Strago, Red, & Feena are largely unchanged from post here:
http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php/topic,5907.msg137177.html#msg137177Well, except for one thing: Feena now has the might of *Time Gate*.
Celes's repertoire:
Cure/Cure2/Cure3/Antdot/Regen/Remedy/Life/Life2/Life3
Ice/Ice2/Ice3/Fire/Fire3/Bolt3/Bio
Imp/Sleep/Mute/Break/Muddle/Berserk/Doom/Vanish/Haste/Slow/Demi/Rasp/Osmose/Safe/Shell/Dispel/Quick
Learned this floor: Ultima
Marvel Shoes is Haste, Safe, Shell, and Regen. FF6 haste is a +31% speed boost taken literally; it is one of the rare things that can set up doubles in FF6, although it's still not as good as a +31% speed boost in a straight FFT-esque system. Safe & Shell are 34% damage reduction, and contrary to my recollection, upon testing Shell does *not* mess with healing in FF6 after all.
Mystile is crazy evade rate and general awesomeness.
Obligatory note that if you allow Vanish / Doom, there are a lot of single badass bosses on this floor, so that trivializes every single fight except maybe the second one.
Team Snowfire | Celes, Feena, Red XIII, Strago (Neo Speed), Ricardo
[Celes: Kirin , Siren, Shoat, Unicorn, Phantom, ZoneSeek, Tritoch, Phoenix, Raiden, Ragnarok]
Floor 8: Maze of Trials
*Celes has been granted Marvel Shoes
*Red XIII has been granted Mystile
Team Snowfire vs. Mascot Yuna (FFX-2)
Soooo I thought for awhile this was going to be impossible, but actually Marvel Shoes means this is quite winnable. Short version: Runic spam. Silence in FFX-2 stops Arcana and Kupo!, so that leaves Yuna with Swordplay, her worst skillset. She can do ~.15 PCHP damage Breaks, or charge up > 1 turn to do slightly more damage, of which her best is ~.34 PCHP Holy Physical that takes an extra half a turn. So not that much of a DPS increase, and elemental. Normally I'd be worried about Yuna speed hype, but A) If you respect FFX-2 Haste, Strago can Rippler and Runic spam will lock a recasting, and B) Marvel Shoes's innate Haste means Celes keep up.
Longer writeup: First off, I talked with the Vice President, and the FFX-2 stat topic averages do *not* include Mascot. Mascot is batshit insane enough on stats to actually drag them up some, so all Yuna's stats are a little worse than they look. Since Yuna's abilities all have Charge Times, she's basically one turn behind unless she uses a physical (but she won't fall further behind unless she uses abilities with > 1.0 CT). Arguably there should be some kind of initative bonus for the cast, since some of the cast uses CT abilities and is thus a lot slower than their stats look... but headaches. Yuna is ~1.09 average speed taken literally, Celes is ~1.31 speed taken literally, and apparently there's some question about FFX-2 speed respect anyway, but the general point is that if Celes uses Runic on turn 2 and every turn afterward, Yuna never gets a spell off. (Well. She might get off the 0.8 CT Moogle Regen before Celes' second turn if she charges that... maybe... but as noted, that just hands Haste+Regen to Strago as I Rippler it.) The downside of Runic spam is that it turns off all my healing, but... see above about Yuna's Swordplay damage sucking. She can spam Defense Break and maybe eventually get somewhere, but there's a counter to that in Ricardo. So:
Celes: Quick / Ice3 / Ice3. (Quick / Life3 self / Ice3 is also a possibility.) (Or, better yet: Quick / Vanish / Demi. I definitely allow this but putting in parens for those who don't let Vanish guarantee Demi hits.)
Feena: Magic offense. (Time Gate -> Unload with magic if you have high Yuna beatdown respect and think this fight needs to end ASAP.)
Red XIII: Attack. (Reminder that endgame Red is actually a good fighter, ~.50 PCHP damage)
Yuna: Charge a move. (If 1.0 CT, will be ready by her init next turn.)
Strago: Grand Train.
Ricardo: HP-regen song (!!! It's actually decent, 24% max HP over 5 turns)
--Round 2--
Celes: Runic
Feena: Zap Whip, or Combos if trying to rebuild SP later
Red: Constantly spam attacks.
Yuna: Knowing Runic was going to come up, she probably doesn't try Arcana or Kupo!, so Defense Break somebody? Then charge (another) Swordplay.
Strago: GrandTrain. (Rippler if Yuna went for speedy buffs. Remember, Lore not affected by Runic.)
Ricardo: Whatever.
