FFXIV Raid History & Rankings - ARR Extreme Trials

foreign Mr Happy here and welcome back to another Final Fantasy 14 ranking video it's a realm reborn's 10th anniversary and for that I'm doing all sorts of nostalgic Style videos covering the old content that a lot of newer players wouldn't have been around for when it was fresh and people who were might just want to remember the good old days as some people well probably don't call it now last week I talked about The Binding coils of Bahamut all three of the raid tiers throughout a realm are born and so this week I wanted to talk about the Extreme Trials that were releasing parallel to all the other content we all know that Extreme Trials release pretty much every patch nowadays But A Realm Reborn was a pretty special era it didn't work quite the same way back then and so I thought it'd be fun to also look at those now that we've brushed up on the other part of the aroma-born end game I think it's going to be a fun one to rank from my least favorite to my most favorite and we'll see how much of that is affected by the release of things like unreal giving me a fresher perspective on some of those encounters either way we've got a lot to discuss so let's get get started now one thing I do want to lead with is exactly what I'm going to be covering because while I did say Extreme Trials there were actually a lot more end game Trials as a whole back in A Realm Reborn so I need to give some honorable mention to the ones that won't actually be included in this ranking things like the Chrysalis and the steps of Faith were majorly impactful trials that were part of the main scenario quests and they were not something you could completely walk over that stands true for most of the hard mode trials including a freak Garuda and Titan which are actually the Gateway Into The Binding Coil of Bahamut back then however from 2.1 onward we would get Extreme Trials sometimes more than one in a patch and so I really want to focus on that upper echelon of trial maybe we'd go back and talk about the implications and the impact on the difficulty of main scenario trials in a future video but for now I just want to mention the five that aren't here I already mentioned the Chrysalis and the steps of faith and Steps of Faith is one that's definitely worth looking back on but we also had all the Hildebrand trials we had battle at big bridge battle at Big keep and the dragon's neck Coliseum again none of these were that hard but they also weren't something you could just walk over either so some people might have expected them to be in this list and sorry to say but they won't be I like them and maybe they'll make their way into a future video but for now we're going to focus on the difficult stuff so now let's get started on that ranking alright so we have nine Extreme Trials on my list and I definitely know which one is my least favorite coming in at number nine moggle MOG extreme Thorn March extreme I could barely even say the word because it was uh just don't like this trial at all I'll just I'll just be out right with it the fight sucked to deal damage to magomog himself you have to weaken the health bars of the little moogles before you actually kill any of them because as soon as you kill one of them magomog will restore all of their health to Max and sacrifice his own health to do so now on paper that's actually fine and Probably sounds like a really interesting Prospect to a lot of people but it made things like damage over time abilities pets and even just little Auto attacks just an absolute nightmare you would just have accidental deaths early you'd have people who would Dot and then people who wouldn't control damage and people who just wouldn't look at HP bars and oh we all know how difficult it is for people to stop hitting buttons whether it be because of a HP check or because of something like a Stillness mechanic well either way not to mention most of the mechanics just weren't great by any measure it also only dropped accessories it didn't have an extreme trial Mount so outside of Moogle themed accessory Glam and I guess for some people an item level upgrade it was just such a drag at least hard mode had weapons and the crafted weapons would come later but this extreme trial I would just leave it in the trash and I never want to see it returned in any form now number eight on this list I wasn't sure if I wanted to include it in my ranking I went back and forth Just because of the nicknames that we had for it and that's Earth's Fount now some people call it Odin hard mode some people called it Odin extreme but I think it has just enough difficulty to earn a spot on this list now this fight was added in patch 2.5 but it actually made its debut at Fan Fest as a battle challenge that people could take on in person to earn a shirt it was a bit easier at Fan Fest you could silence some attacks and it just didn't deal as much damage didn't have as tight of a DPS check or anything like that but in the final release you know they amped the damage up a little bit they got rid of some of that counter play by getting rid of the silences and yeah it was actually a pretty fun fight it had some Nifty attacks a lot of them just dealt massive damage some of it based on your max HP so even if you go in now and get hit by some of that stuff it'll chunk you completely tanks would get destroyed by the tank Buster and then just a ton of aoes and AOE raid damage that came out there was even a DPS check at the very end where you have to kill him before he finishes casting the shin zantetsukan skill and that actually scared a lot of people I had plenty of groups that could do the mechanics fine up to that point but couldn't bring it home in the