Bravely Default 2: How to beat Bernard

How to beat Bernard

As a master thief, Bernard uses his skills to steal various things from your characters and uses his extreme speed to cause severe damage, if left unchecked. His HP is also quite a bit, considering how quickly you engage with him, so be sure to level up a bit before fighting him. I personally dealt with him with a full level 16 group, but I was definitely sub-level. Being around 19-20 is your best bet if you want to stay on par with his stats.

Unlike the previous fight with Anihal, the owner of Beastmaster Asterisk, Bernard is a beast on his own, without needing too many forage monsters. Well, there are two guards by his side, but compared to Anihal's beasts, they literally have nothing to brag about. Bernard fights his own battles, and you need to watch out for his Steal Courage skill, which steals BP from any of your characters, and his Godspeed Strike, a deadly attack that can take you down in an instant.

There's a sure-fire way to defeat Bernard with ease, and that's by overusing the Beastmaster's Tame command and capture abilities. As you know, Beastmasters can capture monsters to bid on. So what you need to do is go down the sewers and capture some minotaurs. These are the big hulky bull-like creatures that charge you up when they see you. To be on the safe side, capture around 10 of them. Yes, I know, it takes time and is inconvenient. However, it is worth it when you see the results against the fight with Bernard.

With those Minotaurs caught, make sure you have 2 characters with Beastmaster as a sub-job. You can of course use it as your main job, but it's optional. Have at least one white mage and one vanguard. A dark mage is also suggested, to quickly get rid of the guards. Which brings us to the start of the fight. Start by casting "Enrage" with your tank, to aggravate Bernard, and easily kill the guards with your dark mage's spells. After that, the rest is easy to pull off.

First of all, keep your HP with your healer. If possible, cast protective spells on your tank, in order to mitigate some damage. Then whenever the turn is for one of your Beastmasters, if Bernard isn't in the default position, just keep throwing your Minotaurs at him. He's vulnerable to axes and the Earth element, so each Minotaur hits extremely hard, at around 2k damage per hit.

In order to achieve all of this, it is advisable to default for a while until you collect 2-3 BP for each of your party members. Then continue with what we mentioned above, and Bernard should be taken out pretty quickly. If you decide not to do this method, just because you don't care about Beastmaster's work or for some other reason, then my suggestion would be to bring in more Vanguards or Dark Mages, and just keep going. to assault it with your main tank, with the Mages doing all the work. Just make sure you DO NOT bring any monks, as Bernard counter attacks their skills, easily killing them all in the process. If you're not following the Minotaur's path, then it's simply a battle of patience and a matter of keeping your team with high HP. After defeating him, collect the Thief's Asterisk and proceed to Chapter 2.

Bravely default 2 is exclusively available on the Nintendo Switch.