Taima Five VR Strategy Guide MT

## Key Information:

The Masked Taimanin puts you in a battle against her alone on the same helicopter landing pad recycled from main quest 1-5. There are two phases to the fight, during the first phase the Masked Taimanin will fight by herself using mostly a few normal melee attacks. After her HP is depleted to 0, an unskippable cutscene will happen she'll take off her cape, grow stronger, and use special attacks. A peculiar characteristic of the Masked Taimanin is that **her attacks have a high critical hit rate** and can inflict massive damage on a whim.

### Masked Taimanin's First Phase:

* Taunts the player dramatically by saying "Kono teido-", wasting her action and leaving her open to attacks.
* Lunges forward with a single powerful strike in front of her.
* Swing her right arm backwards, then attacks twice from the right and then from the left.
* Jumps up high and slams the ground with her weapons dealing damage in an area upon landing and knocking you down.
* She can at any moment teleport to a distant target, however this will not happen if there's a character nearby her.

### Masked Taimanin's Second Phase:

All of her attacks from the first phase are retained and become stronger, In addition she also gains the following moves listed down below.

* Pulls herself in and throws four knives in front of her in an arc which explode after a set distance. Characters directly in front of her will receive all 4 hits at the same time for massive damage.
* Jumps backwards and throws several homing Kunai that track one or several of your characters.
* Starting at step 6: she'll idle and a purple ring will appear around her feet, with a beeping sound cue. At the end of the cue, she'll summon several clones in a circle around herself. They can all use her normal attacks and patterns from the 1st phase, but have significantly lower health. She will not summon the clones if she gets interrupted by the time the countdown ends, for instance if her armor is broken or she becomes disabled.
* Immediately after summoning her clones, if she's not interrupted, she will teleport to the furthest corner and spin like a beyblade, flinging waves of large spinning blades in 8 directions for several seconds. If you stun her before she teleports, or displace her out of the corner after she beings spinning using a skill such as Rin's Volt Hook or Shizuru's Whip Grip this attack will be canceled. If there are any clones alive, she can skip the summoning and immediately teleport to spin and fling.
* Starting at step 11: she'll pull out a big-ass shuriken and throw it. It takes a wide area and moves slowly towards one character, following them for several seconds and proving to be almost unavoidable. Deals high damage over time.
* After her HP drops a certain amount she will power up and gain a buff to her speed. While she's powering up she becomes completely invulnerable for several seconds. She doesn't gain much from this buff, however it's effective at waiting out your buffs and debuffs.

An important thing to note is that during her second phase she actually has lower critical hit resistance and weaker super armor, making her more vulnerable to attacks.

## General Strategy

The first phase of the Masked Taimanin is fairly straightforward, compromising of only a few melee attacks, which are fairly easy to read. At all stages she has a tendency to to waste a lot of time taunting, however **it's not uncommon for her first action to be walking towards you and attacking, which gives an excellent window to trigger an extreme dodge**. This doesn't mean the first phase is entirely free, however. Masked Taimanin's attacks do quite a lot of damage, and they happen with very little startup, often starting and coming out during your skills. This is particularly risky as her high critical hit rate means she can potentially one-shot an ally if the parameter boost her attack or if you're a few steps too high for your characters. Regardless, a valid strategy still is is to surround her and overwhelm her early on to advance into the second phase quickly.

When the second phase arrives that's when things get interesting. She'll gain powerful projectiles which can surprise players with ranged characters as well as a faster rate of attack. She'll deal a few attacks before starting the countdown for her clones to come out and depending on your damage relative to her defenses she will either summon clones that you'll have to deal with, as well as briefly turning the game into a Touhou rip-off, or you'll get a golden opportunity to damage her and hopefully finish her off. This phase is particularly dangerous because she has several attacks that are particularly unavoidable. Her homing kunai, her gigantic homing chakram, her bullet-hell projectiles, and the swarm of clone can easily overwhelm any player let alone the AI partners you bring. As such the best strategy is **preventing her from attacking, be it through your offense or disruption**.

