i force my way down through more grendels, behemoths, ruby dragons, and iron giants.
strategy -
grendel - put grendel to sleep, kill the imp thing first, then smash grendel
behemoth - put it to sleep, kill it by drawing and casting flare from it
ruby dragon - the most annoying since it can't be put to sleep! heal from its huge breath attack, and otherwise just draw and cast meteor against it
iron giants - not the worst since you can put them to sleep (and both rinoa and zell have 100% sleep junction). draw and cast quake until the second time they wake up; at that point, they're ready for carding
at the bottom, i hit the save point and prepare myself mentally and game-wise for ultima weapon. one major adjustment is junctioning revive to squall; i previously went in with attack/card/draw/recover, which is a nice default but terrible vs bosses. with attack/magic/revive/recover, squall is in a better spot. i also junction better stat boosts to everyone (flare! quake! meteor! yeah baby!) and give rinoa auto-haste, zell +60% atk, etc.
turns out ultimaweapon is pretty weak to physical attacks (while fairly resistant to its own ultima magic attack). so everyone focuses on physical attacks after we draw from it to get regen on everyone - this pretty much allows us to disregard the physical attack entirely. since everyone is now capable of reviving one another, i just hammer it with physical attacks while healing asap from gravitaj (which luckily it only does 2-3 times this fight) and reviving asap when it hits me with light pillar. it actually goes down sooner than i'd expected - i do enjoy these non-status-effect bosses so much more
eden goes on zell, and off we go to the next sidequest!
yet all azuarc of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness
