A Case Study With [REDACTED]
Hey all,
With the drop of 1.0 and the release of the superboss Ehalcodon, it's really pushed my brain hard to find consistent strategies for victory against such an overwhelming foe. Looking for solutions that work based off of equipment only (and no hand-e-nuke) has been tough; but I want to come to you all today with what I think is an extremely reliable strategy you can use regardless of whether you're true kin or mutant.
The relics had the following traits:
- Helmet: +4 Willpower, +2 to hit in melee
- Arm Band: Rank 4 Temporal Fugue
- Kesil Face: +3 Willpower (for a total of +4)
- Extradimensional Psychodyne Helmet: +10 heat resistance
In the fight I did not use Temporal Fugue in order to keep things standard, I also did not use any metamorphic polygel whatsoever. I used 4 Eater's Nectar Injectors, and got MP from all 4. I cooked with 4 drops of nectar and got a single +1 to all 6. No brain brine was used, no warm static was used. I had a relic injector that I did not use. I received no baetyl boons.
Not pictured because they broke during the fight, but my empty hands had a psionic zetachrome dagger and a sharp extradimensional zetachrome dagger from Aoyg-No-Longer.
Setup
In order to set up for the fight, the core of the strategy is to rely on the confused effect and pair this with psionic weapons. The confused effect does 2 very important things:
- Removes counterattacks
- Reduces mental armor
Flashbangs are an OK and powerful source of the confused effect, but the problem is that the Nephilim in general are extremely resilient when it comes to keeping them confused. This is where the zigzag fangs come in. They have a baseline 15% chance to confuse, and they do not need to penetrate in order to do so. The confusion effect they apply is weaker than flashbangs, but far more reliable when paired with precision nanon fingers and strong enough for our needs. In total, they result in a 16 MA drop when applied, which is pretty significant. When paired with Multiweapon Fighting and Jab, they become very reliable at applying their status effect. Additionally, you can wear multiple with the Two-Faced mod, but I chose not to here because 1 was enough and I wanted the Kesil Face. The night-sight interpolators were inconsequential.
Once I had the zigzag fangs, the psionic weaponry had to be sourced. If you have 34 Ego or lower, the crystalline jile should actually be the best option but I restricted myself from cloning it. Aoyg-No-Longer has a guaranteed sharp extradimensional zetachrome dagger which you can clone and have the Ego to use it properly. This will be your best high Ego option. In order to source the rest of the weapons in my case, I tinkered up some spiral borers and explored the depths for arch dervishes and took their weapons. I did not encounter any of my clones while in the depths.
In my case, I had Multiple Arms as a mutation but if you did not have this mutation you could instead use Helping Hands. I didn't here as not every build would have access to a 4th pair of limbs, but every build can have access to 3. Using 4 pairs of limbs makes this strategy work even better so use them if you have them.
Skills
There actually are only 5 skills you need for this strategy:
- Short Blade Expertise (Comes with the 50sp needed to unlock the tree)
- Jab (100sp)
- Multiweapon Proficiency (Comes with the 150sp needed to unlock the tree)
- Multiweapon Expertise (150sp)
- Multiweapon Mastery (200sp)
The total cost here comes out to 650 skill points, which is not a lot by the stage in the game where you're fighting Ehalcodon. Pointed Circle was never used, despite me having Triple-Jointed that could have taken advantage of it, and Shank is actually worse DPR than just bump attacking, even with high stacks of bleed (I tested it, usually got mid to high 200s at best). Bump attacking while Ehalcodon was confused by zigzag fangs resulted in 350+ damage consistently. If you had maxed Single Weapon Fighting (I didn't) then Shank would become far more useful, but just goes to show that it's not necessary.
As an added note, if you get lucky with a village teaching you Multiweapon Mastery, you only need to spend 150sp
Fighting Ehalcodon
During the fight, Ehalcodon unfortunately spawned very far away. There was no issue dodging the initial Irisdual Beam, but this resulting in qem getting creshes down. Looking back on it now, I would definitely have rather tried to cull them with my eigenrifle (chosen for its punch-through) than the explosives that I tried, since I was unable to weave them past the Quantum Fugue clones charging at me and ended up hitting myself and still having the girshlings spawn. I did manage to wipe out quite a few, but this is a big area for improvement.
This takes us to the Quantum Fugue Irisdual Beam. It was about as bad as it could be with all the girshlings on screen, but with the help of Juke and Sprint I was able to avoid all the beams. This is another area for improvement and something that new adopters should keep in mind is that they'll need a reliable way to avoid this phase. The ideal would be to have Ehalcodon start it when you're at the edge of the screen so you can transition over and be fine or to have killed more girshlings but in my experience they were too far away to really refract things back towards me. High movement speed may be one of the biggest assets here combined with pretty high quickness, but thanks to my gear I could have taken a couple Irisdual Beams to the face so it wasn't the end of the world if I was hit by one or two.
EDIT: The proper solve here is to bring mk III stasis grenades along. Pop one on yourself when the Irisdual Beams start raining down and you'll come out on the other end in perfect health. The duration can be a bit tight, so pop it when you need to. You may also just be able to pop multiple in a row; but haven't tested that.
Once Quantum Fugue expired, the fight was incredibly easy. It was a matter of just attacking Ehalcodon until qe died. Only a single Irisdual Beam was fired off before the fight was over. This was Ehalcodon at full power too, I did not pacify any Nephilim. Berate was used at the start, but not kept up with since I just was autoattacking to speed things up. No cooking effect was used, but potentially a cooking effect where taking damage gives you the ability to Shank and then popping a hulk honey injector could massively increase DPR if soul curd was used. Alternatively, if you are able to hit Ehalcodon with plasma to reduce resistances, an on-crit effect that allowed you to sock via electrical generation could be good as well as many crits occurred. Or you could use the beguiling one and eventually it'll work and you have a pet Ehalcodon.
In total, I used 1 urberry and 1 salve injector, as I did get hit by a few Quantum Fugue clones while trying to take out the girshlings. Hopefully this case study was helpful in some way and perhaps if you were struggling with this fight you can take something from it for your own use case! Also if you're wondering why many pieces of equipment were not max modded, it's because I had complete ass luck in getting any good mods on merchants and I couldn't be asked to farm them forever.