PSO2 NGS - Masquerade D100 (Slayer)

Look who's back with a vengeance, huh? Welcome back, white Masq!

Casual Sl/Wa clear of the final difficulty of the NGS solo quest 虚構の光芒 / Fictional Glow. This was my third successful run, so I played it very safely. Fantastic fight; made all the easy floors before it worth slogging through. In addition to his grab coming out faster and clones harassing you more, three of his new moves become unblockable at this depth (the floor dive, the cage, and the sweeping beam) and he has a beautiful new DM around half health that probably does instant kill levels of damage but I thankfully haven't gotten hit by it yet to know for sure :^)

Unlike PSO2's D999 Masquerade, NGS D100 Masq does NOT instantly kill you with most of his moves. I'm using Waker subclass and some pretty beefy equipment that sacrificed a small bit of damage for much more survivability, but even without it most of his minor attacks and even the unblockables won't kill you from full health. Instead, he has very dangerous combo potential in his second phase (I nearly died from one major mistake here!) and he has a high chance of inflicting super-extended poison and an attack power debuff. If you get poisoned, then you'll easily find yourself at 1HP eventually without some sort of regen effect, and with only 10 minutes to clear the quest, even if you DO have sustainable healing then you're still fighting the clock. Not much of a problem for Slayer and especially not with nearly-minmaxed affixes (I'm just missing some upgraded units, some dmg variance, and also using Fixa Attack instead of Fixa Termina since I primarily play Techter), but definitely scary on slower classes that run a risk of getting caught by an unblockable just for doing their typical high-damage moves. It's a very clever way to reintroduce the same kind of pressure that PSO2 D999 Masq puts on you and is tuned excellently for casual play. Long fight, severe punishment, but with a chance to recover if you can wait out the poison at critical health for a while...

Because the orange attacks bypass all guarding/dodging effects except for Photon Blasts, it can be very risky to use long moves that are typically protected by guard/dodge properties like Slayer's Gunslash Gear Overdrive finisher or Wand's fourth normal attack. At one point in this fight, I didn't bother using GGO Finish since I was afraid of getting punished and was more concerned with a reasonably safe clear than a fast one - but I traded with it at the end because it didn't matter whether I got debuffed afterward. I wonder how the fastest clears will handle these moves; maybe it's worth the attack debuff to trade with him every time and just use super-armored moves, especially the cage attack...

Outside of reading his moves better to sneak in more attacks and counters, there are some obvious gameplay improvements I could make here, like better use of Slayer's repositioning tools, particularly smarter use of Regulus + Charge Slash at a distance. Learning his attack cycles for better usage of GGO would also shave down a lot of time, and obviously the exact hit timing for his new DM so I'm not wasting time spamming safe moves praying it doesn't hit me... A friend also told me that it's possible to dive attack him when he does his own floor dive attack to stun him for a couple seconds. I had absolutely no idea...

It seems weird to use PB outside of a stun, but it feels like the best time to burn it is when he does the cage attack since it wastes a lot of time to jump out of it and PBs are protected against EVERYTHING unlike other finisher-type moves. I'm not sure if it's worth using it to bypass his throwable phase though, since the sweeping beam attack messes with his hitbox enough that you're liable to miss his weakpoint (and at this depth he has pretty beefy non-weakpoint defense...), plus you get a lot of free crit on stuns anyway.

As for subclasses, if it's for pure damage, Slayer and Fighter sub are the obvious way to go, but for survival it's pretty subjective IMO... The moves you can and can't afford to trade with look pretty different based on your subclass, which is pretty cool if you ask me! Hunter sub will let you survive some of the heavier hits, but then you're dealing with the poison; Ranger sub will protect you from the poison, but won't help with the heavier hits; Waker sub is a bit of a middleground where both light and heavy attacks suck to get hit by, but you can comfortably heal back out of dangerously low HP and let the regen counteract the poison.