Empyrea Part 2:
Grandmother and the Big Bad Wolf
Boss Battle

In the Northeast Aero Plains, you can find a small cottage with Grandmother standing in front of it. She won’t talk to you until you pick up the quest “What Big Lies you Have” from Sheriff Etta in Velo City. This quest is a side quest, but I thoroughly recommend you do it. The dialog is super nice and the battle is very interesting.

First Battle

Firstly, during the first battle, you will be facing the Big Bad Wolf. He’s a rank 16 Balance elite creature with 4,780 health. If you’re soloing this instance, there will be no minions. If you bring a full team, you will be facing an additional three Blue Oxes (rank 16 Myth). prepare to get mass stunned by these!

The Big Bad Wolf doesn’t cheat so this fight is very straight-forward.

 

Second Battle

After the first battle, you’ll be heading downstairs and face Grandmother. She’s a rank 17 Shadow boss with 11,950 health. If you are soloing the instance, she won’t have any minions. On the other hand, if you bring a couple of friends, she will get three Blue Oxes (rank 16 Myth) as reinforcement.

Grandmother doesn’t cast a lot of spells besides her cheats. The only two spells she seems to know are Storm’s Iron Giant and Glowbug Squall. Because her arsenal is so small, she passes most of the time.

Grandmother’s Cheats

At the end of round one, Grandmother will announce that “the curse spreads”. This results in you (if you’re soloing) or one person on your team (if you’re doing it with friends) to get polymorphed into a copy of Grandmother herself. In addition, Grandmother will cast Confusion on you at the same time, in the same way as Medulla does at the end of Empyrea Part 1.

This cheat will be repeated every four rounds, with Grandmother either targetting one random person on your team, or just you if you’re soloing.

Grandmother’s Deck

Once properly polymorphed and confused, you will have a whole new deck with six shiny cards with mysterious effects.Their descriptions don’t really reveal what they do, so here is a list:

Group Strategy

When You’re Polymorphed

Just like with Medulla’s cheat, a random spell is cast when you don’t pick one from your deck. I recommend picking “Curse of Grandma” every turn. This just triggers the polymorph/confuse cheat without attacking anyone so you won’t be doing any damage to your team at all. If it’s your hitter who gets grandma-ified, I’d recommend choosing Knitted Sweater (stunning someone randomly) or maybe Smooches or Overfeed. These two both attack someone random, so this could be a good move if your team has decent resist. (Thanks for the information, Tabitha Sunflower!)

The Rest of your Team

The non-grandmothered (totally a word) members of your team can just feint and blade like usually. It might be a good idea to bring a Cleanse Charm, just in case the grandmothered person happens to click Amigurumi.

 

Solo Strategy

If you solo this fight, Grandma’s spells can either land on you or on Grandma. That’s different from team fights, were grandma’s spells seem to exclusively hit one of your team members.

Knitted Sweater is actually a good spell to use while in Grandma-mode! It will exclusively stun grandma, never you yourself. This can save you from at least one Iron Giant or Lightning Bugs hitting you.

Bringing a cleanse charm could be helpful. While in grandma-mode you may want to use Amigurumi to get the 1500 health if you need it. The Bad Juju that comes with the heal can land on either you or Grandma, so being able to remove it is vital.

Other than that, just blade and feint until you’re ready to kill her!

 

Did we miss any cheats?
Do you have any strategy ideas?

 

 

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