13-21 Adverse 5 star Casters only

Rewatching this clear my first thought is that it's nowhere near as complex or challenging as it was in my head; but then I check the sheer amount of items in my recycling bin and they're all just attempts of this stage and I remember what a pain in the butt it was.
This chapter has everything I dislike about this game: unnecessary micromanaging, bugs, and inconsistencies.

I obviously couldn't go into detail with just subtitles, but there's thought put into most slug kills, and where and when to kill them, which may or may not be something exclusive to ranged only niches, I'm not sure. The bomb is also another thing I despise: it's impossible to math out their movements; push them too far, they die too early to the casters circling around the altar, don't push them enough, your characters die to the boss not having the bomb in range and focusing his attacks on them instead. It's impossible to know how many attacks exactly you'd want the bomb to take to push it to your desired position, it's trial and error nonsense.

Another thing that drove me crazy is crystal spawn rng. Whenever a slug dies, it leaves behind a crystal: this crystal can vary in position on any given tile, it doesnt always spawn dead center of it, in fact it usually always appears off-center in one of the 4 directions. This matters because of Leizi: there are times where, depending on crystal position, she would chain differently leading to different, and undesired outcomes. An example would be at the start, at 00:35 : if those 2 crystals spawned off-center to the left, Leizi would chain on the boss two more times than I would've liked her to, slowing him down more than she should have, doing more damage to him, and also chaining on the bomb as a consequence, pushing it further and changing the run. Another clear instance of this is on the whip guy at 1:10 : the reason she can chain on him, and slow him down like we want her to, is because the crystal closest to him didnt spawn off-center upwards; if it did I would've had to restart.

Lastly, there seems to be something wrong with Beeswax targeting this chapter. Idk who fricked up the enemy pathing, but some enemies seem to take complete priority over any sort of targeting logic that would actually make sense. The only way I could grasp onto anything was to just see every possible pillar drop outcome and go from there. An example, where we even take advantage of this, is in the run at 2:58. Beeswax drops the pillar on the bulky slug dude in spite of the fact that there are clearly enemies closer to the blue box on the tile directly to the right, and even then it's not consistent, activating Beeswax skill on always the exact same frame on that segment would result in what felt like a 50/50 in pillar positioning. Again, trial and error.

Music:
Elden Ring - Mohg, Lord of Blood
Bloodborne - Living Failures

#arknights