Water Dragon boss strategies

[KFCrispy]

i didn't try very hard, but i think i did give Hugo a Pale Moon Set and his defense was way too low to sustain the battle. I don't think Hellfire can actually take out the Ice Pillars without extra boosts. Hellfire's base dmg is 1500, and an S rank gives a 70% boost = 2550, just barely more than the Ice Pillar hp--but besides the question about their MDF vs the Hugo or Geddoe's MAG, we also found most enemies have a natural 20-30% resistance to spells. getting Hugo or Geddoe to use fire magic requires a decent amount of sacrifice of equipment slots, so we won't have ideal PDF or magic resistance to sustain attacks from all 7 enemies (6 pillars + Ice Dragon) for 2 full rounds...

it's definitely an interesting challenge to try.

[gildedtalon]

Use sacrificial jizo?

[eldrasidar]

Right, so I tried the mage option. I did it slightly differently than I detailed above as I had first made a mistake regarding wizard runes, they don't stack. I also forgot that Lucia is not available for this fight, so I used Joker instead, which wasn't all that much of a difference. Anyway, I was not able to beat the water dragon in a single turn, it in fact took exactly two full turns. I've rounded damage to the nearest 100, since it was faster for me to note it down that way, but here's how I set up:

Party:
Joker: level 56
magic stat=238 with wizard rune
S in fire magic, with rage rune
equipment:
Wizard hat
custom leather
iron boots
iron fist
fire magic ring

Estella: level 91
magic stat is 293 with wizard rune
S in fire and lightning, with rage and thunder runes
equipment:
wizard hat
custom tunic
lightning magic ring
iron heel shoes
blue ribbon

Geddoe: level 56
magic stat is 203 with wizard rune
S in Fire Magic, with true fire
equipment:
wizard hat
premier chain mail
iron boots
fire magic ring
fire magic ring

ernie in support(adds 8% magic damage)
Turn 1:
Geddoe casting hellfire does 1900 damage
Estella casting final flame does 1600
Joker casting final flame does 1500

Turn 2:
Geddoe casting final flame 1500
Estella casting thunder storm 1500
Joker casting final flame 1500

So yeah, the water dragon and ice pillars have a lot of magic resistance. The S rank and Ernie makes damage x1.78, so Hellfire would have done 2670 damage with no resistance, then the dragon and ice pillars have approximately 30% magic resistance. Interestingly, doing Hellfire on a ghost knight, it will do nearly 3000 damage, so some monsters actually have weaknesses to at least certain types of magic. Unfortunately, other than maybe super spamming magic and magic defense stones, I don't see any way to do this in one turn particularly as the only two ways to further improve one's magic damage, casting Battlefield or equipping Alertness wouldn't be able to affect the first round of combat.
If you did set it up so that you had alertness and battlefield in effect, Hellfire would do about 4275 damage, and Final Flame and Thunderstorm 3400-3600 damage, so you could kill everything in one turn, just not your first turn.

It's also interesting to note that the wizard rune apparently did almost nothing in terms of adding damage. Not really sure what the point of it is then, as it doesn't give you extra rune slots either. Yes, Estella was doing a bit more damage than Geddoe or Joker for having 55-90 higher MGC, but that only translated to about 50-75 more points of damage. Presumably if you had a high MDF and an average or low MAG, this would make more of a difference, however, Roland is the only character who would qualify to benefit from this as all the other characters with that kind of stat growth have only 0-1 rune slots available and thus couldn't have a wizard rune and then a magic rune to cast spells with.

[KFCrispy]

yeah I've never found Wizard Runes to be useful in any of the normal games, although boosting MAG stat in S5 increases your MP count. but in Tactics it is pretty awesome (but broken, since enemies rarely get to cast magic on you and make you pay for reducing MDF!)
in this game since most enemies have the 20-30% magic resistance, your Wizard boost is nerfed pretty badly. A 100 point increase to MAG would translate to 70 extra damage.

[eldrasidar]

it's interesting that they give enemies extra percentage based magic resistance, but not really any extra physical damage resistance.

[Punkaiser]

Although the result isn't awesome but in a certain situation, we can set up wizard rune+violence for a character then a friendly attack from pale gate or fire rune could trigger violent state easier(In S2 i tried to manipulate violent state by using empty world spell and sometimes it didn't work due to Mdef of some 3 rune slotters were pretty high). Also, wizard rune helps to increase damage from using pixie rune...a little LOL.

Golems probably have high physical resistance, you can see that even with critical hit, characters still deal low damage compared to other monsters (always counting on critical hit) then Ghost armors got hurt for more than our attack value which means they are vulnerable to physical attacks.

[eldrasidar]

alas getting the violence rune to activate would take one turn, as the pale gate rune is incredibly slow so everyone else would have attacked first, and the fire rune's damage radius rarely affects the party in it's initial position(certainly doesn't against most of the bosses) so you still couldn't get the one turn kill against the dragon rune.

[Punkaiser]

That wasn't idea for 1 turn battle, just my comment on usefulness of wizard runes throughout series, not exclusively in S3. Since S3 have casting time for runes which makes this becomes irrelevant strategy but in S2 it's pretty easy to control turns order for friendly attacks.

[Aldo]

Another good way is:

Nei: Jongleur
Shabon: Double Strike + Fury + Lion
Emily: Lion
And then whomever else you want that can do some decent damage (e.g. more claw users for more lion, or something else)

Jongleur (without Jeane even) activates before Lion rune, so it adds a ton of damage for the first round to the Lion rune (which is already +50%). I use this setup (especially in chapter 3) for my treasure chest load/reload to wipe out bosses in a turn. Emily and Shabon were easily doing ~3k on Azzodess. I imagine that could easily take out the water dragon.

Fury rune ties lion rune as far as damage is concerned. Double strike is more, but if you are aiming for one round (which we are) you will get more out of a lion rune if you can't use make use of a double-strike rune AFTER jongleur. If you're not using Jongleur, then double-strike wins of course.

[eldrasidar]

The only problem with that set up is that, your two lion users would be the only two guaranteed to hit the water dragon, and of course 3000 damage is only 1/3 of its health, so the two lion shots wouldn't cut it alone. The rest of your party would more than likely end up wasting attacks against ice pillars. That is the inherent weakness of command runes in suikoden 3 in that you forfeit control of the other half of your pair, which often leads that half to do less than optimum moves.

[Aldo]

Well, the 3000 was in chapter 3. In chapter 4 they would be higher level as well as higher weapon level. Shabon would also have her third rune slot. So the damage would be higher, but I'm doubting that it would be enough still. I see what you mean though. I'm at the water dragon, I'll have to play.

[Punkaiser]

Also try the unites: pretty boy and girl attack, those will kill the boss with no need for song of madness from Nei. In the next playthrough I'd want to check performance of Bow Wow squad, i think it will be pretty strong, not sure if it can reach 9999 though.

[Aldo]

I always use Nei just because I like her anyways, so she is always with me. Those are good as well, and they also have a greater delay than the Jongleur Rune so you can still stack them if you want anyways.

[Noraibah]

Uh...my first time I defeated it I used.......( forgive my east Malaysian English) Estella with a pale gate rune[level 1] and Chris as Flame Champion. Hey don't blame me if I chose Chris as Flame Champion. She really reminds me of myself. And no I am not Wyatt Lightfellow.
He is a fictional character. Thank you. Oh and I used the Zexen knights except Salome.