FFXIV Raiding Has Changed How I See MMORPGs 

FFXIV fights are also designed a lot to show you boss mechanics one at a time, and then they start layering multiple boss mechanics at the same time after. So you learn what to watch out for and how to deal with it them overlapping one another.

In FFXIV, even if you lose, you feel progression. That's a rare feeling to have in an MMORPG.

It's almost like not having to balance the game with 10 gorillion variables, providing a global release of a boss that is actually not a buggy mess and rewarding gear progressions even if you don't get good RNG on the rolls makes the playerbase feel...happy? Impossible..

A little tip for bell if he wanted to keep a keen eye on bosses cast bar without squinting his eyes. You can split the boss debuff/buff bar, cast bar and health bar into separate bits, enlarge them and place them to places where your eyes are generally placed so its easier to see what mechs the boss are casting and what not.

Just to clarify the extended fight times due to deaths and repeatable mechanics are only applicable to normal. In savage you WILL enrage in a set amount of time so deaths usually = enrage. Also, for savage 99% of the time mechanics are tuned for 8 people so if you have only 7 up or 1 person fails a mechanic you will likely kill the entire raid - or end up with a lot of damage downs that inevitably = enrage.

The biggest thing FF14 does is that it makes Raiding Feel Like real tangible progression. Ik that sounds weird but it's just simply something other games really lack. I feel like I can easily enter and I learn as I go, and then I'm optimizing. It's stair stepped and I have actual progression. It's not just a brick wall

The entire teaching journey that is taken throughout every bit of content in this game, including the MSQ dungeons and trials, is exactly why people advise against skipping if you don't have the brain and awareness to very quickly pick up mechanics. You miss out on so much and will have trouble recognising a new mechanic that someone who has played through more of the content could immediately narrow down to one of two or three possible things.

*Big Disclaimer, everyone:* Michael is (more or less) comparing his experience with *Normal Difficulty* content to WoW Heroic Raiding. That's basically like comparing Raid Finder in WoW to Heroics. I wanted to point this out because I felt for people who don't play FFXIV, it wouldn't be obvious that this is the "easy/accessible" content he's talking about. Savage Difficulty, on the other hand, is a step up... deaths are far more frequent, failing mechanics more punishing... and there's much more of a "puzzle" (like Michael described experiencing in WoW). In addition, the raids can last anywhere from about 10m to 30m or longer... which is why there's the "tradeoff" he mentioned (i.e., one "long" chain of fights vs. the fights being broken into single encounters). One other thing: the "very clear animations and indications" aren't always the case in Savage. Those big yellow/orange circles you see on the ground, for instance, aren't even there most of the time... nor are stackup markers, spread markers, flare markers, or other "blatantly obvious" indicators. And yes, in Savage, you can (and will) constantly fail mechanics that wipe the entire group. So the statement "This is more of a dance and less of a strategic mechanical puzzle where one or two people messing up can wipe the entire group" is objectively false. Hell, in P1S (the Savage version of the fight he shows), the most common thing that causes wipes is one person messing up or not being resurrected in time to satisfy the mechanical requirements.

Well of course. WoW raiding is not really like FFXIV, in FF accessibility is way higher. Oh yeah and jobs are actually balanced with very minor difference in dps. In WoW it can be a 30% difference sometimes. That's insane.

The nice thing about FF14 raids is that they actually teach u a lot of the core raiding mechanics from 7-8 years ago in ARR and HW dungeons/raids. Mechanics that we still see even in current content.

Just correction for your video, FF14 does have large scale Raids with many bosses one after another on savage difficulty. One in Bozja and one in Euruka. and they are very VERY hard on release.

Honestly the best way I describe FFXIV Raiding is perfectly complicated: There’s enough of a difficulty to where it does challenge you but that difficulty never feels overly complicated to the point of nigh-impossible, something that whether intentionally or not WoW’s raiding became guilty of doing in the attempt to raise the stakes

The way you gush over extremes, I think you'll enjoy savage a lot. Normal mode is fun and I still like jumping into them regularly, but savage is where the design really shines.

The stats you are checking are for Savage. You can change it to normal in the upper left drop done :) Stats will be a little different

Consider separating the boss castbar and make it like 160% size and put it into your field of vision. Really helpful for me

Yeah just wait until you do savage. They stopped giving vulnerability stacks because it started to become normal to eat them for uptime. Now you get damage down... and with how tight some DPS checks can be, that is 100x worse than vulnerability stacks.

