[DFFOO JP][Divine Ifrit Lufenia+]Machina aurabotting for Shdaow (orb pushing, 4 debuff, no dispel)
4I was thinking with Machina it will be significantly faster, but my guess is all the counter attacks and follow-ups took up the time, so it balanced it out.
Other than damage taken management, I think the key point of optimizing the fight is just how to deal with the fire suppression aura that appears once the orb on the fireball goes off. Do note though, this is also somewhat limited by the orb on the fireball going off immediately when the boss is directly below 50%. So you would see after Machina actual BT and the boss is pushed below 50%, the orb goes off immediately and we are back to the fire aura.
Ideas:
1. Orb pushing
There are effectively two ways of pushing the orb. One is to rebreak them. I think Vayne and Noel are excellent at this. The second way is to do wind off-turn damage. (tbh I think Vayne BT would fulfil both lol, so he could be the best orb pusher, I was unsure if I could survive the recasts without dodges so I opt for Shadow instead) Both Shadow and Machina counter and follow-up, so with a Fujin imperil they can effectively push the orb up with little to no effort.
Once the orb is above 35, unless the boss is just below 50%, the orb will go back to the fireball and lift the suppression aura. So you can deal full damage once again.
2. Dealing with the fire aura
2a. Aurabot by delaying yourself - buff and CA hoarding
There is ultimately still a lot of fire aura uptime, so you still have to suck it up while pushing the orb. The idea is to put on mBRV and overflow or atypical damage buffs and CAs like Sazh and Cait Sith on Machina, then under his own BT effect his transformed HP attack, which has high action delay, will push himself off the turn order, thus Shadow can harvest all the damage with hoarding turns.
Shadow himself also facilitate this by turn hoarding and high DPT. When you are hyper aggressive with DPS, you will push the boss thresolds so fast that, machina will get delayed by two turns again with the threshold recast (Hellfire+). So in the end you hoard even more from that aura. In addition to just damage buff hoarding, since Snow is getting pushed back by hellfire while Shadow is dodging it, I put Fujin CA on him so Shadow can push the orb.
2b. Four and only four debuffs
The fire aura is only tamed when there are 4 and 4 debuffs alone. I thought this was anywhere more than 4, so I was a bit confused as to why my max HP and mBRV was all over the place with occasional orange numbers in the first run. Knowing there is a strict rule to this, it is actually possible to maintain even higher damage while pushing the orb, but this is more important in the sub-50 threshold, since there is a period of time that pushing the orb above 35 would be completely pointless.
In the 2nd half of the run, the 4 debuffs are Lock (Snow/Shadow), Fujin Wind resist down, Snow's Ice resist down and Machina's LD debuff. Once the debuffs are in place, your mBRV and HP will go up by a large margin, but you still need to keep taps on the debuff durations since after all the boss turns are locked. We are only making the time with Shadow hoarding turns.
About Shadow:
MVP of the fight. Extremely high DPS and interesting turn shenanigans. High turn rate on skills mean you may have a chance of getting a fourth turn before the boss moves as well. He is considered for the role not only because of his evasion and hoarding, the ST lock on him can be a clutch tool as well. I have mentioned that in my previous run with Paine, Snow got blasted twice with a ST HP dump and died. Shadow's lock and evasion can be your insurance policy for that purpose. Pop it before pushing HP thresholds, and no one should die just by the AoE.
Also, the extremely aggressive playstyle with Machina and Shadow means, you get much higher DPT and more turns than the boss, so you can completely ignore the fat 370k HP regen or any dispelling needs. The counters from both characters will also ensure the boss fail to stack a large amount of BRV over back-to-back turns, so "best offense is also the best defence in this case".
Additional Candidates for consideration:
Balthier: He actually fits extremely well. mBRV and overflow aura, cleanse and the most genius thing is he steals the boss's HP regen for himself, killing two birds with one stone. He has great damage potential as well, but you may have to find specific teammates with high DPT to compensate for the lack of counter or follow-up.
Prompto: Stack that HP regen aura, same clutch dodging function as Shadow and has follow-up that instant breaks. He also has mBRV aura to help out with the suppression phase. His follow-up also party BRV refunds so you don't get randomly broken by that AoE bash attack and get pushed behind his locked turns.
Caius: detailed on another video
Now I am REALLY curious to see what kind of crazy damage Shadow will be doing with max Ultima weapon and c88 extension when he gets to 90.