How To Defeat The Serpenphare In Expedition 33 and The Best Build To Beat the Fight

Scattered throughout Expedition 33, you can find a variety of endgame fights, bosses, dungeons, and world events to tackle. Some of these are simple challenges that can be beaten without much buildcrafting or leveling. However, others are much tougher, forcing you to grind levels, make use of specific Pictos, or tackle them after you have taken on everything else in the game.

The Serpenphare is one of those battles. You may have already noticed the large dragon-like creature in the sky. It can be found flying above the map towards the east of The Continent, north of the Flying Casino. Thankfully, in this guide, we will break down the Serpenphare’s key moves and some builds and Pictos combinations that can make the entire fight a breeze.

The Best Build To Defeat The Serpenphare

There are a lot of ways you can spec your party to destroy the Serpenphare. While you can fight it normally, it is far easier to just break the game’s buildcrafting and create an overpowered loadout using Pictos and Lumina, as well as Maelle, who does more damage in Virtuoso Stance.

The key build you want to create includes:

• Party at level 80+
• Level 33 weapon for Maelle (ideally Lithum or Medalum)
• Maelle’s Last Chance and Stendhal skills
• Verso’s Powerful skill
• Pictos/Lumina - Painted Power, Fueling Break, SOS Shell, Versatile, Solidifying, Glass Cannon, Energising Start (more than 2 of these), Augmented First Strike, SOS Power, At Death’s Door, Energising Parry, Immaculate, Critical Moment
• Maelle’s Attributes focused on Might, Luck, and Speed

With this build and this strategy, The Serpenphare should fall in one or two hits, and if not, you can keep repeating this, landing hits with other characters or reviving Maelle in between her turns. You also don’t need all of this, you can pick and choose between some Lumina and Pictos that better fit your playstyle or what you have currently available.

If you are fighting it normally, the Serpenphare is weak to lightning damage. Therefore, characters like Lune, Monaco, and Verso are a good choice to have at your party. You still want to wait until you are of a high level and close to completing everything in the game, as your damage output simply won’t be enough to eliminate it effectively.

How To Fight The Serpenphare

Using the build we mentioned above, the best method to defeat the Serpenphare quickly is:

• Burn the Serpenphare
• Enter Virtuoso Stance with Maelle using her Last-Chance skill
• Use Verso’s Powerful skill to apply powerful to your team, including Maelle
• Parry the Serpenphare’s attack
• Use Maelle’s Last Chance skill again (if you have no AP)
• Attack with Maelle’s Stendhal skill

If you want to learn its moves, the Serpenphare has a few key attacks and abilities that can be incredibly punishing. The first key ability absorbs everyone’s AP. This can’t be dodged or parried, and the boss will almost always use this as its first or second attack.

Therefore, builds that quickly replenish AP, or have ways of generating additional AP through Lumina and Pictos, are exceptionally strong in this fight. If the Serpenphare absorbs too many AP from your party, usually above 10, it will explode, dealing a devastating explosion that has a bomb-like countdown timer with a sound effect.

To avoid this, look at the lighthouse on its head, and when the sound effect starts repeating fast it will explode after the fourth time.

One other deadly attack is a 2-hit head smash combo. This is extremely fast and will catch you off-guard initially. But unlike most of the Serpenphare’s attacks, you want to parry twice rapidly to deflect this head smash, rather than wait for an attack to charge up.

The Serpenhare can also give itself nine shields and increase its speed, allowing it to attack more. There isn’t much you can do about this besides saving and stockpiling AP or improving AP generation within your build. This will allow you to use Free Aim hits to remove them. You can also equip Maelle’s Defenseless skill to remove all these shields with one attack.

After this, it will almost certainly use a Silencing attack, preventing you from using your skills. During this attack, the Serpenphare will fly around and shoot explosive Light bombs that will crash onto the platform you are fighting on. The explosion sound effect of the bomb will play, and shortly after it begins, it will explode, which is when you want to parry, not before.

Beyond this, it has a tail swipe that consists of two hits. The first can be parried or dodged as the tail crashes into the ground, and the second can only be avoided by jumping.

The boss can also fire an ice beam three times at your party. This is much easier to avoid than the tail swipe, as you can parry or dodge as the beam concentrates on its head. This can also be used in a four-hit combo that ends with an attack that has to be Gradient Parried. Similar to the other ice beam shots, you want to wait until the beam concentrates to parry.

Generally, you want to parry the Serpenphare because you can make use of Counterattacks to deal a lot of damage. BackSeat Guides on YouTube has a great showcase of the fight which shows off every move the Serpenphare does and how and when to parry or dodge.

These tips should help you prepare and take on one of the most challenging fights in the open world as you approach the endgame.

Expedition 33 is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.