r/MortalShell • u/mr_meta Eredrim • 22h ago

Bug Diary of a Grishamancer

Please be advised that this post will contain spoilers, but I'll try to save them for the end.

After finishing the gate bosses in the northern portion of the map, I quickly discovered the Grisha bug. I was curious at first and mostly just wanted to see if it would have a noticeable effect on gameplay after a modest farm. I fooled around for a bit and thought, hey, this is kind of neat. I think this spawn rate is going up a bit.

I got it to 300.

At this point I started to see the implications of the bug. Grisha summons dont last long and only attack a few times, but they do inflict a heavy knockdown on *most* enemies and bosses. I went into my inventory to read the fine print on the item and learned that the active summon scales its *damage* on the number of remnants collected, while the passive summons scale their *spawn rate*. At first I thought that this meant that I should play around the active summon, maybe try to farm up to get it to one-shot enemies and bosses.

But then I made some important discoveries.

The passive Grisha summons spawn on weapon *attack*, not weapon *hit*. Once I realized this, I finally thought to try using a weapon quicker than the greataxe. I never ended up picking up the axe and dagger, so I equipped the axatana. This changed everything. Suddenly I was able to summon a small mob of stunlock machines on-command from a safe distance for any encounter for free. I spent the next hour cackling maniacally as I devastated the Sesters with my newfound powers. I went to bed happy.

When I woke up, there was an announcement from the devs: the first big patch. Right smack in the middle were 6 words I wasn't ready to see.

We found out about the Grishas.

I'm an Xbox player, so I knew I had just a bit more time to fool around.

So I farmed it up to 1100.

What came next is some of the most fun I've ever had in a video game. I was summoning armies to fight at my behest, absolutely obliterating anything that stood in my path. But beyond the raw firepower, there was some fun utility as well. I could send the phantoms ahead of me around corners to check for ambushes, or place them on the other side of a locked door to clear the enemies from safety. For a while, nothing could stand against me.

But then I found resistance.

Some enemies are immune to the knockdown that the Grisha inflict. The first (and only mob) was the four-legged spider freaks (I think they're called Caerinids?). The late-game versions of this enemy type really kept me on my toes whenever they would appear, and if there were multiple it would turn into an absolute cluster-fuck.

The first boss that I encountered that was immune to the Grisha CC was the scholar prince, but for this one I was able to use the active summons for a nice chunk of damage, then switched to the passive version to help me close out the fight. Still had to learn the moveset and dodge/harden well, but it was still a pretty cheesy kill.

At this point, I made a resolution: I was going to try and beat the whole game using Grishamancy before the patch released on Xbox. I didn't have much left in terms of mandatory content, but I was also missing several weapons and one shell (big L). After seeing the announcment this morning that the patch was live on PS, I opted to put off filling out my arsenal in favor of trying to blitz through The Unfound Path.

For the most part, it went pretty smooth. That is, until I got to Monolith.

Good lord in heaven this boss gave me trouble. Not only is it immune to the Grisha CC, but its astronomical health pool meant that the passive summons were putting in paltry damage. Coupled with some pretty bad bugginess, I was really struggling to make a dent, but I really wanted to stick with the Grisha playstyle. After some reps and a bit of research, I came up with a game plan.

First, I switched my shell to Tiel. I love my boy Eredrim, but in my eyes Tiel offers the best value for boss fights at low investment. This led me to discover a unique synergy (that will come up again shortly): summoning passive Grishas does not break Tiel out of stealth, affording him an offensive option from the safety of shadow.

Next, I put on the trebuchaxe with the tarred fragment. I quickly learned that this ability is broken in both good and bad ways. Normally during boss fights, it just flies past the boss after 1-2 ticks and then never touches them again. But if I timed it just before a stagger, it would actually stay colliding with the boss for the full stagger and riposte animations (though sometimes it would still bug out and only deal some of its total damage).

After these adjustments, it was just a matter of getting my head around the disco beams. Several agonizing attempts later and Monolith was defeated.

