Boss: if you can't deal more than 500,000 damage per turn to the main body, you have to kill the left arm ten times, and then the right arm twice before finally killing the main body. This means that if you save the body for last, you have to slog through 54,000,000 HP. Luckily Fryevia's hybrid damage means that the body-first strategy is more possible, even with Aigaion's Ice weakness removed from the Global version. The rewards are worth it, with the strongest weapon in the game that increases Limit Break fill rate by 100% and Knuckle Mastery. You can also get his World Destroyer ability, but this is less useful than the other special abilities because Rikku's TMR has a slightly weaker version of AoE Full Break. The mission to get that is not using magic - including healing. At the time, only one unit had access to ability-based healing, and she was limited. Any sort of clear of this boss is so hard that the game's tips, on release, tried to scare you out of attempting it.
- The original Rumble of Malboro trial, at release, is widely considered to be the hardest trial of all time. Great Malboro has ten million health, high attack, and unprecedentedly high defense. It is accompanied by two smaller Malboro with four million health each and similar offensive power. If a small Malboro dies, they're summoned back next turn. If both the smaller Malboros die on the same turn, Great Malboro suffers a two-turn 99% DEF/SPR debuff, allowing you to deal some damage. However, if Great Malboro dies and either Malboro survives that turn, Great Malboro is summoned back with full health. You have to kill all three on the same turn to win. This means you have to judge your damage output with extreme care, lest Great Malboro end up too low on health for you to kill him on the same turn as the little ones. This is on top of all of them doing massive dark and non-elemental damage. If the Malboros are brought down to 10% health, they self-destruct, doing massive damage to your party and debuffing your Dark resistance. But this isn't all. Every four turns, Malboro will use Bad Breath to hit your party with every status ailment and Devour to take one of your units out of the fight. This happens every three turns once he's below 50%. This can only be avoided by killing the small Malboros on the previous turn. It's telling that the strategies for beating this one at the start included Save Scumming (a patched-over strategy where you force-closed the client to reset the turn counter and avoid attacks), deliberately Petrifying your own party to avoid damage (while Xon or another Hide unit with Rikku's Pouch escaped battle for a turn), using Setzer to deal massive fixed damage after an AoE chain, and/or using two Rikkus for endless AoE Reraise. Two of the four strategies are direct exploits. A legitimate clear only became easier with the release of Trance Terra's enhancements. To make matters worse, Malboro has less of an incentive to clear than Aigaion because it has dramatically worse rewards. The best is a MAG whip (which, at the time, had poor weapon access), a terrible status resistance ability that only gives 50% resistance to poison/sleep/silence/petrify on use, and a unique 30% MAG/20% HP materia.
- The Bloody Moon trial is considered to also be challenging if you don't have a non-elemental magical AoE chainer. Firstly, he summons eight apostles in waves of three (two in the last wave). Each absorbs its respective element. In short, elemental mage chainers like Barbariccia or Victoria are useless because the relevant apostle will absorb the damage. Secondly, the Moon is outright immune to physical damage. Thirdly, most of its damage is single-target and has heavy magic-based damage (including a massive Meteor attack every 3 hits). A Provoke tank like Wilhelm or Veritas of the Earth is required for this content, and the rest of your team should have about 300 SPR. It also outright counters black magic with a powerful attack of its own. If you have enough units and Reraise up at the end, Phase 1 is a cakewalk, despite the Moon itself healing to full. Kill the three waves of Moons and Phase 2 starts. Bloody Moon casts an AoE Death, which will kill at least three of your party members. If you Reraised them, their DEF and SPR get debuffed and face yet another salvo of attacks. Here, it enters a phase mode, using an attack and a debuff. Each 20% of HP you take from him, it uses a random threshold attack, depending on its phase. You can either face a 3-turn Snort, a strong AoE physical attack, a 50% Full Break, or another AoE Death. If none of those chances procced, you just receive a powerful AoE magical attack. Finally, if you kill the Moon before its Apostles, they will revive and snort 3 of your units, permanently removing them from the battle. Break resistance is needed for Phase 2, specifically. In short, Bloody Moon's difficulty depends on your units and whether or not you resort to Save Scumming to avoid taking damage during thresholds. If you have a top-tier non-elemental chainer like Trance Terra or Grim Lord Sakura, it's an Anticlimax Boss. If you have Ashe, however, it gets a bit tougher unless you have strong support units.
