Hey glad to see your reply! glad to hear you've started another playthrough with a DPS phodom. that should be very interesting to see should you ever finish the game!
I was very impressed to hear you beat the Ch. 4 epic with a DPS phodom! you must upload a video of this since i didn't think it would be possible! Do you know how i beat this stupidly bugged boss? by saving the game everytime i successfully landed 2/3 ground zeros and when every chaotic rift successfully landed! if i missed even one, i reloaded the game. seriously that was the only way i could figure out to beat him. That plus i had to constantly reload whenever he went from the mirror image event to another without any breaks (the rotating energy beam one isn't too bad, it can't instantly kill you if you've leveled up the magic resistance CK, which i had; plus it let me time some ground zeros on him because i started it the moment he was about to do the last (i.e. 10th) beam).
regarding Francesca, well you're right it is a very valuable item, but IMO its opportunity cost is far too high for what it gives. i went about it logically and did some math before i came to my conclusion. for example, the roughly 1k gold you have to spend to complete ruby axe in chapter 1 would have become 2k by chapter 8 (cumulative effect from riddles). the same applies to the other parts. when you calculate how much the gold for all of its parts would amounted to (cumulatively with riddle gold), it becomes by far the most expensive item in the game (the opportunity cost for it was higher then 30k unless i'm mistaken!).
As for Andenaj, i love the item up till the 2nd iteration. the final version (A III) is IMO useless because it doesn't level up its most valuable aspect: the permanent HP increase. Andenaj II and III (according to the tooltip at least) both give an additional 75HP upon level up. Hence, doesn't that make you question why you would spend a zozi and over 7k on a recipe that just gives some bonus hp and stats? for that cost i would have expected A III to at least increase its per-level-additional-HP to 100-125.
The new version offers some interesting changes though. Namely, since one of fradz' starting packs now guarantees that you can't miss on steals, it makes one question whether fradz can now do without thief/shadow set. However i would still probably consider it compulsory since its passive is still the only effective AOE ability Fradz has (his skills with respect to dealing with large numbers of enemies are all pretty useless IMO).
I'll probably take a lot of flak for this, but irrespective of how he's built, i generally consider Fradz to be the most useless of the three heroes. Agility is by far the most useless stat in this game and even fradz' DPS build is honestly nothing compared to magic DPS Galeoth and Phodom, who i rely on to do all the work and damage. There are very few circumstances where i would say Fradz shines and even then its because of the items he has and not his skillset. for example, he's great against the ch. 8 epic with jade set because he can clear those ice blocks really fast. I may change my mind after some more experimentation and once aero has ironed out the major bugs but at the moment, fradz to me is completely ornamental and mostly just there to steal items, then step aside.