Tartaros vs Zenith

Channel:

DimiPZC

Subscribers:

45

Published on September 18, 2023 11:48:55 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJHfFTdG0SM

Duration: 7:35

7 views

0

Tartaros is an extremely annoying and painful matchup against Zenith, and a lot of it comes down to Phase 1 and sometimes Phase 2. Tartaros has a very small magic pool and an attack penalty, both of which makes popping elements take forever in normal circumstances. I found a bypass for tartaros's low damage; both the spears and whirlwind can assist with popping an element when used in tandem with a normal spell.

However, the low magic amount is always a factor, especially when needing to maintain speed or when needing to pop earth (earth conduit is too expensive to justify using); this means chaos usage both for popping earth and maintaining speed at low MP suddenly looks a lot more appealing. Chaos comes with the massive tradeoff of being an attention tax though; if you select the wrong thing, you could end up not being able to use Chaos for a few seconds or worse, be stuck in place and be guaranteed to be hit. While you're attention is focused on casting the right thing, your likelyhood of getting hit by Zenith because your guard is down is very high.

On top of that, you're left with very little MP after thunderwaves to cast chaos with, so if you want to pop chaos before the first ingrain you need to avoid using blink to dodge the intro attack. As a result, over half of my attempt reset before the first ingrain due to frustration at either being hit by the intro attack (which doesn't kill you, but it feels *bad*), rolling a bad spell with chaos, or being hit because I'm too focused on Chaos.

The fight becomes a lot more manageable once the elements have been dealt with. Tartaros's low health is only a factor if you're bad at the fight; you can survive being hit with crimson haze and even sometimes survive being hit with 4 orbs while hazed. You ideally want to keep as many skulls as long as possible; the shorter duration on the haze when you have more skulls is vital because the less you're hazed, the less time you have to be killed by what would otherwise be scratch damage.

Phase 3 is very buttclench because failure is more punishing, and both the wallcling shots and the small red pellets require a lot of concentration; but if you're lucky, you'll get easy attacks like swords, wind, or the giant laser, where it's just free real estate on damaging the boss. Tartaros has very easy flora kills provided you aren't hazed; just avoid transitioning to the big bang threshold if you're hazed. Phase 4 is extremely punishing, but it's also fairly easy pattern-wise; the spinning laser with swords is a usual exception as your nerves are tense and one mistake can end everything, but a new exception emerges with Tartaros: the meteor attack. Tartaros has a hard time maintaining speed and your MP is likely very low at this point, so you'll likely need to prolong the subphase before the meteor in order to roll chaos and also have MP for blink.

Besides that, this wasn't *too* unreasonable, but also I think it'd be a lot harder if I didn't know about the interactions with direct damage and element popping. Took me 3 days to do, compared to the week I spent beating Zenith the first time with Vanice.