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General Bosses
- Marie in the 40 AP Rider Daily Quest has a boatload of HP and will keep spamming her invincibility skill (which comes with healing, just to rub salt in the wound). She doesn't even hit hard, she just has enough survivability tools to make fighting her pre-Skadi really tedious.
- Dragons as bosses are annoying in general. Their attacks hit all Servants at once, their critical hits can really hurt, and Assassin-class servants (the ones you'll usually be using in an anti-Dragon party due to Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors) mostly have the Man attribute, which means they take additional damage from Earth-attribute Dragons on top of their low HP.
- Giant boars. They're typically Berserkers with enormous HP, so they can take better advantage of their class's Mutual Disadvantage than any of your servants can, their attacks hit all your active teammates at once, and one of their skills gives them a point of charge and an attack boost. Worse, being gold-level enemies, they get to attack three times per turn which means your team will be stomped by three high-damaging AoE attacks each turn.
- Assassin bosses are also hard to handle due to their high innate critical rates and short charge bars. Also, the class that counters them, Casters, also has an inherent attack power disadvantage, and only a few of them are designed as boss fighters. note . One may try bringing a Berserker against them, only to die from critical hits. Farming these bosses takes longer than other classes.
- In general, any boss whose Noble Phantasm can bypass the normal defense mechanisms of Invincibility/Evade has the potential to be utterly obnoxious. Example effects include Pierce Invincibility, Remove Buff and Instant Death. With 99% of bosses not using those sorts of Noble Phantasms, players will almost certainly have built their boss-killer teams around Invincibility/Evade, which are suddenly rendered useless, turning battles into a mad damage race where you'll probably be forced to revive via Command Spell unless you happen to have some powerful servants with more obscure abilities (NP Seal, NP Charge Loss...) that can stall the boss a little longer. Bonus points for Amakusa Shirou, who has the gall to regularly use an NP Charge skill on top of all this. If nothing else, it gives Nightingale a chance to shine; her Noble Phantasm's heavy debuffs will succeed where all other defensive measures fail. Altria Caster is also acceptable, as her Anti-Enforcement cannot be pierced by any means... but it can still be buff stripped, meaning Nightingale is still the only option in that specific case.
Arc 1: Observer on Timeless Temple
- Hektor in the Okeanos chapter loves to use and abuse his Proof of Friendship skill, which has two obnoxious effects: It stuns the target (and since he gets up to three actions per turn, he can make you completely lose your turn even with a full party), and it reduces their NP gauge, which is especially a problem for Servants who don't have a double- or triple-capacity NP gauge yet since they will have a hard time trying to fire their Noble Phantasms off.
- Forneus during the Solomon raid. It has a skill that reduces one party member's buff success chance, another skill that gives it debuff immunity and finally a party-wide NP drain that also gives it one Charge. And even when you're not fighting Forneus, it can support the other Demon Pillars with a party-wide Buster Down on the front row, which can gimp the heavy hitters of your team.
- The initial battle with False Solomon within the Solomon singularity isn't as brutally hard as the battle with Goetia, but he still loves to spam an Evade skill over and over, meaning that a player who doesn't have access to a broad pallet of Sure Hit or Pierce Invulnerability CEs is going to be pulling their hair out by the roots trying to hurt him by properly lining up skills and NPs.
Arc 1.5: Epic of Remnant
- The final boss of the Salem singularity, Foreigner Abigail Williams. While she crits often and hard, and her weakness is to the rare Alter Ego class and little else (and the fact that her newly-introduced Foreigner class has unique offensive and defensive affinities that are never directly explained), her actual damage output is not incredibly high (outside of her brutally hard-hitting Noble Phantasm, which also removes buffs before dealing damage, ensuring even class-advantaged allies will surely be killed unless heavy attack debuffs are used), her basic attacks have high hitcounts that boost friendly NP generation quickly, and she only starts using her actual NP in the final of several boss battles. And even then, rather than Break Bars, she simply restores herself to full health each time her hitpoints are depleted a set number of times, uses mechanics more like Guts stacks than Break Bars (so the player doesn't have to wait for the turn to end to begin depleting it again if they switch attackers or use NPs), and without pulling out hidden buffs or altering her HP total. Plus, not only was a pretty-good Alter Ego given out as a welfare servant for that year's Halloween event, Mecha Eli-Chan, but the Pseudo-Singularity's Bond Bonus encourages bringing along whatever powerful support casters you might have to boost her even further. The fight is still on the harder side however, particularly the final battle, as the boss freely and liberally uses her Witch Trial skill to NP drain and reduce damage from random party members, and her Mass Hysteria skill on the whole party at once to not only decrease defense but inflict the Terror debuff, causing a chance to randomly stun the party for several turns, to say nothing of giving herself free points of charge and NP Damage Up buffs with Faithful Prayer even in the earlier boss fights. In short, you have a fight where the difficulty comes from random factors and opacity rather than intricate mechanics like the previous bosses of the story arc had.
