Part 90: Day 40 - Gameplay Again
Day 40: Gameplay AgainMusic: neutral 3
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This time we move Tenebrais down to Extraction, for the +3% attack and defense. Every little bit helps!
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We also put her back in her murderin' suit.
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Rules: Suppress The Red Mist. Tenebrais is the only Agent on duty today.
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Music: Second Trumpet
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Say hello to the mouse cursor, everyone. This particular challenge is one I'm not doing twice, so my footage has the mouse cursor in it. If it shows up in a shot, just pretend it's not there.
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All Phases posted:
Ill destroy a shoddy place like this with my own hands.
Whats left for me, the one who failed to protect them?
Do you really think feeble cowards like you can stop me?
Let me show you how to actually wield E.G.O.
Phase 1 posted:
Im back; the Red Mist has walked out from a sea of pain.
Im no longer weak like I used to be; I can replace any body part even if it gets cut off, and I can be repaired even if Im broken.
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So, Phase 1. At this point Gebura is basically warming up, and is introducing us to the mechanics that will last the entire day. While Tiphereth was a test of endurance over a long period and being able to react to (if not necessarily defeat) a Midnight and Chesed was a test of dealing with and managing high damage numbers, Gebura is a very straightforward test: one of how good we are at suppressing threats. Every phase of Gebura has 3000 HP, meaning we have 12,000 HP to slice through and only Tenebrais to do it with. Speaking of her, that Blessing was pretty nice. Let's see if we can get it again.
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So -45 here has a second quirk: anyone whose name is on the clock cannot work with him ever again, even if we retry. He remembers.
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Anyways, we start by murdering every other Agent in the building.
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This frees Mountain of Smiling Bodies, of course.
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Because it stops to chomp on the Clerks in this department, Tenebrais is able to shut it down without issues-her damage output is nothing to sneeze at.
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Big Bird also needs to be suppressed.
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We can easily run Tenebrais up to Disciplinary and back whenever it waves its lamp, so it's no trouble at all.
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Of course, since our Clerks are running around and shooting themselves at random both of the Abnormalities just breach again, and I have to wait for Tenebrais to get blessed as Parasite Tree activates.
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The Mountain manages to grab enough bodies to hit stage 2 as well, and gain its scream attack.
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One of Gebura's very useful tells is that she says something each time she's going to attack. We'll cover all of it in a bonus update, but knowing which line precedes which attack lets us know what to prepare for. She deals a bit of damage to Mountain as it runs past, though it screams at her in return for some chip damage too.
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Tenebrais does a fair bit more damage
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Cutting it back to stage 1 before it runs off in search of more bodies.
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By the time we catch up with it, it's already back up to stage 3, and since a single stage 3 vomit attack does around a third of Tenebrais's health I opt to back off.
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Gebura's main problem is that her moves are telegraphed and just about any Agent can get away before she swings. This allows us to deal a lot of damage without taking much in return-and this fight is basically just using the clunky micro controls of Lobotomy Corporation to kite like this was League of Legends or Starcraft or something. Because the controls are clunky, this takes a lot of pausing.
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With Tenebrais's damage output, it doesn't take too long to knock Gebura to her first Road of Gold. This has a windup too, so we're able to get out of the way easily.
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When tracking Gebura as she dashes through the facility, all we need to do is check in main rooms until we see one without an exit portal-that's her destination. We start sending Tenebrais over towards it.
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Since Gebura isn't yet at the point where she can really injure us, I get a bit sloppy during part 2 of phase 1, letting Tenebrais go back and forth with Gebura in a straight fight.
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This one foreground object and its ability to murder cool shots is becoming my least favorite Abnormality in the entire facility, but the healthbars and numbers tell the story here just fine. Every time Tenebrais uses the Twilight sword's special attack, a whole chunk of Gebura's HP bar just vanishes.
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She moves to Central 3. Big Bird is one floor above her in Central 2, but it can't cause any problems for Central 3 unless it moves there. Upper and lower Central are basically considered to be two different departments.
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Music: Distorted Night
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Phase 2 posted:
Some things simply couldnt be forgotten, no matter how much time has passed.
Hatred is a poison that eviscerates me, and yet it makes me open my eyes once more.
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In this form Gebura's attacks deal significantly more damage, and one of them (Da Capo) comes out instantly-we can only dodge hits 2 and 3 of that combo no matter how good our reflexes are.
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So long as we dodge out of the way of the vomit attack (not too hard since it has such a long startup time), it's difficult for Mountain to deal any considerable damage to Tenebrais.
