DFFOO [JP][Yuna FR Heretic Raid] Using melee against melee countering bosses
25I pulled for Yuna FR, I gave her points and realized her FR, but then it is kinda ironic that the melee counter mechanic of this boss can be exploited by using melee + melee counter characters.
This fight is odd. It can be annoying, fun or funny, depending on how you approach this, and I have tried different iterations. All in all, I kinda like this boss because of the different elements and interactions you can have besides just stomp it with power play.
Boss: Heretic Holy Sanctuary Guardian x2
For your reference, some of the nasty special debuffs in this fight are:
Stop: SPD down and prevent EX recast accumulation
Heat Burn: periodic HP dmg
Force Mechanics:
+1%: Boss turn
0%: Counter attack any melee BRV dmg with Bust/Burst(?) Shot+
Note: In my tests, this counter attack gets a bit wonky after Selphie used her LD. Sometimes they counter, sometimes they don't. In this run I avoided using her LD so it stays consistent.
This attack hits very hard, force breaks and inflicts the HP attack silence and Stop.
FA: Photon Wing++ (Guaranteed hit, AOE 60% player HP attack)
FT: 6 turns
Outside of recast ability trigger, on boss turns or player character is under 30% HP, they would use Magical Breath++ (AOE) or Burst Shot++ (ST), both of which means death
Force Weakness: (cancel FT)
FA that deals magic BRV dmg
Threshold Mechanics:
When below 10/30/50/70/90%:
They would use "concentration" (individually), it has 4 effects:
1. Inflict player characters with HP dmg taken up
2. buff themselves with BRV dmg up
3. Player buff duration -2
4. Debuffs on boss duration -2
When they are below 20% (once only):
They would use "Curaga", which recovers 20% HP and apply a HP regen buff on themselves.
Recast: Photon Wing
It deals HP proportional dmg. It would inflict "Buff success rate down", "Heat Burn", "Darkness", "HP silence". Both the attack and the debuffs are guaranteed, unless you use Raijin LDCA. It cannot be dodged with debuff evasion.
The debuffs from the normal AOE attack Magical Breath are pretty trivial. So the most annoying one you want to look out for are from the recast.
Approach:
Basically the boss hits very hard, and you can possibly die at turn start, so get some mitigation/healing or whatever necessary to get through the first few turns first.
The major gimmicks of this boss are (1) their debuffs (on/off turns), (2) their threshold mechanic reduces your buff duration and their debuff duration and (3) they counter melee with a very punishing and debilitating attack.
Dealing with the recast and debuffs:
Supposedly there were a lot of ways you can deal with the debuffs, but since this boss's recast goes through debuff evasion and they reduces buff duration, that means stuffing your party with 6 framed buffs is not going to work either.
Force breaking myself to get its recast up:
In this run I particularly used two melee characters to attack A, because this boss first fires the recast. With the counter attack force breaking Gladio, it accumulates recast gauge in its off-turns. Combined with Minwu turn controlling B, I can eventually get both to fire off their recast together and shut them down with a single Raijin LDCA. If this is too troublesome or something bad happens, you can always get some cleansing CAs for backup like Balthier/Yuna.
Exploiting the boss for off-turn dmg:
This boss is actually a gold mine for off-turn dmg, especially with Gladio + Yang, since Yang has a generic counter and the LD follow-up that activates whenever someone does something to the opposite party.
(1) Countering their melee Counter
Both Gladio and Yang would do their thing, while Gladio would cover Yang, individually. Say Yang gets a turn and attack, it would end up like Yang follow-up, Yang on boss A counter, Gladio counter, Yang on B, Gladio counter. So when Minwu FR happens, it counts a lot more times than usual.
As long as Gladio LD buff is up, he is practically immortal and impervious to debuffs, so feel free to let him absorb all the counter hits. Though before that too many turns of force break may lead to him failing to refresh his buffs, especially when the thresholds were pushed and buff duration gets reduced. Same goes with his Royal Guard buff on others, particularly Yang's.
(2) Threshold Mechanic
The threshold mechanic not only reduces your buff duration but also the duration of debuffs on them. Normally that would be a very bad thing, but for Minwu, since his trap lasts for 6 turns, the debuff duration decrease during this mechanic actually count as a trap trigger as well. So you would see a much longer string of Holy 16 trap than usual, even going as far as getting his overhead to trigger twice without stopping.
His trap also refreshes whenever the overhead fires, so it is quite convenient.
I chose to go into BT phase here because Royal Guard fell off of Yang. Though it is very possible to keep it up or just summon to refresh all buffs as needed.