Aspect of supay with hestia on attack and zues blitz on special. Try and get storm ring on the cast as well. Be sure to bring as many rerolls as you can and try to reroll for those gods/boons. I’d also recommend Hera on dash to help clear rooms. I breezed all the way to Rival Typhon and almost beat him first try because the build was so OP. I choked and lost but now that I know what happens I’m sure I’ll get past him Another try or two. I also beat unrivaled Chronos first try with the same build. I really think supay gives you the ability to just sprint around and near enemies so your Scorch and blitz take effect, drop your cast a lot and do some omegas when safe.

As others said, I’d really try to get a lot of hearts going too. Not sure what your health pool looks like going into the fights, but for new players the more max life you have can’t hurt. Wouldn’t take it to the detriment of your build though if you’re trying to get your boons filled up. Sea stars from Poseidon is super useful for extra poms, magic and hearts. Hermes has a boom that replaces first item bought at a shop with another item. So you can get extra boons that way too. I’d still rock with DD personally. I know people like the strength card, but it’s been nerfed a bit and I think fully upgraded DD and Strength, you get more health back with DD than the life bonus from strength. Also take Toula for the DD.

For Chronos' second phase you need to keep in mind that his moveset is roughly the same. Pretty much every one of his new abilities is just area denial to punish you for tunnel-visioning him. Try not to race him down and instead be more methodical with how you're positioning yourself. Try doing this fight with a ranged weapon and try to wear him down without taking a hit. I was having a lot of trouble with him at one point until I took the staff and just slowly chipped him down while focusing on avoiding as much damage as possible. Once I'd done that consistently it made fighting him with every other weapon a hell of a lot easier. To fight Time, you need patience 

Typhon... idk. I just picked the game back up a day or two ago and when I'd previously put it down, Eris was as far as you could go on the surface. I've managed to beat Typhon three times now and all three of those times I COMPLETELY maxed out Path of Stars on either the beam (2x) or the meteor hex. Those hexes can carry you if you've got the right boons for quickly spending and gaining magick. 

You just have to keep trying and learn the new phases like you did with the first ones. Some of the attacks change up a bit, so don’t muscle memory attacks just because they look similar to the first phase ones.

For Chronos’ second phase, just checking that you know this: he opens with an avoidable instakill. Get to the 1 glowing circle on the clock face. That’s the safe zone. He’ll repeat that occasionally or a different one where he’s in the middle in a black circle and the outer ring of the arena is also black. Stay in the narrow ring between the black zones.

You either need higher DPS or more survivability— what are you arcana like? I found it way easier when I ditched death defiance totally for the single life arcana options. Fast hitting weapon like blades or coat special with hestia / Poseidon/ Zeus should do it. If you have supay, there are multiple easy builds off of that with heph/zeus on the special and any other god on attack.

If he's gotten to you you've already lost. It's clear that you've already taken extreme measures, but you haven't even taken advantage of the basics of the Pact of Punishment; even something as making the traps deadlier will weaken him and make your urns more deadly, but why fight him if you can make your minions kill him for you? Make your minions work overtime, and put them through a regimen of calisthenics and hard labor. Put out a summons for more minions while you're at it, and use a stick of middle managers and a carrot of benefits packages while you're at it to keep your minions in line. Start charging convenience fees too, Charon will love the extra free income so his greedy ass will definitely not complain.

Hold a kaizen to improve damage control, customs, inspections, and approval processes as well, those will make his weapons and smuggled Olympian boons less effective.

Oh, Zagreus doesn't want to implement the pact? Taunt him with bounties of Titan's blood and ambrosia. Or better yet, appeal to his pride and taunt him into agreeing to use more heat. Eventually he'll tire of the escape and he'll go back to sulking in his quarters like he used to.

The Narrator seems pretty good at killing Zagreus; you should ask him.

Have you considered showing him love and understanding, in an effort to trick him into not laying waste to your realm and destroying your insurance premiums?

