FFXIV starved its toughest raiders for 2 years brings the next ultimate challenge
Patch 6.11 went live in Final Fantasy XIV today and with it the new hardest raid ever Dragon War (Fatal). The update marks the start of the world-first race for the kill and is accompanied by a major community event.
What are these raids? The fatal or “ultimate” raids are considered to be the hardest type of PvE content in FFXIV. Estimates of Japanese stats blog LuckyBancho after about 5% of all players manage to master these raids.
The fights are designed as a kind of boss rush, in which teams of 8 raiders have to fight against several intermediate bosses in a row in order to be able to defeat the big opponent in the end.
- In Bahamut Ultimate, these bosses are Twintania and Nael deus Darnus
- In Ultima you fight beforehand against the Primae Garuda, Ifrit and Titan
To ensure that the raids remain a challenge years after release, they are the only content that cannot be “over-leveled”. All Fatal Raids must be completed at the level and item level they were designed for.
Dragon War as the first Ultimate Raid after over 2 years
This is the dragon war: The new fatal raid was taken from FFXIV’s first addon, Heavensward. It revolves around the thousand-year war between the nation of Ishgard and the dragons.
Screenshots have already shown individual knights of King Thordan in an arena above Ishgard Cathedral, as well as the two dragons Nidhogg and Hraesvelgr. At the end of the trailer for patch 6.1 you also saw King Thordan himself, who carried out the limit break together with his knights.
To the great dismay of the hardcore community, the raid was postponed for more than half a year. It was originally supposed to appear with patch 5.5, at the end of Shadowbringers. However, according to director Yoshida, this was not possible without the postponement of the new addon Endwalker and other important content.
Accordingly, the hardcore raiders had to wait more than two years for the new content. The last Ultimate Raid, Alexander, was released in November 2019.
In order to keep the race for the World First title fair, all FFXIV servers went online at the same time after the maintenance at 12:00 p.m. The maintenance was also not ended prematurely, as is often the case with the MMORPG, so that all raiders have the same chances.
What is the reward? The Ultimate Raids differ from the “normal” Raids, which involve gear progression. As a reward for the kill, there are titles and chic, shimmering weapons that, with an additional materia slot, are slightly stronger than the currently strongest from the Savage Raid.
But they are mainly considered status symbols and signs that you have conquered the hardest content in the game. So you don’t farm the raids to get better equipment, but to have nice glamour.
The dataminers have already been able to pull the appearance of the new weapons from the code of the update. They are based on the weapons obtained from the extreme battle against King Thordan, but have many more glow effects:
Here you can see the new Ultimate weapons in an Imgur gallery.
Community organizes a streaming event
The World First race is considered a big event in the community, watched by thousands on Twitch. With each Raid release, FFXIV briefly rose to the top 10 most watched games on Twitch.
This is also the case with Thordan Ultimate, because the community around the podcast MogTalk This time around is also organizing a streaming event with casters and analysts who will accompany the race. Currently, on April 26 at 12:22 p.m., FFXIV is in 6th place with 50,200 viewers, after GTA V and ahead of Dota 2, CoD Warzone and Fornite.
A special guest this time is the streamer and YouTuber Preach, who only commented on the WoW race in February. Preach has been playing FFXIV extensively for many months and has recently arrived in endgame.
Who is in the race? Teams from all over the world take part in the race. Since the servers go online for everyone at the same time, everyone has the same chance of success.
The favorites of the race are the Thoughts per Second raid group the Guild Radiance on the Gilgamesh server. The group has a history of being the first to defeat Alexander Ultimate and have since claimed multiple Savage Raids World First titles.
EU group Entropy, who took world first at Ultima and finished third in the Pandaemonium race, is also a good contender for victory.
However, the case of Ultimate Bahamut can also occur again, in which a Japanese raiding group unexpectedly won first place.
The Liquid eSports team doesn’t seem to be taking part this time, however. Liquid bought the WoW guild Limit in January 2022 to get into world racing of WoW and FFXIV.
Reference-mein-mmo.de