I completely agree that the vulnerability stack system is genius. It's a mark of shame that I want to prevent as a player, but at the same time, it doesn't punish the entire raid for one person's screw ups.

As a long time WoW vet, I was kind of nervous to try diving into the Ex trials blind a week after they were out. But I tried the duty finder, found a practice group, and spent 45 minutes working through the mechanics with a bunch of strangers. We eventually got the kill, and it left such a good impression that I went on to farm 99 totems out, mostly in pug groups. 10/10

6:26 - Alliance raids are a thing, in FFXIV. There are quite a lot in fact. "humongous contiguous raids, big dungeon to delve into with a full raid group" Every expansion has at least 1. The EW Alliance raid is just not out yet..

Two things people seriously underrate in FFXIV: the Sprout Symbol and the "A player has yet to clear this instance" message. It does three things. 1) People who have the content cleared or on farm immediately know they have a new player and instantly set expectations that it's not going to be a clean one shot. Pressure is instantly off the new player because nobody is expecting you to instantly know the fight (plus everyone else gets some bonus Poetics for Transmogs and more re-rolls for Wonderous Tails so it's win-win). 2) People who are legit new and have no clue what the encounter entails are honest about it. Everyone can see there's someone without a clear and nobody is going to bite your head off about it because people have already set expectations due to point 1. You also can't kick a player until 5-15 mins have passed depending on isntance so if you don't want to play with a new player, the onus is on you to leave, not on you to kick them. So the new player knows they won't get insta kicked like what happens often in LFR because they're new. 3) Because personal responsibility mechanics are a core focus of FFXIV Raid Design, everyone can see what killed the new player, how they died and what you can advise them to do next time. So there's much more of an active incentive there to communicate. With how FFXIV raid design works, it's often beneficial to allow a new player to go in blind for a few pulls to feel out the fight and get used to the mechanics than bombard them with information. because there's also no massive run back and combat resses are more generous, people are willing to let the new player dying a lot slide since hey, we were all shit at this fight once, right? Also because the game actively rewards you for not being a dick, people who are toxic to someone clearly struggling or having a hard time get dogpiled pretty quickly by the rest of the raid. Sure you meet some group of people who are dicks but that hapens in all MMOs. It's why the FFXIV community comes off as more "mature" I suppose. The game is basically built around people actually helping each other and communicating with each other. Compare to M+ which by design just breeds toxicity and impatience because if someone wipes you, well that's your key they just fucked up, or current WoW raids that are so time consuming there's always a huge flamewar (or people just quitting in PUGs) when people are running back to the boss.

Cool analysis, my only complain is that normal is casual content. Therefore, you will have to do this video format again if you jump in savage, where: Dying will punish you and your group; DPS check will slap you because enrage is always fixed to the timeline of the encounter. I really encourage you to run savage, and then if you want more difficulty go to ultimates. Will look forward to check your impresions.

What a lot of seasoned raiders will do is that while going through the normal fights, they'll pay close attention to the mechanics there and think about how to dial it up a notch or two. They've been doing this with decent success for years now. FF is the embodiment of, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

I came over from WoW in March. That feeling of new mechanics seeming so complex and impossible until you do them a few times and only then does it seem so obvious and easy to read, and really well designed.. I love every moment of this game.

I'd be curious to see you and Matt's take on savage difficulty, usually the first two savage bosses per tier are quite manageable with a step in difficulty to the 3rd then likewise the 4th.

I hope you reevaluate the ending of Endwalker after experiencing, as you put it, having a fire lit in you. I understand your original criticism, but that last challenge and the choice of "That I cannot deny" resonated with me because of this part of the game.

Small correction on the Weakness and Brink of Death debuff, it lasts for about 100 seconds, so 1min and 40 seconds. Doing 25% or 50% less damage for almost 1/6th of a fight in Ex or Savage can be huge, even if it's only 1 person.

Most of what you said only applies to normal. Try savage and it all goes out the window But it's fine. They're two things made for two kinds of players. Normal is great to let everyone enjoy the story, including people who can't or won't dedicate the extra time savage takes

I don't know whenever Bellular was this hyped, in awe and enjoying this much. Great video!

