Master The First Descendant’s frustrating boss mechanics with expert strategies to overcome unavoidable attacks.
The Core Complaint: Undodgeable Boss Mechanics
A significant segment of The First Descendant community has voiced strong criticism regarding a core combat mechanic, creating a notable rift between player expectation and game design.
While the game boasts visually stunning boss encounters that serve as key narrative milestones, a pervasive issue threatens to undermine their enjoyment. The central grievance, amplified through forums like Reddit, targets attacks that completely bypass player reaction time and mobility.
Players report encountering damage sources—ranging from homing missile volleys to persistent energy orbs—that feature flawless tracking. These abilities, employed by bosses such as the Swamp Walker, maintain perfect accuracy regardless of evasive maneuvers like dashes or grapples, rendering traditional action-game dodging ineffective.
This design creates a fundamental clash with character identity. Many Descendants, including the high-mobility Bunny, are engineered for agile, fast-paced combat. When their primary defensive tool (movement) is invalidated by certain boss patterns, it not only reduces tactical options but actively diminishes the intended fantasy of playing that character.
Strategic Adaptation: Playing Around Tracking Attacks
The community consensus establishes a clear, if unsatisfying, rule: against certain attacks, cover is not an option—it is a requirement. This has forcibly shifted the meta towards a more tactical, cover-based shooter style, contrary to the game’s otherwise movement-heavy flow.
Common Mistake: Attempting to outrun or grapple away from locked-on attacks like the Executioner’s elemental globe or a Walker’s missile barrage. Players report these projectiles performing 180-degree turns, making escape impossible. The Correction: Immediately identify and reposition to durable cover the moment these attacks are telegraphed. Prioritize destroying persistent threats (like the large globe) from safety if possible.
Practical Tip for Agile Descendants (Bunny, etc.): Your speed is not for evasion, but for repositioning. Use your mobility not to dodge the undodgeable, but to quickly traverse the arena to reach safe cover points before the tracking attack lands. Think of your grapple as a tool for accessing cover, not for avoiding projectiles.
Optimization for Advanced Play: Map the arena at the start of the fight. Identify all indestructible cover points and note their sightlines to the boss. During attacks with long wind-ups (e.g., Pyromaniac’s orb cast), do not DPS—instead, preemptively move to a cover position that allows you to continue firing. This maintains damage uptime while ensuring survival.
One player encapsulated the frustration: “Some of the attacks are just laserbeams that will perfectly track you until you’re behind cover no matter how much you’re moving or how fast. It doesn’t feel like I died because of anything I did wrong; it feels like I died because they decided I would, so I will.” This sentiment highlights the perceived lack of player agency.
Another added, “The tracking on some of the mission barrages literally can’t be dodged unless you’re behind cover, I can’t count the number of times a Walker’s mission barrage did a full 180 to me when I’ve grappled away.”
Community Solutions and Developer Outlook
In the absence of official changes, the player base has coalesced around a shared understanding of the necessary playstyle. The strategy is no longer about iframe timing or perfect dodges, but about environmental mastery and pre-combat planning.
Developer Nexon has not yet announced any planned adjustments to boss attack tracking or the viability of dodging. Consequently, encounters with bosses like the Swamp Walker, Executioner, and Pyromaniac remain a significant difficulty spike, particularly punishing for players who favor the kinetic playstyle of Descendants such as Bunny.
The Long-Term View: For the game’s health, a balance must be struck. Perfect-tracking attacks have a place to enforce cover usage, but an over-reliance on them stifles build and playstyle diversity. The ideal patch would introduce a skill-based counterplay option, such as a perfectly timed dodge creating a brief window of invulnerability to tracking, or certain modules providing resistance to homing attacks.
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Until such changes materialize, success demands a mental shift. Players must accept that against certain mechanics, evasion through movement is a trap. Victory is secured by using the arena itself as your primary defensive tool, adapting your Descendant’s strengths to a cover-centric tactical game, and understanding that survival often means disengaging from the fight to break line-of-sight.
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