My Thoughts & Breakdown on Dragonsong Reprise Ultimate!

[Music] hey everyone mr happy here and in this video i'm going to be sharing with you my thoughts on dragon song reprise ultimate i am just coming down off the high of clearing it myself for the first time and as such i wanted to share how i felt about this ultimate both through prague and now that it's over the entire time people have been asking me how do you like it so far how does it stack up against the other ultimates is it the hardest is it your favorite i'm gonna cover all of that in this video even though the recency bias of having just done it is probably going to affect some of my opinions about the encounter so for those unfamiliar dragon song reprise ultimate is a long awaited piece of content it was originally scheduled to release in patch 5.51 back in shadowbringers however due to the development of end walker being a priority over this high-end content due to the situation in the world they decided to push it off until patch 6.11 basically a year later if not longer and as a high-end raider i wasn't too super excited about that a lot of people weren't as well but given everything going on of course it was completely understood so we waited patiently we theorized we we just anticipated the moment where we would get our hands on this and i'll say it right now it was well worth the wait and it was far more than i would have ever predicted that i would have ever expected and this is going to set a new bar for what ultimate raiders expect going forward it's going to be tough for the next one so i feel bad for whoever has to has to follow up mr osma the code name for the developer of this encounter whoever has to follow him up is they're gonna be in for a time now dragon song reprise is a seven plus phase encounter technically some of the littler things in there you could count as a phase altogether if you really wanted to and say as much as nine phases happened in this encounter it's basically a retelling of the most major moments in heaven's wards specifically against thordan his knights and nidhogg now it starts off fairly familiar but it evolves into something way different than we've ever had in an ultimate before and it gets major points for me for that however i want to pump the brakes because there are so many phases to this encounter i could basically review every single one of them and share my thoughts on them so that's what i'm gonna do although a bit truncated so strap in because we got a lot to talk about upon entering dragon song reprise ultimate you are put up against the three bosses from the vault and actually the arena you're fighting on is not the final boss arena from the vault they instead decided to very strategically use a section later on that's only featured in a cut scene right before thordan escapes with his knights and that is because of another very important story event that actually takes place in this location so upon entering you have is basically the ultimate version of the vault you know you have to kill these two knights and they have to die at about the same time and then you also go through a little bit of a bonus phase with the remaining knight who was hanging off to the side and just casting spells before you got to the end right there it's pretty straightforward and i don't think anyone was really surprised by anything here i myself went back into the vault before this came out and i fully expected some of these things to pop up and then they also threw some surprises and in the way that the different knights actually interacted the damage values were high the dps check of course being brand new into the instance and the encounter feels reasonable enough but not overwhelming and then it just kind of goes in ways that you don't expect right at the end and it just starts to kind of warp your perspective of what you think is gonna happen throughout the rest of the fight so mechanically this is fine all standard there really isn't too much for me to praise or knock however towards the end of the phase i mentioned that there was a specific moment in heaven's ward that this phase wants to reference and why the arena is located where it is and that is that hosh font actually comes out and blocks a spear from sir zephan just like he does in the main story and just like he does in the main story we have to watch our boy die it's not a pleasant thing but it's what i predicted would happen what made the most sense to me before this even came out so i felt a little vindicated seeing that that was indeed the result however before even entering people noticed something about the description of dragon song reprise ultimate it mentions that what would happen if we saved our dear friend so of course seeing that hosh font is targetable seeing he gets a debuff but also seeing that there was realistically no way to save him led to a lot of discussion about how you could possibly save him what would happen if we saved him did we need to save him here but a lot of that discussion was shut down in the early days of prague because after defeating chairboard and not even defeating really mind you this was another really weird thing after you get through this phase by surviving sir cherbert's final attack by getting him to a low enough health percentage thordan comes down begins attacking and you know most groups will die almost immediately upon getting there their first time that was when we were surprised by a checkpoint something that has never existed in ultimate in fact something they have explicitly stated they would not do in ultimates so this was surprising in a lot of ways one you just needed to survive chair birth's attack you didn't have to do the entire phase properly you could screw up the mechanics right there at the end and just have one person get through and that was enough to reach this checkpoint and that's you know not unusual for other checkpoints but in ultimate it's super not expected but also if there's a checkpoint here then what about all the hash font guesses because we clearly couldn't save him and even if we could it's not like we would take a you know like oh you screwed up before the checkpoint go back and re-instance so we were just like oh i guess you're not supposed to save him that's really just for dramatic effect so you know pragging we all write that off we're done with the night's phase but those thoughts just keep lingering like why would they do it this way why would they do a checkpoint for the first time why would they make us watch that with hosh font maybe the checkpoint is just an emotional checkpoint so we don't have to watch him die over and over again and lose the emotional impact of the events of heaven's ward whatever the reason at this point we had a new concern the new first boss that was in front of us king thornton now king thordan sets the expectations for the entire encounter and that is a compliment most of the time the first phases in an ultimate they introduce you to the idea of the ultimate some sort