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What a good day, isn't it? And you know what good days are for? Threads!

So today let's discuss monsters. I have quite a lot of interesting ideas, but let's hear from all of you about interesting monster designs! So here I come. I hope the community can give and get inspirating designs when it comes to monsters.

What I look is more monsters with also feedback about mine, also I will give feedback to yours and I suppose so will any other. Let us begin the monster factory working!

-Cerberus-

Normally Cerberuses are fire elemental, but I wanted an interesting cerberus fight. First thing to note is its elemental resistances and weaknesses.

Cerberus has 3 heads. One for fire, one for ice and one for lightning. As long as those heads live, the Cerberus gets resistances.

When the fire head lives, Cerberus gets %100 fire and %50 earth resist.
When the ice head lives, Cerberus gets %100 ice and %50 water resist.
When the thunder head lives, Cerberus gets %100 thunder and %50 wind resist.
Cerberus's innate resistances are %100 against dark, %-50 against light and aether and %-100 against mental skills, since they all share the same brain but on 3 different brain systems, affecting it would prove fatal but when the Cerberus is reduced to a single head the mental weakness fades. But it is still immune to dark and weak to light and aether so there is that.
Otherwise it takes normal damage from physical, temporal and arcane magic.

Now the fight begins smoothly, Cerberus has 3 moves from each head. One thing to note is, they do not act at the same time. Thunder head acts surprisingly fast and will quite likely be the first to move, fire is just decent and ice acts horribly slow but being slow has merits on this one.

Fire head works with DoT's and its damage starts low but fire head works with a large amount of AoE and if you do not cleanse the DoT then it stacks and becomes destructive.
Ice head works with using magic penetration and use ice based magic, also occasionally throw in ice shields which needs to be broken if you need to continue your onslaught.
Thunder head typically aims for a single target and attempts to stun it but the stun lasts momentarily and expires after the turn passes, like the guard's duration that is why the thunder head acts first.

Also Cerberuses apply triple breath which reduces resistance to their own elements but they do not do that often so you must mind those and cleanse when they do that.

The best thing to note however is that they share the same brain and body so debuffing them will debuff all, stunning them will stun all. Speaking about my game, stuns are really rare so the bosses are not immune to it.

Now the battle is managable because the Cerberus headlings do not hit hard, it would be a real problem if they did with their innate elemental resistance to everything. But that does not a problem.

Cerberus is not that threatening near the battle where it has those resistances, but when it drops down to %66 the fun starts because thunder head dies. That is where it loses that thunder and wind resistance. It will matter for some people to bring the pain, but that is not all because the heads enrage, and begin to use more damaging versions of their own attacks. That is the part where the ice head becomes scary with its shields because the cooldown for it reduces from 5 to 3 and you need your dps to break the shield. Also one thing to note that some of the fire head's skills will apply 2 stacks from now on.

When it is reduced below %33 the ice head dies too, but the fire head becomes able to attack 5 times and begins to become a real threat since its skills upgrade for a second time and begin to apply 3 fire stacks with being more damaging and destructive but the fight is pretty straightforvard at that point. Cerberus loses all its ice and water resistance firstly, but its resistance also modifies. It absorbs fire and darkness, is immune to earth and gets %-100 weaker to ice, light and aether.

At that point you can go all out on the Cerberus because it will die quickly. An important thing to note is that you can always bring neutral attackers but if you bring an elemental attacker, even though they become obsolete at the start, they will be essential to finish off the cerberus which is more dangerous than ever, so having a good balance between elemental and non elemental attacks are a must.

-Necromancer-

I wanted this battle to be interesting so I made a death mechanic. All of the Necromancer's single target attacks have a chance to inflict instant death. Now that is not very interesting, but the Necromancer then revives the dead as a zombie. When the character stays zombie for more than 3 turns, the Necromancer permanently removes it from this battle and absorbs its life energy for a good amount of healing. You can recall it with Ultimecia battle from final fantasy where she absorbs the fallen allies to time and removes them from the fight. Needless to say, auto-revives are particularly useful for this battle.

The strategy is a sort of suicide bombing. One of the characters have a skill that deals huge damage should the target dies called corpse mine, which isn't hard considering this boss specializes in it. But you can also apply an auto-revive to the said ally so if you use it to a tank that can draw attacks, the tank will first draw attacks and when it dies it will explode then get revived just after it. A pretty good strategy if you ask me, but this strategy is not limited to such situations of course, because that is the best combo in the game considering how hard you manage to pull it off because of the corpse mine's short duration.