Sat Oct 11, 2025 6:09 am by CMADR
Section 1: Dragon
The following guide is needlessly detailed but the boss was so frustrating on my first go around when I didn’t really understand what was happening, so I’m making it detailed to the point of handholding. Now that I know what to do, I basically beat the boss every try on reattempts, so it should be simple if you know what to do (1-3 tries at most).
The first of the 5 special bosses in Makara is in the Ratatouille fight on tile (60,54). The boss is called Dragon, and is essentially a clone of Teostra in every way except for its special ability Dragon’s Anger. This ability activates when Dragon gets hit with a status effect, and will cure him of the status condition and give him a special status where his damage ramps up every turn and ignores any attack drops you have placed on him.
This might not be entirely accurate as there is no actual description, so this is just my experience. Either way, he becomes basically unkillable at this point and you have lost the fight if it comes to this. Point being, do not put any status conditions on him ever. This includes Barbary’s hypothermia, Sage’s group bind, and Demonmare’s hypnosis. Notably, if he statuses himself (Grus reflecting an attack back onto himself), he will take the burn damage and not activate the special status.
Team Selection
The team selection should include Grus and Hippo. Nearly every single person who has beat the boss has had those two starters, with the exception of Water Spirit replacing Hippo for one person. That being said, Hippo *feels* like a necessity here, and Grus 100% is a requirement for the fight. The remaining two are more flexible. I personally used Obsidianess and Barbary to round out the 4, but other people have tried Barbary Sage, Gargoyle Barbary, etc. Team selection should focus on mons strong enough to beat Cerberus and the Rat. Cerberus is fairly standard this far into the game, and with the following strategy you should have a full health Grus by the time both Dragon and enemy Hippo are dead. Basically, anything works as your last two, but I highly recommend Obsidianess and Barbary as they make the fight very easy.
Strategy Breakdown
The strategy is fairly simple: stall with Grus and stack matk boosts while you kill both the enemy Hippo and Dragon together. This guide will get a little nerdy with move order, but if you follow the strategy of using Hippo to lower the enemy attack, heal with Grus when needed, you can’t go wrong.
Turn 1 the Hippo will go for Gnar and the Dragon will go with Heat Wave (group attack), which will nearly always burn you. Since Dragon moves first, you should go with Water Flow on Grus to instantly cure the burn before it does any damage, and Gnar with your own Hippo. Your #1 priority should be to preserve health on Hippo, since regenerating with Grus is trivial but Hippo doesn’t have good reliable healing.
The enemy Hippo attack pattern is: Gnar, Taunt, Taunt, Gnar, Taunt, Strike (and then repeats indefinitely). This will always be the case unless your hippo stuns theirs, in which case it will move down the order depending on where you are. This isn’t super relevant aside from a couple small tricks that I’ll get into shortly.
My Hippo had level 2 swallow. Obviously the higher the better, but because it was only level 2, you cannot reliably heal from your own attacks, and you often get Swallowed by the enemy Hippo in return. Therefore, you want to limit the number of times you use your attack as Hippo. Basically, never use it if you can.
As I said before, the Hippo attack pattern is guaranteed. By turn 6, you are similarly unable to use anything but Strike, so you’re forced to attack. If you’re in this spot, ALWAYS AIM FOR THEIR HIPPO. Yes, you will lose health from Swallow, but the risk of striking the Dragon and then hitting the low % stun chance will end your battle since it gives him his special ability status.
You have a couple workarounds. First, on turn 4 (when their hippo is guaranteed to use Gnar the second time) you can choose to strike the Dragon instead of Gnaring yourself. I know I just said to not do this, but because it’s turn 4, if you do end up stunning the Dragon you can simply reset the battle and not lose that much time. Doing this sets you up for another 10 turns of worry-free Gnar + Taunt before you’re forced to Strike again.
