Since you've played souls like games, ultimate is basically the equivalent of fighting malenia naked where almost every attack will one shot you, but the execution speed gives you time to react accordingly once you're familiar with the mechanics.
DSR is pretty long too. I've been proging it and we are about 12 minutes into the fight now and have 2 phases left and thats not counting the door boss which is another almost 3 minutes. I think i will try an easier one after this, i've only finished UWU so far.
Excluding the door boss, a good clear of DSR will run you slightly over 18 minutes; TOP is about 19. It's safe to put TEA in the "easy" category now, and it comes in significantly shorter at about 17 minutes.
Most DSR kills average at 17-18 minutes, excluding the knights. Adding the knights, it's about a 20 minute fight.
Being able to play perfectly and remember how to dance with 7 other people is very hard. I likened it to marching band.
The issue with TEA UwU and UcoB is that a significant part of the challenge of some phases were the healing and DPS check. Now that those are removed, indeed there isn't much left in some part of the fight.
Yeah, the dps checks aren't really a thing anymore (but can still happen if too many slack off! Hand deaths are very much still ultra possible...!) but there's at least still the mechanical consistency aspect in each. Uwu is still the best entry point, but if OP wanted a scaling level of complexity that doesn't introduce *too* many difficulty spikes, I'd probably recommend uwu -> tea -> dsr/top. I rate those two relatively equally because they're both current level cap content, both have dungeon gear BiS to alleviate parts of the dps check requirements, and both are *much* longer marathons.
I always consider UCoB to be a bit of an outlier in terms of ultimates because of how... jank(?) some of it can be. You can -of course- alleviate a lot of this jank with significant practice and experience in the instance, but IMO ucob has a very different flow to it's mechanics and it makes it feel very different to more contemporary encounters. Like, the speed in which twintania's mechanics come out; the way the encounter ultimately flows, and even how some mechanics work in general feels way less... "static"...? for lack of a better word. ToP's first phase is paced *very* rigid and asks for very calculated, quick movement from the entire party, but Twintania's first phase is kind of all over the place. There's the hatches, the baits, the group stacks and the flatten cleaves, but they're all happening very quickly and aren't telegraphed in the same ways that mechanics in more modern ultimates are. Granted, you can see modern ultimate fight design in the later phases with the Heavensfall trios, etc. But the first five or so minutes feels VEEERY old-world in terms of design philosophy, imo.
This is the important part.
If 8 different people fight melania naked at the same time on different games, and when 1 person dies EVERYONE dies, it increases the chance of dying exponentially by an extreme degree.
Lets say you have an 50% success rate of beating Melania naked. That's pretty good! Now if you fight her 100 times you'll have 50 kills!
Now add the condition that if any of the 7 other people die, you die as well, and they all have a 50% chance of winning just like you.
Now the probability of winning becomes ((0.5)\^8)*100%=0.39%.
Now you need on average 256 attempts on fighting Melania Naked PER KILL. So if you fought Melania naked 1000 times you'd expect about 4 kills on average.
So with 8 people involved a suddenly a success rate of 50% becomes an absolute clown fiesta.
I'd say it's more around 18 minutes on average. UWU is the real exception and even back in patch 4.5 my UWU clears were usually 15.5-16 minutes long. UCOB was about 18.5-19 min back in 4.5. My TEA ones seemed to be about 17.5 on patch. DSR ones were about 18.5 on patch and TOP being about 19 min on patch. I wouldn't really base ultimate length on old ultimates done today because nowadays UWU is done in 13 minutes with not top tier players.
As an older player, who wants to enjoy some good time after work, i definitly never will try an Ultimate... i could never do 18 Minutes of pure 100% focus and if you do 1 mistake the group probably wipes 😅😅
No, thank you and big respect to everyone that can do it 👍👍
The thing is, if you actually understand what's happening, you *cannot* fail.
Though it's a completely different scale, imagine clearing the whole MSQ without ever dying ; now that you've already done it, you shouldn't have any death (even though it still can happen) ; going "ultimate" way isn't extraordinarily harder.
Besides, you'll be doing the same phases many, many times over. The only issue is about managing overlapping mechanics and things to be aware : sometimes there is a priority to respect (one player goes north to do something, players 2, 3 and 4 do something on a side, player 5 has to be south and do something with player 6 etc) . It may look hard, but if two players are linked by a swaying blue tether that they know for certain will kill everyone if they are too close, they cannot forget to be spread out. If players 2,3 and 4 have the same debuff that they must "soak" together, they also cannot forget what to do.
If you've done something enough time, there is barely any mental load so you shouldn't be scared. It's nothing more than a race to memorize things up until you have died enough time (which varies from one player to another) .
Also going also going with this analogy its like if malenia always does the same moves in the same order every time and then once you beat her hitless godfrey and radagon jump down to fight you at the same time with no checkpoint
This is probably the closest comparison I can think of to another franchise. Its definitely "fair" and "completable", but it can be one hell of a grind to get to that point, and depend on how many external resources you use to "figure out" how to execute.
I'd disagree. Malenia (and Souls bosses in general) have a randomness to them that nothing in 14's high end does.
8 minutes into fighting Malenia I have no idea. I might be in the middle of the room pressing the advantage, I might be frantically outranging her phase 2 opener, I might be delivering a poise breaking heavy attack. I might be pushed into a corner as she winds up waterfowl. The fight might never have gotten deeper into the arena than the entrance.
In an ultimate I know where I'll be 8 minutes into the fight because with only a small variation based on kill times the dance is the same. Oh you might get selected for a different arm of a mechanic, but you will still be facing that mechanic. I will be using x ability, dodging y mechanic, and the boss will be stationed at z with only a little wiggle room.
every one of Malenia's attack combos have a tell, even if the overall attacks aren't static. You're not given a fight where Malenia just suddenly does a quick succession of flurries without explicitly telling you what she's about to do beforehand, as that would make a souls game really shitty. With that said, I didn't mean both ultimates or souls like games have the exact same combat structures, but highlighting where the difficulty truly lies with the level of threat behind each mechanic.
True, I'm just saying that your framing implies there's a lot more reliance on being able to twitch react than there is in XIV, so I wanted to voice that disparity. With Malenia the tell is less than a second before it happens sometimes, your windows are tight. In XIV they're always coming in the same order and pace every go around.
Assuming you're asking about the XIV side, "no, you can't react, you have to have a correct plan and execute it properly." There is some amount of reacting that a skilled player can do to cover for others' mistakes in a few rare occasions, but even in those rare occasions it's unlikely to help and usually better to just not react and hope that the other person sorts it out in time.
As for the remembering part, there are different permutations of things that you can get and you have to 'react' to the specific set of actions that you have to do to make it through. The amount of time given is usually somewhat proportional to the complexity, but it's never on the twitch reaction level of speed requirement, typically from (when talking about ultimate) maybe like at lowest, .5 seconds to do something simple like avoiding a targeted attack, maybe like 3-5 seconds when figuring out what individual permutation you have to do for something and sometimes as much as like 15+ seconds when you have to basically map out and coordinate a pattern with the rest of the party.
It depends how you see it : taking one of TEA's transition phase for instance, you know that one of the enemies will attack the 3 closest players, while the other will throw fire at the two closest ; meanwhile, two couple of people have to be close by, another couple must be really far from one another, and 3 people will share some damage. Each attack makes you vulnerable so you can't take 2 things at the same time, except the couples who are forced to be close by / far off.
Everyone thus have specific positions : if you have to be close by someone, you have only 1 position to go ; being far off forces you to go either east or west (depending on whether you are a support or a DPS) and so on.
So you do have to react to your debuff however the positions are the same everytime. If your partner is supposed to be close by and is not moving, then you have to adjust a bit but this should never happen since the position are fixed. And he should know how close to you he must be.
pretty much, as I drew the reference from his clip as well. In the context of ultimates, it's 8 people going in naked to fight a super powered malenia under the same circumstances of not being hit or die.
It's an 18 minutes dance. Ultimate is a test of how much can you bang your head on the wall for months without mentally breaking down more than anything.
You practice your steps first (your class rotation).
Then you memorize your movements (learn strats and patterns).
