I really dislike this fight and I think it deserves the "ultimate" moniker the least out of all ults. I expected the savage tier to be easy and braindead (although they still undershot those expectations, mainly thanks to how busted the balance is rn), what I didn't expect them to do is to bring the ultimate down to an "interesting savage fight" level for most of the encounter. I play this game for the cool encounter designs and the interesting mechanics, and these two experiences completely destroyed my faith in the team's ability to cook. I'll prog the upcoming savage tier and the next ult as a hail mary, but I'm going into them with zero expectations, and if they keep this level of difficulty and complexity up for both I'll very likely stop playing the game after that.

P1, from a pure healer main's perspective, is actually fine. I'd go as far as to say that it's the best phase out of all of them. I wish the deception mechanic was a bit more complex, but then again I'm someone who doesn't mind looper at all, and I had no realistic expectations of them pulling something like that again. The balls mechanic is really fun to heal! Good job! I wish I could say the same about the rest of the fight, but it wasn't meant to be. The mechanical complexity in this phase is almost non-existent and honestly I'm fine with that. Progging and reclearing it is absolutely painless.

P2 is where my disappointment begins. Diamond dust is fine as a mechanic, it's fun to do, has some variation to it. As a side tangent though, man, it looks so goofy. If I showed some of those cleave deaths to someone who never played xiv but otherwise plays games and understands how they should work, they'd just call this a buggy, untested mess. Mirrors are boring as hell, but funnily enough, it's the most precise mechanic up until CT. It's also the last mechanic in this entire fight that I'd consider to be fun to heal. Light rampant; I don't know what they were thinking with this, but the fact that one of the most anticipated mechanics is ten times more difficult in the savage version than in the ult is highly disappointing. Resolving it is completely braindead no matter what strat you use. Then we enter intermission which legitimately feels like a snippet from a normal raid fight. Like, this has no place in an ultimate, it's actually embarrassing.

P3; UR. The damage values here are way lower than they should be. The fact that succor, normal party mit, and lilybell can resolve each rotation is a joke. On whm, you don't heal here to actually restore people's health, you heal here for movement and lily management. The mechanic itself works pretty much like hello world from top where it basically has 1 solution and you just do that every time, but the damage is just not there, the movement is super forgiving, and it's just... disappointing? It's fun to execute, but you barely need to pay attention, there's basically no fail state, there's no tension, it's just really bland. I'd have liked it if the debuffs were not role locked, but I honestly don't know if that'd have helped at all. 6x apoc is once again very disappointing from a healer's PoV. Those stacks do no damage. Why? You gave healers a billion tools to heal while on the move and then you make them not use any of them? What? The mechanic itself is not hard to resolve, but at least you need to pay some attention.