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This freakish scientist wants to experiment on your party members with certifiably dangerous results. It has a whole slew of elemental attacks that reduce your elemental resistance and a deadly end-of-turn attack that inflicts damage equal to the damage you dealt to it on that turn. Painful…

Apparati’s attacks include Electrolysis, a strong lightning-based attack on your party that causes weakness to fire, Flame Test, which inflicts fire-based damage on random targets and makes them weak to water, and Electrolyte Solution, a strong water-based attack that adds weakness to lightning.

At the end of each turn, if you inflicted any damage to Apparati, it will use Action-Reaction to deal the same amount of damage to a random character. On occasions, it will use Pole Shift to reverse the polarity of stat boosts for itself and your party members.

Evidentally, if you don’t want Apparati to have its way, the Astrologian’s Elemental Barrier is a must for this battle. Since Apparati frequently causes weakness to elements, you may want to consider casting it together with the Mist Spellcraft so you don’t need to keep casting it nearly every turn.

Besides that, Action-Reaction is the biggest nuisance in this battle. There are at least two ways to counter it. One, you can boost your characters’ HP to over 9999, allowing them to survive the hit. Characters in the Guardian job with the Catmancer’s HP 20% Up can achieve this, for example.

Or two, focus all your attacks in a single turn, then resurrect your fallen comrade with resurrection spells/items or the Time Mage’s Reraise. If you’re following this plan, you should kit out your healer with speed and agility-boosting gear and abilities to help them outrun Apparati.

Having found a way to survive the crazy experiments, it shouldn’t be hard to send Apparati out of the lab. Its defences are mediocre and you can exploit its wind weakness or use your humanoid-slaying weapons. In general, your favourite 9999 damage-dealing attacks should suffice.

Another way you can handle Apparati without fear is falling back on the reliable one tank and three ghost mage build (see our Recommended Builds section, a few pages earlier). If you follow it correctly, you can KO Apparati in a single turn, without having to worry about Action-Reaction.

That said, if this is your first time, you should have somebody with the Learning ability equipped and let Apparati use Electrolysis on your party so you can learn it as a Cat Mastery technique. If you’re fielding ghost mages, your lonesome tank will have to fulfil that task, of course.

Neo Version¶

If you’ve tackled Neo Turtle Dove or Neo Redshirt, you should know what to expect of Neo Apparati. This powered up madman fights the same, but has superior stats, including normally untouchable defences. Like that’s going to stop us.

The obvious ways to deal with this are to use attacks that pierce Physical Defence, of which there are numerous, such as the Hawkeye’s Harpoon, Catmancer’s Sonic Boom, Monk’s Pressure Point, Templar’s Desperation, etc. Or equip the Black Mage’s Pierce Magic Defence.

Like the previous two Neo Ba’als, you’ll probably have the best luck by fielding the same tank and three mages that you used to defeat the regular version, but making the painful decision to remove Chainspell and wisely adding Pierce Magic Defence instead.

Because Neo Apparati has a lot more HP and the removal of Chainspell reduces your damage output, you can’t defeat the shiny new Apparati in a single turn, so your tank needs to actually… tank hits. To add to the problem, there’s the issue of Action-Reaction.

One possible solution is to make sure your tank has over 9999 HP. Although it may sound hard, it’s actually pretty easy for Level 99 characters with the Catmancer’s HP 20% Up and/or the Life Ring accessory. Tiz and Magnolia can even achieve this naturally in the Guardian job.

Next, your tank should equip the Catmancer’s job command, Freelancer’s Physical Defence 20% Up, Knight’s Dual Shields, Astrologian’s Prescience and be geared for optimal Physical Defence. Meanwhile, your Ventriloquism Wizard should have the Astrologian’s Limit Breaker and healing spells.

Have your tank start by using the Catmancer’s Purrfect Stance. Because of their insane Physical Defence, they should be able to casually shrug off most of Apparati’s attacks, even when weak to them. If Apparati uses Pole Shift, simply use Purrfect Stance again.

Before your ghost mages attack, have one of them cast Re-raise on your tank as a safety net. After unleashing your fury. Apparati will use Action-Reaction to deal 9999 damage to your tank, but since they took no damage earlier, they will have 9999 HP to spare. Afterwards, heal and repeat.