About a month ago, the new ultimate raid, Dragon War (Fatal), was released in Final Fantasy XIV, which is considered the hardest PvE content of the MMORPG to date. The best WoW guild, Echo, which secured the last World First, is now attempting it. Their first raid day was great, says MeinMMO author Irina Moritz.
The release of an ultimate raid in FFXIV has been a special event for years. The best players in the world gather to compete for the first kill of these incredibly difficult bosses, which are always hyped.
While FFXIV is usually not very popular on Twitch, it gets temporarily catapulted into the top 10 games with the most viewers thanks to the Ultimate streams. It’s a lot of fun to watch the raiders tackle the sometimes completely absurd mechanics and the breakneck speed of the encounters.
It’s especially amusing when the raiders come from WoW and don’t have much experience in FFXIV. Like the guild Echo, which won the last World First race in WoW.
Now the group led by Scripe (in the title image) is trying to tackle the new hardest raid in FFXIV completely blind.
“This is going to be really bad”
This is not the first encounter of Echo’s raiders with FFXIV. At the end of the Shadowbringers expansion, a team of 8 players completed the Eden raid series (epic) blind. They also tackled the new raid Pandaemonium (epic).
So they know how the jobs in FFXIV work and can execute their rotations. They are familiar with the “dance” that defines the mechanics of epic raids, which refers to the specific sequence of mechanics that involve multiple steps to resolve successfully. The established rhythm and movements during execution resemble a dance.
Based on this knowledge, the Echo group estimated that progression would not take particularly long. Within 10 days of 6 to 8 hours of raid time, they wanted to finish the fight, if not even faster.
The problem is that there is a huge gap between epic and ultimate raids.
The FFXIV raider Sfia, who achieved the World First in Alexander with the group Thoughts Per Second, analyzed the first day together with WoW content creator Alex from FatBossTV. He assesses Dragon War (Fatal) as the hardest raid in FFXIV to date and commented on the endeavor with “This is going to be really bad”. He is likely to be correct.
An additional drawback for the Echo group is that they have little experience in FFXIV. Many of the mechanics that appear in ultimate fights are based on attacks that have already been introduced in other instances.
This means that someone who has run Nidhogg (Ex), Thordan (Ex), or Bahamut (Fatal) countless times will simply grasp what’s happening on screen much faster. A very simple example of this is one of the very first mechanics in the fight:
- In the first phase, you fight against 2 Knights of Thordan, both of whom have appeared in earlier fights.
- One of them does targeted line-AoEs on random players, causing dark portals to appear at the edge of the arena.
- Experienced FFXIV raiders know immediately:
- The portals must not be close together, otherwise they will explode.
- You must not approach the portals, or you will die and potentially take a few group members with you.
Both were mechanics that the Echo team had to uncover over several pulls. The same applied to the knock-back mechanic “Faith Unmoving”, which anyone who has been in the dungeon Basilica of the Holy can identify. Or the fire chain mechanic, which every experienced FFXIV raider will automatically break.
As a result, Echo took about 8 hours for the first phase of the fight. And that doesn’t even count as part of the actual fight, but is referred to as a “door boss”.
FFXIV Raiders are never truly “blind”
But it is precisely this lack of knowledge from Echo that makes their stream of Ultimate progression so immensely entertaining. It leads to many sometimes completely absurd situations that experienced FFXIV raiders would never encounter, as for them the prog is never “really” and 100% blind.
The mechanics in the epic and ultimate FFXIV fights often consist of many combined “sub-mechanics”, which are mostly not unique. As described above, many of them occur in other areas of the MMORPG.
It’s something I recognize from my own blind progressions in epic raids. These known elements from the fights immediately stand out. Too often it has happened that my raid group has seen a mechanic and immediately knew: “Ah, those are Shiva circles”, “Those are the towers from Bahamut Prime” or “Okay, those are dive bombs.”
The challenge is to decipher the new elements, implement them into a strategy, and execute them in a much faster and deadlier raid environment without the entire group collectively biting the dust.
That’s why I think it’s fantastic to watch Echo during their progression in Dragon War, as they really go in blind. The lack of prior knowledge leads them to come up with some completely strange strategies that make survival harder than it needs to be.
Not only does it lead to extremely funny situations, but it also shows how an FFXIV raid would go if every single mechanic were completely new. Strategies or solutions that seem absurd to me make sense to the Echo group.
With so many different sub-mechanics that are all stacked on top of each other and going off at the same time, the WoW raiders draw incorrect conclusions from the results. For example, that the ice patches in the second phase of Thordan are soak damage that must be intercepted by several players.
It’s not too far-fetched a thought, but not something an FFXIV raider would suspect first, because these ice patches usually deal simple area damage and then become a DoT.
That’s why the channels of Echo, Scripe, and other members of the group will be my main entertainment on Twitch for the next few days. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the guys. How brutal the fight is, I’m experiencing firsthand alongside my Static.
However, there was trouble in the race for the Dragon War kill:
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