FFXIV Raid History & Rankings - Alexander Raids

foreign Mr Happy here and welcome back to my ranking series for Final Fantasy 14. right now I've been going through ranking the raids and the trial series and I've already finished up A Realm Reborn in regards to those two things so this video probably the hardest video of all my ranking videos I'm going to be talking about the heavensward raid series Alexander so that's gordius Midas and the Creator as a precursor to this I was very conflicted when I was ranking a lot of these fights because my memory of them is probably a lot different than many other people I was around for the hardcore 16 to 18 hour days of gordius and living liquid and manipulator and then I had a more relaxed approach to things like Midas and the Creator so it was like one of the expansions where I took on both extremes pretty seriously and so that's probably changed my opinion on some of these encounters even looking back all these years later and even revisiting some of them recently with a low item level setup but either way the point of this video I'm going to rank these fights for my least favorite to my most favorite based on a few General criteria and just my personal opinion so with that let's relive some trauma shall we now before we get started I want to tell you about this video's sponsor magic spoon you know I actually used to love cereal as my go-to snack pour a bunch of Dry Cereal in a bowl and just eat it on the side of my desk while I'm doing work or while I'm playing games sometimes I would just eat out of the bag too sorry Mom but several years ago I just stopped buying cereal altogether because it was full of sugar and a bunch of other things I just didn't want to eat so when magic spoon reached out to me and wanted to sponsor a video you can bet that I jumped on that one pretty quick I mean there's a lot to say about it it's a high quality cereal with all sorts of accolades on its rap sheet 140 calories per serving 13 to 14 grams of protein per serving 4 grams of net carbs per serving and for me the biggest thing is the zero grams of sugar not to mention it's gluten-free grain free soy free and keto friendly I've got their variety pack here with four great flavors peanut butter cocoa fruity and frosting they're all good on their own but I personally like to get a little crazy and mix the peanut butter and the cocoa that's really good I'm recording this at like 9 00 p.m and it's been a long day so this is definitely hitting the spot right now so if you want to try out magic spoon and support the channel then you can use the QR code that's on the screen right now you just scan that with your phone real quick or you can use the link in the description if you use discount code Mr Happy you will save five dollars on any order of magic spoon and it has a money back guarantee a 100 happiness guarantee for magic spoon if you don't like it they will send you your money back so scan the QR code or use the link and don't forget the discount code Mr happy to save five dollars with that let's get to the video alright so first one I have here on my list is ranked at the very bottom my least favorite encounter in all of the heavensward raid series a2s that's the second encounter in gorgeous all right this is just one of those ruined by doing it weekly fights because very similar to in my Aroma born ranking this is an ad fight much like turn four and so the early weeks were actually quite intense so the premise of the fight if you've never done it you're fighting wave after wave of goblins and different Goblin machines and each of them has their own mechanics and means of counter playing them however the big gimmick of this encounter is that you get two Gob Walkers to use throughout the fights that a player can step into and then use a few abilities that it has you can crowd control certain enemies you can weaken them and you can also drag bombs away from the party which is probably the thing you do the most with this now the resource pool is finite as well and it can only be refilled by leaving a certain type of mob barely alive and then allowing them to reabsorb the energy and that's very important when it comes to actually managing the resource for them I believe it was called EP either way in order to deal with every wave you really needed like a good strategy for both the group fighting the actual goblins as well as the person in the Gob Walker they needed to know what to give vulnerability Stacks to what to stun um when the bot when the bombs were supposed to be spawning and you needed to work in tandem with the actual party so it's one of those fights that again it's really cool when you think about it on the surface when it's described to you it actually sounds engaging and fun but it loses that luster so incredibly quickly so much so to the point where it just feels like a chore being in the Gob Walker isn't super fun even during week one as someone who had to do some of the god blocker Duty week one we had it split between two different people compared to being in the waves and the encounters and dealing with all of the different DPS checks and position checks and all that the Gob Walker was kind of just the free pass to not have to actually learn how to play your job in the encounter and that