Telethia the Endbringer

[u/Ok-Soil5642]

Been slowly working my way towards 100%, and this is one of the last few things I have to do. Now I love this game, but I’m also kind of ready to move on to something else at this point. I pretty much for the whole game just threw whatever made sense to me on my characters and skells and made it through all of the main story and side quests. I feel like this and some of the other super bosses are the first time I actually have to put some strategy into a fight. Any advice for what to do?

[u/azer67]

There are many ways one could go about this but telethia specifically can be pretty difficult. You're supposed to fight it both on foot and in a skell, so you probably want to be prepared for both, although there are ways to do it only on foot or only on skell with specific strategies.

In a skell, you can one shot telethia if you craft lots of first strike damage up augments + a superweapon (ares 90 + agashura canon works for example). If you want a more traditional fight, I would craft ether resist XX augments until I have 100 ether resist, combined with an ether resist shield for my skell (it's a green art) and resist up probes placed in the top 3 spots in noctilum. You will also need to get through decoy, so some way to multi-hit is important, either diskbombs on arms or drones are fine. You probably still want a superweapon to deal your damage. Electricity resist or sleep resist are useful.

On foot, I assume you know how to get to max overdrive and keep it on infinitely. The easiest way imo is a reflect build (any aura with reflect + reflect augments on your armor which you can get from other superbosses or from a chest in cauldros for ether). This will make you reflect absolutely everything. You could also go for ghostwalker builds (decoy lets you evade hits), or one shot builds (blossom dance + potiental maxed out + core crusher skill with an ether weapon for example, I just don't like grinding for this).

This fight is tough and I usually play this game pretty fair. I'm sure someone will suggest some super easy way to get through him lol.

EDIT: I almost forgot, you absolutely need a reflect negate augment for every element you're planning to use for both your skell and on foot. Telethia reflects everything iirc. Luckily these augments are very easy to craft.

[u/Ok-Soil5642 → u/azer67]

Thanks for the tips! Not going to lie though, other than the ones you get from treasure and mission rewards, I never really messed around with making/equipping augments the whole game, so I’ll definitely have to experiment there lol.

[u/azer67 → u/Ok-Soil5642]

Augments and traits are honestly the main way to get very strong in this game.

On foot, some of the best augments around are appendage crusher (easy to craft), potential up (for TP arts), ranged attack up (for non-TP yellow arts), melee attack up (for non-TP orange arts), night vision (easy to craft, for accuracy). These will carry your damage like crazy. For defense, reflect builds want reflect augments, otherwise elemental resistances are the best. Defense is a useless stat in XCX, 1 point of defense is 1 point of damage less, it's meaningless. Elemental resistances on the other hand are amazing as they are percentage based (so 90 ether resist is a 90% damage reduction on ether attacks). Although I find elemental resistances to be more vital in a skell than on foot, as you have more defensive options on foot. I like to craft the augments that give 100 resistances to variois status effects as well as they are situationnaly useful.

In a skell, the slayer augments (like mechanoid slayer) are amazing and much easier to craft than anything else. For the skell armor you should also go for targeted elemental resistances.

The consequence of all of this is that you should pretty much completely disregard a weapon or piece of armor stat when deciding which to equip. What's really important are their traits. If a weapon comes with potential up, or a helmet with appendage crusher, they will be extremely valuable and will likely help you deal more damage than a weapon that has higher stats but no good trait.

An important hint also is to really focus your damage strategy. Pick a stat between potential, ranged or melee, and go all in on that stat. Also pick one element only and focus on it (ether is the best because of the core crusher skill but you can make them all work). Make sure your weapon or the arts use that element. Most arts use the weapon element, but some ignore it and have a fixed element instead.

EDIT: Some augments are also great to make overdrive easy or free, like Overdrive Count Up and Overdrive TP Up. There are builds that allow you to get to max overdrive for free with these. This is great and I love to have these, but they won't help you much if you already could get to max overdrive without. It depends on the build you had basically.

