Final Fantasy VI Bosses

What does Gold Dragon do? First off, every four Fight commands, it will get especially pissed and the message "Gold Dragon begins storing energy..." will be displayed. Gold Dragon will spend a turn doing nothing (aka, charging for Thundaga) before casting a Thundaga spell on the entire party. We faced a level 3 spell with fair warning halfway through the WoB, for crying out loud! If any living character has the Reflect status, Gold Dragon will cast the Reflect spell on itself and will start bouncing Thunder and Thundara spells off at the party. Every Magic spell can be countered by a Thunder or Thundara spell normally, but Gold Dragon will not counter Magic spells when he is charging for the Thundaga spell. Normally, Gold Dragon will just attack with Thunder and Thundara spells, and Gigavolt attacks.

Gold Dragon is an incredibly easy enemy at this point; all of its attacks are either Battle or Lightning-elemental. The magic attacks are all vulnerable to Celes's Runic, and Lightning is very easily absorbed or nullified by equipment such as the Thunder Shield, Paladin's Shield, Minerva Bustier, or Berserker Ring. The bane of Gold Dragon's existence, however, is summoning Phantom in conjunction with the Berserk spell. Heck, set Berserk in some other way; the neat thing about late-game battles is that you have so many options. Expand Full Strategy

Gold Dragon (Redux) absorbs Magic exactly like Celes does. This means that most of your spells will be absorbed and have no effect. Though you'll probably immediately understand that means Firaga and such are out of the question, the real threat here is that you can no longer use support and healing spells either.

Just in case you never did pay much attention to Celes, notable spells that can't be used: Cure, Cura and Curaga, Drain, Osmose, Esuna, Float, Dispel, Berserk, Haste and Hastega, Libra, Raise, Arise, Reraise, -aga spells, Flare and Ultima. Also, note that the only enemy attack that's vulnerable to Runic's effects worth mentioning that you can use is Northern Cross, which Ragers can use by emulating Fiend Dragon.

Notable spells that you can use include: Quake, Meteor, Flood, Meltdown, Valor and Quick. You can also summon Espers without any troubles. FYI, If you have both Celes on Runic stand-by and you cast a spell, both will try to absorb it. If it's a multi-target spell, both will absorb half of the MP normally used to cast the spell. Gold Dragon (Redux) will, due to a cute bug, even use Celes' blade animation when that happens. When the spell is single-target, a dominant Runic user is picked at random and only that one will gain MP, but still half of the MP normally used to cast the spell. Man, fun stuff.

Gold Dragon (Redux)'s battle logic is pretty simple. Since it can't use the most prominent Lightning-elemental attacks (it would absorb them), Gold Dragon (Redux) is pretty much stuck with Plasma and Wave Cannon. It'll use physical attacks a lot, countering with them and possibly with !Mighty Claw as well, which sets Confuse. Make sure to summon Golem or otherwise null Confuse effects, since you can't restore affected characters with Esuna for obvious reasons. Once past 25600 HP, Gold Dragon (Redux) will set Protect to buff up its Defense and will start to attack more, adding Wave Cannon to the list. Very simple and not threatening at all!

So yeah, Gold Dragon (Redux) is absorbing magic, which isn't that big a deal since about the strongest spell you can use against it not called Ultima flies past Runic: Flood! Flood spells are very powerful and feed off of Gold Dragon (Redux)'s weakness to water. Very sweet. In addition, Valor-centric set-ups are powerful, since you can cast Valor no problem, then unleash Fang, Drill, physical attacks, you name it.

This is such an easy battle compared to the previous one! Spellcasters should just focus on Flood and Quake spells (Flood is stronger). Shadow and Gogo can Throw Water Scrolls or Tridents, depending on your ammunition. Other Water- elemental attacks such as Aqua Breath and Tsunami are too weak to really take into consideration, and Dancing the Water Harmony is nowhere near as powerful as Dragon Horn Jumping. Hastega is out and you can't cast Reraise, but it doesn't matter. Summon the Maginot Line which all suffer no ill effects from Gold Dragon (Redux)'s Runic status to make sure !Mighty Claw doesn't become a problem. Absorbing all Lightning-elemental attacks and having negated physical ones, there's no threat so we can just kill the thing. Expand Full Strategy