of major concept or narrative beginning to what story is trying to be told but they are rarely such an expectation setting first phase thorden immediately lets you know this is going to be like the other ultimates you've done and in ways you almost wish it wasn't because thordan immediately goes into using his knights and he has these massive downtime phases where you're not dpsing you're not hitting anything you're just focused on these incredibly tight movements that you have to be it's so it's like a dance it's like the rest of final fantasy 14 it's like the bahamit trios it's like alexander it's we've done these phases in ultimate so many times before but they are normally not at the very beginning of the phase they're kind of at that mid to late point where they're trying to amp things up a little bit and get your heart racing because there's these major dance mechanics and you're trying to sweat but the first mechanic is immediately taking a very simple prospect of getting into two safe spots and spreading out amongst players while then dodging an earth aoe while then baiting another one to then step to the side and then all of a sudden you've got three dives on players two proximity related tank busters only four really safe spots and a split damage aoe now fortunately that's actually a pretty simple thing to resolve if you've been doing ultimates before you just have to properly take the time to gather all the data and kind of resolve it the only way you can imagine or at least one of only a few ways you can imagine and again that's fairly standard that's that's just how ultimates work it's about understanding how many permutations of rng you personally need to know and be responsible for and be able to react to and to get enough pulls in to repeat the process learn it get the movement down and so but it's just so early it's the first thing and it doesn't get any better the very second mechanic sanctity of the ward is one of the most threatening early mechanics we've seen at least one that works like this it's just so much information so much happening on the screen at the same time there's these nights dashing all over and gotta look away from the eyes and there's this proximity damage a light party split followed by these meteors that are in these incredibly random patterns that you have to space so precisely while avoiding fire aoes baiting split damage ice aoes it's such a precise dance two minutes into the encounter if this was e8s all over again all the way back in shadowbringers this would look like a light rampant mechanic this would look like a pug ender but it's not really it has a lot of very set rules again it's very structured even when it's not trying to be and so you just get this big expectation check right out the gate that you really don't expect and then you realize you still have you don't even know how long at this point is left in the encounter and you're already exhausted and that's pretty much the theme of the phase constant exhaustion over and over offset by a couple of easier things that happen in between i also really like how in the thornton phase after you get through the major mechanics you get hit by ultimate end and i was wondering if they would do this in the normal mode of thordan uh he does this kind of like wild swing mode where he just runs at people and swings his sword pretty much randomly as a last act of desperation here it's more structured though you can still see the kind of desperation that thornton is having so the fact that they even took that and made it a really simple dodge mechanic uh i thought that was really really neat and again the attention to detail here is something that just reverberates i mean at this point we've already had these major major nights of the round dances you've had the hush font moment with the vaults and the knight the knights in the vault sorry you can tell i'm actually still a little excited to talk about it and you wonder where it's going to go next and you beat thorden and then all of a sudden you are in the final steps of faith and you're like oh nidhogg's here cool this is where we're at next except there's not just nidhogg it's istinian nidhogg or nid stinion as i like to call him just jumping and diving down and you're probably dead the first time you get there now as a polar opposite to the previous phase nidstinian is a lot more like the phases that are in between of the the major trio phases it is a boss that you have to constantly worry about hitting and that there's a very very specific dance you have to do with placements around the arena a little bit closer to something like nail or living liquid phases where it's just all this really really tight movement here it's actually a little more random even because you can be again assigned different uh responsibilities depending on how the mechanic wants to treat you you could be one of the people dealing with these dives that come down three different sets of dives you know three people mark for one two people mark for two and three mark for three you could be the one two or the three on top of that you could have a high jump which drops a tower where you're standing a spine chatter that drops it 10 yards in front of you or an elusive that drops it 10 years behind you so you have to be ready to potentially aim either the forward or back arrows you have to know where your spots can be based on your number and you also need to know it based on who on your team gets assigned the same thing or gets assigned something different so you need priority systems you need rules and that's all it's really trying to establish but you also need to be dealing with uh nidhogg throughout the entire phase and it's a pretty short phase only about two minutes long to get used to this super intense dance on top of that having to deal with point-blank aoes or donut aoes that can be in one of two orders a split damage aoe on a target standing in front of him again really tight movement type mitigation but it's just this constant feeling of go go go and it maintains that momentum that thorden sets but this time without pumping any brakes so it raises the stakes a little bit more and while i think it's mechanically easier than thordan the fact that you are now up against nidhogg the entire time and his position and which direction he's facing matters and where you're placing it you really have to be a lot more calculated here and that gives the phase again that increased momentum or to continue to use the momentum that the first phase or the second phase of a thornton i suppose sets up there's even this little tower dance this isn't really that stressful you just really have to understand what the possibilities are again assigning people to kind of a base location and then sending people to specific locations you know here's your priority of you know if your tower doesn't have a two then you would move over if you're the anchor for your tower you can stay still no matter what baiting the aoes after and then these two massive