(Kinda spoilers but not really...)

Yeah, the final boss of this game is fucked up (on normal at least, easy is a cakewalk I hear). I made it with the ship you get when you reach sector 5, destroyed his first form easily, then, he sent my ship into oblivion using his drone volley even though I stunned his drone bay with a ion bomb.

This second form is completly unfair. He takes at least 25% of your health everytime he throw extra drones at you and he does it every 30 seconds or so.

I hear he's even got a third form. Beating him with the first few ships seems impossible to me. What do you think?

I feel like I've done it without, but the 2nd form is easier if you have cloaking. It basically let's you run out the clock on the drone swarm, because I think each drone swarm has a set length, so being cloaked for 5-10 seconds helps negate it.
Though in general, it helps if you have engines totally maxed and have sweet weapons so you can end the fight as soon as possible.

The second form is only really possible with a cloaking device. Having it upgraded helps, since you get more time to charge your weapons with impunity, but any cloak at all will let you dodge that ridiculous drone attack. The third form involves enemies boarding your ship, so you'll want to be prepared for that as well. Anti-personnel drones always help in that regard.

Also, "the first few ships" is kind of a moot point, as the later ships aren't strictly better than the Kestrel (in fact, the stealth ship is honestly much worse). The Kestrel actually has a pretty good starting weapon mix, as does the Torus. Though naturally by the time you reach the final boss you will have several more weapons anyway.

My current build is all sorts of screwed. Two of those three laser shooters, a big launcher, and a heavy laser thing I kinda hate using.
Ah well making it to be killed by that thing is an honor

@BisonHero said:

the 2nd form is easier if you have cloaking.

Even with cloaking you need to be quick about it, it will trigger faster than the cloaking's cooldown right?

I died that way, couldn't pierce his shields at all :(

Wow, I can't believe I just beat him on normal moments ago. It was a fucking hard battle and the 2 determining factors were definitively the cloaking device (at least level 2, you don't want a full charge since you get the next one quicker with a lvl 2 charge) and a motherfucking mantis men deathsquad of death.

Did it with the kestrel, breach missiles and halberg were very efficient.

That was one hell of a fight!

Not really a cakewalk on easy.

I'm gonna post this in every FTL thread I come across: Multiple Ion Cannons = win mode. Target one on shields and another on their weapons and set them to auto-attack,

Not really a cakewalk on easy.

I'm gonna post this in every FTL thread I come across: Multiple Ion Cannons = win mode. Target one on shields and another on their weapons and set them to auto-attack,

I was able to do it pretty easily with the kestral. Got cloak and 3 levels of shield. Weapons wise I just got as many burst lasers as I could get my hands on, to the point that I could shoot a volley of 10 at a time. I would just cloak to evade the nasty stuff and fire everything at once. First time I made it to him at all I was able to beat all 3 forms.

Honestly It's all about the gear you're able to get. A beam weapon and one of the 4 damage missiles would be just as effective I bet.

@pyrodactyl said:

@kalmis

Not really a cakewalk on easy.

After multiple sector 8 runs and a winning run on normal I'm pretty sure easy would bore me to death. About the only danger on that difficulty level really...

Congrats on the superiority complex.

The final boss is too hard, it's as simple as that. The game is too long, at least in one constant play through, to get to the end and have to face something you more than likely won't beat. That's not a game, that's not fun, that's just unnecessary nonsense. It's the equivalent of getting to the end of Diablo and having to beat him, three times...with one life. Not many people are going to do it, which means A LOT of people are doing little more than wasting their time playing this game. I like a challenge, but a realistic one. I almost get the sense that the creator of this game is a super nerd who actually got his feelings hurt when someone beat his original design of the final boss. So the nerd went back to the drawing board and made it a three part ending. I'll just say that even at 8 bucks this game is over priced. Hopefully this guy learns that people don't like wasting their time, though most developers have the people skills of a retarded goat so I guess I shouldn't expect too much.

@escobar06 said:

The final boss is too hard, it's as simple as that. The game is too long, at least in one constant play through, to get to the end and have to face something you more than likely won't beat. That's not a game, that's not fun, that's just unnecessary nonsense. It's the equivalent of getting to the end of Diablo and having to beat him, three times...with one life. Not many people are going to do it, which means A LOT of people are doing little more than wasting their time playing this game. I like a challenge, but a realistic one. I almost get the sense that the creator of this game is a super nerd who actually got his feelings hurt when someone beat his original design of the final boss. So the nerd went back to the drawing board and made it a three part ending. I'll just say that even at 8 bucks this game is over priced. Hopefully this guy learns that people don't like wasting their time, though most developers have the people skills of a retarded goat so I guess I shouldn't expect too much.

