Final Fantasy 14 seems to have NAILED raiding with the Alexander raid. The flow, the story, it was all simply amazing.
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Sad fact- Asmon pretty much quit the new WoW raid after the second boss because factions are so lopsided he realized he couldn't raid on his main Alliance character. There were enough people to get a full group together and they kept wiping on the second boss of normal over and over again.
But Alexander was definitely great. Stormblood is where ex-trials and raids really get awesome, though. Might be lopsided story-wise, but SB has some of the best dungeons and raids.
Ths mob fight at release was actually fun. You had to target specific mobs to stop them from buffing others and had to use to gobwalkers to move the bombs away from the team and apply vulnerability debuffs to mobs.
Hey! Did you saw the new cinematic? 9.2
Just a small correction: Savage is harder than Extreme most of the time. 12:42
Edit:
Trials: 8-man, Normal mode (MSQ) and Extreme. MSQ Trials + Side Story Trials (Warring Triad, The Four Lords, etc.)
Normal Raids: 8-man, Normal mode and Savage. A total of 12 instances per expansion
Alliance Raids: 24-man. 3 per Expansion
The alliance raids definatly have RNG in loot distribution. I've spammed a few of them 20-30 times each solely for the minions with no luck yet (They always drop one but only 1 of the 24 people get it)
The normal raids are good with the token system, where even if you get unlucky with the rolls, at least you get a token and know that worse case scenario, you get get your item in X amount of wins.
Yeah, each expansion has its own equivilent to the Warring Triad.
Just a bunch of optional bosses tied to a side storyline.
>Moved to tears twice in HW
>*Laughs in ShB and EW*
I think the thing i like the most about raids in ff14 is that i understand the story even though i have never played a final fantasy game before. Although many bosses are references to the other games it is a self contained story.
Also, Alexanders Phase Changes are really neat. Some really nice visuals and overall a great fight.
Normal trials -> extreme trials
Normal raids -> savage raids -> ultimate raids
Trials are always easier than their raid counterparts. All content is built as extreme or savage version first, then have mechanics stripped back to the core few that are then made to tutorialise the harder difficulties.
bahamut would have been the same experience, if it had a normal mode. it really should.
My absolute favourite raids is the eight man in stormblood and shadowbringers.
And this is all free content btw
The music… You left the absolutely amazing music out.
14:30 difficulties go in this order from easiest to hardest:
Normal 8 man Trials-no rewards, just story
Normal 8 man Raids- tokens for gear
Alliance Raids- Catch up gear
Extreme Trials- High item level weapons and mounts
Savage 8 man Raids- Very high item level weapons, gear, accessories and mounts
Ultimate 8 man raids- Awesome looking weapons with same stats as current BiS weapons.
Just gonna disagree my man. FF raids are just subpar compared to WoWs. It's just something no other mmo has been able to beat.
13:52 "Well, Twintania isn't an ultimate fight"
Haha. Twintania is actually a small PART of Ultimate Coils of Bahamut.
UCoB is no joke.
The cool thing about the Alexander Raid story, is the route of Time Travel that they take, rather than have the time travel cause chaos at several points, Alexander traps himself in a specific time frame, and pushes events to follow the course that he's given with no room to have serious paradoxes that would clash with other parts of the game and those stories
I have only 1 thing to say about Alexander:
BOOM BOOM GOBBIE DOOM!!
A good way to keep in mind what comes out when: the Normal Raids release on even Patches, the Alliance Raids on uneven Patches. So for each Expansion, the Cycle Begins at the .0 Patch (.01 to be precise) with a normal Raid in normal Mode, with the .05 Patch introducing the Savage Version, and continuing that for the .2 and .4 Patches, whereas the Alliance Raids begin at .1, release the 2nd one on .3 and close out at the end of the cycle with .5, after which the next expansion begins again
FF seems to have a policy of being "story-forward" in that almost every single piece of content that you can unlock has a story element to it. Raids and trials not only have a normal mode story, but also a small additional story for Extreme and Savage that explains why you're facing these bosses again, and why they're a little different. They're nothing outstanding or meaningful, but the effort is made and you can really feel it because it keeps the world feeling like a world where a myriad of people live and have their own life stories rather than just being NPCs.
