FFXIV Raid History & Rankings - Heavensward Extreme Trials

foreign Mr Happy here and welcome back to another ranking video for Final Fantasy 14 this time I'm going to be taking a look at the trials for heavensward for the aroma born one there were a lot more trials to judge in fact I had to leave a bunch of them out because I really didn't know how to judge some of their difficulties against one another however with Heaven's word things were much more direct we had seven trials we had two upon the initial release at least extreme difficulty trials and then one was added in each subsequent patch which they've largely kept to since then minus a few things that we'll get to talk about in the other expansions with that this is one of my favorite expansions to talk about the trials so I'm really looking forward to ranking all seven of these encounters for you that being said starting the list off with number seven and I think it's a pretty obvious one in that of Bismarck I really don't think anyone would be super surprised by this if you were around during Heaven's Ward Bismarck is legit just just killing a few sets of ads and then shooting some Dragon killers at him in order to pull him close jump on his back and then DPS his head his Corona as it's called I mean the there is an actual ad phase where you're supposed to like have the tank Swap and there's these debuffs that can mean you either reflect damage back at yourself or you know you actually just deal damage to the ad and there's tornadoes all over the place during that particular phase it's it's not a bad ad phase but it doesn't really redeem the rest of the fight being just killing a bunch of vanu vanu and then getting on his back I do like some aspects about this the storm's mechanic in the later phase I think is mildly interesting just being able to look at the environment and just have to go okay there's a thunderstorm the weather also changes on the mini map these are the mechanics that will happen but it's still just it doesn't really do enough for the encounter so all I'll do is enjoy that when you jump on his back you take damage the storm's mechanic actually looks aesthetically cool and I love the 12 second Loop that are both of the Bismarck songs phase one and phase two but it had to go at number seven right at the bottom of this list now that being said everyone after this was kind of tough I really had to kind of reach into I wouldn't call them Petty reasons to figure out where I was gonna Place everything else at least in the middle of the list but it certainly was nothing that if ranked against some of the other expansions would have really netted them a lower spot so for number six I decided to go with zerven now I'm sure some of you think this is because of the classic meme of skipping soar but it's just that the fight's a bit too basic that's what it is phase one phase two in the ad phase you know there's a couple of things that are interesting in there but it just feels like I wish I could just go to the last phase you know some fights I feel like the the first phase is really kind of build up the encounter and that doesn't feel like it's the case here not to mention the in my opinion really awkward ultimate attack that zirven has where he charges through a snowflake I don't know it's just it's just kind of weird the Final Phase is actually pretty good he's got the knock back into the laser and then there's of course the spread and the Stacked mechanics and having to actually do so it was always funny to me everyone's like yeah we have to skip sore in the first phase and then people don't learn how to do it they just die to it in the second phase anyway I was like what was the point of doing that but overall while I don't think it's a bad encounter it certainly has a lower quality I feel than the rest of the encounters on this list and that makes number five kind of a weird one for me because I feel dirty doing this my number five is ravana it's I ah man it's so thematically and executionally different than almost every ex Primal and not in the way that Bismarck was Bismarck was like a failed attempt at being that ravano who released alongside Bismarck was not a failed attempt in any way I mean the alternating stances each having their own different attacks you having the one phase where he takes a ton more damage the phase where he takes less damage dealing damage actually pushing his phases faster to push his gauge up faster so you can see more or less of a specific mechanic and the actual attacks and the variety here is really really well done despite all of that it never really feels like it's too much because it's paced extremely well honestly I'm kind of disappointed this hasn't been an unreal yet and I'm afraid they're not even gonna make it on an unreal I feel like they're gonna go through the heavensward trials and not double back to ravana honestly the only reason it's landing at number five is because of those long cast phases where he takes bonus damage it just kind of slows the fight down a little bit too much and is incredibly abusable even back when it was brand new we skipped so much of the later part of the fight just because of saving damage for that damage increased phase and so that really knocks down a lot of the fun stuff especially the limit cut-esque mechanic that ravana people credit limit cut with what's his face with cruise Chaser and yes that is like technically the full limit cut with all eight markers but ravana had limit cut light way before that and nobody gives him credit for it because most of us skipped it so while it wasn't an easy decision I I feel like it's right to put him at number five now number four is going to be Sophia this was actually heavily influenced by the fact that this is the unreal encounter right now and just having done it a bunch more recently and then looking back at Old footage before it came out it just felt like this needed to be smack dab in the middle of the list to make it the most balanced decision that I could make and it's not even just a pun everything about this fight kind of Screams Goldilocks to me it's all just right it is a decent mix of dangerous mechanics but in a mostly recoverable encounter I mean even back in the day it was the first