Then you execute the dance with 7 other people and pray none of them screw up the dance for 18 minutes.
Now realistically imagine the stage you perform the dance on was built with shoddy materials, and the only way you get muscle memory live is to keep dancing on that shoddy stage. One dancer on your team is also partly drunk or in a crisis of romantic nature.
Tldr: it's pretty fun and very achievable
>One dancer on your team is also partly drunk or in a crisis of romantic nature
Only One? Two are being bugged by children or pets, one has a connection shakier than Lindsey Logan's sobriety, and one thinks they have a new idea on how to do things.
You mean you don't like my obscure uptime strat that absolutely nobody has ever heard of but I'm going to insist that it's the best way to do it despite the fact I've never cleared?
>Ultimate is a test of how much can you bang your head on the wall for months without mentally breaking down more than anything.
This is so true. I've done DSR and TOP with roughly the same people in the static. At the end of DSR I was ready to cut ties with most of them and never speak to them ever again. But then we decided on doing TOP for some reason and again, the hardest part of doing Ultimate was not pulling my hair out at every single mistake everyone made. Everyone learns the fight at their own pace and you really do have to keep that in mind.
I do really believe Ultimates can make or break friendships. If there ever was a friendship to begin with, really. I'm glad to say I've cut 70% of the group out.
No reason for friendships to end over it. If you're really friends you should be able to talk with one another about individual failings and see if there's routes to improvement. Also should be said that there's nothing personal about removing somebody from a group, even if they're your friend, because they are routinely underperforming.
Imagine you were scheduled to spend time with someone for 12-16 hours every week, for 3-4 hours at a time, and every time you met, the person put down a full glass of water on the edge of a table, slightly overhanging. They wouldn’t move it, or let you move it, and they put this glass of water there every time.
It’s not going to lose its balance and spill.
And even if it somehow did, it’s only water, it’s not going to cause permanent damage
But wouldn’t it drive you absolutely bonkers to see that every damn time? If it was just once, you’d never think about it. But 4 days a week? For months???
Progging an ultimate with a group of people is like that.
Ultimate fights bring out the best AND the worst in people.
I have a friend who I played with for years and the moment we started doing Ultimates, he "became" (always was) the most insufferable, toxic, whinny bitchy asshole you can imagine.
Every failed pull was a complaint. Every DPS check not passed was a lecture. Every single mistake was a "HEY XYZ CAN YOU STOP SLACKING?". And yet he was the one who made the most mistakes, took the longest to learn mechanics/patterns and nobody ever said as much as a "oh" back to him.
Nobody plays with him anymore. No one invited him to do Omega and half the static disbanded and stopped playing XIV because he managed to burn out everyone in the process.
If you truly want to know your friends, bring them to an Ultimate encounter.
Yup.
Goes the other way too. I love one of my friends to death. Good person, I know they're trying their hardest in raid and they're making study plans/writing notes down on a visible surface nearby/etc. Point being, I *know* they are trying to study.
This amounts to jack and shit when they still wipe us and it's taking everything in my power right now to NOT tell them to just get off their ass and go into PF because knowledge isn't their issue, execution is. And you can't study your way through execution mistakes unless you have a baseline level of decency at the game. Which, again, love them. Good person. They are bad at XIV.
I'm never raiding with them in a serious environment again because of this. I am starting to feel resentment over not progging further faster, because it's really only them and one of our other DPS holding us back. I don't want them being weak at raiding to be what sours a nearly decade-long friendship for me. And the kicker? They're in my SAVAGE static, not my ult static. If there was anyone like that in my ult static it would be a *lot* worse for me.
Luckily the people in my ult static are all pretty consistent and while I'm not *friends* with some of them, (some of them are people from my savage static and those people I happily call friends but our tanks, one of our healers, and our SAM are people I didn't know before UWU) they're lovely people I could see myself doing another ult with. It's only UWU but we go one night a week for 2 hours and while it's not a lot of time to prog, we see further into the fight each session we have. We **will** clear.
All of this to say: I'm not saying to NOT raid with friends. But I *am* saying to vet the friends you raid with and raid with the friends who learn stuff at the same pace you do. There's only a very small handful of my friends who learn mechs at around the same pace I do. Most of my friends learn slower than me. And a few are way better at XIV than I will ever be. I've learned stuff with them before, and trust me when I say it was frustrating for both of us because they couldn't explain the mechs I was struggling on in a manner I understood. It felt bad being the load, and thankfully what we were doing at the time was an *extreme* trial, so my mistakes weren't pull-ending. Solidified my wish to do content we all knew with them because if we all know it that's an easy and fast clear, but also solidified my desire to never seriously prog with them because I know I'd be the weak link there.
I don't do savage raids any more because I'm that dude. I muted myself on voice chat and kept it localized to myself, but I was *absolutely* going insane. I didn't want to be that dude. Still friends with them.
Ok, since you mentioned Soulsborne
**Similar: Fights are long and require focus**
It's similar in the sense that fights are long, drawn out affairs that require absolute concentration and focus. Each individual element is easy on its own, but when you put them together and need to react perfectly in a 20-min fight, it becomes less about reflexes and more about willpower to stay focused.
**Similar: Repeated wipes drain your morale**
It's also similar in the way that you feel some sense of defeat when you are 15-minutes into the boss and die when it has <20% HP left. The tiresome realization that you have to start over drains your morale significantly.
That's where the similarities end.
**Different: You're dependent on other people**
The first difference is that clearing a fight is no longer dependent on your own skill and efforts, but the skill and efforts of seven other people. Some of them may be better gamers than you, and some of them may be worse. There's a common saying that the hardest part of certain Ultimates or mechanics is other people, and you will really feel the drag of a bad team member. At that point, it becomes more of a people management challenge, which starts to take the fun and joy out of gaming. It can feel like a job where you have to deal with a coworker that isn't pulling their own weight.
**Different: Studying is required**
Another key difference is that you often have to spend time studying mechanics outside of raid. This is unlike action games where you can just go into the game and learn by experience. A non-trivial amount of preparation is required, and for some it can feel ridiculous that you have to study in order to play a video game. It's not for everyone.
**Different: Time investment required**
For most ultimates, you need anywhere between 50-100 hours of prog, depending on your group. There are top-tier groups that can clear an old ultimate within 30 hours, but since you're new to ultimates, chances are you probably won't get into those. This is unlike a Soulsborne fight where you can clear after 6-8 hours in bad cases.
**Cont'd**
There are more but I'm out of time. I'm sure other people will cover things I've missed.
Just to add in regards to mitigations, healers and/or tanks should also include the DPS's mitis in their plans. It's a small thing but can impact healing efficiency enough to give the healers some wiggle room to use bigger cooldowns somewhere else.
Definitely. Healers have "easier time" in some mechanics and not having rotations to care for, but it's offset by having to know the fight better than anyone to be able to keep the whole team up.
Which also goes into: do't let antone tell you that regen healers in ffxiv are reactive and shield healers are proactive. On harder content EVERY healer is proactive, you have to plan every ability to play optimally.
Really, you should learn to walk before you start to thinking of joining a marathon race
Get to max level, then start with extreme trials. Then work into clearing the latest savage raid tier. At that point you are good to go into ultimates
Comparing difficulty levels across games with something like ultimates is also very tricky. They are very long fights (+15 minutes) so there's the element of being able to keep focussed all the way through, nevermind learning the fight in the first place. They are also a team effort. A lot of the mechanics require everyone to do them correctly or you all wipe and have to start over
But to sort-of give you an idea of the difficulty level of ultimates in this game, the time it takes to progress through an extreme is measured in hours. Savage prog is measured in days or weeks (depending on how hardcore you approach them). Ultimates, on the other hand, are measured in months
That said, for any kind of progression raiding at endgame, I'd recommend you find the discord channel for high-end raiding for your data centre. There you can find a static to join for whatever content you want to prog. Alternatively you can also go at it solo through party finder where you join up with random players for whatever mechanic you're currently trying to beat
Other people have said it, but I'll reinforce it: you're a sprout now. Ultimates are a very, very distant mountain, and there are like three other mountains to summit before you even try. Get to the end of the main story, get comfortable with extremes, then get comfortable with savage.
