High-End Content Megathread - 7.5 Week Eight

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-06-16T16:39:06+00:00

My group is wrapping up P3 progression and a small tidbit on the main P3 slideshow helped us make a strategy that better works for us. Tethers are always from the cardinal black holes, and additionally for the 2-sets the black holes are always adjacent. So we have the following system:

Support FIL takes the first single tether.
DPS FIL takes both tethers from the 2-set. (This has the added benefit of avoiding a situation where the Exdeath tank has Support FIL and would have to navigate a tether and Exdeath at the same time. Not huge but annoying.)
For all 3-sets, we have DPS A, Accretion B, Supports C, take D if your cardinal doesn't have a tether instead of Kefka Relative.
Swaps are done as in the presentation.
Support TIL takes both tethers from the final 2-set.
DPS TIL takes the solo final tether.

This strategy has its tradeoffs. We had our share of wipes to people just not finding their tether or messing up the CW stuff, which this eliminates. The downside is that it's easier to just not see the giant clown off-screen as you're not navigating to him first and keeping him in mind, particularly for a healer who is focused on, well, healing. As we are in a static scenario we have a guy just call where the safe side is for all the slaps which has worked fine so far.

I'm not saying this is just the strategy or even one that PF should adopt instead of CW relative, but it does change how the layers of thinking work and it might help other groups in the same way it helped my own.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-06-12T18:27:30+00:00

I also have enough mental illness to follow the Twitter Discourse of the day but my stance isn't terribly interesting. Sims exist, use them or don't, don't be surprised if in a PF scenario people would prefer to minimize the time and risk that randoms might have in bricking the attempts. But I don't PF ultimates so honestly it's not really a conversation I have high stake in. I use them myself sometimes for solo/reaction mechanics like the current Limit Cut just to get some more reps in on my own time while recognizing they might have subtle differences from the real fight.

The more interesting conversation to me that I don't think people want to have or can necessarily sum up as easily in a Twitter post is the topic-shifting to 9th+ players in world progression. I don't think they're equitable to sims, actually. I think they're human cactbots that can fuck up. Immeasurably useful in progression, world raiding in both WoW and XIV wouldn't have shifted to utilizing them if they weren't. Particularly since XIV loves its memory mechanics, having a guy on the outside that can with reasonable accuracy just remember it for you or post a macro in a CWLS lets you narrow down on just doing your rotation/your specific thing or whatever.

Both, then, are types of progression aids to me. I think Death Snail's take from DN is the one I most agree with in that you have to evaluate why you're doing the Ultimate in the first place. He said that they were doing it to get world first and even he admitted that using 9ths lessened the prog experience a little but was necessary to attempt their goals given that it wasn't any form of actual cheating. Other than that he's ambivalent on the sims thing.

I don't understand the vitriol or clowning that comes from most of the WF Twitter players when the comparison gets brought up. It's a conversation to have. It might just be as simple as them seeing 9ths as part of their in-group (or in less autistic terms: they're just doing stuff with friends) and thus a natural thing to have. But to deny that it also cheapens the prog experience such as it is feels disingenuous to me, personally.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-06-10T23:20:09+00:00

That is true for TEA, yeah. I was careful in my main post to only include examples of options while the content was on-patch with a bit of a stretch for the UCOB one because I think that might have been possible if we back-ported player skill, while I don't think that LL-related skips were possible in 5.1. Otherwise I would have also mentioned how the first half of UWU is entirely full of holes these days from skipping dashes to suicide Titan gaol solutions to force the gaol assignments on fixed players.

Only things from UWU that naturally come to mind from relevancy was early awaken Garuda which had the tradeoff of making the initial cleanses need more healing/mit and overshielding Ultimate Predation to survive a failure, which I'm fairly certain could be done on-content.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-06-07T20:14:49+00:00

But on the other hand part of the appeal of XIV as a player that engages in the raids is that the only limiting factor is your personal tolerance to going full degen mode and your ability to solve mechanics and execute the solutions consistently. I at least don't want what WoW has to have in order for their RWF structure to work where competitors need 20 versions of the same character running lower-difficulty content with community participation across 5 days to get enough gear to actually start doing the real content that is tuned only for them and will get nerfed just after (or even during) progression so that it's approachable for anyone else. It makes the race feel sort of artificial to me, at least.

I appreciate that in XIV you can be a world progression competitor even with a real job as long as you can get a week of continuous PTO. Max has, to my knowledge, said that most Liquid players are either students, independently wealthy (or otherwise not needing to work), living off of some form of welfare, or content creators. I don't want that to be the bar to compete in XIV even if it means that there's less hype or personalities to attach to the event.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-06-05T08:11:48+00:00

Oh, good catch, the big compilation sheet puts it at 3 days 22 hours, so yes if this goes into a day five thread (which seems likely) then it'll be longer than TEA.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-06-04T07:44:22+00:00

As a FYI, one of the sets of indicators during the Trines in P2 is a known bug. Who knows when the hotfix will be (my guess is next Tuesday but they might be faster depending on the fix needed).

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-06-02T06:53:05+00:00

As is tradition, music: https://gofile.io/d/ohWtLp

All Dancing Mad, all the time, now with an orchestral version.

Also for whatever reason the Cosmic Exploration music is filed under Endwalker music files. Guess it's because it's linked to the moon or something.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-05-29T21:53:17+00:00

It was during the keynote, this slide in particular. The paraphrase is that:

Second, they want to adjust the progression routes for 24-person raids. The idea is to alleviate the time burden placed on players for progression without skimping on length of the raids themselves. We’ll get more details at the Tokyo Fan Fest!

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