Tone down Dadaluma

This fight is not even remotely reasonably balanced.  Either remove his regen or remove his "spoon" attack or significantly nerf both. This fight is not even close to being fun.

I don't think toneing him down is necessary, yes I agree the first few times I fought him I was pulling my hair out.

But with the right setup and strategy he is a bit of a push over.

If you search the forum under dadaluma you will find a thread on beating him.

But, heres my 2 cents.

Hopefully this helps you out in future runs.

I've beaten him before on the 1.4a version. Not sure if he was buffed or what not but this time it's virtually impossible. I legit had a much easier time with Atma weapon than this fucking guy. I'm over leveled for the zone with all level 13-14's when the mod maker says the zone is intended for 10-12(good fucking joke). I'm employing what is literally a flawless strategy. I always defend his jump attack. I hold my turn with Edgar usually with bio blast so I can immediately kill his adds when he spawns them. My entire team is in the back row using weapons that ignore row so that I avoid as much damage as possible. I'm having Celes slow and heal non stop. I've attempted 6x so far with my last attempt had him using "spoon" literally back to back insta killing 2 of my guys then after I rezzed them he insta killed them again. No fucking boss this early in the game should be this difficult. He's literally harder than Atma weapon which is fucking retarded. He 100 million percent needs to be toned down. 

Personnaly this is one of this bosses where I wonder why the fuck people have trouble with him honnestly I have never lost against this guy in vanilla BNW (on Nowea Hardtype that's another story) and I wasn't overlevel, so I assume that you are either unprepare or you are using a wrong strategie.

Are you setting Sap and Slowing him?
Every time he pops a Slim Jim he gains Regen and Haste, so you wanna make sure to counter those with Slow and something like Drill or Pummel or you're going to have a bad time.

7 minutes ago, A Dummy said:

Are you setting Sap and Slowing him?
Every time he pops a Slim Jim he gains Regen and Haste, so you wanna make sure to counter those with Slow and something like Drill or Pummel or you're going to have a bad time.

Yep. Drilling. Slowing. Poisoning. I know I've been getting extremely close to killing him but he pulls out some bullshit RNG on me every time so far 6x in a row now.

What’s your party setup?  It’s a tricky fight with several moving parts but you can figure this out.

I'm using gau, locke, edgar, celes. I'm well aware it's not min maxing but there's no fucking reason whatsoever that I should be having this much difficulty with a party that's entirely over leveled and has the best possible gear in the entire game at this point in time. This piece of shit uses slim jim every 20 fucking seconds. It's so god damn retarded it's unbelievable. Then he uses spoon once every minute and auto kills whoever it hits. Then I rez them, then he hits that fucking person right before I can heal them then they die again, then he spawns adds, then he slim jims again. Tone this fucking piece of shit boss down. It's seriously the most cancerous shit I've ever experienced in my entire life playing a JRPG.

Yo bro, this isn’t reddit. Check your attitude.  If you want help we’ll be glad to offer advice but rolling in here like we owe you something is garbage. 

What rage do toi have for Gau ?

Locke should hit hard with 2 butterflies + Black Belt and you van use him for items usage

Celles with Sprint Shoes for auto-haste is good égaler and van deal sole damage with Ice (Dadaluma is weak To it)

Edgar should do nothing but bio blaster spam.

When he jumps put everyone on Defense when he cimes black immediatly use Slow and Drill, espion is annoying but single target if he has slow you shouldn't have trouble recovering.

If everything fails then go back to Narshe and I suggest replacing Gau and Locke for Sabin and Cyan.

He can win fine with that party.

Lo/Ce play healing and revive duty with as much pdef as possible, including shields.

Edgar runs a stout spear and Bio Blast. His Bio Blast is especially important for adds.  

Gau uses Wild Rat rage if you have it.

Everyone in the back row. White capes and Safety gloves.  

If you want you can try dual Butterfly Locke but I don’t like this personally.  As long as you have one dedicated healer you should be fine.  Just don’t waste turns and pay attention to how Dadaluma reacts.  

55 minutes ago, Mishrak said:

Yo bro, this isn’t reddit. Check your attitude.  If you want help we’ll be glad to offer advice but rolling in here like we owe you something is garbage. 

