The Qadistu, the new villains introduced via Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance's all-new Canon🍬 of Vengeance story route, succeed in pulling off both things that any SMT antagoni🎃st must do: look cool and give players a rough time.

Indeed, the boss battle against Eisheth in the Shinagawa region sets the ball rolling with fast attacks that can quickly chip away heaps of HP. Eisheth is swift and deadly; the key t🍒o survival is to outpace that alacrity with an even faster barrage of your own. While plenty of party compositions can make it happen, our gꦇuide will fill you in on how we went about it.

Preparing For Eisheth

A little background first: Eisheth is fought a little of the way into SMT 5's Shinagawa region, and, as the game mercifully does on a routine bꦓasis, it will ౠwarn you ahead of time that the going is about to get rough.

Before you get to it, avoid bringing anyone along who focuses on fire- and dark-based attacks, as Eisheth is resistant to fire and dark. On the flip side, Eisheth is weak to force attacks.

Eisheth's innate skill is Qadistu Savagery. This will raise the odds of her inflicting critlcal hits, and it's compounded in deadliness by Eisheth's +6 affinity modifier for her slew of physical-based attacks.

The biggest challenge with Eisheth, at least in our experience, is the fact that her unique ability, Voracious Salvation, is already a heavy HP-draining move but it's that much more dangerous when the target has an ailment.

In true Shin Megami Tensei fashion, this is designed to synergize with something scary: namely, Toxic Cloud. This party-wide move aims to inflict your team with poison, which, yeah - it's an ailment, all right.

All of Eisheth's other attacks can hit hard. Put together, then, she's a simple-to-grasp sort of boss who you nonetheless do not want to lose momentum against. We want to bring force-dealing allies and obliterate her health before thingཧs get frightening.

We also want Phys Dampeners if possible. You can sometimes find them as buried treasure for your demon guides to point out to you, and they're occasionally drops after fights. You can only hold three at a time, but that'll be plenty.

Battling Eisheth

If you've got those Phys Dampeners handy, start out by tossing one out there to soften the earliest blow(s). This will nullify one physical attack for all allies.

We brought Anahita with us, and used Wind Breath to take advantage of Eisheth's force weakness. Since we had Tao and Yoko with us to also use items, we tossed Force Shards as well.

That said, maybe don't have them both in your party. We didn't know what we were getting into at the time, and while it's worth having two people who can use items, Yoko's offensive output wasn't especially useful here.

You'll probably run into a situation in which someone is going to need to serve a consistent healing role, because Eisheth, once she gets going, will likely strike for 50+ damage several times to a single target with some of these attacks.

It's best, then, to head into this with the expectation that you're going to lose at least someone before it's over. Here's how it went for us - we got Eisheth's HP down to about a third with relative ease before her little bo⛄ut of payback ℱbegan in earnest.

Since you'll be better prepared than we were, you'll likely fare better - whittle away that HP with an Omagatoki: Critical right from the jump, launching force-based attacks.

If Eisheth doesn't go down fast enough to avoid suffering losses, then at least she'll be close to bowing out once you've gotten replacements in, and you're back in the zone.