Part 2 of the guild below. Mods, let me know if I should put this all in one post (it seemed huge for one post though).
Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon:
The Turks were not too bad. I started with Choco-mog and got one Turk in Stop, then put the other to sleep, then used Beta. For some reason I remember wanting these two to die at the same time (I think it's to get both items).
As for the Titan materia boss, he wasn't bad at all. He has a ton of HP but you can use L4 Suicide to put him in drain status, and slow him to prevent some incoming damage. If you have trouble taking too much damage, try Sadness.
On the way to Cosmo Canyon, be sure to get Frog Song (as usual). This helps with the Cave of the Gi in the original FF7 and is damn near essential for the hardcore mod. Also just run from the big bird enemy here, since it drains all your MP!
Once in the cave, Frog Song destroys the spiders as well as a few other enemies. The only thing I really had to worry about here was Death Sentence, but I found with the right magic I was able to kill most things before the end of the timer. Be sure to get Added Effect, as I used it many times from here on out. I threw an X-Potion at the Gi-Nattak and was shocked that it worked... but this being a hardcore mod and there not being a save point around, I didn't feel bad.
Oh, you really should buy 2 HP Plus at Cosmo Canyon. Don't buy an MP Plus like I did and think you'll be okay with just the one HP plus. You won't. Not having HP Plus on all my characters repeatedly made my life difficult later on. I was also sure to pick up some Vagyrisk Claws from the green monkey enemies here, which are a lot easier to get than they used to be (I got two).
Nibelheim:
I went into the mansion to collect treasure, but found quickly that I couldn't beat Lost Number, so I came back after going up the mountain. As for the mountain itself, I found that crowd control was again the way to go - if it's susceptible to a status, get that status on ASAP! I liked the new enemies that cast Demi spells, as they filled up the limit bar really fast!
The Dragons here are way OP, as there's no way to survive Cometeo and they open with it (but this point was brought up many times already). I looked in Proud Clod and they're apparently level 97 with 250k HP and no status weaknesses, so either mod them yourself or save VERY often. Luckily, the encounter rate is very low and I think they only appear right after the save point near Materia Keeper. The other enemies I hated fighting were the ones that drained MP, but I was able to kill the groups using Choco-mog to stop some of them.
For Materia Keeper, one person got the Bolt Ring, another Elemental-Lightning, and the third got Mighty Guard to deal with Trine. I also needed two Light Curtains to help with the physical attacks, which I believe would have oneshot me otherwise. At the end of the battle I believe he starts countering with Cura, so at this point you might want to let the Poison finish the job (correct me if I'm wrong here - I know I also beat Godo this way).
Rocket Town:
Finally, the Barrier materia! Barrier/All is at least as important as Restore/All in this game without the old Big Guard. Barrier is what made the rest of the game possible for me so far, so make sure to get it! Also get the Yoshiyuki, since it helps a ton with the Wutai event.
With Barrier in hand I went back to Lost Number. I used Barrier and Choco-mog to stop the boss, then hit him with Slow and pummeled away with Beta, planning to turn him into his magical form... but then Cait got his stupid limit break and it was the attack that pushed him over... into physical form! Luckily I was able to keep Barriers up and pummel away on him with more Beta and equivalent magic attacks. While here, it's definitely a good idea to get the Question Mark enemy skill as well.
Back to Rocket Town, I noticed you kept Palmer's stats exactly the same - I guess he was embarassed about the Wall Market
. Before going to Wutai I made sure I had plenty of Hi-Potions, Phoenix Downs, preferably 5-6 Tents, at least 1-2 of each curtain, and a few attack items including at least 4 Graviballs and 2 Right arms. The only detour I took was to steal Right arms, which took about 2 minutes. I also had Aeris' level 3 limits from all the trips to Fort Condor - Planet Protector was ESSENTIAL for the next part.
Wutai:
First order of business is to get to the beach and steal three Adaman Bangles. The adamantoises are impossible to kill at this point, but they can be slept and manipulated if necessary. I opened with Mug to get him to counterattack me for 95% of my health, filling up all the limit bars. Then I used Planet Protector and Mugged until getting the armor, then I escaped. Rinse and repeat for three.
With three Adaman Bangles in hand (which nullify Water), I went back to get Aqualung at this point. I poisoned the harpy straight away and stole the Umbrella (important!). Once Aqualung went out, I manipulated the harpy, then went to the restroom for the win.