A) I wasn't cursing at you or anyone else. B) I don't need advice, the encounter is simply broken. C) I finally beat it, took me 13 phoenix downs and 15 minutes. No encounter this early in the game should be that difficult. The only reason I was losing was because I only had 9 phoenix downs originally so I had to go back to town and buy a fuck ton of them. If you have to rez 13 times to beat this shit when you're over leveled for it and geared to the teeth, it's broken. It felt like I was fighting a weapon in FF7.

There’s nothing broken with the encounter at all.  It’s difficult, yes, but lots of people have had much less of a hard time with it than you did on their first play, myself included. 

Quote

I don't need advice, the encounter is simply broken

This is a really bad attitude to put towards any game, not just limited to here.
Assuming your strategy is already perfect when you're clearly having trouble and putting it at the fault of the encounter or the balance, rather than analyzing your approach and looking for ways to improve, is going to make things hard for you whether the game is something like Dark Souls, something more PvP oriented like Overwatch, or even a simple platformer like Mario. (Kind of a silly example I know, but the same philosophy can apply.)

37 minutes ago, ShadowNinja said:

 

A) I wasn't cursing at you or anyone else. B) I don't need advice, the encounter is simply broken. C) I finally beat it, took me 13 phoenix downs and 15 minutes. No encounter this early in the game should be that difficult. The only reason I was losing was because I only had 9 phoenix downs originally so I had to go back to town and buy a fuck ton of them. If you have to rez 13 times to beat this shit when you're over leveled for it and geared to the teeth, it's broken. It felt like I was fighting a weapon in FF7.

So it is as I say you were poorly prepare who the fuck would not have a stock of phenix Downs when they became available, and I beat him in 6-7 minutes at LV13-14 with 0 Phenix Downs the only difference is that I had Sabin instead of Edgar so sorry but I don't think the fight is as insane as you make it seems.

1 hour ago, Nesouk said:

So it is as I say you were poorly prepare who the fuck would not have a stock of phenix Downs when they became available, and I beat him in 6-7 minutes at LV13-14 with 0 Phenix Downs the only difference is that I had Sabin instead of Edgar so sorry but I don't think the fight is as insane as you make it seems.

Well I spent a lot of $$ on gear and had 20 phoenix's but kept getting bullshit step mines and magnitude killing people. Also, it's literally impossible to do the fight with 0 downs unless he never does the spoon attack. He did the spoon attack at least 8x in all of my attempts and it's a 100% hit rate auto kill so how the fuck did you not die once.

Like this and this was done with a suboptimal strat as I berserk Sabin and forgot to bring someone that could inflict Sap (and forgot to put Gau in a Rage that could do so), admitadly he didn't use Spoon in that fight (tough I could record another fight with spoon in it that wouldn't be a problem) and he did kill Locke but I killed him before having the time to use a phenix downs but I already beat him with Spoon involve but again Spoon is only when he is low on HP and is single target with Slow you have time to recover, normally I take either Cyan or Edgar instead of Gau here but I wanted to have fun with him, the global idea is I keep a character Berserked so that I have a consistant source of damage (in this case Sabin because 2 Poison Claws with Berserk hurt that guy A LOT) and the 3 other on the defensive to healing put Slow and Sap on him and to deals with the minions with AoE (Bio Blaster or Global Ice).

Very weird. He was using spoon on me very early on in the fight and in the attempt that I beat him he used it around 10 times.

He uses Spoon based on what commands are hitting him, three of his attacks work this way (ie. Slim Jim + Jump, Elbow Drop, and Spoon).  The Fight command, for example, will make him use the least threatening of the three attacks, where he eats a Slim Jim and Jumps.  If you drag out the fight, he'll eventually use all 3 of those attacks regardless of how you are fighting him though.

But he really isn't that threatning I redo some testing and with a team of Sabin, Locke, Cyan and Celes it took me only 4 minutes with the same team as ShadowNinja (Locke, Edgar, Celes and Gau) I beat him first try took me around 8 minutes and 4 Phenix Downs so it's definitly not the optimal set up but it works just fine he did use Spoon this time tough.

On my most recent playthrough I actually lost to dadaluma once because of bad rng and forgetting to defend against jump but I thought it was a really fun fight.

