Blue Archive Total Assault Guide: Clearing Insane Difficulty

Insane is where Total Assault stops playing nice. Everything up through Extreme is a stat check with a boss bolted on. Insane changes what the boss hits you with, swaps in new skill scripts, and folds teams that were getting by on raw numbers. A roster that farms Extreme on auto can lose this fight in one phase.

The fix is mostly prep work. The mode tells you exactly what it wants before you spend a ticket: match your damage type to the boss armor, match your students to the map, and have a real plan for the cost bar. Nail those three things and the clear stops being scary.

Understanding Boss Weaknesses and Damage Types

The color wheel and the damage math

Damage typing in Blue Archive is rock-paper-scissors with colors. Red attacks (Explosive) shred Light armor. Yellow attacks (Piercing) shred Heavy armor. Blue attacks (Mystic) shreds Special armor. A matched hit lands for double damage. A resisted hit lands for half. That's a 4x spread between a good pick and a bad one, which is why a carry can feel broken on one boss and useless on the next.

Two newer attack types exist too. Sonic doubles into Elastic armor, and Corrosive handles Composite. They only matter for the newest bosses, but the old three colors cover most of the roster.

One thing people miss: some support skills only boost one specific attack type, and the boost only fires if that type is the one the armor is actually weak to. A piercing-effectiveness buff does nothing for your red carry into Heavy armor. Read the skill text before you assume the buff is landing.

What actually changes at Insane

This is the big one. From Normal all the way up to Extreme, every raid boss attacks with Normal typing, which does flat 100% damage to every armor in the game. Your students' own armor basically never mattered.

At Insane that ends. The boss gets a real attack type, and suddenly who's tanking matters as much as who's shooting. Binah starts firing Piercing rounds, so your Heavy armor strikers take double damage from hits they used to shrug off. The bosses also run upgraded skill lists at this tier, so patterns you memorized on Extreme won't all carry over.

Binah gets a bonus layer of pain: a permanent passive at Insane (Heavy Sandstorm) that lowers Accuracy and Stability for your whole team, specials included. Your damage gets lumpier than a damage calculator will tell you.

The boss cheat sheet

| Boss | Armor | Bring | Deals at Insane | Maps | Timer | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Binah | Heavy | Piercing | Piercing | Outdoor / Street | 3:00 | | Chesed | Heavy | Piercing | Explosive | Indoor / Outdoor | 4:00 | | Hod | Heavy | Piercing | Mystic | Street / Indoor | 4:00 | | Hovercraft | Heavy | Piercing | Piercing | Outdoor | 4:00 | | Hieronymus | Light | Explosive | Explosive | Indoor / Street | 4:00 | | KAITEN FX Mk.0 | Light | Explosive | Piercing | Outdoor / Street | 3:00 | | Gregorius | Light | Explosive | Mystic | Indoor | 4:00 | | Perorodzilla | Special | Mystic | Mystic | Indoor / Outdoor | 4:00 | | Shiro & Kuro | Special | Mystic | Piercing | Street / Indoor | 4:00 | | Goz | Special | Mystic | Explosive | Indoor / Outdoor | 4:00 | | Kurokage | Elastic | Sonic | Mystic | Street | 4:00 |

Same armor color, same answer. Four of the heavyweights want Piercing, so a strong yellow bench pays off more often than any other color.

Team Compositions for the Current Rotating Boss

First, figure out which boss is up

One boss runs at a time, seasons last about a week, and they come back around roughly every two weeks. Each boss also swaps between two fixed maps, so check both the boss and the map icon before you build anything. Chesed on Indoor is a different fight than Chesed on Outdoor, and the students change with it.

The shape of a raid team

You get six slots: four Strikers on the field, two Specials backing them up. Up front you want a tank, one on-type main carry, and then damage or a debuffer in the last two slots. In back, a buffer and a healer covers most fights.

Here's a detail worth knowing. Specials hand your Strikers 10% of their HP and attack, plus 5% of their defense and healing power. Only base stats transfer though - self-buffs from a special's own skills don't count. So on a special, level, gear, and bond do the work. Don't slack on them just because they stand off-screen.