Then repeat Round 2 a bunch. Although Strago starts getting constant doubles thanks to NeoSpeed's speed boost.
Yuna has the ZOMG insane durability, including her auto-Safe and auto-Shell, of
3.40 (6.80) physical, 2.79 (5.58) magical
(but against the Mascot-less average, so maybe a bit worse than this?)
Still, Red & Strago are grinding away 1 PCHP unmodified damage a round, Celes & Feena got in solid damage early even if no Demi hype, and Yuna's first 5 turns are pretty much canceled by Ricardo's HP-regen buff. (They keep getting canceled if you see Ricardo as able to play more songs under Runic, which... I probably wouldn't by default. Would have to look up but don't think it matters.) If Yuna goes for Strago, he spends a turn to Rippler Protect & Shell over to him, which are the badass FFX-2 half damage variety, and he'll have that backed by regen, so he's a bad target. But Red & Celes aren't much better, since Red has crazy evade, and Celes has okay evade, good defense, and auto-Safe. Anyone else is practically irrelevant. The party times it so that just when Yuna might start making progress, she dies, thus conserving as much Feena SP as possible.
I'll run the numbers if someone wants, but pretty sure this is not an issue while Yuna is locked down from healing by Runic and has great trouble doing damage. EDIT: Derp, Strago's GrandTrain is ITD. Since Yuna has awesome MDef baked into her durability numbers, it's actually doing quite a lot of effective durability damage.
As two side notes: No, I checked, Rippler does not get rid of auto-status abilities like from Marvel / RunningShoes. So Strago isn't removing Yuna's auto-Protect/Shell, although he'll be Protect / Shelled himself (and Haste/ Regened if Yuna is foolish enough to try it). Also, sadly, an MP-draining strategy does not work, though it'd be preferable if it did. I'll probably post it to the FF6 stat topic, but basically,
DL Celes (So Floor 7) drains 262 MP with Rasp (more with Osmose if Celes is missing more than 262 MP) against 150 Magic Defense enemies. Compared to PC MP, that is 63% PCMP damage. Compared to endgame random monsters in Kefka's Tower... I actually bothered to stick them all into a spreadsheet from CTRL-Fing through the monster list on GameFAQs, and the *mean* enemy MP is 2077. The *median* enemy MP is 770. So yeah, all over the place since there are some enemies with a ginormous pile of MP... that some of them don't even use, I don't think. (Brontaurs have 12850 MP for you to Osmose off of!!!1!). Including the bosses... well, and combining all the Tier pieces of Kefka's tower into one boss (they all have 10000 MP), it's 5217 mean MP, and 1600 median MP. So, a party of 4 Celes can one-round MP KO the median non-bosses easily, and come close to MP KOing median with bosses. Mean non-bosses is a two-round MP KO. However, this is all moot. Mascot Yuna has ~2.3x PCMP, which wouldn't be too bad for incoming Quick'd Rasps... except... she also has great Magic Defense and Shell. And I'm pretty sure Shell messes with Rasp in-game. So those Rasps are doing a quarter - a third their normal power. That can't really keep up with Yuna MP regeneration anymore. Right, end side note.
Team Snowfire vs. Zeromus, Exdeath and Chaos
If Runic stops Ricardo's songs, Ricardo wasn't able to play the MP-regen song beforehand, so there might be some resource issues. That said... Celes & Ricardo will have a boatload of resources no matter what, Red doesn't use his MP in the previous fight, and Strago has enough in the tank for ~8-9 Grand Trains (and that many are not needed against Yuna), so Feena is the only one that has to worry some. I'm going to assume she had to blow Time Gate in fight 1; this fight is a breeze if she didn't have to.
Anyway. Zeromus's Dispel doesn't do anything against Marvel Shoes. So he charges Big Bang, I guess. Whatever, he's not really the threat here. I think I just beatdown Chaos. This is easy if Feena saved End of the World and only used lvl. 2 magic or cheaper lvl. 3 magic, since it's non-elemental, but I can probably smash through Chaos just fine anyway, his HP is not *that* incredible (Elfboy's topic says 0.74 PCHP). The non-elemental End of the World and GrandTrain both hurt him, and Celes can Quick -> doublecast powerful magic worst comes to worst (who cares if it's resisted by 50% if you cast it twice and it hurts).
