I'm still a bit stunned by this, in a good way. Last night, I hit level 99, and began what was to be my last benchmark fight before seed farming. At 196 strength, I figured, based on my data from my level 90 fight, that I might possibly be able to overcome his regeneration. I figured this battle would give me a feel for how much more I'd have to raise my strength to finish off his HP before I ran out of MP.
I used the Dragon Mail, which gave me the best overall results in my previous fights. I successfully cast Stopspell and got off four successful Orochi Sword uses in a relatively short period of time. Because I wanted to start attacking at the beginning of a healing cycle, I ended up using the Orochi Sword twice more before healing, and both attempts were successful.
Tracking my damage, I saw after a few healing cycles that I was indeed overcoming his regeneration, at a rate larger than I expected. In fact, after three rounds of attack and one round of heal, I was ended up ahead in damage somewhat more often than not. Despite the bulk of the existing documentation of this fight being against the possibility, I began to wonder if this wasn't possible.
I was consistently able to go three attack rounds before healing. There were a few, and only a few, times where I knew that taking the third round was a gamble, because my HP was lower than the max damage he could do in a round. But each time I took that gamble, I ended up alive, although in the single digit HP range. (There's always a slight gamble anyway healing every four rounds, because there's always a slim chance Baramos will go before you even at max agility.) I figured if I wanted to beat this without excessive seed grinding, I would have to rely at least a little bit on good fortune in the fight.
About 100 rounds in (measured from when I began attacking) I saw that my MP likely wasn't going to last, but I was doing far better than I thought, having dealt on the net over 500 damage. Then on round 102, I finally got a critical hit for 260 damage. Now my tracking showed 668 damage net. His remaining health, then, would be around 232, give or take, depending on his actual regeneration compared to the average I was estimating. If his regeneration was on the low end, he might be in the damage range for the Lightning spell! Even if that wasn't quite enough, I would still be able to get one more attack off. It might just be enough.
I had around 160 HP and exactly 31 MP left. After thinking about it for a minute, trying to decide if I should go for it, I decided to. I cast the spell of Lightning, doing 211 damage. And watched Baramos's sprite vanish, as the game declared me victorious.
I couldn't believe I'd pulled it off. All of the internet's decades' long history of comments about this game suggested that a solo fight against Baramos without the Noh Mask and/or excessive seed farming was impossible, yet here I was, on my very first attempt at level 99, standing over Baramos' corpse. And whereas I'm sure I did get a few seeds dropped from enemies while I was travelling the world in my stepping on each map square, I never did any actual seed farming.
Now, I am fairly confident that I had somewhat above average luck on my level-up Strength gains. I was consistently getting gains all through the 70, 80, and 90 level range. It seems, in the end, that was all that was needed.
I had 473 Max HP, and 233 Max MP, typical amounts for max level, I think. Agility was capped with the Meteorite Armband.
I think that there is a dearth of useful information posted online about how to approach this fight. Since it used to be regarded as impossible, no one bothered to try enough to develop useful strategies. Accounts like Gamefaqs user joaquintall were very useful to me in helping me figure this out. I hope that this account (which I've also posted on Gamefaqs message boards) will similarly help anyone out who wants to try this in the future.
Of course, it's not over. I still have the Zoma fight, which according to my research is no cakewalk. It seems that the Baramos fight is generally regarded as harder, but a lot of people still get hung up at the very end. I expect I'll be ready to try Zoma by the end of next week at the latest, though I'll try to get it much sooner if I can.
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