takes a lot away from it but even when I'm not in the Gob Walker I mean it's just after a week or two you just mow through everything so quickly and then the Gob Walker's job actually starts to look like the one that you want week after week it's just it's unfortunate because I set it in The Realm Reborn raid ranking video I like when the dev team makes ad based fight and I'd like to see them do it again but I don't think this is the kind I'd ever want again the Gob Walker is a gimmick just doesn't work for me and I don't like those very fight-specific gimmicks especially vehicle gimmicks they just don't resonate with me personally so between the sheer tedium and how much the unique aspects of it just dissipate after the first week or two I think the this has to be on the bottom of the list so that's where it is now a2s I put on the bottom of the list because I genuinely just don't like the encounter and what it's trying to do the next one number 11 is a4s the fourth encounter in gordius the manipulator and like a part of me as someone who experienced this firsthand wants to put it below a2s but this is like a real boss fight with some real mechanics and a lot of really interesting Concepts that just doesn't turn out fun so I think it just kind of has to naturally be above it like gordius is a RAID tier I I often credit as the downfall of the heavensward raid scene on top of the potential fear that I could have re-killed Final Fantasy 14 like that's how bad I think gordius was for the overall community and that might be kind of weird because I'm sure you guys hear some praise about heavensward rating from all of us you know heavensward Boomers and you know all the Realm Reborn Boomers I think one two and three are generally okay some of them even great for their time but a4s is an encounter that absolutely no one misses in a fight against the manipulator players are tasked with fighting this stationary Machine by knocking out his four legs before dealing with the body itself on the surface it exhibits a great deal of creativity you know the boss gains new abilities every time you destroy a leg the order you destroy the legs is also up to you you just have to commit to one leg you can't like damage them little by little and then just kill one and then kill them all back to back as soon as you kill one leg all the other legs come back at full health so you just need to commit to which one and I can change your general position and given the mechanics that are introduced during certain waves of the legs it just it just makes the fight a little bit more adjustable and on top of that you need things like crowd control to deal with the steaming legs in order to reduce the attacks there's a ton of ads that require careful management you know you have to weaken the little dolls and feed them to the big doll and then kill the big doll and the big doll does huge damage to the tank but then the tanks are both taking tank Busters from the boss itself so you need ones with cooldowns for the ads and then ones with cooldowns for the bosses and there's a lot a lot of little things and I think almost all the mechanics are acceptable and even fun at times but there's three things that really land it down here on my list first is the boringness of the boss itself manipulator is one of the most generic looking robots we could have gotten and it's just the complete immobility just drags down the energy for the whole fight especially because there's so much Arena on the opposite side of the room and while that's there to do mechanics you just like the boss is just sitting there the whole time while you're doing it number two the tuning is way too tight while doable in the lower gear levels it's kind of like what we do in raids now actually it's been beaten in like the bare minimum that you need for it but it requires absolute perfection from the players in order to beat it at those gear levels and honestly it's not super fun a lot of it's just there's so much damage that it just makes it harder to survive it's less even about like damage checks or things it's just living is sometimes a problem in that regard and then finally nisi this is a mechanic that strikes fear into the hearts of Raiders everywhere basically it's a passable debuff that deals damage over time and it gradually wears off the longer that you have it and it'll lose stacks of Nissi starting at five now as they lose Stacks it actually starts to do less damage so your natural response would be to let it wear off but instead you actually need players with Nissi to disarm a mechanic Royal Pentacles in the Final Phase so from the point you receive it until the point where you never need to see a pentacle again it has to be maintained and passed around all the different players safely if two players with different nieces touch you're gonna die if you have a bad pass time and you're gonna die and you need to be able to take these damage amounts between all the other damage that the boss is dealing between the tanks dealing with tank buses just there's so many things back to back to back to back to back and one mistake and it's all over now to be fair that's how rating is but what all of that I just described is then equally as undone by a cheese strategy where you could actually suicide to