So, Chaos dies to some combination of beatdown & magic. After that I probably want to kill Zeromus, but in general I think I'm safe once there's two enemies left. Zeromus can spam Flares, but only at <50% HP, which he won't stay at for long. If Exdeath picked his final form, than Ricardo plays the status-immunity song, and Ricardo naturally immunes ID (and Stone I believe?) himself, so White Hole is not a big deal. If he picked Castle Exdeath, then he can try and kill Strago every round with Vacuum Wave, which just forces Celes to spend a turn casting Quick / Life2 / Something else. Also everybody here can be MP-drained, so usual reminder that Celes's resources aren't under threat. Big Bang is answered by MT healing as usual, so yeah, at worst Exdeath & Zeromus tie up Celes's turns undoing whatever they did. Chip Zeromus to 50% HP, finish him off before he gets another round, collect victoly vs. an alone Exdeath after setting up MP-regen songs (and maybe letting Feena farm combos for SP). If Exdeath picked his final form it totally doesn't matter (assuming you allow NeoExdeath) as Neo dies horribly to MT after form 1 dies.
Team SnowFire vs. Boss Timelord and Belial (No 4D Pocket)
TimeLord is below average speed, Belial can't inflict enough damage quickly to actually do damage. Kill Belial round 1, I have plenty of MT if she wastes a turn on the Distortion, and TimeLord is tanky enough not to be hit into 50% HP range from incidental damage. (And if you see him AS that frail, then just kill TL first!) Ricardo can play the status immunity song to turn off TL's status game, so TL hits somebody (which gets healed off easily if I care, or revived). Chip TL to 50% HP. Finish it off in one round - a task made super-easy by Time Gate, but that isn't even really necessary.
*Full Heal
Team SnowFire vs.
Luther
*UNLOAD* and kill Luther round 1. Time Gate if needed. This is because Luther has MP damage and if Ricardo loses his MP, that's no more MP-regen for everyone else. Considering that Celes has ~0.95-1.0 PCHP damage off Quick / Ice3 / Ice3 I doubt Time Gate is needed. (Also Strago is doing the ST version of GrandTrain, so that's another .55-.60 PCHP).
Indalecio and Cyril
Cyril's elemental hole is Fire, so Quick->Fire3->Fire3 (.95-1.0 PCHP), Red physical (.50), split-damage GrandTrain (~.30 PCHP), Feena damage (Burnflare or EOTW - .30 PCHP - .50 PCHP depending on respect and what's needed) all add up to huge pain. That's 2 PCHP damage minimum, more if Feena really unloads, even more if Feena blows Time Gate (Which she shouldn't need to). Indy is not really a threat before Time of Trial, so throw up a giant wave of buffs (BigGuard which never wears off / EternalTreasure / MP-regen song / FF6 Haste which never wears off), then eliminate Indy.
Xorn
Xorn's anti-buff move only triggers at 75% HP, and I walk into this battle buffed to the gills. Xorn gets one turn off ramming into my buffs, then gets exterminated. If needed, wait a round of chipping, but that's not needed without large Xorn HP respect - Strago's doing ST GrandTrain damage (~.60 PCHP), Feena has full MP and can safely blow EOTW or even Time Gate.
Profound Darkness
Cancelling, PD's anti-buff move, only unlocks in this third form. Even then, he doesn't have a MT OHKO, which is what he needs. It barely costs any MP to heal the party so I can spam physicals if I want for forms 1 & 2, really, while the attacks ram into Big Guard.
Team SnowFire vs.
Myria 1
Myria1, even ignoring Agni, is fearsome in a duel but not so scary in a team setting - her MT damage is terrible. She is also definitely vulnerable to Slow (Idle owns her badly in-game, possibly due to the coding quirk), so she isn't even getting doubles. Buff to high heaven then win, with Red providing consistent cheap damage.
Deathevans and Barubary
Deathevans has an MT dispel! And is slightly below average speed. And thus will never live to use it. Barubary has a slow MT 2HKO that's elemental. Heal it off, have Ricardo play the status immunity song *now*, then kill Barubary.
Myria 3
If Myria wants to get anywhere, she opens with Dispel, since her status game is kaput against Ricardo. Ricardo throws the status immunity song back up, though, so Myria is forced to dispel every turn until she doubles Ricardo. (If she goes for damage it gets healed off.) If I was worried about that happening, Celes can also spam Haste, but it's probably easier just to kill Myria. This does mean I enter the next fight without my buffs, or at least with only one up.
Fou-lu
Also not really a threat. Soul Rends it MT HP=1! Uh, cast an MT heal spell. He physicals and kills somebody! Revive them. He can dispel, too, but it takes his turn, so I can probably throw up buffs if I wanted to... but there's not much point against HP-1. Just heal & maybe cast Gale to keep the beatdown going.
