Penultimate Fan/Exc/Ber/Emu XF update~
4-7-A (Charlton 1): Not a terribly hard fight. Charlton can be rocked pretty badly by Feeble Mind, and even before then he'll waste some turns on Fragile instead of the far more dangerous Dark Destruction. You do have to rout the fight at least, and John Does are powerful enough to be annoying, but nothing too bad.
4-7-B (Royal Knights 2): As with last week, sleep and gravity leads to lulz. Get used to this.
4-8-A (Chelle finale): Stealth Stalkers again, Detect again. They're more durable, they get instant death off, I petrify them back so fair is fair. Chelle... What would I do here without sleep? Probably just die. Debuffs are one turn on her. She still manages to kill a couple people since I had no way to really null her out (it's possible to box the team against Predator Barrage but that slows down the approach to deal with the obnoxious status whore Forsaken Mutants and her normals still hurt enough. But yeah, sleep her, nuke them, take things apart from there.
4-8-B (Piedras Blancas): Slow Piedras, surround him and action replay gravity spam! Heal when needed, his offence ain't too special. Kill the mutants as they approach before they get in range to be eaten, using either weakness-hitting spells or Petrify.
4-9-A (Tormenta Triad 3) [4 resets]: Um, ow. This fight's hard, man. The tormenta triad have a crippling status weakness which wrecks their devious teamwork strategy... unfortunately it's Rob Turn, so I don't have it. This is like their first fight except the strategy I employed there (MP-bust Trueno) doesn't work so well because he has MP Regen. I try once but it's a pointless waste of turns and get mostly wiped out by random spells from the plentiful, unkillable support in the meantime.
So I decide that I'll just go for the kill on Lluvia (who has low res) to stop the doom strategy. 3 more resets making this work. First time I get overwhelmed pretty badly. Next two I'm able to drop Lluvia, but still get wiped out thereafter. MAG-boosted spells from the brothers do high 2HKO damage, OHKO anyone after revival. As soon as I'm down to three PCs even infinite items (which I don't really have anyway) I can't heal as fast as two brothers and six clones can kill me, and though some of them start out of range on turn 1 they close pretty quickly.
Slow Down on Lluvia, then beat on him with CAs. I try to heal somewhat but it's a tight balance between maintaining offence. I take out Trueno second with Valiant-enhanced damage as they bring down Alexia, which proves very helpful. Once two are down the battle is basically in hand, though the final toll is 9 Revive Fruits (over half of what I have), a bunch of Potion Berries, and all but two PCs dead. Yikes.
4-9-B (Tormenta Triad finale) [1 reset]: Much easier. Still not easy! Anyway, giving too many turns to the brothers after one is dead = bad. Giving even one turn to the final brother = bad. After a slight error costs me one reset, I try again, poisoning Viento and intending to leave him to last so he'll die of poison even if things go awry. It proves an unnecessary precaution, as the turns fall out such that I take him out anyway. Otherwise, the usual strategy of "get them all as low HP as possible before killing any" works well enough, CAs to chew into them and chippy spells to finish.
4-10-A (Katrina 2): As the previous battle mostly. This battle kinda bores me outside the end which isn't that bad. Katrina does shockingly high damage off shockingly high speed but Slow Down and 50% sleep keep that under control, and 5HKO Feeble Mind means she doesn't take long to die anyway.
4-10-B (Clysmian 1): It's vulnerable to physicals or something. I mostly use gravity anyway, same idea as Piedras. The support, in both this battle and the previous, is a bit too easy to pick off with Emulator nonsense (petrify and weaknesses, both work although their healing can mess with the damage some).
4-11-A (Charlton 2): Ah, much less bad with six PCs, so I can actually surround him to stop the summon strategy. Still nasty to get under control. CAs help since they trigger fewer counters, before finally getting him trapped. Slow Down, etc., the usual works here although he has no real weaknesses to exploit.
4-11-B (puzzle): Is a puzzle. I meant to check if gems could activate the switches but forgot, oh well.
4-11-C (Charlton finale) [2 resets]: This reset count probably shouldn't be taken too seriously because I know exactly how to win this without them but chose to give the "fair" fight a try anyway. It didn't really feel especially doable, with no way to kill the John Does (Sacred Slayer, Sentinel, Extremist), no way to effectively cure disease and heal faster than once per round per PC (Gadgeteer, Enigmancer), and no ability to get in range of Charlton super-quickly (High Cavalier, maybe Grappler and/or Nightstalker?), this just isn't doable. I get diseased/killed and there's nothing I can do to stop it.
Of course since Black Corrosion's range is 20 instead of, say, 30, the coward's route brings victory.
And that does it for C4.