tank busters that hit so hard you either really want involves or to basically use every defensive cooldown in your arsenal fortunately the fight's designed around that there's not really any tank mechanics immediately before and almost none after for quite a long time so it's the only tank mechanic that you're really dealing with for about four minutes so taking either approaches it seems very deliberate at the very least the only thing that's kind of weird is the dragon lance a that's not what it was originally called in the nidhogg encounter and b it's just this random conal aoe almost like a nerve check like oh you're still paying attention right you don't just have to think about that but i guess that's really the only down point it's not really a down point it's just awkward like why is this here they could have done literally anything else he could have just auto attacked two more times and it would have been more threatening i think but you spend the two minutes you get through that hopefully and then you move on to what i like to consider almost a break in the action something to let you breathe for a little bit before the fight really hits its crescendo you go into an eye phase now this is in some ways a completely unique phase and in other ways a an ultimate version of a mechanic that happens during the nidstinian phase in the final steps of faith so two eyes come out one is red one is blue if you've done nidhogg extreme you recognize this as the fang and claw phase where you have a blue eye that starts at 50 health and tethers to players and any player with a blue tether will heal that eye if they are hit by damage so your goal is to make sure if you have a blue tether to never be hit by anything the whole phase however the red eye starts at 100 health but actually takes damage whenever anyone tethered to that eye gets hit so your goal is pretty straightforward make sure all of the players with a red tether take all the damage in the phase and all the players with the blue tether avoid all the damage in the phase um it gives you a few seconds there's a there's a big bleed a big aoe and a bleed to deal with but immediately after that it's all about you know dancing between who has the tethers and they made it really simple if you have a blue tether you can't pass to another blue tether player but you can pass to a red tether the red and blues can only exchange between each other and there's even a three second period where you can't pass again so they made sure they were really careful about these passes that they weren't uh annoying to do and that's really important because a final fantasy 14 does not have a great track record with passing tethers or passing debuffs or things like that it can still mess up a little bit but it's certainly better than it could have been i'm glad they took the steps that they did but at this point again it's just about you know making sure that you handle like these yellow orbs or split damage aoes so you have two people soak those together and then you have two other players take the red tethers off of them and then go take these expanded aoes one thing i think is a really subtle detail that i really like is this orb expanding mechanic so the orbs you can pop them before they're fully expanded and they don't really do that much damage to you when they're not that large however if you do pop them when they're smaller then the red eye is actually going to take less damage so they deliberately kind of force you into this very specific timing to make sure that you can deal the maximum amount of damage to the eye and to force you to mitigate things you know because if you were to just take this damage raw it would be lethal but you don't want to take less than that because you need to be able to kill the red eye quickly enough so it's a nice little balance that i don't think gets a lot of credit but by the time you've done it a few times it's so second nature you're not even really thinking about that detail so i got it and the only other mechanic is the mirage dives these will target two red tethered players um however they can target any of them so after you've been hit you have to pass your tether off to somebody else otherwise the vulnerability it gives you could essentially result in you being killed and if you die in this phase you actually lose the tethers and you lose the buff that you get oh that was something i actually completely skipped over the phase begins by going into this the very somber theme uh i forget what it's called i actually i think it's called condemnation where it's just it's with the dragon song kind of piano but it's no lyrics or anything it's far more peaceful um and the phase starts with hosh font and isaiah's ghosts giving you buffs and you have to make sure you stack with alphano who is also in the arena and you guys all share this buff because if you don't get this buff you can't actually damage the eyes if you die in this phase you lose that buff so if you die at any point in this phase you can't deal damage to either of the eyes so failing no mechanics is very very important making sure no blue tethers get hit by anything making sure nobody dies um and for for that reason it's very simple the eyes even do auto attack so the tanks do have to take care of aggro but that's not too big of a deal you know aggro in this game is not a whole big deal anymore now once you've done with the four sets of mirage dives you just have to finish off the eyes um you actually supposed to basically finish one of them off on uh its own and then go to the other one because they do this big room-wide aoe and if they both do it it's just so much damage it's probably gonna kill people unless you spend a lot of resources but on top of that the blue eye is still tethered to people so the blue eye is healing off that damage and the red eye is actually still taking damage from that damage so most groups you'll see kill the blue eye first then swap to the red eye and then even though it dies the blue eye actually does heal from zero percent back up to like point four when it does the room wide aoe so you just have to kill it again real quick and then with that you're done with kind of again what i consider the brake phase after you've done this phase enough you get past nidstinian and this phase will be like a deep breath and then the next phase even will eventually be a deep breath before it kind of gets serious again now this was where things took a big turn in prague and this is what really got people excited about this on top of the overall encounter design at this point the minstrel tells you that that's the end of the dragon song war you've done it there's actually even been a little progress bar that's filled all the way to a hundred you've saved istinian you know you can move on and get ready for storm blood minstrel is like though that's cool and all but i wonder what would have happened if we saved hosh fawn so he sends you back to the vault in the story and he specifically sends you