the Pentacles even two of them at a time because the games like server latency is just so weird that you can take two insta kills that require you running across a distance and you know not die before taking the second one and then you just raise and move on hell that big ad that you need to feed the little ads to people just started letting that thing explode and putting all that damage on the boss instead even though it exploding brings everyone's MP down to zero people just said ah we don't care it was just easier to do it that way than it was to actually do the ad so the fact that it's so tightly balanced that's that you can barely survive attacks and at the same time you can completely cheese the things that make it difficult with that low gear it's just it's just such a weird mishmash of bad balancing and just not very well thought out mechanics not very well tested mechanics in fact a4s is responsible for the way the dev team does things now which you can criticize with or not you'd want but in gordius they released it without ever beating it internally without god mode every raids here after that they have made sure they can beat without god mode they have a test team they do it and while they don't always nail the fights the fun or even the balancing in the case of abyssos they are still it really changed the way the dev team thinks and tests things so at the very least I'm grateful for that but it's down here because it's not a fun fight above all else it's just not fun all right and now this next one is actually the last on the list that's kind of just at the bottom because I don't like it the rest of this list is a lot harder for me but the next one is a9s that's the first encounter of the Creator against the refurbisher and it's this giant trash robot that absorbs other robots and trash to rebuild itself and power up the fight's mostly about picking up these coils and putting them down to resurrect robots and then you're just gonna kill them in a different spot so that the refurbisher can't absorb them basically you're gonna drop them in lava so he can't you know or ask it or whatever it is you're just trying to destroy the robot so he can't absorb them and rebuild but as the fight goes on some waves become unavoidable that he'll be able to actually resurrect them you get to pick and choose which robots you can feed them and which robots you feed does change the way that the boss gets stronger in some way so either way it's just unavoidable the robot will rebuild itself eventually and then you know you're going to enrage and you're gonna die honestly it's not that bad overall it's serviceable but the stationary boss again and honestly just kind of the repetitive and uninteresting nature of most of the phases and mechanics it just kind of doesn't impress more than anything else acceptable but not really anything all that special also the actual electrical coils you have to interact with I mean you have to walk up to them there's a cast bar for picking them up if you get hit with them over your head they get put down and then you have to drop them in the right spot but if you drop them while you're moving they get kind of dropped behind you because of server link the interactables it's not a great idea so these are the reasons why it's below everything else other than two and four on the list okay and now into bosses I all actually like and I kind of just have to rank them based on the overall quality and mechanics so the next one on the list is a1s and I'm kind of sad I have to put this down on the list the oppressor is kind of like a revisit of caduceus from back in the first coil you start off against one boss and it shows you all the mechanics and you learn them and then a second one shows up and you kind of have to split the party and deal with them both simultaneously all the mechanic get doubled including ads placed aoes tank Busters raid wides everything the bass mechanics are really simple but also really satisfying for a first turn encounter and despite being obliterated by gear it never really becomes unfun or tedious which is a really important thing for an encounter you're going to do week after week I think of a fight like this was released today it would actually be decently received it probably wouldn't be as important or as popular as some other encounters but I think it'd be okay and I think people would really like the odd shaped Arena here I mean it is just a wrecked tangle but the size of it is very important to the way all the mechanics play out and I think people always take a little bit extra note of that it also comes with its very own door boss in the form of Faust now this is something I didn't mention for a9s as well but all of the first Encounters in gordius Midas and Creator all have a mini Faust boss and they get a little bit more complex this one's the simplest it's literally just a boss that gets stronger and stronger as it summons more ads and does tank Busters and I think maybe it did aoes I think it honestly just did tank Busters over and over again so you just have to you know start it down while you tank all the ads before it gets too strong in a no big deal whereas the other ones have like a couple more mechanics or like raid-wide aoes or things that need to be silenced like there's