Lately, I've been noticing that not a whole lot of event formations allow Mindy to copy only two crusaders with a full formation. In order to make sure she only copies two crusaders, at least one formation slot has to be left empty, otherwise she has to be put in a spot where she can only copy one crusader. While I understand that there is an intended level of strategy to re-working your ideas for a formation around the shape provided by the chapter, leaving a space empty just feels...wrong. I've been doing it in the hopes that maybe I just needed to adjust, but having done it for many events and still not quite shaking that crawling feeling has prompted me to make the following suggestion...

Currently (to my knowledge), Mindy will try to copy all crusaders around her, regardless of if they have formation abilities or not. This means that if she is beside a crusader like Sal the Merman, who has no formation abilities, she will still try to mimic him and gain nothing from it, wasting a "mimic slot" that could be used on another adjacent crusader with a useful formation ability. Since Mindy already ignores escorts, could her mimic mechanic be altered to also ignore crusaders that do not currently have any formation abilities to copy? This would mean that a player would still need to be wary of placing a crusader with an ability not worth mimicking next to her, but would open up the ability to fill an empty slot with something like a DPSer with no formation abilities without being a nuisance to Mindy's mimic ability.

Normally I wouldn't suggest such a change to mechanics for something so overly-specific, but because Mindy is SUCH a hugely-popular crusader to use in pretty much ANY formation, it seems worth a mention to have her, one of the more important crusaders, be treated with the importance she's long since earned by now.

Progression isn't my issue since what you recommended is just fine. What my issue with this is on the DPS side of things. If progression varies a bit, that's fine, but if DPS varies for about 30 seconds, that's a huge deal. If I put 3 crusaders next to Mindy, including Milgrid, she should ALWAYS be mimicking Milgrid, but there's no way to make sure that happens, which means my DPS at the end of a run would vary wildly between insta-killing monsters and not even scratching them depending on which 2 of the 3 are being mimicked.

Well that's why I suggested she should ignore crusaders with no formation abilities to copy since she already ignores escorts. The player would still have to make sure there wasn't a third crusader near her with a formation ability, so it would still require some amount of positional awareness. It would just remove the "Why would she try mimicking something with nothing to mimic?" issue. Between "Remove a crusader from the formation entirely because another crusader's HELPFUL ability would be penalized" and "Slightly alter how this helpful ability functions", the latter seems more reasonable.

I mean, think about it. You've got a situation where you need to remove a crusader entirely for Mindy to refresh her mimics on two crusaders. This means you're COMPLETELY giving up the buffs of this one crusader so that Mindy won't target it and will focus on the other two. More specifically, this means you're giving up buffs to AVOID losing buffs, which is a sentence which makes no sense.