Comps by armor color

Heavy armor bosses (Binah, Chesed, Hod, Hovercraft) want Piercing. Mika is the ceiling here - limited, and the strongest single-target Piercing attacker in the game. She's so far ahead that she gets used even into fights where she's neutral. Iori is the other staple, and she punches above her color too. Himari and Ako in the back pumping crit and cost is the classic support pair behind either of them.

Light armor bosses (Hieronymus, KAITEN, Gregorius) want Explosive. Hibiki is an easy fit - she's an Explosive special who drops a cheap missile barrage across several overlapping circles from total safety.

Special armor bosses (Perorodzilla, Shiro & Kuro, Goz) want Mystic. If your Mystic bench is thin, a stacked off-type carry can still get there - Iori gets slotted into blue-armor content constantly because her numbers hold up. You're giving up the 2x multiplier, so gear quality has to cover the gap.

Kurokage is the odd one out with Elastic armor. That means Sonic attackers, and that roster is still pretty thin since the type is new.

Two cheap pickups that punch way up: Tsubaki with a Tier 4 Navy School Bag tanks like a unit twice her cost, and Serina is a perfectly good healer at the lowest rarity in the game.

One team or two

You're allowed multiple teams, but there's a catch on each side. Students lock once you field them, and your score adds up combat time across every team you use. One stacked team killing fast beats two half-strength teams killing slow, basically every time. Split only when your best six genuinely can't finish the bar.

Also: you can set and borrow raid supports from your club. Missing a carry? Borrow one. This is the single cheapest way to close a gear gap for an Insane clear.

Terrain Bonuses and Positioning on the Assault Map

Terrain grades move numbers hard

Every student has a separate terrain rating for Street, Outdoor, and Indoor maps. The grade is a straight damage multiplier:

| Grade | Damage | Cover effect | |---|---|---| | SS | 130% | 75% | | S | 120% | 60% | | A | 110% | 45% | | B | 100% | 30% | | C | 90% | 15% | | D | 80% | 0% |

SS only shows up through unique weapon upgrades, so for most of your roster the ceiling is S at 120%.

Look at the spread between S and D. That's 120 versus 80 - a 1.5x swing from one map to the next, which is bigger than most buffs in the game. A B-tier student on their home map will usually out-damage an S-tier student stuck on the wrong one. Check the map icon before you lock a comp, every single time.

Cover and the field

The same grade controls how much cover protects that student. Indoor maps are littered with cover, Outdoor maps are mostly open ground. And cover isn't permanent - bosses smash it as the fight drags on, so don't build a whole plan around one wall staying up for four minutes.

Worth saying plainly: raid fights are a single arena, not a hex map. There's no tile movement here. "Positioning" in Total Assault means dragging your strikers around the field while the fight is live, and at Insane that's half the job.

Moving students mid-fight

Telegraphs are the thing to watch. Binah's Atziluth Light laser burns a straight line across the field, so spread your strikers out enough that one beam can't clip two of them. And once Binah drops under roughly 60% HP it burrows, which forces you to relocate just to keep damage flowing.

Hod has a whole opening act. Two Erosion Towers come first, and you want them dead before you worry about the boss. The good news is there are defense turrets on the field firing at Hod for free, and both Hod and the towers have skills you can shut down with crowd control - so a stun goes a long way in that fight. Goz flags its incoming train early in phase one now, which is your cue to move.

Rough rule: beam and line attacks mean spread out, splash attacks mean don't over-stack either. Mostly just watch what's killing you in practice mode and stand somewhere else.

EX Skill Timing and Cost Management During the Fight

How cost works

Your cost bar builds over time, and every student on the team adds regen - a full six fills meaningfully faster than a five. Some students bend the economy directly. Ui makes EX skills cheaper to cast, and Himari and Cherino speed up how fast the bar refills. Those slots are close to free damage.

