• she/they

grumpy queer zillenial.
i play ggxrd and ffxiv and do a bunch of other nerd things
Ophelia Navi @ Jenova


last week, i finished the last set of reclears i'm doing with my group before we get back together for TEA for pre-6.3 ult prep.

for reference, i played caster this tier; red mage for my first clears of 5 and 6 and for early 7/8 p1 prog, and summoner the rest of the time. this was the first time that i had ever progged any content on a role that wasn't melee, and helped give me a different perspective on the game as a result.


P5S: What the dog doing?

Standouts: Devour, RG4 and 6

devour is pretty fun to execute, even though one pattern (of two!) might as well not exist. it's a little sad that this ended up being the most punishing mechanic of the tier before 8, but i think that's more of a flaw of 6 and 7. resolving it by deliberately failing a puddle is a pretty cool way of doing it as well, and it's cool presentation-wise since the mechanic as a whole is the cutscene from normal mode, and even gives you a small hint as to how to solve it for savage.

i didn't have an image here originally, but i ended up using an image in all the other sections, so i added this devour diagram at the end lol

i can just include RG4 and RG6 together, since the reason i like them is the exact same, that being using the healer stacks to poison the topaz stones and create a safe spot from explosions.

aside from these mechanics, all the ruby glows as a whole are decent mechanic-wise, though having done this fight on melee now, RG2 feels extremely bad to execute on the role (and they can hold that lol). the second claw to tail/tail to claw after RG5/partner puddles is a nice way to keep everyone on their feet as well. overall, this fight was by far the best of the first three.


P6S: Snakes on a something or other

Standouts: Cachexia, Limit Cut?, Hegemone's design, Scream the first few times

this isn't the worst savage fight i've ever done, and i don't think E6S on dragoon when i was extremely bad at FF14 will ever be topped in that category, but it's just kinda boring and easy.

cachexia 1 is the only mechanic worth talking about; figuring out how to execute it perfectly in prog was fun. and honestly, i'm a sucker for any mechanic with different debuff timings that require personal responsibility. cachexia 2 had the potential to be way cooler, but it's way too late in the fight and is essentially invalidated by either killing the boss before everything goes off or tank LB3ing it. cachexia 1 also has LB3 cheese potential since you can healer LB3 it, but there's less potential for that since it's reactionary and requires that someone be alive for it, instead of a preemptive safety net like tank LB3 for cachexia 2.

limit cut is only mentioned because there's a lot of ways to solve it, and mario kart in particular is extremely funny.

i mentioned personal responsibility in the cachexia section specifically because this fight seriously lacks it. the damage downs basically don't matter, and the fact that there's so many things in this fight that don't even kill you if you get hit by them is ridiculous. i pulled up my clear log from when we cleared in week 1, and the results aren't even as comical as you'll see from other groups. being bad at geometry is less punishing in ff14 than it is in middle school

despite what i said, this wasn't even the worst fight from this very tier. it's at least really funny in reclears, because you can just show up and as long as you don't fuck up cachexia 1, the rest of the fight is a choose your own adventure novel. get hit by choros ixou and a danger tile at the same time? sure, who fucking cares, that works i guess. scream is also a cool song, but i got my fill of it week 0 in normal mode.


P7S: Bed time

Standouts: The 8 minutes of rest my brain gets after the pull starts, the arena's various layouts

this fight is extremely boring and sucks. it's worse than P6S, basically because wiping to back-to-back-to-back choke checks late into the fight is annoying. maybe i would have liked it a little bit had i done it early week 1 and not like, 3 days after the tier dropped and purgation had already turned into a non-mechanic, but i didn't. at least the arena is pretty unique.

i cannot stress enough that this fight is a snoozefest. my midcore group got to purgation in like, 30 minutes (6 pulls) from fresh. we didn't have the Highly Controversial markers for our first night of prog, but we honestly didn't even need them; spacing is pretty easy to eyeball.

footage of a young ophelia navi, age 27, jp dodging through exaflares on pull 3 of p7s prog

the harvests are the only interesting mechanics, and i really don't like that the fight designers decided to put them all at the very end of the fight. spacing them out would have been a lot better for the fight; all the animals and their actions are shown pretty early into the fight, and i don't think it would have been that weird to space them in between other mechanics. i guess third floors are notorious for having end-of-fight choke checks, and it's probably the best implementation of it that i've played, but it does not fix the rest of the fight at all.

music-wise, i guess it's not that bad that they reused scream for this floor, but as a personal gripe, i feel like reused music with lyrics, especially back to back, feels worse than reused instrumental music. otherwise, i don't have much else to say about this fight. it was boring to prog, it's boring to reclear, that's all there is to it for me. at least it's easy.