I had locke on healing duty with his shiv, celes smacking him with the flail, edgar spamming bio blaster and noise blaster for his adds, and gau doing the engineer and wild rat rages. Getting vanish helps with a lot of his attacks, though shockwave will cancel it out. A trick that will help a lot is waiting until your healer can act immediately after whoever throws the phoenix down so they don't get sandbag'd by daddy luma.

Next time I play (hopefully after 2.0 comes out) I think I'll swap celes for shadow or cyan, smoke bomb spam would probably be immensely helpful, and dispatch does stupid damage.

But anyway yeah, daddy is supposed to be the first REAL boss fight, but I think he's at a perfectly reasonable level of difficulty.

Dadaluma is kind of a damage race. At some point, he starts throwing spoons more frequently I feel... That's when you are starting to lose the race. Aside from that, he is pretty manageable due to his poison and ice weaknesses and being human - nigh every character has something powerful against him. I think that was done really well to give you a leg up in the fight.

6 hours ago, JohnFuklaw said:

I had locke on healing duty with his shiv, celes smacking him with the flail, edgar spamming bio blaster and noise blaster for his adds, and gau doing the engineer and wild rat rages. Getting vanish helps with a lot of his attacks, though shockwave will cancel it out. A trick that will help a lot is waiting until your healer can act immediately after whoever throws the phoenix down so they don't get sandbag'd by daddy luma.

Gau can also help with his Conjurer rage which can use Rerise and at this point Rerise is quite OP as it will raise your character at full HP or near Full HP, Conjurer normal attack can also inflict Sap so that's also a good use for Gau in this fight.

In my case I just decided to screw him over by confusing his henchmen via Noiseblast and make the do my bidding by rocking the tarr out of the old man alongside Shadow while Celes and Locke played medics and sometimes lay down some hits to fast things up.

Morale of this topic: EVERYONE has that one boss that make you rage-quit, just deal with it and try to enjoy this awesome mod

I agree that either Spoon or Jump does just a touch too much damage. The ability to one-shot nearly everyone on two abilities is rough, especially this early, since it's hard to stack defense freely, and especially because there's nothing really obvious telling you why he's hitting you with these hard-hitting attacks back-to-back. If it were up to me, Jump would instead auto-set you to 1 hp instead of insta-gibbing 2/3 the roster.

Obviously, once you know the script, or know what you need to do to crush his damage in that race, you can cheese the fight, but it's a rude awakening to how hard this mod can be when you first get to it. I actually don't believe about half of you who claim to have beat it first try the first time you played this mod, and I don't believe any of you who say you did it with no issues: The sheer amount of damage he throws out in a supposed rebalance, instead of hard mode hack, is off-putting at best.

That said, coming in here and talking the way you did about a fight that so many people have managed to beat is disrespectful as hell. We all managed to beat it, we've all managed to find ways around it, and now that we have, we all can get past it without more than a single wipe, if that. And yet you completely talk down our experience and our ability, disrespecting everything we've done - and the truly impressive amount of work some of the crazier players here have put in to figuring out the fight. It's why you got such a terrible response to your thread.

Personally, my favorite strategy for him is to bring Shadow and funnel all post-Narshe money into a stack of Butterflies. Power Gloving Thrown Butterflies is hilarious amounts of damage.

Jump's damage can be mitigated by defending, and the time he spends in the air should mostly ensure that you have enough time to react.

The concern I have with the Dadaluma fight isn't so much its difficulty but the unpleasant play experience it creates if he spends as much time in the air as on the ground.  It's just so much time during which you can't interact with the boss.  The situation I found myself in when I first attempted the fight (in 1.6, so grain of salt) was that I clearly could win, eventually, I just got bored before he died.  A friend of mine had a similar experience just a few weeks ago in his first playthrough (1.9); he did win on his first attempt, it just took a very long time, mostly because he was using fight with multiple characters on many turns.  I don't think it would be realistic to expect the player to discover the effects of their commands on Dadaluma's behavior; after a while, they're just trying to get in as much damage as possible between jumps.

My suggestion would be to make him jump slightly less often, maybe by changing the condition that causes him to jump from a counter of 3 to 4.  On the other hand, that does make him less dangerous.  To address that, maybe he could randomly jump 2/3 and elbow drop 1/3 along with the slim jim?  That's not really consistent with the joke/gimmick of the fight, though.  Just brainstorming.