Arc 2: Cosmos in the Lostbelt
- The Minotaur from Lostbelt 1 isn't an outright hard boss, he's a Male Berserker without Debuff Immunity, making Servants like Euryale capable of taking him down relatively easily. The problem is that, being a feral form of Asterios, he has the same kit with plenty of health to make him less fragile, meaning he can debuff your team and buff his defenses, turning a rather simple fight into a stall battle with your own team on the stalling end if the player lets it come to that. This is all if he isn't facing a stall team; unlike many of his later compatriots he isn't immune to Mental Debuffs, so he can be stun/charmlocked, and Abigail in particular absolutely trivializes him through her class advantage, Arts stall synergy, and ability to munch up all his buffs.
- The Fourth Lostbelt has at least one fight against one of the Lokapala that are not hard but just annoying.
- The second-to-last battle with William Tell in the fourth Lostbelt is this for similar reasons as False Solomon listed above. Only this time, he has a permanent unremovable chance to evade. Meaning that without a servant/CE with Sure Hit/Pierce Invincibility, your chance of hitting the archer is entirely RNG-dependent.
- Lostbelt Nezha hits extremely hard thanks to her getting permanent unremovable hard-hitting attack/crit buffs to the point that she can one-shot some of your teammates. On the plus side, for every turn she is in, she loses HP, and the amount of HP she loses increases as the battle goes on. If the player manages to use a bunch of defense-buffing servants against her, she will eventually self-destruct.
- The final fight against Asclepius isn’t very hard itself; he doesn’t hit hard enough to be a threat, and he primarily focuses on healing. The issue is the two Chimera type enemies with him, which instead of being Berserkers, are Riders. Since Asclepius is a Caster, this tips the fight into being a slog if you aren’t able to take them out, as not only will he heal them, but they have an unremovable buff that heals them for 10k HP each turn, meaning he can quickly undo any damage done to them. Since you are fighting two Riders and a Caster, Alter Egos can mostly handle the fight, but if you lack one or are unable to field it because the previous wave consisting of a Lancer, the fight can become a tedious back and forth of your Servants trying to clear the three, only for the enemies to just keep going.
- Aphrodite is the easiest of the Olympian Gods fight in the Olympus chapter, but she's still considered a hard fight. Not because she has any real complex moves, but because she has an obscenely high crit chance thanks to her Assassin class typing, meaning she can potentially wipe a frontline within the first two turns of the fight if she crits (which she can do easily), and she has a skill that fully drains a single Servant's NP bar, while inflicting Charm and numerous other debuffs. She can be easily killed in roughly three/four turns as long as the player has the means to counter her first Break Bar's Skill Seal and NP Seal, but outside of that tactic, she's hard for those two reasons.