I love raiding in FF14. I started after you and have already cleared P1S. Hopfully tomorrow P2S. I like that I dont have to deal with trash and running around after dying.

There's a lot to be said about a game that actually teaches its players how to learn mechanics

14:00 To extend this point, the other thing that's really helpful with the (brief) floor markers is that it gives you JUST enough information to know which sort of mechanic you died to, so you can ask about it. "I died to the cone attack - what the telegraph for this?" works a lot better than "I died in the middle there, uh, to some sword swing I think?" for asking your teammates what you missed. The quick wipe reset gives a changes for people to do FAQ on fights, moreso with a veteran explaining the mechanic that everyone else wiped to, or with a newbie asking the "what's the telegraph" question. The short iteration time gives you a chance to ask and learn these things while it's all fresh. Do note that not all of the older content does this, so you might die on Shiva EX or Coils of Bahamut NM and say "What the hell killed me? I didn't even see it." It is definitely something that they got better with over time.

Hi! EW is the first expansion where I really dived into doing Extremes. Haven't done Savages but will do in the near future. And I got to say that I was really enjoying it! Our practice group wiped or died on the first few tries both for Trial 1 and 2 but after getting the hang of it, it felt really good! I agree that there is a sense of accomplishment in doing higher-tier difficulties and there are incentives to do these things. Still afraid of doing Savages but doing Extremes made the usual normal content/dungeons seem easier, in my humble opinion. Also, I like how people are friendly enough to others who are first-timers doing the Extremes and how we progress with the mechanic, inch by inch. It's one thing to watch a guide and take note of the basics but it is a whole lot different when you're actually in the fight and starting to feel that you're learning how the flow happens. I say, FFXIV's Normal Raids/Trials are akin to dancing, you dance you're way through the mechanics to minimize damage while Extremes/Savages, its like synchronized dancing/swimming, you need to be in tune and in sync with the other members to take down the boss :D

Seeing Mike getting all hype for the EX trials makes me want to go do them again, haha. Really excited to see a video on Savage experiences. 👍

We call ACT "fight club" in linkshell chat if we ever have to reference it. (As in, we don't talk about fight club.) Everything regarding it is discussed in our Discord.

"Let's scrap world bosses and move to FF's style of combat design." Anybody wanna let him know we have world bosses? 😆

Just a drive-by tip, you can change your view so you see more of the boss instead of the floor behind you. : Character Configuration > Control Settings > General > 3rd Person Camera Angle (or ctrl + arrow key up/down). Glad you're enjoying the game. Have a wonderful day :)

P3 and P3S out there making Warriors of Light out of Sprouts, love to see it. Just to show how these raids actually TEACH you the more pulls you have: my static spent last week proging P3S, we only managed to clear it 1 hour before maintenance. During our reclears today, we killed the bird in our 2nd pull with a lot of time to spare before enrage. Everyone knew what and when to do. Felt super satisfying, like when you spend a week studying for a test and when the test is in your hands you read it and realize you know all the answers.

Well there is a dummy in Thavnair. You don't need ACT - You pick the boss you want to fight and it puts you in a solo "duty" for that boss. It's still a dummy, but it is tuned to account for your movement etc against the chosen boss. For example, I couldn't down one boss dummy until I changed my starting rotation. If you can't down the dummy in a certain amount of time? Your dps isn't as good as it should be for that boss to account for the movement and mechanics. For someone trying to catch up you are still in WoW in many ways. I think you all need to unlearn or maybe play more of a variety of MMO's so you are more accustomed to changing your play style more. Also, in FFXIV when you are debuffed like that (8:22)? In WoW we do tend to move apart and away because it will do damage to others based on radius. Here if you move too far apart it can limit the healing you receive so it's better to not have another's circles overlapping your toon, but not be too spread apart.

You talked about the "Vuln Stacks", those are more a way for normal mode to teach people that they screwed up, those same mechanics on Savage apply "Damage Down" which is a 1minute debuff on you that you do 50% less damage. (If you were to survive the mechanic, if you aren't a tank yourself) this is to prevent tanks doing un orthodox things like sacrificng health to stand in an AOE to give rest of the party more room to manouver, there are two outliars, Gunbreakers Superbolide and Paladin's Hallowed Ground that prevent them taking any damage meaning that they wont take damage from the specific mechanic nor will the damage down bebuff then be applied to them.