The second option is just to strike Hippo. This becomes a problem later into the fight as you slowly lose health on your own Hippo, which leaves the third option. You can swap in Barbary (or whoever else) on the turn you run out of moves besides Strike on hippo, and then swap Hippo back the very next turn to gain back pp. This is better later into the fight after you have already stacked many Gnars so they don’t do much damage to your switch in.
Now on the other end, Hippo will not take any damage from Dragon except through burns. That means you need to watch for the burns and heal them with Grus’s Water Flow move immediately. Dragon’s Heat Wave move will guarantee a burn if it hits, so you should try to save Water Flow for that as much as possible. Alternatively, if Grus is ever burned but Hippo isn’t, do not use Water Flow to remove the burn. Water Flow should only be used for Hippo since Grus will always heal passively during the match and never be low hp even with a few burns.
Water Flow pp and Heat Wave pp are both 3, so when you get back Water Flow, Heat Wave is also ready. Dragon will also always go for Heat Wave when it’s ready, so you can use Water Flow when it’s 3/3 and time it perfectly to cure Heat Wave’s burn that very turn, and when Water Flow is back to 3/3 you can go for it immediately to negate Dragon’s Heat Wave.
This works, and is fairly reliable. However, there are slight optimizations. First, you can time the Hippo switch strat from earlier to a turn when Dragon goes for Heat Wave, taking the burn on Barbary or whoever else. Then, you simply don’t use Water flow on Grus at all and eat the burn until the next cycle. This banks one extra Water Flow for use when Hippo is burned on a random attack.
The second work around is the fact that Hippo will cure burn if it activates Swallow, so if you happen to have a maxed out Swallow, Dragon’s first attack burning you simply doesn’t matter since you always Swallow him back. Using this, you can Strike to cure yourself of burn. This isn’t a great idea though, since you might get Swallowed by their Hippo and end up taking more damage than had you just used Water Flow.
You can also try to get lucky and reflect back Dragon’s Heat Wave. Basically, you stagger when you use Water Flow to 1 turn after Dragon uses Heat Wave. Doing this means you will always take 1 turn of burn, but I like to fish for this chance if my hippo has a lot of hp remaining. If you get lucky, where Dragon’s attack gets reflected, or if your Hippo dodged, or if the burn didn’t activate, you save an entire 3 pp of water flow for use later in the battle.
Now as far as killing the mons, you only begin to do damage with Grus after a couple stacked matk boosts. Knowing the Hippo attack pattern, you can time your Grus’s group attack when Hippo is using Gnar/Strike to bypass his Taunt. However, you should opt to single target the Dragon early on in the fight when the Hippo isn’t Taunting, because you want to get Dragon down to 0 to activate its revive ability first. Your goal is to kill Hippo and Dragon at the same time, ideally on the same turn but within 2 turns at the worst. Because of Hippo’s taunt, you can always guarantee to not hit the Dragon if you get him down to his ability early on and focus the Hippo if he has more hp. But you can’t guarantee not hitting the Hippo if you accidentally got him lower than Dragon.
This isn’t too complicated, just balance attacking both while prioritizing hitting Dragon with the single target attack when you can to get his revive ability out of the way.
Towards the end of the fight, when both guys are low, you should start saving Gnars. On my try, I had 7/3 Gnars and killed both Hippo and Dragon with Grus’s group attack. My Grus was full health, and my hippo was around 15-20%. I then got off 2 Gnars on Cerb + Rat before Hippo died. Your goal should be to get as many Gnars on Cerb as possible before Obsidianess comes in.
The end game is easy. Obsidianess + Grus should either kill Cerb outright or leave him with low enough heath that Barbary coming in cleans up, and you clean up the Rat with Grus + Barbary which he cannot deal with. There’s a bit of RNG here where if Obsidianess doesn’t inflict bleed or stun ever, or if Cerb hard targets Grus instead, you could potentially lose. But if Cerb is focusing Grus, swapping it out for Barbary usually gets it to retarget to Obsidianess.
