The First Descendant does a real good job of making you feel overpowered in the early game. For the first few hours you're blazing through content at the speed of light, disintegrating enemies and bosses alike. To gro win power you don't really have to do much more than switch out your weapons for newer ones. Since weapons drop all the time that's no issue. That's until you get to the Dead Bride boss.
Void Intercept Battles
At certain points during the campaign you'll have to beat what is called a Void Intercept Battle to continue progressing. These occur once you've completed a zone. These are basically boss battles against huge colossi where four players work together to defeat them. The reward is a bunch of weapons or other gear and you get to open what is called an Amorphous Material. This is ont of being able to continue progressing the campaign and also a reason to come back to these fights. I'll be talking about Amorphous Materials in some other post, I'm sure.
All the Intercept Battles up until reaching the Dead Bride was rather easy. Me and my teams of randoms were able to take them all down on our first tries. That was without really making any changes to my characters except equipping stronger weapons. It was quite obvious after failing two attempts that wasn't the case for the Dead Bride. I had some weapon and character building to do to be able to defeat this one.
Chasing cold resistance and fire damage
The Dead Bride deals tons of cold damage and as a result she's also weak to fire. I had to build my character and weapons around resisting as much cold damage as possible while dealing as much fire damage as possible. I already had the modules I needed to equip for this but they were all level 1 with barely any power to them. The game recommended a total of 1800 cold resistance so I had to go farming for some upgrade materials.
While doing so I also switched out my Descendant. I had been playing as Bunny all this time who is a Descendant focusing on electric damage. I switched to the character I started with called Lepic who deals fire damage with his skills instead. This way I could level him up a bit while farming the needed Kuiper Shards to level up my modules.
Teammates were the real obstacle all along...
After getting my modules in place it was time to start attempting the boss again. I was dealing decent damage now and I was able to surprise most attacks that the boss threw at me. Turns out this wasn't true for my teammates as well. For the next 10 attempts I got nothing but knuckleheads as teammates who were just throwing themselves at the boss dealing virtually no damage and dying left to right. If you die you get to resurrect but the team only has a total of 3 deaths before failing the boss fight.
I was so furious after trying again and again and seeing my teammates fail me that I had to take a good break from it and do some other activities for a bit. Luckily when I got back to it I was able to defeat it on the first attempt thanks to having a decent team who seemed to understand what they had to do.
Even though this was frustrating it was also quite fun having to do some targeted farming to build my character wand weapon right. Hopefully this was a learning experience for most players so that the next boss will go down easier than this. I'm not going to have my hopes up though. People are dumb.
Now I can finally keep progressing this dreadful campaign. Let's see where that takes me.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.