The Haukke Manor Dungeon (Hard) in Final Fantasy XIV is already 9.5 years old. However, if players are not careful, they can still wipe there damn fast.
Actually, most dungeons in FFXIV are very easy, especially those from the early “A Realm Reborn” days. The old mechanics and simple fights will only elicit a tired smile from most players. But there is a level 50 dungeon whose final boss can still take down careless players even today.
This is the Haukke Manor (hard): The dungeon is a continuation of the normal Haukke Manor, which players can enter during the main story quests starting at level 28.
It is an old estate that has been overrun by demons, and you must defeat their leader Halicarnassus. It is precisely this demoness that can dismantle newcomers as well as veterans even after more than 9 years, as a post on reddit demonstrates.
The Dungeon Boss Demands Respect
Here’s how the mechanic works: Halicarnassus summons several trash monsters during the fight. They actually need to be beaten down by the players before they turn their attention back to the boss.
In such an old dungeon as Haukke Manor (hard), the mechanics are often ignored by the players. After all, they want to get through quickly, and the most direct way to do that is usually to just destroy the boss. Although players are reduced from level 90 to level 50 upon entering, they are still extremely fast thanks to gear and balance adjustments.
That’s why Halicarnassus is often just zerged down, as you can see in the video. The problem with this is that the trash mobs do not simply disappear. As soon as the boss reaches certain percentage of HP, she eats the mobs and uses an attack whose strength is based on the amount of remaining HP.
If the trash mobs have full HP at that moment, it leads immediately to a wipe. In the video, that would have also happened if the tank hadn’t reacted quickly and triggered a defensive Limit Break for the entire group. He was able to mitigate the damage just enough to prevent it from becoming a group-wide one-shot.
But even players who know about the mechanics must be careful not to deal too much damage. Thanks to the high gear level and balance adjustments, it can happen extremely quickly that the boss unintentionally falls below the HP threshold, leading to a wipe for the group.
What’s behind it: Such HP-based mechanics were often present during the early days of FFXIV in fights. Bosses like Ifrit, King Mogul Mog, and Leviathan had minimum HP thresholds that could only be exceeded after correctly executing certain mechanics.
Most of the time, wipes are not serious. You lose nothing except for a few minutes of time. However, they can still be annoying if, for example, a group member doesn’t listen and just keeps hitting the boss.
In some FFXIV player circles, there is therefore the insider joke “Respect the mechanics”. This refers to old mechanics that must still be executed and cannot be ignored, or else it would lead to a wipe.
This kind of mechanics has become increasingly rare over time, and some bosses have even been revised so that this mechanic was removed from the fights. The developers have resorted to other methods to wipe the floor with players. Many of these can be found in the ultimate raids:
