DFFOO [JP][Divine Leviathan]The easier way: Ignore the orb with Leila and Ramza (BT+2)
3Ramza is my weakness. I may have spent quite a sum of gems to get his BT. No regrets at all though, he is really good.
Soundtrack used:
FFXIV: Shadowbringers: Eden's Gate inundation
FFT: Antipyretic (Ramza BT)
FFT: Victory Fanfare
Not going to copy and paste all the details from the Zack version video. The gist of it is you need debuff evasion, dmg mitigation and maybe a fair bit of turn manipulation.
I brought Machina along for two reasons. For one he counters, shave off some BRV and do off-turn dmg. Two since my Ramza is only at BT+2, I brought him along to buff the initial rush with 30% HP dmg cap up. This setup does not tail to his needs to bring out his dmg since he really require some form of BRV gain up being a Lv80 character.
Leila:
Leila trivializes a large chunk of this fight, simply because she heals whenever she dodges and brings all party members to the front of the queue and break the long chain of enemy turns. Her EX also applies a debuff on the enemies such that they have 30% accuracy down and dmg down. Not only this helps the party occasionally dodge the attacks (and its debuffs), both of this fulfil the orb condition. That said the downside of bringing her is it is almost guaranteed to trigger the orb, since there will always be at least -3 orb count on the ledger whenever the party is brought to the front and performs actions. On the bright side, you can almost never die with the dmg down and constant healing, so you may just ignore the orb.
The one thing that Leila does not bring to this fight is debuff evasion. So I brought Lenna CA to prevent them for a certain period of time. Since Leila always brings the party to the front though and given that the debuff duration are around 2 turns only, you can rinse them off beforehand if you are about to go all in with burst dmg.
I would have brought Selphie along to cover this with the additional benefit of launch refund for Ramza, but since her Wall debuff evasion is still not 100% it invites inconsistencies and frustration if the water demon debuff lands and block brv gain.
Ramza:
Ramza got a big update. Conceptually he is still the old Ramza but he works so much better now. BRV+++ now heals even more and overall he gets a lot more HP dumps across the board. I was expecting HP+++ to have 3 dumps, but they gave him 4 (3 for Shout) and it comes with a BRV refund afterwards. So he is much harder to be broken and more ready for the next action.
Obviously the EX extension gives him the BRV dmg/gain/stolen/gain overflow up package. His EX hits so much harder now with 6 dumps and BRV refund in between.
His LD received a similar treatment with 5 dumps, though I keep thinking there is an awkwardly long pause during the animation after the first 2 and I would rather them to just straight up give it a 3-3 treatment. It also delays all enemies by 2 turns instead of 1 now. The LD buff also comes with overflow, BRV/HP dmg up for the entire party now, so he is much more viable for buffing dmg even outside of BT than he was before.
His BT retains the scaling with the number of buffs on all allies nature. It is also one of the rare BTs that buff something like iBRV, so it goes really well with some characters like Zack, WoL, Caius etc.
His BT+ now has an additional scaling on HP dmg, holding BRV and HP dmg cap up. I believe he is currently the one with the highest number of HP dmg cap up at 36%, if you can attain the highest number of buffs. It offers an explosive boost to burst dmg and when you combine him with Gilgamesh, Machina, Squall, Yuna or any other cap increasers your dmg will simply go to a whole new tier. You can even see its effect when he launches something afterwards. Everyone is holding onto so much BRV to be dumped during launches. Since he is more of a support character, he is probably easier to slot in for the other party members than someone that are more selfish dmg oriented like Machina.
The one surprising thing that I expected him to get but did not is party BRV gain up. I thought as a BRV gain character that batteries the party, he would get it with a C88 or something. Oddly enough his c88 gives himself 40% BRV cap up, ATK and overflow increase.
I have always liked Ramza and I like him even more now. It is going to be really fun pairing him with different updated units in JP and see the dynamics between them. Definitely BT+3 when I finally get the last 10 nuggets from the coop.