EX2 was my first Extreme despite having played since ARR. It was so much fun and I loved the wave mechanic.

You probably couldn't see it because of the spell effects, but the second trial boss on Extreme actually has a visual indicator for which Crystalize effect it chooses, it's like an aura around its body.

There's a Stone Sky Sea location from HW to EW that you can unlock for practicing. Stone Sky Sea - HW: Dravanian Hinterlands (outside Idyllshire) The Circles of Answering - SB: Rhalgr's Reach The Lawns - ShB: Kholusia (Outside Eulmore) The Burning Fields - EW: Palaka's Stand (Outside Radz At Han) What we normally do if were not using ACT is unlock the content that you want to practice for, go to the designated Stone Sky Sea location for that expansion and choose the duty you want to practice for (ie Savage content). We hit the dummy with the openers and rotations. If you are able to beat the dummy within the time limit given (2 minutes) it means your dps is more or less within the range required for that content. If you can't, then you might wanna look at your equipment ilvl and your rotations and update the.. Practicing with the dummies builds good muscle memory and the time limit gives you a sense of urgency in fights.

Talking about the fight difficulty, here are my insights as someone who played WoW to BfA and who has played XIV since ARR. You will generally die more in XIV when you are unfamiliar with a fight. But dying has less of a penalty, because raises are only limited by the healers and red mages / summoners MP. The enrage timers for non-savage are also either non-existent or incredibly forgiving. The end result is that you can be carried through a fight by good healers. Healers in any given group, more than any other role, hold the keys to success or failure. If you have bad healers that die a lot or just don't understand / use their kit, you might wipe many times and never clear the fight. If you have great healers that avoid mechanics, help DPS, keep their MP up with their MP management tools, and raise quickly, you're almost guaranteed to win. An advantage of this design is that the fights can go for long and so people can experience / see the mechanics more, which leads to greater understanding. This is also helped by the fact that every single one of XIV's fights largely explains itself. There's a tutorial phase at the start where each mechanic happens on it's own with some time between each. Then after you've been introduced, that's when mechanics start getting mixed together and happen faster. The visual language used to convey mechanics is also fantastic and is (largely) consistent. The biggest downside is that if you end up with bad healers it could be just pure suffering and despair - although this can be mitigated by a good red mage and/or tanks that use their healing abilities to help keep the group going. Warrior, Paladin, and Gunbreaker all have varying capacities to heal party members, heal themselves, and just keep things going.

9:11 going to say you are comparing your damage to savage log on that fight and not normal

You can split the hp and cast bars for your target and move the cast bar above or below the center of your screen so you can watch the boss model and casts at the same time easier. You can also pitch the camera up or down with ctrl and the arrow keys if you want to modify your viewing angle more

Great video - cool to see you enjoying the game

Oh hey! As a long time raider, I love hearling new people's opinon about the raid. I'm happy to see you excited about the mechs! Because for me, these mech are just an old recycled mech that I've seen 1000 times. But hearing a new player getting excited about these is so fresh. You should try doing ultimates, Ucob and UWU are rather easy now, but they're fun. TEA is also fun actually it's the most fun for me! Pretty sure you will like these too.

I've been trying to teach some newbies in my FC to watch the boss animation more so glad you mentioned it!

Welcome to the game and it's great you're enjoying it! I'd always recommend starting with the early game raids, because those allow you to learn the games base mechanics (AoE markers/shapes, and common attack names). That way when you're in the higher end content, you'll recognise certain mechanics 2nd nature and be able to react a bit quicker :D You can also go into your HUD, and seperate the bosses information from being 1 'block' into 3 blocks. That allows you to make the bosses cast bar larger to get familiar with paying attention to it. You can also use 'Focus Target' to have the boss focused even when you're clicking other adds or players, so you still have a view of the cast bar! Have fun! And you'll pick everything up in time :D

Definitely would love a full video on your opinions of Extreme tier stuff once you've done both fights! These first two Endwalker ones are both fun while being very very different.

