Heal Beam is better than Aura Whirl

I should have read the Mechanics FAQ on GameFAQs more closely.  Look at Heal Beam, and then scroll down to Dual Techs and look at Aura Whirl.  See the multiplier difference?  Yeah.

Heal Beam heals the entire party for Robo's magic multiplied by 10, as a single tech.  Aura Whirl heals the entire party for Marle's magic multiplied by 5.5, as a dual tech with Crono.  Using Heal Beam frees up Crono so he can spam Luminaire.  In addition, since Heal Beam is only needed with every other spell Spekkio casts, Robo can spam Shock and just heal when necessary, which adds a fair bit of extra damage.

Since I have everyone's magic maxed except for Ayla's (30 magic tabs left), this is basically trading Aura Whirl's heal of around 540 that takes two party members to cast for Heal Beam's heal of around 990 that only requires one.

In short, the battle with level ** Spekkio just got almost three times faster.  This took me from a 58 minute run with minor errors to a 52 minute nearly perfect run.  I couldn't incapacitate one of the two guards on my prison escape and had to fight him, I triggered an accidental battle midway through Lab 16, and miscellaneous terrain snags got me.  When I got Robo and equipped him, I was sitting at 0:39.  I didn't check the clock when I got to the End of Time, so the difference of 13 minutes includes shortcutting the Factory.  I equipped everyone specially for this battle as soon as they joined, since the battles leading up to it largely don't matter.

So now the party, equipment, and strategy looks like this:
Everyone level ** with ** magic and ** speed.
Crono: (Haste Helm/Moon Armor/Gold Stud)
Lucca: (Haste Helm/PrismDress/Gold Stud)
Robo: (Haste Helm/Moon Armor/Gold Stud)
Spam *Luminaire and *Flare, and Shock.  Heal with Heal Beam as necessary.

Yeah, that's a lot simpler.  You know what they say...  Keep It Simple, Stupid!

The old Crono/Marle/Lucca method relied on queueing up Aura Whirl while Spekkio was in the process of casting Hallation and then firing it off again immediately when both of them were ready (the timing was just barely perfect with Haste Helms, with only a third to a half of an ATB bar of leniency), which meant saving both Marle and Crono's turns, resulting in much lower damage output.  With this method, it's more like "oh look, Spekkio used Hallation again.  Time to tell Robo to use Heal Beam instead of Shock when he's ready."  The results showed plain as day, six minutes shaved off.

Here's how the battle went down for me.  He led off with *Dark Matter.  I got off three casts each of *Flare, *Luminaire, and Shock (about 10500 damage) before he cast Hallation.  Set up *Flare and *Luminaire (about 2400 damage) and then queued up Heal Beam.  It healed the full 999 HP for everyone.  A couple more rounds of *Flare, *Luminaire, then Shock (about 7000 damage) was enough to seal the deal, during which he casted *Dark Matter again.  I'm ignoring the tens' and ones' places in the calculations, so that's why these numbers only indicate that I did 19900 damage. He only has 20000 HP, and the rounded off digits more than account for the mere 100 damage difference.

I wonder if I can get a sub-50 minute time with a little refinement.  Three minutes is a lot to ask when my run to the End of Time was nearly perfect, but it'd be awesome to see it happen.

To anyone having trouble with Spekkio's final form, get the equipment and stats I mentioned above and try this out.  It should work without the stats, but it'll take longer.  The equipment is absolutely required.