TVTropes Now available in the app store!
Open

Follow TV Tropes

Ballad of Heroes

Go To

  • Difficulty Spike: The Ballad of the Underworld is when the game stops pulling its punches. Besides being a temporary Point of No Return, the mooks are much stronger than the previous ones, having at least 2-5 times the health as those in the Isle of Libya. You'll need the Rare Random Drop equipment set from the enemies in the Molten Shield (which grants a very useful health regen), Molten Armor, Molten Ring and Molten Sword (which makes you deal an instant 42 Fire Damage everytime you cast an ability) if you want to avoid taking too much damage while dishing out enough in return.
  • Goddamned Bats: Several enemies have abilities that can prolong combat, making them especially irritating to face:
    • Husks in the Ballad of the Argo all have the move "Tackle", which does decent damage but will also always stun the target hit for 3 seconds. This can potentially cause a Cycle of Hurting and make fights longer than they should.
    • Sirens are only found in two areas of the game, but are even worse than Husks as their Siren Song attack not only damages and stuns, but targets your entire party.
    • Enchanted Armors, Bronze Automatons and Gold Automatons have a shield that nullifies 3 (4 for the latter) hits worth of damage, making it especially infuriating to grind for 2500 wins to get the final achievement reward for their area.
  • Goddamned Boss: There are a number of bosses with irritating abilities but aren't particularly hard to take down. A number of bosses also have traits and abilities that make them much more irritating to farm for 2500 wins or defeat within 10 seconds to get all the achievement rewards against them:
    • The Nemean Lion is completely immune to auto-attacks, meaning that you can only hurt it with your slower-charging skills.
    • The Lernean Hydra is a Shielded Core Boss whose main body is completely immune to any attacks or damage until both its heads are down. Irritatingly, it also nullifies any Herd-Hitting Attack if its first target was the body, leaving both heads unscathed. As your characters normally target randomly unless explicitly made to target a specific enemy (and that target disappears when the fight refreshes), it can cause your party to launch attacks against its body several times if they're unlucky.
    • The Dual Boss against Poseidon's Dolphins is an irritating fight due to their Loud Chirping move, which doesn't damage but slows your cooldowns by a very high 40% and prolonging the fights in general.
    • The Minotaur, which is considered That One Boss when first encountered, turns into this once your level is high enough. Its three shielding means that it's highly likely to pull of Intimidate, which doubles your cooldown times for a whopping 20 seconds, making it take a tediously long time to kill it over and over — especially since it tends to use Intimidate at the beginning of a fight.
    • King Aeetes will always open up with a move that reduces three of each party member's stats (excluding HP) by 50%. Combined with his rather high health at the time you fight him, and he'll take an annoying long time to go down, but isn't too deadly unless the fight goes on for too long. This also makes him an annoyance in Eternal Melee, while he goes down quickly, the -50% given to three of your stats will linger for a while, hampering you especially if it was your Attack that got hit.
    • Typhon's Monstrous Aura with a 20-second paralysis effect and a 20-second cooldown means that Thales and Zosime will be permanently paralyzed for the duration of the battle, causing them to randomly get stunned for a few seconds and prolonging the fight. Like with King Aeetes' stat debuffs, the paralysis and random stuns from Typhon will still linger even after the player breezes past him in the Eternal Melee.
    • Athena as a Trial of Skill boss is a Stone Wall to the highest degree: aside from the level-scaled stats and gods' ability to reduce damage by a percent based on Level Scaling, she further has a passive ability that increases her defense and resistance by a whopping 1000%, but is lowered by 125% per unique debuff on her. While she doesn't do as much damage as other Trial of Skill gods, you will need to multi-debuff her if you even want to do any meaningful damage, and the fight will take forever if the player doesn't bring her weakness in Dionysus.
    • Artemis as a Trial of Skill boss immediately opens her fight with Paralyzing Volley, which not only hits Thales and Zosime for a fair amount of damage, but also paralyzes both of them, causing random stuns to occur similarly to the fight with Typhon.
    • Themis, the Trial of the Stars boss for Libra on harder difficulties. Firstly, using auto-attacks is a no-go as she returns 10% of all auto-attack damage, which is massive due to Health/Damage Asymmetry. This means you're forced to rely on abilities, and her "Perfectly Balanced" skill has a 10 second cooldown (5 seconds for the first use, faster than any of your abilities) and randomly makes one of your characters deal no damage for 10 seconds, while the other receives no healing for 10 seconds. If your DPS gets the no damage effect, it can drag the battle out for a long while.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • Jaghancement mentioned that when he started developing the game, Khronos would be important to the plot and eventually the Big Bad. Then, Hades II was announced, where Chronos was indeed the Big Bad of that game's plot.
      "Of course I started developing this game and came up with the idea of time magic and Khronos being relevant to the plot, then they drop the Hades 2 trailer where time magic and Khronos look relevant to the plot so I decided I needed to work double time on this game or people will think I just copied from Hades 2 lol"
    • Furthermore, one of the bosses unleashed as part of the villain's plan in Hades II is Typhon, who's also unleashed here as a means to stop the heroes from reaching Mount Olympus again. In both games, the player has to fight his spawn as they ascend Mount Olympus.