In recent savage difficulties (Edens and now Pandaemonium), getting hit with avoidable damage gives you Damage Down as opposed to Vuln Up, and with how the fights are tuned, even one damage down will typically mean you're hitting enrage unless you have nothing but blue and above parsers in your group. It means you won't die, you'll get to see the whole fight and learn the mechanics, but you won't clear it. It's a brilliant way to teach you the fight without having to wipe a whole bunch.

You can pan your camera up towards the boss (this is different than holding left or right click and moving the mouse) by holding the Control key and Up arrow. What I did was put my bar at the absolute bottom on my screen and my character is near the bar, I have much more screen estate to look at the boss and their animations.

Happy you enjoyed it so much :) When you say T1 ppl gonna think about the Coil Raids, since those are called turn 1-13 xP Only after i saw her i knew you meant the trial haha

@17:30 14 delivers on quantity. Just because something isn't labelled a "raid" doesn't mean it doesn't have bosses with proper and challenging boss design. Can't wait to see you check out Bozja especially. Eureka's fate bosses were more like Hunts which are akin to WoW's World Bosses (with a few special ones being proper boss encounters mechanically), but for Bozja with the Critical Engagements people must queue into, they're proper boss fights and many can rack up dozens of player deaths... which is manageable due to 14's bres design. Some of them are quite a bit more hectic and challenging than the normal raids... Red Comet...

I love raids in FF, if you wanna some other nice stories and good fights definitely dive into the older ones as well!

As far as raid tiers go, I'm split between Alex and Omega for best structure. While I like the boss rushes we have had with Eden and Pandemonium.... I still do miss the trash pulls as they help make the encounter feel a bit more complete to me. Omega probably handled that the best as you had trash in the story instances, and did the boss in group.

glad you're having fun. i recommend entering the balance discord for informations about your opener to help with your damage! hope you enjoy the (savage) raids.

Looking at some of his game footage and it seems like his *3rd Person Camera Angle* is not fine tuned yet. Changing this value will raise the camera from looking at the floor to looking at the boss. Go to: Settings > Character Configuration > Control Settings > General tab. Scroll to bottom and adjust to around 70. It's honestly life changing when you see do it. I really helps looking at the edge for mechanics like the lvl 83 trial for example.

If I may point out a feature, it is possible to adjust your Enemy Status HUD element to split off the debuffs and, more importantly, their cast bar, into separate moveable, scalable modules. You can absolutely get away with making a 200% size cast bar that is impossible to miss, and have it closer towards the middle so your eyes don't have to travel as far and will always notice when they're casting, and what they're casting, meaning less losing track of where you're looking, and faster reaction times as you don't have to travel your eyes all the way from the rightmost edge of the enemy health bar then back to the middle of the screen to watch animations/mechanics and then lower down to your buttons to track cooldowns. You can make it far less straining. Another feature that you may find beneficial, especially in some boss content where you might have multiple entities to track, or if you want to track a specific friendly player (especially if you some day decide to learn healers), is the Focus Target system that you can access by targeting an entity and then pressing Shift + F.

Bellular. Matt. For the love of God, primals, and Masayoshi Soken, PLEASE put links or credits to your end card music in your video descriptions! First the Bozja remix, now this awesome Radz-at-Han jam? You’re killin’ me!

Lol, hearing you talk about all of this almost sounds adorable. Glad you’re enjoying it!

If you miss the big raids with huge parties and multiple bosses... you're waiting for the alliance raid tier. Soon enough, we'll get the alliance raids which are 24-player raids with several bosses. Look forward to that!

Glad you liked the raiding experience. Savage is totally a different beast and would love to hear your thoughts on it once youget around doing that.

I think you would love Seat of Sacrifice Extreme with min item level and no echo. EX 2 in Endwalker feels like a lite version of this fight :D

So much to be said for the ability to tackle a specific raid/dungeon over and over. Thinking back to just about any of my first gos at an normal, Hard, or Expert fight and feeling like I’m barely hanging on vs doing it for the 30th+ time (TY Duty Roulette) and now feeling like it’s a well choreographed dance. Savage (synched) is still a tough one though because everything can hinge on not doing a single thing wrong.