back to the moment where you have to defeat sir cherbert you have to reduce his health enough so the aoe doesn't it doesn't kill you that is the exact moment that hosh font runs in front of sir zephan spear so what ends up happening this time however is you actually are able to have limit break in the earlier phase you actually only have an lb2 so you know and that makes sense you know they are dungeon bosses so they give you a dungeon lb value instead of giving you all the way to lb3 and another reason why we thought we couldn't save him there was no way to have lb enough to you know kill chairberg faster or to save him with healer there's nothing you could do at least that's what we thought when it loops back around though you do have lb3 and as soon as he pops up in the arena he starts running in front of you to block sir zefran spear you can tank lb3 and keep him alive makes it so you can actually heal him and keep him alive through the damage that he's taking but in exchange your group is also going to take a whole lot more damage because while he's actually blocking the spear and this is true in the earlier phase as well the the raid is taking damage so when he dies in the earlier phase that raid damage stops but here it continues and it's like 5 000 damage a second so it adds this really immense uh heal check on top of still needing to meet the dps check for sir chair bird of getting him under 30 and still dealing with his mechanics which do deal a lot of damage these conal aoes followed by these baited aoes that you need to make sure you avoid um can very easily overwhelm and kill if you aren't really tight on mitigation and i think that's another thing i never felt like an ultimate had as tight of a mitigation check as this maybe golden bahamut i i'd say that that was a fairly tight mitigation check but this whole phase kind of feels like any sort of slip up on mitigation or shields or anything it's just it's an instant snowball and there's almost no way you're getting out of it in one piece and that's again really impressive you know i've i've caused a few wipes by for getting a troubadorn thinking to myself oh i missed that but there's no way that's why we died going back and looking oh yeah the troubadour is definitely why we died not not having it there is definitely why so again yeah just really really uh tightly tightly balanced and it's really impressive what they did with that but once you manage to stop sir cherbert you got to make sure your healers are still keeping hosh font alive until that very moment including all the way at the end of the phase because sir cherbert does do that room-wide aoe that he did back before you went to the checkpoint then on top of that you actually still need to kill the spear or break the spear that he's blocking so you have to go over and dps down the spear of the fury before it finishes casting pierce pierce will instantly ko hashfont if it finishes casting so you know that's that's that and then you've saved him now we think to ourselves all right we saved hosh font and obviously that would change the timeline if it did but like okay whatever we saved him and that's the end of it but as the minstrel is very very eager to tell you you know oh you saved you saved one life but you know that usually has an effect what kind of effect would that have and nobody was expecting the result that we ended up getting so this begins what's known as the alternative dragon song war where we learn what would have happened had hosh font actually survived his encounter in the vault first and foremost apparently not spurred on by the death of our ally we allow thordan to get just enough of a heads up on us so that he gets to bismarck he gets the key he makes it to aza's law before us he gets into the center of uh of the of the etherochemical research facility he absorbs the ether of the warring triad and we we never get there in time to stop him assumingly he still kills la jabrea and iggy yorm um using the eye i'd have to assume that still happens and that he doesn't just let them go given what his original plans were but his ether pool is so immense now that he actually begins to use nidhogg's eye and ascalon to temper dragons and the first thing he does is we meet him over in i forget the name of the arena but it's the arena up at the north of uh the churning mists where you fight that where you do the dark scale fate uh i forget the exact name but it's all the way to the north of the turning mist and he tempers dark scale vetter fullnear and vedofnier and they become part of his knights of the round they join the knights he's trying to take control of his enemies in order to uh be a more effective effectively more powerful and that leads to what is essentially the second unending coil of bahamut because a bunch of unending coil mechanics start popping up more specifically now you know what i'll say just all of them there's there's twin tony mechanics there's nail mechanics i i think there are also bahamut mechanics i'm trying to think maybe there aren't there's definitely those two though there's definitely dragon mechanics you know that you would find familiar if you did the unending coils and it makes for what i like to call uh drew cobb because i call this dragon song reprise ultimate and then they have you cobb so i call this drew cobb that's what it is it's just you cobb two electric boogaloo and that was a major shock i definitely i definitely expected to see some familiar dragon mechanics because of nidhogg i didn't expect to see them because of thorden although thornton actually did have a lot of coil mechanics even in normal mode which surprised a lot of people at the time so i suppose it's still um it kind of follows suit to some capacity and again this is actually a lot like thordan's first phase i mean he does these two major dances wrath of the heavens and death of the heavens i'd say they are mildly more difficult maybe maybe even not i honestly think this phase is largely the same difficulty but death of the heavens is so late in the fight and the amount of pulls you'll get to practice it is so much lower that it is inherently more difficult to do consistently there's almost no variance in the way you can approach it there's a tiny bit but not a whole lot and it requires such tight execution and movement that can any sort of slip up in your back to the beginning there are you know ways that you can get through even with a death or two but it starts combining you gotta remember it's now combining thornton's mechanics with the knights mechanics with dragon mechanics so the number of things on the table is just so high so the first time you do these things it's so incredibly overwhelming especially when you get to the playstation tethers from the first phase which you haven't done again since then and those get mixed in with spread damage aoes and needing to be knocked towards doom puddles from the faith unmoving and there's a spear aoe and cauterizes coming from the dragons and there's twisters