Etrian Odyssey 3 HD: Anemone

This fight sucks.

It's not hard so much as incredibly annoying because Anemone doesn't let you play the game. Its main mechanic is to bind your party with Tentacle Grab, and then follow up with Tentacle Suck, which deals strike damage to everyone, and the damage doubles for each bind on the party. So clear off those binds ASAP. Also it heals itself when it does that. Not only that, it's heavily resistant to physicals at 25% multipliers, but it is weak to elementals at 150% multipliers.

When you get down to 60% it introduces Cnidocyte Rush which can inflict Poison or Paralysis. Bad enough on its own, but it likes to combo this with Tentacle Reap. Which normally has a 1% chance to instantly kill your party, but if any party members have any ailments, that chance jumps up to a whopping 50%! In short it's another disable focused boss and you want to clear off any disables ASAP.

My strategy ended up being spamming Theriaca As for a few turns as I did not have a Monk with Unbind, and the unpolished Accumulative Resistance system in 3 meant that doing this for a few turns would grant me heavy resistance or immunity to the binds, at which point my party was free to beat the crap out of this sea creature at their leisure. And at the start of the fight, Anemone has a whopping 79% chance to spam Tentacle Grab if no one has any binds. Works pretty nicely unless Tentacle Reap managed to kill someone, but wasting several turns at the start doing that nonsense made this fight way less annoying to deal with. (Yeah there's a reason why 4 doesn't really have disable focused bosses like this, where instead they're just a part of their toolkit and they all just elect to beat the crap out of your party instead, with disables being a supplementary mechanic instead of a core mechanic.)

Anemone's conditional drop is to not kill it with elemental damage. Your options are Almighty damage, ailment damage (yeah good luck with that!), or just smack it with a hard hitting physical once it's almost dead since Anemone isn't immune to them, just heavily resistant.

[acanthus]

Ah, a boss battle where spamming 40 or so items at the beginning is a valid strategy 😂

[captainjobo]

I think it's kind of funny anemone has an achievement for it but kraken doesn't

[tomatopawah]

That 1% instakill chance is one of the most obnoxious things in the game

[ChaosMissile]

>the unpolished Accumulative Resistance system in 3
The heck does that mean?