kinda surprised at how all these wow players seem to think that Normal Mode Raids are the golden standard for how raiding should be. Yeah they're harder than their Trial counterparts. But i don't really feel "normal mode" to be considered the "endgame". Admittedly i've never raided in wow. I'm just kinda surprised that ppl are looking at Panda and are like "that's the raiding end game and it's super good". Compared to myself and i'm like "uhhhhh extremes and savage feel way more "endgame" to me". I guess one way i think about it sometimes is that the Raids, like Panda, eden, etc. etc. aren't something i think about as a separate "Tier" of difficulty. I consider them a separate piece of content, but it's the harder difficulty that i would categorize as the "end game". Yeah it's true that in terms of difficulty it goes Dungeons > Trials > Normal Raids=Alliance Raids > Extremes > Savage > Ultimate. But as a FFXIV player for the last 3 years, i guess i've just assumed that most players that make it through the MSQ would kinda do everything on "normal mode" regardless? Maybe its just a difference in how i define endgame, but for me, doing the content on normal mode isn't "end game" it's kinda "expected?" not sure if that's the right word for it. My point i that defining Normal Raids as "endgame" seems odd to me. Possibly because of how my personal experiences with Raiding differ from what i'm seeing on various WoW content creators and hearing their opinions. Just one of the benefits of having NOT played wow for the last 10 years lol.

20:00 - see those marks that your experience player put down for that raid right as you were talking about how helpful experience players are? There's a tool in the UI to save those marks, so that next time you see that boss you can load in pre-positioned marks. If someone helping you seems to have a good marking setup, save it.

One tip, you can change your camera tilt so the boss isn't disappearing off the top of your screen. It really helps with visual clarity, at least it did for me

i shrink my ability bars and split the cast bar from the boss HP bar and place it enlarged above my abilities to combat looking at bars but in such a way that a slight glance will let me see boss telegraphs rather than looking to the top of my screen :) but i know where everything is on my bars

i haven't spotted it posted, but assuming you haven't rebound it, CTRL+up or down arrow key pan your camera, the default is something like 28, and i play around 70-80, putting my character sitting right above my hotbar setup and the boss much closer to center mass, really helps with how tall a lot of the bosses are

I just wanted to add in a bit of info. There are a few dungeons in FFXIV that do have the the same feel as wow raids, but they are side content and niche things to do. Delubrum Reginae Savage, and the Baldesion Arsenal. DRS is a 48 man raid, and BA is a 56 man raid. BA is the only one that I've done personally, but comparing it to wow raids I've done, it felt very similar. Big huge dungeon, trash mobs that had a mechanic or two you had to do, everyone is pretty much listening to one group leader explaining everything as you go, setting up strategies for each fight beforehand while staring at the boss, assigning special roles to individuals for handling certain mechanics, preparing food, potions, special spells, etc. There is one big huge catch to both of these dungeons. You die, you're booted out of the raid. There's three ways you can be rezed, a spell called sacrifice, where the caster dies in your place, a potion called a reraiser, where if you die while under it's buff you have a chance to be rezed, and finally healer LB3. All raise spells are disabled outside of this, and that's outside of combat as well. There is no returning to the start and walking back. You are kicked from the instance 3 minutes after dieing, or you hit abandon duty. These fights are not commonly done, as BA has a frustrating entry system, and neither can be done with the duty finder, only a premade group can enter them. The strict rez restriction is also a massive deterrent, as it requires everyone to execute every mechanic perfectly. Very few leave you alive if you mess up, and in DR, when you fail any mechanic you get a debuff for two minutes that will auto kill you after 3 stacks, later reduce to 2 stacks. And yes, there are raid wiping mechanics in these fights. These are considered to be the savage version of large scale raiding, whereas the 24 man raids are fairly casual. So, while there's only 2 dungeons in the game that captures the feel of WoW's raiding, they do exist! Plus you get a special mount on your first clear of each, some snazzy FFXI and FFXII armor, minions, and a few other glamour items to show off.

As you talked about ACT: yes it gives you tour numbers. You can upload it to fflogs to see your rating. And upload logs to xivanalysis to get info about the buttons you pressed (combo breaks, number of gcd incident burst windows etc). Some jobs are not yet updated though.

You can separate the Target bar into multiple subsets. I like move the Target Progress bar down to the bottom middle and enlarging it so you always know what skill is being cast easily.