Once you've studied the fight and understand the manipulations, there's no problem at all.  Even a level 3 party doesn't find Dadaluma to be a stumbling block (well, the fight is much easier than many other things in such a challenge.)  So I don't think his HP or regen or damage needs a nerf.  I just get annoyed by enemies that become invincible too often.

7 hours ago, Miasmir said:

The concern I have with the Dadaluma fight isn't so much its difficulty but the unpleasant play experience it creates if he spends as much time in the air as on the ground.  It's just so much time during which you can't interact with the boss.  The situation I found myself in when I first attempted the fight (in 1.6, so grain of salt) was that I clearly could win, eventually, I just got bored before he died.  A friend of mine had a similar experience just a few weeks ago in his first playthrough (1.9); he did win on his first attempt, it just took a very long time, mostly because he was using fight with multiple characters on many turns.  I don't think it would be realistic to expect the player to discover the effects of their commands on Dadaluma's behavior; after a while, they're just trying to get in as much damage as possible between jumps.

My suggestion would be to make him jump slightly less often, maybe by changing the condition that causes him to jump from a counter of 3 to 4.  On the other hand, that does make him less dangerous.  To address that, maybe he could randomly jump 2/3 and elbow drop 1/3 along with the slim jim?  That's not really consistent with the joke/gimmick of the fight, though.  Just brainstorming.

Once you've studied the fight and understand the manipulations, there's no problem at all.  Even a level 3 party doesn't find Dadaluma to be a stumbling block (well, the fight is much easier than many other things in such a challenge.)  So I don't think his HP or regen or damage needs a nerf.  I just get annoyed by enemies that become invincible too often.

But isn't it par for the course that, when you get to a boss, you save, you try everything you can and then die, going in with more information next time?
Of course, being unable to always easily switchh characters is a bit of a bummer. But I think just about every party setup has some sufficiently strong stuff vs Dadaluma.

38 minutes ago, Vaylen said:

But isn't it par for the course that, when you get to a boss, you save, you try everything you can and then die, going in with more information next time?
Of course, being unable to always easily switchh characters is a bit of a bummer. But I think just about every party setup has some sufficiently strong stuff vs Dadaluma.

This is true but there is an exception to this which is call "First Time" when you fight a boss for first time it can differ, such can be the case with Dadaluma the first time I fight him I was uninform and so not perfectly prepare and altough I win on the first try it tooks me like 15 minutes and let face it Dadaluma isn't that diversify of a fight so I can see how one can get old of him, however yeah if you lose on your first try yes you should try other strategy and set up and eventually pass it. 

Just now, Nesouk said:

This is true but there is an exception to this which is call "First Time" when you fight a boss for first time it can differ, such can be the case with Dadaluma the first time I fight him I was uninform and so not perfectly prepare and altough I win on the first try it tooks me like 15 minutes and let face it Dadaluma isn't that diversify of a fight so I can see how one can get old of him, however yeah if you lose on your first try yes you should try other strategy and set up and eventually pass it. 

Yeah, first try can be hard. On the first try, I tend to jusk fuck around: Use all status available, all commands available(To check for counters) and stuff like that.
I remember Wrexsoul wrecking me pretty hard, cause my team lacked good offence or defence against it the first fight.
Sabin's random targeting made him useless.
Terra was my big damage dealer with morph n fire 3 - but she was also my best reviver/healer.
Edgar's damage just isn't that high to capitalize on Wrexsoul's short appearances.

After changing the setup a little - hell claws, more M.Def for Sabin(He'd get one shot by flare and nigh one shot by meteor) and keeping terra dead when he has posessed her, so she can't get re-posessed... he went down real quick.

So yeah, first time, fight seemed unbeatable. Second time, it was pretty quick.
Same goes for some other bosses which I fought pretty underlevelled. Wrecked Holy D thanks to Celes' runic, for example...

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to think of defending Dadaluma's jump so I wiped a few times on my first play through. Once I did I beat him "first time" and he has been easy since. I attribute this to defend being pretty useless in most ff games and not because I had a brain fart, hmph!