An important weakness Masked Taimanin has that other VR bosses do not have are that she has **absolutely no resistance to debuffs**, as in In both phases she's susceptible to all kinds and for their full duration. Characters with skills that apply debuffs such as Tokiko and Rin, as well as weapons that apply debuffs such as Rebellious weapons prove very effective in dealing a lot of damage and cycling through her phases faster. Disruptive status effect such as Disarm from Saika and Terrorize from Astaroth can also make fights safer. However, one must however be very careful at all times when dealing with her for her high damage output and her critical hit rate can instantly wipe a party in what would seem to be at first glance an easy victory. No matter what strategy you choose to approach the Masked Taimanin **respect her at all times** and be ready to dodge her attacks whenever you can. If you dare give her an inch, she will take a mile.

## Dominating the Taimanin

The ideal way to conquer this fight is by exploiting Masked Taimanin's two major weaknesses of this boss fight. The first being the fact that for most of the battle she's completely alone, meaning all of your attack and AI partners will focus exclusively her and as such applying effects with attacks from AI controlled allies is much more consistent than in other fights. The second being her vulnerability to debuffs, particularly **Speed Decrease**. Stacking several instances of speed decrease can freeze her to a complete halt. A few examples of characters and builds with speed decrese in their skillsets include the following:

* Murasaki is a reliable source of strong and consistent slowdown. By herself, she can slow MT almost completely using Tentacle Anchor with green set effect, as well as looping it though short cooldown of the move and also capitalizing through her very high damage output as well as healing and Tentacle Mine as a failsafe.
* Shizuru using a main red + 2 blue skill sets as well can apply slow by 20% for 10 seconds using Chasing Strike while also decreasing defense with Whip Shot and Rose Rondo to improve your damage through the fight.
* Felicia can equip a single green supporter and 2 blue supporters to have Slaying Spree decrease enemy speed by 30% for 15 seconds.
* Yukikaze on a pure red red build can give Hiraiten 30% speed decrease for 15 seconds, while also having a high damage output as well as safety of attacking from a distance.
* Emily can also provide high amounts of slow by using Ground Shock and Drone Shocker with 2+ red, for roughly 40% slow with almost 100% uptime, however this comes at the cost of Gravity Hold for sustain.
* Kirara on a blue set has several sources of slow such as 20% for 10 seconds from Blossoming Fog as well as 10% for 10 seconds Snow Veil for speed debuff. Her extreme dodge is extremely powerful reducing both speed and defense for over 50% for 7 seconds
* Shisui with a red build also has 20% and 10% speed debuff in Arrowing Light and Guardian Charge while being in general a very bulky and sustainable character.

There are several ways to inflict speed decrease and it's not necessary to dedicate your entire team around this. Simply rearranging your usual desired team in order to include speed decrease within your skillsets should improve your performance in this fight by a lot. You must however still be very careful as any minor slipup in your attacking pattern or your AI simply deciding not to cooperate can spell the end of any run to a critical hit. Be aware of when she could attack and respect her attacks as you see them coming.

Other very reliable, albeit specific strategies to prevent MT from ever attacking is by permanently disarming though the use of a Disarm applier like Serika Tachibana or Ise Nodoka and amplifying the effect with [Lil' Witch] Su Jinglei. You can also try breaking her Super Armor though the effects of Supporters such as [White Feather] Asuka which has a 10% per hit of a skill to disable Super Armor or [Draconic] Su Jinglei which shoots a projectile that disables the boss's super armor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nML84TdWLuQ

In this video, the player has [White Feather] Asuka equipped on Maika, and with some luck is able to instantly break MT's super armor. You'll notice that MT is able to begin channeling attacks every now and then, but gets interrupted by super armor break. This is capitalized by Kurenai using disarm on the main supporter to increase the consistency of the disruption, as well as using the party-wide speed buff from Kurenai's Pure Heart weapon.

https://twitter.com/0918aju/status/1640677630847643649

In this video, the player equipped Emily with [White Feather] Asuka so each hit of Homing Missile has a chance of wiping super armor, and he racked up as much damage as possible on Astaroth by equipping Mido Haruka (the SR supporter) on main as well as a bunch of damage boosters while he slowed down Masked Taimanin with Murasaki.