- While the fight against Zeus isn't as hard as Demeter's earlier in the same chapter, he's still a pain in the neck for entirely different reasons: its core part is highly resistant to damage unless you take down its "wings", Ouranos and Gaia. All attacks are treated as single-target for this fight; while you can manually switch targets while applying useful effects by using Ares's abilities which replace your Mystic Code for this fight, any unused cards after you deplete the wing's HP to 0 are wasted (including any support Noble Phantasms) unless they're part of a Brave Chain, meaning you have to tightly control your damage output to not waste effort. Also Zeus can switch your target to another "wing" before you defeat it, while Ares's powers have recharge times. And every time Zeus's core fills up its Charge meter attack at least one "wing" will be restored (and when you break it for the second time both will recover, first on break, then with every subsequent NP). This unique mechanic already makes the fight frustrating enough, and then come the buffs/debuffs all three components can use to hobble a party's damage while boosting their own, including randomized disruption effects every time a wing breaks. On top of all that, Orteneus Mash is force deployed to the player's front line, with story buffs that are more a hindrance than a help. With her kit being unable to serve any practical purpose in this fight, due to the area of effect nature of Zeus' attacks, she becomes an absurdly sturdy unit who doesn't contribute to the fight and wasting one of the player's precious deployment spaces. At the same time, while Zeus is listed as Ruler-class, it actually takes neutral damage from all classes (only Avengers/Berserkers are given normal typing), random useful effects go off each turn, all three of Ares's skills take some pain off (one strips away all those buffs from the enemy and gives the party an ATK and NP gauge boost), and the story support is actually quite powerful and useful, but while not one of the hardest of the Lostbelt the fight is more than tricky and frustrating enough to knock down unprepared/unlucky players.
- The battle against "Guardian Demonic Beast" in Traum on paper doesn't seem hard, it's just a Tarnished God with non-permanent buffs. The problem with the battle is that you are only given two Servants to clear the battle, both of them being Ruler James Moriarty. Ruler Moriarty himself is not a bad Servant, but the fact that you are forced to use two of them means that composing a Brave Chain in the battle is a matter of luck since unless only one of them has buffs, figuring out which Command Cards are who's is impossible. It is basically a battle of having too much of a good thing.
- The second battle against Kingprotea Xochitónal is already annoying enough, being an Alter Ego that can only be fully countered by the Pretender class, but one annoying gimmick is that at the start of her turn, she will shuffle the main party in the first turn not unlike the Chaos Tide Ushiwakamaru clones, making an annoying boss battle more tedious. The only servants that can resist it are servants with the Stout Defender trait, of which there are seven total. If she isn't taken out in 11 turns, she'll also gain as massive HP boost unless a servant with the Goddess trait is in the frontline.
Events
- Mata Hari in GUDAGUDA Order - Assassin stage. She has a huge amount of HP, a skill that charms any enemy regardless of gender, and her Noble Phantasm charms any gender. Luckily her attacks aren't that damaging, being a 1* Servant.
- Serving not only as the final boss to the Christmas 2019 event but to Epic of Remnant as a whole, Nergal is a downright nightmare if taken on with a team designed for participation in the event. Even if you bring your full might to bear Nergal will make defeating him and freeing Ereshkigal hell. One of his abilities is essentially a weaponized Murphy's Law that inflicts fourteen debuffs which reduce attack, defense, Buster, Quick and Arts card effectiveness, critical strength, NP strength, NP gain while attacking and being attacked, Critical Star drop rate, HP Recovery, damage inflicted, debuff resistance, and then finally poison for good measure. It outright cripples both offense and defense to a ludicrous degree. Nergal also has another skill which is a delayed buff that inflicts party-wide stun after one turn, meaning that he can potentially stunlock the entire part if he keeps using it each turn. As a large ghost he attacks the whole party at once and as an Archer his NP charge time is a low as it can get which he'll use to inflict even stronger poison on you. To top it all off, keeping with the theme of the Christmas bosses hitting alarmingly hard, Nergal is more than happy to follow suit. No matter how you decide to try to tackle Nergal his debuffs will make sure that your fights against him are a struggle if you can't acquire hefty debuff immunity and keep it up.
- The fight against Okita in the "GUDAGUDA Legend of the Imperial Capital Grail" isn't a terribly hard fight on its own, as while she hits somewhat hard, she isn't super strong. The reason it fits here though is a combination of getting a break bar, and a skill every turn that gives her one time use of Evade, per turn, on top of a Quick card buff. This means a team that didn't come prepared with Sure Hit in some way is effectively wasting at least one attack just to damage her, on top of her having the ability to use her own personal Evade skill to avoid being hit for a full turn. The Quick buff she gets on each turn means her damage output becomes higher than you would think, potentially dragging the fight out longer as a result.