a few other things with the other ones but the Faust however is the only notorious one because there were groups that couldn't get past vows and had to disband and I don't mean groups like pickup groups I mean like Statics that played in coil together and cleared it and couldn't get past Faust in the first couple of weeks and disbanded honestly the only real negatives I have for this is that you know gear kind of outscales it because it's a first encounter which isn't a big knock and re-killing Faust when you re-enter every single time it's just not super interesting it's never interesting to have to re-kill a door boss when you're progging the actual boss but here it's like oh thanks for spending two or three minutes of my time at least it was only two or three minutes of your time as long as you beat it in one pull but otherwise I think it's a pretty neat fight now number seven on the list is going to be a10s that's the second encounter in the Creator and honestly I just love this fight for the boss name alone lame bricks strike box yeah try saying that three times fast this is an ultra tenacious Goblin he actually shows up in Eureka later and different versions of him show up in a few other places as well but he's honestly a pretty cool guy and I'm glad they brought him back because this fight is a really well done fight there are three buttons on the arena that can be activated by the player or by the boss now the boss will jump on them deliberately but you can also drag the boss over them and that will cause them to activate as well but you're supposed to actually use these buttons to counter the boss mechanics or the boss uses them against you and you need to dodge what the buttons are doing so there's this really neat Arena interaction that combined with the other mechanics is something I can't even recall the last time we've seen anything like this it might have been on Lane bricks so you have like machines that are like poking and prodding to like separate players across the arena you of course have stacks you have spreads you have Point blanks you have Donuts you have kiting you have ads you have all these really creative and engaging encounter bits and they all come together to make a really honestly it's a fight that repeats mechanics but it always feels like something new is happening it's a really really good thing to have and you know it's also nicer interacting with the buttons on the ground than it was picking up the coils or using the gobwalk or anything like that it just means that there's the occasional meme activations but honestly this one's only down here because I like the other ones more again a lot of them left on the list I like them for their own individual reasons and so it just becomes my fun factor I suppose that separates them and the fact that this one's all the way down at seven and have that much good to say about it says a lot about the encounters coming up number six on the list is a5s the last of the first Encounters this one did come with another Faust you know you beat a Faust and then actually two more come down with a proximity AOE and then you got to deal with them and it's like another two and a half three minute fight but it also happens to be another fight where I love the name of the boss rat thinks twinkle dinks Yes again say that three times fast this guy's like a mad scientist so the fight's all about battling his experiments and then taking his potions to transform and counter his mechanics being the first fight in a raid tier the use of each potion is pretty straightforward so it's not like a really cryptic fight but the in order to activate them there's a player that has to take damage over time so I do like those kind of interactions with the arena they don't feel overly tedious they don't require you to interact with anything in terms of clicking it you just get to physically be in a location and force other things to happen and that's when these mechanics are done a lot better it's a fight with a ton of movement and really simple mechanics that are strung together into some something engaging and fun the boss itself also transforms into this hulked out bug bear Goblin that takes reduced damage and Deals massive damage to both the tanks and the party seriously this fight has great variety and freshness it makes stuff like I don't know like p6s it's just really sad to see this type of encounter and then to see stuff like p6s it is honestly depressing to see not to mention one of the few places where the range Delby is used very regularly yeah range will be yeah that's definitely I think castor oil B maybe was also popular but I remember rain still being in this fight next up on the list is the very next encounter in Midas in that of a6s this encounter sees you face four individual mini bosses in a back to back to back to back Gauntlet now in normal mode if you wipe on any of these bosses you actually just can go right back to that boss and Try Again from that point but in Savage it's one continuous Gauntlet and from the moment you pull the first robot the enrage timer begins which means the time in between the robots is contributing to the enrage each time so it's not something you can be slow and take your time with despite having all these extra Arenas that you have to