DFFOO [JP][Act 4 Ch 2 Part 2] Iris throwing a moogle doll to copy others' homework
20Home had no electricity for half a day, so a bit late.
Typical that when you want someone's BT, you would just have to pity it. Also had to throw a few tickets because Tifa love giving me her FR instead of Iris.
I love gimmicks and shenanigans. So I went for Iris BT for the 0 mBRV effect and her EX for copying other people's dmg. This boss is rather squishy and it does not have HP lock either, so fight ended really early.
I may do something along the lines of Iris + Aranea FR for some 0 mBRV fun later. Immediate thoughts, tricks and info at the bottom.
Boss: Magitek Armor x2
Force:
+4%: Player action
10%: 20% BRV/HP dmg reduction
50%: - 50% BRV/HP dmg reduction
- Also use "magitek laser+"
This attack ignores BRV/HP dmg reduction and lowers 50% of your current HP.
90%: 80% BRV/HP dmg reduction
FA: Hyper Tackle+(++) (guaranteed hit, always trigger unless BT/summon)
- consume 100% of player BRV
- lowers 50% of your current HP (ignore mitigation)
* ++version is used when not more than 2 people have above 100% BRV
++ version additionally puts 2T paralysis onto all characters
FT: 20T
- recover 80% HP dmg taken at the end of turn
Weakness: (cancel FT)
- FA that deals melee BRV dmg
No threshold mechanics involved. However, beware that the boss does have a variety of ST elemental BRV attack that comes with different nasty debuffs such as "Freeze", "HP sap", "Paralysis".
General Approach:
Relatively simple boss. The biggest hurdle are the nasty debuffs, quick FG charge and potentially 2T AoE paralysis on the entire party due to FA++ if you are not careful with your BRV. Not letting them have turns seems to be effective counters to those debuffs.
The FT cancel condition is very simple. Combined with the various FG BRV/HP dmg reductions in place, they are to entice you to go with the cancel FT route rather than racing against the clock. It is perfectly doable, but you would have to deal with the reduction with that method.
Boss does not have a lot of HP and it does not have HP locks. Have fun torturing it or nuke it with spectacular fireworks. It is all up to you.
Iris:
First of all, animations are quite basic but they are really fast. You can kind of use her to farm summon boards with her S2. She can one shot all unless it is Shiva or Brothers due to having phases.
Cleign battle theme is great, so I pop her BT last.
Her EX is the biggest selling point imo. It copies any dmg from the last action of the character before her on the turn queue. So far I observed the following when she copies the dmg, take Cid using FR echo at the end just before her as reference:
1. It is the dmg from the action of the last character within his turn
Meaning from Cid's attack, launches and launch contribution from others are all included. The total dmg is copied.
2. Off-turn dmg from others afterwards do not count
Leo's extra 10m or so did not get copied
3. Total BT dmg is not the last action
Iris only copies the finisher dmg
4. It is not affected by FR% bonus
No matter what bonus it is or was, Iris would 100% copy it, then do her EX attack.
This means you can use this outside of FT and still do dmg as if it is still in FT, like a FT extension. Doing this would not cause any FT loss without any FR echo and copy dmg done at the highest FR%.
This gimmick makes her, relatively timeless until normal turn DPS is important once again (?) as long as you have someone really strong alongside her.
Strats:
Iris - Iris Ping Pong
You can have Iris copy another Iris if you have a friend one. You can keep going outside of FT since it is unaffected by FR%. The dmg keeps rolling bigger and bigger. She is the only one so far who can show the softcap (9999,9999) but interestingly the total dmg can show beyond that. Highest I saw was 370m on one single EX.
The counterbalance for this is stages/challenges that do not allow friend uses or HP threshold locks that make excessive dmg meaningless. So beware that even though this seems incredibly broken, it is not always usable.
Continuous Turn Manipulation:
You can insert her turn after a certain target (typically who you want her to copy) with her LD, filling her EX to the max at the same time. Alternatively, using her EX can designate who to act next.
With an additional manipulator who happens to have high DPS like Cid Raines, you can keep doing this until her EX or skills are exhausted while keeping the 3rd party member from moving.
Lunafreya's Swiftness:
An alternate strategy would be putting Lunafreya swiftness buff on Iris. then she can continuously pull whoever she wants to copy consecutively. This works on Iris because she only pulls one person with her EX, and she would put her target right before her consecutive turns.
0 ATK/ 0 DEF/ 0 mBRV:
In this run, 0 mBRV kept the bosses getting broken when Leo's follow-up triggered.
While 0 ATK/DEF are also invaluable (e.g. Sp. Shiva), 0 mBRV allows synergy for certain character combos. More on this next time.