All Missions 5★ with 1 Primary and 1 Secondary Role Developed

[ずー]

I was looking for a challenge run for my second playthrough that wasn't NCU because NCU is painfully slow. In the end, I decided to do this because it's very likely that I would be able to defeat all marks with these restrictions. Just looking to share some of the things i've done for this.

So for this challenge I develop only two roles for each character.
Lightning: COM/SYN (Her secondary SYN is quite good as it contains enspells)
Snow: SEN/MED (Best primary SEN and best secondary MED. Easy picks)
Sazh: SYN/SAB (His SYN is great early game and we need someone with poison)
Vanille: MED/SEN (She's one of the two people to learn Reprieve, although I guess I didn't actually use it lol)
Hope: RAV/COM (We need a RAV and Hope learns everything. I guess he has a full ATB skill too)
Fang: SAB/RAV (There's only one character with a secondary RAV tree)

All fights pre-postgame were done with Tier 1 Weapons (no Catalysts)

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This contains every fight after Enlil Enki, all 64 missions and Long Gui + Shaolong Gui. Although the last Gui fights were really just there for completion sake and use Elixirs to cheese them.

Hardest Mission was 62. Took over 250 attempts spread across a few days with several reloads to an earlier save file to try different upgrades before I could put together a solid strategy to beat it within the target time with some semblance of consistency.

Hardest story fight was Barthandelus 2. I tried to use a strategy that didn't rely heavily on SENs to go for a fast kill, but once shrouds ran out the fight simply became a struggle to survive. I've retried more on Produclad 2, but that was because I was looking for a 2 stagger kill strategy.

Anyway here are some of the takeaways from doing the challenge

1. Renew is nuts
Renew has always been my personal favourite when playing casually and not having it for most of the characters due to the trees I've developed really prevents me from performing some of the aggressive strategies I would like to use.

2. Barthandelus 2 is actually hard
I had a real easy time with Bart 2 on my first playthrough and never really got what made him the hardest boss. As it turns out, getting constantly hit by cursega and being pelted to death by the lasers is actually the real difficulty of the fight. Laughter almost never kills you if you're ready for it, even at this level of development.

3. Sazh blitz is very good
Sazh is a very good character in this challenge but I've found his attacking speed way too slow for my liking. Blitz is really what makes his damage output competitive with the other commandos. I really miss using blitz, RAV buffering blitz or just shredding enemies with it. I even made a vague comparison to test how much better blitz would be

3. COM/SEN/SYN Ruinga spam is fantastic
Ruinga has rise, and you can spam Ruinga fast enough to maintain interruption. SYNs will give you the relevant En-Spell and Vigilance to interrupt stuff that you weren't able to initially interrupt and the SEN draws the enemies closer to one spot. Then you can shift mid ruinga to COM/SEN/SAB or COM/MED/SAB depending on the situation and just keep using Ruinga. This simple strategy is used in so many missions i've lost count. It allows you to beat missions that normally would lay waste to your party really quickly.


Highlights:

Proudclad 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usZqEhO5zOw
One stagger kill with a fortisol. Funny how this is faster than my casual playthrough kill even though they're both one stagger kills.

Orphan 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQEYaSiSuIY
Very clean fight. The key is surviving the second phase in order to get to the last phase. I still don't know the timing to dodge Dies Irae with a summon because I've never seen it casually.

Mission 55
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSJOuJHReHM
Random Instant Chain neochu. We survive screech by simply standing out of range!

Mission 62
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE5WUN0z4jU
Hardest mission in the game due to the development I have not lining up very well. RAV does nothing without at least some development. This requires me to rely on tight execution with an hint of good multicast RNG.

Bonus: Theoratical 2 Stagger PC2 Kill DRCNC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya6aQpp3SLk
Unfortunately you take too much damage to be able do this on Normal Mode. With Renew this might be much more doable.

Finishing thoughts:
I started this challenge hoping that it would set me on the right direction to approach the skill ceiling for this game, but I guess this challenge isn't really hard enough to do that. I'm still garbage at this game, and I'm also still not fast enough at the menus, especially the RAV ones. I also believe that everything except for some of the titan trials missions and Mission 62 and Mission 63 could be done with Tier 2 or lower weapons, but I didn't find playing the game extremely slowly particularly fun.

[tiornys]

Looks awesome! I'm not at all surprised that mission 62 gave you the most problems; I think it's the hardest mission to score a 5-star win against.

Any interest in speedrunning the game? It's one of the better ways to push the skill ceiling.

[ずー]

Originally posted by tiornys:

Looks awesome! I'm not at all surprised that mission 62 gave you the most problems; I think it's the hardest mission to score a 5-star win against.

Any interest in speedrunning the game? It's one of the better ways to push the skill ceiling.

Oh my, I've captured the attention of THE tironys. Big fan of the work you do for the 13 community. :)

Is 62 really the hardest to 5-star in the game on a non-challenge playthrough? Surviving? Sure. I feel like the target time is extremely long and the casual player would be more worried about surviving and once they get the kill it's almost always going to 5 star.
On the other hand Mission 35 has a horribly low target time and lacks a consistent manual pre-empt (or at least, I don't recall a >95% consistent manual pre-empt and couldn't find one) AND requires you to stick imperil as fast as possible to even come close to getting a 5 star.
(Of course, you could come in pre-taejins and do this mission with low stats for that 5 star, but I don't think people would have considered this casually, since to even GET to 35 some rather
tricky missions must be taken out at Stage 8 crystarium)

In regards to speedrunning, well I'm not decided on that. Speedruns was the reason I even discovered this game. (Wasn't a FF fan, but I LOVED the intricacies of 13's battle system) Unfortunately I generally lack the 6 hours of uninterrupted time to complete a run due to real life. It's definitely something at the back of my mind that I want to do at SOME point though.

[-|Nur|-]

The thing about Mission 62 is that you basically have to kill both in their first stagger; otherwise you'll run out of time. I had difficulties doing this with tier 2 weapons but I eventually managed to do it in just 10 minutes. (The target time was 14 I think, but obviously that's not enough for a 5-star rating.) Probably a lot easier with maxed out weapons.

[Neurometry]

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. And I thought 5 starring all missions in Chapter 11 was the big challenge...