Considering people are already beating normal mode through some explorations of various builds as well as a little luck, I'd say the challenge is quite reasonable when you keep in mind that its a rogue-like. What percentage of people who play nethack ascends after all?

Not all game genres are eager to play along with your desired sense of illusionary machismo. Not all players desire games to do such things either.

The main issue with the last boss is that it makes decisions binary, you absolutely have to get cloak at some point, you should have high evasion and 3-4 shields, etc. In a roguelike part of the charm is beating the game with as many different setups as possible, but in this game there's literally 1 or 2 setups with slight variances in weaponry and that's it. That said the rest of the game is fun on normal, the boss doesn't change at all on easy so the point of playing easy is so that your chance at beating the boss isn't completely luck based, though it does make the rest of the game pretty boring.

@Turambar said:

@escobar06 said:

The final boss is too hard, it's as simple as that. The game is too long, at least in one constant play through, to get to the end and have to face something you more than likely won't beat. That's not a game, that's not fun, that's just unnecessary nonsense. It's the equivalent of getting to the end of Diablo and having to beat him, three times...with one life. Not many people are going to do it, which means A LOT of people are doing little more than wasting their time playing this game. I like a challenge, but a realistic one. I almost get the sense that the creator of this game is a super nerd who actually got his feelings hurt when someone beat his original design of the final boss. So the nerd went back to the drawing board and made it a three part ending. I'll just say that even at 8 bucks this game is over priced. Hopefully this guy learns that people don't like wasting their time, though most developers have the people skills of a retarded goat so I guess I shouldn't expect too much.

Considering people are already beating normal mode through some explorations of various builds as well as a little luck, I'd say the challenge is quite reasonable when you keep in mind that its a rogue-like. What percentage of people who play nethack ascends after all?

Not all game genres are eager to play along with your desired sense of illusionary machismo. Not all players desire games to do such things either.

That said, I'd really like a version of the game that was a bit less punishing for the simple ability to then extend the game beyond a mad dash through 8 sectors, ie actually like Star Trek or any space opera. Keep the battles hectic (heck I'd like power to be equally vulnerable to damage just like the warp core going down) and the events random, but provide more ability to mitigate completely random strokes of bad luck so you can really explore.

I suppose I should note that I just annihilated the last boss with the Osprey and no cloak, anti ship drone mark 2, Ion bomb, burst laser 2, hull laser 2, and Heavy Ion, 4 points into the Artillery beam. Kind of lucky to get that much ordnance, and amusingly if I didn't have the ion bomb it would've been much much closer, what a broken weapon.

@BisonHero said:

Also, "the first few ships" is kind of a moot point, as the later ships aren't strictly better than the Kestrel (in fact, the stealth ship is honestly much worse). The Kestrel actually has a pretty good starting weapon mix, as does the Torus. Though naturally by the time you reach the final boss you will have several more weapons anyway.

The stealth ship seems to be "hard mode" at least on normal, any gain you get from having stealth is immediately lost to not having shields and shields costing the same amount. You pretty much need a miracle run to beat normal with it (find, not purchase, some combination of Ion bomb, stealth weapons upgrade, weapons igniter, hull repair drone in the first 2 sectors)

I refuse to believe the final boss is beatable.

Gotten to him 3 times, all 3 times, didn't get close to beating him, then discover that's only the first form?

Fuck you, FTL.

I beat the final boss the first time I met him with the Torus, it was super tense by the end and I won the fight with one life left. I had two ion cannons, a beam and anti-ship drone and level four shields; no cloak. I haven't had any luck since though.

I found that the game dropped off after beating the final boss; as the only new thing to achieve is ship unlocks, which are random encounters so you have no solid goal to aim at.

@AmatureIdiot said:

I beat the final boss the first time I met him with the Torus, it was super tense by the end and I won the fight with one life left. I had two ion cannons, a beam and anti-ship drone and level four shields; no cloak. I haven't had any luck since though.

I found that the game dropped off after beating the final boss; as the only new thing to achieve is ship unlocks, which are random encounters so you have no solid goal to aim at.

It's a bummer you feel that way. Beating the boss with each ship type and variant isn't enough to keep you going?

In my opinion, even if there wasn't more than one ship, FTL would be highly replayable because of the random map/encounters and because the gameplay is really fun.