I equipped all characters with Adaman Bangles, then put my highest attack weapons on all characters. This meant Yoshiyuki for Cloud, Umbrella for Aeris and Seraph Comb for Red XIII. Even with this setup, the monsters on the way to Wutai ripped me a new one anytime I didn't have Planet Protector up. The Peace Ring was very helpful for avoiding Berserk from the salamanders, but I stayed away from Ribbons because they also prevent Peerless.
In Wutai, I switched Red XIII for Barret and got Mindblow ready for Rapps. Thankfully, this strategy still seems to work, as I only took one Aerega from the boss (it costs 50 MP and he has 600, so you need to drain 551 to avoid that attack). Mindblow, Graviball x3, Right arm x2 and I've got my materia back. The weapons for sale here are quite good and worth the trouble of the sidequest. Magic Hammer is also an essential ability that you NEED to get on every E-skill materia you have.
Temple of the Ancients:
I didn't have much trouble at all here. Part of this is because Great Gospel is an amazing limit break, but even without it both bosses are beatable.
For Red Dragon, I got my team immune to Fire and went to work, poisoning the dragon and getting Barrier/Haste on my guys. This was the closest thing to tank and spank I encountered in the mod so far. As for Demons Gate, protection to Ice helped for the Cave-in, but since most of the damage was physical Barrier won again. I simply used a Soft or Esuna if he tried to Petrify me. He's also susceptible to slow and wastes several turns moving back and forth, so there's plenty of time to beat him down. He has 20k health but it goes down surprisingly fast.
Sleeping Forest:
And now for something a little different. The Kjata/Kujata boss is insanely difficult and took me at least 15 tries to kill. They have an attack pattern and you can beat it with a good strategy, but only if they cooperate a bit. To prepare, as much of your team as possible needs to be immune to Berserk. Get Thunder and Blizzard protection on anyone you can after this. You also REALLY want DeSpell, but if you don't have it the battle is still doable with just DeBarrier. I also had a Holy Torch, which uses DeSpell on all enemies.
Once in battle, you need to get Barrier and preferably Haste up on everyone BEFORE they put Reflect on you. Second, if someone dies, you need to spend the next turn getting them up, putting Mighty Guard up, and healing that person to full with White Wind. People should die only before Reflect, so make sure you get the barriers on them before Reflect goes up. If any of this does not go according to plan, reset.
Once reflect goes up, you need to drain the MP of the two guys in front. At this point they won't be able to heal themselves, so you can start pounding them with spells and enemy skills, and dispell Regen if you can. They will still charge you, so you'll need to heal with White Wind or potions periodically. Definitely prioritize one at a time and make sure you're healed after the second one dies. Once this happens, Levant will attack and Berserk/Mini one of your characters, then heal himself with Firaga. Luckily, he loses his crazy defense at this point, but you basically have one turn to drain 5k HP. The best way to do this is to reflect Aqualung off your party so it hits him 3x, and have another person use Bahamut for the win.
Once that's out of the way, go SAVE!!! Then come back and go to the next screen, where you want to win at least one and preferably two Dazers from the Boundfat enemies. Like all useful enemies in this mod, they only come paired with difficult, new enemies, so be careful. You NEED at least one so don't slack off here!
Forgotten City:
First things first, get the well-hidden Enemy Skill materia so you have three of them. Then extend your side trip to Fort Condor to make sure you get Magic Hammer and White Wind on that materia. You now have enemy skills on all three members of the team. Keep it equipped and you'll pick up at least Magic Breath, Trine and Aqualung very soon.
As for Jenova Life, veterans know that you prepare for Water attacks here, so I had two people equipped with Adaman Bangles and the other with a Water Ring. Unfortunately, this being a hardcore mod, Blue Light is no longer Water based and it causes nasty statuses! Luckily, you can protect at least two characters against Sleep (1 Ribbon, one Added Effect/Seal) while still preventing Water attacks, so it's basically just a matter of whittling him away while healing damage from Blue Light. If he puts the wrong person to sleep, attack them or use Esuna. Like most bosses, you can and should get Slow on him.
* START OF DISC 2 *
Yuffie side-quest:
I took a detour to Wutai here to finish the Yuffie pagoda, since I had a feeling the Ice Ring and Leviathan would be useful. I set Yuffie up with the weapon from the store in Wutai and I forget which armor (I probably switched back and forth). She got the best Enemy Skill materia, HP Plus, Poison, Luck Plus for extra crit, Counter Attack, you know the deal. Here's what I did for the individual bosses.
Gorki: He's weak to wind, so I had Choco-mog/Elemental in Yuffie's weapon. I also had Destruct on to get rid of his defenses. I started with Mighty Guard, cast Choco-mog, then poisoned him. You only need to stay above 25% of your Max HP to win. If you have trouble, you can use Time with or without Added Effect to Slow/Stop him.
