does anybody have a good way to beat orphan in his first form.....its sucks you cant save right after you beat barthendulus so when you quit and dont beat orphan, you have to go through fighing barthendulus again.

Syn / Sab / Med, start off by buffing up fully and debuff fully.
Com / Rav / Med, calmy build up stagger.
Com / Com / Rav during stagger and burst him down as quickly as possible.
 
If you can get his HP to 40% in one stagger you will skip the status effect phase competely, then after that it's just a matter of switching between paradigms and attacking until he dies, making sure to go Med / Med / Sen when you're in trouble.
 
If you can't avoid the status effects make sure you have Veil on your party at all times, this will stop alot of the debuffs, if they do get onto you. Dispelga straight away, don't waste your TP on summons. You should of just looted an Elixir before the boss, use if TP gets low.
 
Or easy-mode/boring-mode:
Play full defence. Sab to keep Poison applied. Then Med / Med / Med and he will die slowly while the Poison ticks away.

Its one of those status effect fights. Used Lightning, Hope and Vanille.
 
I'd start out with Syn,Sab and Lighthealing.
Switch it up to Commando, Ravager and a healer
When I'm at 100% health I'd go Comm, Rav, Rav to bring him to a stagger.
As soon as I stagger, I switch to the Medic, Sab, Syn because a staggered opponent can't resist debuffs.
When he does his really powerful attacks that brings my partys health down to like 15% each, I go Med/Med/Med and heal up in a flash.
 
I think when I beat him, I just got lucky that he didnt use that Pergitorial Wrath or whatever on my lead character.

nevermind i just beat him 
my team was vanille,lightning,hope
i used sab,med,med and poisoned him
then i switched to med,med,syn and just let hope use haste on us so i can heal faster
and then i switched to med,med,med 
then i used poison again when it wore off then thats about it

Powerlevel like a muthafucker!

I have powerleveled as much as I can and this boss is still killing me badly. I'm using Lightning, Snow, Hope.  
 
Lightning: 
8240 HP 
1888 STR 
1380 MAG 
Helter-Skelter * 
Warrior's Wristband Lv.1 
Diamond Bangle Lv.1 
Power Glove lv.1 
 
Snow: 
9710 HP 
1166 STR 
1588 MAG 
Soul Blazer * 
Weirding Glyph * 
Wierding Glyph Lv.1 
Diamond Bangle Lv.1 
 
Hope: 
6395 HP 
952 STR 
2184 MAG 
Eagletalon * 
Goddess's Favor Lv.1 
Sorcere's Mark lv.1 
Adamant Bangle Lv.1 
 
Does anyone have any advice for me? Sometimes Orphan uses that big cutting move twice in a row on me and I don't stand a chance. I'm using Lightning as a Commando mainly, sometimes a medic. Snow is a my Sentinel because of his crazy HP and he sometimes goes into Ravager to help with chains. Hope is my Medic and Ravager. Also, when those annoying orb things start shooting I really don't stand a chance because they do like over 100 damage and are relentless. 
 
I should also mention that I can't go any higher with each characters main three roles, so I've done all the leveling I can do.

You have time to switch to med everytime he does the big chop move, I could be wrong but everytime he does the chop, he slowly does a backhand slap right after it, but inbetween attacks I have enough time to use my med/med/med setup to heal back to full, then switch back to whatever paradigm I use to attack him with. My characters had enough HP to stay alive everytime he does its attack, I try to let Hope keep my party buffs up when I have the chance, even though he suck at it, he still do haste/shell/veil I think, so it's better than nothing.

The only problem I had with the fight was instant death, I don't know if you could provoke it away from the lead character, I also heard he only does it if you take too long killing him, so I never used a tank for the fight, as every attack were AoE anyway, I just hit him a few times and rav/rav/rav him to stagger him, spam attacks, switch to med/syn/sab to debuff/buff/heal, switch back to med/med/med if necessary for healing/esuna, then back to attacking mode, rinse and repeat, at the end he go apeshit but it's just the matter of doing the same thing faster and spamming more magic on him, and just remember every other paradigm shift you get a full ATB bar, so it's easy to switch to medic role and heal yourself back to full, it was just annoying having to cast esuna on everyone when he spam those status ailments, just pray Hope's Veil helps and doesn't wear out.