Part 19: Caina Is Hard Edition and Persona Notes

Gameplay Notes: Caina Is Hard

Caina is a super nasty place. It's the first place we start to see lots of powerful single Shadows that don't have any weaknesses for one. They generally have lots of powerful physicals as well, making them even more threatening. What you need to do is engage them from behind and run. Never fight them. It's not worth the time, SP, or risk of death. If you're having trouble go back to Cocytus for a while and slam through some easy Shadows there.

It's also where the Shadow bosses start to get really serious. Caina's second boss especially is very brutal. You can never be too high level and can never prepare too heavily for these fights. If you're feeling like you're taking too much damage that means you're too low level aren't in good gear, or just made a bad choice in Personas.

Persona Notes for Caina:

Persona MVPs: Queen Mab and Rangda. Queen Mab continues to be awesome with her fire resistance, high general magic defense, and the ability to get Bufu skills through Fusion. Rangda becomes our real MVP though, because she is completely insulated from the most dangerous form of attack on the second boss and is armed with the Fire attacks we need for it. We want to ensure she's got a healing spell too, and any buffs or debuffs we can scrape up will really help too.

Personas To Fuse: Rangda is amazing for the second boss, as I note in the update and above. Let's talk about some other decent Personas in the 40ish level range.
Nata Taisha: Pros- Powerful Strike Attacks. Cons- Not very good against the bosses in this door.
Dominion: Pros- Good mix of skills, including relatively rare Light attacks. Cons- Again not great on the bosses.
Clotho: Pros- Good if you need Wind. Cons- I never do, because I have Yukari and Metis.
Grimekhala: Pros- Repels Slash and Dark, powerful Dark attacks and good with physicals. Cons- Again not great on bosses.
Succubus: Pros- Amazing. Cons- A bit high level for this Door, she's really more appropriate to the next one (which is when I fused her, because again she's Amazing.)

Personas To Pick Up: Mothman is a big one, because it has Growth. This level range has a lot of really valuable Fusion fodder, strongly consider ditching anything old that doesn't have some really incredible skill you're saving for a higher level, upmarket version.

General Persona Strategy: I actually used very few Personas in this Door. In the first part I largely relied on Queen Mab, because she's not really bad at anything and I tend to avoid the sorts of fights where her weakness to Slash will even matter. I try to win any fight that I actually do with an All-Out, ideally from the party and not me. When I start getting deeper into the block I actually Fused Queen Mab into Rangda to keep the skills I liked. I also created Grimekhala, who I used a lot on trash later on because he's got powerful physicals. I made a Dominion but didn't use it much, same with Nata Taisha. A few really good Personas can largely carry your efforts in the Abyss, it's better to have one or two really good ones than a whole stable of mediocre ones.

Mythology Fun Facts: Caina is the name of one of the regions of the lake of Cocytus. It was set aside for those who betrayed their relatives, and its principle damned soul was of course Caine.