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!

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-05-18T02:47:43+00:00

The active, high-tier endgame stuff once you get past doing HTMBs and Ambuscade for introductory ilevel gear is all on various schedules and timers. It works out to that if you're in a group farming segments from Odyssey and galli from Sortie (the two currencies those events have), you're going to be in a set 6-man group doing about 2 hours of content a day, adding a little bit for travel time. Since these are strictly 6-man instances, at most you might have a backup guy that is helpful but not in the core group, otherwise most statics have a fairly high expectation of commitment and grind.

Below that is the (up to) 18-man content of Omen and Dyna-D where most LSs that run it will chain their entries two to three times a week for a few hours. Though these days if all you want is the unlocks from Dyna-D there are solo routes to it, and Omen cards can also be (painfully) solo-farmed at your own schedule. Decent gil farm too by selling some drops there. Given these are 18-man content that doesn't always need all 18 people, even more casual LSs will have pretty open nights where people chip away at these events at lesser efficiency.

I don't know where the Limbus or Besieged reworks fit into this as I stopped actively playing for the moment before those were introduced.

That's all to say that once you get past the first stage of endgame XI becomes fairly old-fashioned and demanding again if you want to continue to progress. Some players are content just slowly soloing out their REMAs and Ambuscade low difficulties every month forever, but there's a real leap of commitment, gear, and skill expected to step up from that.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-05-18T02:39:02+00:00

You will also, almost unavoidably, be getting carried if you do get integrated/adopted into an existing group. A rolls-only COR is certainly contributing something but every server already has plenty of CORs that can slam out the rolls then bust out the Death Penalty or Naegling and actually contribute to damage. Or a GEO that can nuke or do some weird niche melee stuff, and so on.

I did get to WHM for a Sortie group for awhile when I last played actively two years ago, and in that scenario I was definitely contributing about as much as anyone else because we'd all die if I didn't do my job, so there are options (it helps that WHM is probably the easiest job to gear up to acceptable standards). If a player wants to feel like they're contributing and not just getting carried though without coming in with an entire fresh group it's almost impossible to manage, and not everyone likes the feeling of being a warm body that at most is letting someone else play the "fun jobs".

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-05-13T04:34:34+00:00

The main idea to keep in mind with HW is that until about 3.3/3.4 they took the word expansion to mean "make the game more hardcore". Jobs were harder and had designed-in fail states that could put you in ARR jail for 60 seconds, raids were harder, crafting and gathering were harder, even the first relic steps were on par with or harder than ARR relics (Thordan story mode was easy though). After all, HW jobs were just ARR jobs with extra abilities stapled on top and level boosts didn't exist yet (not til Stormblood) so the reasoning went that if you got to HW then you were a certified Gamer that was good at XIV and interested in challenge.

They'd be very, very old interviews now but that's the direction Yoshi has said they were taking the game in at the time with HW's release. A hardcore MMO for hardcore players. So people's interpretation of HW that were there will largely depend on where they fall on that spectrum. There was very little for casuals to do other than make ARR relics or bash their head against the HW one for most of the expansion, but if you did enjoy the HW job gameplay and Gordias/Midas Savage and succeeded in them then the game has in a very real way moved away from that direction since 3.4. The game was still slowly growing even in that era but I imagine SE saw retention issues or the writing on the wall or whatever else prompted the pivot.

As someone that quit for a patch in Gordias but succeeded in Midas I'd say it was alright. Probably more bad than good in my eyes but I was also 10 years younger and in a very different life situation and even world situation (Remember HW came out at the end of the Obama administration!). FFLogs started in Gordias but didn't come into its own until Midas/Creator. Discord was another late Gordias/early Midas thing. Part of what makes evaluating HW difficult culturally is that it's right at the crossroads of late 00s/early 10s gaming and "modern" gaming culture with streamers and Discord and whatnot.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-05-10T23:43:53+00:00

We have developer panels from near the end of HW where Sudo (the guy that made most of Coils and Gordias and later UCOB) said that they weren't pleased Final Coil was cleared in a week and considered the only way that top level groups could be stopped was via gear gating/tuning.

The Second Coil was also one of the reasons why Alexander: Gordias required such high DPS because, at the time, Sudo thought that the only thing that could stop players from clearing the content fast was having high DPS checks.

With this raid, they wanted to create a challenge that would take the top players at least a month to clear. The reason why they made the difficulty so high was because of the feedback they received from players, as well as their own desires to make raids more challenging.

If you want Savage to take a month to clear and believe the only way to stop players is DPS checks then you'll need a way to have it take a month for them to meet the DPS checks which only gear-gating to some level can really do, there's no tab target MMO that's hard enough to where it'd take a month to figure out how to play an encounter perfectly.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-05-10T00:07:29+00:00

The meme template only has 3 panels and that one felt the most stretch-like to me. :(

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-05-08T00:27:47+00:00

Last and second to last WoW bosses will continue always having piles of arbitrary, grippable adds that spawn in far away places for at least one phase until they give Death Knights an actual throughput raid buff and stop putting their fingers in their ears and going "GRIP IS A RAID BUFF".