Just grab him and throw him far away so just dies lmao

Take away that boys allowance

Welcome! As a lover of this particular brand of progressive challenge, story, and fantastical build-craft, I personally couldn't be happier with hades 2.

It's been a while, but before I unlocked weapon aspects i found focusing on gods with chunky damage like Hephaestus and Zeus along with a freeze from demeter to be the most fun.

Welcome to the geeking out!

Take your time and explore different options, different paths. Unlocking certain dialogue triggers and story progression requires certain things to happen. Even just reaching the boss of a Region will trigger things. Talk to everyone you can who has a ! above their head. Skip nothing.

Make use of the Forget-Me-Not once you have it; it will make your life so much easier finding resources.

Change up your farming focus every now and again. I don't mean some mechanical focus (you used to be able to prioritize tools, but that just changed), I mean opting whether you want to go hard on a bunch of Psyche to level your Grasp, or Ash to unlock Arcana or other things, and so on. Gives a refreshing change of pace as you work to unlock things.

Get Nectar when you can. Every character that you can give Nectar to, give exactly 1 and no more until you've given just about every character 1 Nectar. This goes for Boon-giver gods especially. You may have figured this out already, but it's how you get Keepsakes, and you want to get them ASAP so you have them for runs.

Enjoy the story and dialogue. The gameplay is very fun, but half the draw of the Hades series is the story. If you played Hades 1, you'll know what I mean.

Lastly, take the time to learn enemy attack patterns and how to not take damage. It's a rougelite, damage has a habit of sticking. You don't have a timer.

Death to Chronos!

So, Boss1 shows you, that you take a huge amount of damage from all attacks, which means dodging and keeping distance is a valid and good strategy. Later on some skills let you regenerate health, but thats rare.

Boss 2 throws different dangers together, one on their own is very predictable, but 2 or even 3 is much to calculate with.

Boss 3 is a check if you are skilled enough to endurance a very long fight, as you have to run around a lot with distance weapons (meele is another thing), then it is dancing before and behind him (much easiert than with all overworld bosses, but also doable there)

Or if you do unholy amounts of damage, just throw all attacks out at once.

Sad thing with all bosses except Underworld 2 is, you cannot stack Burn on them, as they have either several phases or just have ways to loose/heal the burn.

Be sure to check the cauldron and swap tools every now and again. Every now and again it's good to do a run with the sole focus of gathering materials as some incantations are game changing.

When you're able to get companions Frinos can block the first bosses morph attack.

Also make sure you're giving 1 nectar to all characters you can. Not sure if you're new to hades in general but in the first game I didn't do this until beating REDACTED a few times thinking nectar was needed for something else.

Edit almost forgot you can level your Arcana and grasp. Early builds of Hades 2 it was hard to tell where to go to do so and IK many people didn't know how to do so for a week or so

More like Greek out

It typically takes around 35-40 run to kill the boss, so you still young and good. I suggest you just learn how he fight and try to boost the mirror for perma buff

yeah i never use the skull or torches, ranged is just lame. knives are fun though, get aphrodite boons and close range them fights, youll die alot but utll be funner

You’re not forced to play at range. If you can’t get into melee no offense but it’s a skill issue and you need to practice more

Chronos isnt too bad to fight with the daggers since you can omega attack to teleport behind him. Axe is pretty hard though if you don't get the ranged whirlwind or something

Turn on god mode for a bit? It's not like god mode in other games, it just gives you more damage resistance. The reason why those end bosses are hard is you haven't learned their moves yet. Reminds me of Charon in Hades 1 where he beat my ass with his oar swipes. I had to dodge at him or in the direction of the swing but facing him was so rare that it took longer to learn.

If you're really struggling at the game then I wouldn't underestimate how much just getting a lot of health can help, particularly on the surface runs. Sometimes you just need a big HP bar if you're not good at dodging and you can generally get by on fewer boons than you think, although they are a lot more 'fun'. Once you get better at the game it's really more about outputting DPS than about your own health, but I think just being able to tank more is useful for beginners or people who are struggling.

