Final Fantasy 13 - Secondary roles challenge beaten!
Final dungeon was just nasty more or less throughout; there were no real gimme fights. Dagonites I really wanted a sentinel for... but their knockdown attack hits a line so even that's not perfect, and Veil is important too. Sacrifices are more Veil and just staying on top of debuffs; Fog is great on them if it lands. There are a couple fights against ~6 of these lower-tier enemies total and they were insanely tough; I beat one of them after a bunch of tries because it was kinda in the way.
Motorcycles are the real threat, though, Plasma Cannon is MT 4000+ damage which is a a OHKO if not buffed and still terrifying if I am. By itself I can deal with them but when they start getting competent support or appearing in pairs? Yeesh. Staggering works well (since Plasma Cannon becomes easily interrupted then) but I can't do it fast enough outside pre-emptives. My only real recourse for them in such circumstances is to try to get Pain or Daze to land but this isn't easy and spending time trying to do it and having it fail invites a wipe.
Megrim Thrashers are also powerful (huge ST damage) but can be controlled alone well enough. With support they're... yeah. I eventually figure out how to dodge that fight. <_< Sanctum Templars are scary but not too bad, they'll use Dispel but not so quickly buffs aren't useful, and Fog/Barthunder both cut down their offence considerably. There's a Tyrant pallette-swap called Immortal. I do not beat him.
I rotate my team around a bunch, with Snow (for Pain/Fog/Slow/Daze) and Lightning (for SEN) seeing some playtime, but my most common team is Fang/Sazh/Vanille.
Bosses:
Bandersnatch and Jabberwocky: Honestly these guys are easier than most of the randoms! You have to be awake during them because they do have some damage but not much to say. The one with more HP is strangely more vulnerable, Deprotect/Deshell are really great as always. I don't have much to say here.
Wladisaus: (around 8 resets?) On the other hand this guy is a nightmare. He uses an attack called Mounting Contempt, which does somewhere north of 5000 damage. So far, so bad, but hey, we have buffs, and it does take a while to charge. Unfortunately, every subsequent time he uses it, the attack gets BETTER, as it charges faster each time, and from the second use onwards it's paired with an attack which can dispel, Deprotect, and/or Deshell before use (the move always hits the lower defence). If you're under Deprotect/Deshell, get dunked on. The solution is to have your player-controlled Synergist ready to IMMEDIATELY apply Protect(ra)/Shell(ra) if the status lands. Besides that, Veil helps, Sazh's healing helps, Deprotect helps, the usual. He will mix in relatively fast and decently powerful physicals, so of course keeping defensive buffs up is a good idea, Veil too.
Tiamat Eliminator: Certainly easier. Tiamat is fairly interesting, but her damage isn't too hot (she uses ice attacks mostly, lol I am so clever guys). Basically she switches between two forms. The flying form is immune to all Saboteur stuff like Proudclad (including Dispel, and she does buff herself midway through this stage) and rains down mostly ice attacks which can cause slow or imperil (making them stronger). Esuna for Imperil is nice! The ground form is vulnerable to SAB, but instead all but immunes SYN, since her attacks come fast and furious and add dispel. The ground form is more dangerous because it generally does more damage, but switching between them resets her chain gauge. So yeah I do actually beat this on the first try though it isn't totally trivial.
Before Tiamat there are random encounter Wladisalauses, one of which has support. lolnope
Barthandelus 3: (around 5 resets?) The big problem here is Ultima, which does random, non-typed damage... sometimes not too much, but it can do up to 4200. Which is extremely painful for me (my HP is around 5000). He's good at keeping HP down through other means too: Thanatosian Laughter this time is a powerful MT gravity attack (~87% CHP), and like Bart 2 he constantly peppers you with LASERS. So sooner or later Ultima rolls high at a bad time and I am dead.
Ultimately I decide to swap Fang for Snow. There are two reasons for this: one, Slow is actually better than Haste when applicable, and he's vulnerable to it. Spacing out those Ultimas and Laughters more is huge. The other is that this is a long fight, and keeping Protect/Shell up on everyone all the time is incredibly valuable, so the longer-term versions of the buffs prove their worth. No, they don't stop the big attacks, but they cut down on laser damage which adds up hugely. Sazh is a must for Curasa. I experiment without Vanille but no COM is unacceptable here; my winning run takes 16 minutes which is kinda close to the Doom limit already. Otherwise strategy is simple enough, Sazh heals or debuffs, Snow buffs and slows (and heals if neither is needed), Vanille brings the hurting, and I switch to two Sentinels for every Ultima or Laughter. This is a simple fight but not easy at all, certainly the endgame boss against whom low HP hurts the most, as we'll see. (Wladislaus' post-debuff damage is murder at almost any level.)
Orphan 1: The big surprise is that this is the easiest boss of the final chain. I have a plan lined up for this one: screw Commandos, use Lightning/Sazh/Fang for poison, healing, and haste. Very clever of me. However you don't get a chance to switch between the fights unless you die and I... don't. What starts out as a scouting run to feel out his AI specifics turns into a win. Some of it is that I get a little lucky (despite my lack of Death blocker [that was also a planned setup change], ID is only rarely used and never hits) but some of that is that, while not optimised, I do have a lot of the tools to control him.
