As some of you may or may not know, I recently started a challenge for myself, and anyone else interested to complete all trials up to Octopus Teacher with a team of only main characters. Of course, no duplicates allowed.

These units include: Rain, Lasswell, Fina, Lid, Nichol, Jake, Sakura and Dark Fina. For those of you without Dark Fina, you're welcome to use a Dark Fina friend for a party of six. Keep in mind that actually owning Dark Fina will not grant you any advantages in this challenge since you most likely won't find any friends using story unit leaders.

The Gilgamesh Trial has been completed and the results can be found here:

Gilgamesh Trial - Main Character Challenge

Moving onto the next one! I've decided to challenge The Beasts of the Dark, also known as the Dark Espers Trial. Here are the results:

https://i.imgur.com/Qnns1xS.png https://i.imgur.com/p4I39nW.jpg

Again, I left Dark Fina out of my party, and went with a line up of Rain, Lasswell, Jake, Fina and Sakura. A couple of things that are crucial to winning the fight:

• All units must have at least 4K HP, sufficient MP Regen, and a combined resist of ~120% across Fire, Water and Dark. Garnet's TMR is god send for people that farmed it.

• Sakura is MVP in this trial with Thunder's Protection, Defensive Barrier and Dual Cast Barfira/Barwatera. Yes, that's the only thing she did throughout the fight, and damn was it important. Make sure you slap some MP regen on her if possible, and have a ton of MP recovery items.

• Confuse resist is absolutely required, pretty self explanatory

• Rain needs to use provoke before Siren's Osmose. Emperor's Majesty is one of those god send TMRs for this trial since it gives both a decent amount of HP and MP regen. I had enough MP Regen on Rain to have Leadership up most of the time.

• The key to winning the fight is to find a good balance between DPS, HP, Elemental resist and status resist.

That'll be all for today, I will be attempting the Echidna later this week. I have a couple builds ready to test out, time to go back to Earth Shrine!

Let me know if you guys are interested in seeing my builds. Warning, it's super TMR heavy.

Please post your results, recommendations, strategies, etc. Any feedback is much appreciated.