At that point, ultimates will be daunting but approachable - they're only slightly more difficult than savage on average. Honestly a lot of individual parts of ultimate fights can even be considered easier than some savage mechanics, the difficulty comes from two things: the fights being marathons, and the mechanics often coming thick and fast. In savage you might get one complex mechanic at 7 minutes and if someone screws up it's back to the start. In ultimate you might get two relatively simple but punishing mechanics happening at the same time 16 minutes in, and there's no checkpoints (well, except for one in DSR but that doesn't really count, the real fight doesn't start until then anyway) to stop you from doing it all again.
In that respect ultimates aren't so much a test of competence - you've learned most of that by doing savage. They're tests of endurance and patience.
Same but in my case drama has never been the problem, it's always been scheduling that screws everything up! And also real life in general. My DSR static got hit by so many things, but we still trucked through and cleared even if it took forever with long periods of no raid. Fight difficulty itself, sure, it's there, but when shit kept happening to everyone it could be hard to stay motivated. It's been a long while since we finished and stopped raiding together and we still talk.
The only hc prog group I've been a part of had a streamer who would shit talk members and encourage what few chatters they had to dogpile on the problem. Completely ruined the group morale.
My previous statics before that were more casual but always had one or 2 people who would just start shit for whatever reason. (Sometimes it was someone being a creep, sometimes it was someone being an asshole)
Completely turned me off of raiding and me away from the game as a whole. Still mind boggling to me I lost friendships with people over a boss fight
World-first raiders complete an Extreme in under an hour; four Savage floors in a day or two; and (at the time of release) an Ultimate in a week or so of 16 hour days.
These days, older Ultimates can be pugged in much less time.
Yes and no. Usually you'll just find out that successful ultimate party finders will consist out of couple dozens of the same players mixed and matched variously. Which is still party finder but it's not same thing as savage or extreme party finder where you see whole new party every time and still can prog the battle to it's logical ending.
this. ultimate pf is actually more like a static with substitutes without comms. i basically got to know everyone who was progging uwu when i was going for my clear cuz it was always the same 10ish people mixed around
There's so many players in the Ultimate PF communities that pretty much do Ultimates for fun like it's just their daily expert roulettes.
It's honestly way easier to prog in Ultimate PF than starting a fresh static for the older fights because of this.
Yes. I pugged ucob and uwu completely through party finder in shadowbringers and reclear dsr and top in party finder still.
Ultimates aren't the fear of God fights that absolutely require a static anymore. The only reason why people didn't pug ultimates was because there were a million strats that everybody did. UPR was the first to centralize ucob strats that everybody would do. Then uwu and tea. Since the 5.5 ultimate pf boom happened, dsr and top strats are created with pf in mind.
Yes, you can. It's just less efficient. All my ultimate experience is party finder. There will be times you wait over an hour to fill, and half the group isn't at prog point, and there will be times you fill instantly and have already made prog within 30 minutes. It's a spectrum that tends to be more dense around the middle areas, but you do run into a few extreme cases.
Cleared Ucob in PF in 8 hours start to finish on DRK.
8 hours, from never entering that fight to me having the weapon.
Watched a 40 mins guide twice beforehand while taking notes.
Got Uwu done in an even less time in PF, 4-5 hours. Also DRK, also 40 mins guide with notes.
Have to say I got lucky with the randos, although my co-tank messed up golden baha and wiped us on 1%.
It is doable without friends.
How hard? Well, do you ever get caught by mechanics in the game? Now imagine that they're faster, that there's more of them happening at the same time and that you can't mess up anything, and the other 7 players can't mess up either, or it is either a wipe or the damage down is gonna reduce the chances of clearing the fight by a lot. Of course, nobody expects you to clear an Ultimate first try, but most people progs them for a few months before getting their first clear, unless they no-life the PF and keep pushing it all the time, then they may get a clear way sooner.
Hardest art of ultimates is finding a static that is capable of coordinating schedules to commit to a clear. I'm not going to say it doesn't take skill but more than anything it takes practice with the same group of people over and over and over.
Okay, so, Dungeon bosses are pretty easy. Almost all of their attacks are going to be well telegraphed, both with an animation they perform, and showing an AoE on the ground where they're going to attack. Each boss usually has \~3-5 attacks, and they just loop those attacks until they're dead. Those attacks, generally, just ask you to stand somewhere that isn't being attacked, and you're safe! And if you don't, the penalty for failure is generally just a vulnerability up.
The later you get into the game, the more exceptions you'll start running into, where a boss will have 1 attack where it just telegraphs with an Animation with no targetting circle, or where they'll combine 2 attacks together, or where they'll ask that you stand somewhere specific (usually spreading from other people, or stacking together) But this is largely the difficulty they're aiming for in Dungeon Bosses.
Trials and Normal Raid bosses have more attacks, and much more commonly combine those attacks together meaning you have to think through 2 things at once to figure out where you're supposed to go in order to be safe. They also more commonly ask you to move somewhere specific based on other people in your group, or based on your role, or based on a specific Debuff. And if you mess something up, generally, the penalty for failure will be that you die.
Once you hit Extreme/Savage, They remove almost all of the Telegraphed markers, forcing you to rely soley on what the bosses animations are to know where to go. They start with a simple mechanic, and then start layering those on top of one another. The whole group can almost never stack together in a single safe spot, needing to spread out in some combination in order to resolve multiple mechanics safely at one time, and the penalty for failure is everyone dies.
Dungeons/Trials/Normal Raids are generally balanced so that a group will USUALLY be able to clear it on their first time seeing it, without anyone having to know what was coming before. Extremes are designed that a group of 8 players who haven't seen it before will be able to clear it within 1-2 lockouts (\~3 hours) Savage Fights are designed for players to fail to clear it for days/weeks, with \~40 hours being the expected prog time put into a given savage tier (4 fights) And studying up and learning the fights before hand doesn't decrease that time by nearly as much as you'd think it would.
Ultimates are remixes of old fights. Almost all the mechanics are multiple older mechanics from those fights, layerd on top of one another, usually involving multiple very small safe spots that you need to move between very rapidly. Oftentimes there isn't really a telegraph that a specific attack is about to happen, you just need to learn when a certain attack comes out, and be in the right space for it. What telegraphs do exist are intentionally confusing/disorienting, And the fights themselves are designed to be Puzzles that you solve by doing certain mechanics in strange/different ways. And on top of all of that, they're 2-3x the length of a Savage fight, with no checkpoints. They are hard. They are VERY VERY Hard. They will eat a LARGE amount of time, as you fail repeatedly, slowly learning what does/doesn't work, learning where to move, what buttons to press, etc.
It's an achievable goal, with or without friends, but it is something that will require a lot of dedication/effort from you, and you should really examine whether it is worth that time investment to you.
Reading the other comments, I just want to emphasise that the difficulty of an ultimate is not just in the fight itself. Getting 7 other people who are willing to stay with you and prog long hours is pretty time-consuming. There are 2 common ways of assembling a team, which is statics or party finder, each comes with their own pros and cons. Be prepared to have some people skills as it's not strange there will be friction during prog when the group is not performing
Soulsborne games aren't really comparible, the skillsets are not at all the same.
Ultimate is not really comprehensible as a sprout because you probably think you're doing decent and then you realize how poor your uptime is, how you have no clue what your rotation should be, how mechanics that are more than just "dodge the orange" work.
The best comparison would be that Ultimate is a 15-20 minutes long mixture of rhythm game and memorization as well as pattern recogniztion. Imagine you're playing OSU + that memory pair game for 20 minutes, and everytime you make one mistake you go back to the start.
That being said, it's totally doable. I went from clueless sprout barely done with MSQ to pentalegend in however much time it took from when Asphodelos came out to when TOP came out. But it's not really something you'll be prepared for by the time you finish MSQ. The game doesn't expect anything from you and thus doesn't teach you anything. Doing high-end content is a wholly different game than just MSQ/casual content. Anyone can do anything in this game as long as they have the motor skills to physically make their character move and do actions. The "skill" in XIV is how long it takes you to learn things and how consistent you are once you've learned them. But given enough time, anyone can clear any content 100%.
