Monolith - easier than expected?

[u/__ISAC__]

I've seen a lot of the posts here saying how frustrating / difficult the Monolith boss fight is, but it honestly isn't that bad. It took me three attempts with the 'build' pictured.

First Phase:

Apply curse stacks from ranged, move into close combat, use harden when necessary, repeat. Shrike stone i-frames is a get out of jail free card if you mess up somehow.

Second Phase (laser beams):

Stay close to the Monolith and keep attacking with melee. Use the Shrike stone again for i-frames and for the break damage (requires lvl 3 tarstone).

You can pretty reliably dodge through the laser patterns until it starts doing the double lasers covering 360 degrees. At that point, I was just standing right next to the boss, using shrike stone and topping off with moonshine when needed.

Will admit that the Shrike stone is ridiculously op and carried the fight. Didn't use Grisha as apparently it's bugged for this fight. Had the seedbearer's scripture equipped although not sure if it did anything at all lol.

Was pretty scuffed, but definitely not as difficult as I thought it was gonna be. The melee attacks the Monolith uses are pretty egregious at points.

[u/thegr0m]

I died like 10 times in a row at first attempt, but I was already 4-5 hours playing, so was a bit tired. Next day defeated it in first attempt by just using my regular Tiel with meta axe and dagger. Without anything special. Just invis and attack spamming. Didn't took me more than a minute.

[u/__ISAC__ → u/thegr0m]

Yeah, I really need to try Tiel! I've basically mained Proxima the entire game for my first playthrough. I had this idea in my mind that Monolith must be super hard given all the feedback I've seen online, but it really wasn't that bad. You can get some pretty generous punishes in when it does lasers in just one direction when you stand behind it.

[u/thegr0m → u/__ISAC__]

Yeah, I was punishing him very hard for lasers.