The difficulty spike: how would you address this situation?

I'm running a test after having changed some of the commands, and I'm hitting an immense difficulty spike at the Esper Defense in Narshe (right after the scenario split).  I found myself spamming tonics between fights (each heals 25% in my hack) and several times I had a party wipe out, forcing me to quickly heal them and run them back into the battle.


I'm especially concerned because the Esper Defense battle poses a threat as a soft-lock; there's no way to leave Narshe and build some experience before attempting the fight again, and depending on the last scenario you beat you might not even have access to a shop to buy more gear.

As currently implemented, Gau is the most powerful character during the battle and Edgar is the weakest (his new cover command not serving much purpose but to kill him from the heavy strikes of the enemies, unless you park him in the back row... he was much more useful on the train).  The only characters with multi-enemy strikes are Terra and Celes (and maybe Gau), whereas the fights are designed with strike-all in mind.  So... how do I change the fight to make it more easily beatable?  Or rather, how would YOU change the fight?

The Nerf Bat
I could reduce the battle power of the enemies to 75% or 60%, so that they're not hitting for 100+ damage each attack.  I'm not sure how much this would help... it might keep the dogs from one-shotting characters that aren't fully healed.
Alternatively, I could remove an entity or two from certain formations so that they don't get as many attacks on the party before defeat.

The Buff Stick
I could give Edgar a Bracer (permanent Protect status) relic on recruitment.  Protect almost halves physical damage, and while a relic like that wouldn't normally be available it could make the difference with careful planning.  Alternatively, I could put it on the Coronet he starts with.  Unfortunately, this doesn't help with the soft-lock situation because it could easily be sold before the event.

The New Contender
I could try to make an event tweak to add Mog to the player party for the event, and then remove him again.  He's set to a high level average and he's got natural magic in the hack, so it would evenly balance the three parties.  The trouble is making room in the event code to make that change; it's probably only a couple hex bytes to add him and a couple more to remove him, but the last time I did something like that I had to completely change the cinematic motion of the Falcon to make room... and that was just a palette swap.

Anyway, what would you do to smooth out something like this?