On July 30, 2024, Square Enix released the new hard endgame raid for Final Fantasy XIV. Within 24 hours, the top players cracked the World First. The difference between 1st and 2nd place was only 21 seconds.
What content is it about? The latest World First refers to the recently released raid series Arkadion – Heavyweight (epic)
. This is the latest hard content in Final Fantasy XIV. A complete clear is when all four fights contained in the raid are completed within a week.
The Arkadion is an 8-man raid. The easy version is usually released first, followed by the hard non-nerfed
version one to two weeks later. Everything about unlocking and the prerequisites can be found in our endgame guide.
With the new epic raid, Final Fantasy XIV has fresh endgame group content. The only harder challenges are the so-called Ultimates. Accordingly, the community competes for the World First with each release, which this time was really very close.
Grind is worth it – Victory with just a few seconds to spare
Who achieved the World First? The development team at Square Enix has yet to confirm the World First clear, but the Twitch channel MogTalk has collected the times. According to them, the top three spots are as follows in GMT (Greenwich Mean Time):
- 3rd place: Team Lucrezia (via X.com) on July 30, 2024, at 19:17
- 2nd place: Team Serenity on July 30, 2024, at 18:59
- 1st place: Team GRIND on July 30, 2024, at 18:59
According to the minute details, there is no difference between 1st and 2nd place – the victories were that close together. You can also watch the victory of GRIND on YouTube.
How were 1st and 2nd place determined? To accurately determine which of the two teams was really faster, the in-game time of the game world was considered. One in-game minute is about 3 seconds long.
In a Twitch stream, MogTalk announced that GRIND finished the raid series with an in-game time of 3:14. Serenity concluded their fight at 3:21. The 7 in-game minute time difference results in a time difference of about 21 seconds between the completions.
Team GRIND from Japan narrowly won just ahead of their North American rivals from Team Serenity.
How does MogTalk get the information? MogTalk collects information internationally via a Google Docs. Anyone who wants to participate in the World First race can report their progress through it.
The clears don’t necessarily have to be streamed. However, MogTalk requires at least proof screenshots or videos with the fully displayed UI. This also allowed reading the in-game time necessary for the accurate identification of the winner.
Specifically, MogTalk has been collecting clear information from raid groups for some time: one of the first was the Heavensward raid Alexander from patch 3.4.
This allows tracking part of the progress of current winners. For example, Team GRIND managed to place 3rd in the second to last hard raid Pandaemonium Anabaseios
and snagged 5th place in the battle for the latest Ultimate.
In fact, the easy version of the new raid already excited players both in terms of content, design, and soundtrack. However, with the hard raid, there were a whole lot of buffs for many jobs: A new class in Final Fantasy 14 is so overpowered that developers now need to buff other jobs
