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In response to
"FF13 spoils."
by
Shaun
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General FF13 boss fight tips.
Posted by
David (aka David)
Apr 6 '10, 11:23
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The combo chain is a process that takes a while to grasp completely. Building up that chain is -everything- in the game. If you let the chain reset, you might as well not be attacking the boss. You're effectively starting from scratch and if that happens, you might as well hit retry. The key to this is subtle and takes some practice to master.
Paradigm shifts do not work like you would expect. They reward proactive player behavior and punish passive play. Let's say for instance that you paradigm shift to a defensive stance in order to heal but that you don't need a lot of healing. Your inclination as a player is to wait until everyone has acted. Final Fantasy XIII is brilliantly designed to punish people for this sort of lackadaisical behavior.
What you should do instead is thrown on your healing paradigm and then after just a few moments switch back to something that attacks the boss and thereby keeps the combo chain bar active. Ravagers jack up the chain so as many ravager attacks as possible boosts it quickly. Commando attacks slow the depreciation of the chain, meaning that a well timed one of these can save a bar from going back to nothing. Balancing these attacks goes a long way in boosting the chain and gaining staggers.
Once a boss is staggered, the thing to keep in mind is that you still want to boost the chain. That's the thing Kim and I struggled to appreciate early in the game. An attack that does 350% damage sounds great, which is why we would throw commando after commando attack at bosses. Had we used ravagers to jack the chain up to 700%, however, it would have taken only one or two more rounds of spells to do so. After this, all of our attacks would have been twice as powerful.
The combo chain in this game is math-based and thereby easily mastered by those of us here on this board who played HSX and did multipliers every weekend. It's the same thing. The key is to focus on the amount of multiplication added to each attack and to do everything in your power to prevent the chain bar from ever dropping to zero.
You will be surprised when you experiment with this to see how many of your paradigms do something that impacts the chain. For instance, saboteur attacks are great in this regard, almost as good as ravager ones. Similarly, sentinel taunts also move the chain gauge up, which is something I hadn't expected. In other words, even your defensive paradigms and debuffs have some impact on the stagger bar.
The other thing to keep in mind is that weakening a boss with saboteur spells like deshell, deprotect and imperil go a long way in making a fight not only easily but occasionally one that is a breeze to beat. Later in the game, there are some fights that aren't even possible unless those three debuffs (plus slow and poison) are active.
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