@Ravenlight said:

@AmatureIdiot said:

I beat the final boss the first time I met him with the Torus, it was super tense by the end and I won the fight with one life left. I had two ion cannons, a beam and anti-ship drone and level four shields; no cloak. I haven't had any luck since though.

I found that the game dropped off after beating the final boss; as the only new thing to achieve is ship unlocks, which are random encounters so you have no solid goal to aim at.

It's a bummer you feel that way. Beating the boss with each ship type and variant isn't enough to keep you going?

In my opinion, even if there wasn't more than one ship, FTL would be highly replayable because of the random map/encounters and because the gameplay is really fun.

I guess Binding of Isaac kinda spoilt me, almost every time you finish that game you get something new. I still think its a great game however, and I did play it a lot when first came out so I might of just got burnt out. I'll keep going though.

Just beat him for the first time, looked dicey for a while but managed to grind him down eventually. Had the Zoltan ship with cloaking, two defense drones (both Mk 1), ion/small bomb/halberd/burst laser combo.

Not the best setup I've faced him with but everything just seemed to go right on this run, having just checked the stats it appears that it took me 163 tries to get it done!

@amatureidiot: I know this thread is old, but have you found anyway to keep the game feeling fresh? I recently got it from a sale and played it a lot for the past few days, but am feeling burnt out already after realizing there's not much to gain (if anything) from beating the boss again. What you pointed out is exactly how i feel, binding of isaac kinda spoiled me given that not only are you unlocking new characters but a hundred or so items of the course of beating it over and over.

@spongecat: After you've beaten the game on Normal, you can keep trying to unlock more starting ships. Each ship usually lends itself to a particular gameplay style, so if you lean into that, you can try beating the game in different ways.

As much as I loved FTL, I eventually got my fill of it after a couple of weeks and a handful of wins. Still got more than my money's worth of fun out of it though.

@spongecat said:

Yeah, FTL doesn't go for the same dopamine response of "hundreds of tiny, gradual unlocks!" in the same way that the Binding of Isaac does.

Nonetheless, like Savage, trying to get all the ships is still the reason I come back to the game. That last secret ship still eludes me, because it has some very specific requirements that don't always come up.

At the end of the day, I actually burned out on Binding of Isaac more than I burned out on FTL, so I don't know what to tell you. In BoI, it got to the point that I knew the game well enough that as long as I played as Isaac (with D6) or Cain, I could beat the game nearly every time I played. I still don't have the "no damage in The Depths" achievement, because once you own Wrath of the Lamb it is way more frustrating because of how cheap some of the new enemy types are. Not cheap enough to kill you, but cheap enough to spam you with an unavoidable wall of damage that disqualifies you from the achievement.

FTL is easier once you know the lay of the land, but at the end of the day still requires a bit of luck in some cases, since you can't just manually dodge everything like you can in BoI. Sometimes you get a run where missiles just keep hitting you, and it keeps things interesting. You do have greater control over your upgrades (engines, shields, you should always have a teleporter to fight the final boss, etc.) which makes a lot of attempts feel a little samey compared to how random each BoI attempt is, but I still occasionally end up with some weird, novel weapon combination in FTL that I've never had to use before.

If the game doesn't feel fresh to you anymore, that's fine. You've got your fill of it. You don't have to keep playing it.

The best way for taking it out is a combination of Mantis boarding party and cloak for me. Since the weapon chambers are shut off from the rest it can't be repaired any more. Those drones are still brutal though.

How about that AE.

The flagship is even more annoying now that the first form has the hacking tool. I had three runs ruined by it completely neutering my droids or slower weapons, whichever I was more dependent on. Finally thanks to ridiculously generous scrap rewards and it hacking the Medbay I just blew right through it. Getting lucky with the RNG always helps but other tactics might be more reliable now.

@ervonymous: Ugh, yeah. I beat the boss two times in a row on AE with Kestrel and Adjucator. Since then I've consistently made it to stage 2 or 3 of the end boss and found it completely impossible. Probably got there about 10 times. My hit chance seems to be about 20% whenever I get to stage 2. Which means it doesn't even matter if I have the most amazing set of weapons, two combat drones, full shields, cloaking, pre-igniter etc. What good does any of that do if a volley of ten shots only take off two of his shield layers? He only needs to get one good hit on my shield or cloak and I'm done.

Wouldn't even feel good about beating it now.. it'd be nothing but luck if my shots actually hit. Sorry about the rant, but I've gone so sour on this game. ^_^'