Visions of Mana: Black Rabite (Superboss / Expert Difficulty)
Yeah, I whittled this bastard superboss down on Expert difficulty. There's not much to say about this fight as long as you're prepared to counter what the Black Rabite does, which is mostly unchanged from previous entries in the series. The Black Rabite is a brutally long fight, and the attack pattern is very cool. The first thing to check is that you have one source of Saber Magic or passive abilities that ignore monster resistances: because the Black Rabite will spam Dark Saber on your party against their will to reduce their damage to 0. It also periodically summons Archdemons as per its historical style, so be prepared to dispatch dangerous adds early and often. Most of the Black Rabite's attacks inflict massive Dark damage and a status ailment, but if you've been 100%ing the game you should have access to 1x Immunity to all statuses and 1x 60% Resistance to all statuses, as well as multiple Immunity to individual statuses. You can divide this equipment amongst your chosen party to make every be basically immune to all the nasty stuff, mostly Paralysis spam. As for the raw damage itself: stack various sources of Dark Resistance with the active ability Dark Shield+ and nobody should be getting one-shotted, even on Expert difficulty. This is the core of the strategy to not instantly lose on Hard and Expert difficulties.
The bigger issue is that the AI won't dodge the attacks well enough and that the fight is extremely long, so they will repeatedly take catastrophic damage that you can't afford to constantly be healing off. It wastes time and resources in what can be a losing battle of attrition. So the actual way to win this fight is with Crystallize spam: using it to negate incoming damage and keep the fight up. Another option is to ensure Morley has his Samurai passives including 70% bonus damage when he's the only one left alive, and just solo this fight after you stack buffs on Morley. He can maintain all relevant debuffs with Critical Hits and corresponding skills; and you should be able to dodge when necessary and find openings to get in damage even without Crystallize spam. The hard part of the fight is definitely when the Black Rabite summons clones of itself: I'm not sure I could cleanly solo fight that phase without relying on Crystallize. You might argue that using this move cheapens the fight, but feel free to try this yourself and then you'll quickly change your mind.
0:00 Entering Hell
0:15 Fight Starts
22:20 Build Details
