A Duty so hard that many players were stuck for days, or had to get new gear, or even had to outright change job! I sure wonder which one it is!
In this video I explain the details that make this duty so hard, and also highglight some other difficult duties that I originally missed in my previous video ranking the hardest Mandatory MSQ Duties!
My previous video ranking Mandatory MSQ Duties: https://youtu.be/Mabkl-mMbqA
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Music Used:
FFXIV Endwalker – Cradle of Hope
#ffxiv #endwalker
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:49 The Fight with Venat: Worthy of His Back
04:42 The Fight with Sadu: The Will of the Moon
05:40 Lakshmi Solo Duty: The Return of the Bull
06:57 WoL vs Ran’Jit: A Feast of Lies
07:39 Thancred vs Ran’Jit: Full Steam Ahead / Coming Clean
08:30 Fighting Text Messages: Escape from Castrum Centri
09:57 Fun Fact
source
i feel like this mainly stems from the fact that at that point in the story, you'd be roughly level 86 or 87, and you might still be rocking either level 80 gear or a couple pieces here and there of 81/83/85. i remember trying one of the samurai job quest solo duties with the level 50 armor they give you, and it wasn't possible. went and bought a couple pieces of gear, and then it was trivial, even without playing on the very easy difficulty.
I forgot what the name of the trial was because it's been a while already, but there is an Endwalker MSQ trial where you aren't in your own body and you have to do some very specific gimmicks to advance, AND they have this stupid invisible time limit…I at least despised that one, and had to retry it six times, even on Very Easy.
I lost my sprout yesterday
sad times
i would maybe add the lvl 60 rdm quest Stained in Scarlet, iirc you have to heal yourself to max health to get rid of a staking vulnerability debuff which is only said by text and is really easy to miss because you're busy spam healing arya because she has a death wish and stand in every goddamn aoe
Not msq but the final duty for the shadowbringers physical dps role quests is quite difficult and annoying because its basically an escort mission, you, playing a role that historically gets very little party support for survivability, have to protect the catboy throughout the entire fight, if he dies you fail instantly, and even doing all the mechanics correctly figuring out how to avoid him stupidly taking damage and dying is really hard.
8:30 ah yes, Literacy Check (Extreme)
the Level 83 quest, In from the Cold.
if you have no clue what to do or where to go, it can be very difficult. I had more issues with that quest then I did with Venat lol
I remember a fairly recent patch saying they increased the aoe range of the duty action in the lakshmi fight.
So I guess that one is slightly easier than what most remember now.
The three I found to be the hardest was the second half of will of the moon where you control Y'shtola and will have to heal Hien with targeted healing every now and then, then the lv 70 Ninja quest when the enemy uses clones during a cast and you have to find the real enemy, and then the lv 80 ranged DPS role quest as you have 5 enemies(Bard, Paladin, Warrior, Black and White Mage) and there health bars drop slowly as you are synced to item level 430 I believe.
Not solo duties, but I feel like the lvl 83 and 89 trials deserved to be in the previous video. Imo those are the two hardest msq trials they've ever done, primarily because of the hard-hitting multi-stack attacks both of them have. The lvl 83 trials in particular has the boss use it right after 'falling like a closing book page' Astral Eclipse, which is just mean for newbies and sometimes even veterans. I remember having to abandon that duty once, because one of the healers, and like 1-2 dps, just couldn't grasp how to dodge Eclipse, and the other healer was unable to solo heal the multi-stack with a 5 or 6/8 party still living.
I found the fight against Venat hard mostly because I had misty eyes from the situation, the build-up and the incredible emotion of "Flow Together" ><
Great video as always
Wait… you can keybind the hovering solo duty/Bozja/Island Sanctuary buttons? What option is this?
Venat duty convinced me of being plain bad SAM, since dps role overall is mostly out of my comfort zone.
You forgot In From the Cold. While this has you playing as an NPC Garlean, you're having to do stealth – which normally isn't something you did in an MMO. The other problem is is that you're literally not as strong and have only Rampart, a 123 combo, and Fight or Flight along with limited resources. A LOT of people complained about In From the Cold at launch day.
I think the duty where you are a normal Garlen person on Garlemald is also worth noting, its rlly hard I still retry it a lot of times even with very easy mode
I have also noticed how easy some of the solo duties are on ranged phys since you can just infinitely kite. I remember watching a streamer do the final 6.0 solo duty on dancer and they didn't struggle nearly as bad as I did with DRG (admittedly I was also very rusty with DRG and only did it since that was what I originally started my journey as)
Personally I think Venat was just fun especially as a DNC and seeing her pull out her own DNC weapons too. Not saying it was "easy" but I'm always shocked watching people get destroyed by it sooooo often. I often hear that DPS has it the hardest in this fight but I'd make the clarification that RANGED dps is easy mode (speaking as a ranged player).
The one on this list that I hard agree with is that Lakshmi one. That was my own personal hell but I chalk it up to me not being a very experienced player compared to now.
