And that new way would be? Not like my OCD wants me to beat him, i just need to know for....for... research, yes research. ( I tricked aque so good, muahahha).
To survive the first few attacks before you get a turn, you need to start the fight with protect rings (Auto-Wall), if you stole a ribbon from Brass Dagon, it could be also used on one of your character depending how they can tank the opening attacks. Sadness helps a lot to reduce damage as well. From there, juste haste your team, get a character who keep shielding your team, get one spamming Bolt 3 and the last one to attack a lot with elemental + lightning (and lot of counter attacks
).
If you run out of ether (though I used something like 2 elixirs and 2 Turbo Ethers) you can steal Turbo Ethers from the "panther" in the tunnel just in front of Shinra HQ.
Going further on the fight, he'll use new attacks such "Harsh warning" which will damage for 9999 one character and ignoring your Shield Status, just use a fullCure on the character and reshield him. He used it only once and seems to be usable only by the arms which means it's not a threat anymore once only torso is left.
You might need 2 or 3 tries to get lucky with the arm grab (it can be used at the beginning right after his opener but it's pretty rare).
In the last phase he has two new attacks which are annoying : Coral laser and Timed warning.
Coral laser won't damage much but inflicts death, shield will again prevent the damage and status.
Timed warning is more tricky because it causes damage ignoring shield (low damage tho, around 1.2k) and inflicts Slow + Stop even when shielded. It's an annoyance only if it affects the character who shield the team. I haven't tested yet but there is an accessory preventing time statuses, equip it on shielding character and it should be fine.
I just checked with the Prod Cloud tool, both arms got 99k hp, torso have around 350k.Since both arms sum up at 200k I'm pretty sure Torso can be done even if it's a bit longer because of the stop status on your attacking character.
There is only last attack from what I've seen with PrC tool which is called "Rainbow laser", the only attack the boss haven't done to me yet. From what I saw with the tool, it should damage a lot but shouldn't pierce shield. I might be wrong, but if it doesn't ignore shield, the boss is definitely doable ^^
Edit: I think I'm going to go through story as I want to see all the additions of the mod. I'll retry this boss later, keeping a save file at Shinra HQ.