Some quick reminders/tips about brutal bosses

I’ve been playing melee lately, have done some melee tutorials on some of the endgame bosses, and in hundreds of attempts I’ve noticed some things (a lot of these have been said before ofc)

0. (Because this one is so, so fundamental). Circle strafe. Just get used to the motion, you’ll be very glad you did. This works in a lot of games including Souls, Diablo/Poe, etc. you just sort of circle around the mob and try to poke its butt. You can avoid many, many boss abilities this way, without burning thru shields or iframes.

1. Don’t turn sound off. All bosses have sound cues associated with abilities. These are crucial in letting you know what the boss is about to do, and they don’t take much time to learn. Infinitely helpful when learning move sets.

2. Speaking of move sets, every boss has cooldowns and priority moves and proximity-based moves just like the player, although we can’t see their timers on our screen. You can still get a feel for which abilities are spammable, which are longer cd, which have limited “charges” (e.g. in Adam phase 1 he can do his triple slash three times), and which abilities the boss wants to prioritize if it’s up. If the only move a boss has available needs to be done at close range, and you’re far, some bosses will just mill around a bit until their other moves come up (Megara and Drac both do this).

3. The AI isn’t dumb and will try to catch you slipping - for example, Adam LOVES to pop his shield when the game detects you’re mid-swing, so you hit the shield and damage yourself. Another example is Megara will pop out close to you in her phase 2 and try to one-shot you with a quick beam attack which can be startling if you’re not expecting it, and it hits for a billion.

4. Speaking of the AI not being dumb, bosses especially in the late game tend to not use their move unless they think they can hit you with it. For example, you may think you’re out of range of the gears Solarus throws out when he slashes, but guess what, he’s not going to do that move unless yourself or other hostile unit (summoned skelly etc) are in range, so watch out.

5. Sometimes, a good offense is the best defense. If you can quickly push a boss through their hp bar you can essentially skip a ton of moves, since boss abilities are locked behind an HP wall (in other words, they can only do basic things at 100%. As they lose hp, more abilities get unlocked). An example of this is Solarus. I’m currently running a build that kills him in about 1:35, and this means I can basically skip his entire second phase (him running around like a madman, gap closing on me, quadruple sword slashing etc) because I push his health down so fast he never progresses to those moves before he keels over.

6. The longer a move takes to wind up, and the more obvious the telegraph, the more it hurts. If you see a big red circle on the ground slooowly filling up, probably best to get to steppin.

7. Random elements are what makes a boss fight hard, since no amount of learning the move set can help you predict where falling knives will spawn on Drac, for example. To mitigate this risk and make the randomness as ineffectual / non impactful as possible, learn the move set as thoroughly as you can. That way you ONLY have to consciously pay attention to the randomness - the actual abilities won’t be able to surprise you, since every boss is on a very predictable loop.

8. Move speed is great, but it’s possible to move TOO much and overstep/overshoot, and end up getting hit or walking into stuff you didn’t mean to. Take your time and be precise with where you step. This game isn’t so fast-paced that it’s totally going to leave you in the dust for being appropriately cautious with movement.

9. Shields and counters may seem like defensive abilities, but they do INSANE dps. I’m a fan of Ward of the damned, frost ward, discharge, and blood rite depending on the situation. Look carefully at the gems and try to pick out ones that add extra damage in some way. Because while you may think stacking nukes and damage buffs is the way, I myself am a recent convert and I love running double shield. Between dash, iframe (GS or pistol), and your shields, you can almost guarantee you never get hit, and your dps will be through the roof if you get comfortable with using recast.

10. Weapon swapping! You won’t need to do this most fights, but on some it can be a godsend. For example on Voltatia I like to swap to slasher E to pause her beam. I also like it on Dantos for when my iframes are all down, can buy yourself time for your cds to come back up. I also do it on Megara phase 3 (when she’s trying to saw you in half with multiple beams), I’ll swap in pistol for the roll because greatsword jump isn’t nearly as useful in that instance. If you want to be really fancy, you can swap in weapons like reaper to use E and spawn skellies for extra dps, I mostly use weapon swapping defensively tho.

Hope these help, lemme know if I’m missing anything! Good luck out there.