A special Titan that was spotted in the Containment Zone Aleph. Its form is fairly different from Titans recorded in the past, and the way it attacks resembles that of Manifestations.

Pact of Antinomy is a boss that serves as the climax of the Gradient of Souls story event. I have no idea why it got put into the Neural Sim rotation literally the week after Gradient of Souls released, but I guess that’s just life. It’s an annoying fight loaded with RNG and way too much time spent with it in an invulnerable state, but that’s also just life.

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Attacks And Behaviour

At the beginning of the battle, Antinomy will spawn a circular area that deals DoT damage when standing in it.

It might seem like it’s chasing you, but it actually just moves clockwise around the arena, which means you can get behind its path and not worry about it for a while.

Antinomy also has a breakable part covering its one weak spot, but it’s annoying to break and regenerates after each of its invulnerability phases (more on this later), so it’s really not worth the trouble.

Basic Attacks

Antinomy will use all of these attacks throughout the battle.

Darts of Demise

Antinomy charges up, then fires a barrage of missiles towards you. The missiles stagger on hit. At higher difficulty levels, more missiles are fired, and they move more quickly. You can really just walk out of the targeted area if you’re paying attention, which makes this the lowest-threat (and thus preferred) attack that it can do. If you apply Slow to Antinomy while this attack is being performed, the missiles will also be slowed, making this even easier to dodge.

Bullet Stream

Antinomy fires bullets at you. It’s really as simple as that. Again, walking side to side is enough to evade Antinomy’s aim, and the individual bullets don’t do a lot of damage, so you can eat a few and not worry too much.

Forest of Blades

Antinomy drops to the ground, plunging swords down in front of her in three waves. It can’t move while it’s doing this, so it’s also kind of a freebie as long as you get out of the attack range.

That being said… sometimes it’ll become temporarily invulnerable before performing this attack. From my testing, it seems to only happen if it casts the attack while Slowed.

Teleport Strike

Antinomy becomes temporarily invulnerable, then teleports towards you to perform an initial strike. It then becomes momentarily invulnerable again, teleporting away to dash towards you and perform another strike. It then becomes invulnerable for a third time and once again teleports away to perform a dash attack, before doing one final melee attack on the spot. 

What a mess of an attack. Yes, that’s three teleports with short bursts of invulnerability to go with them within the span of nine seconds. This is objectively the worst basic attack you’ll have to deal with when fighting it. And to make it worse, this attack comes with mixups!

Yes, that’s right. At higher difficulty levels, Antinomy can decide to do a Forest of Blades attack instead of its normal attack combo. Isn’t that fun?

Anyways, all of the melee attacks that Antinomy does during this attack stagger you, so it’s in your best interest to dodge them all. Be careful not to get hit by the second attack when it does its third teleport. Keep in mind that all the moments of invulnerability that it gets aren’t super long (just long enough to be an annoyance), so make sure to still keep your DPS up.

Phase 1/2

The first two phases play normally, with Antinomy using its basic attacks. Upon reaching 75% HP, Antinomy will become invulnerable and perform one of two attacks:

Tones of Light and Shadow

Antinomy splits into two bodies and sends out waves of energy that stagger on hit. You can dodge through them or just jump over them, as for whatever reason you can jump in this one specific Sim battle. Weird.

At higher difficulties, each attack will also create a Chasm of Bleakness, which is… I actually have no idea. I investigated this for ages and asked others if they knew anything, but there is genuinely nothing that could be it. But it’s apparently there, because the other high-difficulty attack modifier associated with this attack releases a ring of cube projectiles whenever a Chasm of Bleakness is created. I’m as confused as you are.

Grip of Truculence

Antinomy charges up an area attack around itself, causing a knockback on hit. At higher difficulty levels, it will also pull you in while it’s charging up. You can just dodge out of it, even with that.

The fight then proceeds to phase 2, which plays identically to the first.

Phase 3

When its HP is reduced to 50%, Antinomy will turn invulnerable again, splitting in two as well. The two bodies will fly around the arena, spawning light and dark balls in the air. Once Antinomy finishes spawning balls, they will drop and deal damage if you’re in range. But it’s pretty easy to not be in range, since the spawning takes a while and you can just sit at the edge of the area and be safe there.

After this attack finishes, phase 3 begins, which again has Antinomy use its basic attacks, but it can now also randomly perform either of the two special attacks from the Phase 1 HP trigger. Yes, that includes the invulnerability, which means you can get screwed out of eleven seconds on your run just because you got unlucky. Have I mentioned I don’t like this boss yet?

Strategy

Antinomy can feel like quite an overwhelming boss at first, as some of its attacks can be a lot to handle if you aren’t sure what’s going on. For that reason getting a grasp on its moveset helps a lot here, arguably more than with any other boss. Knowledge is power! Beyond that, Antinomy falls under the “kill it faster to kill it faster” camp that other bosses like Beauvoir 13 and Ni-Mech do. The faster you can push Antinomy to its HP trigger, the lower the chances are that you’ll have to deal with its Teleport Strike and the invulns that come with it. Similarly, the faster you can finish off Antinomy after Phase 2, the better your odds are of not having to sit through one of its HP trigger special attacks retooled as a random basic attack.

The randomness of this boss is arguably the worst part about it. When it was first released in Neural Sim, I personally grinded multiple runs getting small time saves over the course of a few runs, but one run I had it suddenly drop by over ten seconds. Why? Because during that run, Antinomy decided not to do a random phase 1 HP trigger attack, so I didn’t sit through the extra eleven seconds of invulnerability that I had to in previous attempts. If you’re serious about getting the best time possible, you’re almost definitely going to be forced to make multiple attempts through no fault of your own.

Ghost Hunting

When Antinomy performs one of its HP trigger attacks, its visual model will fly all over the place, as well as appearing untargetable. However, its actual hitbox will remain where it started the attack, and can be interacted with. You still can’t damage it since it’s invulnerable, but you can do things like stack Cherno - Enigma’s Enmity stacks and regenerate S-Energy with Katya (you can see this effect specifically in the clips below).

Team Building

Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. If you have Cherno - Enigma in a usable state, that’s the DPS you’ll want to go with. Antinomy blatantly favours Cherno to a degree never seen in any boss released before, from the 20% Chaos vulnerability to Cherno being able to stack Enmity on invulnerable enemies. And in case you haven’t realised yet, Antinomy goes invulnerable quite often. These frequent invulnerabilities give Cherno extra windows to prepare her DPS rotations while other operatives are more or less stuck sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

If you don’t have Cherno, congrats on not falling for the marketing scheme. Also, your life just got a lot harder. Its long and frequent invulnerabilities make Fritia - Hush basically a non-starter, and its lack of an easily-accessible weak spot doesn’t exactly give most ballistic damage DPS operatives a fun time either. Thus, the next best two options are Katya, who doesn’t crit to begin with, and Yao - Winter Solstice, who can just burst through Antinomy’s HP via brute force (even without crits) if fully built and supported.

Antinomy is another Slow-only boss, bringing up Acacia - Redacted’s value once again. Cherno - Those Two will also work, but will likely be a lot more of a hassle as you might have to chase Antinomy down first.