Shake: Equip a Peace Ring. Rage Bomber hurts, so make sure you keep Barrier up and stay alive. Take off Destruct, use Time and Choco-mog to Stop or Slow him, then poison him and just stay alive. If you have armor with high Pdef% you can dodge Rage Bomber most of the time.
Chekhov: Use the Jem Ring to prevent Paralyze, and Added Effect/Time on your weapon. He's annoying in that he drains HP with Absorb and kills your MP with Stare Down. Get Mighty Guard up, then attack until he stops. At that point poison him and beat the hell out of him. You need to do 7500 damage before he gets out of stop. Summons and Enemy Skills can help here, so equip what you need to to kill him.
Staniv: Equip the Protect Vest and Earth/Elemental on your armor. Get Mighty Guard up, poison him, and stay alive. You should be able to attack him to get healed (if you have level 3 elemental), but I didn't need to and just stuck with the poison/slow/stop then beatdown strat. He's pretty easy.
Godo: He cannot be stopped, so take off choco-mog. You need to be immune to poison, sleep and mini, so the easiest way is to use a Ribbon. Unfortunately, that also means no barrier and haste, but that's how it'll have to be. Get Lightning/Elemental on your armor to prevent Trine, then get poison and slow on him. The main concern is Beast Sword - if you get hit, heal up ASAP. It seemed to miss me a few times even though Proud Clod says it has max hit%, so I'm not sure what's going on. When you have statuses on him, cast Laser until he starts to cure himself as a counter attack. At this point Defend and heal as necessary until he dies from the poison. Congrats on beating the pagoda!
Before moving on, you really should have at least 25 Phoenix Downs. I ran out on Schizo and had to hack in some more to continue.
Great Glacier:
I touched the hot springs, saved in the hut, and went to get my Alexander materia. In the normal game you fight a basic Snow enemy, but here you fight Snow Queen! You need to protect all three characters against Ice to mitigate her attacks (Ice Ring, Elemental/Blizzard, and Dragon Armlet/Mbarrier or a second Elemental/Shiva), but she also has Envy which WILL drain ALL of your MP. Note that throughout this whole area, you should have your team immune to Ice, so there shouldn't be much preparation here. How do we deplete 32k HP without much MP? There are a few choices:
1) Use Laser, T/S bombs, etc and finish off with regular attacks, using Ethers to selectively get MP back. This is what I did.
2) Cast Death Sentence and go make yourself a sandwich.
Afterwards you have Alexander, which is great if you have problems with the upcoming trash as some of it is weak to Holy.
Gaea's Cliff:
Cimbing up the cliff I kept having lots of trouble with the Zolokander enemy, which liked to attack in groups of 4, double attack, and use a poison thing that did 7/8 of my 2.6k hp in damage. Luckily there's a solution, and it's called Every Status in the Book. So use Transform/All or Frog Song and make them less threatening. I actually started using these sleeping frogs as Ethers by Magic Hammering them to full MP! Also watch out for the bomber guys, which use an attack called Extreme Bomber at low HP that will kill your party one by one.
As for enemy skills, find a Stilva and manipulate it. Then make it use Magic Breath and Trine on your party. Then Poison it, use Magic Hammer to get all your MP back, and let it die. Congrats! The alternative is to somehow do 50k damage to it without dying when its physicals are a guaranteed two-shot and it can drain all your MP (and it's immune to Gravity, cheater).
Next you'll want to put Ribbons on two characters (you DID get the second one in the cave, right?) and find a Malboro outside. They have 44k health and can't be manipulated, so how do we kill that? Lots of ways actually:
1) It's weak to water, so Aqualung and Leviathan work.
2) It is level 72, so L4 Suicide works.
3) It can be slept and slowed/stopped.
4) Death Sentence (+ Haste if you're impatient).
Let it use Bad Breath on you, then kill it. Once you get to the recovery pool, save and kill two Blue Dragons for extra Dragon Armlets (use Poison then defend a lot). Proud Clod confirms they cannot be manipulated, so unfortunately you can't get Dragon Force. Save and prepare for...
Schizo:
This was a very hard battle! You need protection against Fire, Ice, Lighting and Earth to fully nullify stuff... but this obviously isn't possible. Both heads will use breath attacks (one uses Fire/Lightning and the other uses Ice/Lightning), as well as a Double Breath that is non-elemental and puts you in drain status, and Tremor, which does an asston of earth damage (4.5k). The priority here is the one that will kill you, so I used Elemental/Earth and Elemental/Titan. As for the third character, I gave her a Dragon Armlet and kept Mbarrier up. With the Dragon Armlet, not only is all breath damage halfed, but it appears the chance to remove Mbarrier is also cut in half. I used the Fire Armlet and Bolt Armlet as well as elemental rings to get as many elemental resistances as possible on my stone-immune characters. For my Dragon Armlet character, I had the Talisman (+50 Spirit) on.
