The Pyromaniac boss fight in The First Descendant is notorious for its fiery onslaught and relentless attacks, quickly becoming a brutal challenge for players. This guide will provide you with the essential strategies to overcome this encounter on both Normal and Hard difficulties, focusing on exploiting weaknesses and employing effective combat tactics. To defeat this scorching foe, a combination of robust defense, Chill-element damage, and strategic long-range engagements targeting weak points is crucial. The Pyromaniac excels in close-quarters combat, making distance your greatest ally in this battle.
Essential Tips for Defeating the Pyromaniac
Here’s a concise breakdown of key strategies to effectively combat the Pyromaniac:
- Exploit Chill Weakness: The Pyromaniac is highly vulnerable to Chill-type damage. Prioritize weapons and skills that inflict this status effect to maximize your damage output. It also has multiple weak spots that are critical to target.
- Fortify Defenses: Fire resistance is paramount, but don’t neglect overall health and defense. Modules that boost these stats are vital for surviving the Pyromaniac’s punishing attacks.
- Maintain Distance: The Pyromaniac’s attack range is limited. Engage from afar to minimize exposure to its flamethrowers and fire-based abilities. Fast-moving targets at a distance pose a significant challenge to this boss.
- Grapple for Evasion: The chains summoned by the Pyromaniac are a major threat. Utilize your Grapple ability to swiftly evade these attacks and reposition yourself strategically.
- Team Coordination (Multiplayer): In group play, assign a Descendant with high mobility to distract the Pyromaniac. This allows teammates to focus fire on its vulnerable weak points without drawing aggro.
- Weapon Selection: Prioritize weapons that excel at dealing weak point damage and rapidly apply Chill or Frostbite status effects. Sniper rifles, pistols, and machine guns with appropriate elemental and module enhancements are highly effective.
These points provide a foundational understanding for tackling the Pyromaniac. Let’s delve into more specific details, starting with understanding its vulnerabilities.
Understanding Pyromaniac Weaknesses
The Pyromaniac’s primary weakness lies in Chill-type damage. While Toxic damage can serve as a secondary option, focusing on Ice-based powers is significantly more effective. Characters like Viessa, known as one of the best characters in The First Descendant, are exceptionally well-suited for this encounter due to their inherent Chill abilities. However, even without Viessa, equipping weapons with Chill damage modules such as Chill Enhancement and Snowflake Conductor can be highly effective. Upgrading these modules at Albion is strongly recommended to amplify their impact – consult a guide on Kuiper Shard farming in The First Descendant if you need resources for these enhancements.
When it comes to weaponry, the optimal choices are those that either maximize weak point exploitation or deliver consistent Chill damage. Sniper rifles and pistols stand out for their high weak point damage potential, while machine guns like The Tamer are favored for their ability to rapidly apply Chill status.
Beyond elemental weaknesses, the Pyromaniac presents several obvious weak points: its shoulders, eyes, knees, and the core at its center. Given its relatively slow movement speed, consistently targeting these weak points should be a priority throughout the fight to maximize damage output and expedite the encounter.
Pyromaniac Combat Strategy
Before engaging the Pyromaniac, preparation is key. Equip as many Fire-resistant modules as possible, prioritizing enhanced versions of modules like the Heat Antibody module. Beyond fire resistance, focus on a build that emphasizes defense, increased maximum HP, and shield capacity. The goal is to create a tanky build capable of withstanding the Pyromaniac’s unavoidable attacks. Many of its attacks are difficult, if not impossible, to dodge consistently, making survivability the cornerstone of your strategy. Accept that you will take hits and build to mitigate the damage.
Once the fight begins, prioritize long-range combat. Similar to encounters with the Executioner, the Pyromaniac is slow-moving. While it possesses teleportation abilities and can pull you in with certain attacks, maintaining distance is generally the safest approach. Utilize available cover to shield yourself from fireballs while consistently targeting its weak points. If the Pyromaniac unleashes its flamethrower, strafe laterally with maximum speed or use your grapple hook to quickly reposition out of its reach.
The Pyromaniac also employs summons, deploying both smaller Hummingbird/Kingfisher robots and expanding circles of damaging chains. Designate at least one player to focus on eliminating the robots, as they can inflict significant damage if left unchecked. Simultaneously, remain vigilant for the chain attacks. When these chains begin to spawn, the most effective countermeasure is to grapple to elevated positions, such as towers or floating debris, to avoid the ground-based damage.
During Frenzy mode, the Pyromaniac becomes temporarily invulnerable to damage, with one critical exception: the tube located on its back. While this weak point is challenging to access, the optimal strategy is for the player currently targeted by the Pyromaniac to focus solely on evasion, kiting the boss to create an opening for teammates to attack the exposed tube from behind. This principle of focusing fire on the back tube during Frenzy mode, and generally targeting weak points at other times, is applicable not only to the Pyromaniac but to many boss encounters in The First Descendant, making it a broadly valuable tactic. In Frenzy mode, it becomes your near-exclusive path to success.
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