Made some delicious burnt cookies.
Trying to do the Great "C" at challenge level with a semi-challenge party. Said party consists of the cast of EoSD as well as Alice, Ran and Chen. Its a fairly strong group, due in no small part to Flandre and her absurd damage, but its one weak point is debuffing. The only debuff for all twelve characters is a Speed debuff from Cirno. To be fair, her Speed debuffs are ABSURD, but they're not enough on their own. Giving her the Hexer subclass somewhat helped, but the default Curse spells that the Hexer gets are somewhat weak and generally not reliable. For the Great "C" fight, strong aoe debuffs are very important, because there are five "C's. My team also lacked non-Paralysis statuses, but Toxicologist Marisa with Sheer Force works just as well as most dedicated status inflicter.
The Great "C" fight is a slog. It has five "C"s which are all capable of strong attacks, most notably one which reduces your hp to 1 and another that deals weak damage through defenses. Combining those two is basically a guaranteed kill, even on absurdly tanky Remilia. The Great "C", moreover, is strong against Fire, Dark and Mystic, which many of my best attacks correspond to. Each "C" has 2-3 million health and they all must be killed at the same time or you basically have to restart. The Great "C" fight is heavily based on luck. Will Cirno's Perfect Freeze do literally nothing or halve the speed of all enemies? Will the "C"s waste their turns with pathetically useless attacks that can't scratch my squishiest non-Flandre members or kill everyone with defense-ignoring attacks? Will Sakuya accidentally Extra Attack the middle "C" to death prematurely and cause it to resurrect with full health? In general, my strategy boiled down to the following:
-Have Hong and Remilia welded to the front line and tanking at all times
-Keep their Speed debuffed with Cirno/Alice and our defenses topped up with Ran
-Poison them with Marisa or Sakuya, since Poison damage is always non-lethal
-Abuse Chen's Instant Attack switch thing to keep everyone moving real swift
-Near the end, use Patchouli/Flandre to wipe out all the "C"s at once
Of course, the "C"s rarely cooperate with that plan for long, because of their numbers and erratic deadliness. Hopefully Reimu/Rumia/Ran and Hong can heal enough damage to keep up with their potentially staggering output while the Poison ticks down their delicious doughy health. Of course, once a "C" has dropped to a single hit point through Poison, even one point of damage from Cirno/Marisa's status effect attacks will kill it and necessitate a restart. If any of the critical characters die to a 1 hp -> defense piercing combo, restart.
The first tricky part, on the try where I finally beat them, came when Marisa bit the dust ahead of schedule. Without her, I had only Sakuya's much weaker Poison effect and Alice's Little Legion for reliable damage. Somehow, though, things just kept working. Sakuya gently tapped each "C" until the brink of death, with Remilia lending an occasional Spear the Gungnir when it seemed safe. Supporting party members fell one after another as I whittled down the "C"s' heealth, until I only had half of my original team, with two of them[Patchouli and Flandre] being fragile enough that they'd most likely die to one shot. Eventually, I could safely cookie tap no further: I needed burst damage. During a momentary gap in the "C"s' bombard, I moved Patchouli in to ready a Grand Incantation. She almost immediately took a physical Shadowstep attack to the face, leaving her on the brink of death. Still, she manged to Concentrate and obtain the 140% damage boost. Next came Flandre, who was even more fragile then Patchouli. Thankfully, the "C"s ignored the new arrivals, preferring to pelt Remilia and Reimu instead. Herbalist Reimu gave Flandre a Herb of Awakening for a 36% boost and I held my breath as my final turn approached, one way or another. Patchouli's damnable slowness almost cost me, as one of the "C"s got a turn RIGHT before hers came up. It wasted that turn scratching Patchouli's impressive magical defenses and paid for its failure to eliminate her with an empowered Sattelite Himewari to the face. But I'd miscalculated: Two "C"s still remained, more then enough to resurrect their fallen comrades and force a reset. Flandre's turn came up next and she went wild with a Lavatein. Due to the "C"s high Fire resistance, her normally potent ultimate move did perhaps a third of its normal damage.
It was still enough. I watched gleefully as the last of the cookies that had tormented me for so long burned to a crisp beneath the scorching divine flame.
Touhou Labyrinth 2
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