With Snow/Vanille I can bring out the buff parade: Protect/Shell, Veil, Brave on Vanille, etc. The first three are what matter. This largely controls his offence; nothing he does can hit harder than around 3000 damage, and only two rarely-used moves actually break 1000. The bigger issue is this:
all debuffs must perish! Orphan can land most of 'em. In order: Daze gets removed by an item, Deprotect/Deshell by Snow recasting the opposite buff, Poison by an item (or Esuna, in all cases), Pain/Fog if necessary. Veil makes him land less of these and it's usually not too hard to recover. The first four are really crucial because they make it possible for Merciless Judgement to kill, a 99% gravity move, or Dies Irae, which has a base damage of over 4000 (but is only used rarely and only at low HP).
Besides that, offence is just a nice bonus here, because Orphan can be poisoned! So Sazh can do that, when he isn't on Esuna duty. (He can also be hit by Slow, so Snow's other perk is definitely still active.) Poison him three times and you win, pretty much. I do still run offence since Vanille doesn't have much else to do besides the odd SEN switch for a big attack and Veil buffing when that's needed, and hey it helps some especially with Deprotect active, but yeah poison is definitely the real workhorse of this fight. The fight takes around 9 minutes.
Orphan 2: (about ~15 resets) Okay so let's talk about this one. After one reset where it's obvious a Fang-less party has zero chance, I go back to Fang/Sazh/Vanille.
Totally unlike the first form, Orphan 2 gives you just 7 minutes to win (Bart 3 and most other major bosses give you 23, Orphan 1 gives you 33). He is invincible until you stagger him (and is immune to poison, sadly), and has a high stagger point. But here's the real problem: about once every minute, he will use Temporal Hollow, which resets his chain gauge, and removes any debuffs from him and buffs from you... pretty much resetting the battle! Except any damage you took stays and any buffs/debuffs favouring him stay. Grah. So basically you get six shots to stagger him. Once you do, you have to do as much damage as possible fast, because when the stagger ends it's back to invincibility for him, this time with a pile of buffs.
On his own turns he'll use one of three attacks. One is a short-range magical blast which damages and slows. Slow sucks! The good news is that, if you don't try to use physicals on him, you won't close in to close range, and you'll be immune. One key strategy is to Librascope him immediately so that my PCs realise that physicals are useless (the AI seems to prefer magic if neither does damage... possibly this fight is the reason?). The other two attacks are still a problem though. One is a full-MT physical. It does some modest damage; who cares. The problem is that it launches everyone in the air for a long time, which, combined with the get-up animation, loses you a lot of valuable time, meaning Temporal Hollow comes sooner. If he uses this a lot there's... not much you can do, try again next cycle loser. It says everything about how bad Curse is that it doesn't stop this from launching. (Using physical attacks against a cursed Orphan DOES make you immune to launching, but uhhh see the comments about the slow move; this is not worth it.) He also has an attack which inflicts Pain and Fog. Wastes time, use the appropriate item and keep blasting. Finally, there's Kaleidoscopic Ray, which exists strictly to keep the player "honest": it ALWAYS targets the leader and does up to 4800 damage. Ow! So yeah, you can't neglect healing. Protect+Shell can reduce this, but... well.
The problem is that you gotta stagger him fast. Every buff you cast has to be weighed against the time spent casting it. Obviously Haste is worthwhile (Orphan 2 can be slowed but it's hard to land and doesn't affect Temporal Hollow so it's much less valuable). For a while I use Protect/Shell but eventually I settle on not. Kaleidoscopic Ray can be tanked anyway, especially with the maxed Imperial Armlet to reduce its damage. But, even after hammering out all the details of my strategy, it's not enough. The game is balanced around you having multiple Ravagers here (though Tri-Disaster is ill-advised, as his launch attack stops your chain-gaining), and I don't. The best I can do is RAV/SAB/COM with my team. And that's... sometimes enough! I'll paradigm shift every two turns to get the free ATB recharge, sometimes throwing in Sazh Medic to get in some healing. But even if I do everything perfectly (which includes not dying to Kaleidoscopic Ray of course), I have to hope his AI is very friendly, and I barely stagger him on time. What's worse, I don't one-round him on a stagger. And I'm never able to successfully stagger him twice before the counter runs out (or Kaleidoscopic Ray is fatal).
So eventually, I hit on what I hope is a Laggy- and Grefter-approved strat. Okay, see, Fang is my only Ravager. The class that adds the second most chain is... Saboteur. So RAV/SAB/SAB works, right? Well... without COM, I can't do good damage to close the deal. So no, one of Vanille or Hope must stay. Vanille doesn't have SAB under my challenge, while Hope does, but all he has is the junky MT spells which are bad at adding chain on top of their other problems. Except, except,
except! Hope has Dispel.
And thus it was that I manually spammed Dispel like crazy against a boss who had no buffs in place, allowing me to stagger him quickly enough. As usual I set up Haste first (fortunately the AI obliges), but after that it's the paradigm shift madness to get in all the SAB/SAB/RAV I can. Hope/Sazh/Fang. I actually hadn't used Hope for the entirety of Chapter 13 since Vanille had largely outpaced him; I burned through his 600k CP to just get him ALL THE MAGIC POSSIBLE. With the extra time right before the stagger I set Fang to cast offensive buffs and with Sazh having landed all of Imperil/Deprotect/Deshell, the blitz was on, and this time I even actually killed him in the first stagger.
Achievement unlocked: Superstar. Apparently this is for 5-starring the final boss which I'd never done before, but I'll take it as a reward for beating this challenge.
I'll probably post more about final thoughts on the PCs and stuff later, but this post is already long enough, so not now.