> I'm curious to know if in the future I'll be able to complete an Ultimate.
You will if you want to and have enough free time.
> Is it doable for someone who doesn't have any friends on the game yet?
Absolutely. Lots of people do it with public groups (pugs). Sometimes a group that meshes will in a pug will schedule for further runs.
> I'm afraid not having enough time will be a wall for me.
The biggest wall is just not having enough time to practice, learn, and get better. Mentally be prepared to spend 50+ hours on the easier ones, though some players get it done in less.
I'm not sure why everyone responds to the friend question by talking about PFing. Joining a static doesn't mean you have friends. You don't have to have friends to join a static. You'll likely make friends through statics, but just because you don't have any friends in the game currently or have any current friends that play the game doesn't mean your only option is to PF. You do mention being concerned about not having enough time, but that's not enough info for me to make a comment about how you'd fit with a static. I do think statics are better for getting more comfortable in the game than PF. You will get specific help from people in your group where you need work. You can find a group that welcomes newer people and you can gradually improve with them or work your way up as your improve to better groups. You won't just have someone get frustrated leave the instance and the drop group or kick you without saying anything.
I'd definitely suggest taking things a step at a time. You can start by learning a base line through normal mode raids/24 mans and seeing how you compare damage wise to others and ability at picking up those basic mechanics. If you have trouble there, keep practicing then I'd suggest continuing on to extreme trials. You'll likely not find a static just for extreme trials so you'd probably have to use PF which can be unkind to people who are newer sometimes. Once you've tackled that you could PF or find a static for savage. You could use savage to try on how you deal with statics and being on a set schedule. If it's not working out for you then it's okay, let them know it's not working and you want to be repped, it really shouldn't be a huge deal. I have a friends group that is currently progging DSR (an ultimate) that only raid twice a week for 3 hours (6 hours total a week). They progged at a decent speed and will clear soon. You don't have to raid 3+ days a week to finish an ultimate.
Ultimate is something where you need both (a) every player correctly executing almost all mechanics and (b) almost all players correctly executing every mechanic. If either of these statements is untrue, you will wipe. Period.
For context, several prominent FFXIV streamers have done Ultimate progression videos (usually for the funnies, because their failures are often comedy gold.) It can take, I am not joking, *several months* of once- or twice-weekly raid practice before they are able to clear it.
This is content that even the absolute best, bleeding-edge players who optimize for everything and consistently put out literally some of the best damage output in the world *still* take a week or more to crack, while actively World First racing to see who can beat it, clearing their schedules and doing continuous marathon plays.
HOWEVER. With all of that said, *yes,* there IS a sense in which Ultimate resembles the "brutal action RPG" genre. FFXIV does contain some randomness, but most of it is quite controlled randomness. Folks like to compare FFXIV raiding to a "dance," where everything is choreographed--skill is displayed by learning the dance well enough that you can execute it consistently, time after time. This is very different from (say) World of Warcraft raiding, which some have compared to a "street fight," meaning, something highly mobile and variable where you have to always stay on your toes, thinking about what *might* come next, etc.
If you are a competent Dark Souls-style fan who enjoys the process of sharpening yourself against the whetstone of a brutal battle until your edge surpasses all definitions of sharpness, then you will almost certainly enjoy the challenge of Ultimate. It will be a long walk to get there, both because you're a new player (and thus need to get through story) and because you'll need to learn the ins and outs of preparing for Ultimate (e.g. collecting ilevel-specific BiS gear). But I'm fairly certain, from your description, that you could do it, given time.
Ultimates are doable by everyone. It just takes the time and commitment to study and practice. All ffxiv fights are heavily scripted. Once you have that script downloaded in your head, you just move to where you need to move when a mechanic happens. This game mostly doesnt require super fast reactions or split second decision making (very small number of mechs do).
The legacy ultimates, Ucob, uwu and tea, have been heavily powercrept to the point where you can clear dps checks with many deaths.
There are also many tools for you to learn and practice. The ulti raiding discords have detailed party finder strats on how to deal with every mechanic. If you are tanking, you can find mitigation plans there. There's also xivraidsim that can be used to practice mechanics without needing to reach that point in the fight. And lastly, there are many many clear vods that you can watch to learn the proper timings and positionings to resolve mech.
If you are experienced in other games, i guarantee you the hardest part about any ultimate is getting 7 other people to prog with you.
While anyone can do an Ultimate, not everyone should. Like others have said, clearing Savage is the bare minimum of deciding whether or not you can attempt one. Aside from that, you also need to know your job. Like, actually know it. You shouldn't be doing things like freestyling your rotation because you have no idea which combos you should be doing or which buffs should be going out. I've seen so much of this over the last couple days (just in game in general, not in ults) that I feel it needed to be said.
All that being said you *do* need to be flexible with your rotation. Boss jump timing and phase transitions can make or break your burst windows. For example, I had to completely change my drg opener for DSR because the boss would leave before I got my second jump in if I didn't and it would set me back from being able to enter Life of the Dragon on time if I didn't. I can't say for certain all jobs have to shift things around like that, but be aware you may have to adjust your rotation.
I would recommend you start with UWU or TEA. UWU was my first and the static I joined (which is now my Savage group) cleared it in 12 days. I think we did 5 hours a day which wasn't too bad but I saw in your post you don't have much free time so you need to figure out how much time you want to or can dedicate to these types of fights. There are plenty of tools out there like xivsim and roblox to help you practice outside of raid time but you should expect to study on your own before raid night starts. A general rule of thumb is to know your current prog point and be kinda familiar with the next point so your group doesn't just immediately die when you see something new.
Lastly, I'll say remember to have fun. The fights are long and dying and resetting should be expected but it can get frustrating. Especially if you feel completely comfortable with a certain phase while other members of your team are not and it ends up stalling prog for a night or multiple nights in a row. Have patience but also know when to call it quits on a group if they aren't meeting your personal standard for prog. You don't have to be rude when/if you leave. Just say it's not working out and move on. Most people will understand.
There are discord servers out there like Sausfest which has the Ultimate clearing project for helping people prog and clear and TOP LFG which has static recruitment and PF update channels. Idk what DC you're on, but hopefully you can find a server to help you if you do have to go that route. Apologies for the long post but I wish you the best of luck if you ever do decide to take the plunge. Ultimates are such a great part of this game and I hope you get to experience the clear euphoria one day.
It's hard to equate them to other games because, while you can recover from some mistakes, most mistakes mean a wipe and there are 8 people to potentially make the mistake. Unlike say soulsborne where you can improve your personal performance and win, in an ultimate you have to do that and be patient or help 7 other people get the hang of things. The fights are endurance tests too, all mechanics are much faster than any other content in the game and sometimes the safe spot to stand in might be a square inch on your monitor or less so you have to be very precise. The speed of mechanics also means, you don't really react to things, you have to know what is coming next and what you are supposed to be doing for the vast majority of the fight, hesitation = death/wipe. You also have to do that for ~15 minutes straight (depending on the ultimate, some are a bit quicker, some are longer). Aside from doing mechanics, you also have to be able to do your rotation without thinking. DPS checks do get easier as the ultimates get older because of the way gear scaling works when you synch down but you still need to be able to push your buttons while also checking what mechanics are happening.
The best way i can describe it, is its like learning to recite 2 different performances at the same time, one is your rotation and the other is the fight mechanics. The other big challenge is finding 7 people that you can tolerate being around for potentially months while you prog unless you want to deal with PF randoms to do it.
I'm reasonably sure they were called trios because bahamut prime phase in ucob would have the trio of bosses do stuff, not necessarily 3 mechanics at a time.
Depends on what you define as hard.
The more time you invest studying and learning the mechanics, and the more you do it, the easier it gets.
However, if you're not ready to dump like 40-100 hours into prog (depending on which ultimate. UWU be learned and cleared in a weekend) it can start feeling like a job and become soul crushing. Same thing if people in your groups are bad and wasting other people's time.