I'm only two minutes into the video but the comments on "the duty being scaled differently based on role" caught my attention. What if I told you every solo duty, excepting only the "Role Play" ones, were like that? It's all handled through that "Brilliant Conviction" status. It has the following effects (numbers are estimates based on like, 15 minutes of testing):
Heal over time for 1% of max HP if role is not Healer. (Amount healed cannot exceed max HP, causing it to appear to stop when full)
Reduce all damage taken by 50% if role is not Tank.
Increase all damage dealt by 80% if role is not DPS.
The effects are pretty easy to test since you can click off the buff. It suddenly starts to make a lot of sense why a lot of the duties DPS players in particular struggle with tend to be duties with notable DPS checks (Cape Westwind, A Requiem for Heroes, and Worthy of His Back all come to mind). The non-DPS get a very serious handicap bonus. Incidentally, because the regen is so tiny, healers tend to feel like they double dip on the bonuses resulting in a very easy time (on top of how little room for actual failure their DPS "rotations" have).
Hah, what's so hard about DPS checks?
Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil … :p
The only ones I really had a problem with were the venat fight and lahkshmi, most of the other ones only took 1 or 2 tries, but those two REALLY gave me trouble, I had no clue the red orbs were the same level as blue that’s why I focused them
You forgot the one where we end up trapped in a Garlean soldier's body. That one was rough at Endwalker's launch
when i first did the castrum centri one, i wasnt reading the text cause i was new and was focused on not dying and doing my attacks. but i did notice the invulnerable text so i knew i had to go off and do something.
as for the bonds ive seen that text before but i never knew how to free them so if i ever end up doing that solo duty again im going to try and remember to try and free them
The DPS check was what made this fight hard for me. The rest was easy. This took me several tries. I should do this again, now that I know way more about the game. IDK what I did wrong the first time, but I struggled. I wasn't stuck, it took a few tries, but I beat it in one session. If I had to guess why, maybe it was because I was undergeared. Or I missed the red orbs.
In general, what I struggled most were all gimmick fights. I sped through the MSQ to avoid spoilers from the community. Meaning I was still very new even in Endwalker. It took me 6 weeks to clear 6.0 from the start. That was with daily roulettes and while still learning the game. FFXIV was my first MMO and the wakeup call came after 6.0. I bought Rinascita gear from the MB upon reaching level 90. Back then it was the best I could buy. I thought that was good enough until it wasn't even minimum item level for the MSQ. That's when I paid way more attention to these kinds of game mechanics and generally improved a lot.
Text message were not a problem. That's because I mainly played with NPCs for the additional dialogue that may give me a bit more story. So I was already used to reading everything on the screen.
I found the venat very easy on smn due to the changes it took and how much incedental aoe smn now has, and on sch i don't even remember it(i definately did it as my alt for a second raid group is done with msq and i've never changed the difficulty)
No doubt. Definitely the hardest MSQ duty is Venat.
A TEST OF YOUR REFLEXES
The duel against Rhitahtyn, a lv49 ARR boss, was the first time I've actually died in the MSQ. It was a long 3-phase battle with unfamiliar ground telegraphs for a new player. After completing post-EW MSQ, I consider Rhitahtyn the sharpest difficulty jump in the MSQ i've ever experienced.
Most veteran players won't remember this fight since he was changed to a duel in 6.1.
God, the EW one where you get thrown in a soldier body. That one was terrible
Also every EW sneak/follow mission. Terrible duties
As a commenter on the other vid who also nominated the friendly sparring with Venat, I was new at the time and I felt like I was barely surviving through the fight, at least mentally. Although I was aware of the orb priority strategy, I was fumbling with pressing Tab to cycle targets and just crumbled until I succumbed to lowering the difficulty
When I was playing the game, I ended up getting conditioned not only to ignore the "important messages" but that if the game wanted me to do an extra objective it'd tell me so by spawning the same ads I just killed again. The Castrum Centri one specifically I remember killing the ads a couple times over before I went "oh there's probably an objective I have to do".
You can probably guess how that led to confusion in later expansions for me.
The only msq solo duty I lost is to venat and only in the final phase. I played scholar and didn't know that the orbs moved at different speeds.
oh man i started in 5.2 and the ranjit duty was LEGIT rough as a sprout haha i also remember struggling with the sadu one too
for me personally, In From The Cold was the only 'hard' solo duty. I had to actually look up a guide for that one, the rest of them took 1-2 normal tries at most. I'm not entirely sure how I even beat Venat the first time, I was playing a monk and had no idea what I was doing. It didn't feel that hard until I saw my friend struggle with it. Fist of the Bullshit I guess lol
There's definitely a theme in my gameplay of having to go back and read the NPC dialogue when I fail a solo duty. I distinctly remember a few of these, but the Venat fight is the only one I've turned down the difficulty for to complete the MSQ. I gave it a few tries on GNB but wasn't making progress so I swapped to MCH thinking range would help. After neither of those worked I went out and got some gear upgrades to no avail, and after 8-10 more tries I gave up and lowered it to Easy to progress. I still feel like I cheated; I'll go back and do it in NG+ since I understand my jobs a lot better now
Didn't they change the Lakshmi solo duty so that the duty action is way bigger?
Ranged DPS here. I don't even remember the orbs in the Vanat fight. It was just completely forgetable. Orbs went poof, heh.