Riftweaver81

yes, that is true.  but it is a weakpoint in your team.  he might be strong already, but you need more strength to beat the boss.

idealy, your healer should be able to cast multi-heal (or omni heal, depending on how much mana you have) and recover any damage you took. so having too much defence wont really help much... even more so because the boss has several spells available too, which defence cant help with at all.

it might be annoying, but i do recommend you resynth your team and level them up again. that will give them some extra stats and skill points anyway. and that never hurts.    the balhib, slimestack, demon-at-arms would be a good team to fight him with, you just need to fine-tune their skills a bit more

the golems outside bemuse are 1-shot.. they dissapear once you beat the boss of the area. i've checked during the day, night, day-rain, night-rain. nothing, they are just gone.   so stock up on them while you can! you will need lots of them for synthing

they are split up by family type. each time you enter a new area, the game will randomly select one of the families to inhabit the room till you leave.

slime : behemoth slime, slime, metal kaiser, bauble king, slime stack, dark slime knight (in battle only, liquid metal, metal king)  the 2 metals are quite rare, dont rely on them for farming.

dragon :argon lizard, great argon, metal dragon, great dragon, snap dragon, red dragon

beast : jumping jackel,  notso matcho,  pazuzu (you'll be scouting a LOT of these), pink sanguini, moosifer, teenie sanguini, and rarely an atlas

material : pupeteer, wax murderer

undead : soulspawn, heydrae, walking corpse, night knight.    the undead are mostly found in the small rooms, they never seem to show up in the cross shaped ones

nature : helligator (they can drop beastie bites, i think), goreilla, beetleboy, hell hornet

finaly, the hidden basement area that you get to by falling down the holes that randomly appear has its own monster group
killing machine, traumanator (the only scoutable rank x), living statue, imp, goody bag, gemon, boss troll

i think thats all of them

Don't even bother with the metal kaiser slime he's more trouble then he's worth,its best to just do your heavy training in the metal forest aka land of light once you beat the main story and a small side story...

you dont fight the kaiser for the xp, you fight hm for scouting. since you need at least 2 of them during the rigor mortex synth line, maybe more for random other monsters

i like how you think 'long and tedious' means the same thing as 'difficult'.  if you want truely difficult games, go back in time and try out some of the old school games like the early might and magic games, or wizardry.  heck, any of the SSI gold box games were pretty unforgiving if you make a mistake in battle

or if you want more modern game,  shin megami tensei nocturne  for the ps2.  freaking fantastic game, but very very difficult at times due to the battle system.