Subjugation - Vivienne

Stun bar

Just as in the Jacqueline subjugation, Vivi has a stun bar mechanic that makes her immune to all CC, but stuns (and only stuns) will bring this bar down. When the bar is depleted, Vivi will go into stun mode for a duration. It will also fully replenish all your characters’ mana bars and activate their ultimates, so spamming your abilities right before the bar is depleted, it is best to use up all your skills (of course, saving the ones that stun for last).

Breaking her stun bar will also put a 100% received damage debuff on Vivi for the duration of the stun, making it the best time to use your best DPS ultimates.

This stun bar mechanic is very important to making your life easier in subjugation, as the amount you remove from it in battle carries over from team to team. Keeping this in mind, you can use some “throwaway” stun teams in between your main DPS teams to deplete the bar prior to a fight. It’s also very important to make sure you don’t deplete it by accident in the last few seconds of a fight when you’ve already used up your good DPS ultimates, allowing it to carry over for your next team to start a fresh rotation.

Main skill

While this isn’t anything new, it is good to keep note of Vivi’s mana bar progress. When her bar is full she unleashes a large AoE nuke that does significant damage to your team and knocks them back. Making sure your team is healed up, and/or using defensive abilities right before the skill hits can save your run.

The higher difficulty you take on, the more this skill will hurt.

Tarnished Wisdom

The other skill of note in Vivi’s arsenal is her subskill Tarnished Wisdom. She will stand still and channel this skill, which deals damage over time, and provides her with mana. Because of this mana increase, she will tend to use her main skill right after this, which can be a pain for keeping your team alive. At higher levels, it also applies a DoT debuff that can be removed by using your main skill.

Storm of Doom

When Vivi’s HP reaches 20% she will go into an enrage mode, at which point she will stop moving and channel a map-wide AoE damage skill that ramps up over time. The stun mechanic does not work during this phase, and after a certain period of time, it also ignores invulnerability skills like Catherine’s subskill. Playing around the last 20% of her HP bar is imperative to winning this fight, but there are ways to make it easier, as will be discussed in this guide.

The following is an explanation of how to make the fight easier, using examples from experience. This guide was made for clearing level 301, with a 242 level sync and average character ascensions/artifacts. Keeping this in mind, you may try higher/lower difficulties as your roster permits.

The first ~70%

Starting out the fight is relatively simple, as long as you keep your teams alive. The idea for the first 70% of her HP bar is to deplete her stun bar strategically, only breaking it when you can put out optimal DPS (your best ults and teams). With this in mind, you may even want to intentionally not break her bar at all throughout an entire team’s duration. In the example run, the first break was saved for team 2 so that the Lizelotte team could get 2 entire DPS phases. Your teams may vary, but the idea will remain the same.

**Unless you have multiple copies of Petra, it is strongly recommended to not use her until the final team.

30% - 15%

This is the area where team building and stun bar optimization can become a struggle. Using the example teams, the ideal place to have her HP and stun bar is at about half stun and 30% HP. Depending on your team’s DPS you may need it to be higher or lower.

There are different ways to attempt this, so I will try to list a few scenarios.

• Scenario 1: The team you use around this time can do decent DPS, and you time the stun to go off just before Vivi’s HP gets to 20%, at which point you throw out all the best DPS ults to try to bring her down as low as possible so that your final team can finish her last remaining HP off while the storm is up.
• Scenario 2: You use a stun filler team here that can deal a small amount of damage, and whittle down the stun bar to one hit. This team must NOT bring her HP to 20%, or your next team will start in the storm with no way to stun, but must do enough damage so that your next team starts approximately at 20% when the stun goes off. Complicated to pull off, but may be necessary if your DPS is low.
• Scenario 3 (Not recommended): Save your Lize/best DPS team for last, kill her stun bar just before she hits 20% HP, and kill her in stun phase before she goes berserk. Timing this is not fun, definitely not recommended unless you enjoy malding

The last 20%

This is where the Petra magic comes in. Petra has a beautiful reflect damage subskill that reflects damage she takes back at the dealer after 18 seconds, so the idea here is to ensure Petra lives long enough to do this. Depending on where you ended off your stun/HP bars previously, you can either:

• Stun bar 1-2 hits off: Bring a full undead team and stun her before she hits 20% using Erusha/Jacq, then do the usual Violette DoT nuke thing during the stun phase, hopefully doing enough damage that Petra can finish her off once the rest of your team dies when she comes out of stun,
• HP below 15%: Bring a full sustain team that includes Catherine, anything that keeps Petra alive until she gets her reflect subskill off, at which point Vivi’s HP bar will cease to exis

Fairy

Mid-tier DPS and lots of stun bar manipulation.

Lizelotte + Beasts

Big thicc DPS, save your stuns for this one.

Human

Stuns and DPS, great for setting up before your last DPS phase, and either leaving the stun or using it to get her down to sub-20% HP

Petra + Sustain

For when you’ve gotten the HP quite low, keep Petra alive until she nukes Vivi with her own damage.