Final Fantasy XIII

Class: A
HP: 2,475,000

If you completed the Titan’s Trials / Faultwarrens, you will have already fought a Zirnitra and may be familiar with the strategy already. Here are some tips for defeating it again though as these enemies are very tough.

Zirnitra has three attacks that you need to be aware of. Two of them are regular attacks that it will use throughout the fight followed by its most powerful attack, “Feeding Stoop”. More on that later.

Its two regular attacks are made up of an AoE attack where it will fly down towards your party and attack in a sort of whirlwind-like motion that will hit any of your party members that are in range of the primary target. Its other attack is a poison volley that looks like a ball of green spit being thrown at one of your characters. This attack will remove some of the positive status effects of the party member it hits and it has a chance to inflict Poison (which will need to be removed by a Medic).

Zirnitra will tend towards using the poison volley attack when your party members have buffs that can be removed, and due to the high amount of damage dealt with its other whirlwind-type physical attack, the preferred option is to keep buffs active on your party members so it keeps using the single target volley. Its for this reason, and due to the general difficulty of the fight, that you should consider initiating the fight after using a Fortisol and Aegisol.

Its most powerful attack is called Feeding Stoop. This attack deals an incredibly high amount of damage to a single party member, hitting three times in succession. This attack is best dealt with by switching your party into a paradigm with a Sentinel in a paradigm like Protection. Assuming your party leader is Fang, time your paradigm swap with enough time for your other two party members to heal Fang up, use Challenge to get the attention of Zirnitra, and be ready to use Mediguard as soon as you see the words “Feeding Stoop” up on screen. Zirnitra uses “Feeding Stoop” at a fairly regular and consistent pace which means you can anticipate when it will be coming and get your party ready.

The only other key to this fight is to swap into paradigms that have Saboteurs and Synergists to keep buffs up on your party and debuffs (Deshell and Deprotect) active on the mark. From there, try to build up towards a Stagger and then bring it down quickly. Check out the video to see how it can be done:

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