He sucks so bad. I fought him with good stats and had thousand cuts and monk staff guan dao weapon. With that dire flame and spirit thief

In Dark Alliance 1, you can get killed in 1 hit on normal difficulty and maybe get lucky if you get hit and lose 70% of your health. However, if you keep evading/blocking and sneaking in hits, you might defeat her in 15-20 tries.

However master li on Master (normal) Difficulty is even worse. You have to salvage your focus for when he tries to setup a harmonic combo. From there once you run out of focus its almost always over.

Weapons deal damage but not enough without you 1 shotting yourself from his thorns.

My character had thousand cuts which delivers like 8 hits in 1 combo. Because of that when he gets thorns on I 1 shot myself from his thorns.

He's a great boss and a nightmare for an action/rpg but has anyone even gotten close to beating on Grandmaster. I probably could have beaten him on master but after so many tries and getting close once, I decided to just bump my save to student.

I got past the rest of the game on grandmaster and master so I did my time, heh.

Still the bitch from DarkAlliance is defeated in 1 minute while master li if you cant defeat him within 4 minutes the game is over. What a psycho.

Uhm... have you tried using Support Styles, like Storm Dragon on him?

Im not sure you are talking about playing on master or student. But on master difficulty, the support styles dont help you do enough damage in enough time. You will get killed if you do what you suggest on the difficulty Im speaking of.

I would disagree, because I usually play on highest difficulty setting available from the start (except for Jade Master) and never really had much problem with him... But I used Thousand Cuts once - not a bad style, but the weakest from them all in damage department.
And Storm Dragon is almost broken, to be honest. Leveled it stuns for way too long, and allows to go through normal fights on Focus and ending it with 100% or almost of it remaining. And it usually stuns bosses for 1-2 full combo, except for those that are totaly inmune to Support Styles.
The worst fights, for me, are the Arena Battle Royale and Dirge 3 Dopplers fight... But well - I had quite a break in the game, so I could try to play it again on this hardest diff. and see if I can still pull it off.

well the arena battle royale was difficult until i adjusted my tactics. The hardest part was the end where usually i was fighting the elephant demon which just is a brute close up, and is immune to my distance elemental attacks, so was very annoying.

What i did was ignore it until almost last. I killed everything else except for 1 human type. Then i just drained the human to replenish my Chi so i could heal up, played keep away until my health was maxed, then attacked the elephant demon as best as I could to damage it some. When it beat me up enough my health was low, i repeated and drained chi from the human enemy to heal back up again, repeat until demon finally died, then finished off the last pathetic human (my little chi battery).

Against big demons like Elephan I prefer chaning into Horse Demon for a moment, fireball him, and switch back. Demon fire works on demons, you know? >:3

It's pretty necro but I hope it will help someone. Go with the Jade Golem style and you will beat Master Li easily because this style gives you immunity to pretty much everything except for melee weapons and at the same time allows you to inflict lots of damage.