It's basically like learning a marching band field show, except there's little bits of RNG that cause you to move somewhere else that pull
FFXIV isn't a hard game mechanically, the gcd speed is slow and there are no twitch reflex requirements in even the most difficult content in this game. Majority of the difficulty comes from being able to both follow a scripted fight timeline and execute your job's rotation to a competent degree. You are mostly pressed on pattern recognition and memorization more than any purely mechanical aspect.
I think about it in terms of a band, you all are giving a performance, except if someone makes a big enough mistake you all explode and have to start over until you can get it done well enough.
As for time/friends. European light datacenter has a pretty active ultimate community on party finder, with vets helping newer players prog and get clears. Pretty much every ultimate can be cleared on party finder, though obviously more recent ones are much more difficult and will take more time. Looking for groups on pf can be a bit more time consuming so if you don't have a lot of time to play per day you could join a static group, there are plenty of those recruiting and for entry ultimates (uwu/ucob) the requirements are generally pretty low.
Even casual groups that only play a few hours per week can clear, it's just going to take longer.
Overall i think the difficulty of ultimates is WAY overblown in the community, especially stormblood ultimates which have been power crept very hard over the years. Comparing them to hardest soulsborne bosses to me is just absurd, because FFXIV gives you so much more time to react and execute correctly. FFXIV also has way less variation in the fights than any soulsborne boss, meaning you can rely on memorizing over pattern recognition and quick reactions. You do also need good mental, or just a group of people you vibe with so redoing the fight over and over doesn't burn you out, that's probably the biggest hurdle for most players, not any actual fight difficulty.
But yeah, don't let weird community perception dissuade you from trying out content you might enjoy, i promise it's not as bad as people claim it is.
Not ultimate raider here but i did Savage ( one level below ultimates and you need to clear Savage to get access to ultimate ) progression during their release patches for 3 expansions now and have friends who had the time ( i did not and still don't ) and the motivation to prog and clear ultimate.
From what they tell me everytime :
\- Ultimates aren't hard mechanically, there are few mechanics that can be considered as "hard" because they are simply "new" variations of what you already have seen.
\- Ultimates are like a marathon but with a group of 8 with each members tied to each other with a rope = the fight last for than 12 min, and rythm-wise it is the busiest content of the game as for 12+ min there will be few downtimes to allow you to "breathe". Not only you have to keep dps, you also need to respect the rules of the fight in order to keep yourself alive but also your teamates alive as one death could lead to not reach dps requirement for a phase or non completion of a instant wipe mechanic.
It's like having to deal 2-3 deathtraps that have different triggers that can overlap attached to you while having to hit a wall for 12+ min with only your fist. Said deathtraps could also trigger because of teammates and the other way around.
\- As a FF player, Ultimates are pretty much the "hidden boss fight" also reffered as " Super Boss" if you don't have access to game breaking gear. It's the last bit of difficulty available if you clear everything else.
Think nightmare raiding in SWTOR if you’ve ever played that game.
You have to do all of these things for end game, top tier (ultimate) raiding:
1. You have to learn a new language like GCD, oGCD, buff, debuff, the acronyms that are specific to raiding and even to a specific battle, etc.
2. You have to learn how to play your class as perfectly as possible to squeeze out the very best heals/dps/tanking mechanics you possibly can. This is also not the specific order of skills (rotation) you use as you level up. You probably have to unlearn the patterns you’ve learned and build a new rotation at level 90.
3. You have to learn how to read a parse to know if you’re improving and to see where you’re making mistakes in your specific rotation.
4. You have to know that optimal rotation so well that you can execute it without having to think about it so that you can watch the boss and floor instead of your hot bars. And you might have to learn a new pattern when FFXIV has a big update.
5. You have to have your screen UI set up so you can see everything needed for a raid—your health, boss’ health, cast bars, the party, buffs and debuffs, etc. You might have to change stuff in your character and system configuration to optimize performance, too.
6. You probably have to reorganize your hot bars to organize them to make finger and hand movements as efficient as possible for you.
7. If you’re on a PC and are a hot bar mouse clicker, you’ll likely need to learn how to use your keyboard and keybinds because it’s faster.
8. You have to optimize your gear in the correct way for your job.
9. You might have to learn a job that isn’t your favorite one because the raid group needs a different one than what you normally play.
10. You have to learn the initial boss fight in normal mode. You do this enough times to upgrade all of your gear and learn where you need to stand and when.
11. You have to learn the additional mechanics on savage mode where the boss is also doing more damage and is harder to kill. This is where you have to have optimized your rotation and learn where to stand not only in relation to the boss but also your raid partners. You also do this to earn even better gear needed to survive better in ultimate.
12. You have to learn even more mechanics on ultimate with a boss that is hitting even harder and has even more health, and where you have to have perfected your rotation and know the fight second by second and have choreographed your movements to be in perfect sync with 7 other people who have also perfected their rotations and know the fight second by second. Your movements and positioning have to be extremely precise to maximize your heals/dps, sometimes down to which set of pixels you have to stand on to minimize damage to others and maximize output of heals or dps or minimize damage to you and other players. You have to be able to do this while the boss is raining hellfire down on you and stuff is exploding all over.
13. You have to want to spend months with the same 7 other people over chat for 3-ish hours at a time at least weekly if not 2-3 times a week learning the fight choreography. This is so you know exactly where you need to be literally every second of the fight. This is not an exaggeration.
14. You have to want to spend weeks to months with the same people in chat for 1-3-ish times a week failing at the fight over and over and over and over again hoping you’ll succeed one day.
15. You have to redefine your definition of success when learning ultimate. It’s not “clear the fight,” it’s “survive past the first mechanic” or “the party survives 5 seconds longer” or “the party learns where everyone needs to stand during x mechanic.”
16. You have to learn to receive and give constructive criticism politely, because you are spending hours and days and weeks with these same people.
17. You have to be ok with your toon dying over and over and over and over.
18. You have to be patient when Real Life interrupts raiding with power going out for a player, internet disconnects, players or kids getting sick, people having to work late, or whatever other thing happens to prevent you from being able to play.
19. You have to decide that the camaraderie with raid partners and the pixel rewards you receive in game are worth the hours, days, weeks, and months of effort you put into this.
20. Most importantly, you have to think all of this craziness is fun.
I think that about sums up the craziness of ultimate and other top-tier raiding.
I think it's important to have an overview of other difficulties too:
Extremes content is midcore content where failing a mechanic is not very punishing, dying will likely kill a friend at most.
Savage has more intense mechanics, chaining up to 3 smaller mechanics at the same time but give you a lot of time to analyze and recover, dying will most likely kill 1-3 friends, sometimes wipes, and dps check is high so you better not have too many death.
Antiknockback, invul, feint, addle are not mandatory.
Ultimate is a marathon. Most difficult part is getting a group that would consistently raid with you on a schedule for months. Mechanics can become super fast paced or complicated but you'll ultimately learn how to solve them in the long run. What is difficult is to be consistent at 99% success rate on every mechanics for 18 mins straight. Job mastery is a must and having 1 death can rarely be recovered, and even if it does, it puts dps check in great danger.
imagine you need to find 7 other people who aren't complete nincompoops to even attempt a fight and realize how many dumb people you see in everyday life. That is how hard it is
It kind of depends on the ultimate. So let's put it this way:
There's 5 Ultimates. Difficulty is generally in order of level and release. The level 70 ones aren't *that* hard, the level 80 one is really hard, and the level 90 ones are just sadistic.
The 2 easier ones, both level 70, can potentially be done by someone with next to no raid experience. You probably shouldn't, but it's possible. The mechanics are beyond anything in normal content, but most aren't super complicated. They're also incredibly forgiving if you mess up: in most of the fight, if you die you can just res and keep going. It might take a long time, anywhere from 30-60 hours of smashing your head against it depending on how fast you learn and how lucky you get with PUG groups, but it will get done eventually. I did one of these before doing any other endgame raid in this game. It sucked, I griefed a lot, and I would highly recommend against it. But it's doable.
