Hex Does the Blog Thing

August 5, 2026: FFXIV Raiding

let's talk about Final Fantasy Fourteen.

first i should lay some groundwork for the uninitiated. ffxiv is an mmorpg. i don't play other mmos, but from what i understand, xiv is built different. the story is really good. the battles play out like choreographed dances. the community is in large part very friendly, considerate of newbies, and willing to help if you ask nicely. also they have their own band.

i never thought i'd be a hardcore gamer. i'm not usually one to challenge myself to do the really tough stuff; i would often get easily frustrated by more than a base level of difficulty. if a game had difficulty levels, i'd usually go for normal but sometimes opt for easy.

but ffxiv has a way of tempting you into this stuff. it has harder versions of some fights, with difficulty levels such as extreme, savage, and ultimate. they usually feature similar mechanics to the normal versions, but with added complications. there are rewards locked behind the completion of these challenges - mounts, gear, titles, achievement points, and so on. and for older content released in previous patches, you're able to take them on at your current level, making them much easier than when they were released.

so you start out by going, "oh that mount's neat, how do i get it? extreme? scary... but we're 20 levels higher than recommended, so it's basically trivial." and you farm those for a while and maybe you see a handful of mechs, and some are coded to just kill you if you don't solve them correctly, but most aren't an issue anymore. then you go to the next expansion's extremes and they're a little harder, but you've got a bit of experience now. and then you run out of things you can farm easily and you've really started to get the hang of things. and then next thing you know you're in a static raid group tackling the hardest content in the game, not even because you want the rewards, but just for the challenge and camaraderie.

extremes are pretty tough, but you can often muddle through in an hour or two with a decent group and some tenacity. savage is a step up, requiring hours of learning and practice to complete. in my opinion, almost anybody has the capacity to clear savage content, but it does require some serious time commitment and diligence, so it's more of a question of whether you want that.

ultimates are the hardest content in the game, requiring hundreds of attempts (pulls) and dozens of hours to clear. for one thing, their mechanics are the most complex and punishing of all; one mistake can easily cause a wipe. for another, they're extremely long fights - extremes and savages tend to cap at around 11 minutes; ultimates can go up to 18 - and failing means starting over from the very beginning. as an example, the first and only ultimate i've cleared, The Weapons' Refrain, is the easiest one. with 7 other people who had already cleared it before (albeit some of them on different roles), it took me 181 pulls over 16.6 hours. of those pulls, 45 made it to the final phase. my goal is to clear all the ultimates eventually, but i'm still relatively new to them!