Learning about boon combos and aiming towards boon combos that synergise both with each other and with your weapon aspect is a big part of the game. Beyond just 'gitting gud' at dodging etc it's probably the area you can improve at the most in the game. I still have a lot of room for improvement in that regard! Partly it's just about experimenting, with some boons/aspects it's more obvious than others. You can dig out content/recommendations from online if needed.

The most important thing imo is learning to protect yourself.

A good build can help you make up for mistakes, but getting good at dodging can let you win with bad builds.

Some of that comes from learning enemy attack patterns and how to avoid them. Know which enemies you need to be close to, which ones to stand behind, which ones to take out from afar, which ones to trap with your cast, etc.

The other side of that is learning your weapons movesets, so you know what openings you can afford to take and what works well in different scenarios.

In terms of builds, you learn what are good gods for difrent types of weapons. Some like the weapon to have a high DPS, others like it to have a high rate of fire, others like it to be aoe. Matching that eith thr attack and special can make a big difference by itself, then learning what secondary boons support it well and what types of duo boons you want.

Turn on God mode

First remember that all roguelites have a difficulty that drop over time since the meta progression between runs so do all possible quests and so on.

Second, from arcana, to weapon, keepsake, pet and vows, ensure to fit the playstyle with proper synergies, remember to keep a balance of offense and defense options.

Three, consider god mode option to reduce difficulty since Hades is known to be designed as fairly hard, so the option is there on purpose for thoses who want a more relaxed experience.

Make sure you have upgraded all the arcana cards and your weapon aspects and keepsakes - that's your baseline

Then make sure you have a build in mind when starting a run and try to aim for it.

And then it's just pure skill and learning boss moves.

I think its part skill issue and the bosses being a bit too strong. The strategies that we used for their previous forms don't work as great with them like rushing Unrivaled Prometheus would just kill you ASAP. My tips would be to plan your run knowing what you're up against and use all the broken things at your disposal (scorch is bonkers now) Good luck!

Aside from the more specific advice folks have given: Be patient with yourself and give yourself some grace with the learning curve.

It's easy to forget a year into EA, but we all struggled with the bosses in their Rival-Free form for the first few weeks after they were initially released as well. While the identity of the bosses themselves are largely unchanged in their rivaled form, in terms of attack patterns and strategies you're basically looking at 8 new bosses to learn at once.

It's going to take time to memorize and adapt your play style accordingly, let alone doing so on a consistent basis. And honestly, that's not an indictment of player skill or even boss difficulty - it's just the reality of having effectively doubled the boss pool AND having done so all at once instead of staggering them across multiple updates like they did with the Surface bosses.

Give yourself time to learn and practice without getting to frustrated by a self imposed timeline of when you 'should' have it down by. It's a LOT to take in at once, give yourself some grace and keep your head clear enough that it's more likely to stick.

Polyphemus : Play patiently, keep distance between you and the boss, and only rush in when you know it's safe. Also, Medea only has a few patterns, you'll get used to them over time

Eris : Stay close and play aggressively, go behind her when she prepares her laser. Try to pop the bombs with your attacks during her phase transitions.

Hecate : When she activates dark side, you can get a couple hits in but you need to get away quickly or you'll get hit by her attack spam. It can deal a ton of damage if you're not careful, definitely her most dangerous move.

Scylla : There's a lot going on, but staying mobile will naturally make you evade a lot of the projectiles. You can kinda run laps around the arena and hit whatever is close.

My only gripe is for Rivals 3 Underworld, like how can you even dodge or block in the first stage alone

Have you tried dodging? For your early runs divine dash is your best friend. I also recommend killing the skulls before they explode when you can it will slow the boss down from using his stronger moves because he likes to keep the skulls out.

I’ve won probably 80% of my Hades fights using a leveled up call, for what it’s worth. That lets you focus on dodging and killing the spawns until your gauge is full