Honestly I think the best example of this would be the crafter/gatherer jobs – these jobs are full jobs with abilities, gear, optimal rotations, and STORY! While a lot of them aren't super consequential or memorable (aside from Alchemist – great stories for both 1-50 and 60-70) they help to develop the world and make it feel like it was worth it to level a crafter to experience the content that can be further unlocked (crafting beast tribes, for example). I've yet to unlock anything in this game that doesn't have some aspect of in-game story related to it, even the Gold Saucer.
But that beard tho 👏🏽 👏🏽 👏🏽 I’m trying to get mines there
the game lore is connected to fight mechanics….a12…
Came for the raid, stayed for the rave, then went on a journey on the feels train that is how Alexander do.
How to remember difficulty levels:
Extreme
Savage
Ultimate
Namazu
Alliance raids day one
Difficulties spell ESUNA, because where the eals????
(This is a random joke I thought it was funny)
Coils play the same? Who ever told you that was a HW Spout. Coils were nerfed down to earth, and still to me were the best raids ever. Original Alexander with no quality of life (3.0) was the worst raid tier on FFXIV and nearly killed FF raiding. Even so, yes it wipes the floor with WoW, considering wer talking about 2015 content.
The 'one raid' thing is kinda the thing that people need to get there mind out of WoW for. We only call one thing the raid raid, but we have a lot of hardcore content for 'raiders' to progress and beat in XIV. Especially if you want to do it blind group and relearn everything without guides cause you can do all it as hard content at max with synching your ilv down.
I just finished this raid series this week, and I still have Locus on repeat in my fc room.😂 I loved every minute.
Please have a look at Mr Happys video on the history of FFXIV raiding. It’s a little outdated now, but it’s got a very interesting hot take on how As5-8 saved the raiding scene. Might be good for a response video.
I miss the Alexander approach, re: the balance between the journey+mobs and the big boss. I don’t do Savage so don’t @ me, but there’s not much difference in feel for me between a normal raid and a trial. Apart from difficulty obviously, but it’s still just one big bad. I’d like more of a difference.
Ultimate is actually a gauntlet of that series in one single fight with no checkpoints. ex. Coils Ultimate is you fight Twintania then Nael and finally Bahamut.
Quickthinx Allthoughts a side boss is more of a compelling villain than the main villain of Shadowlands, The Jailer 😛
Basically, within an expansion there's:
Trials(8-man)
>Normal difficulty
>Extreme difficulty
Raids(8-man)
>Normal difficulty
>Savage difficulty
Alliance raids (24-man)
Ultimates(8-man)
Well say Goodbye to Trash in Raids ^^. Alexander was the Last Raidseries which have Trashmobs in it. Every Raidseties after is just the Bossfight because even with this handfull of Mobs the Player hated the Idea of Trash.
Also the Lootsystem in the Raidseries Remainds always the Same. For the newer Raids you still have a ID lock which means you can only get 1 Item per Bossfight. BUT even if you get that 1 Item you can still run this fight over and over for Training. On the other Side when you dont get your Token from the Kill you can go over and over until you get that specific Token you want.
For Savage difficulty its little bit differend. There you have coffers. When you kill a Boss he drops Chest according of how many ppl already killed this Boss this week. If nobody killed the Boss then its 2 Chests. 5-7 not killed is 1 Chest and if 4 ppl already killed the Boss then its 0 Chests. And in this Chests you get a Coffer with i.e a Chest Piece. And this coffer guarantees the loot according to your equipped Job you open the Coffer with. If you open it with your Blackmage then you get the Caster Chest. If you open it as a Healer then its Healing Chest….etc.