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She cuts it back down to size before it runs away. I could possibly stop it with Slow bullets, but I want to conserve ammo for later.
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When it gets back up to size 3 in the span of running through Central, I call the attack off again and decide to get back to fighting Gebura.
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Kiting back and forth is much more important now than before since her damage has increased so much-it keeps things from moving as fast as we have to stop attacks midway through to retreat. Tenebrais's suit will deal passive damage over time, but that's slow so after a bit I try something else.
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I run past her until she starts an attack, then have Tenebrais attack her from behind! This proves to work out a bit better.
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This spear is in a bad spot, it'll definitely hit even if we try to run past-so I opt to let Tenebrais finish her attack and then withdraw.
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I send Tenebrais to a main room whenever she needs to heal since it's twice as fast as the corridors. She needs to heal frequently, since the options here are either 'take forever' or 'take damage' and I am impatient.
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Bad luck makes Tenebrais take a scythe to the face for a little under half her SP bar, but we get her out of the way before Gebura can follow up with Mimicry.
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She winds up near the door, which is perfect for us-we can have Tenebrais dip in, attack, and dip out when a counterattack comes without worrying about range. Out of her normal attacks, only Gebura's spear can hit someone on the other side of a door transition.
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We still take chip damage from Da Capo's opener, though, so we have to heal.
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Before sending Tenebrais back in, I check on the position of Mountain of Smiling Bodies.
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Somehow, its AI broke and now it's stuck on a random clerk body in the middle of a Training hallway. It's not moving.
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This time she moves to Records. This is ideal-her final attack in this phase means we want to be able to quickly escape either up or down from her current position, and the elevator will let us do that. She also charged and reached the department before the scythe arrived, which I had never seen happen before. Good to know!
Anyways, we're just whittling her down like before here-lots of running back to Welfare and then in to fight and so on. Once we've established a basic pattern that works it's all about execution.
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The problem comes in once Red Mist gets down to a sliver of health. She doesn't want to come close to the elevator door, so I opt to have Tenebrais enter and exit the room without engaging, slowly grinding Gebura down via the passive damage ability of the Twilight suit. It's slow, but I want nothing to do with that final attack.
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Phase 3 posted:
Some things just wouldnt cool down, no matter how long they were left in the cold.
Those monsters always kill people, there is no end to this sin; I have descended to bring about their reckoning.
Before we get into the meat of the phase, we have to deal with Phase 2's death throes attack.
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Or death throws, as it were. This attack is the leading cause of death in Phase 2, so much so that I've seen players recommend calling Rabbits on her just to avoid the attack. Tenebrais is out of the path, though, so it doesn't matter too much.
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Gebura's Phase 3 is when her attacks start hitting a wide range, rather than just in front of her. This makes our life a little more difficult, as she'll do things like this:
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The Smile weapon has a hurtbox that extends a good distance behind her, leaving us vulnerable to it whenever we attack with Twilight now. As for how much damage it deals
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It's a lot! We have to play safer than before, and can only really attack when she's using Justita.
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With the Red bullet, this attack winds up dealing 0 damage to Tenebrais. Road of Gold is kind of a breather, compared to Pale damage or Smile's tendency to just melt agents.
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Gebura winds up hugging the door by the time we catch up with her. It's even better for dealing with her than it was in Phase 2, since her ranged attacks can't go through door transitions-we can attack and retreat much more safely now. Just have to check on the Mountain
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Yeah, we're good.
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The entire facility to play with, and this small area right here is where the entire fight happens.
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The bullet this time was useless, she left that room before Gebura got there.
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It's about now that I try poking Mountain to see if its AI will unbreak.
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It unbreaks, and ends poorly for Tenebrais.
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Luckily for us, in the meanwhile Gebura moves back to a doorway! This means about half of this room's fight looks much like it did in Welfare, with us dipping in and out.
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It takes a lot more dodging and weaving, but eventually
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Music: Insignia Decay
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I didn't get a good shot of it again, but you can see Gebura slamming Smile into the ground in the photo. It sort of grinds away and deals damage when she transitions into her final form.
Phase 4 posted:
The right path is too far away, and I have too far to go. My heart is pulsing with anger, and I must keep pushing.
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Phase 4 is likely to just obliterate new players their first time seeing it, because it does only two things and both of them will ruin our day. The first is the portal-slash combo we saw all day yesterday. This is the attack we'd prefer seeing since it's less dangerous for us-by this point in the fight we should be good at getting away from the portals.