encounter where if you fell off you could then be resurrected anyway and it felt like a good change it felt like something that made sense for this fight or made sense for the direction that the game was going when this fight came out its ad phase is equally as cheesable as it is dangerous I see people screw it up all the time get confused die when they're not supposed to and then fail to die when they're supposed to that's a whole other thing and the last phase feels like a decent evolution of the first phase but also never really takes off too far you know and it never really reaches too far beyond what you expect of it once you learn the arena can tilt but it does have a decent variety there's a lot of tank buster is a lot of tank swaps a lot of knockbacks a lot of raid wide damage and the Clone mechanic is also something that's pretty good something we've seen since then but was done really well upon its initial execution here but the big thing is that this is a list based on how I feel about these encounters and for me Sophia never really impressed as an encounter but it was also never bad in any particular way so for me again it feels like it's just the right balance of things to land at smack dab in the middle of this list now from this point on we're going into my top three and I'm not gonna lie they are leagues above the first four four five and six were kind of hard but three two and one are really really easy to me and I'm gonna start number three with nidhog the final Steps of Faith this is a big big Improvement for me from number four and I think the biggest thing is how much more atmospheric and aesthetically pleasing this and the next two encounters are on top of having an except optional array of mechanics while still feeling like an ex trial difficulty nidhog's first phase serves just decent enough to get a few Basics out of the way but I think if it weren't for the context of the rest of the fight it would be a weaker first phase it's very short not a whole lot happens if you can you do see the dive bombs you do see the puddles placed on the grass there's there's some things to it that you definitely want to know for the later phases but it's by no means impressive on its own but it builds up it's like it's like the start of a song that's just kind of getting you into it and that's I think that's the beauty of it it is the end of the Dragon song war and every phase feels like a piece of a composition they all have their own music they all you know build up to this one final face and that just goes such a long way at making these even simpler things more enjoyable I also really like the ad phase very much on the tanks to be good with their mitigation very much on the DPS to kill the ads quickly enough to make sure the tanks don't have to do any sort of against and everyone still has to be dodging that third ad that just shoots fireballs and tries to swing at people not to mention the hilariousness in people's kind of misinterpretation of going from the ad phase to the midstinian phase there's eight circles on the ground so everyone thought oh everyone needs to stand in a circle in order to survive this attack because people were just dying outright to the damage from final chorus and it was just they just blamed it on not doing the mechanic correctly by stating in the circles but it was just nobody was mitigating we weren't really as good at that kind of stuff back then as a whole Community for the game but it was especially noticeable here so that hilarious memory to add into there not to mention the midstinian phase man that's one of my favorite ex phases just across all of them it has so many little things that you need to do but again it's really just putting the pressure on you to get out of the way of a lot of stuff until the Fang and Claw mechanic which is one of my favorite ex mechanics I mean it requires very careful movement you just need to understand what it means when you have a specific tether and what the conditions for killing each of the Fang and Claw are and I just like that little bit of involvement that's there but again it all hits a crescendo when you get to enraged nidhog now enraged nidhog is really just a build up on that first phase you haven't really done most of these mechanics since the start and then there's a few more things added in with the akmorns dealing the damage the Bomberman orbs which are probably the most iconic thing here not to mention the uh the stacking you know tank stack I suppose so that there's just a lot of little elements here that add up to a really enjoyable fight the music the arena changing everything is just it's so extravagant I wish enraged nidhog was in Dragon's hunger prize not as another phase mind you I just wish he was there yeah I don't want that fight being any longer than it already was but honestly I can't praise this extreme enough and you'll hear me say similar things when we get to shadowbringers to a similar style encounter but when you nail extremes like this even the most hardcore of player isn't really in it for the challenge anymore they're in it for everything else and nidhog nails that so it's crazy to think that nidhog's just number three because I feel like number two and number one do that for me but they also do other things so the big thing is number two is thorden I'm I think some people will be surprised that that's not number one but also you now know what my number one is so you're probably not surprised at that either and honestly for me thorden and nidhog kind of tied between like second and third it was that was another tough decision but first so let me back up Thornton is often referred to as the Pinnacle of EX trial difficulty it was used as a bridge to get People Gear specifically a new weapon to help them with the DPS checks in gordius turn three against living liquid it didn't really achieve that super well but it means that he was designed with that kind of upper difficulty in mind so at the time his scaling was that something that punished a lot of pickup groups when it came to trying to do this encounter it has a ton of mechanical dances micro DPS checks within the different phases tight mitigation checks and attention checks I mean it just it demands the same things that a raid