- FFBE finally has its first superboss port in Omega, and he's about as powerful as he is in the other games. In Japan, Omega was designed specifically for 7-stars in mind. He counters any physical attack with a physical counter that hits for 50% of the target's HP and causes confusion, requiring a full evasion cover tank to absorb the hits so they don't get whittled down by his main attacks. He starts off with a pre-emptive Fire-elemental AoE attack, making 100% Fire resistance a strict entry requirement for every single unit. He has a ten-turn rotation, along with his counters. Most, like instant KO or even the AoE Magic attack, aren't much to worry about, but it uses Encircle every 5 turns to outright remove one of your party members. He will also Stop one of your allies every third turn (starting with Turn 2), and he will cast his AoE Earth attack/status break as well once he's under 50%. The boss is considerably easier on the Global side due to Olive, a Lightning-elemental unit designed to kill machines, and a Machine Killer clone materia to circumvent the original's unstackability.
- The Venomous Vines of Death takes the original Malboro and doubles it up. The fight has two stages. The first features Great Malboro, which is weak to magic but strong against physical attacks. Every single turn, he uses an AoE physical attack, an ice magic attack, and a series of normal attacks. If you exploit his -100% fire weakness, he trades the ice magic attack for a stronger fire/ice magic attack that also debuffs those two resistances. Every two turns, he uses Bad Breath, doing strong AoE magic damage and inflicting all status ailments. At the 80/60/40% thresholds, he uses Bile, which does AoE magic damage and inflicts a -100% full break on your party. This can stack with Bad Breath if triggered on even turns. Below 60% is when he starts to get annoying. Every turn, Great Malboro will target a unit with either Stop, Death, or Berserk. The first two can be guarded against, but Berserk practically requires that your provoker be separate from your tank and takes several turns to get rid of. Once you beat Great Malboro, Queen Malboro and her Mini Malboros make your life hell. Queen Malboro follows the same pattern as Great Malboro, only with a physical weakness and Charm as her gimmick. She's not the issue, though. Her three Mini Malboros use Bad Breath every turn, then either heal themselves for a small amount or use a powerful jump attack. The Malboros will randomly be vulnerable to either physical or magical damage (always two of one type and one of the other). For each one you kill, the remainder get an additional Bad Breath on top of their normal rotation. Winning takes a long time no matter how you go about it, and you better hope you have a way to survive long enough in round two to knock out the Queen quickly. The powerful DPS and RNG gates in both sections makes this a particularly nasty fight.
- Behemoth K, the Maddened Sage, combines a number of cheap mechanics to make a truly obnoxious fight. He has a massive health pool and sky-high offense. His main physical attacks ignore cover and provoke. He retaliates against elemental damage with a AoE magic attack of that element, a 100% self-buff for that element, and a 120% imperil on your team. He also has powerful, non-elemental magic that he will use every round. You either need to gear your entire team save your magic tank for full evasion, or summon Golem every turn to negate the physical damage. His worst ability, however, is that he has an innate 30% resistance to any break, making the entire fight an RNG fest of hoping that your breaks decide to work that turn. If that weren't bad enough, once he's reached 50% health, he'll perform a self-dispel on even turns, further upping the RNG. Finally, between 50% and 30%, he'll retaliate with an even more powerful magic attack if he's damaged, which will really stress your magic tank to its limits.
Chamber of Arms bosses
- The debut of the Chamber of Arms gave Sheratan, a powerful boss that guards an equally powerful staff. Every turn, she uses a single-target physical attack, a powerful single-target magical nuke that paralyzes, and a few physical attacks. Every three turns, she drains someone's MP to heal herself, halves one character's HP, and nukes your party with a magical Earth attack. At 80% and 60%, she will inflict strong magical damage to your party. Phase 2 is where things start to get dangerous, though: she summons two fruits, which are more powerful and dangerous than Aigaion's arms or the Malboros, and nukes your party with massive Dark-elemental damage. Both fruits use a powerful ST nuke every turn. One fruit buffs its ATK/MAG and uses an MP drain, while one fruit buffs its DEF/SPR and uses an HP drain every turn. Sheratan herself uses an attack that blinds and paralyzes someone, does a fixed 4500 HP to someone, and more powerful attacks. Every third turn (including turns in Phase 1), she uses an AoE Osmose. Every third turn after she has changed forms, she uses her Dark nuke from the first round again. And at 40% and 20%, she has an even stronger non-elemental nuke. The challenging part is surviving the damage in the second phase, which is much harder due to the restrictions from Chamber of Arms trials. Unlike Aigaion or Great Malboro, you can only bring one Rikku, and you cannot bring a strong companion.