run through which keeps it really really fast paced and also because each of the four bosses is only like a couple of minutes long each fight is paced incredibly fast hopping from mechanic to mechanic really quickly Blaster is the first boss and he likes to make clones of himself that the players have to like bait and Dodge or they get Tethered to them and they have to either look at them or look away from them nothing too crazy or complicated but requires particular positioning as well as making sure you're paying attention to the bot you're actually attached to there's also mines on the ground that that a tank has to go and manually detonate these are actually a huge problem for a lot of new Statics so much so they actually nerfed this mechanic a month later in order to help more groups get through this initial Blaster proc not to mention that's the first place we really had Minds like that and we see those all over the game nowadays so you really have Blaster to I guess thank for that mechanic if you want to thank a boss for doing something that kills you then you have the second boss which is actually going to be what's its name again I have it written down here brawler everyone always said brawler should have been called Blaster but Brawler's whole mechanic is that he transforms his fists into different weapons that's the reason why he's called brawler so he can turn them into cannons or drills and they can be distance based mechanics or tank Busters or split damage aoes I just need to pay attention to his animations to determine what he's going to do as soon as he's free then he has this whole phase where he sounds like lightning chakrams like spinning around the arena and then there's like orbs that you have to kill and crowd control some of them just blow up on the raid some of them are DPS checks and on top of that he's doing the single drill the single laser the double laser the double drill really awesome two minute like two and a half minute phase then you have the third one swindler who has the infamous height mechanic we were all shocked it wasn't in the Epic of Alexander the patch 5.1 ultimate but it is by far the thing swindler is known most for he also has bunch of ads that show up that you know you have to kill I think they like damage resist each other but most people just like lb3 them and kind of burn through that it also has enumerations which is you need a certain number of people in an AOE we see that used all the time nowadays but that was really the first place we saw it way back when and finally vortexer who is a bit of a meme in and of itself now the fight was actually tough against vortexer he's got Elemental missiles where he has like water tornadoes that players have to kind of Spawn while also dealing split damage with each other and then the debuffs pass there's also a lightning debuff that you need to share with at least one other person but if you share with any more than one person it kills them so you have this like two player stack and you have this like six player stack over on the other sides but if you got hit with water you can't be in the water stack again there's all these like little rules to it but then he also has you know fire missiles which can destroy the water tornadoes and then ice missiles which can freeze the water tornado so all of his attacks are like different elements and stuff even as a wind knockback and all that and it's really engaging but there's all also a pretty buggy fight in the first few weeks I believe there was a situation where the water debuff and the lightning debuff wouldn't pass to another player and that's considered a fail and an instant wipe so it's really this fight is responsible for a lot of memes it's responsible for the memes of there were no bugs in Midas that's you know sarcastic and also we were told this rate here would between would be between second and final coil and difficulty and this fight showed us that that was an absolute lie it was not that we have never trusted difficulty statements since but either way it is an awesome fight even to this day even post Nerf and also acts as a teaching tool for a8s which will use a lot of these mechanics later in the list and for number five on the list we're going to go up right through Midas one more time into a7s this fight is against the actual kind of true antagonist of the Alexander raid series quick thanks all thoughts he Pilots his own personal Gob Walker and his is way better than ours was on a2s and this fight's all about the arena there's spikes that prevent you from using a lot of space most of the time there's bombs that need to be spread out carefully but iconically he uses these prisons that he traps players in the boss will pick up or drag tethered players into different prisons and the goal is to make sure that the right players get put in the right prisons you need to make sure let's see if I remember this correctly the healers go into the poison gas one the tanks go into the ice one to kill a very hard-hitting ad the casters go into the Slime one the fire one but they have to wait until the party destroys a lock on the outside or they just take damage constantly but the Slime takes reduced physical damage so it has to be a Caster or somebody with really really good magic damage and