dropping at your feet you're just it's everything imaginable they could have thrown at you all at once and the only reprieve is that it's at the end of the day a downtime dance you're just trying to focus on the mechanics and not uh trying to dps the boss at the same time so that gives it a little bit of uh it pumps the brakes a little bit more than i think most people would have expected but then something else really weird happened so now we're on this alternative timeline you know we're ten plus minutes into the fight we've survived wrath of the heavens death of the heavens and the end of the thornton phase is kind of similar he instead of you know being weak and doing the whole swinging around thing like desperately at just under three percent soon as you bring him to 2.9 percent he actually starts begging for his life and this is another branching timeline that can happen if you s if you do not spare his life you will go on to face nidhogg and rice felger but and that's the next phase spoiler by the way you're going to face nidhogg at the final steps of faith but you won't have the same results because now when you go to try to save astinian from nidhogg's eyes you are going to not have the ether of your dead allies you know you won't have hosh font you won't have a sale i think you do still get a buff from is sale but i i pretty sure she's alive and fighting in the background she also never dies apparently in this timeline so i i haven't seen that i actually would like to see it but i haven't seen it because we never we never got to the point where we beat the dragons without sparing thordan so you just lose at that point you can't save a stinion so you may have saved font but you still you lost the war at the end of the day but if you spare thord and he begs for mercy and then mocks your compassion then he jumps away and leaves ascalon behind now a lot of people have wondered if we let thornton get away how does nidhogg return and that's because thordan actually leaves ascalon on the ground and the other dragon eye is in ascalon because of all the ether he absorbed from azusa's law he doesn't need ascalon in order to maintain his primal form he still has his knights he's now temporary he's now tempered dragons and his reservoir of ether is whatever as this law had tucked away in the etherochemical research facility he just doesn't need the eyes anymore so esthinian will take the eye he will hold them both together and nidhogg will take him over but for some reason nidhogg just takes a completely different approach to the dragon song war this time around what ends up happening is when nidhogg descends upon ishgard in the final steps of faith he actually uses neurolink technology on hracefelker in order to enslave him and make him part of the offensive because no doubt reiss felger with his vow would have denied attacking ishgard and that one's weird to me only because the the logical way that happens is there's two things one he saw what tiamat and what had happened to tiamat which wasn't so much it was neural linking technology but it's really just sealing them away and not demanding them to do things but i guess after thorden um i don't know i guess after he went to as a salon absorbed all of the warring triad through that nidhogg's eye that was an ascalon learned more about neurolinking technology and decided to use it against his own brood who refused to fight against ishgard maybe they battled on their own terms and uh and sorkai or something and uh nidhogg just after being the victor decided that was the best outcome and that plays a major major role in the next fight because now you have to fight both nidhogg and race felger at the same time and that is that is a time indeed because i think that's the hardest phase in the entire encounter so this phase has two major rules while you're actually doing all of the mechanics for one grace velgar has a vow with shiva if many of you have done the story you know what that is he's not allowed to claim a mortal life he can kill other dragons if he really wants to but he cannot kill a person that is what he promised shiva and that's what saves our hides with him a fair number of times however with the neurolinking technology he doesn't have a choice realistically he has to attack so what happens is if trace felger kills anybody he actually falls into a rage from breaking his vow with shiva and then he becomes unkillable he's just empowered by it he takes less damage he deals lethal damage with every single attack so if anybody dies to a race velgar attack across the entire phase you essentially wipe there's no way you're gonna finish this encounter on the flip side nidhogg's vow i don't remember the exact vowel but i think it has something to do with inflicting eternal uh suffering upon ishgard so his goal is not to wipe ishgard out it is to um ensure that they suffer for eternity because as a dragon you know he'll be able to enjoy it's like a blink it's like a blink of the eye to him but for them it'll feel they'll feel the effects of time and like this constant oppression from nidhogg and his brood and so he gives you a buff called a debuff called mortal vow and it deals damage over time constant suffering and then it eventually explodes and if you don't give the mortal vow to another person to continue the suffering then nidhogg's vow is broken and he goes into a rage it's far more technical than race velgar's but essentially those are the two conditions that have to be endlessly met throughout the encounter if nidhogg kills someone but it's the immortal vow still goes off then you're fine but if race feller kills anybody it's over so it's a very very tight phase because the pressure's on absolutely everybody to not make even the smallest mistake and the rest of the phase is again unlike thorin this is pretty much constant uptime with both of these dragons you need to constantly be monitoring how much damage you're dealing which one of them is higher which one of them is lower what mechanics they're doing where are they on the arena because they fly around for their different mechanics and the big thing is balancing the health because they have two points in the fight with their health is not within about three percent of each other then they actually just blow somebody up the dragon with more health actually will just blow up a team normally it's just two light party stacks you know four players each but the light party of the dragon that's two ion health just gets absolutely obliterated if that happens to be trace vulgar it's instantly over but i'll be honest if you suffer four deaths in this phase at best you're picking it up and trying to progress just to see more mechanics at that point and i think they did a fantastic job with the mechanics during this phase definitely my favorite phase definitely the phase i think is the hardest because there's just so many things that can go wrong the mortal vow passes even being slightly off with an aoe somebody accidentally getting clipped by