  • That One Boss: Several bosses can be difficult fights for the level where you first encounter them, with a number being downgraded to Goddamned Boss once your stats get high enough.
    • Geryon has a shield ability that blocks 50% of the damage he takes (which becomes 75% at low health), can increase his defense even more, and has a lot of health to spare while also having an enrage timer.
    • Porphyrion not only opens the fight in his Earthern Offense mode, which gives him 75% to his already high attack and luck, but also immediately uses Rockfall after that, which deals huge damage to both Thales and Zosime thanks to being boosted. He also has several painful attacks that either cause dangerous status effects or hit hard, the Giants' signature percent Damage Reduction plus 5% health regeneration every few seconds, and has an enrage timer that makes it stronger over time like most bosses in the latter half of the game.
    • The Minotaur is a Broken Armor Boss Battle who immediately puts up a shielding that nullifies the damage and effects of three incoming hits, and can refresh this shielding every 20 seconds. It also uses Intimidate, which doubles your party's cooldown timers, making it harder to get damage in before it refreshing those shields. It also has a move called Rampage, which deals huge damage to both party members four times. Like other bosses in the second half of the game, they have an enrage timer that boosts all their stats except HP by 30% every 30 seconds!
    • Charybdis is an Optional Boss at the point of the game it's fought in, but it has an absolutely enormous amount of health at that point, hits hard, and has an Anti-Armor attack. It also has Vortex Pull, an ability that makes your Auto-Attack and Ability cooldowns slower and slower until it stuns you for 8 seconds, the only way to escape is to use enough Abilities in succession to break free. Take too long to defeat it and it will spam a move called Furious Waves, which deals huge water damage and has a 5-second cooldown. Finally, like other bosses in the second half of the game, they have an enrage timer that boosts all their stats except HP by 30% every 30 seconds!
    • The Guardian of The Grove is a souped-up version of earlier boss Ladon, with an attack that deals high Damage Over Time as well as the ability to constrict a party member, preventing them from doing anything and taking constant damage unless the free party member deals enough damage to let them go. If that's not enough, it also has the ability to recover to full and remove all its debuffs once its health gets low, meaning that you essentially have to beat it twice if you don't overkill it, and is further exacerbated with its ability to enrage, gaining a permanent +25% in all stats except health every 30 seconds.
    • The four Broken Husks are an Optional Boss at the point of the game they're fought in, and are much tougher than their summoner and chapter boss King Aeetes. Each of them have 55 million HP, which is already more than the Guardian of the Grove, while also having high stats. They also have incoming damage reduction from all attacks, and their Break ability applies a stack of break to a target. If both party members get 5+ stacks of break, they both take 300k damage in a Fixed Damage Attack, which is a lot at this point of the game and have all their stats except HP halved for a long period of time. Their other attacks hit hard and have randomized chance to hit even harder, and all four of them have the late-game boss ability to enrage, gaining +25% stats per 30 seconds.
    • Enceladus in his second fight averts Villain Forgot to Level Grind in every way possible. Firstly, he has a giant amount of health at 278 million. Secondly, he has his Giants' ability to take 50% less incoming damage while recovering 5% of his max HP every 30 seconds. He can even use Defend to reduce his damage taken by another 50%. As for his attacks, all of them hit hard and have very short cooldowns. Finally, like other bosses in the second half of the game, he too has an enrage timer, except his boosts all his stats except HP by a huge 40% every 30 seconds, which is bound to happen a few times thanks to his massive HP and damage reduction abilities.
    • Final Boss Khronos is a very dangerous fight that can go south quickly thanks to his liberal use of stuns. You're essentially down a party member once 30 seconds have passed, as he will use Frozen in Time, which stuns a party member for 30 seconds... and has a 30 second cooldown. His Arbiter of Fate deals a huge amount of damage to both party members after 15 seconds. When he gets to <50% health, he unleashes Final Hour, which stuns both party members for 10 seconds and gives him a HP barrier. Finally, like other bosses in the second half of the game, he too has an enrage timer, except his boosts all his stats except HP by a massive 50% every 30 seconds, which is bound to happen a few times thanks to his ability to stun you easily. Even if the player is overleveled enough to defeat him, he will always pull off Final Hour even if he dies in one hit, making him excruciating to farm 2500 wins from. He's also this if encountered in the Eternal Melee, as his Final Hour and Frozen In Time are massive time-wasters in a gauntlet where you only have 5 minutes to kill as many increasingly-difficult enemies as you can.
    • Nemesis in the Trial of Skill turns into this at higher levels and will destroy you if you go in guns blazing. Her signature ability is Dues, which gains stacks equal to 3% of all the damage she had received beforehand, and adds all that to her next ability while resetting Dues to 0. At higher levels, she has ~15-30 billion HP, and your characters can deal damage in the billions, but only have health in the tens-to-hundreds of millions at best. Getting hit by her abilities when she has even a few stacks of Dues is often overkill and will utterly destroy the character hit.

Top