The boss strategy is fairly simple but subject to some luck. I started with Mbarrier and reapplied whenever it fell off using Mighty Guard. Between keeping Mbarrier up and reviving/healing characters (usually with White Wind), I hit the boss with Alexander, Bahamut, and strong single target attacks on the LEFT head (Fire ok, Ice no-no). I used Firaga and Comet mainly, but Stonega/Thundaga work too. Aqualung is good but it's slower.
You're not out of the woods after killing one head, but it's a lot easier. This is a good time to start Mugging the right head in the hopes of getting a Protect Ring. Keep pummeling away and eventually it'll fall. This is the first battle where my lack of 3 HP Plus was a real problem. Definitely go back and save after this battle.
Whirlwind Maze:
I walked in about 5 feet and encountered a Gigas. He's got 35k hp and plenty of vulnerabilities... but he was smashing my face. Berserk and Mini is not a good combination! But even without any statuses there was no way I could kill one, so I ran. In fact, I ran from all encounters here except the Wind Wings and Gremlin/Sculpture (which was handled with Bad Breath).
Next up is Gold Dragon, the Neo-Bahamut boss. Luckily he's all physical attacks except for his breath, which is Lightning. Through various means I got my whole team immune to Lightning (and linked Leviathan to a weapon) and went in, and it was just a matter of killing him before his physical attacks killed me. I started with Barrier/All, Haste/All and Leviathan. Next round I put Reflect on my whole team and started bouncing Aqualung x3 at him. I did this four times then put Reflect up again and did it four more times. After that the SOB was still alive so I pounded away with (single) Aqualungs, Bahamut/Alexander, and water-elemental attacks. Done and done... but this was just a warmup.
Jenova Death:
According to Proud Clod, he's supposed to cast Silence... but it appears he casts Death instead? But who cares, all his other attacks are Fire, right? Nope, Red Light is non-elemental now, and if you don't prepare it does about 4k damage, leading to a one hit KO. The first time I walked up to him he did Red Light x3 before I could act and killed my party. Oh yeah, he has 180k HP. So I loaded an old save and bought 2 HP Plus materia and got them some AP.
No just kidding, I would never go back. I couldn't! It turns out the boss has a few subtle, but critical, weaknesses that allowed me to kill it. First though, remove all unnecessary materia, including any summons and any magic not called Barrier, Restore, or Time, or linked to a blue materia for some effect. You need to prevent Confuse, Silence and Death Sentence, so Ribbons go on two people and Added Effect/Mystify on the third. If the third is immune (not 1/2) to Fire, I think it prevents the Silence from Tropic Wind, meaning the boss would need to use Silence to inflict it. This is a great waste of a turn. On that note, make sure all characters are immune to Fire and/or Wind. Give an Enemy Skill to each character.
Now we need to make sure at least 2, but preferably all three, characters can survive Red Light. Whichever character does not have a Ribbon should have a Wizard Armlet and a Talisman on to pump up Mdef. The other two need to be as high HP as possible... for me, I was only able to get Cloud up to 3.8k while Tifa was in oneshot territory at 3.1k (she was also the one without a Ribbon, since she should never get Death Sentence). Yuffie had the high Mdef setup and sat at 3.4k and she was fine. I forgot Sadness at this point, but in theory that should reduce all incoming damage by 30% so feel free to give that a try.
When you start the battle, immediately throw a Dazers. If it hits, good job! Haste your team and start using Magic Breath for ~150MP drain per turn. Slow the boss next turn and keep up with Magic Breath. When you run out of MP, switch to Magic Hammer, then start alternating the two and mixing in White Wind when you need to heal. If you have a character that cannot survive Red Light, throw Mbarrier on her. With haste on you and slow on the boss, you will get 9 turns to its 1, meaning plenty of time to drain away. If you have more than one Dazers this is much less risky. You need to drain about 6600 MP.
While most other drainable bosses in this mod were given a 0 MP attack, this one was not, so once you are done draining the battle is won! Tape down the action button and about 65 turns later, you will have killed it! Thanks for keeping this boss drainable... it would have been damn near impossible otherwise!
And that bring me to my current point in the game. I bought 2 HP Plus as soon as I got the Highwind, so hopefully the rest of the game will be a little easier. Wish me luck!
