Taming Stormterror

Good Morning Folks! One of my favorite things about Genshin Impact are the boss fights. The game is full of these raid boss style encounters that reward a significant amount of good loot. Two of them are on weekly timers Andrius the Wolf god and Stormterror which in theory I hope you have already fought by this point as part of the story. Fair warning if you have NOT finished that step in the main story then this might give you some spoilers. The big wolf is awesome because you can bring your friends and quite honestly he is a cakewalk with multiple ranged characters. However Stormterror is a pain in the butt and something that both myself and Grace barely limped through.

As a result this has been something I have dreaded stepping foot in, and last night apparently I had some clarity. So far every boss fight in Genshin Impact has been challenging but at the same time very fair and if you understood the mechanics you were going to get through the fight regardless of your gear levels. This made me realize that we were likely doing the fight entirely wrong. The problem with Genshin Impact guides is that they are almost all YouTube videos, and the vast majority seem to be streams of people opening Gacha pulls. After some digging I found an excellent resource from one of the beta tests and if watching a video is your jam then I highly suggest checking it out.

For those who prefer a written guide, I am going to take stills from that video and talk through the process. One of the problems with the Stormterror fight is that you won’t have full control of your camera because it effectively puts you in a 2.5D encounter as you traverse a series of platforms left to right in front of the boss. Because of this ranged classes have a hard time doing normal damage or “white hitting” the boss, and since the guide suggested it I made a party of nothing but melee characters along with Barbara as a healer. This helped immensely, and now I will walk you through the basic mechanics of the fight.

At the beginning of the fight you are going to spend most of your time just avoiding getting hit. Stormterror will strafe the platform and you need to be preserving your stamina so you can dodge out of the way. I took another tip from the video and decided to use Kaeya as a “soak” or a character that I didn’t care that much about to use doing the dodge phases so I didn’t risk killing my highest damage characters which were Razor and Xiangling. There are going to be some wind sprites on the edges of the platform and you want to go ahead and activate those to start the wind currents going which will come into play in a later phase.

After a few minutes Storm Terror will slam his claws down onto the platform giving you an opportunity to dps them down. If you look at the health bar for the encounter you will see a smaller white bar below it which indicates the health of the claws. Your goal is to burn through these claws as fast as possible to trigger a phase shift. Like the video I started dpsing the right claw and very shortly after doing so Stormterror will start a breath attack that ultimately sweeps the platform. As this is beginning you want to dodge your way over to the left claw and begin burning as hard as you can to shift the phase. If you are of reasonable gear and you burn various DPS “E” attacks you can do this. I would hold your limit breaks or “Q” attacks for the next phase.

When you have burned through the claws, it will cause Stormterror to slump down onto the platform at which point you need to climb up on top of his neck and unleash everything you have on the glowing pink “scab”. This is the point where you want to hit your limit breaks if you have them saved up and cycle through any attacks that you might have available as well. This is the REAL burn phase of the encounter because it is the first time you have been able to do anything to the red bar indicating the health of Stormterror. In theory you should be able to get this down to about half before the next phase change.

Now here is the key to the fight, that I apparently originally missed in the times I have done it before. Stormterror is surrounded by a ring of platforms and he is going to do an attack that causes them to start cracking. If you stand on the ground during this phase you will take signficant damage over time. However the goal is now to find a clean platform and use the wind currents to safely make your way across the chasms between. In the video the guy just keeps going left until he finds a clean one and that is precisely what I did as well and it seemed to work. This will cause a reset of the phases and you are back to dodge the strafes, attack the claws and dodge the beam and then hop up on the back and in theory you should be able to finish it off in the next phase.

Once I knew what the hell I was doing I was able to finish off the fight last night without taking significant damage on any of my characters. This went from a fight that I dread to something that I can probably cakewalk my way through with way lower geared characters. Essentially here is the TL;DR of the keys to success as outlined in the excellent video.

• Bring a Melee Team
• Avoid taking damage until he slams claws down
• Burn claws while avoiding the breath attack
• Hop up on Back and Burn the “Scab”
• Glide left until you find a clean platform
• Start the process over by avoiding taking damage until claws phase

The reset of the Wolf and Dragon encounters is essentially in the wee hours of Monday morning each week. It is well worth doing and hopefully between the video that I keep linking and my text/screenshot break down this will give you the confidence to tackle the fight. Doing so this week managed to net me a second piece of Gladiator’s gear giving my Razor the excellent 2 piece bonus. At some point I will also do a write up on how I have approached the wolf encounter, but that one is considerably easier given that you can co-op it. For friends I am more than happy to ride along for wolf kills even though I have probably already gotten my rewards for the week.

That is one thing above all else that I really enjoy about this game is the way that they handle lockouts for encounters. You can always attempt something for free and bash your head against it as many times as you like until you figure it out without risk of spending currency on attempts. You don’t spend any of your resin until you actually receive loot, and similarly you can keep helping friends out with encounters as many times as you like without getting loot. So for Wolf boy I could do it over and over all night long even though I already got my loot for the week. So if you are a mutual and are struggling with some of these fights, hit me up and I am more than happen to help you through them.