last 15 percent maybe because of a bad phase push or just because you know dodging mechanics is one thing dealing damage is another but at its core it really is just a lot of dodging aoes and if your group is really good you skip a lot of those aoes as a whole and it gets even Lamer and Lamer it's just isn't really very interesting of a fight outside of it dealing very serious damage and actually still getting people with that final sequence at the end not to mention the rewards were just individual Glam versions of the full body suit that you could get from the Fate so it's much like magomog the reward structure is just kind of weird and unsatisfying at the very least it did come with some Story related quests that give more background on Odin so if you haven't done those quests I would highly recommend it now we move on to number seven seven I think we got the two that were most likely expected to be at the bottom out of the way and at this point it's a matter of taste and the next one for me is efreet Extreme honestly I could have even put this one below Odin I really don't like a freed extreme I just don't find it very fun I do think that at the very least they captured the idea of extreme being an escalation of hard mode very very well in this encounter I mean it's pretty much all the same mechanics as hard mode they just there's more eruptions there's more plumes there's more dashes there's more Nails there's so many nails and on top of that you needed you know careful damage control and make sure you were mitigating things and the tank Buster was actually quite scary but at the end of the day it just wasn't that interesting not to mention the new mechanics that they added uh searing wind was your healer has to stand away from the group and I know that sounds easy but let me tell you oh man the number of times a Healer wouldn't move out and just insta kill everybody or someone would just move move into the Healer because they just forgot that it was even happening in the first place because it's not a very interactive mechanic oh and then there's a chain between like I think the off tank and one of the DPS that if you were far apart you took more damage or like dealt more damage to over time and you dealt less damage which could make killing the nails harder and that was like all that they added that wasn't just multiplying what was already there I don't know it's just was always so uninteresting to me but at the same time it was still good for the game in the patch that it came out 2.1 which was the first patch that we actually got Extremes in a realm were born I just wish it was better especially because it was the last of the three Extremes in sequence for the quest that you needed to do so uh you know definitely wasn't how I would have ended it especially given what one of the other three extremes was next on the list is minstrels ballad ultima's Bane you know again this almost doesn't count as an extreme and I'll I'll talk about why in a little bit but you know on paper this should have been super exciting this was the first time they you know took a final boss from the story and gave us a harder version of it and this is something they've done every expansion since two varying degrees of success looking at you and singer um but I mean the final boss of praetorium the Ultimate Weapon one of the most iconic Final Fantasy bosses super bosses that's been present in a ton of games and on top of that you know got a difficulty bump new accessories all this extra damage but it's only barely harder it's really just the amount of damage that it deals that kind of catches people off guard it's still just you know Dodge different eruptions and Dodge you know weight of the land and you know don't get knocked in front of garudas cleave it's a like the mechanics in the first 50 aren't really much different than normal mode I think most people probably got past the first 50 Mark in a single poll even back then and then the last 50 percent it's really just tons of lasers kill the magitek bits you know mitigate and Dodge the the proximity aoes and then the orbs honestly the orbs are pretty much the entire fight you just have to make sure that you deal with the split damage and that was kind of a thing back then you know we didn't know those were split damage the first time we did it because there were no split damage indicators you just had to see wow that did a lot of damage maybe we need multiple people to get hit by it that's like all the information that you were gonna get uh now that being said I still did enjoy it it was simple at the very least and you could actually just do it with a group of friends and it wasn't all that bad and that became really true and it came back as an unreal encounter but if I'm to grade it based on the quality of the actual fight it's just kind of disappointing I mean it's weird how Ultima weapon just kind of has that air about it I mean it's a final boss of a story dungeon which is now in its own separate trial actually and that separate trial makes me want them to redo the Mitchell's ballot version oddly enough and it also kind of makes me want them to redo it's just it was just like easy like I don't know it's just always associated with that um but then it's not even just me Yoshi P himself said they didn't want to call it an extreme trial in patch 2.1 because they didn't think it was on the same caliber as like ifric Garuda and Titan so I mean even if they didn't want to do it then you know as you can see why I'm kind of conflicted about it but I still like it more than E3 so it ends up here speaking of Garuda like I just mentioned Groot is next on the list and I think from this point on on the list it's kind of just like they're