Nightmare:

Start of fight 2 possibilities:

1. go to Adol and punch, 2. stay up (rarer); this is RNG so any mixture of the two is possible.

When ≤ 1536HP:

1. fly away and do the pollen attack, 2. go to Adol and punch (rare), 3. stay up (even rarer). All these behaviors are RNG so you might get 2 pollens in a row or 2 punches in a row, I’ve had 5 or 6 punches in a row happen, but only 2 pollen in a row strangely enough, but I’ve had a sequence of pollen ×2 → stay up → pollen again, which would lose a ton of time if it’s not hittable.

When ≤ 1152HP:

Same stuff but pollen becomes spawning minions; it can still do it but it’s fairly rare. At this point the lower its HP the more minions it will spawn at once.

Each pollen attack loses like 12″ if it’s not hittable. So the strategy is get it to 1537HP, wait for it to lock in the punch action, then deal as much damage as you can and if it goes perfectly I think you can skip the pollen phase entirely. Then you just keep dealing as much dmg as you can while killing fireflies on dead time, if you still need Emel it’s best to drop Zonplas to like 20HP so it spawns the maximum amount of minions at once.

Edit: Actually after rewatching our PBs I don’t think manipulation is even necessary. You always just get 1 pollen attack anyway even with bad manipulation… you just need the RNG to be able to hit. If manipulation could skip it entirely reliable it would be good, but I haven’t even gotten it once; maybe on Hard it would work. Edit: Of course as soon as I say that I get a run where manipulation would’ve helped me.

For Normal the HP threshold is 640HP and you can actually skip the pollen attack entirely with perfect execution. I think it would be too hard to do in a run though, so I don’t think it’s useful.