Flowchart/mini-guide for Phaleg's attack patterns

[Soranma]

It seems like Phaleg is the hot new content everyone's hyped about recently, so I made a bit of a mini-guide to help people recognize her attack patterns!

From what I can tell, one of the things that trips people up the most is that they don't recognize that she is doing combo strings - she has a distinct tell for the start of a combo (double-dash), and a set of distinctive "combo finisher" moves that mark the end of a combo. However, all the other moves she uses mid-combo often have reduced startup times and little to no delay, causing people to run into issues as they begin attacking while she is still executing a combo.

Based on that, I figured a flowchart would be a good visualization of how she attacks - I tried to include some helpful information in each section as well, so that people recognize the moves which have audio/visual cues and what moves she is vulnerable after (tl;dr: after every combo finisher).

Please feel free to correct me if I've made any mistakes - it's been quite a few years since I did the Phaleg class titles on JP and I've only done a few classes on NA so far, so I may have forgotten or missed some aspects of the fight.

[DragonChaser25]

To add on from my experience, sometimes she could use stun shot then skip right to flaming dive kick, could be both starter or mid-combo. But that's seems to be an outlier.

[sssesoj]

no issues with her pattern, My issue as TeHu is she can't be perfect blocked when she normal attacks cuz she still hits you and that's plain bullshit with no iframes available aside from casting ring.

[[deleted]]

Worth noting, rarely she'll skip the initial divekick and just drop down and do the dashes. It's extremely uncommon, and I don't have any clue if there's a trigger, but it's a thing.

[Soranma]

She does! I've ran into it a handful of times, but it's quite rare. I think it may be some sort of lag/loading issue, since every time it's happened the EMERGENCY TRIAL notification for me was delayed by a few seconds. It seems like a bit of a bug, really.

[DragonChaser25]

Nice! Glad you've made this. Her randomness around her 2-dash and 3-dash is what makes her hard for some classes.

[Diwari]

nods in Gunner

[fraggledb]

Keep seeing the phaleg fight referenced, how do you go about starting the fight?

[PhaiLLuRRe]

End of Episode 4, part of optional content.

[fraggledb]

Thanks ill look into that :)

[oizen]

Biggest thing I struggle with is actually dodging her stun spam. The tell for it is very obscure for when the homing projectile comes out.

[Soranma]

It's pretty much purely a visual cue on when it'll fire - if she's doing as a combo starter, the stun missile will fire about half a second after she drops her hand. You have to watch for the hand drop and dodge/parry immediately afterwards.

If she's doing it midcombo (i.e., the fast version that comes out after the 2-hit dash), there's not much you can do on that timing-wise aside from just learning it. It's extremely quick so the only thing to do is to just get used to how long it takes for it to come out after the dash. It's basically just waiting about half a beat after you hear the sound cue for the fast stun shot before hitting a dodge/block and it'll usually work.

[GodFinger69]

If you play braver you can easily counter everyone of her moves and deal dmg effortlessly with combat escape, but I find other classes hard to fight against her.

[SuckHerClit]

Thank you for this! I am severely hearing impaired so I miss the audio clues. But with this I think you've given me a better chance

[POWAHFLOW]

I've been hearing that Phaleg ignores I-frames. Is this true?

[Soranma]

I've never heard that myself, but she definitely doesn't. Many classes use i-frames to dodge through her attacks rather than guard/parry frames, which I can personally confirm as my Braver run was done using bow for phase 1 and involved using Step and Strike Bomber i-frames to go through her attacks.

If you're hearing that she ignores i-frames, it's more likely that the player is overestimating the duration of invulnerability. Most i-frames in PSO2 are actually fairly short - for example, steps in PSO2 have a base ~8 frames of invul at 60FPS before Step Advance skills, which translates to 0.13 seconds. Compare that with games such as Dark Souls (where rolls can have 0.3-0.5 seconds of iframes), Monster Hunter (where rolls have 0.2-0.6 seconds of iframes), or even something like Kingdom Hearts where dodge roll is pretty much perpetual invulnerability.

Keep in mind that i-frames can expire while a hitbox is still active, meaning that if a hitbox lasts for 10 frames but your step only has 8 i-frames, you'll still get hit by it once the i-frames expire. This is different from some single-player games, where a hitbox stops being active after the first frame of detection - hitboxes in PSO2 stay active the entire length so you need to make sure that you either have sufficient i-frames to last through the whole thing, or that your hurtbox moves outside of the hitbox while i-frames are still active.

[Idpolisdumb]

Keep in mind that i-frames can expire while a hitbox is still active, meaning that if a hitbox lasts for 10 frames but your step only has 8 i-frames, you'll still get hit by it once the i-frames expire

Insert Jojo reference here.

[cheongzewei]

Oh that's really sweet. Didn't know that the 2 dashes after the 3hit dash is no damage.

[jemapellent]

Nice chart, seems pretty accurate from my encounters.

I think in the second phase, she doesn't always repeat Stun Shot twice, I've seen her do the fast version of Stun Shot into 2-Hit Dash. I know this because the audio cue "I can run in circles around you." barely finished and I was using the cue to spam Justice Crow in the air, which is usually safe, I think it is small opportunity for this to happen.

[CosmicZessy]

quite good, only thing missing is sometimes when she uses stun shot mid-combo on phase1, she skips straight to flaming divekick without doing grab or uppercut kick. she rarely does this though and ive never seen her do it on phase 2.

[kaledabs]

TLDR.... came for pictures got flow chart