Crimson Desert

Pearl Abyss

Relatively early on in Crimson Desert, about 100 hours in, I randomly wandered through some icy mountains that were so cold they were actively damaging me. Wandering through the snow and dodging wraiths, I finally found my way to an arena…where I promptly ran into a boss I could barely damage and who froze and one-shot me within about five seconds every time I faced him.

Welp, see ya later, I told him.

Later is now, and after attempting a number of exhausting strategies, I finally found one that I think is less annoying and requires less setup than the others, and does not drag the fight on for 30 minutes of poking him from behind pillars, or doing hyper-specific unlimited explosive arrow builds. Here’s what I did, though keep in mind, you are not going to stroll through this at lower levels, even with this guide. He’s a true endgame boss.

The gist of this is to channel Edge of Tomorrow: Live. Die. Repeat. This combines three elements: Your bow. The Fire infusion element. Palmer Pills. Throw in some grilled meat as well, I suppose.

The strategy is this: As you may expect, this ice boss is very weak to fire, and clearly, he is not weak to anything else, including your normal melee slashes. You need the fire infusion element from the Abyss. You need any bow upgraded as much as you can (I had max crit, but it’s not necessary. All you are doing is backing up enough to get off Power Shot, which will be automatically infused with the fire element. You fire it 2-3 times, which does about 10x the damage of your melee, and will fill up a very large portion of his stun bar. Once he’s stunned, I usually froze before I got to him (I only had ice resist 8 for this, 15 is obviously something that would help, but it’s not necessary for this).

You are free to try to Focus to get more spirit back for more shots, but this will be difficult given how often he attacks. Rather, I found the best strategy was to simply die, respawn using a Palmer Pill which refills your entire spirt instant, and fire off those shots again. You can also chug some meat during all this for a bit more protection rather than staying at 30%. You can use your 100% Palmers, but it’s not necessary. More specifics on the ingredients.

Fire element – This may be the hardest thing to find, as it’s only in one specific Abyss puzzle you’ll have to navigate to. But you should not be taking on Beloth anyway if you haven’t gotten far enough to get elements. You are looking for the Tree of Slumber puzzle, which is at the end of the Spire of Ringing Truth chain that begins in Pailune. It takes five other puzzles to get there. Here’s a guide for this.

Good bow – Really any bow can be a good bow in this game, given that power comes from cores and most stats are close to identical. The key is to upgrade it as much as you can. Mine was maxed, but close to that should be okay. The fire shot is the main key here.

Spirit – The more spirit you have, the better, given that you can get more shots off before you die. I did this at Spirit 8, and that was three fire power shots.

Palmer Pills – These may seem rare at the start of the game, but once you get the recipe (found here, among a few other places). The recipe is not difficult; you just need literally any medicinal herb, and there are like 30, including Peonies that grow like five feet from your Greymane base, and two waters. Getting the Pororin research upgrade to gather more plants at a time helps. That’s it. I think I went through about eight of these during the fight.

Optional – I also had the Volcanic Eruption and Flames of Judgment Gears on my armor, but I don’t think they did anything because they’re about AOE damage on groups, not single target bosses.

Also throw about 30 grilled meat or so in there just to spam periodically for a little extra survival. Well, sometimes.

There are many ways to beat this boss, but this one was not hard to set up and took maybe 6-8 minutes in total, rather than the long slogs I’ve heard other people do. Even if you don’t want to do this, fire is key to this fight in whatever form you want to use it.

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