something from price vulgar somebody just losing their attention for a few seconds but the big mechanic is roth flames which actually marks four players with a dark debuff two players with a light debuff and two players with nothing on top of that it does the orbs from nidhogg extreme the bomberman explosion ones he does ock mourns that you have to be baiting because they leave puddles behind so if you stand in the puddle you'll bleed and die the mortal valve player is taking bonus damage there's a cauterize through the room you have to do this incredibly tight very specific movement in order to make sure everything is resolved there's so many different permutations of where you might have to go and who has what debuff and that's why we have that's why somebody actually hits a macro that puts markers over everyone's head so to remind us of our priority for when we actually line up because afterwards the four dark aoes need to spread away from everyone else and the two light aoes are split damage aoes so they need to pair up with one unmarked player each and then three seconds after that is over there's a mortal vowel pass it's just it just instantly is like this constant barrage of mechanics and this is a major choke point for the phase because after that honestly it's not that bad you know there's some new positioning you have to learn for the remaining mechanics both the tethers and the hallowed wings plus hot tail oh there's a hot tail or a hot wing from nidhogg at the same time after you've done all the bomberman bombs as well so you got to be paying attention to that and know how to spread out within the narrow hot wing versus the very wide hot tail it's it's a lot and even though it's only like a three minute phase it just this phase feels like eternity i see how the dragons see time now because that phase feels like an eternity so um but once you get through it um it's just a matter of consistency this is your huge consistency check along with death of the heavens and phase five and thornton beforehand because once you manage to get through all that once you get through the cauterize after having the correct debuff and going to the correct side to make sure you cancel out debuffs and then finishing this final dps check after one final mortal vow pass you now you know at this point you'd think oh the war is over and if you killed thordan then this is where the team would wipe because they are unable to free ostinian however by leaving thordan alive we kind of resolve one of those issues in exchange for a much worse one alpha shows up he's like okay where he got to save estinian he starts attacking the eyes they start doing those big room-wide damage bleed aoes from the earlier phase but thornton shows up and goes oh i'm going to take all these eyes and i'm going to become the ultimate god so he eats nidhogg's two eyes he eats grace velgar's two eyes and grace vulgar by the way who thanks you for killing them they're like oh thank god you killed me now i won't break my vow and i can be with my beloved which is heartbreaking by the way instead he has his eyes eaten and he becomes part of this amalgamation of thornton who takes on the aspects of both dragons and becomes the dragon king thorden essentially the ultimate god of amongst because not only does he have the warring triad he has four dragon eyes there's a lot of either oh there's no way we can do that and i love the little detail alphano he when he sees that thordan is actually absorbing the eyes he grabbed justinian who was freed because the eyes were taken from him uh he tries to like get him away but you're like there's no way you're getting out of here time alpha no he does get away they like disappear like npcs do when they just need to move but like there's no way you're getting it but it does that's fine and then we come into the final phase and we're like 15 minutes into the fight at this point and all of a sudden now you got to deal with dragon king thorden this final phase is a lot like the golden bahamut phase back in yukob it's about a three minute really tight execution and mitigation check alongside the final dps check of the encounter but this one is a lot more technical than i think the previous finales have been now i want to be more clear the last approximately three minutes probably even a little bit less than that of all of the ultimate encounters normally involves a tank mechanic a party split damage mechanic and some kind of aoe to avoid golden bahamut is oc mourns uh i forget the name of the i think it's it's not i keep wanting to say akhafa because of this encounter he has a tank damage split aoe he has a party split damage aoe and then he has extra flares which just send the aoes across the arena you just gotta move between them real quick you have um on you have ultima weapon ultimate which does each of the primal mechanics you know does an infrared mechanic a titan mechanic and a garuda mechanic before he starts actually charging up his enrage and then for alexander you have the aoes the the three aoes that go one at a time he has a split damage aoe on the party and then he has you know a tank swap he has you know he hits a single tank and then um well technically it's it's a split tank buster followed by a single tank buster that requires a swap but we end up usually just involving that and then stacking for one of them so again he has a tank mechanic in a way this one doesn't really do that he does do three mechanics that essentially rotate but then he mixes in some other things that you have to just manage throughout the entire phase so he starts with exo flares but they're nothing like any of the exoplayers we've seen before because he has he's grown like a tail with another sword and he has two swords in his in his actual hands all of his mechanics come from the swords and every single one of his major attacks comes assisted with either a point blank aoe or doughnut so exit flare's edge will do either fire swords to get out of his hit box or ice where you have to be in his hit box and then on top of that it starts an extra flare from each of his sword locations and those patterns are wildly random so you have to dodge the exit flares while dodging the donut aoe or the point blank aoe and that gives you a bunch of different permutations fortunately the world's second group figured out a fairly consistent strategy regardless of which one you do but it is incredibly overwhelming the first time you see it fortunately again with experience or with smart thinking a lot of these things can be broken down to very simple elements now immediately after getting through that though you're introduced to a fairly unique mechanic for dragon king thorden his auto attacks all give either a dark resistance down or a light resistance down and he will always target your top two aggro as well as the closest party member now this is very interesting because the tanks essentially will take two autos and then tank swap because they want to swap which of the two debuffs