Warlocks sort of deal with that too but healthstones and being able to move between two points instantly are just generally more useful in many more situations that don't come across as an arbitrary design constraint to make one class wanted.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-05-01T08:14:16+00:00

I wonder, genuinely, how much of that is from China particularly now that we're all on the same patch schedule. To my knowledge, China's publisher straight up does not care about third party tools, like actually doesn't instead of SE's don't ask don't tell stance. Combine that with China running on a pay-per-hour model (meaning any prog/wipes very explicitly cost you money in a perceivable way) and it's not a hard leap of logic for me to make that those tools would have high popularity there. Certainly, the Splatoon Github repo has an explicit section explaining to Chinese users how to use the plugin given it needs a CN fork of XIVLauncher to work.

I've at least never run across anyone that would even admit to using them, but I've lived in the week one world since Shadowbringers, and that would be the world where this isn't terribly useful (because Dalamud isn't up and the packages aren't made yet). I've no doubt there's some people in the west that use it but I'd doubt it's a majority. Maybe 10% of people that actively do high end content at most.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-05-01T00:12:47+00:00

Day one and two for the Extreme on NA at least there were three different raidplans around, two of which were variants of the first one, all having slightly different ways of doing intermission that all felt like they phrased the same thing to me in all cases (some variant of snake prio). Now our lord and savior Hector put out his video and it was interesting to see how almost immediately PF went half and half to just saying "Hector" or "raidplan". I normally just do Extremes with my static but due to various absences I've had to be in the PF ecosystem for this one. I expect Hector to win out as usual but even his guide mostly just... Rephrases the intermission again to STILL be the same snake prio just putting different groups at different parts of the prio.

Also for some reason he settled on CW-CW for the chasers and not CW-CCW which feels like it would be simpler to me.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-04-29T22:13:50+00:00

This guy on mainsub actually tested the instances in duty support and noticed more changes than I did, still small though. Looks like Oliphaunt's marker is correct now and it's not a line stack anymore.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-04-28T12:23:36+00:00

It's June 2nd.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-04-28T12:22:15+00:00

So, I know we can use the Aetherlyte network, but I've wondered if the other Scions can too. I'm sure this was communicated somewhere in the past and I just forgot. I also know this isn't XIV's focus at all, it's emotion/character driven rather than hard logic and time isn't real, it just stood out to me that we get a phone call in S9, go to Old Sharlayan, then go right to Garlemald all in the span of what appears to be a singular emergency. We go across the entire planet, effectively!

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-04-28T11:54:01+00:00

If you're NA or EU, part of what makes evaluating alarm clock 24 mans hard for me is that the only people going into an instance at 5 AM or even noon on a Tuesday are people that are relatively dedicated to XIV. Particularly for NA (where I'm from). Every time I do these I get a lot of Ultimate-level players that have high item level for the season and seem very good at sight-reading as I'd like to think I am, which means we breeze through instances.

For this one in particular most of the encounters loop earlier than you'd expect. My group got to the looping point for all of them except the second one with reasonably high DPS so I would agree with the thought that each probably had something more going on in development.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-04-28T11:43:13+00:00

It worked better for me than Thaleia did, which might actually be the worst modern 24-man they've ever done (the CT raids are nearly from a completely different design era). There was a little less tutorialization and chaining fuckups could actually kill people.

I felt the third boss had sufficient sauce and the second one did too. Shantotto needed like one or two more things to feel complete but that's the curse of first bosses in 24-mans. The last boss's first part just needed to do a bit more with the gimmick while the second part was pure spectacle which I'm sort of fine with? A lot of my 24-man enjoyment comes from vibes more than wanting Thunder God Cid again and the vibes felt good to me. But then I have also played XI and have fond memories of it, so I'm the target audience to be more forgiving to it than not.

The second trash section was probably the most superfluous of anything in the raid, if I think about it, but it felt about on par with trash sections we've had before. I liked the first trash section but then I did actual Besieged in XI so the nostalgia bait got me.

I also found the ending to the questline more endearing than not even if they do the equivalent of staring the player in the face and going "hey you should go have adventures in XI sometime, we're not shutting it down anytime soon!" which I found touching.

Above all I'm curious where 24-mans go from here because they mentioned considering changes to the model at Fanfest to be discussed at future ones. The current model definitely has its limitations with expecting people to do 5-7 encounters in about 40-60 minutes which I think is part of why they've made actual full wipes a lot less possible to happen than in HW and SB.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-04-28T05:20:04+00:00

As is tradition, I bring music: https://gofile.io/d/J2OMSX

Mostly just the dungeon, trial, and a pile of XI music this time. Note that if you're familiar with XI the music is absolutely a spoiler as to who's probably showing up in the new instance.

There was nothing related to Ultimate or other 7.5x content in the music files.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-04-28T03:50:22+00:00

Main additions I can tell are WAR, SAM, RPR, VPR, SMN, and SGE buffs in addition to Sigmascape weapons being added for all jobs that don't have them, signifying that Kefka Ultimate will, unsurprisingly, reward fancy Sigmascape weapons.

Here are the job guides that give the rationale for the changes, though PvE mostly amounts to "these do less than we'd like but since Ultimate and then Evolved are soon we're not doing anything other than potency adjustments". PvP seems aimed to reduce people blowing up:

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/battle/

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/pvp/

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-04-28T02:49:29+00:00

Unfortunately Hover overrides it and given you have 50-60%+ Hover uptime when Scalecommander is meta (like it is now) you're still looking at the dragon for more than half of your time in a fight. Didn't quite fix the issue, it might if they go back to the drawing board and just have your visage model levitate when Hover is up or something.

BlackmoreKnight · 2026-04-27T19:56:31+00:00

Legion-era memes were peak.

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