would demand of you and also has all that extravagance all that aesthetic the music everything although I don't know if I was really a huge fan of the phase one music I mean Heroes now scars me every time I hear it I just kind of but at the same time I get wanting to build into Heroes for that last phase but it also just feels like it should be there the whole time for me the other music doesn't really do it quite the same but at least they're going for that same effect that kind of build up into that last phase when Heroes kicks in and it does work I am really glad when it when it happens but even still now I will say that nowadays the Thornton encounter is much less impressive all of the mechanics that are here are like dungeon mechanics now or like easy ex mechanics now we just we've had so much exposure to the stuff that used to be sort of unique like they kind of also used Thornton as a means of teaching people mechanics that were used in coil so it's again this kind of weird dichotomy between these being Savage style mechanics or you know what would have been the Savage equivalent with the with the final coils and being an extreme difficulty trial at the same time which then leads into the difficulty that they designed it with and there's not as many mechanics that feel that thematic to thorden until the Final Phase stuff like the spear throw stuff like the eyes appearing around the arena but everything else is like a mishmash of aoes and things that we've seen before just put together in a more difficult kind of situation but if you were to take someone in nowadays who's been playing for the past several years they probably wouldn't understand why thorden was regarded the way that it was or even something like this video is regarded the way that it is but for me the big thing is it still has such a high bar of quality compared to a lot of other Extreme Trials that we've had even to this day that it deserves the spot full and through with both its history and how it Stacks up against other stuff nowadays and that takes us into our number one which is sephirot Veni Veni venios that is the achievement for beating the extreme but we're not talking about that sephiroth but it's again another ex trial that just to me shows that it has a massive quality difference than the other stuff we've seen in recent years it's not only my favorite heavensward trial but it's one of my favorite trials to this day I don't think it was unseated until shadowbringers to be honest it just combines so many things at once into a fast and frantic fight phase one alternates between two mechanics but doesn't really overstay its welcome and both mechanics are quite threatening on their own they're neither bothersome so you get through that first phase you feel good and accomplished about it then you move on to the ad phase which has this massive tank mitigation check and if either tanks dies it falls apart really quick not to mention every ad you destroy is doing incredibly annoying amounts of damage the big ads super threatening the little ads explode frequently enough that it can cause issues and a little bit of a panic attack when it comes to playing healer in there trust me I know and on top of that when you then move into that Final Phase the giant spectacle and the fake Powerman 5000 music that kicks in it's just it just sets such a mood again the atmosphere the aesthetic it all works so so well and it just for me works as well as some of the other things I don't think it's as extreme extravagant as nidhog and thorden but for something that's not those like msqex trial fights it really again just stands above for me not to mention the Final Phase shows that square can do stationary bosses there are a few stands at the wall stationary bosses they've done well and this is one of them because sephiroth himself is so anime aided and you're constantly shifting around the arena for bait spreads tethers ads all this kind of stuff knockbacks expanding aoes the damage resistance phase that you have to do a couple of times it just has everything back in the day it also had no resurrections when you fell off the arena and they fixed that when the unreal trial came around um but one thing I realized when it came around was Unreal is that it didn't feel like oh man back in my day you know we wouldn't have been able to raise from there or I didn't feel that way at all because the rest of the fight was still demanding so much of my attention and my admiration that I realized that wasn't really a defining Factor not like it was with Titan on Titan falling off was like a defining Factor something about that fight that when taken away felt like it was missing sephiroth isn't that he doesn't need that to stand out because all the other aspects of the fight work so well together that still one of my favorite fights to this day and I highly recommend it uh I know you might have missed unreal but you can always go back I can do it right and that is going to be a wrap for my heavensward trial ranking man it feels so good to look back at these and I'm really looking forward to looking at the stormblood stuff next because obviously the next videos will be the stormblood raid series and that of Omega which trust me fresh on my mind right now as well as the trial series with the four Lords as well as tsukiyomi shinriyu um what is it susano and I'm forgetting the level 87 one how am I doing that what was it I can't remember I actually can't remember in the middle of the video oh I feel dumb I guess that's going in last place and then I guess that one's last place when I actually do the thing because uh it's something oh Lakshmi yeah no that's definitely going last place and I have multiple reasons for that spoiler alert anyway looking forward to doing those videos hopefully you are too so be sure to check out the playlist be sure to like favorite subscribe and share and let me know what your rankings are for the heavensward trial series if you were around at the very least anyway thanks for watching and I'll see you all in the next one until then take care [Music]

Channel: Mrhappy1227

Views: 10,131

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

Id: 8kNEth8gIrU

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 30 2023