then the last one is an alarm ad which just has a tight DPS check so we usually sent melees into that but on top of that I mean there's other mechanics that are happening here there's baited aoes there's marks on players the boss gets stronger repeatedly if it kills people especially in short succession even post Nerf that can be a bit of a problem Heck if somebody disconnects the boss it's a damage stack which is just hilarious but then on top of that the arena also opens up the whole thing and these giant iron balls start just rolling all over the place and you got to make sure they don't crush you while you're again baiting aoes and also killing a heart that is being sent to the Boss by a cat you have to look for a cat listen to it meow and kill the heart that it it tries to give to the boss because it's a massive buff of all those those damage Stacks so again really engaging really good use of the arena and while it does repeat things maybe a little too much compared to some of the other fights it's a constant on edge situation when the boss is just constantly pulling and dragging and summoning ads and doing all this other stuff that can really disorient the party and number four on the list we're gonna hop away from minus and back up to the Creator for that of a12s the final boss in the Alexander raid series Alexander Alexander Prime you know it says a lot for the other three fights above this when the final boss of the raid series is only number 4. especially given that this is a really good fight Alexander hits like a damn truck has a fast and furious ads phase and does a phenomenal job of splitting up the party and making them do different things across different points of the fight whether it be positions for things like time stops or sending people through time Gates that time gate mechanic is forever going to be one of the most praised mechanics across all of Final Fantasy 14 because it fits the fight so thematically and Visually I mean think about this you're fighting Alexander inside of Alexander who summons a giant Alexander and then sends you back in time to so you can save yourself from another Alexander it's a it's just it's mind-blowing and it's all that is told to you just through the mechanics and it's done incredibly well on top of that they have some minorly cryptic stuff that's really satisfying to solve like the crystals that spawn that'll reveal where Alexander is when he like time warps into different locations the only downside the only one to this fight is that it was not tuned tightly enough so you skip a lot of the Final Phase even in the early weeks even without a lot of gear it's it's such a good phase too there's like puddles that need to be absorbed most people will call them wormholes because of the Epic of Alexander but then you also need to like bait these puddles on the ground that are following players at the same time the boss is doing Sacrament and at the same time you're doing those large wormholes then there's extra tank Busters there's really hard hitting raid wisers so many things that happen so quickly and it's such a huge amount of damage and movement and placement and responsibility and it can all go downhill so so quick but it just wasn't tuned tightly enough people used to just be okay with those big puddles failing because they didn't have a player inside of them and you could just kind of Limp your way through the end even if you did screw up in fact I'm pretty sure that's what the world first kill even looked like so it's uh it's unfortunately not a great end to the fight but objectively all of those mechanics are fantastic I just wish we could get something that's scaled more properly and get it re-released in the modern day I think it'd be pretty cool now for number three we're gonna go down a fight back to a11s and honestly I was kind of going forward and back between this and a12s in terms of three and four because of this actually this fight actually has a number of issues a11 it has an entirely skippable phase and there are attacks that you just may never see if your DPS is okay and then it becomes embarrassing if you see them because that means your DPS is really not okay that being said what transpires on the rest of the encounter is a fun straightforward battle that's given us some iconic mechanics we still see to this day cruise Chaser itself uses a few basic attacks you know it's got spreads it's got baited aoes rotating AOE simple stuff but he also has a ton of stuff that kind of Marvels in its Simplicity stuff like left and right swords for players to dodge you just gotta read the name of the ability and step to the correct side and then there's like these mini DPS checks where he summons an ad and then the ad summons an ad that you need to kill before it's cast finishes one or two gcds and then the ad itself will become enraged and you hit the the tank a lot harder try to do like a tank Buster it'll hit them once and then you have to dodge the other hits all while other things are happening so these mini DPS checks inside many DPS checks while you're dealing with the boss mechanics is a lot of fun there's also like fire on the ground and then the boss will reduce your max HP to one so you need to make sure you have shielding so you can properly save these people