I really loved this video! What is the song you played during the outro?? It was like a boppy version of the radz-at-han theme and I need to add it to my ffxiv music playlist lol

Hey great vid as always. Any chance you guys can do a UI guide for FF? Maybe not all jobs but by roles? Ingame UI that said, don't have to do an external one if ya don't want to.

Michael, you're a proper (MMO) gamer. If you read your job's abilities and play with it (especially throughout the MSQ and all the dungeons and duties), it will come naturally to you. Step 1 in any new content in XIV: understand the mechanics. You can be the world's best dps, but if you're on the floor 20% of the bossfight, no one's going to benefit. If you absolutely MUST know your 'parse', then only bring it out once you've actually understood the fight. But by then, you'll realize it doesn't even matter. Just enjoy the fight :)

1 or 2 people can definitely wipe your whole group and its actually incredibly often for it to happen in XIV lmao

In savage instead of vulnerability stacks, they give you a damage down debuff instead. You're doing half damage for the next 30 seconds. Have fun killing the boss before enrage :). Also, nobody calls the extremes by number beyond the spoiler moratorium. And they definitely don't call it "T#". It's either Primal 1, the first extreme, or just [spoiler] extreme.

I specifically bound displacement with a alt+ combined key so I don't accidentally jump to my death

The Extreme, Savage and Ultimate fights in FF14 are SO MUCH FUN! Wrapping your mind around some of the craziness that are the current Savage content is legitimately some of the most fun I have ever had in all my life. They're tough, and you don't even get any loot, but once it clicks and you get that first kill.. OMG.

16:22 I have to say, it is very jarring to watch several WoW Mythic Raiders on streams consistently fail to obvious mechanic "tells" in dungeons or normal raid fights, it is extremely telling

Hey! Did you know that you can detach your target's cast bar from it's HP bar and move it anywhere on your HUD? You can also increase its size. I have the cast bar down just under the center of the screen and enlarged 200%

I really like vulnerability stack system because not only does it drive you to be better ,but it also shows who has difficulty with which mechanic, tank for example generally dont die as easily as other rolls but for example if you keep seeing off-tank with 3 or more stacks all the time then you know that that tank doesnt understand the fight and needs explaining how the fight works

The biggest thing, to me, is how if you die against a boss in a Normal Raid or Trial, everybody gets insta-rezzed and the whole fight just resets itself then and there. No lame corpse running, no time for players to bicker at each other. Just the boss staring you down waiting for you to try again. And again. And Again. until you defeat it. I'd have to say that I can count on one hand the number of times that my group had to entirely give a duty up on anything in Duty Finder. I think it happened once with the 4.0 MSQ boss, and again with the Trial after it when they were current content. Had a close call with the Lv83 trial, but we managed to do it with 12 minutes left on the timer after half of the group was replaced. Now, obviously, in Alliance Raids and in 4man Dungeons, there's still a corpse run, but _they give you shortcuts to each boss_ so your run is only from the previous boss to the boss you wiped against which cuts a lot of the time spent running. Also, Bellular hit the nail right on the head when he talks about awesome comeback stories. Everybody has seen this at least once... a healer and a tank are the only ones left alive, boss is at 5%, and the Healer pulls a sacrificial LB3 and rezzes the whole group who goes on to win the fight. Those moments, especially if you're the healer or the tank, feel so _awesome_ and that's something that cannot be overstated, the elation you feel when you managed to be the one to hold the line as the last person standing, or the healer who, with the click of the button, brought your entire group back to life, the healer's ultimate act of healing, simultaneously rezzing 6 people. It really puts a big smile on one's face to see it.

I havent done T1 EX, but from what Ive heard people say, the DPS checks are a lot tighter on that one.

i never played wow (even though i wanted to) but the way you describe the raids, latge boss gauntlets, reminds me of delubrum reginae, which is a large like 24 player road unlocked during the bozja storyline. i love it, and if you havent gotten to do it, you might like it too

I am also a first time Endgame FFXIV player and I played WoW from launch to date. FFXIV EX2 blew my mind for complexity and challenge in a raid boss. I was a healer and needed to know the right times to go to my marker, which gets really hard near the end of the fight, especially while people are getting tagged by stuff. I am glad I was not alone in thinking it was insane, old FFXIV players told me it was not that hard, that made me laugh.