Build a burst window, don't spam

The classic Insane mistake is tapping skills the second cost shows up. Fights run three to four minutes, which is long enough that lining skills up beats dumping them on cooldown.

The pattern that works: hold your expensive nukes until the buff stack is up. Attack up, defense down, crit buffs - get them all running, then dump the big skills inside that window. To give you a sense of the ceiling, a single hit in this game caps at 10,969,999 damage, and numbers anywhere near that only happen when everything's stacked at once. The same skill outside a window is a fraction of it.

Reapply buffs before they fall off rather than after, and spend the bar down before the clock ends. Leftover cost is just wasted damage, and killing faster is worth points - more on that below.

One boss-specific note: Binah's defense stat is enormous, so defense-reduction and defense-ignoring skills punch way above their cost in that fight. Bring at least one.

Practice, auto, and the clock

Auto mode plays worse than a human with a plan - it fires skills whenever it feels like it. Run Insane manual. Once you know the fight, 3x speed manual is still you making the calls, and it's fine.

Practice battles are free and don't burn a ticket. Use them hard. A real attempt locks the students you field, so make your mistakes in practice, not on the clock.

And if the game crashes or you drop connection mid-run, the fight counts as never happening and your team stays usable - but the 60-minute real-time timer on that attempt keeps ticking down anyway. Don't start a run you can't sit with for a bit.

Score Thresholds and Reward Tiers to Aim For

How the score gets made

Score comes from time left on the clock, not damage dealt. The catch is that multi-team runs add their combat times together, so a single fast team outscores two slow ones even if both clear.

Timers differ by boss. Binah and KAITEN give you 3 minutes. Everything else on the list gives you 4.

For a ballpark, a clean one-team Insane clear lands somewhere in the high twenties of millions - community clears tend to sit around 26 to 28 million, and that number creeps up every time the level cap rises. Don't chase the leaderboard on your first clear. Clear it, then shave time.

Coins per clear

| Difficulty | Raid Coin | Rare Raid Coin | |---|---|---| | Normal | 40 | - | | Hard | 60 | - | | Very Hard | 80 | - | | Hardcore | 100 | 10 | | Extreme | 120 | 20 | | Insane | 140 | 40 | | Torment | 160 | 60 | | Lunatic | 180 | 80 |

Rare Raid Coins literally exist because Insane was added - that currency shipped with the difficulty. The rare-coin section of the raid shop is where the actually good stuff sits, and the whole shop restocks on the first of every month, so there's a monthly rhythm to your spending.

Ladder brackets and season totals

At season's end you also get paid by ladder rank:

| Rank | Raid Coin | Rare Raid Coin | Pyroxene | |---|---|---|---| | 1 - 20,000 | 575 | 300 | 1,200 | | 20,001 - 120,000 | 500 | 250 | 1,000 | | 120,001 - 240,000 | 425 | 200 | 800 | | Below 240,000 | 325 | 150 | 600 |

Bracket sizes shift by region, so treat the cutoffs as loose. A weekly Insane clear is the baseline for the better brackets; fighting for the top one is Torment territory.

Separately, there are season total-point milestones. The newer bosses (Geburah onward) want somewhere around 620 million points across the season to claim everything, where older bosses topped out near 420 million. That sounds like a lot, but every clear across every difficulty feeds the total.

Planning your week

Tickets come in at 3 a day, which is 21 across a full season, and they don't carry over to the next boss. Newer servers have raised the hold cap to 6 so you can bank a few - that change hit the JP server first.

The unlock order is the part to plan around. You have to clear each lower difficulty once to open the next one up. At 3 tickets a day, day one caps out at Very Hard, and Insane unlocks on day two. So the schedule writes itself: burn your lower clears day one, take a real swing at Insane day two.

And here's the safety net - reward insurance. If an Insane attempt fails, through a wipe, a forfeit, or running out the hour, you still get paid Extreme-tier coins for it. It works once per day. So once your Extreme clear is banked, throwing a ticket at Insane is close to free upside: clear it and it's 140 coins plus 40 rare coins, fail it and it's 120 plus 20 anyway.