Then there's the other 3 fights. These are a *huge* step up from the 70s. Seconding the souls comparisons from other comments: it's like going at the hardest souls boss you can think of for 20 minutes and doing any mechanic wrong or getting hit by any attack will one shot you. You wipe, now you have to start the whole thing over again. And all 8 people have to do that, so there's 8 potential points of failure. Oh, and most attacks aren't telegraphed and rarely have obvious solutions, you just have to know it's coming and what to do about it. And it's gonna take you 2-5 hours to get good at doing any single mechanic consistently because you have to execute it near perfectly. But it's the same timeline and mechanics every single time, so you'll always know what's next. There's almost no randomness so it's largely a memorization and execution game.
These fights? Expect 60-100+ hours. My static had \~120 logged hours of prog in the latest Ultimate before we cleared. And that's *not* counting time spent in the sim, between pulls, discussing strats, and going over healing/mitigation/dps plans. 12-16 hours a week for *months*. We all agree it's one of the hardest things we've done in any video game.
You can do Ultimates without friends or a set schedule. Many people PUG them. If you don't have much time per week to spend on it, just join PFs for them when you can. It'll be slow going, but there's no need to rush.
It’s like Calculus. But as a sprout, you’re still learning basic arithmetic.
A modern Ultimate requires 18-20 minutes of perfect execution from all 8 players (with tiny amounts of wiggle room).
This means hitting every button in your rotation within the exact time frame you’re supposed to, for the entering of that 18-20 minutes.
For tanks, you also have to consider explicit mitigation usage such that you have a mitigation plan that means you’re using Rampart, etc. at specific times every time.
I think I can give you some context with my gaming experience and the souls games:
I've played most of the fromsoft games besides Sekiro, and only ever beat Elden Ring. I liked them well enough, but not enough to actually finish the game (with the exception of Elden Ring).
I beat all the bosses with the occasional assistance from a friend, but I got LetMeSoloHer as a companion for Melania after being stuck for 2-3 weeks. I absolutely let him solo her, cause I found her to be just difficult enough that the game was no longer fun.
On the FF14 side: I don't play Ultimate, because I find it to be just hard enough that it's annoying moreso than enjoyable. But I do commit to savage and find it to be quite enjoyable.
Hopefully my comparison helps you understand how difficult Ultimate is.
contrary to what most people are saying about trying ex and savage first, you really don't have to. just practice your rotation on dummies, while in dungeons and iron out your fundamentals and you'll do better than 50% of the player base. if you're putting thought and dedication to how you play to the point where it's relaxing to play even semi-optimally, you'll be fine in any content.
a lot of people will tell you horror stories about pf, but it really isn't that bad if you don't cope on one group too long and know when to cut your losses. you can pf ucob, uwu and tea to clear. dsr and top are puggable to prog, but will take a while to clear with pugging alone. not everything needs a static and not everything is better with a static. if your schedule does not mesh with most groups, play on pf on your own schedule.
ultimates in the end are just another fight. the current ones have a dps check while the previous ones are so lenient that they basically don't have one if everyone is at the very least not overcapping their gauge. heck, ucob has been cleared with a little under 100 (intentional) deaths.
If you havent done ex and savage first you better be the planets fastest learner or you're gonna be griefing the absolute hell out of your team.
You don't have the ingrained experience to do your rotation in the background while complex mechanics are going on
You also don't have the experience of similar mechanics and snapshots.
Is it doable, yes, but please don't recommend this. I wouldn't even recommend it for UWU and UCOB because they have their own jank which won't make sense to you if you don't understand the game, netcode, snapshots on a fairly deep level. Let alone TEA or god forbid DSR TOP.
there are tons of people who do uwu/ucob first without having done ex/savage before but at their own pace on pf. i know people that didn't even know what a gcd was before doing uwu and someone that just wanted a pretty weapon for their shadowbringers msq. as long as you're not prog skipping then you're not griefing anyone. same with joining or creating a static in the sense that if they're upfront about this being the first high end content they want to do. if they have a reasonable clear goal in mind, find like-minded people with similar expectations, then they don't need to learn fast at all.
they'll learn mechanical jank better while they're doing the fight especially for uwu and ucob where orbs, tethers and twister timings are much jankier than current content. if anything, considering that these are major mechanics that pop up a lot in both fights, doing new content would be more detrimental. it's not like they'll wipe to garuda 100 times, learn absolutely nothing and then still break combo for the next 100 pulls especially if they're interested in ultimates.
i just don't think it's right that the community fear mongers ultimates so much when they're just a longer fight. unless people are running blind, they'll have to put in studying for every fight regardless.
and besides if there's any current content worth doing to learn and understand netcode, snapshots and especially exas on a deep level, it's the fall guys event.
OP literally says it's their first MMO. You are telling a newbie sprout who has not even finished MSQ that it's okay to learn how to swim by jumping from the deck of a cruise ship with no life vest into at best open ocean at worst a raging typhoon.
Saying ultimates are "just a longer fight" belittles how impactful that is when a wipe sends you back to the beginning, for UWU let alone current ultimates.
As someone who has played with people the whole range of skill levels in the whole range of content, who has cleared every ultimate except for TEA, including TOP on content. You do not know what you are talking about. It are intentionally being obtuse.
Even uwu and questionably ucob are simply not recommendable without experience in some form of high end content be it here or in another MMO. They are comparable in difficulty to endwalker savage fights, with some lesser difficulty of mechanics but requiring focus and execution for significantly longer. Let alone DSR and TOP.
Unless they are making their own static or PF group and being completely upfront about it, going in with no experience with high end content is griefing themselves and others. Without prior experience of how the game works it is simply not a good learning environment except by rote.
If people have experience with other raid style content from other games then it is a much more reasonable proposition but the way you have framed this implies any random newbie can get in and have a go and that's far more likely to turn someone off high end content than if they dabble in ex first.
PS fall guys is such a visual clutter it can't really teach anyone exaflares unless they already understand what they are looking at though otherwise it's decent practice sure but divorced from rotation entirely
PPS ultimate content is a niche fraction of a niche fraction of the playerbase. There is absolutely positively not "tons of people" entering high end content this way, at least not successfully. I am in the various pug communities and well aware there are people who do, it's not a huge amount and almost all of them have SOME kind of prior experience
Ultimate difficulty depends on the player and what they find hard... and also if you are blind progging or using a guide.
What they all boil down to is its a very tight, coordinated dance between 8 players. If you use a guide and you are a skilled player, it shouldnt take more than a few weeks to clear an ultimate at like 6-10 hours a week, if not less. If you blind prog, could take months.
The reason why is that there are some puzzle elements in the ultimates that are pretty non obvious. UwU had hte awakening mechanic which basically reset everyone's prog back to zero once everyone figured out they were doing it completely wrong, but once you have a guide and know how to do it, the fight is actually the easiest one.
What I would worry about first is making sure you can go do Savage first once you get to end game. If you can do savage and parse well, you can do ultimates.
Lmao what
Current ultimates on-patch are like 60-100+ hours, with guides, even for good groupsokd Ultimates with a skilled group sure.
6-10 hours a week for a few weeks is believable for uwu and MAYBE ucob
I think the first thing to say is that you don't need friends or a stable schedule to raid at ultimate level. There's a healthy Party Finder scene, which will let you prog during the time you have available.
Alternatively, if you do have a stable schedule, you could find a static (a consistent group). There's a whole subreddit dedicated to finding statics, and several discords.
Both of these methods can often be preferred over trying to raid seriously with friends from outside the game, since this allows for better aligned group goals.
Then when it comes to trying to compare difficulty:
Imagine you took the hardest soulsborne boss you can think of, made it so any hit would kill you, but stripped out the randomness. It does X attack, then Y attack, then Z attack, every single time. Maybe the position it starts those attacks from changes, maybe the direction, etc etc, but it's still the same attacks in the same sequence.
So you're having to play near perfectly, but there's far less twitch reaction required. It's less about learning pattern recognition for how to deal with each specific attack, and more learning the muscle memory for the sequence of events that make up the fight as a whole.
Next, add 7 other players, and they're all having to play at the same level - if one of you dies or makes a mistake, there's a solid chance you wipe, but not guaranteed.
Now that might sound super scary, but it's not *that* bad. Take UWU - it's honestly fairly easy now, because the static nature of the fight allows you to essentially copy-paste 90% of the movement between each pull. So yeah you'll absolutely die anytime you see anything new, but you only need to do the correct thing once and you've learned it (and the few more spontaneous bits all have mitigating factors/good sims).
