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How to beat Balteus, Armored Core VI’s toughest professor

1K View2023-09-09

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon’s first chapter is punctuated by three big bosses, and each one is a vital lesson about how to approach From Software’s new mecha combat game. In classic From tradition, these lessons are taught the hard way—generally by killing you until you internalize whatever new mechanic the game wants you to learn. Balteus, the boss that caps off chapter one, is the toughest of the three, and it’s proven to be a brick wall for many players—myself included, for a while. And so: I’m going to tell you how to beat him, but you might not like what I have to say.

First, though, let’s run through what happens in the Balteus boss fight. You’ve just defeated fellow AC pilot Sulla and broken into the Watchpoint. Balteus appears when you emerge on the roof of the huge round structure, and there’s not a brick of cover anywhere to be found: it’s just you versus this big mech in a missile boat.
Balteus has twin rings that encircle his inner mech, which is seated in front of a large rocket-powered hovercraft. The rings launch missiles in all directions, and Balteus can shift their configuration so that they fire in tight arcs or in a spherical cloud. Either way, they’re tracking missiles that will slowly make their way toward you.

Balteus also has a nasty single-shot missile launcher, which is telegraphed by a red square and a warning beep on your HUD. He has a chain gun he can use for strafing runs, and a pair of shotguns that he pulls out in round two. Most importantly, though, he has a pulse shield that activates as soon as the fight begins.

The key to the fight is breaking Balteus’s pulse shield as quickly as possible. Simple enough, right? Well, it turns out that it depends on who you ask.

I wound up struggling with the Balteus fight for several evenings, and in the interest of getting it over with, I turned to the internet, which by that point was starting to percolate with guides on how to do it. When you look up a guide for a particular part of any game, usually one is much like any other—each guide will essentially give you identical information about what to do.

That’s not the case for Balteus.

Every guide I looked up contained a different solution. One claimed the only way to beat him was by using twin back-mounted plasma launchers to take down the shield. Another suggested eight-cell missile launchers on the back, with dual-trigger shotguns up front. Laser cannons, bazooka, plasma sword—there was not a single common part among all the builds I found suggested in online guides.

I started asking friends what they had used to beat Balteus, and each answer I got from them was different too. My brother told me he’d used the tracked base for the increased stability and armor. Another friend said she’d run a full Dafeng frame and as many missiles as she could bolt onto it. One friend said the sword was the only way to beat the boss; another said to skip the sword entirely because it’s useless. One friend cleared the fight in his first try without having changed any of the default components on his AC. Were we all even fighting the same boss?

Indeed we were, and therein lies Balteus’s important Armored Core VI lesson. The first boss, the AH12: HC Helicopter, is there to teach you that you’re not playing a traditional shooter—ducking around cover and taking potshots won’t cut it; you need to get up in its face to do any significant damage. Juggernaut, the mobile artillery piece that’s impervious to attacks from the front, forces you to learn the value of light, nimble AC builds. Balteus’s lesson is perhaps the most abstract, but it’s the most valuable. You have to find a build that works for you, and that build might not look like anyone else’s.

There is no magic solution to beating Balteus. He’s a difficult boss, and the first that flat-out requires you to dig into Armored Core VI’s Assembly area to experiment and tinker with your build. The task is to find a selection of weapons that works for you, and a mech frame that can support its weight and energy requirements.

I had tried several runs at Balteus using plasma launchers, thinking they’d take his shields down quickly and let me start doing direct damage right away. However, those plasma missiles take quite a while to reach their targets, and I was getting ripped up waiting for them to land. Eventually, I swapped them out for the shoulder-mounted laser cannons, and found that if I paired those with the starting melee sword, I could smash through Balteus’s shields within a few seconds.

After that, it was a matter of learning when to back off, particularly during phase two. It’s important to get some distance from the boss when the phase begins, because he emits a massive energy pulse explosion. I kept an eye on my EN so I could stay off the ground as much as possible, and dove in to do damage with my sword after Balteus had done a couple swipes with his flame sword. Down to my last sliver of health, I finished him off with a few blasts from my laser cannons.

Your Balteus-beating build will undoubtedly look different from mine. The real key is to keep experimenting. If you need additional funds, remember you can always sell parts back to the shop for no loss, and you can earn more credits by repeating missions you’ve already completed (Armored Core VI will even give you a rank on subsequent mission clears). Be patient, try something new, and you’ll persevere over Balteus in the end.