Epic Battle Fantasy 5 - How to Beat Valhalla

Neon Valhalla is a jerk. Here’s a good way, or two, to beat it.

Other Epic Battle Fantasy 5 Guides:

General Tips

All credit goes to Dotsidious!

Neon Valhalla is easily the hardest premium boss, and one of the hardest overall. However, I’m here to say that it used to be stronger, and that it’s actually not quite as hard as it seems. Not to say it’s not hard.

To begin with, Valhalla has a wonderful innate regen, meaning if you don’t do enough damage in a turn, it’ll slowly get back to full HP. This happened to me multiple times before it was nerfed. On top of the regen, it buffs itself and summons turrets which have quite a bit of HP that you need to take out sooner rather than later. And even worse, it starts out by ramming your party! Needless to say, it has a lot of elements to work around to beat it.

However, you can beat it the second you reach it, with minimal detours. Easy? No. Possible? Yes. To begin with, there’s only a few differences between late-game strats and early-game strats, mostly due to weapon availability. In general, I prefer using weaken or curse via flair, heavy, and earth element attacks. Later on, you can use a staff to apply invis every turn, which helps even more. Here’s how to do it early on, which is… rather difficult, and not recommended on your first playthrough.

The most general tips that always apply are to stack bomb resist and keep buffs up. Most of Valhalla’s attacks are non-elemental, meaning you can’t resist them except via more defense, so not much can realistically be done there. However, it has one nasty attack where it sprays the party randomly with machine guns. This will do a lot of damage if you don’t resist bomb. If you do, I’ve seen it do single digit damage due to 90% bomb resist, if it’s not healing.

For summons, I don’t often use many, but they can be useful. Viking Monolith, found in the caves before No Man’s Land, is one of the best summons in the game bar none. Free Haste for everyone, so two more turns. Very useful, if expensive. Blue Creep can be useful if you need a small burst of damage, 400 power single-target bomb attack. Probably best used to finish Valhalla off. The various Flybots are underrated summons, but have very useful effects. They invert buffs and debuffs. Valhalla can buff itself and debuff you. While swapping your own buffs can be tricky, swapping its buffs is often only positive. If you can, you can add in a Quartz Ore for a cheap party heal. Not needed, just nice to have as a backup. I like to use Viking Monolith to start the fight for a quick setup of buffs and damage. If you want to save it for a troublesome point in the battle, go ahead.

Early Valhalla

To begin with, allow me to show you a screenshot (also the title picture) i took of Matt’s skills when I did early Valhalla.

As you can see, Matt’s skills are… heavily imbalanced. I was informed that beating Valhalla early was “impossible” by another player, so decided to test out various strats against it to test this. The best way to do so? Spend minimal SP so i can revert to a previous save and try something else if it doesn’t work. This makes the fortress BRUTAL. I would honestly say the fortress was harder than Valhalla like that. Level 1 skills do no damage. Epic would have slaughtered me over and over. I nearly died multiple times, and I was on normal.

If you try at it, I’m sure you can work something out to deal with that, but that’s not the reason you’re here. My general strategy for early Valhalla is rather simple. I limited myself to not collecting the next key item (the axe) and wanted to see how it went. Turns out, you don’t need much.

For the sake of conciseness, this is a general view of my gear I used to beat Valhalla. I know someone else did it one level lower, so don’t think you need to be the same level. The gear is fairly easy to get. Most of it is either in shops or in the maze itself. Earth’s Whisper and Gigavolt Axe are fairly useful, so I would highly recommend using them. Upgrading both is a must, as well. Genji Armor for Matt is a nice boost to Earth damage, which he will be using a lot of.

The general idea is that turrets are evil and must die. To this end, you want points put into every applicable AoE limit break you can. I use Mighty Oak, Oblivion, and Destroyer mainly. Destroyer is slightly preferred over Creator as it dispels, and Valhalla buffs itself, so it’s just a minor benefit there. Otherwise the two would be interchangeable.

The general strategy for attacking is that Natalie starts off with normal attack, which procs Surge, which does a surprising amount of damage. Giving her a status flair is just icing on the cake, preferably Curse or Weaken. Tired does actually nothing here and is useless. Due to her not being very important here, you CAN use anyone instead of Natz, but Gigavolt is just good, and you can also use her to heal because why not. Also, 7th Heaven is useful.

