The dungeon Haukke Mansion (Hard) in Final Fantasy XIV is already 9.5 years old. But if players aren’t careful, they can still wipe there pretty damn fast.
In fact, most dungeons in FFXIV are very easy, especially those that date back to the early days of A Realm Reborn. The old mechanics and simple combat will only make most players smile wearily. But there is a level 50 dungeon whose final boss still dismantles careless players today.
This is the Haukke Mansion (Hard): The dungeon is a sequel to the normal Haukke Manor that players can enter during the main story quests at level 28 and above.
It’s an ancient estate overrun by demons and you must defeat their leader, Halicarnassus. It’s this very demon that can still dissect newbies and veterans alike after over 9 years, as a post on reddit proves.
The dungeon boss enforces respect
This is how the mechanics work: Halicarnassus spawns several trash monsters throughout the fight. Actually, they have to be beaten down by the players before you take care of the boss again.
However, in a dungeon as old as Haukke Mansion (Hard), the mechanics are often ignored by the players. After all, you want to get through it quickly and the most direct way to do this is usually to simply destroy the boss. While entering will drop you from level 90 to level 50, players are still extremely fast thanks to armor and balance adjustments.
That’s why Halicarnassus is often simply dragged down, as you can see in the video. The problem is that trash mobs don’t just go away. Once the boss reaches a certain percentage of HP, she eats the mobs and uses an attack whose strength is based on the amount of HP left.
If the trash mobs have full HP, then this immediately leads to a wipe. This would also have happened in the video if the tank hadn’t reacted quickly and ignited a defensive limit break for the whole group. He was able to reduce the damage taken just enough not to become a group-wide one-shot.
But even players who know about the mechanics have to be careful not to deal too much damage. Thanks to the high gear level and the balance adjustments, it can happen extremely quickly that the boss unintentionally falls below the HP threshold and wipes the group.
This is behind it: Such HP-based mechanics were common in fights during the early days of FFXIV. Bosses like Ifrit, King Mogul Mog, and Leviathan had minimum HP thresholds that could only be crossed after certain mechanics were correctly executed.
Most of the time the wipes are not severe. Nothing is lost except a few minutes of time. However, they can still get angry if, for example, a group member doesn’t listen and simply hits the boss.
In some FFXIV player circles there is therefore the inside joke “Respect the mechanics”. This is referring to old mechanics that you still have to do and not ignore or it would result in a wipe.
However, these types of mechanics have become less common over time, and some bosses have even been redesigned to remove this mechanic from combat. The developers resorted to other methods to wipe the floor with the players. A particularly large number of them can be found in the Ultimate Raids:
Best WoW guild despairs of the hardest raid in Final Fantasy XIV, but celebrates it as “super cool”