I'm having a really difficult time with the Cradle Guardian. He just seems to do way too much damage and I'm hardly doing any, especially when he's in any mode that isn't his Phys mode. Any suggestions of what I should do?

I'm running:

NS, Logre, D

RM, A/M, F/D

What's your level? Did you get Spectral Cage from the Golden Deer Keep? That plus Black Mist will shut him down for awhile.

What's your general strategies with your team? At that point in the game your team is likely pretty specialized, so it's hard to give specific advice. Paralysis is a good status effect to inflict on him if either your Nightseeker or Arcanist has it.

My general plan for my team is that I use poison with my Arcanist, then do a bunch of burst damage with the NS and Logre. My problem is that once it changes it's face, my main damage dealers start doing very little damage, the only one who seems to be doing any damage is my rune master. The ailments also stop working once the face change happens.

Do you think I need to rest some of my characters? My NS isn't really ailment oriented, I wanted to make it so that the Arcanist did that so that I could focus on just doing burst damage when someone did get effect by an ailment. Otherwise I think my party is pretty sound. Maybe my runemaster needs a rest too? Her general runes are pretty low, I only leveled her actual damage dealing spells rather than her defensive ones.

Levels: NS:49, F: 49, D:49 RM:50 A:47

Having your Arcanist inflict ailments isn't a bad plan, but something to note is that the Nightseeker's Venom Throw is significantly better than the Arcanist's Poison Circle. It does 700 damage a tic instead of just 300. My personal set-up has my Nightseeker with maxed out Venom Throw and the Arcanist with maxed out Paralysis Circle. Make sure you have Ailment Boost maxed (or near maxed) as well. Ailment Boost affects bursts like Spectral Cage too.

I don't use a Runemaster, so I can't really give any good advice for builds, but focusing more on one element might help.

The lowest I can get him down to is about 1/4 of his health, and that's will everyones TP increadibly low. I'm gonna respec a few of my characters and try to figure this out.

Thanks for the tips.

@joeyoe31: Remember that ice strike is an elemental attack, and you always have the elemental oils to enchant weapons to deal elemental damage.

After an hour of internet searching and some hard decision making, I respec my NS and A/M. I also took a couple of other precautions but I was able to beat him first try after the respec. Thanks for all the help guys.