Anna gets Earth’s Whisper, which is found nearby in the maze. It’s Earth element, which is already useful, but it inflicts Heavy with attacks, which is even better as it boosts earth damage. If you can get it to level 5, it adds a free Cataclysm on top of that, which, while not as strong as a maxed Cataclysm from Matt, is basically free damage. However, there is no way to farm the needed materials early on outside a VERY tedious gallery farm of Dirt Boulders, or a simple one off of Dragons, which simply isn’t practical to farm on your first playthrough. The medals needed might be just too high for the point in the game you’re at. Some dirt boulders do spawn in the maze, but they have a low drop rate of the needed material (opals) so you’ll be there a while for something that isn’t truly needed. For Anna, combo shot and normal attack cover your needs just fine, unless you need to heal someone.

Matt is also quite simple. After you add Heavy with Earth’s Whisper, you use your (preferably overleveled) Cataclysm to hit Valhalla for a lot of damage. Even early on, you can outpace Valhalla’s healing with just one attack if the skill is high enough level. Keep Matt’s buffs up as best you can, as Valhalla can debuff your attack, meaning you won’t be doing enough damage.

I mentioned Limit Breaks earlier, and there’s not a lot to be said there. I start off the fight with Lance, Matt and Natz in the front row, and their jobs are to use 7th Heaven and then Oblivion against Valhalla to clear the turrets, or at least come close to it so they can be finished off. Lance is then swapped to backup to use Anna. You do not want turrets to last a turn unless they’re bombs. Harpoons can and will severely mess up your ability to fight normally, and should be killed ASAP.

After a few turns, Valhalla will respawn turrets, which is when you use Mighty Oak with Anna to, again, clear them out. And when it respawns them again, use Destroyer with Nolegs to repeat the process. It may respawn turrets another time if you’re unlucky, but if it does, you should be able to finish it before the bombs launch.

Other than that, it’s mostly about staying alive. Anna and Matt get priority for attacking over Natz, who is mostly there for support, so use Natz to heal and buff as needed. With any luck, Valhalla should go down with minimal effort.

One final note is that I used the Casual Skirt on Natalie. This is found in the Grand Gallery on the right side in the top chest. The only real reason is that it increases the effect of buff skills used, such as 7th Heaven. Nothing major, but it’s nice to have for that little extra boost. You’ll need a golden key to get it, which you should have grabbed at some point prior.

Final Valhalla

Okay, so, you didn’t want to fight Valhalla early. I do not blame you. It is not easy. I highly recommend fighting it later as it makes the fight, in my opinion, a lot more fun. The overall idea is much the same, with only minor differences. In general, I’m assuming you have all skills, maxed, and most gear upgraded a lot, if not maxed. Having every piece of gear isn’t needed, but a few make your life a lot easier.

This is a general idea of what I use to fight Valhalla late game. Again, level doesn’t matter, although the way scaling works highly discourages going past upper 30s. Enemies start getting more powerful than you.

For the sake of simplicity, I removed any flairs I didn’t think were “needed” for the fight, so feel free to fill in the slots. Once again, Lance and NoLegs don’t see much use, as the focus remains on Natz, Anna and Matt.

Elder’s Wisdom is by far the largest change in this setup. Natz’s role is the same, she attacks Valhalla and manages healing/buffs. However, unlike Gigavolt and Surge with weaken/curse, her attack now applies Enchant and weaken/curse (curse in the example shown). Enchant makes Valhalla immune to any and all magical damage, but that’s fine, you’re not using any at all. It also makes it take a whopping DOUBLE physical damage. And that’s before getting into buffs, debuffs, and other statuses. You can see where I’m going with this.

If you want, you can swap her gear around to boost 7th Heaven even more, but that would need to replace some of the gear to add more bomb resist. I’d recommend swapping the Iron Cross to Natz in that case and giving Anna the Blue Elephant hat, which is also useful. Things to consider.

Next up, we have Anna. Her job is once again to spam Combo Shot/attack/what have you to add heavy and Cataclysm procs. With enchant, she will be doing a lot of damage on her own, but we’re not done yet.

Here’s the fun part. Matt now has, hopefully, a large attack buff, with a very strong weapon, and Valhalla should have enchant and heavy. If all goes well, that’s +100 attack from buff, +180 from Soul Eater, +50 from heavy, +100 from enchant, and another +50 from debuffs. That is a LOT. And you’re using Cataclysm which is an already strong attack. You obviously won’t keep all these buffs up the whole time, but you want at least heavy, enchant and an attack buff up as much as you can.

The goal of limit breaks remains the same, except now you should also have Tsunami. Give it to Matt and toss it in to kill the turrets if you want to, if not, feel free to use Cleaver or Ragnarok, it doesn’t matter TOO much. Summons are in much the same roles as before. Not many new ones are obtained that help with the fight.