Lumine fights the Raiden Shogun completely by herself- no food/buffs either!
After Azhdaha, I felt like this was the next logical target.
This is my new favorite boss fight in the game after all!
Now. Doing this made me learn a few things about the fight.
First of all, neither Anemo nor Geo can stop the insta-kill attack from happening. Thus that leaves Electro Lumine as the only possible option for this challenge (Getting her up to speed took quite a bit of resources, but it was worth it lol). Sadly, it seems Electro is not quite as good of a damage dealer as Geo Traveler, causing the fight to draw out a tad.
Raiden in general likes to move/teleport around a lot, and it is quite difficult to deal damage with a melee character, especially one that is on the weaker side with not very good reach like Lumine. This is mostly a challenge of endurance; this fight is going to be LONG, and you will have to survive multiple cycles of it if you want to win.
Raiden in phase 1 can occasionally be stunned briefly by breaking her guard; to do this, the most consistent combo I found is Charged attack → Skill → Charged Attack. This should break her guard, provived you do it ASAP with no delay between each action- otherwise she will break out of it and hit you. You can see it in action at 0:10 where I rush to her precisely to do this combo.
After her guard is broken, you can do up to 3 charged attacks. Once you do these, immediately back off; because she *will* counterattack if you get greedy and try to get more attacks than those in- 8:32 is a perfect example; if I continued attacking instead of dashing away, she would have hit me. The hit itself doesn’t do all that much damage but it does set you up for whatever attack Raiden may do next and that is no good!
Phase 2 is sadly, purely a matter of endurance/surviving.
You are Electro, so, attacking her is pretty pointless. Your damage gets reduced by a certain %, and Traveler already deals rather low damage as it is, so in all honestly, the best bet is to play completely defensively.
There is little point in getting hits here when it will amount to very little in the long run, and Raiden in the other hand will kill you in like 3 hits. If you could affect the shield, or deal major damage, I would suggest otherwise, but as it is, it doesn’t make a difference IMO.
When her shield eventually depletes, she will get stunned for quite a long time, and your burst will be instantly charged. This is your major source of damage in the fight; hit her with everything you have!
I don’t think a No Damage run for this is reasonable, and that has to do with 2 certain attacks, which are also one of the few bad things I have to say about this fight:
2 attacks in this fight, AFAIK, are completely unavoidable with regular movement speed or no iframes.
You can see the first one here 9:04. The shadow circle will damage you when it makes contact with you. The thing is, YOU CAN’T OUTRUN THIS THING. It is impossible. I tried everything, trust me.
Even if you are on the oppositive side of the arena, this will get you and damage you. It ignores dash iframes. Because it’s phase 2, you don’t have energy for your burst, so no iframes to save you either. Maybe someone like Sayu can outrun it, and I believe Beidou can block it, but the point is, in most regular cases it is just not possible to not take damage from this attack. It is not much damage, but it is damage at the end of the day.
The 2nd attack didn’t happen in the video but basically, if you are very far away, Raiden will do a mad sword dash attack towards you. Again, I don’t think this can be dodged with normal means.
You can sorta prevent both attacks from happening by staying close/medium distance to Raiden, which is precisely why you will see me being close to her at all times, even if staying far away seems like it would make more sense given I am not attacking her anyway. It’s purely to reduce the likehood of her using either of these attacks!
So yeah. These two attacks are the blunder of this fight. Not a fan of undodgeable crap. If someone could prove me wrong and dodge them with REGULAR movement, you are welcome, but I saw a couple of videos of this fight and they either do have an unconventional tool to get around them (EX Beidou’s block skill) or they just plain got lucky and Raiden didn’t use them.
Because this fight takes so many cycles due to Traveler’s damage, the chances of Raiden not using either attack are quite slim. It’s not worth the grind to attempt to do No Damage just to lose to bad luck, IMO.
This run actually ended up taking fairly low damage anyways. I am satisfied with it! Took a little longer than I would have personally liked, but there is really not much to be done to make it go faster.