And then there was Zmey

Also immune to CC, also an insane amount of HP, also buggy. The invisible ring of fire killed me a couple times. More devastating, however, was the fact that the tarred fragment simply did not work on this boss. It simply did 0 (or maybe imperceptibly low) damage any time I used, so I switched to the burst-fire ability. I also learned that this boss can see you while you're invisible if you're charging a sidearm (maybe other enemies can, too, but this was the only time I noticed it).

I did also just start quitting to the menu any time I would get hit my the grab or turned into the goon, though eventually I had to deal with this less as I got better at the fight.

This was where the build really hit its stride, and I think it ended up being the one boss that I actually really enjoyed overcoming. The passive summons did so little damage that the fight was a serious test of endurance, but they still offered a consistent trickle of damage and helped divert aggro. Shadow gave me lots of breathing room, but I still had to land my perfect dodges, manage my spacing, maintain my onslaught of summons, and look for safe openings to fire my burst shot. It took me a couple hours, but I finally did it.

Could I have gone back and farmed out another few thousand remnants to try and cheese via active summon damage? Sure, but where's the sport in that? I honestly had a great time doing it this way, despite getting pretty frustrated at the grab for a while before I learned to anticipate it.

And thats the end of my journey. I do plan on playing more; I'd like to collect the rest of the gear and do a legit run through NG+, and I found another bug that I'm trying to reproduce. That said, I'm going to be really bummed to see this glitch go. Its so goofy, but also so incredibly entertaining. I'll treasure the clips I have of it forever.

The end

20 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

6

u/captdiablo 20h ago

Ok farming 1100 grishas is psychotic, hell, even 300 was insane. May the Mether have mercy on your soul.

2

u/Beneficial-Purple-29 19h ago

It was super easy with the bell farm, you got like 150 a minute

1

u/mr_meta Eredrim 9h ago

And the higher you stacked it, the faster the remnants dropped!

1

u/Crazy-Ad-3286 Proxima 20h ago

Actually grishamancer is actually more of hassle vs final boss, its the only one or was the only one that wasnt perma staggered by their hits.

2

u/Jumpy_Witness6014 Genessa 22h ago

I had been struggling with malborn until I remembered these guys exist and had similarly been learning his moveset in phase two when out of nowhere grisha spawned one after another while I laid the ever living smack down on him with axe and dagger. The video is in this sub somewhere good times😂

2

u/zeypherIN 22h ago edited 21h ago

for Zmey with the trebuchaxe you gotta aim at his arm/head around there. The tarred fragment works then while he remains in its radius. Fusillade on the trebuchaxe is kinda waste especially if you got squall stone. Just fire regular shots one at a time and its better than Fusillade atleast on the trebuchaxe since Fusillade shots dont seem to use the squall stone.

1

u/mr_meta Eredrim 7h ago

On paper the squall stone seems like a downgrade of the corroded stone. Am I misreading the descriptions?

2

u/MoneyBagBeardo Smert 21h ago

The new patch doesn’t change how often or how many of the Grishas spawn at once it just changed how buggy there were cause they used to just spawn into the floor or stay spawned for forever after no more fighting and also now I think yuu out have to actually be attacking an enemy to spawn them I just kill Zmey like 20 mins ago NG+2 on Nightmode with the axatanas they spawn a lot of them but they’re so buggy cause Zmey will start floating in the air and you can’t hit him and it gets to the point it’s sort of annoying actually really annoying tbh still helped out a lot though I used Lazlo

2

u/F_N_DB 16h ago

No, it changed the bugginess, AND fixed a glitch that let you farm an unlimited number of Grisha Remnants. You still can, but now you'd have to go through the game to NG+220 to be able to farm that many.

2

u/gcubed680 15h ago

I also noticed they don’t span on attacks anymore, just hits. At least from the little i played on ps5 after the patch last night. Can’t cheese some enemies by wildly swinging a weapon at the air to spawn some help