in time and then Shields I can only be DPS from one side of the boss and then a spread charge so as soon as you destroy that Shield you got to make sure you're spread properly but honestly the most iconic thing the thing most people expect me to talk about is limit cut this attack swipes it players from behind before charging to another player and it does that in numer directly so it'll swipe at one charge it two swipe it three charge it four and go through all of those numbers it's so simple but there's really tight positioning you have to remember your numbers get into the right spot check the direction you're facing it's just become such a feared mechanic especially if it's ever made to be done with other things at the same time as soon as we do any fight we see those little numbers pop up over our heads oh there's always some degree of concern this fight just kind of had that effect on players not to mention there's a little active time event which is just a nice little short break it's not anything too engaging but it gives the players kind of like a second to catch their breath the skippable lapis phase if you don't skip it is actually a really well done ad phase then the careful Act of saving pieces of the arena in the final bit the fact that it doesn't necessarily have a hard in Rage but you need to be able to keep the arena itself propped up by Saving pieces of it which forces you to place mechanics in certain ways and there are certain mechanics the boss has that will undoubtedly damage them so you have to weigh when you want to deliberately damage them to make a mechanic easier versus when you want to limit the amount of damage they take so you can preserve the encounter longer there's just a lot of little things like that that do really really well and it's nice to have that because Cruise Chaser is kind of an iconic boss it's originally a reference like a late 1980s game uh Cruise Chaser blasty which is why you see blasty you know all over this boss whenever he talks but also Final Fantasy 9's Arc is a reference to cruise Chaser blasty so this becomes a reference to both of them with you know the Final Fantasy 9 animation somewhat making an appearance here as well but at the same time Cruise Chaser itself has become iconic to Final Fantasy 14 so it doesn't just feel like an homage anymore it feels very much like its own original memorable thing number two on the list now there's only two encounters left so I'm sure people are trying to figure out which of the two is there if you watch my top 5 raid series you probably know what the answer should be I'm gonna surprise people and my number two is a3s living liquid talk about that again in a little bit why it's number two is it pain 3 really that puts me here though because this boss is one of the ones I have the most different experience with compared to most people watching this video it's one of the most historic Encounters in Final Fantasy 14 history the Slayer of Statics the jiggly butt the hands of pain this encounter broke the souls and spirits of most Raiders in early heavensward sporting really tight DPS check it's insanely tight mechanical checks and just pushing every element of player's skill at the time to its absolute limit whether it be passing digititis debuff and passing it after a random knock back to boot bursting DPS on the hands to level them out during hand of pain while they crushed the tanks full of damage who by the way at this point we're turning off tank stance just to meet DPS check so they were taking even more damage back then because that's how it worked you have crowd controlled ads during the very masterfully done ad phase and those unresponsive tank tethers oh there were so many jokes about that so many places things can go wrong everywhere across All Phases and it never stops until the very end especially magnets people don't know how magnets work it's depressing and anyway getting back onto this reliving my trauma at this point uh if there's a single fight you want to blame for healers being expected to DPS in Final Fantasy 14 for the way that tanks would just like forego their most natural tank stance and had to have that completely rework it's this encounter it happened a little bit outside of this beforehand but this encounter pushed it to that level oh it's just it just changed the game in ways that a lot of people will never know or understand and it still holds a special if not damaged place in a lot of people's hearts that being said it's unfortunate that you can never relive that experience because they nerfed the ever loving hell out of this encounter it's just you have to self-impose restrictions to even come close to emulating the way it was back then and and it's not the same and honestly I don't even wish that upon most people because I was there on the front lines I was one of only six groups to beat it before Tombstone weapons became available and I wouldn't wish that upon anyone but at the same time experiencing experiencing history is kind of nice and the first phase of tea doesn't even come close to replicating everything this fight does and finally my number one a8s the final boss of Midas like I said this might be a bit of a surprise a8s did not even show up in my top five boss ranking video for Final Fantasy 14 but