The second attack is more problematic. It slaps a marker over an Agent's head. I couldn't get a good shot of it, so I grabbed it from the wiki:
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She beelines towards whoever has this marker at a total of 200 speed (a little more than twice as fast as Tenebrais), and when she reaches them they're probably going to die. I have Tenebrais run for Welfare so that I can take advantage of something very specific down there.
Shelter from the 27th of March posted:
"If a subject enters Shelter from the 27th of March while being pursued by a hostile entity, the subject will become undetectable to the pursuer."
The plan is simple: if she gets marked, I'll wait for Gebura to get close, hide her, and then get out to finish her off.
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She starts with the portal. Were I thinking I'd have had Tenebrais back off to lower Information, since the final portal puts her in Central 1 right next to the elevator and I could deal some serious damage. Instead I keep running-I didn't think of it at the time.
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Luckily for us, she does it again-it seems to be completely random what attack she picks, so this is great for us. Better: she's ending in Training.
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I don't like using Rabbits on Phase 2 because I prefer burning them in this phase. She has 1.5x weaknesses to everything, meaning they can graze through a lot of her HP.
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The Rabbits chew through her health, and with their barriers blocking the doors, nothing can escape from Training right now.
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Since she's running, that means Gebura's started up her hunt for Tenebrais. The Rabbit's zone lockdown doesn't actually work on her for reasons that I'm not entirely sure about-either she runs too fast and skips the trigger or she's just not coded to teleport to another point in the department, one of the two.
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Something to be careful of with the Rabbit team: if their target can teleport out of the area, they'll just leave without finishing it off. No biggie, since Gebura's at a sliver I just have to put Tenebrais in the Shelter for about ten seconds and leave to finish the job.
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Uh-oh. It turns out that there's a previously undocumented effect of Gebura's hunter mark: whoever has it can't go into the shelter. My plan has officially gone south, and it's time to improvise.
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This means taking advantage of our Slow bullets. These halve her speed from 200 to 100, and since the 20 second timer works the same either way this halves her effective murder range. I then have Tenebrais move down and prepare to run away through Central 4.
Turns out I don't have to, as Gebura's AI kind of breaks.
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She starts running in the opposite direction of what she just was and slows down to a crawl, moving at her normal speed without the 4x speed boost that she normally gets when a target is marked. I have no idea why this happened.
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Not entirely sure what's going on, I have Tenebrais tail her as she slowly moves her way up to Training. She walks into the elevator, stands for one frame, and then
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She turns around and starts dashing right towards Tenebrais at full speed, clearing half the corridor before I could react and hit pause. At this point, we're in serious trouble-I've heard that it's possible to dodge her big attack by being in the same room as her and then leaving as she enters, but I've never been able to get the timing right.
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So we Slow bullet her and scramble.
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Slow bullets only last ten seconds, so I reapply early to make sure she can't rush after us suddenly. We don't have a lot of wiggle room here.
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My plan here is one born of pure desperation. Let me explain:
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This part of Control is special. The Agent enters a between-room transition whenever they go between any two of them, and it's possible to quickly alternate between them all in order to avoid ever reaching an actual room. Agents cannot take damage while they're in a between-room state, meaning that Gebura won't be able to harm Tenebrais as long as I can keep juggling her between all three rooms. This would be doable on the other side of Control as well, but I focused on this one even though it was further away because
Well, because I was in a blind "OH SHIT" moment and my thinking wasn't 100% clear.
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As Gebura approaches I put the plan to work. In this picture I've circled the mark, it actually moves with the Agent so it's possible to track when we need to trigger the next move command to keep them hidden. I prepare to put the plan into action
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And then she says this right in front of the door. This is one of her breakdown quotes, signaling she's open for attack. With her HP that low and Tenebrais right there, we're home free. Phew.
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Overall, Gebura is a good test of a manager's suppression skills-and while she's a difficult opponent she's a very fair one as long as nothing in her scripting breaks. I don't think I'll be soloing her again anytime soon, though.
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Music: never frozen bottom flows
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O-01-64: "...Sadness says: Begone, pass away! But greed seeks eternityseeks deep, deep eternity."
O-01-04: In the name of Love and Justice~ Here comes Magical Girl!
O-03-89: If a flaw in the system disables the censors covering the Abnormality, we will once again have to sincerely consider how to dispose of the manager.
We've seen all three of these before, so I'll spare you the explanation beyond this:
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Knight of Despair is lonely. We should bring her friends to the party.
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Next time, on Lobotomy Corporation: A DOOM reference.
Bonus
VIDEO: Gebura Core Suppression