a lot closer than the first four on the list were I I like and dislike different things about them and they could be depending on my mood interchangeable but Garuda is going to be my number five this was our first extreme trial at All In A Realm Reborn and it was a great one to start out with in my opinion there's a lot of really subtle mechanic changes and incorporates a more raid-esque use of the Arena than we see in most of the trials now the first phase introduces the new suparna and Toronto which were the ads from the hard mode and unfortunately for those of you who watched my guide to this way back when they also meant many a deaths yeah so Toronto was supposed to be just tanked by the party while the other tank grabbed superna and that was known as the triangle Strat it became the standard Strat over in JP and people who would stop and think about it a little bit would also have done that over here in n a it's just because of a split damage cleave that charada does and that tsuparna does this massive like AOE tank Buster style attack that was always killing people and yeah I apologize for that one looking back but at the same time was just because I was doing it with people with a lot of gear and so we're just like oh wow yeah we could just do it that way and that's just kind of what ended up sticking and that was a big problem with a lot of Trials especially way back when less of a problem now because they're more Dancy than they are uh any other way I guess if that makes sense but it is what it is uh now those things do repeat in phase two you will have tarata and superna again but with the infamous spiny plume mixed in this little tiny plume that just lays down tank Busters that give you this debuff and if the debuff gets high enough it blows up and just damages everyone oh man that thing was scary and all you had to do was tank swap it and mitigate the hit while you were dealing with the ads at the same time and that was a monstrous problem for a lot of people honestly that plum like one of the hardest hitting things in Ultimate for Ultima weapon as well but it actually became a really engaging ex mechanic because you're actually doing a bunch of other stuff while you're dealing with that spiny plume there's also a bunch of other plumes you need to kill including one that if you don't kill it fast enough will put everyone to sleep probably the worst mechanic just because if it goes off you just sit there and wait because you're probably gonna die to like an AOE or something that's gonna happen and it's like this Slow Burn of pain that you just wish wasn't happening honestly I think the most unfortunate thing about that encounter is none of those things I mentioned are Garuda garuda's just kind of there does you know a cleave that you need to avoid does a you know a tank Buster and whatnot but Garuda herself is so not the focus of her own extreme and that's just kind of I don't know it's a little lame but at the very least it has a lot of really positive things about it and I think if we had gotten it unreal for that one it would have been fun but it just lands a little bit further down for for those couple of reasons then we move on to number four Shiva extreme now next we have the last officially labeled ex trial given that Odin was something that was more of a formality this fight actually encapsulates a lot of pretty modern raid design when I look back at it almost seemingly unintentionally it has stack spreads and pair mechanics what else can you say about Final Fantasy 14 end game it all boils down to some variation of those three things and they're key to positioning for the various weapon phases that she has not to mention her damage is actually quite high for an ex trial every time she changes her weapon she gets a stacking damage buff and everything she does that actually hurts her Auto stack damage resistance debuffs which I actually really like as a tank mechanic although they may not have been strong enough even on content and then her bow Autos always crit we had awareness back then but nowadays that would be a really scary thing she spams raid wides as well as just requires constant mitigation healing and shielding and we didn't have a lot of tools back then so when these things were happening I mean you were probably sitting there actually doing gcd heals we didn't even have a size or Asylum or anything you would have just thrown up a Medica too and then a Medica every time she just does this ice spam on the whole party she also takes less damage and sword and shield form which can make hitting and rage a real possibility for groups if she uses it frequently especially less experienced groups since she randomly chooses between staff and sword form in the second phase you just gotta be on your toes and know how to react to each of them and people really weren't good at that back then so it became a much more engaging fight than I think it actually is on paper and again that damage that damage gets really really scary oddly the thing that stands out as kind of like a negative is the ad phase it's like yeah she can swap to sword during that and then have to do like a party-wide clip but the ads themselves just Auto attack they're just there to be damaged sponges and aren't really that interesting honestly probably the most troll thing about Shiva extreme is tanks would do Shiva extreme where she does this cleave attack that's a party split but in hard mode it's not a party split it's just a tank Buster so you can always have that tank that's like oh let me aim this at the party real quick and just kill everyone that probably still happens to this day I haven't done it in the traveler in a while but yeah there's a lot of really really positive