a3s did for this video though I considered what the objective was of the video and I think for me I needed to think of what the overall better fight was and less of a top five of my favorite I at least wanted to consider that more here because I think if you just look at a8s against the rest of the encounters it does a lot of the things a3s does but it's more creative and a little bit more fun of a boss I mean that's from the music to the appearance of the themes to kind of just the entire energy of the encounter so as Revenge we're not making it into that video a8s now sits at number one for this video this encounter has almost no flaws in its design from start to finish every phase is a piece of a larger puzzle draws from past mechanics and experiences and just makes for a really really good encounter it starts with a slightly more mobile version of the manipulator it's a manipulator wannabe it's not called that but like it's meant to invoke that thought it even has the same theme as manipulator and has some of the same mechanics as well but again it's drawn out to be a little bit more interesting and to use the arena space a lot better and it's a and the boss can actually be moved but then on top of that it then does like a gauntlet of bosses similar to a6s against the a6s robots it summons two of them and then a few seconds later some is the third one a few seconds later summons the fourth one and you need to manage these things so quickly you got to burst one down you got to deal with this one's mechanics and that one's mechanics and then when you reduce them fifty percent they each do like a special mechanic so one of them has like a like a transition phase one of them summons an ad that can't be next to the boss so it's something's like the clone from the Blaster fight so you need to separate the Clone and Blaster but there's also another boss coming down there's just all these elements not to mention height during the whole thing which of course always catches people off guard and then they all combine into this giant robot robot called Brute Justice and that's really when the fight begins this trumpet kicks in the fight goes extra crazy now Brew Justice itself has some okay mechanics now it's got a split damage missile it's got spread missiles it's got prey markers that need to be spread it jumps around it fires lasers it fires flamethrowers it does these rocket punches it does it does a bunch of things that are you know neat and Nifty but what most people will remember are what we call the intermission phases where it delinks all of the robots from the previous phases and does basically what is the equivalent of ultimate trios but in a Savage level encounter and it's to this day kind of regarded to as the first instance of an ultimate level mechanic I mean you just need to be doing so many so so many things at once not to mention that it's also regularly regarded to as the first ultimate encounter because it has a Savage exclusive phase about three minutes of the encounter where brute Justice regains all its Health becomes winged Justice or we call it Wing Justice and then has a whole new set of mechanics or mechanics from the earlier phases amped up to the nth degree it has gavel link up and of course the legendary J waves that final DPS and healing check at the very end of the fight it's just it's a masterpiece even if you were to do it nowadays even if it weren't to be as difficult as it was back then I think doing it really lets you appreciate what the fight is and can probably imagine what it was like to get that kind of encounter you know like seven years ago at this point and that's going to be a wrap for my heavensward ranking video I'm sure a lot of you notice how much more energy I have in this than the aroma worn ones and it's just that's just kind of how it was I'm very passionate about the heavensward raid scene even if I think the current raid scene would never survive it [Music] very least it's worth revisiting these memories and what they mean because they all influenced the way the game is nowadays Creator defined what Savage tears would be for the future it was the first tier we got that hey you can kind of treat this as a midcore raid kind of savage whereas gordius and Midas is scared people away non-stop especially with the other content that was coming out in between it was it was a scary time for Final Fantasy 14 but at the same time you can laugh at our pain and realize that things are for the most part in a better place now anyway thanks for watching be sure to like favorite subscribe and share and stay tuned we're doing ton of nostalgic videos for romerborn's 10th anniversary and well I just want you all to be along for the ride anyway I'll see you in the next one and until then take care

Channel: Mrhappy1227

Views: 17,712

Keywords: Square, Enix, Mrhappy, Game, Games, Gaming, MMO, RPG, MMORPG, FF, Final, Fantasy, Final Fantasy, FF14, FFXIV, Final Fantasy 14, Final Fantasy XIV, Guide, Tips, Tricks, How To, Lets, Play, Lets Play, Alexander, Living, Liquid, Brute, Jusitce, TEA, Epic of Alexander, Ultimate, Rank, Ranking, Tier List, Tier, List, Creator, Gordias, Midas, History, Info, Information

Id: ZNWWgERX7C8

Length: 37min 29sec (2249 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023