- The Elnath trial is also very strenuous. The first phase of the fight has a three turn Countdown. Each count is followed by an AoE physical attack, with an AoE magical nuke at 0. The strength of the physical attack increases with each 10% of health Elnath loses, adding debuffs near the end. This is pretty simple to beat with good chainers or good tanks. Once the boss is reduced to 59%, you transition to Phase 2. Then, it will summon two arms: one is immune to magic damage, he other is immune to physical damage. The three will combine to unleash a barrage of magic and physical attacks. Elnath becomes vulnerable after both arms are killed, taking the immunity of whichever arm is killed first. On Phase 3, Elnath starts doing a physical and magical nuke every turn, while buffing its DEF and SPR by 300%. He also initially buffs his ATK and MAG by 50%. After doing another Lightning-elemental nuke at 10%, he dies. Though magic and provoke tanks can trivialize the first two portions of the trial, the third phases AoE nukes make getting the "kill with magic" condition incredibly difficult, given you have to bring him down to his threshold with magic attacks to achieve it and the nukes are likely to kill your mages.
- Tegmine is the hardest boss released since Malboro. It has more health than its predecessors, higher defenses, and only its offensive stats can be broken. It absorbs water and holy, nullifying the most common chainers (and weapon sets) that Brave Exvius has to offer, though as a tradeoff it has 100% weaknesses to the rest. Like most Chamber of Arms bosses, it requires bringing both physical and magical damage, but with a twist. In this case, Tegmine is physical immune for the first phase, and magic immune for the second and third, throwing the normal pattern out of whack. And since its physical defense is much higher, this makes killing it that much harder. The first stage is easy enough if you bring a magical cover tank with 150% Holy resistance and a strong Provoke tank with Draw Attacks and Death resistance. The second stage is where things get a little hairier. Every turn, Tegmine will use an AoE physical attack that will paralyze any unit not immune, requiring a strong physical cover and full paralysis resistance for your team. Every turn, he has a one-in-three chance of using Counter Zapper, a non-elemental AoE magic attack. This can catch the party massively off-guard without breaks. If he doesn't use it, he'll hit your party with either an ATK/DEF break or MAG/SPR break, both of which come packaged with a 75% water Imperil. On top of that, as a counter-attack to anything that targets him, he gets another chance to use any of these three. The toughest part is its third stage. At 39%, he uses all three attacks, a powerful physical AoE, an uncoverable hybrid attack, and another instant KO attack. After that, he uses a 1300% fixed-damage water attack every turn that hits everyone on screen (and heals him as well), piercing through cover and imperilling your team by 75%, along with a litany of punishing magic attacks. He also has a 50/50 chance of using a powerful physical AoE on top his counter-attack roulette. He is considered one of the hardest Chamber of Arms bosses, despite being only the fourth of 13.
Chamber of the Indignant bosses
- The Intangir comes back with a vengeance. It starts off the battle with preemptive Meteor that requires a lot of SPR/health to survive, all but ensuring everyone but your tank and healer are getting wiped. Once that's done, in a homage to Final Fantasy VI's resident Boss in Mook Clothing, it uses a sleeping attack to buff itself (either ATK/SPR or MAG/DEF) on one turn (Turn A). Attacking him causes him to retaliate massively, but not attacking him will send him into a deep sleep (Turn B). You must attack him on Turn B, or he will swing with massive physical AoE damage, likely wiping your party. How Intangir retaliates on Turn B depends on what you hit it with. If you hit it with a spell when he uses his ATK/DEF boost, he uses a powerful set of ST physical attacks, an instant KO attack, and three powerful AoE magical attacks. If you swing with abilities, LBs, or regular attacks, he uses an even bigger stack of physical attacks and three weaker Meteors. Then, he will use his MAG/DEF boost. If he uses that, he follows a different pattern. Hitting him with magic or espers has a big stack of physical attacks and Meteors too, but adds an AoE Sleep attack and a physical AoE to the mix. If you use abilities, LBs, or regular attacks, he will use another big stack of physical attacks and strong magic AoEs, coupled with an AoE full status attack. On thresholds, he will use an even stronger AoE magic attack, with a status attack at the later thresholds. He also has the honor of having physical attacks which evasion builds cannot dodge, so having a well-built provoke tank is required to survive his physical barrages. Even if you stick to physical attacks so your tanks can absorb the damage, you have to spend every other turn dispelling and breaking him just to keep his damage manageable. Beating Intangir not only requires a wide variety of units to keep his damage in check, there's a lot of variables to keep track of.
