It’s that time of year again, and tons of summon tickets are on offer for handling some of the story mode’s greatest hits. All told, you can end up receiving ten tickets in addition to your two traveling outfit CEs, but that requires a full clear, and Saber Alter is no walk in the park.
The first several quests feature no break gauges, and are pretty susceptible to burst because of this. The Epic of Remnant set feature breaks just like the story versions, so you’ll have to be a bit more conscious of what’s going on in them and since you can’t repeat the story chapters, keep in mind that the particular mechanics from last year are still in force.
Part 1 Memorials
The part one quests have nothing particularly special going on outside of Flauros appearing for Septem (If you don’t recall, Demon God Pillars are weak to the Cavalry classes; Rider, Caster, and Assassin). All non-Flauros enemies have their normal servant skillset, all seven including Flauros sport just shy of 700,000 HP.
For this first set, any given double-support team composition should be capable as long as you’re conscious of the enemy NP and setting up your skills well. If you lack glitzy supports, Hans is a good option for this sort of content. Pair him with an appropriate friend unit and your best damage dealer with class advantage and you’re off to the races. If you’re heavier on the support side, any promising looking friend unit should do.
If you’re confident in your burst, the backline can be used for bond farming. If not, it’s probably best to bring alternatives for your weakest link in two of the three rear slots, with the last devoted to a hard-to-kill anchor like Cu Chulainn or Heracles. That will make sure even if things get out of hand, you have a safety net.
However, if you’re feeling confident in your servants, no break gauges and no mechanics mean that one-shot attempts are on the table. If you’re unfamiliar with this strategy since it’s become pointless lately with most fights having special mechanics and punishing all-in strategies, you use three supports with the highest buff values you can find, regardless of turn length.
You’ll need to use the Plugsuit (CCU) to shift the third forward after the first two use all their abilities on whoever your strongest burst character is, and in some cases reset for a brave chain. Certain sets of CEs and characters are more suited to this, but as it hasn’t frequently been a feasible strategy for most challenges since just after the original run of these quests, we won’t get too in-depth with that.
Epic of Remnant Memorials and Saber Alter
There’s no general strategy that will work for this boss rush. Several of the hardest fights for Part 1.5 are rerun here. The prevailing advice with these during their story run was to just use your Command Spells but naturally, that’s not really feasible when you’re doing them one after the other during the anniversary event.
You’re gonna have to do at least a few of these the hard way, and I very much recommend saving your Command Spells for Saber Alter if you intend to use them. There’s no general composition that works here since there’s a mix of single-target and AoE fights, but you’re still usually going to want to bring your best supports. Just be ready for the final node, where that particular strategy is punished through heavy AI targeting. It can still be used, but protecting your casters will become important.
Moriarty
Moriarty does a few things that make damage dealer redundancy pretty valuable on him. I’d recommend bringing a comp that features multiple characters who either support and damage simultaneously or can do a lot of damage in a brief window.
During Phase 1, on his first bar, Moriarty will randomly select an ally for his Empty Equation and randomly seal either their NP or skills. This can be mitigated by not being overly reliant on a single DPS or the skills of a single character for your clear. The first bar is quite a bit larger here, and keep in mind his normal skills are still available. End of the Spider’s Web can result in surprise NPs, so be on the lookout when he’s short just a little bit of charge.
When you break the first gauge and start Phase 2, Moriarty will select a random target for 3,000 Year Hatred and apply a taunt to them. He also upgrades Empty Equation into Incomprehensible Question, which selects one party member to have their buffs removed, and another to have their NP sealed. This means it’s very hard to keep any sort of sustained offense going and you should try to save your skills to buff for a single big turn.
I’d choose your back-line options to have strong things they can do on a single turn’s notice as it’s very inconsistent to keep buffs any longer than that. Here’s an example comp which can be swapped for characters you own with similar roles:
Megalos and Columbus
There are two ways to approach this one. One favors AoE and tries to down both bosses simultaneously to minimize the number of NPs it needs to survive by fitting the fight into one cycle. I don’t recommend that strategy since while it does tend to result in less overall NPs, there are more early on and they’ll have invulnerability pierce significantly restricting your options to avoid them.
Instead, I’d recommend bringing a strong single target Assassin and the Assassin supports if you have them (Most notably Semiramis and Carmilla) and focusing down Megalos. Unfortunately, some runs can go fairly sour through no fault of your own because Megalos is sometimes prone to spamming Mind’s Eye and bringing a comp to counter that is usually pretty soft against the AoE damage you’ll be facing. Megalos doesn’t use Heracles’ normal single-target NP so don’t get caught unawares.
