Nightborne Phantom is the featured boss of the Operation Midnight special story chapter. For all practical purposes it's a pretty straightforward fight, but if you want to know what makes it tick, it's uh... confusing. You'll see what I mean.

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Attacks and Behaviour

General Info

Nightborne Phantom has four breakable parts - three armor parts and its weapon. While the armor parts are unbroken, it supposedly gets 30% damage reduction, but I didn't actually notice a difference. Weird.

Regardless, breaking these parts will drop S-Energy refills.

As well, Nightborne Phantom has a special energy bar for a resource called Ageless Corruption. This is continuously refilled by its weapon when it is not broken, as well as being completely refilled during its HP triggers.

What does it do? I have no idea. Believe me, I spent ages looking into this. But by and large, there doesn't seem to be any actual difference in its moveset whether it has energy available or not.

One more thing - at higher difficulty levels, being hit by Nightborne Phantom's attacks will reduce your HP over a period of time, while also restoring your S-Energy. This is the same effect as being in its Corrupt Field, which will be covered later.

Orb Burst

Nightborne Phantom summons an array of orbs on the ground that detonate, dealing damage and staggering on hit. To avoid this, simply walk out of the area.

Orb Strike

Nightborne Phantom summons three large orbs that it launches at you, dealing damage and staggering on hit. The orbs are slow enough that you can simply sidestep it.

Oneiric Spring

Nightborne Phantom summons a circle and a large amount of orbs to attack anyone in it. This attack comes in two forms:

In either case, you have more than enough time to walk out of the area of effect as long as you make sure not to walk into an orb. The area of effect increases at higher difficulty levels.

Libation Fountain

Nightborne Phantom summons multiple rings of columns that deal large damage and stagger on hit. Each subsequent ring slowly moves towards you and doesn't spawn all at once, which can make this tricky to dodge. To avoid it, dodge forward into the ring when it's about to reach you.

Refined Air Slash

Nightborne Phantom slices with its weapon and sends several energy waves towards you, dealing damage and staggering on hit. At higher difficulty levels, it will perform two additional slices as seen in the clip above. It doesn't change this attack being very easy to sidestep, though.

Corrupt Field

Nightborne Phantom creates a field that continuously damages you while you're inside it, but also restores S-Energy. Nightborne Phantom is free to cast other attacks while this field is active. And it's here that the only visible effect of its energy bar being empty can be seen, with one unique move that it can cast after creating the field:

It's like Orb Strike, but with a larger amount of smaller balls that don't stagger on hit. You'll likely end up getting tagged by one or two, but each projectile doesn't do a lot of damage so it's probably fine.

HP Triggers

Upon reaching 70% HP, Nightborne Phantom will enter an invulnerability period.

It teleports back to the center of the arena and summons rings of orbs that rotate before then detonating, dealing damage and staggering on hit. At higher difficulty levels, it will also summon a Libation Fountain. It also refills its energy bar and regenerates all of its breakable parts.

The fight then continues until its HP is reduced to 40%. Nightborne Phantom enters another invulnerability phase.

Like with the first trigger, all of its armor parts are regenerated and it refills its energy. However, this time it creates a larger version of the Corrupt Field in the center of the map that lasts until the end of the fight.

Strategy

Boss HP: 2,642,760

Nightborne Phantom is another case of a boss being much more bark than bite. It has a lot of very flashy and intimidating attacks, but most of them end up being pretty easy to avoid if you're paying attention.

Phase Skipping

Nightborne Phantom has two invulnerability phases, which can spawn annoying attacks to deal with and more importantly, are time loss. Fortunately, there are two ways of skipping them.

Breaking the last two parts on Nightborne Phantom right as you reach an HP trigger will skip it. This does require some very specific setup to time the two conditions together, and can be difficult if you lack the damage.

Slowing the boss can increase the window you have to achieve this, however, making it a decent amount easier.

Alternately, you can also Freeze the boss right as an attack hits to bring the boss' HP to the trigger threshold:

This is much more forgiving as long as your DPS pick allows for the timing coordination.

Team Building

Nightborne Phantom is the designated pandering boss for Vidya - Agave, and she'll be getting a special section later. She unsurprisingly does well here due to her ability to break parts while DPSing and the travel time of her projectiles allowing for synergy with phase skip strategies. Other DPS picks like Lyfe - Infinite Sight and Fenny - Coronet will do well here too though, being able to stay relatively competitive.

For supports, the usual suspects are all pretty useful, though Mauxir - Shadow Ka will suffer a bit if you're not phase skipping due to the invulnerability phases cutting off her support skill duration. Bringing a source of Freeze or Slow will be useful even if you aren't phase skipping as CC is CC, after all. It may be tempting to bring a healer for sustain while fighting in Corrupt Fields, but most players will find that the fight ends fast enough for this to not be necessary.

Featured Operative: Vidya - Agave

Aside from the previously mentioned benefits that Agave has due to this boss specifically being designed to promote her, she has a few other benefits as well. She can essentially ignore every attack that Nightborne Phantom throws at her due to having CC immunity while her standard skill is at phase 4. As well, she uniquely benefits from the HP-to-S-Energy conversion status that attacks inflict due to her damage output heavily relying on having S-Energy to cast her standard skill. For this reason, Agave runs will specifically want Nightborne Phantom to cast Corrupt Field as often as possible, as Agave can sit in it to essentially have infinite S-Energy.