- The Bonus Quest fight against Robin Hood from the Fate Requiem event is just a single fight against him, and in theory he can be killed in one turn thanks to no Break Bars. However, at the start of the fight, he puts a debuff on all your units that makes it where all but one characters cards do no damage, forcing the player to have to find which character can damage him. This means the player needs to either brute force the fight with an all offensive team, spend at least one turn finding which Servant can damage him, swap a back-row Servant in, or most likely, reset and try again. It is very easy to get unlucky and get a a support character who can damage him instead of your main attacker, and if the player has no way to get around that, it will take several resets just to do so. Worse, Robin Hood has a good chunk of HP, and being an Archer means he can throw out his NP in three turns (or two if he uses Golden Rule), meaning dragging it out isn't a good option.
- Summer Kiara’s Boss Fight in Summer Camp. It has all the workings of an obnoxious battle that can go on for far too long. Full Debuff Immunity. Only AOE attacks work. Summer Yu is forced into the front-line, even though she doesn’t have an AOE NP and can’t even inflict Burn & Curse with it, making her almost useless for the fight. (Summer Tomoe and Summer Byrnhildr are also forced onto the front-line, but at least have AOE NPs, abilities to survive a good while and gain extra NP Gain, also starting with a great amount of Stars, but it’s left up to RNG if they can use them for said NP Gain.) The boss also has some nasty abilities that are all tailored to prolong the fight, being able to re-gain a great amount of HP, basically just about negating an NP attack. She’s also able to do the same entirely with a one-hit Evade which only goes away after three turns or when hit by an AOE NP and lastly, place Guts upon herself. She also has a three Charge bar and is able to increase it by one with one of her skills. Her NP likely won’t instantly KO any non-Berserker/Avenger Servants, but will leave them close to 0. A not too difficult fight, but one that will most likely overstay its welcome if you don’t have a strong AOE Servant.
- Katsushika Hokusai in the Imaginary Scramble event starts off with her inflicting Buff Nullification on the entire player team and a unremovable 25% Evasion buff. This makes attacking her without having a Craft Essence that has Ignore Evasion or Invincibility a major Luck-Based Mission, and unless you brought a Servant with Buff Removal Resistance, she will remove any offensive buffs upon her first Break Bar.
- The very first fight of the "Little Big Tengu" event is a seemingly normal fight against Kiichi Hogen, and two enemies. On paper the player can win on turn one with little trouble, but Kiichi Hogen starts the fight applying a five turn skill seal on your frontline. This basically means the player needs to either bring something that can clear it, or block it, or else the fight becomes an annoying back and forth as the player waits for it to go away, or has to relay on raw damage from a characters NP or face cards. Some characters, like Arjuna Alter, can do this, but if the player doesn't have anyone like that, it can be an annoying introduction that has the potential to gatekeep weaker accounts.
- Beast IV:L, discounting the raid version, is pretty much your standard boss fight, though with a lot of annoying factors. For one, your party is hit with a permanent 40% decrease of buff success rate, ruining any buff-centric teams. The only way to mitigate this is to use the NPC Taigong Wang and have him deployed as well. This makes it seem like that Quick-centric teams might be favored here, except the LWB-M8 provides a Quick Card Performance debuff, meaning that they will have an initial hard start. Finally, at her last break bar, she summons both an Retainer, which removes a buff every turn, and HWB-M8, which has the ability to instantly kill one of your servants as a counterattack. The only reason why this boss fight isn't considered That One Boss is because of Mash's Black Barrel having the ability to debuff them and deal damage when she uses it, but only once per battle, and that every two turns, buffs and debuffs that are beneficial to you are able to save a party from the brink when timed right. For this reason, many consider it one of the most frustrating fights in the game.
- The third challenge quest of Fūun Karakuri Illya's Castle, "Lie down Ms.Jaguar Man", has the game effectively forcing you to play Simon Says by forcing you to perform card chains of a specific color (Red corresponding to Buster, Blue corresponding to Arts, Green corresponding to Quick). That alone should tell you how annoying this one will be, not being helped that, much like the other challenge quests in the event, almost all party members are story supports. Even if you bring in the Mage's Association uniform and Altria Pendragon (Ruler) to shuffle the cards when you get a bad hand, there's a chance it won't give you the cards needed to make the correct chain. Brute forcing it isn't even an option due to Jaguar Man's HP being bloated.
