DFFOO [JP][Arc 3 Ch 7 Pt 2] Cait Sith, Shadow, Snow vs Anti-Crit Safer Sephiroth
23No desire to pull cissnei so I have to find ways to deal with Anti-crit Safer Sephiroth, whose orb demands off turn/ crit dmg, who has super beefy HP but requires you to defeat him within 40 turns.
Also I am not sure why Zidane is even on this banner. Safer Sephiroth resists launching, turn deletion or delay. After 79% he even resist breaking. So it pretty much completely stops Zidane's mechanics lmao.
This one is probably one of the more challenging ones in the Lv90 era, if you are not having certain characters or even synergy ones.
Reduction: 70/70
Lethal Orb: limit 10
+1: Take crit BRV dmg
+1: Take Off-turn follow-up BRV dmg (excluding counter and off-turn dmg that happens when Sephiroth is taking his turn)
-2: Player Action
Relatively tricky orb condition. His HP is super beefy so it is unlikely you can out DPS the orb unless you break the HP limit cap or something.
It is also worth noting that Shadow here does not do "off-turn" follow-up dmg. Shadow's follow-up is actually on turn, as you can see that the orb never ticks down when interceptor starts attacking, it only ticks down afterwards.
A demanding and picky boss because of Orb + Mechanics:
Normally the orb is not a big deal, but after 79% Safer Sephiroth starts to resist breaking (BRV cannot fall below 1% of mBRV), so unless your character has 100% crit rate themselves, you would need someone or a CA to satisfy orb condition 1. This mechanic alone also indirectly puts a lot of prominent follow-up attackers off the list, such as Vayne, Prompto ... etc who requires breaking or a broken target to activate or refresh the follow-up (stacks).
He also resist launching, turn deletion/delay (except for break before 80%). So that's quite a few characters gone here as well. Picky Sephiroth eh?
Also Safer Sephiroth periodically dispels your generic buffs. So if you are using someone like Sazh with a generic crit buff, you would need to refresh your buffs and lose a few orb turns (note that it is -2). Due to this reason, Cait Sith with his silver framed crit buff bundled with his LD is chosen.
Sephiroth would turn warp (3 turns) at 29%/49%/79% and start his cycles. He does dmg, he puts blind/paralysis on you, and dispels you. So you also need tanks/healers/debuff evasion or something that deals with the debuffs.
If that isn't enough, the completion criteria dictates that you finish his tanky body off within 40 turns. i.e. High Dmg requirement
At 19%, Sephiroth would also throw out Heartless Angel+ and take away a set amount of HP from you. It can get dicey if you decide to bundle up 19%/29% threshold together and skip them at the same time when he throws all of them at you consecutively.
Cait Sith:
He is here for pretty much the prema crit buff as long as he is here in the field. His dmg deficit is covered by teammates. As long as his cheerful gift framed buff is on he can go on and spam BRV+ to battery the party outside of LD uses. If Snow gets paralyzed (or blinded), it probably is best to just S2 and put on some generic buffs to rinse those debuffs off.
When Noctis friend comes in, I used Sazh CA to maintain the crit dmg. So the timing of summon needs to be quite precise, or it would take a long time get the crit buff on Noctis.
Shadow:
Star of the show. Shadow has ridiculous DPT within one turn count when he has more than 1 stack of Path of Carnage without pretty much any help using ignore defence attacks. He also dodges the dispels and other attacks. Only use C88 when necessary after 79% as it consumes orb counts, but when used right especially when Safer Sephiroth gets multiple turns or warp turns, the crit dmg from counters can still uptick the orb. Use it to fix the count and slow the decrease. Dodging also refreshes the stacks, so he gets more turn count efficient.
His continuous turns also abuses the Noctis friend BT follow-up that comes near the 50% mark.
Snow:
Snow also has his preemptive strikes for upticking the orb with the crit dmg criteria. He protects and he attacks with his ridiculous BRV gain and refund shenanigans. Like Shadow he doesn't need help to deal dmg. Sometimes it is best to let Shadow provoke and dodge the attacks (sometimes the ones that debuff) for turn efficiency.
BT effects helped Noctis friend big time, as observed that the dmg fell off rq during the actual BT phase where the buff fell off midway. It also helps with Shadow's follow-up dmg, which has less chance to cap esp when C88 is not active with the BRV cap buff.
It is kind of an odd team that solves the puzzle together, but their mechanics relatively function independently. It is a bit risky too because there is no perma way to keep the orb up. One wrong move and it can be beyond salvaging.
Made a mistake letting Shadow fall off turn order before Snow BT though. For some reason I thought the other two would get broken so Shadow would come out on top to buff crit rate again with another CA lol.
May not be here for 1 or 2 days when Prishe LD is up.