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Alongside Memory of Chaos and Pure Fiction, one of the hardest content you’ll find inHonkai: Star Railis when a new weekly boss a.k.a. Echo of War gets released. The difficulty of these battles can be understood by the fact that you almost always get an external source of help to get you through.
This was proven once again during the Version 2.2 update when The Great Septimus a.k.a Sunday got released. While he is a difficult boss to beat, you can make things much easier if you keep a few things in mind.
How To Unlock The Great Septimus Boss Fight
If you’re just starting out in Honkai: Star Rail, you’ll have quite a tough time getting to the point where you can start farming this Echo of War. You have tofinish not one, not two, but three full stories for three planets: Herta Space Station, Jarilo-VI, and the Xianzhou Luofu.
Once you’re finished with these, you’ll finally be able to embark on Penacony. However, if you want to reach this boss fight, you’ll also have to reach the main ending of this region,which will also unlock the Penacony Grand Theater for youalongside this weekly boss.
Even after unlocking this domain, you can only farm it three times a week at maximum. Thisnets you a total of nine dropsat the highest difficulty.
The Great Septimus First Phase Guide
As soon as you enter the boss battle, you’ll find onegiant figure in the middle alongside four fairies called Echoes of Faded Dreams. This boss both looks and feels intimidating during battle because of how much pressure he can create. Here are some of the main mechanics you have to remember in this fight:
The second point makes it important tofocus on the echoes as much as possibleto break their Toughness.
However, you wouldn’t want to completely ignore the boss since you canonly get the shield when you remove his Toughness bar.
The boss can deal both minor and major single-target and multi-target damage with his attacks,but the main attack in this phase is arguably the toughest one. In this attack, the boss summons all the echoes to instantly deal a ton of Imaginary DMG to your team members.
However, the echoeswon’t deal damage if they can’t act due to being Weakness Broken. This attack also regenerates all echoes' Weakness bars at the end. Other than this attack, another problematic attack from the boss is when he has a chance of putting one of your characters in the Alien Dream state.
This state prevents the character from taking action during their turn for a few turns whilehealing them at the start of every turn.
However, a character in this statetakes a lot more damage from attacks. After one attack, the state automatically goes away.
The Great Septimus Second Phase Guide
The Great Septimus' second phase stays largely similar to the first one, but it’ll be a lot harder for you to get past thisdue to an added ability and an added effect to the Ultimate. Whenever the boss uses the new ability, he gains a shield that’s represented with a white par on top of his HP bar.
When this shield is present, the boss takes decreased DMG,increases his own DMG, and prevents his Toughness from being shredded. He becomes quite formidable when the shield is active, and the last thing you’d want is for the boss to activate his Ultimate ability with it present.
This makes it a lot more important tobreak the shields of the Echoesas fast as possible.
When you enter the second phase, the boss already starts with his Ultimate ability, and this ability can be activated again after a charge turn. While it looks quite pleasing, you’d want to avoid this activation as much as you can by breaking the boss' and the echoes' Toughness.
Third Phase Guide (Sunday)
Unlike the first and the second phases, you’ll witnessentirely different mechanics during the third phase of this boss. The name will also change to “Embryo of Philosophy”, Sunday. In this phase, the boss only has three abilities, which include the Talent, Charge up, and the Ultimate.
Due to the talent, Sunday gains all seven combat types as its weakness during this phase,which allows you to shred the Toughness bar with all your characters. With his charge-up attack, he enters a state where he consistently gains stacks, which go up to seven as seen right below his health bar.
In the charge-up state, Sunday takes action after every ally’s action, giving himself a stack with every turn.
Youcan’t apply any turn delay effects on himduring this time.
Once Sunday reaches seven stacks, he unleashes a humongous attack thatdeals countless instances of DMG to all allies and also ignores their DEF. Another important thing to note here is that Sunday gains a lot more multipliers on his Toughness bar during this phase, even though the actual Toughness remains the same.
The idea behind this phase is to break as many Toughness bars as possible to get the shield stacked up,which will help you tank the damage from the Ultimate. You’d normally need to bring the boss down to one or two stacks of Toughness bar if you want to have enough shield for this.
Best Characters To Beat Sunday
After learning exactly how the boss performs, the next step is to find the best team to defeat it based on your account’s availability. Thankfully, thebest character you can use against this boss is completely freeto everyone, and comes in theform of Harmony Trailblazer. This is majorly because of how they can capitalize on the Weakness Broken enemies.
While attacking Weakness Broken enemies after using their Ultimate, you’ll deal extra Super Break DMG based on theToughness DMG of the attack and the character’s Break Effect. Other than that, Aventurine is also a cheat character for this fight since he almost makes it too easy even on auto-battle.
Not only does he have a stackable shield, but his follow-up also makes itquite easy to get rid of the echoes' Toughness.
The third character of choice is Ruan Mei because of her increased Weakness Break efficiency, which is already good enough,but becomes even better when paired with Harmony Trailblazer. Moreover, the reason for follow-up attackers to be good is that the follow-up attacks don’t count as character actions, so the boss doesn’t take a turn after one in the last phase.
Apart from everything mentioned above, you can use any character that has abig impact on theenemy’s Toughness bar.