things about this fight just had one other weird thing in patch 2.45 they introduced upgrade items for her weapons to give them an extra five item levels I don't recall anyone really caring when that happened so it was just kind of weird that they did it oh she also had the slidey floor yeah that's slidy floor that was not good there's a lot of people who could not stay still during that and also even just her dropping aoes and kind of like a rotating pattern technically Titan did that too with his bombs but nowadays when we see those types of mechanics players that were around back then will still to this day call them Shiva circles it's just how it is so uh yeah it's a funny how she actually had a pretty large impact on terminology and just the way people handle certain things in in ratings very very ahead of its time actually now we move on to my big three these actually I think I knew were going to be in my top three uh Leviathan extreme is my number three you know I think if you would ask me this maybe two three years ago I wouldn't have said this but like I said at the beginning you know I was wondering how much unreal would really affects my opinion on some of this stuff and after getting to do it again in unreal during shadowbringers I actually ended up growing a newfound appreciation for the fight there's a lot of interesting Nuance with its mechanics albeit a bit of grief involved too the two big ones are the head and tail and the mirror debuffs the head and tail each reflect a different type of damage the head I believe reflects physical yeah because the tail is meant for positionals it has to be oh I think it's actually the head reflects range and the tail reflects magic it's one of the two but either way they yeah they don't just reflect physical it's range damage and Magic damage and so you know on paper that's fine you just need to attack the correct one but you know nowadays we have a lot of incidental AOE and our tanks have mixed damage like if you're a paladin or a dark knight that means you're you're gonna have to attack a specific one and if you have both of them then well one of them is going to be taking some reflective damage so it's a little weirder nowadays but on paper again it's still one of those really cool ideas and for a tank it's not that big of a deal as long as you know your healers aren't completely asleep at the wheel speaking of the healers then you have the mirror mechanic so a tank would get a mirror debuff and if you healed that player with whatever spell you had that would heal their health um it would actually give you a stacking debuff and the debuff with each stack would reduce the range of your healing heck it would reduce the range that you needed to be within like the range you need to be not just for your AOE casts but to actually heal somebody just single Target the range that you need to stand from them so it did something back then where it forced A Healer swap where you were like okay I'll heal that tank until I have three stacks and then you'll heal them until you you have three stacks and yeah you would try to avoid that with things like Regens or illustrates and whatnot but the fact that we had this healer swap mechanic that we don't really see ever again I mean if we're always looking for ways to make certain parts of our game more engaging and I think not necessarily this exact thing but mechanics like this do improve engagement when you have to do that although nowadays we barely gcd heal at all so they'd probably need to do something a little different but I think you know what I mean this is other ways to resolve the issue and I don't know that we it would really function the same way nowadays um it also had a ton of ads all of which were threatening in their own way you know they would either just do more damage to people while other aoes were going off or they could hysteria you or leave puddles that would hysteria you either or because they did both and you just walk off the edge so damage control stuns all that stuff was really really important and of course the dive bombs you know Leviathan dashing across and knocking people off and slowing the them down the arena tilting whenever Leviathan would slam on it that was really really cool when it first happened here honestly it's just all really really interesting the only thing that knocks off a few points for Leviathan for me is the activation of the barrier to counter tidal wave interactables in high-end fights not something the game does very well and while this wasn't exactly that bad it was super finicky you needed to be in a really short range of it and uh if you had even just slightly too little ether or you were a little too late or even in some cases a little too early you were dead this was true in hard mode too and I've seen that mistake made a lot of times Al Leviathan also had a really weird upgrade system you had to like get the weapon and then you had to get a mirror that just it was the mirror was super rare I think I saw it once ever until I like went back and did it unsynced and yeah nobody again kind of like Yeshiva nobody really cared but the mirror was out on content so it was even weirder moving on to number two and honestly I knew this one was number two the moment I started making this video because I knew what my number one was and number two we have ramu extreme one of the weirdest and quirkiest extremes the game has ever had it has water along most of the arena and whenever you get hit by lightning it does this electrifying AOE so you really have to Bunch up and spread out at the same time in this really tight space in the center of the room and then you can use that outer ring that outer Donut for positioning for other