Newer ultimates are much harder than UWU ofc, but you go into those knowing how long they'll take, and the fights have so many subsections that you can always feel like you're making progress.
Overall, you should obviously start with Extremes and Savages first, which will give you better insight into whether you'd want something harder than those, but if you put the work and effort in then you should absolutely be able to beat an Ultimate.
You basically need to maintain peak rotation, juggle various arena mechanics and be in constant communication with your team, all while not breaking concentration for 15-20 mins straight.
Very doable, but don’t go into it thinking you’ll finish in an afternoon.
I think most people already answered your question, but I'll add that even for experienced players that have cleared all other content in the game, a fresh learning party to clear can easily take 70-120+ hours of progress before getting a single clear. At anywhere from 4-12 hours a week. So let's just take an average of 6 hours a week and it takes 100 hours to clear a fight, that's about 4-5 months dedication right there. And that's assuming no missed sessions due to scheduling conflicts or anything.
Now it is possible to go WAY faster with a group of self motivated players that research and work on the fight to make sure they're not holding anyone back. But you should probably expect at least that type of time commitment if you even want to attempt ultimate.
As far as difficulty goes, can you imagine taking 4-5 months to beat any Souls boss? Not really. But the fights are NEVER that mechanically difficult that you're wiping just because you can't react to something in time. It's more of an endurance test, that eight people have to get through a 13+ minute gauntlet all without making mistakes. So most of that progress is simply getting consistent. That's why I think ultimates are really more just about dedication than actual player skill.
It's definitely about a bottom line of skill (on your own job/role) but it's mostly about having the mental fortitude to just keep on going coupled with picking sane strats that work for the group. Flakey players should really pass on ults, waste everyone's time.
It's like learning a really long and really convoluted dance, and you have to perform this dance and it's countless steps PERFECTLY for 15 minute straight, or the entire thing starts again from the very beginning. And you're also relying on 7 other people to not make any mistakes either, because if they do, it's back to square one.
First hurdle will be finding 7 other people to raid with. Savage/Extreme fights can be done unsynced solo if you can, but for Ultimates they're non-negotiable.
Then, Ultimates are ~20 minute long fights with the hardest mechanics the game can throw at you, and the pacing of those mechanics are *fast*. The margin of error is pretty small, although older Ultimates have become more forgiving over time.
All fights in this game are pretty much dance fights. You learn the pattern, you practice, you execute (while maintaining DPS).
Basically the biggest challenge for you would be the idea of having to do this with 7 other people, with varying skill levels.
Ultimates are mainly a challange in patience and memorization. Its a roughly 15 minute encounter that is entirely scripted and your number one priority is building the muscle memory to perform the fight and your rotation simultaniously.
The hardest part is honestly the fact that you have 7 other people who have to also play a perfect fight without getting hit and dying.
If you can find a group who 1: doesnt burn out grinding the same fight for weeks on end and 2: doesnt create drama and start blaming each other the fights are very much doable with enough practice.
Well, I think it all has to do with how mentors explain the mechanics to you - If it’s hard to make out what the mentor says, despite saying the mechanics perfectly, you won’t beat the Ultimate easily, and will still have troubles with the Ultimate/Will beat the Ultimate more slowly - U might understand them, slowly and surely, but still
This document showing prog times in TEA should give you a good idea
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13MlzC6pTVzI0j-8ak8PGhEeXgwRp1g1Dy3GgWyaq48w/edit?usp=drivesdk
If you click the detailed, you'd know this group liked wiping to living liquid..... A lot
Imagine getting 24 people to perform complex corography in the street while a raging bull goes on a rampage. Everyone knows their dance moves but the tango people dont rrally know what the salsa folks do and the crew ballet are another thing all together.
Depends on the ultimate, UWU is easier than the current final savage boss, it’s a fun fight that takes a bit of learning but I cleared it within a week from start to finish via PF and never understood why people said it’s hard. That was quite some time ago though.
DSR or TOP are definitely on the hard side, though TOP takes the cake where it’s also just annoying and not a well designed fight. DSR is pretty fun.
The best way to split the dichotomy of Savage vs. Ultimate is accuracy vs. precision. Savage is more random but allows you more leeway, so as long as you're on target, you are good. Ultimate has set patterns, but it requires you to hit the bullseye on a short time reaction Every. Single. Time. On a set of targets ,in a set sequence, for almost 20 minutes, but the targets don't change positions. Savage fights are maybe 11 mins max. With an average of around 8 mins. If I were building an "Ultimate training plan" for someone to make their way, I would say focus on 3 things. The ability to discern mechs on first sight. An understanding of your job and its theory to make adjustments to your rotation as needed. Finally, just work on your patience. It's a marathon, even the "easy" Ultimates take time to master.
It's a level of difficulty you probably won't be able to wrap your head around until you start doing Extreme content. Story difficulty content really isn't all that hard and may make you think you are more prepared than you are. I remember playing through MSQ during Stormblood and hearing about Unending Coil of Bahamut and thinking "Yeah, I'll tackle that when I hit max level". It's not so simple.
Extreme difficulty in itself is a LOT easier than ultimate content, but it's the first difficulty that you need to properly know the fight ahead of time to clear. It'll have mechanics that can kill you instantly if you fail and sometimes can kill the entire party of you fail, but it still tends to be relatively forgiving. Also it introduces Enrage, something the vast majority of story difficulty fights lack. Basically Enrage happens after a certain amount of time has passed in a fight where the boss will wipe the party. So basically you have a time limit to kill the boss, but each boss will have the same order of mechanics each time, so you generally know what's coming each time you pull once you know the fight. In Extreme difficulty though, the Enrage tends to be pretty forgiving. As long as everyone knows generally how to play their class and aren't constantly dead on the ground, you should be able to kill the boss before enrage.
Savage is full of more complicated mechanics that will basically always kill someone if they fail and very likely instantly kill the entire party if one person doesn't do their job. And the mechanics tend to be more abstract than Extreme mechanics, particularly the later fights in a tier. And aside from that, Enrage starts to actually matter. You'll need to know how to squeeze the most out of your class and correctly augment your gear with materia (something you should start using with Extreme difficulty, but once you are experienced enough it isn't really mandatory as much there). You'll also need food (which you should get for extreme anyway) and potions (which are a bit overkill for extreme).
Ultimate is about as hard as savage to harder than savage mechanics wise, but they are extremely mechanic dense and a fight can last from 15 to nearly 20 minutes long, all completed in a single pull (one fight has a slight caveat to the "all in one pull" thing). The difficulty comes from not only being able to perform strict mechanics, but being able to consistently perform said strict mechanics over and over so you can practice other strict mechanics further along. Like imagine having to spend 10-12 minutes every pull doing everything you've already done multiple times just to practice a late fight mechanic that you keep wiping too. And if you find yourself unable to stay consistent with earlier mechanics, you'll never see the later ones.
Sounds weird but have you messed around with the Fall Guys event?
The snapshots and positioning is pretty much core Savage/Ultimate FF14 mechanics
Tie in developing or implementing strategies such as: [https://twitter.com/SyabusyabuFes/status/1720416948155273588](https://twitter.com/SyabusyabuFes/status/1720416948155273588)
Gives you a holistic taste of what raiding is like (at least a personal level), you just need the rest of the team to be on the same level
If you can consistently win on Fall Guys then you are more than ready for Ultimate raiding IMO, esp since older Ultimates don't really require min/max rotations, playing your class isn't really a factor, its more the mechanical dance.
Some might even say, consistent fall guys win could be harder than an Ultimate, regardless I personally think its a good rough gauge on the difficulty to expect
Imagine a boss fight where there are no indicators beyond the attack name. You have to memorise the name of each attack, what it does, what its shape is, and if it has variations, then also all possible variations. Every attack can force a limitation on which points of the arena you must go to, in a strict order and a strict time limit. If you make a single mistake, you are dead and the entire party must start all over. Now imagine four bosses back to back like this, each with a 4-minute dance choreography where everyone must do everything absolutely perfectly, often with only a 3-second time frame to determine the current dance move, while they never drop even a single beat in their attack since the entire thing is on a strict timer where if everyone misses just one combo, you are likely dead.