- Scorn of the Surging Menace takes the original and puts it on steroids. The first round is fairly easy as long as you have reraise, and the second can be beaten with a tank that 100% resists ice and fire. Then comes the third round. Searcher can potentially stop a character every round, or at least lock down your provoke tank, and has the ability to charm. Io, meanwhile, uses mostly weak magic but has an extremely powerful AoE magic attack. However, if you kill Searcher first, Io will use the latter every turn. This forces you to whittle down Io while Searcher is stopping and charming every round. This isn't so bad if you can protect against stop, but it is annoying. Round 4 has Architeuth, which is where the real difficulty begins. Architeuth casts ice and water magic every turn, blinds your units every turn, and drains MP from two targets every turn. Every second turn, it uses an extremely damaging AoE physical attack that will probably wipe your party if you don't block with a tank and will definitely kill the tank. If you reduce it below 70% and the tentacles are still alive, they heal Architeuth for 10%. Killing the tentacles gets rid of the healing and MP drain, but that isn't the end of it. Below 60%, Architeuth will throw out his physical move every turn. Finally, for the fifth round, there's the Greater Demon. Greater Demon dual-casts powerful elemental magic (Tornado, Flood, Quake, Flare), tosses out several hybrid elemental blade moves, and finally hits the party with an AoE physical move, which it will double up below 60%. At thresholds, it casts Cursed Black Sphere, which inflicts Poison, Blind, Paralysis and Disease on top of a 90% HP drain, the latter of which will kill your magic tank if it's guarding. All of this requires a lot of physical and elemental mitigation to survive, and you'll be struggling to make sure you can deal damage without your units being killed every turn. On top of all of that, it starts berserking your units every other turn below 50%. Simple in theory, punishing in practice.
- Scorn of Antenolla seems to have been designed to require the most obnoxious gearing requirements possible. All the parts have different elemental vulnerabilities and resistances, and everything but the main flower are immune to non-elemental damage. Every four turns, Antenolla will rotate between physical and magical immunity, each rotation with its own pattern of attacks. It uses both AoE physical and magical attacks in each rotation, so you can't guard against all the damage. If the smaller parts aren't attacked with certain elements every other turn, they use AoE MP drain, snort your units, and fire off an Earth/Wind magic nuke, so you need a unit that can hit with all three of those. Even then, you have to be able to protect against Stop because the Ivy uses it each turn during physical immune stages, and need an MP battery because it drains a single unit every turn. But the worst part is the flower's ability to fire off status effects every other turn. During magic immune phases, one of these status effects is Charm, which can only be protected against if you've pulled one of two limited 5-star bases or obtained 3* Lakshmi and trained for Charming Protection. If the flower is reduced below 70%, it reduces the rotation to three turns. Where it gets really hairy is below 40%. The immunity rotation is eliminated entirely, but charm is now a permanent part of its status arsenal, and the flower adds a water magic nuke to its attacks. So you need a water resistance buff on top of everything else. If the flower is killed and any of the parts live, your team is hit with unblockable and likely fatal damage every turn. Surviving this trial requires a lot of different gear, especially if you want to complete the attached missions.
- Scorn of Gilgamesh takes everything you hated about the original and dials it up. Gilgamesh now consists of five phases, one for each 20% of his health. During the first, third, and fifth phases, every turn you have to do elemental damage to seal certain attacks, the number of elements you need to hit him with increasing with each phase. During the second and fourth phases, this is reversed, causing Gilgamesh to gain free attacks if you hit him with certain elements. You can't get away with using non-elemental damage, either, because Gilgamesh can only be hurt by elemental damage. If you manage to avoid all that, he still does a lot of damage with physical and magical AoE, and counters both physical and magical attacks each round. During the thresholds between phases, his Bushido - Freedom kills a unit, does uncoverable AoE damage, and dispels your units. Death immune units are spared all three effects, but this means at best half your team is getting hit with huge damage. Worse still, for each threshold passed, Bushido - Freedom gains an extra kill, up to a maximum of three. It's telling that two of the major strategies for this trial are either using Seabreeze Dark Fina's STMR Rainbow Whip on a dedicated sealer unit or using a Cid unit that is absolutely stuffed with jump enhancers and human killers to burst Gilgamesh from 80 to 0 in one turn.