Also you get 1 Book per Boss per ID. Means if you are really unlucky and dont get your Ring within 4 Weeks then you cab trade your 4 Books from that specific encounter and can buy the Ring with the Books. With that System it is guaranteed if you kill all 4 Bosses of a Raidtier within the first week that in 8 Weeks everyone is Best in Slot equipped. Always!. You dont have to farm for months to get your Gear. Nope 8 Weeks and your done.
The alliance raids are not deterministic for their loot * but the gear is never the best one in the patch, at best it's great glamour, at worst it's catch up gear.
Downside of FF14s system is that raid content gets released slower: right now in Endwalker we "only" have 1 raid tier with four bosses and two difficulties, and two trial bosses, also two difficulties. The rest of the raid, more trials (at least four more) and the Alliance Raid get released over the course of the next five "main"-patches. And we get two new Ultimates (or at least one). In the end there is almost as much content as WoW has between expansions, WoW just releases a bigger bulk all at once. Unlike WoW, where the raid is usually a castle that we literally raid, with generals and guarding mobs everywhere, in FF14 there is no trash (only ARR and HW have trash between the fights). Why is that? Simple: the story is that you work your way through the "castle" and to the specific boss encounters, the "generals", sometimes you have solo encounters inbetween that you only do once to unlock the raid. Later you only queue up for those specific boss fights; imagine running Ashzara's Palace and directly teleporting to Lady Ashvane, or any other boss. In ARR it was different, Coils was very much like the WoW raids but they changed that concept, either in HW or later.
Sidenote: "Trials" are always single bosses, from HW onwards the first three will be MSQ related (in HW that means Ravana, Bismarck and Thordan), the next four often have a seperate or continuing story (in HW the Warring Triad Zurvan, Sophia and Sephiroth, and Nidhogg being seperate). The trials in ARR have three difficulties: normal, hard and extreme – but with HW onwards they only have normal and extreme.
"Raids" in FF14 also have only two difficulties: normal and savage (savage being similar to mythic) and are completely seperate stories. ARR is an exception in that Coils of Bahamut only has one difficulty: savage. Raids have three tiers with four bosses each, ramping up in difficulty (the first bosses of each tier are easier than the last bosses of each tier). This concept was also established in HW. Also, raids have loot-lockouts, meaning you can kill the bosses as often as you like, on normal and savage, but you only get loot once per week (savage as another rule, too, were you are locked out from any boss prior to the one you kill first). These loot lockouts are usually suspended when the next tier drops.
Alliance Raids. Again, seperate stories. Three tiers with three bosses each, and unlike the above mentioned raids and trials, Alli raids have trash mobs and mini bosses (though not nearly as many as in WoW). And like you already said, with a larger group: trials and raids are 8 man encounters, whereas Alli Raids are 24 man groups – aka 3 full parties. Alli Raids also have only one diffulty and are designed with catch-up mechanisms: you get 1 token per week per run, which you then can turn in to get another item with which you can upgrade 1 tomestone gear item, either armor, trinket or weapon (it sounds more complicated than it is). Like with the raids though, this loot-lock gets suspended after a couple months.
Ultimates. They have no real story of their own but take iconic encounters we've already had and make them epic. Right now we have three Ultimates: Coils, the Ultima Weapon and Alexander. These fights are similar to savage but unlike the privious bosses, in Ultimate you fight several bosses in one encounter. Fail one and you have to start them all over again. All these bosses are related to the main boss: in Coils you fight several dragon mobs from the "normal" raid encounter, in Ultima Weapon you first fight the primals, in Alexander you fight an assortment of previous bosses like "pepsi man" before the "main" encounter. Single savage encounters take you about ten minutes, an Ultimate boss takes all in all about twenty minutes, more akin to a marathon. As far as I know, there is no loot lockout for Ultimates and the rewards are a title and unique weapon skins – nothing more (though the glam is one of a kind and what else do you need to flex).
I heard people say that Ultimates are not that difficult, that the difficulty lies in them being so long. But I cant speak from experiance, I've only just started with Savage 🙂 Anyway, this is my "little" summary of FF14s "raid" encounters. Feel free to correct me 🙂