Almost a month ago, the new ultimate raid, Dragon War (Fatal), appeared in Final Fantasy XIV, which is considered to be the most difficult PvE content of the MMORPG. WoW’s best guild, Echo, who secured the last World First, is now trying their hand at it. MeinMMO author Irina Moritz thinks her first raid day was great.
The release of an ultimate raid in FFXIV has been a special event for years. The best players in the world gather to compete in a race for the first kill of this incredibly difficult content that is always raved about.
While FFXIV is typically unpopular on Twitch, Ultimate streams briefly catapulted it into the top 10 most watched games. It’s a lot of fun to watch the raiders banging their heads on the sometimes completely absurd mechanics and the breakneck speed of the fights.
But it’s especially fun when the raiders actually come from WoW and don’t have that much experience in FFXIV. Like the Echo guild, which swept away the win in the last World First race in WoW.
Now the group around the head of Scripe (in the title picture) is trying to do the new, hardest raid in FFXIV, completely blind.
The new ultimate raid in FFXIV has a total of 7 phases and lasts almost 19 minutes. A really hard effort to hold out for so long with full concentration.
“This is going to be really bad”
This isn’t the first time the Echo Raiders have encountered FFXIV. At the end of the Shadowbringers addon, a team of 8 players blindfolded through the Eden (Epic) raid series. People also took the new raid Pandaemonium (epic) with them.
So they know how the jobs work in FFXIV and can drive their rotas. You know the “dance” that makes up the mechanics of the epic raids, that is the specific sequence of mechanics that have multiple steps to be successfully resolved. The fixed rhythm and movements of it are reminiscent of a dance when performed.
Based on this knowledge, the Echo Group has estimated that progression will not take particularly long. Within 10 days of 6-8 hour raid time each, the guys wanted to be done with the fight, if not faster.
The only problem is that there are worlds between the epic and the ultimate raids.
The FFXIV raider Sfia, who got the world first in Alexander with the group Thoughts Per Second, analyzed the first day together with the WoW content creator Alex from FatBossTV. He estimates Dragon War (Fatal) as the most difficult raid in FFXIV so far and commented on the project with “It’s going to be really bad”. He will be right about that.
An additional disadvantage for the Echo Group is that they have little experience in FFXIV. Many of the mechanics featured in Ultimate Battles are based on attacks already introduced in other instances.
This means that someone who has run Nidhogg (Ex), Thordan (Ex) or Bahamut (fatal) countless times will just be much quicker at figuring out what’s going on on screen. A very simple example of this is one of the very first mechanics in combat:
Both were mechanics that Echo’s team had to unlock over multiple pulls. The same was true for the “Faith Unmoving” knock-back mechanic, which will be familiar to anyone who has been to the Archbasilica dungeon before. Or the chain of fire mechanic that any seasoned FFXIV raider will automatically break.
All in all, Echo needed almost 8 hours for the first phase of the fight. And that doesn’t even really count for the fight, but is a so-called “Door-Boss”.
In raids, fights are referred to as “door bosses”, which actually only represent a kind of test that you have to pass in order to be admitted to the “real” fight. These boss fights are usually shorter and easier than the actual raid fight. In most cases, they only have to be placed once per instance because they are followed by a check point.
FFXIV raiders are never really “blind”
But it’s Echo’s ignorance that makes streaming her ultimate progression so insanely entertaining. There are many sometimes completely absurd situations that would never happen to experienced FFXIV raiders, because for them the prog is never “real” and 100% blind.
The mechanics in the Epic and Ultimate FFXIV battles often consist of many “sub-mechanics” merged together, but most of them are not unique. As described above, many of them appear in other areas of the MMORPG.
It’s something I know from my own blind progressions in epic raids. These familiar elements from the battles immediately catch your eye. Too often it happened that my raid group saw a mechanic and immediately knew: “Ah, these are Shiva circles”, “These are the towers from Bahamut Prime” or “Ok, they are dive bombs”.
The challenge is to decipher the new elements, strategize them, and execute them in a much faster and deadlier raid environment without the group collectively biting the dust.
So I think it’s great to watch Echo progress in Dragon Wars, because they really go in blind. The prior knowledge of what they lack ensures that they sometimes come up with completely strange strategies that make their survival more difficult than it needs to be.
Not only does it lead to extremely funny situations, it also shows how an FFXIV raid would go if really every single mechanic of it were completely new. Strategies or resolutions that seem absurd to me make sense for the Echo Group.
With so many different sub-mechanics all stacked on top of each other and going out at the same time, the WoW raiders tend to draw the wrong conclusions from the results. For example, that the ice surfaces in Thordan’s second phase are soak damage, which you have to intercept with several players.
It’s not too far-fetched a thought, but not something an FFXIV raider would first suspect, since these ice surfaces typically deal simple area damage and then become the dot.
As such, the channels of Echo, Scripe, and other members of the group will be my main entertainment on Twitch for the next few days. I keep my fingers crossed for the boys. How nasty the fight is, I experience together with my own static on my own skin.
However, there was trouble in the race for the Dragon War kill:
Final Fantasy XIV: Boss of the MMORPG is disappointed because the best players don’t play by his rules