(Theory Crafting/PoC) XC:DE - Avalanche Abaasy (no gems/armor/skill links)
0For people those who don't want to read the whole description, I will probably not be completing this battle under these restrictions. It's definitely possible, but it's not something that can be feasibly done in a reasonable amount of time using this strategy. If anybody else wants to give this a shot themselves, be my guest.
If anybody is interested in the greater details of this strategy and how this battle is possible at all, I'll be discussing that in this description, as well as what's stopping me from actually completing this fight myself.
First, lets talk about the strategy. I'm utilizing a method of locking Abaasy's AI in a pathing loop that I first discovered during my solo level 30 Melia run (video if interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFh4GaLIMFQ). With this, if you have a character with ranged arts, you can lock Abaasy and fight him without having to worry about any damage being taken. As of this uploading, this is the only viable strategy for fighting Abaasy with these restrictions. In theory, this strategy makes Abaasy beatable with these restrictions, at least in theory. However, there are some limitations to this that are shown in this video and I will be discussing below.
Before I get into each segment proper, I'm going to give a brief overview of what problems this fight has. First, the lock is not as rigid as it might at first seem, and there are a lot of things that can break Abaasy's loop. Most of these are shown in the video, but Abaasy blocking attacks, getting burst affinity, and not dealing damage for too long are the biggest issues. All of these problems together mean that the only real viable setup you can use is a Sharla solo with only using Thunder Bullet for damage.
To give a brief idea of how impractical this is for this fight, I found that a single hit of Thunder Bullet did ~1000 damage. It's a realistic estimate to say you'll hit an average of one hit per 7-10 seconds, so for the sake of making a point we'll take the 7 second case. Abaasy has 805,300 HP, so we'll assume 800 thunder bullet hits are needed for the sake of simplicity. Given these conditions, the successful run of this fight will be at least an hour and a half long. Adding in the amount of time that would have to be spent on failed attempts, this strategy quickly becomes not feasible for this battle.
If you want to see raw footage of attempt sessions to see what grinding this fight look like, the following link is to an unlisted video of 2 sessions of attempts I did. During these attempts I used various different ideas to make this fight work, but the general idea is still there.
Raw attempt footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcaA2znyKZk
Below is a list of timestamps for the different sections of this video. Each one will be accompanied by a short description giving details about what problems occur in each clip.
0:00 - PoC with Armor Equipped
This section is the only one where I have armor equipped. This is where I was doing my original theory crafting for whether or not this was possible at all. It's definitely possible to lock him with Sharla as the lead and cycle Cure Bullet and Thunder Bullet to deal damage without dying to the instant death spike. However, there is the issue of having ether arts resisted often due to the level difference and not having Melia's Enlightenment skill linked.
1:50 - Abaasy Leaving Fight
I believe this happened due to not dealing damage to Abaasy for a certain amount of time. I haven't tested thoroughly enough to know for sure, but I'm assuming that the game ends fights if the enemy is chasing you for a certain amount of time with neither you or it dealing damage for a while. Either that or it was caused by some other interaction about the setup I had going on that attempt, like how he was walking in a different direction than normal.
3:01 - Burst Affinity Breaks Lock
You cannot viably use party members to help you defeat Abaasy while using this strategy. Abaasy will break out of the lock if there is a burst affinity, meaning that you cannot have your party members alive if you want the lock to be consistent. Additionally, if Abaasy blocks a physical attack, he will also break out of the lock. I don't have footage of this, so you'll just have to take my word on it.
Edit: I did a bit of grinding on a different build and got a clip of Abaasy blocking an attack. https://twitter.com/arche_knight/status/1336838814879248386?s=20
5:29 - Visions Break Lock
This is a bit of a footnote, but I happened to come across it while testing. If you get a vision while in the fight, Abaasy will break out of the lock. This won't come up in many situations as you won't get visions from Abaasy while he's locked, but if you have a Slobos aggro'd, you can run into problems.