With Hydrangea joining the team, I thought it was time to take on Mother.
The difficulty with Mother is that I don't have any knights that can survive her, so I need to take her down by doing a lot of damage in a short time. Any such team that can seriously damage Mother gets beaten up by the first mobs and the limb, though, and I need any firepower I can spare. Therefore, the first task is to build one team to take care of Mother's soldiers and Mother's limb and the second task is to gather as much firepower as I can to the rest of the teams to take down Mother herself. After a little bit of experimenting, here's the setup I came up with:
The first enemy group, a guardian and two soldiers, are some tough bastards that get buffed even more in the first five turns and the second, Mother's limb, has high HP and does quite a lot of damage until turn 11 when it starts doing all the more damage. Even fully ampied Kerria gets stomped, sadly. So, the idea is to boost Kerria's survivability with Hydrangea. To make sure both of them are not whittled down prematurely, I stack a lot of debuff and have one knight with taunt and evasion to draw initial fire. With all that, the uncentied and not fully superampied Hydrangea still struggles a bit, but with the help of a healing boost flower memory, she is able to make it through to Mother most of the time alongside Kerria:
Mother has some devastating attacks every 4th turn that Hydrangea is able to survive only a couple of and when she's down, Kerria falls shortly after. They usually manage to whittle Mother down to somewhere in the area of the の-character, about 4 characters worth of her health bar (the whole bar is about 14 characters long, give or take). When I'm very lucky and enough defends and skill attacks proc, it could be nearly half the bar, even, which really goes to show what a beast Kerria is. Anyway, time for part two of the plan.
The second party to arrive on the scene has some of my best knights. Heavy emphasis on crit and re-act with the help of flower memories and Yarrow. Pure Flower Anemone is there with her negate damage to help at least a few girls survive Mother's 4th turn attack and Hollyhock helps with 1st turn skill act a bit. Sometimes a knight or two even manage to survive the 8th turn attack, if defend procs. Anyway, they do at least about four characters more worth of damage, usually:
The third party to arrive is my second crit party. I tried to include as many knights of Mother's element as possible to take advantage of SS Sakura's weakness boost. Also, Cymbidium's here to help with skill act, Apricot's negate damage extends the survivability of some of the knights and Tarragon's guts usually have her be the last knight standing. This party usually does at least four characters worth of damage as well:
At this point, if things have gone better than usual, it's curtains for Mother, but more often it's time for the last and weakest party to try to finish her off. No special strategy here, just a bunch of leftover girls:
Anyway, now there's the Sage Laeva mission that still needs to be won somehow (and then 9 times more), but with my current team, I can only bring her down to half health, if I'm lucky. Heck, even her trash mobs can take down most of my teams or at least severely damage them.
Status of remaining main quests:
player level quests -- 174/300 levels
ultimate unique mission quests: 30/40 clears
max affection: 123/300 girls
blossomed affection: 56/300 girls
garden picture book: 1560/1830 pest pictures
Still left to do:
Get superampules out of the bond crystal shop.
Get superampules and equipment out of the whaleship shop.
Get flower gems for events 74-98 and get Rainbow Rose and Asian Rice when they are added to permanent reprints.
Nushi missions.
Prison island.
Defeat the Scene 3 mission and the Sage Laeva mission.
Upgrade and evolve flower memories.
Fully upgrade team 1 (weakness crit) and try to put together a decent team 2.