I recently went through the omega raids on stream in ffxiv and it was absolutely insane. The story, the combat all these elements that came through and here is my honest opinion on it.
0:00 The Alpha And Omega
0:14 The Omega Effect
0:50 From Another Planet
2:50 Omega Analysis
7:19 The Gloves Come Off
9:01 Judgement on Stormblood
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Ya I like to think of it in the sense where if Heavensward was where they first tested out mechanics, Stormblood is where they started to really creatively experiment with the combat
If you do end up wanting to go back to doing those old savage, consider doing them on blue mage.
The difficulty of savage on blue mage is a few steps below doing them min ilvl, but you still have to do most of the mechanics and it adds a unique twist to the gameplay and sometimes requires you to do some out of the box thinking to solve mechanics differently due to having different toolkits.
Blue mage is very easy to get to max level, but getting the spells you want is a bit of a time sink. However it's a lot of fun because it's different and you get to do the Masked Carnival which is a whole other side to the game.
It’s pretty widely accepted that fight design gets really good in Stormblood, and savage raiders were having a blast with the expansion. While I can’t attest to those fights since I started savage in Endwalker with the lv90 raids, I can highly recommend forming a group to do savage with at some point! From 70 onwards they’re all very difficult to do MINE and will be a bit of a time sink, but the feeling you get when you get a mechanic down, figure out how your rotation works during a certain part or plain and simple beating the fight can’t be beat. If not right now, definitely do the current fights once you gain access to them after beating Dawntrail!
Fun fact Alpha (and Omega?) randomly show up in different parts of Eorzea once you complete the raid and you can see them living their best life!
I feel that in Stormblood, they finally found the gameplay identity they have been looking for. All the following expansions just kept on improving the new norm.
Occasionally if you're just out in the world, you might see alpha and little omega just walking around interacting with things🥹
The comparison between Thordan and Shinryu is pretty spot on when it comes to the fight design in HW vs STB: Thordan had a lot of set pieces where either you stood around and dodged mechanics or had ample time to hit the boss without fear of being hit, while Shinryu mixed that cinematic feel with multiple mechanics and tells that the boss would make to keep the player engaged and reward them for "paying attention."
This is basically what future expansions build upon and I look forward to seeing your thoughts on how the developers build on this design!
Glad I was happy to take part, still apologizing for doing that rescue in A11 (Midgardsormer)
Happy to hear that CaffDad finally got his chicken tenders. They were ready to fry.
Im still VERY VERY biased to the omega raids because im a big FF6 fan, and omega is still my favorite superboss in the franchise. I even went so far to buy the $300 emote that comes with a free statue.
Also yeah, the omega raids are a very pivotal point for the FF raiding scene. The raid series going forward took omega's formula. This includes Savages having a special phase transition at the end of each tier and those secret transitions draw in a lot of non raiders to WF races to see what happens. Its always a community event to see who can get to phase 2 first to show the world what it is lol.
I am so glad they took you into the savage versions of the fights. As soon as I saw the title of the video that was going to be my suggestion. Exdeath's transition is still probably my favorite
I view the Omega series as the best raid series in FFXIV. In particular, doing it in SB (which I view as when the gameplay was the best), was an absolute delight. Here's an example of what it was like back in the day: Neo Exdeath.
So, back in SB, threat was actually something that had to be managed. You had a lower damage threat combo, and you had a dps and tank stance. Tank stance was significantly lower damage, often using different (and lower damage) techniques, especially for warriors. Our group had a war and pally for tanks, and for healers it was me (whm) and an astro.
So, the boss starts every phase with a threat wipe, followed by a giant aoe that inflicted a bleed based on damage taken (which made it brutally hard to heal). The mechanic was, in fact, managing healing and threat at the same time, cause it was followed by a tankbuster and if your healer had top threat, they'd die. Our solution? I'd solo heal it, pop thin air (no MP costs for like 15 seconds), spam cure 3 on a stacked up group. War would sit in dps stance and just go ham on pure damage, pally would do the same, I'd be top threat by a mile. Pally would cover the tankbuster (at the time, cover would let pally eat the entire hit but get 15% damage reduction), then the tanks would provoke, paladin shirking onto warrior, and then I'd use lucid dreaming (mp regen, also halved threat at the time) to cut my own threat. I'd swap to dpsing while my mp regened (I'd be down to half even through thin air and assize) and astro would take over healing. End result is the tanks, at no point ever, had to worry about threat and could go harder on dps, while the astro could save their own kit for being main healer the rest of the fight and the phase swap mechanic was utterly solved. It felt absolutely great to do (for me at least, tho the pally loved using cover and war loved going ham).
Also for god kefka's twin tankbuster, we found out a black mage can also eat it no problem with their bubble. Throw a shield on them or something, let them deploy bubble, have them stand away from boss/party, and they'll happily eat it, and will be easy to heal back to full. This lets both tanks stay in to dps.
In general, the omega series (especially back in SB) offered a lot of weird times where you could play wrong or weirdly to solve mechanics in strange ways. There's multiple cheese strats to get around O11S's mechanics, such as having a ranged dps handle a particular mechanic and a paladin cover them to eat the tankbuster they'd get, allowing more uptime. Another is of course tank LB3ing to cheese fists.
The other value of older savage raids is that people will still do them, not just for the mounts, but also because only the savage gear allows you to dye it, and fashion is the endgame.
As a small story correction, it's not from Eorzea's history, it's from "heroes" or warriors of other worlds. As for the difficulties, for future reference, it's normal->ex->savage->ultimate for difficulty. The normal raid encounters are meant to be casual encounters with no enrage where savage has enrage. Normals (since HW) are meant for the every player, while savage is meant for the raider.
The omega raids are some of my favorites, and are the optional side story I consider the most mandatory. Its not inherently that they are necessary, but thematically they cut straight to the heart of what FFXIV is trying to be about.
As an important note, I've heard but not experienced, Heavensward content is unfortunately toothless now. It was blisteringly hard when it was released. Content definitely gets easier with higher scaled gear and general expansion changes.
For example, sans spoilers, when Dawntrail launched, the Expert dungeons were ridiculously difficult. Multiple wipes. But now, that isn't the case. Between the playerbase being familiar with them and most of them geared from raids and tomes, a lot of the nastiest mechanics dont murder you anymore. Like for the sake of keeping no spoilers, there is one boss that has a really nasty debuff, and even when the entire party gets it I've seen clears without even deaths. That wasnt the case early Dawntrail.
Another example is one Endwalker trial where at release, I wiped to it so much that the timer ran out and I had to reque. Now, I wouldnt say that one is easy, but unless the healers are terrible or constantly dead, I dont see too many wipes. Part of the way through Endwalker, people were hitting a boss so hard it nerfed a story moment for any unfortunate sprouts just clearing it the first time. I remember telling people to slow dps till SE brought down the scaling a bit.
So I guess what I'm trying to say content will continue to challenge you.
As a final note, keep doing the side content. Some of it is relevant. I really like some of the tie ins with the alliance raid here and main story.
A lot of people claim HW and StB are way harder than current content…most of those people were playing back then when ingame systems were poorly designed and still in the process of being refined and thordain hit too hard because…they did? The devs did an amazing job each expansion getting more creative and stepping up the difficulty of the raids and such while being on a very old engine that very frankly limits what they can do. The current raids are simply a blast
Our dear alpha go travel and we can see them sometimes ! I mean them. (no spoilers, i supposed)
cant wait for more… i can say for sure you are going to love shadowbringers