- The Scorn of the Beasts of the Dark marks the start of Elemental Tetris. Attempting it requires certain strict elemental resistance requirements, which in this case is 400% total Fire, Dark, Water, and Wind resistance after buffs at a minimum. This fight is a long slog that will test your patience. In the first phase, Dark Ifrit and Dark Siren follow a strict five-turn rotation. In the first four turns of the rotation, they both use powerful AoE physical and magical attacks, status attacks, breaks, and Imperils, with Dark Siren's causing most status effects (including Charm and Stop). Surviving requires either full physical evasion and high innate elemental resistance or a magical tank with enough elemental resistance to override the Imperil and a unit who can give AoE Mirage consistently. Dark Ifrit caps off the fourth turn with an AoE Dispel. On the fifth and final turn of their rotation, both bosses will cast Dual Wave, a strong water, wind, fire, and dark-elemental attack that chains with itself, three times. It requires the aforementioned elemental resistance buffs to nullify the damage. Anything less than complete immunity to this attack means near-certain death. Dark Siren also counters any debuff cast with a stronger AoE magic skill and Imperil, and will cast Curaja on every turn ending in 9. The Curaja can be sealed with a Lightning attack, but Siren counters Lightning attacks with a Lightning and Wind-elemental attack. The second phase of the fight depends on which esper gets killed first. If you kill Dark Ifrit first, Dark Siren starts to use non-elemental AoE magic with an extra casting starting at 40% health. She'll also try to call back Dark Ifrit every three turns, which can be reset with lightning damage. Mercifully, she can only do this twice and Ifrit has less health with each summoning. If you kill Dark Siren first, Dark Ifrit moves to a three-turn rotation, ending with his AoE Dispel followed by a magical fire attack with breaks attached. At 60%, if he is the only one alive, he will use a second AoE physical attack as part of his regular rotation. If you're using a magic tank, this requires high defense and mitigation or a unit who can spam multiple instances of AoE Mirage. All of the units who can do the latter are limited, with one never being able to be re-issued again due to the death of the game he came from. To top it all off, both espers have high DEF and SPR, and only Ifrit is vulnerable to defense breaks, making it a long fight. It also doesn't help that there's a bug where reloading the fight resets Dark Ifrit's rotation, causing a much more painful fight.
- The Scorn of the Octopus and the Teacher takes the original fight and adds even more frustrating mechanics to it. Ultros becomes a Barrier Change Boss, switching between physical and magical immunity paired with fire/lightning weaknesses or wind/holy weaknesses every two turns. You can control this by attacking him with one of the elements he's weak to on each turn, otherwise he selects the next pair randomly. At best, he'll be immune to your attacks half the time. Most of his Magic attacks are fixed-damage, piercing cover and requiring Elemental Tetris to survive, and Tempest and Hailstone are both gravity-based, killing your physical cover tank if he is not built for evasion. However, if you've built for evasion, you'll still get hit by Octo Tentacle, which is an accuracy-based attack that never misses. This is annoying, but easy to deal with until he is below 40%, when he gains the ability to do another cycle of Octo Tentacles and to Berserk the unit with the highest HP (or Provoke tank). Even then, the real challenge isn't until Typhon joins the fray in the second phase of the fight. If he is not hit with the appropriate element (Earth, Wind, or Holy), he snorts a character out of the fight or inflicts unresistable death on them. In addition to hitting like a truck, he will also dispel the unit with the highest HP on a 5-turn cycle that starts on Turn 4, and breaks your status resistances. Ultros is largely the same below 40%, but adds a fixed-damage Water and Wind-elemental attack to his repertoire, along with the ability to inflict statuses on your party. Unless you can kill both really quickly, you're in for a very rough battle.
