Ruthra - raid guide

The most important aspect of this raid is Ruthra’s passive, Manipulating Causality. It makes the boss immune to almost all crits (guaranteed crit skills such as Lizelotte’s bypass this), and locks your team’s ultimate abilities, which makes the stun into DPS phase upon the boss using its main skill imperative for good overall damage.

Ruthra has a pretty simple rotation that doesn’t deviate because the boss doesn’t care about mana and can’t be speed reduced. The skill order is as follows:

Normal > Smash > Normal > Dissolve > Normal > Punishment > Main skill

The normal attacks and Smash don’t do anything of note, but Dissolve will debuff your team’s defense and applies crit vulnerability, Punishment will debuff their attack, and the main skill is very important as this is when you need to use a skill that stuns to interrupt the boss for the DPS phase.

Dissolve (giant eye laser):

This will apply the first debuffs to your team, but for the most part you can just ignore this one because the more punishing debuff is the attack down that comes after.

Punishment (Two arm swings where his fists rocket off):

This attack debuff really hurts your DPS units as it is applied right before the DPS phase, so you’ll definitely want to bring a unit with a cleanse to get rid of it right away. Examples of cleanse units will be discussed in the recommended units section of this guide.

Main skill:

The most important mechanic in this raid revolves around Ruthra’s main attack. After using Punishment, Ruthra’s rune lights will turn from purple to blue and she will start to summon a large orb of light which will manifest a large sword of light that she shanks you with. Just after the runes turn blue, the boss becomes vulnerable to skills that stun. At this point, if you do not stun the boss, it will use its main skill which not only hurts, but will cause your team’s DPS to suffer by missing the DPS phase. Watch for this icon to appear on the boss’ status bar:

Using a stun during this debuff will apply a CC to the boss that stuns it, causes all attacks against it to be guaranteed crits, and unlocks your team’s ultimate abilities. It also gives the boss crit damage vulnerability. This is the point where you want to unload all your DPS skills (the DPS phase).

It is important to note that although the boss does not attack any faster or slower based on your actions, your reaction time on the stun mechanic can affect how many DPS phases you get! The last stun phase normally gets cut off if you’re not perfectly timing your stuns - however, it is possible to get one last stun off at around 2 seconds remaining if you are efficient with all of your stuns throughout the match. Cutting the boss’ main attack skill animation short by stunning as soon as the window is up can pay off pretty big, giving you a chance to throw out all your skills on a debuffed boss one last time before the fight ends.

Defense debuffs:

Another mechanic of note is the use of defense debuffs. Ruthra takes extra damage while its defense is debuffed, so bringing characters with abilities that do this will also help your overall damage.

Cleanse

Out of these four, the easiest to use are Prim, Talia and Erika, as Jiho’s cleanse is tied to her subskill and may not go off when you need it to.

• Prim slots perfectly into the usual undead team, has great buffs and a defense debuff on top of that.
• Talia is great in many team comps, and brings a lot of buffs along.
• Erika works well in most teams, also has a defense debuff, but using her may be slightly harder since you have to remember her heal is a targeted AoE. Using a team that is split between melee and ranged DPS might make her harder to use.

Stun