mechanics so you have to really know how to use each of them in order to make sure that you did all the mechanics correctly Ram also just leaves Behind These lightning orbs when he strikes the arena with lightning now the more of these on the arena the stronger run was attacks become and that was a little confusing to figure out at first because at first we were just kind of ignore wearing them other than the tanks picking them up because they are also required for a tank mechanic but then we learned very quickly that that's why we were dying in one hit to the generic room-wide AOE because there were just way too many of them around now speaking of the tank Buster picking up three of these orbs basically gives you a lightning or a conduit resistance and it's required to survive the tank Buster and it's also required to break a lightning tether during the later phases and honestly that became kind of the key to the whole fight was managing these orbs if you don't have enough of them when a mechanic is happening then your tanks can't do their swap correctly there is a way to play around that by collecting an extra one and taking a healing reduction debuff in exchange for being able to continue to survive those attacks but uh yeah it just becomes a big problem if you don't manage the number of them and honestly people just weren't very good at it heck they're probably not very good at it right now if you were to do it with a brand new party but at the same time it just makes the fight so engaging and that's the big thing with a lot of these A Realm Reborn encounters is some aspect of them is as much more engaging than just do the mechanic you know oh this is how the mechanic is solved through the mechanic it's a lot about management of the boss and of their skills and of whatever gimmick they may have that's something again we just don't see that much nowadays now on top of that you need to free players from a seduction buff with the same thing that left the lightning bolts behind and that was always a disaster because you'd have two people that would try to do it at the same time so you'd set up a priority oh man nowadays priority systems are super normal you know how bad it was setting up a priority system for ramu breaks back then people just couldn't follow it you'd have one person go in and another person be like oh okay I'll let them do it but then the other person sees you coming in so they step out because they're afraid you're going to come in and you're going to double up and hit what a time what a time it's giving me a headache even just thinking about it honestly the only thing that's really finicky is just people are bad at collecting orbs also I mean the ads during the ad phase aren't like super interesting but at the same time they're certainly not bad and the only thing I actively disliked about the fight is because I'm a colorblind player very colorblind mind you the lightning effects during the later part of the fight they shoot like line aoes through the arena I cannot see those lightning bolts for the life of me because they don't have like a traditional AOE marker on the ground it shows this like crackle of lightning that's traveling across before it hits and I could never see that properly all right and number one come on like you knew I wasn't gonna make Titan extreme number one on this list hey it could have been ramu because I really like Ramo but if I'm being honest I just had to put Titan at number one I could listen I could argue one more Leviathan but Titan is just so iconic I get it because the Garland's thing never mind anyway this fight is the definition of the term Extreme as it amps up every anxious thing that players experience with the hard mode and the hard mode was scarring enough for most people more landslides more tank Busters more weight of the lands more bombs More Everything the only thing there was less of the Arena it's just so small it's just down to like this this little nugget that you're standing on that Titan somehow fits on alongside you there really are in my opinion no Faults with the fights design that's another I didn't do that one on per the first one was on purpose this one was outside of the permanent death mechanic if you fall off which is kind of synonymous with the fight like if you took that away it takes away a lot from Titan so much so that when unreal came around they left that they said no if you fall off you're staying dead now I played with plenty of experience groups that could you know beat this fight with only five people alive but it's not like that's something you wanted to do and if you fell off and everyone just kept continuing on you couldn't even watch back that you would just sit at the bottom of the arena and look at the health bars and just be like I wonder how they're doing up there hmm oh well they're not dead yet so we'll see how that goes oh no they're still going okay yeah there you go yeah I don't know I just think Titan is like the most like extreme extreme it's everything I expect from an extreme encounter even to this day and that's gonna be a wrap for my ranking of the A Realm Reborn Extreme Trials if you have an idea you'd like to see the other trials in some sort of other video be sure to let me know in the comment section of the video below and otherwise you know like favorite subscribe you know the drill if you've been around before either way thanks for watching I'll see you all in the next one and until then take care

Channel: Mrhappy1227

Views: 15,914

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, ARR, A Realm Reborn, EX, Extreme, Trial, Raid, History, Trials

Id: 2MFhUYRmGys

Length: 25min 53sec (1553 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2023