TL;DR – Pick the Otherworldy Portal color closest to entrance. Place Elemental Gates near the entrance. Kill all gates except the chosen Portal color, and hide behind the chosen gate for the wipe mechanic.

For veteran players, this is similar to both TSHM Yana’s colors mechanics and SSHM Pahoegar’s pillars mechanic.

Otherworldly Portals

(Similar to TSHM Yana’s colors) After dropping his HP below 95%, there will be Big Orange, Blue, and Green Portals spinning around the map counter-clockwise. (After 55% or below, there will be a 4th Big Purple Portal as well.)

PLEASE NOTE THAT: These Big Portals completely circles around the map at exactly 48 seconds, regardless of the number of Elemental Gates circling around.

Elemental Gates

(Similar to SSHM Pahoegar’s pillars) As soon as you see those messages,

“I’ve been too easy on you”

“Balbatos summons elemental gates!”

3 random party members will have purple orb above their head and a 6-second debuff . (After 55%, 4 random party members will have purple orb.) After 4~5 seconds (as debuff timer goes from 2 to 1 second), there will be an elemental gate placed on them facing the center.Note: We recommend placing the gates close to the entrance, towards the center of the room, not stacked on each other.

Immediately after this will be a small AoE beneath each individual player, these AoEs can remove the Elemental Gates placed down earlier. Removal all the gates except for the “safe color” gate. Make sure to leave 1 Elemental Gate left or else you will fail the next part of the mechanic.



BIG WIPE MECHANIC (MUST READ)

The boss will go to the center of the room, say Time to end this! and begin the wipe mechanic. This is similar to the Curse Ritual in VoK, but everyone MUST hide behind the chosen Elemental Gate that was placed down earlier. This mechanic cannot be iframed since it lasts around 3 seconds. The Elemental Gate will “warp” the AoE that came down to one of the portals circling the room, color corresponding. The outer portal which spits the AoE out will leave a Poisonous Field on the ground which does 100k ticks of damage, this last the entire fight (very similar to ABHM Krakatox Demokron Virus puddle, but worse).

PLEASE NOTE: The time it takes for Elemental Gate to leave a streak on the ground from Balbatos saying “I’ve been too easy on you!” is about 22~24 seconds. I will come back to this later. Cannot be iFramed, Cannot be Blocked.

Not even Smoke Bomb, Recall and Warp Barrier will save you.

Instant Death.

Left: Safe behind the Elemental Gate. Right: Big Blue Otherworldly Portal leaves a streak.



PRO TIP: Don’t be too greedy with DPS.

120 Degree Cone – Immediately after the wipe mechanic, Balbatos will randomly target a party member and put a large cone AoE, which instantly kills anyone inside that AoE. 200k Flat Damage PER TICK.

Cannot be iFramed. Cannot be Blocked.

Now that we’ve covered all mechanics, let’s gather the “PLEASE NOTE:” parts from the explanations above:

Big Otherworldly Portals completely circles around the map at exactly 48 seconds, regardless of the number of Elemental Gates circling around. That means they are rotating around the map at the rate of 7.5° per second. I will come back to this later. Best place to put Small Elemental Gates is somewhere near inner circle. I will also come back to this later. The time it takes for Elemtanal Gate to leave a streak on the ground from Balbatos saying “I’ve been too easy on you!” is about 22~24 seconds. I will come back to this later.

The Otherworldly Portals are located like this (48 Increments of 7.5°) and move in a counter-clockwise direction.

You can see that Orange, Blue, and Green Otherworldly Portals are equidistant by 120° (If there is Purple Elemental Gate as well, then it’s 90° apart). Since Otherworldly Portals rotate Counter-Clockwise, the timer is also listed counter clockwise.If Balbatos started “I’ve been too easy on you!” mechanic at this moment, then we look 22~24 seconds ahead to predict the streak placement, the corresponding colors will be at:

This means that, if you want to safely succeed in doing this mechanic, the placement of Small Elemental Gate you want to hide behind MUST NOT be across (about 165°~180° around the circle) from the Big Otherworldly Portal. If you mess this up, you can get killed by the giant poison lane!

Now we know the logic behind this, let’s move on to actually doing the mechanic without the maths.

How-To: So then what should the whole party do?

Choose a point of reference: the entrance to the third boss room is a good point.

Then, whenever there’s a “I’ve been too easy on you!” mechanic, someone (preferably Healer) should look at that point (the entrance), and say the color of the Otherworldly Portal closest to that point (example: “O” for Orange, “B” for Blue, “G” for Green, and “P” for Purple for quick chat spam).

Now, to figure out where would be a safe spot to place the Elemental Gates, we need to know where the green straight puddle will be placed. Based on how fast the Portals move and which Portal color we choose, we can predict the puddle location as being straight across the room (about 165°~180° around the circle). So let’s say that we have this scenario with 3 Elemental Gates:

The dotted gray line means that, you want to fight the boss under that imaginary line, so if you have some reference point, then fight somewhere near it. When Balbatos says “I’ve been too easy on you!”, then immediately look at the reference point and choose the closest color. When you place the small Elemental Gate, try to place it somewhere near the inner circle of the map shown below. Then, after confirming which one of those are Orange, LEAVE ORANGE ALONE and erase Blue and Green. If you wonder why, this is because our target was orange, but if we had something else, you end up limiting the combat zone, potentially causing wipe. See image below:

Now, you can see that, if you keep doing this, you will most likely stack most of the streaks nicely. However, if you’re somehow panicking and think that there are two Elemental Gates equally near the reference point, choose the one that is approaching it. In other words:

Now, the reason why I recommend placing Small Elemental Gates near the inner circle of the map is because of the 120° Cone. Let’s say the person with secondary aggro was standing behind the Small Elemental Gate and compare the placement of Green with Blue:

Even without knowledge of Geometry, you can already tell that, the closer you are to the boss, the easier it is to get out. You actually have entire 4 seconds between that indicator showing up and getting hit (and dying) from this attack, but if you are too close to the wall, you may reduce the chance for you and your party to survive this attack due to how far you have to travel.

If you clear the dungeon (kill Balbatos) for the first time, you unlock the achievement:

“No Prisoners”