- Scorn of the Fallen Ice Bird exchanges the heavy RNG of the original trial for Elemental Tetris. You need high resists in Ice, Water, and Wind because Glacial will consistently imperil all three, at least 50% for all three and up to 100% in the case of Ice and Wind. Every few turns, Glacial will also summon Glacon minions. While not very dangerous by themselves, Glacial uses them to bounce elemental magic onto your team, randomly hitting units based on how many are out. This isn't all that bad, though, since the damage is negligible if you've built for resists. The real challenge comes at the 50% threshold. When pushed past this threshold, if two or more Glacons exist above or below Glacial, each group will merge into Glacial Sculptures. Glacial Sculptures share most of Glacial's attacks and need to be attacked with Lightning every turn to avoid imbuing your team with elemental attacks that cause you to heal the boss, but hitting them with Lightning also triggers a fixed chaining retaliation attack. Summoning them is avoidable — simply kill all the Glacons before the threshold — but the catch is one of the missions requires you to summon and kill two Sculptures with a limit burst, so a full clear requires you to risk it if you want the Select Ticket. Even if you do manage to finish them off, Glacial will be more aggressive from 50% on, stressing your elemental resistance to its absolute limit. Glacial will also buff itself every other turn below 30%, and uses its most powerful attacks with similar frequency. All in all, not for those lacking elemental resistance gear.
- Scorn of the Wicked Moon is one of the most dreaded trials in both JP and GL due to the sheer preparation it takes and its added mechanics. Like the original, Bloody Moon and its apostles are immune to physical damage, making physical DPS useless. Bloody Moon is again immune to breaks, as are its Apostles. The Apostles also have lower elemental weaknesses this time around, at -300% instead of -2000%. At the start of battle and every time it loses 20% of its HP, it will cast 60% physical and magical damage mitigation on itself for 5 turns and confusion resist removal for 5 turns on everyone else, meaning hybrids can't deal any damage during the time. It has an array of physical, magical, and hybrid damages that hit very hard since you can't use breaks, forcing you to stack all types of mitigations (physical, magical, and general) on top of all your units having high HP and defensive stats, preferably 10,000 HP and 1,000 SPR at a minimum just to survive. It also will use a single target dispel that has 65% chance to confuse that targets the unit with the highest SPR or MAG (a provoke tank, provided they have Phoenix with Auto-Med equipped, can intercept this). The fight comes in two phases. The first has a simple five-round rotation, which gets more punishing below 70%. If your units are dying during this phase, it's a good hint that what comes next is impossible. At the 40% HP threshold, the real fight begins. Once it crosses the threshold, it will use AoE death on everyone, with a repeat use once it crosses 20%. Assuming you can get reraise up, this is manageable, but the real issue is his new rotation and the Apostles. Bloody Moon will switch to a pattern based strictly on turn count that gets worse when it drops below 25% health, and some of these turns are basically a Total Party Kill without reraise. Your best bet is to force him into his threshold attack during one of the killer turns, thereby negating it, so you can get your buffs back up without too much trouble during the lighter turns. On top of that, you have to be extra careful of the Apostles. Once every two turns, Bloody Moon will check to see if two Apostles of opposing elements are alive. Depending on which of the four pairs are alive, it can use up to four different attacks; four-turn single target berserk for fire/ice pair, four-turn AoE 50% full-break for lightning/water pair, two-turn single target unit removal from field for wind-earth pair, and single target unresistable death for light/dark pair. This makes keeping the Apostles off the field an absolute priority. Bloody Moon also casts a permanent stat buff on itself, making all its attacks hit that much harder. The second phase can be skipped by bursting it down, but it has to be done when Bloody Moon shows its face (which happens when its HP is around 40-46% mark). If it hasn't, its HP will be locked at 39% to allow the transition, forcing players to face the second phase. Lastly, if Bloody Moon dies during its second phase before all of the Apostles die, the Apostle will permanently remove one unit from the battle, will try to summon another Apostle, and will remove one unit permanently from battle again once in two turns when at least one of the Apostles are still alive. The trial is so difficult that Gumi deliberately created a unit with kits designed specifically for clearing this trial (Tsukiko) and powered up a lot of mage units that came before the trial. Meanwhile, JP had worse time with this trial because their magic DPS units dealt much less damage than their physical counterparts.