P8S door: Dogs, snakes, and Char Aznable

Standouts: Fourfold and animals 2

after everything that came before this, going back to prog a good fight was a refreshing experience. design-wise, it's a pretty typical execution check that we've come to see from the last few door bosses like eden's promise and hesperos, but these fights have always been (imo) really fun, and the standouts of their tiers, and hephaistos is no exception.

for the two animal forms, both snake sets are more interesting to execute than their dog counterparts, but they're interesting in different ways.

dog 1 even now checks your group's healing and mitigation pretty hard, and dog 2's movement because of the randomness of crush vs impact (knockback) during the untargetable phase forces everyone to keep their heads up just enough.

snake 1 is basically just an intro to snake 2, and snake 2 might be my favorite mechanic for the entire tier. i really like the amount of variation and personal responsibility it has, making it a little intense to keep up with even now that i've cleared the fight so many times. i was also a designated adjuster for snakes in my group, and having that responsibility made an already loaded mechanic even tighter, which i really liked. in particular, having to use the petrified snake to block your debuff gaze is something that i think is really, really cool design.

one thing some people complained about with this fight is how buff windows get messed up if you get dog first, but i think that it was pretty cool actually. it forced groups to look at different ways to get full party buffs, and ended up with a unique solution that i thought was pretty cool (though i've never actually done it myself; it looks cool on video though)

dog first manifold flames party setup for max raid buffs

fourfold stands out as being fun due to how movement-heavy it is, and having to know 4 different spots for the second set of vents going off, due to explosions being able to create two different shaped safespots, and them having different positions for spread/stack depending on which it is. having to remember the conceptual cast that came before the fourfold cast adds a good layer to the mental stack as well, along with reacting to the in/out cast that comes alongside it as it goes off.

prog-wise, this was definitely the most difficult, but most satisfying fight of the tier. my group was also dealing with IRL stuff during this (me and two others went to a FG major in the middle of it, and people got sick after, etc etc), so it took a bit longer than i would have liked or expected, but it didn't dampen how nice the first clear felt.


P8S house: My 10th grade chemistry class

Standouts: The satisfaction of seeing phoenix for the first time, White Stone Black

of all the phase 2 raid bosses i've done, this is probably the weakest that i've done. the sheer amount of downtime kinda kills the fun of high concept, and i think at least HC1 being a full uptime mechanic would have made the fight a lot more interesting. obviously, this comes from a DPS perspective, so i'm sure if i played say, healer, i would have enjoyed it a bit more. natural alignments are pretty cool, at least.

the closest fight i can compare this to is oracle (E12S), and i personally enjoyed that a lot more. the sheer amount of variation in responsibilities that you got from relativities and the movement required to do apocs made the fight a lot more interesting in comparison, even for a puzzle fight. dominion as a victory lap is obviously more engaging than terminal relativity was, but that's not hard to accomplish.

white stone black is a really good song though, and is easily my favorite from the entire raid tier thus far; the creepy aesthetic of the entire arena is nice too. i wish i had more to talk about with the fight, but i just didn't find it super fun. when i cleared the fight, the only thing i could muster out of my mouth was "thank god it's over", instead of any celebratory words or feelings.

achievement unlocked! i guess.


Overall thoughts

well, i don't think it's hard to tell that i didn't enjoy the raid tier very much. on top of all of this, i was dealing with a lot of stress in life during the tier, and was feeling pretty burnt out from progging (and not clearing) DSR for the entirety of 6.1, so i wouldn't be surprised if all these things added up dampened my feelings. though for what it's worth, i feel like negative opinions regarding the raid tier aren't exactly unpopular within the raid community either.

hopefully, i'll be able to write a post like this for the next ult and have it be a lot more positive, but oh well. until next time, pandaemonium.

obligatory duty failed screenshot, shall we?


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