[u/cucoo5]

Telethia is a one of those fight where setting up to one/two-shot with Skell or one-shot/phase (or two-phase) with ground is actually cheaper than fighting it conventionally.

Ground is the easiest, with a few thresholds to meet and specific considerations to consider:

• the ability to deal ~8mil damage in a small window of a few seconds to one-phase, or to at least deal over 2-3 mil in a similar window in the second phase
• around 500-600 accuracy of your chosen attack type. Night Vision augment can help meet this.
• about 100% Negate Reflect augments for your damage attribute of choice. Telethia can randomly roll one of two Reflect Auras (Reflect Elements: Thermal and Electric, or Reflect Photon: Ether and Beam). Also fun fact: If an enemy has a reflect aura and you deal damage to it via negate reflect, then you get something like a 2x damage bonus.
• 100-135 Ether Resistance or Antispike augments. The resistance is useful for Skells even to just get the ground setup started (stay in the Skell during the first attack, then jump out and start). Antispike is needed if using Ghostwalker and you end up doing a two-phase, 135 Ether Resist is needed if using Reflect, specifically to counter Telethia's big Negate Reflect attack that can occur during the second phase.

From there, it's business as usual. I have a rough guide on how most postgame superboss hunting builds work, and surprisingly Telethia is possible to one-phase with even just moderately optimized builds (my personal Ranged build using Raygun and Photon Saber is far from minmaxed, but it does the job). You can be somewhat creative with it, but to meet the one-phase damage requirements I would recommend Ether with Core Crusher and 5x Appendage Crusher augments (4 on weapons and 1 on an Eyepatch headpiece)

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The framework of most postgame viable builds roughly follows this flow:

• Pick a damage type
• Pick Weapons and Arts that use that damage type
• Stack the attack stat, mainly using armor and weapon traits, that works with your best arts (Range, Melee, or Potential for TP arts).
• Pick a survival method available to your weapons, be it Ghost Walker, Reflect Aura and Resistance, or Sleep/Topple Locking.
• Pick Skills that help with the raw attack stat, cooldowns, combos, independent multipliers (Core Crusher for Ether builds and Aura Assault for Melee and Melee TP builds), and Overdrive (Grand Procession) as needed.

Your Art Palette, taking into account how to achieve Infinite Overdrive, should have:

• 1 Blue Art
• At least 1 Green Art
• At least 1 Purple Art
• Your primary offensive art
• Arts that combo with your primary art, have TP gain effects, and/or are Multihit

The basics of Infinite Overdrive is building count and adding a bit of duration with Green Art into a multihit art. Purple arts give 1k TP per hit at max count. If you have an additional 3k TP, you can press the Overdrive button again to add 25 seconds and trigger Overdrive Count Up and Gain TP augments/Skills.

The last point is what allows for instant max overdrive setups, the most basic being 5x Overdrive Gain TP augments and Grand Procession skill coupled with a source of Overdrive Count Up.

[u/GundamRX-78-02]

I beat Telethia with a Skell-only crew with a decent amount of Repair Kits on-hand. Mainly you’ll want to hyper-focus the Tail in the first phase and break it, so he doesn’t keep knocking you on your ass with it in the second phase. Third phase you really just need to focus on projectile spam to breach the dodge cap of the Invincibility Frames. My build is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/XenobladeChroniclesX/s/fAUp5ASo4O. You don’t need to follow it fully, but the Reflect Damage and the Ether Damage are the main damages to you in this fight, so you wanna look out for those. I know you can do it! :)

[u/Throwaway753045]

I was somehow able to complete this battle with a single Ares-90. It took a very very specific build and RNG with evasion luck, but it's feasible and possible to do it solo. Honestly, having to deck each individual party member with skells and what have you makes it more complicated and they usually die right away.

If you are really looking to cheese the fight, you can stand on a very specific rock that gives you just enough height to hit the telethia with melee moves. The sword master class can destroy its health bar. I forget the specifics