Chamber of the Vengeful bosses
- The redux of the Morgana battle, the Empress's Resolution, earns its 900 difficulty rating for having a spectacularly cheap boss. The boss starts with nearly 4 billion health and defenses so high you can barely scratch it without the best damage dealers available, and that's just to start. Morgana has retaliatory actions against guarding, using limit bursts, or damage done by any element other than fire. Morgana also retaliates to debuffs by clearing them, in effect meaning Morgana always does full damage every single turn and you have to reapply debuffs every single turn. Every five turns, Morgana permanently buffs her defenses (50%, 100%, 200%, and 300%) to punish clears taking longer than ten turns, and she builds the morale gauge at an accelerated rate at the same time. Once you hit the 30% threshold, she starts using a Mana Drain every turn, though this can be countered with one of the three morale skills. While it is possible to turtle through the fight dealing 1 or 2% damage every turn, this only works if you can get Morgana past the 30% threshold in the first 15 turns or so, because you won't be able to keep up with morale if it drags on and Morgana gains a Total Party Kill spell if she fills her side of the gauge. Everything about the fight is essentially a DPS check that is borderline unwinnable otherwise (there is a cheese strategy if you have several hours to waste, but even that requires being able to keep the morale gauge neutral). What makes this worse is the very good weapon locked behind a five-man clear, which requires serious role compression.
Series Boss Battles
- Neo Exdeath is a two-part battle, both with absolutely brutal mechanics. The first battle against Exdeath must be completed by turn 10, or Exdeath will use a Total Party Kill attack. But that's only the start. Every turn, Exdeath will use a death attack that targets based on unit slots and ignores provoke, and is designed to hit your friend unit half the time. Every three turns, it uses an upgraded version that dispels and kills the unit, bypassing death protection. This isn't too bad if you have decent damage dealers and your friend unit is protected, but still a rush. If you can get by that, you have to face Neo Exdeath. Neo Exdeath loses the death attack spam, but he trades it for a powerful, unavoidable physical attack that ignores provoke, using it every other turn and on thresholds. This can kill your damage dealers if it chooses to hit them, and there's no defense other than stacking mitigation and hoping it saves them. Reraise is your best hope. His Grand Cross attack imperils your status resistances and then hits you with status attacks, which you have to cast protection against. Worse, on thresholds, he'll package it with a dispel so one and then two of your units will absolutely be hit by it. The real challenge is when you push him past 20% health. Once this happens. Neo Exdeath casts a permanent 30% stat buff, and a permanent 40% physical/magical mitigation buff. On the next turn and every turn thereafter, he exclusively casts a weaker version of his provoke-ignoring physical attack six times in a row, each one of which can kill anything short of a tank due to his buffed stats. You have to pray he chooses to spread out his targets and that your damage dealers survive a round of it, because surviving multiple rounds is nearly impossible.
- The Emperor fight is very challenging, requiring high SPR before buffs to survive and very high damage to keep up with his healing. Emperor follows a three-turn rotation: a 10% heal and light damage on the first turn, a magic nuke on the second turn, and a fire damage nuke on the third turn. On each of these turns, he also a magic attack that ignore cover and provoke, which causes decent damage even with buffs. He'll use this attack more often at lower health. The second turn is where the biggest risk comes in. Shooting Star is a strong fixed-damage attack with a fire Imperil, the latter getting stronger depending on how many thresholds he's passed. The attack is survivable on its own, but the trick is that his magic attacks hit at the same time, which can wipe your damage dealers if they're not bulky enough. You also need someone who can dispel your entire team the next turn (or Myra, who can remove all debuffs with her Limit Burst), so the fire nuke the turn after that doesn't kill you. He will also give himself a one-turn physical and magical mitigation buff to make damaging him even harder. At 80%, he adds a MAG buff, and at 30% he adds a ST Dispel. His thresholds, which trigger at 80%, 50%, and 30% HP, consist of a Dispelga (which can be sealed by Manufacted Nethicite and similar abilities), and reset his rotation back to Turn 1. Assuming you can get him down to 10%, you hit the choke point. 10% HP is hard-locked, so you can't burst past it. Once the threshold is triggered, he dispels himself and your team (only the former can be sealed), casts reraise and mitigation on himself, then starts healing himself by 10% every turn. He uses no threatening attacks after this, but it doesn't matter because his healing is practically unbeatable if you allow it to go on longer than a turn or two. Beating it within 25 turns gives out 1000 Lapis, making the boss a long marathon with heavy RNG elements.
