Final Fantasy V has two challenge bosses. Shinryu, who I beat on Friday, and Omega. They're both brutally powerful with a multitude of actions to wipe out your entire party. They're annoying because unlike most challenge bosses which are hard to find these guys are hard to avoid. Omega is wandering around on a 3x3 grid of the dungeon and if you end up adjacent to him you have to fight him. Thankfully there's a save point right before him, but I'm pretty sure he wipes out every single person who makes it to the final dungeon and doesn't know to do everything possible to avoid him. Shinryu is inside a treasure chest that looks like any other. There's a save point right after that chest, and I'm pretty sure almost everyone dies to Shinryu as well.
At any rate, it was time to give Omega a spin. He started off with an attack that hit my team for a little over 2k. Most of my characters had a little under 2k health and died, but one survived and got everyone back up. Omega had a few things he could do that were rough but the worst was a 2-step combo. First he hit everyone for half their health plus a constant health drain. Then he knocked everyone to single digit health. The dot killed them off before I got another action. I tried a few different times and he only pulled that combo off once so it wasn't all that likely to happen but it sure put a timer on the fight since at any point he could just decide to win in 2 actions.
Another issue is I had a hard time finding a way to actually hurt him. He had up a reflect shield so I couldn't hit him with very many spells. I tried meteo but it hit for about 800 damage total. My melee members did an ok job with flare enchanted weapons (Nick would hit for about 8k and Lena for about 16k) but another problem quickly arose... Any time he took damage he'd counter-attack three times. With brutal spells. It seemed like he'd chose one of three spells for each counter and could choose the same one multiple times. They were a single target attack for 3k (guaranteed death), a single target attack for 50% current health + confusion (not so bad, I can just esuna it away), and a single target attack for permanent removal from the fight. Gone for good, no way to bring them back! This is an actual timer on the fight since there was a pretty good chance he'd just take out one of my damage dealers every time he took damage. Also with fewer people around it was harder and harder to keep a rezzer alive to come back from his brutal normal attacks.
Eventually I gave up and decided I really needed to level up a little bit. One of his often used attacks hit everyone for a little more than their current max health and I figured a couple levels might give them enough health to survive a hit. Also, Nick hadn't mastered monk (just knight) so he could get some more health from that. And maybe summoner could actually do big damage to him without proccing his counter attacks? So I went off to an area worth both xp and ap (but low amounts of both, sadly) and killed things for a while. It was pretty boring (defend, defend, defend, summon leviathan to kill everything).
Then something clicked in my mind on the bus home yesterday... Omega is a giant robot... He's probably weak to lightning! Maybe I could do more damage by enchanting bolt3 on my weapon instead of flare? Also, maybe I should at least cast some summons at him before going through all the effort of mastering the job to see if it is helpful. So I saved up and gave him another shot.
Turns out the giant robot is vulnerable to lightning so Nick was hitting for 16k and Lena was hitting for 32k. Turns out he takes hardly any damage from Bahamut (maybe 1600 total from a double casted Bahamut). Turns out he still counter-attacks three times if you hit him with summons. Turns out getting a little more health helped a lot when it came to surviving. Eventually I decided hitting for 16k wasn't good enough and only had Lena ever attack him to minimize the number of times he counter-attacked. Everyone else just used phoenix downs or cast healing/arise spells and desperately tried to survive while Lena killed him off. It worked! Looking now the internet claims he only has 55k health. Maybe Lena killed him in 2 hits? (I play on a PSP and got home partway through the fight. So this morning when I turned it on I was in the middle of the fight and didn't know how many times I'd hit him.) I feel like it took more than that but I may be crazy. 55k sure doesn't sound like much, though.
Next step, X-Death and the end of the game!
3 comments:
I thought Omega was the easier of the two (again, my memory of Shinryu is that the only attacks he used were party-wiping AoEs). His counter that removes someone from the fight is extremely annoying, but I don't recall him taking many hits from a Bolt3 enchanted weapon - more than two, but not many.
I think Shinryu might open with his 7k damage attack? He definitely has lots of other attacks that aren't devastating. I think I got pretty lucky that aegis shield blocked the 7k one every time but with a 33% chance I think it was inevitable to win after a few tries. I just got lucky to get it on the first try. (Also a guide seems to imply coral ring is good enough to survive it for reals? I don't have a saved game before to test with, sadly.)
Apparently they're both pretty easy for a level 2 party though due to a bug... There's a mix that casts all debuffs on the enemy, including berserk. Apparently Shinryu and Omega are flagged as immune to berserk but it doesn't stop this mix from working on them. So you open with berserking them and then use the knight cover/guard combo to be invincible.
Yeah, Coral ring gets you through the tidal wave (gives you absorb water). My recollection was that his next action was a fire attack that hit everyone for 5k and his action after that was a lightning attack that did 6k.
The strategy I used to beat him (and the one I found in a guide) was basically just Jump while dual wielding lances and never have your characters on the ground after the first tidal wave.
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