As someone who played WoW starting in the first month of Vanilla and just switched to FFXIV this month, I don't miss contiguous raids or a contiguous continent so far. I think the reason why is because FFXIV does such a great job building the world outside of the raids and the trade off with non connected zones is that it enables them to curate better journeys and better experiences which ultimately lead to a better story experience. That's not to say that I think the zones are all better in FFXIV. What the team behind Vanilla WoW did with the cities in WoW still feels like a major achievement almost 20 years later. The difference between in feeling you get between Thunder Bluff, Iron Forge, the Undercity and so on is still pretty remarkable. I'm getting some of that exploring FFXIV for the first time but ultimately many of the most interesting places end up being not that important and you don't return to them very often. I guess what I'm saying is I'm having a lot of fun with FFXIV and the differences from WoW don't feel necessarily better. It feels like each has their own strengths

The dps statistics you were looking at were for Savage difficulty. according to that 9:13 screenshot.

Every time I watch one of these videos I can't help but notice how happy he is.

Progging savage is also a ton of fun, you can see yourself getting further and learning mechanics better as you go, currently on p3s and that fight is really something. p1s is a very good introduction and i think p2s steps up the difficulty in a good way to have even more casual players be able to learn as they go.

The way ffxiv teaches you how to fight throughout the entire game is similar to how most games give you a trial and error learning experience in most games but what I love is the way they subtlety train you into looking at the entire arena make you react like you were some kind of kung fu master they make you read your opponents movements anticipate their attacks stay just out of reach of their aoes so you can counter and punish them and charge in when your opponent is recovering to unleash your devastating signature burst then fall back as they rally up again to begin their charge once more only for you to nimbly evade them again destroying their minions and taking their ultimate attack like it was nothing then when they're exhausted flailing wildly you jump past their onslaught and deal the finishing blow as they cry out in agony as they curse your name from beyond the aetherial sea and you standing there at the end with a little nod or a heartfelt hurrah revel in your well earned victory Gotta love it

Ff14 really has a great way of teaching fights. Sadly for me, I had some bad experiences with other players, that would rather call me out every single time than to let give me time to learn it myself (yes, I announce first timing). Being already sensible it really makes trials a hurdle. In stormblood I remember only learning Shinryu - the other fights were 1shots with me dying and performing badly. Hence MSQ often pauses for me, whenever I have to do a new trial - takes much courage to queue for it. All the trials and even dungeons were a "do it once and never again" thing. However things changed a lot with trust system. I now enjoy the dungeon fights a lot. And hell I was hyped for the 2nd trial in endwalker - done with NPCs. Loved that and hope it gets the norm for MSQ. Learning the fight that way will make me feel prepared to do it in multiplayer too.

cant wait til you delve into savage, enjoying watching you experience XIV and what it has to offer and your thoughts on it vs WoW

Hope you get around doing Ivalice Raids + Bozja at some point. Bozja has some interesting raid mechanics that you might find fascinating to talk about.

In Savage and Ultimate one or two players can definitely wipe the group very easily. There are a ton of pass or die mechanics that can kill more than just the person that messed up.

So you if you want a big WoW-esque raid, the Stormblood and Shadowbringers relic content both have fairly difficult alliance raids with extra stuff, the Baldesion Arsenal in Eureka and Delubrum Reginae (Savage) for Bozja

Every time you mention not binding Engagement and Displacement one button press away I remember back when Displacement did more damage, many of the fights I would just remove it from my hotbar and take the DPS loss. At least now they're the same potency, even if it's less flashy. Now I have them on the same button placement, but different hotbar (using controller). Which... only helps if my brain decides to work but hey.

It’s funny, the way he talks about WoW encounter design being like a puzzle you have to figure out is almost the exact verbiage that others have used to describe XIV Savage fights. I’m really curious to see what his thoughts are on Savage when/if he gets to that point.

Do note that Savage bosses will do enrage cast if you have too many raises (2+ usually), and there are lots of mechanics that lead to very bad things if not all 8 players are alive. But there is also a beauty to this, because even if you lacking damage, you can still play out the fight to enrage. Yeah, you won't kill boss, but every phase I saw so far is time-locked, unlike Blizzard's favorite "boss percentage" locked. Because of that, fights are playing out same no matter what, your character spell timings never drift all over the place, and by pulling continously all the way you get more and more familiar with encounter until you clear it.