they're getting dark or light but the third player gets one dark and one light debuff and a physical phone so if they eat another auto attack afterwards they'll die so you basically the other six members of your party need to take turns being the closest person to thornton while also not being too close to anybody else in order to eat that third auto attack safely and control it and thornton will do two of these auto attacks between each major mechanic so we ended up sending our two melees in first after the first mechanic the exit flare two melees after the next mechanic which will be awkmorn's edge and then two our two healers would go after uh gigaflare's edge which again these are all dragon mechanics these are all familiar mechanics and they're pretty much all vomit mechanics as well so this is again another very yukon similar phase so after dealing with the two autos you come to akmorn's edge which actually puts three akmorn locations two on his like front right and front left and then one on his rear uh the front left and front right ones require three players and the ones on his tail require two players so two tanks take the one on the tail and then your two other parties uh light parties of three take the other two spots he does a point blank aoe and or a donut aoe one of the two so you need to make sure you're standing in the circle but you're also avoiding whichever aoe it is and then this is a massive mitigation just bam bam bam hits all the party with these constant repeating awk mourns and you're standing just apart enough from each other that if you don't take a step in and after the first mechanic goes off after the first blast goes off that you might not even be able to reach each other with the healing very simple position check but very nerve wracking heal and mitigation check after that is two more autos and then the last real mechanic of the fight which is gigaflare's edge this is three proximity aoes and you just have to go opposite of each of them while mitigating and healing he will do a point blank or a donut aoe right at the start but after you dodge that you just have to make sure you're rotating around so go opposite of the first one then rotate over then rotate over again and again it's just scary from a mitigation and healing standpoint because not only do you have to be mitigating healing you have to kill the boss you are on a timer at this point after you've seen uh these three edge attacks gigaflare akmorn and exa flare and then also after there's been two autos following each of those essentially the fight repeats once more you go through x's two autos you go through akbar and two autos you go through giga two autos and then it'll do a couple more things it'll do the exo flare two autos akmorn two autos and then you actually hit the enrage and this in rage i think is probably the least exciting you know not even least exciting it's about as exciting as golden bahamut's in rage it's not as flashy or extravagant as uwu or perfect alexander it's basically ochmorn's edge except that they only require one person each and they will kill the person who stands in them so what ends up happening is you want to send your lowest dps into the first hit your second three worst dps into the second hit and then it's up to your third dps to finish and this is only about a five second time frame because the first second and third hits all come out just a couple of seconds apart and the third hit you just kind of ignore because you can actually get an extra attack in potentially if you don't take the immediate damage and you just let the mechanic fail and blow up on the raid because nobody was standing in it um it really surprised me i didn't think it was going to be as quick as it was the first players die and then the second players have to go in pretty much immediately after the first player's health bars go away so you do not have a whole lot of time here to actually deal with it but considering everything you've been through up to this point it is just oh such a relief i'm relieved even thinking about the fact that i'm just done with it i don't have to think about it anymore oh i'm getting some sushi after i'm done recording this video i need to relax and with that you get about a 19-minute encounter and even with all the down times even with some of the easier phases like the eyes and after you've done it a couple of times the you know saving hush font phase it's just it's it's see i just break down thinking about it it's stressful it's intense and it is rewarding as all hell to know that you are finished with your first clear of an encounter such as this they just went this it just it just elevates past anything we've had with an ultimate before especially in the storytelling the way they went down this alternate what if path but forced you to relive it initially so you could kind of spot all the little differences sparing no expense with the little narrative changes having iselle and hashfont fighting in the background and the final sips of faith after you've actually saved hoshfon alfino having new text lines when thordan shows up to eat the eyes and even just the little things like thordan begging for his life of course mocking the warrior of light genuinely being someone who might actually let him get away that's something you could reasonably see our warrior of light potentially doing especially back in the heavensward days where we really didn't get any choices in our dialogue at least not meaningful ones even now they're not really that meaningful but they're better now than they were way back in the day the fact that the story and the lore and the narrative is just built in makes it so much better and then the encounter design is all wrapped around it too the more you understand about heaven's ward the more you understand about these encounters the better the encounter is and the more smoothly you can actually get through it so this just raises the bar even yoship he said he thinks it's the hardest ultimate they've ever released because they had to take into account players are a lot better at the game than they were back in the unending coils and you know players are capable a lot more we have new game systems and we have new skills so we need to account for all those things so that alone just means they also had to raise the bar and i really do think that if we had gotten this at the end of shadowbringers it wouldn't have been as good i think they would have held back in some regards i do wonder how different the incarnation of this in 5.51 would have looked like versus the incarnation we got in 6.61 and the fact that i even think that means that the that's why i say the weight was worth it because i do i do think that it just wouldn't have been as good if we had gotten it back then as much as i would have loved having one and we'd probably be talking about like the warring triad ultimate right now or omega ultimate or something like that and i'd love to have those things i feel like there's so many lessons