Hm, I remember only Edgar, Sabin, and Cyan being able to reliably survive a jump while defending. Locke and Shadow just didn't have the options for bulk that they'd need to survive the hit, Gau is always doing Gau things and so gets one-shot regardless, and I always geared Celes for Magic, which meant very low Def.

And of the three who can reliably survive, I remember Edgar being too slow to get a Defend command in before Big Daddy D came falling out of the sky, although Cyan's bulky enough to just eat the damned thing and shrug it off. Sabin required a defend, but his huge health and good speed easily let him get one in before eating The People's Elbow.

Of course, my memory is probably bad since I haven't done the fight in a while. I'll try to take notes the next time I do it in order to keep track of things, but I suppose this'll be a non-issue by then.

Perhaps try getting good, and check your attitude.

My problem with Dadaluma is that two crucial pieces of information are more or less completely opaque:

1) Slim Jim giving haste is only possible to see if you bring Scan or have stolen one and used it, and it's perfectly reasonable to assume that Slim Jim just does regen + jump because that's already a lot of things for one attack to do. (Yes, I know it doesn't actually CAUSE the jump, but that's what it looks like to someone who doesn't know what Slim Jim does.)

2) Up until this point, counter-attacks have been very simple. Blitz Albatross, get Fireballed. Tools Tusker, get Gored. Then all of a sudden, Dadaluma has an extremely complicated script with multiple interacting counterattacks and incrementing variables and shit, with no indication of it.

My solution: An NPC in Zozo says "I've noticed Dadaluma gets lethargic after he eats..."

Another NPC in Zozo says something like "I've watched Dadaluma fight. He responds to every attack with exactly the same counter!" or "I've watched Dadaluma fight. His attacks are a lot more threatening than his counters!"

Now the relevant information is not completely hidden, and it's up to the player to figure out what it means. And if they don't talk to the NPCs, well, that's on them! And it has the added benefit of not changing the fight in any way, just giving the player some extra information going into it.

If this were added, then when someone inevitably complains about Dadaluma being too hard, we can be like, "Did you talk to all the NPCs?" rather than "Just figure it out!" and it feels a lot better as a player, knowing it was their fault they missed it, rather than the game just hides it.

16 hours ago, Deschain said:

My solution: An NPC in Zozo says "I've noticed Dadaluma gets lethargic after he eats..."Another NPC in Zozo says something like "I've watched Dadaluma fight. He responds to every attack with exactly the same counter!" or "I've watched Dadaluma fight. His attacks are a lot more threatening than his counters!"

Now the relevant information is not completely hidden, and it's up to the player to figure out what it means. And if they don't talk to the NPCs, well, that's on them! And it has the added benefit of not changing the fight in any way, just giving the player some extra information going into it.

 

If this were added, then when someone inevitably complains about Dadaluma being too hard, we can be like, "Did you talk to all the NPCs?" rather than "Just figure it out!" and it feels a lot better as a player, knowing it was their fault they missed it, rather than the game just hides it.

Pretty cool idea. More NPC interaction isn't bad, especially cause Zozo's so goofy with it.
I knew what Slim Jims did beforehand cause I stole them. Maybe one could make it a rare drop of one of the Zozo enemies and/or put a chest somewhere. The npcs could give more hints about his pattern in contrast to that, being a good learning experience as to what to expect from enemies in the future, too.

Locke can take a hit from Jump even at level 10. You need to stack pdef of course but people forget Safety Gloves are basically additional shields. I usually run two of them plus a shield on Locke for Dadaluma (He’s a healer in my setup). Two Safety Gloves works well for Cranes too. 

5 hours ago, Mishrak said:

Locke can take a hit from Jump even at level 10. You need to stack pdef of course but people forget Safety Gloves are basically additional shields. I usually run two of them plus a shield on Locke for Dadaluma (He’s a healer in my setup). Two Safety Gloves works well for Cranes too. 

Head Band, Ninja Gear and one safety Gloves and with Defending Locke take around 200 damage of a Jump I think with a shield, Green Beret's HP bonus, Mythryl Vest and 2 Safety Gloves he could survive a Jump around LV7-8, for Cranes depend of the build if you invest EL toward Kirin he will already be much harder to kill by the time you reach the Cranes.