So, to preface this a bit, this is how hard the difficulty 5 bosses are specifically, not how hard the bosses themselves are. This is most apparrent with Markiona and Ruins guardian, which are pretty hard to learn the first time through, but in this case diff 5 doesn’t boost them enough for there to be any new roadblocks.
Every boss was beaten at the end of NG+2, lvl 410 using pale knight, best defense parts. amulets: Iron Wall+1, Life+1, Blue Guardianship+3, Leaping+1, Patience+1. Most of these were chosen spefically to max out hp, and the last two to fill out slots since I didn’t want any damage boosts making my time easier.
Bosses within tiers are ordered.
Now to explain the tiers:
Firstly ”Is this even Diff 5?” Contains mostly bosses that died in a single attempt, apart from two that had a fluke.. for the boss. Frankly every single boss here could comfortably receive a 6th difficulty without much issue. The buffs they’ve received just aren’t enough to be much of a threat. There’s only two ways you can die to bosses in this game: either the boss bursts you down, or it runs out your healing with endurance. The bosses here can do neither. In fact YOU have better endurance than them. You can outlast every single one of these even if you have a garbage attempt.
The stand out dissapointment here is most definately Markiona, I expected her to get a much bigger boost, but no. I almost face tanked her, failing parries left and right, sometimes missing even the guard and still managed to beat her first try without any major close moments. I thought maybe she should go up a tier but with how bad my performance was that still ended up winning I don’t think I can.
Secondly ”Pretty easy” contains bosses where you actually have to learn the moveset and have a somewhat competent attempt to win. Though that basically only applies to corrupted parade master as they’ve just gotten trashed on every previous run without much need for moveset learning, but Diff 5 finally pushed the stats high enough for that to be a requirement. 6 attempts.
King of puppets is here for the phase 2, and while it isn’t particularly harder than it is in base (overheat is basically a non-factor at these resistances) it does actually have enough damage to eat pulse cells if you play badly. Finally learned the fire wombo combo and it is pretty easy to parry, beat it 2nd try.
Lastly ruins guardian, it’s ruins guardian with somewhat increased damage and somewhat increased health. Whoop de doo. It’s in this tier cause it actually deals enough damage to be a threat, particularly the red attacks deal very high damage and can even oneshot, but you’ve already learned to parry those in the base fight so it doesn’t really matter. First try.
Thirdly ”relatively challenging”, which is just Laxasia. I’m actually not sure if she belongs in the previous tier or not, but her moveset itself is hard enough that this took a few attempts, since I suck ass at it. Damage and health both boosted a good amount, but not enough to make any sort of meaningful diffrence. 4 Attempts.
Fourthly ”Hard” actually hard fights now. First nameless puppet finally gets enough of a stat boost where you have to learn that weird af moveset, and not just bulldoze the glass cannon he is. Very fun fight, though his health is still quite low for a diff 5 boss so he goes down without that much trouble when you’ve actually learned the moveset. 11 attempts.
Simon Manus… Simon fucking Manus… dear god where do I start… so in my first playthrough I beat both him and nameless first try, and Diff 5 Simon was actually the first time i’ve ever died to him. But I could already foresee the problem. Big health, respectable damage, weird wonky attacks. Diff 3 didn’t buff him enough, Diff 4 didn’t buff him enough, but Diff 5 sure fucking did. And now it’s a problem you can’t just outlast. And dear god there are problems. Mainly the bloody camera. Please pan it the fuck back. I can’t see the bloody overhead swings in any way shape or form, so base of his arm reading it is. I don’t have an issue with blind parrying attacks with muscle memory, Arlecchino is second nature at this point, but at least he has a clear path from reading visuals to just feeling the rythm from memory. No path exists here. Nor rythm. Liked parrying attacks? Now go run a marathon accross the arena. 14 attempts, winning one took 8 bloody minutes.
Finally ”Very Hard”. The first and only two bosses where I actually died at diff 3 and 4. I wasn’t sure if Overseer should be here, but fuck it, here he goes. Remember the two ways you die? Well this fucker does both. One attack unguarded does over half my health, which comes out to about 600 damage. Jesus christ. Even when guarding every attack does chip damage into actual health, and enraged just has so much goddamn DPS you get whittled down and lose the endurance race extremely quickly if you miss too many parries. Thankfully the damage goes to reasonable levels when you manage to break his weapon, but that’s at about half his health and you’ve still got a marathon to finish with probably very low heals remaining. Surprisingly only 8 attempts, but that goddamn damage definately bumps it up a tier.
And finally Arlecchino. Obviously. I beat his Diff 5 as my second Diff 5, only after parade master. You got good enough to beat him, now iron out the issues and have a near perfect run where 3 whiffs in a row means death. Extremely fun, no complaints. I beat him multiple times as a break from the last three. 28 attempts.
(Also is this violating megathread rule? Seems a bit long to just chuck in a comment)