learned here there's so many new things tried and at the same time it still just feels like an ultimate like the mechanics themselves like the actual mechanics you need to perform to successfully survive they are just different enough from what we already know without really breaking new ground i just felt like i was doing an ultimate i said that other than the stress of progression like new prog points or like that very end where your hands are shaking and you don't even press the right buttons but you're like i can't die i can't die as long as i don't die we got this that's always there but the rest of the fight wasn't really that stressful someone who's been doing a ton of ultimate you know over the years and that's a really weird feeling to have to be in the middle of prague and to just be like i'm not worried about this this is easy i've done this a million times even before this fight came out but at the same time to be excited about it almost every time and don't get me wrong when you've repeated the thornton phase a thousand times you're no longer that excited about it you might think about it like i do in retrospect and think about how you felt progressing it but when you've done it a thousand times you're not that excited to do it a thousand and one times so i got bored i was yawning i was like whatever but i never lost my appreciation for it i was just so impressed with what they had put together and how they're gonna follow it up and not to mention they did something else that was very different we didn't really get very many remixes of music here this isn't like alexander or ultima where it's just like we're just laden with these musical remixes it was a lot more again like the unending coil where they just cleverly used the music we already had in the game and matched it to the specific phases based on what they wanted to do you know and we went through a lot we went through the vault final boss music the vault dungeon music we went through uh thordan's bass music the only real theme that i would have expected was the primals version of heroes but having listened to it i'm kind of glad they didn't i don't think it would have fit the fight or the pace of the fight as well as the original version of heroes again i'm glad they went with that but then you've got you know the the midstinian music from final steps of faith you have the uh condemnation i think which is you know from the cutscene at the end of heaven's ward where you're saving astinian you have dragon song when you're dealing with nidhogg and race felger you have uh just all these different tracks that they use throughout heaven's word to really again nail home the point of telling a story and the best part is at the end of it all the minstrel himself gives you a little sign off like he you see dragon king thordan die and you see both race felger and nidhogg you know fly up into the sky like you saw nidhogg did when you freed astinian at the end of heaven's ward and now those are two of stormer's children that were lost in the conflict and he goes over about how you know loss and he talks about loss and he talks about being a hero and he talks about what the possibilities could be and how you know a single a single life just has so many effects on the way things play out he's narrating every phase as you get to it giving you a brief synopsis of how the story has changed or you know how the story was told the first time around and when it all comes together in the end he closes the book on heaven's ward a re-imagining very similarly to the way that we experience the actual heavensward story from the uh from uh i can't remember hoshvan's dad's name right now it's um like i'm almost an hour in the recording recordings yeah i keep i keep thinking of the children yeah of uh yeah you know who i'm talking about it's the book closing he writes he narrates all of heaven's word i just can't remember it i'm so sorry listen maybe i could google it or i can google it right now um uh a harsh font i'm just gonna just get a google watch much fun graystone cool listen this is sometimes you just you have to do this you just have to look up house four top there you go i got it edmond there you go it's very similar to edmont basically narrating except that now it's the minstrel he tells you it's an alternate story closes the book on it and it's such a beautiful end before the screen goes black and it just tells you you won it's just every detail i don't know how they're going to top this i don't know how they can i mean they can the the quality of the story and the raid series and everything it go it's high it goes up after heaven's ward it go it went up in heaven's war so it just makes me even more excited for ultimate because this is just now and this and this what if scenario thing they did opens a whole lot of doors up until now i've been saying there is no chance the warring triad will have kefka because the wandering minstrel just tells us what happened he doesn't make stuff up here he made stuff up he basically looked at what are the possibilities of if holschon had died which is not quite the same but let's be honest if he's just gonna throw things in there that never happened kefka can totally be a part of the warring triad ultimate now and i think we will see them go that route i'm flipping that prediction that i've had for years i said there's no way kefka could be a part of the warring triad now i'll be shocked if he doesn't just go but what if somebody had managed to harness the power of the warring triad upset the delicate balance that asis law had put into it put into effect and brought it crashing down upon eorzea and then there's just gonna be like wasn't there a story omega told and then omega and shinryu we could fight like omega and shinryu could be fighting each other and we're just we're like in between their attacks and aiming their attacks at each other and omega maybe i don't know maybe he absorbs midgard's armor maybe he wonders about a future and if omega had absorbed shinri or if he had beaten midgets who knows what they'll do and that's exciting when we don't know what to expect after all the predictability we get in final fantasy 14 that's what's exciting if you sat through over 50 minutes of me rambling on about all this i hope that at least that takeaway is something you quite look forward to that note i'm hungry i'm gonna wrap this video up yeah it was great we'll see if i still feel that way in like a few months looking back on it after beating it a few more times who knows but man go enjoy the kill vod and i'm going to be releasing some more stuff for this in the near future anyway uh thanks for watching be sure to like favorite subscribe and share and i'll see you all in the next video until then take care

Channel: Mrhappy1227

Views: 94,302

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, DRU, Dragonsong, Reprise, Dragonsong Reprise, Ultimate, Ulti, Thoughts, Breakdown

Id: 9tErDs-UyME

Length: 52min 46sec (3166 seconds)

Published: Mon May 09 2022