ΔΗΜΗΤΡΑ - Boss Notes
So, Covid 19 and other Covid-related activities have kept me pretty busy lately, but I have been keeping up with Fate/Grand Order: Cosmos in the Lostbelt’s new Lostbelt, The Interstellar City on a Mountain Range - Olympus: The Day a God was Shot Down. And I figured that I’d share my notes on the Demeter bossfight which has had a certain portion of the fandom calling this the biggest difficulty spike since the Camelot Singularity years ago.
The Concept: Demeter is an unorthodox bossfight, as it requires you balancing your sustain and damage abilities without the use of a friend support. Instead, it has you locked into a forced story support in the front row of your team, a Caenis (NP5 10/10/10 thankfully) which is not optimal to say the least with the boss being a Caster and Caenis providing no team utility whatsoever.
She has 3 health bars, with her first break bar being one of the two major danger timings of the fight, upon which she removes all party buffs and attempts to apply a 3 turn, 3 buff, buffblock to your entire party.
The second breakbar turns the fight into a more-standard damage test, granting her a 150k guts and healing over time at the cost of randomly sealing her active skills at the start of her turn.
The key to the fight is finding some balance between the damage required to kill her on her last legs and the sustain required to survive her two most dangerous timings. I should also note that she does fairly heavy area of effect damage with her normal attacks, making some degree of sustain strongly recommended for success at this fight.
The Struggle: Demeter has 3 actives skills that she likes to cycle through in a predictable rotation. On turn 1, she uses Earth’s Authority that gives her an effect similar to Tamamo’s Transformation skill on steroids. The defense buff is so potent, that unless you remove it, you will likely do negligible damage to the boss on your second turn.
On turn 2, she will use Mourning Mother to give herself a 3 bar NP charge and a one-turn attack up. This skill isn’t dangerous now, but she will repeat it on her first action on turn 6, granting herself an immediate NP modified by the attack increase. This is the other danger timing of the bossfight, as her NP will likely do enough damage to kill your entire front line if you are not prepared.
On turn 4, she will cast Mother’s Authority to remove any debuffs you’ve applied to her, give herself a one-turn single debuff immunity and heal herself for 25k. This discourages typical stalling strategies during any phase of the fight, but really isn’t terribly problematic.
After turn 4, she’ll repeat her skill rotation, casting Earth’s Authority on turn 5 and Mourning Mother on turn 6. Followed by (I believe) a normal turn then repeating the established rotation. I am unsure exactly how her self skill seal on the third bar interacts with the rotation, whether it pauses it or simply skips the skill for the current turn. Either way, if you plan to be successful, you should be focusing on damage over party sustain to offset her healing at that point.
Her Noble Phantasm is nothing terribly interesting, it deals heavy area of effect damage and applies a max health debuff.
What Works: Caenis tends to die fairly early unless you go out of your way to keep her alive, something I wouldn’t recommend. As far as I’m concerned, her primary purpose is to apply as many attack debuffs as possible using her second skill to Demeter on turn 3, before Demeter uses her first NP. Then she is to die and be replaced by someone more suited to the fight. I’d recommend not even using Caenis’s defensive skill to ensure that she leaves the field when she needs to.
Merlin doesn’t really help you here, as many players have learned, as his healing doesn’t effectively offset the damage that Demeter can do without a rather high NP level and his illusion magic can only mitigate one of her NPs, which in practical terms, occur once every 3 turns. She’ll also cleanse any Garden of Avalon stacks you manage to apply when you break her first bar.
Your best bet is to use Riders over your typical support Casters, with Fragments of 2030 and defense buffs if you have them. In practice, Rider’s class advantage combined with defense buffs removes the threat of Demeter applying continuous pressure to your team, so you can focus on dealing damage when advantageous to you.
DO NOT break her first bar on turn 3 unless you want your front row completely erased. I found doing so on turn 4 much more effective as the 3 turn defense buffs that I applied turn 1 had worn off and I had a few turns before the boss could NP.
I cleared the quest pretty easily with the following team using the Atlas mystic code.
Caenis (support), Reines (2030), Quetzalcoatl (Victor from the Moon), Ushiwakamaru (2030), George (I don’t remember/Not Applicable), Heracles (Bond 10).
Reines and Ushi were wiped out on the last turn, were Quetz killed the boss with a 100% crit brave chain, the last two party members didn’t even need to be there.
Honestly, if you have Reines, she may be the best unit for this quest. I applied her defense buff turn 1, used it to mitigate almost all of the damage to herself and Quetz until it wore off, used the atlas skill haste, broke the boss’s 1st bar, and promptly reapplied Reines’ buffs.
Through Reines’ defense buffs and Caenis’s 3 attack downs, Riders in your party will only take 5.5k or so damage from the boss’s first NP. In other words, with Reines, you don’t need to waste some form of hard protection against the boss’s fist NP and can save them for the more dangerous second NP. Realistically Quetz, Ushi, George and Herc can be replaced with whatever units you like who can effectively do damage to the boss. The Atlas mystic code can remove the boss’s buff block to make sure you can buff your damage unit when you need to.
Alternatives to Reines: I understand that Reines is a limited SSR that due to no friend support, a lot of players won’t have access to. To that end I’ll recommend some alternatives.
I could see using Boudica on an Arts/Rider comp with Ryouma Sakamoto and Mandricardo, so long as you’ve done some skill leveling. I can see it working much more consistently if you’ve managed to pull Da Vinci (Rider) and some good NP gain CEs. Essentially making an arts variant of the team. If you have Kintoki (Rider) I can see you paring him with Alexander for some Quick/Crit composition that exploits Rider Kintoki’s excellent generation skills and single target damage output.
Conclusion: I really hope that this helps someone out. In my opinion, this fight is less difficult, and more requires unorthodox teambuilding from someone with a strong account to clear without the use of command spells. If you have Heracles bond 10, he can probably secure much of Demeter’s last health bar including the guts if you can make sure that he’s the only unit on the field when he comes out.
Anyways, these are just my thoughts. If none of this works, feel free to call me out.