That said, there aren’t really distinct phases to the fight as Megalos and Columbus both do things based on their own gauge rather than the overall state of the bosses. Megalos gauges make him permanently crit harder and become weaker to Quick cards on the first and crit more often and become weak to Arts cards on the second. The really important change is Columbus. After his gauge is broken, he casts Words of Encouragement to Hard Workers, permanently making both he and Megalos pierce invulnerability. Because of this effect, I recommend focusing down Megalos, using invulnerability for the first set of NPs, and then finishing Columbus during his second charge. Here’s a comp that cleared with that strategy:
Shuten & Raikou
Unlike the previous fight, Shuten and Raikou are a bit more suited to being cleaned up with AoE, as their mechanics aren’t as game-changing as permanent invuln pierce. Just one issue; you’re forced to put an underleveled support Musashi in your frontline with no CE. This makes things a bit rough, but I recommend against trying to actually use Musashi. She’s short between two and three thousand attack depending on CE choice compared to actual Musashi.
Best practice here is to plugsuit her out immediately for your strongest AoE character (I would only bother with an Assassin if you have one of the notable rare ones, low rarity AoE assassins tend to be very bad) and work down both bosses simultaneously.
Each begins the fight with a Karma effect. Shuten has The All-Melting which causes her normal attacks to apply a delayed effect that will drain 10% NP from the target without any stacking. Raikou has The All-Purging which causes her to drain stars from your critical pool with each attack.
Once you break their gauges Raikou gains Right Tool for the Right Job, which increases her already punishing crit damage, and Shuten becomes immune to debuffs with Flower Viewing Fete. This fight is pretty simple to mitigate the dead weight Musashi is forced to be in your front line, but the incoming damage is high and Shuten’s Noble Phantasm can be debilitating even when blocked because of the pile of debuffs it places on the party. Here’s a clear team to pattern on, but this can be hard to replicate without friend support. Use the basic strategy with whatever you have available.
Abby
Technically no break gauges here, but it’s an endurance fight. You have to work through Abby’s health bar five times. It works essentially like guts, though there isn’t a visible buff. Other than instantly casting her Mass Hysteria skill when you reach her, there’s nothing else fancy going on here. I recommend you bring the meanest Alter-Ego you can find, from the friends list if you have to, and slapping whatever supports you have next to them. There’s not a lot else to it. Abby doesn’t do much except hit you and she’s pretty much the low point of these refights. At least they didn’t pick one with the half-level gimmick!
Saber Alter
This is the big one. Salter here boasts 3m HP across her break gauges and absolutely hates Casters. Many players suspect that the second part is a direct response to the use of Merlin to cheese bosses prior to the introduction of Break Gauges. Basically, go in pretending Casters on your team have a permanent taunt. She doesn’t always attack them, but the vast majority of the time she will.
Please note, many guides for this fight are based on the original Japanese run and haven’t been updated. The major mechanic of the fight was avoidable with a stun the first time, but on the second time around and when the boss reached the global servers this strategy was patched out. You cannot avoid the gauge skills by stunning Salter!
The simple answers to this are to either bring multiple relatively tough casters so they’ll split the damage between them, or to use none at all. Of the two I would still recommend double-caster comps here but with a greater focus on sustained survivability. If you can swing it, a Waver-Tamamo Arts comp is ideal, but there’s sadly not a good budgetary replacement if you can’t source a friend unit to complete one of the three slots because the low-rarity casters
are just too soft to stand up to the permanent aggro.
Outside of the usual Saber Alter kit with refunding NP and strong, frequent crits, this one features a huge paradigm shift on break. Each gauge casts Defender of Humanity on the boss, which gives her a tick of NP charge, a five turn defense down, a huge one-time attack up that is particularly painful if that extra tick charges Excalibur Morgan, and a ‘poison’ on her basic attacks that applies defense down to her target.
If you’re familiar with Hokusai, it works roughly the same way as her third skill. You can choose to use Defender of Humanity as a way to burn her down faster, but she hits back fairly hard, stalling or blocking her NP is critical. An unsoaked Excalibur Morgan will probably kill your entire frontline.
Ultimately, slow and steady is the name of the game here. You just aren’t gonna be able to burst through, so have a plan for the NP and stick to it. Tamamo and Waver can stall it out pretty well if you’re keeping it in mind, but some players prefer to focus more defensively. If so, I would pair Mash with Tamamo instead, and find a solid NP-based damage dealer to join their chains. Whittle her down, and you’ll have earned your summon ticket by the end.