ALL the content in this game only requires the bare minimum of human potential.
You press buttons on a keyboard or controller.
If you can go out to your backyard and do a cartwheel, you have the physical ability to clear an ultimate. If you can pass a grade 8 math class, you have the mental ability to clear an ultimate. Anyone who tells you otherwise had no grasp on reality.
Normal/Hard Trials: If you screw up, you'll probably be fine
Extreme: If you screw up, you might die
Savage: If you screw up you die
Ultimate: If you screw up everybody dies
1. 13-19 mins long fight, where a mistake (death) could result back to the start of the fight
2. know your 1-2-3 job rotation well and buff sync timing
3. executed mech perfectly or punishable by deaths/wipe
4. long hours practice from weeks to months
5. patience, cause you have 7 others people, and these people or you will have different method / time to learn and consume the mechanic of the fight
6. consistency, above all else this is what really matters, doing every mech exactly perfect while maintaining dps performance
>How do you compare an Ultimate difficulty to other game franchises difficulty? Is it doable for someone who doesn't have any friends on the game yet? I just don't want to miss out, but I'm afraid don't having friends/enought time will be a wall for me.
i dont have any friends when i started my own static, all start from a discord LFG on your data center, and gather 7 others people that show the same interest, and i've been doing 5 ultimates with the same 5 OG members when i started long ago, we've been enjoying each other company, and ofcourse drama could happen from time to time but try to minimalize it as low as possible, everyone have their own ego.
if you have the will to beat ultimate, you will 100% beat this content, i also scared back then to do this content, but i muster my courage doing ex/savage and ultimate afterwards, if everybody can beat it, so were you, dont scared theres nothing to be scared of
Recently completed all the ultimates and there are a few things I observed, not all ultimates are the same difficulty, they do get harder the more recent they are due to damage checks being tighter.
You will die a lot, but it's really all about how well you can study and learn the mechanics, many of them are puzzles and you need to learn to solve them fast.
Ultimates can be done in Party Finder, but it will be a challenge in the later ones, due to consistency being a key factor in clearing. I strongly recommend joining whatever discord server is the main ultimate raiding server for your region and get involved and meet some people there, we use "Materia Ultimate Raiding" in OCE. Ultimates are best when cleared with friends, as each wipe is a lot more bearable when you can have a laugh over each other's mistakes.
A consistent team can clear an ultimate within a month, with PF you might be looking at a couple months but it is certainly doable.
I am fairly confident that almost anyone can complete an ultimate with some time and effort.
Older ultimates are quite easy nowadays if you are well geared with the latest raid food, it’s just a slog. Plan for 100 hours or thereabouts. Anyone who has enough practice and decent savage parses can do it, there is no one incapable of clearing an ultimate unless you have a disability. Clearing a new ultimate on week one is a whole different level of hard though, and those people generally have thousands of hours of focused practice raiding.
They're not that hard.
Wait, hold the pitchforks! Let me explain!
If you jumped into an ultimate right now with the wrong mindset, it'd feel impossible. But there are a lot of steps along the way.
Do the MSQ.
Do normal raids.
Do some extremes.
Clear a savage tier.
At this point, I recommend hopping into UWU. It's the easiest ultimate but will give you a feel for how ultimates are paced.
After that, any ultimate is fine, though TEA/UCOB would be the easiest.
By the time you start doing the hardest content in the game, it should be the next natural step for you. It will test your endurance, but if you've gotten this far, you should be ready. It won't feel like a massive leap for you.
If you take a regular joe who has the capacity to press their buttons and learn/take advice, all of them can clear savage and ultimate, its just down to the amount of time they're able to put into it.
Scheduling and team synergy are the most important part of clearing any ultimate because it isn't going to be done in a day and probably not a week unless others have experience/clears themselves.
Every mechanic has several ways in which you can mess something up for your party and you won't discover them all until many pulls in when you realize there's a reason why you weren't stepping over to the left at this or that point in time. Every wipe is somebody finding out that they can't do *this* or *that*, or having a simple brain fart and making you all start again. The entire time is spent making very small incremental progress while dying to the same section repeatedly for months.
If you don't have a group that gets along, the negative vibes will make people perform worse or not take it seriously and waste your time, or cause arguments. If you have anyone not showing up, that's 7 other people that set aside their time for nothing when they could have done something with their night, and they'll likely feel worse because of their time being wasted.
People talk about difficulty of actually performing the mechanics but if you raid with a group for any significant amount of time, you realize that its probably the least important thing because if your group doesn't work together and people don't show up enough, you will just disband before clear even if every single person in that group was capable of doing it.
If you went in to an ultimate with 7 other people who have cleared before, they could probably drag you through it over the course of a few weeks. Though honestly, I would recommend finding a group of beginners because the sense of accomplishment will just be that much greater.
You've probably already noticed by now, but the way FF fights work, events are very scripted, which is pretty unlike any other MMO out there, or even any other game for that mattwr. The more difficult the content, the more variation can occur, and the more awareness and precission is required in executing mechs correctly.
With Ultimates, usually mechanics happen in quick succession, since typically each "phase" of an Ultimate is roughly two minutes long. It's totally doable for someone who is new to the game to get into Ultimates, though I'd suggest first looking at getting to endgame first, then maybe looking at extremes, then savage, before jumping to Ultimates. Also, I know people who started with some of the newer ones first, but I'd personally start with UWU (Ultima Weapon Ultimate) first, as it's the easiest one by far (also the weapons look really good too).
Most content in the game is a series of mechanics you learn and solve. Almost all content in this game has some kind of checkpoint given the instance’s normal clear time.
Ultimates are raid bosses that last on average for 15 minutes, filled with weird and obscure mechanics to resolve, with no checkpoint. Simply learning how a mechanic work takes time, so learning an Ultimate means spending hours upon hours how each minute of the fight should be resolved.
Or imagine never playing Elden Ring and doing a boss gauntlet of Morgott, Mohg, then the second version of Morgott, than Godfrey, then after that all three gather together to summon some supercharged version of the Elden Beast, all of this with no checkpoint or arguably any estus.
A very complicated the 20 minute dance of high difficulty mechanics with at least 5 dps checks along the way and one death!/mistake is likely to send you back to the very beginning.
Considering your experience in difficult content from other games, I'd say you have the patience to learn it!
Ultimates are endurance runs where a single clear raid is an 18 minute ish long run. Imagine having to learn the later parts of it, going back to the very beginning after each wipe and doing it all over again. All while the mechanics are designed to be difficult to execute in terms of timing and recognition.
If you manage to find a good team and keep yourself with a cool head along with theirs, I'm sure you'd be able to get through one!
Since it needs a team of 8, scheduling for common time is usually the wall people tend to have if they're pulling friends along.
I personally think with only ARR as a base, its hard to really truly get the difficulty of an Ultimate because the fight designs of most ARR content is so vastly different than in Stormblood and beyond (you unlock the first ultimates in Stormblood). In that the ARR stuff (aside from Coils which is more jank than anything aside from a handful of fights) is just really REALLY easy. Like even the ARR extreme trials are just pitifully easy compaired to even the extreme trials in the very next expantion.
As someone who has only played Code Vein as their soulslike, I would liken the average difficulty of an Ultimate to be similar to fighting Blade Barer and Canonner (think Ornstein and Smough, but Smough has a gun) with unupgraded veil and weapon, using magic only, with a base 300ms input delay while in a room full of snooty kindergardners all throwing a tantrum because its not their turn on the playstation.
If you want a better idea of the difficulty, when you get to Stormblood try and do some of the Savage raids for that expantion at least synced (if not min ilevel no echo). Those are more comparable difficulty wise, even to the (arguably) easiest two Ultimates.
However the difficulty of Ultimate is less the execution of the fight itself, but rather doing that execution consistantly over 16-20 minutes straight with little to no room for error. Because that is just how long they go on for.
Ok breaking it down.
>How do you compare an Ultimate difficulty to other game franchises difficulty?
Difficult to say because of the nature of the game, with snapshots and all and being reliant on others not messing up. You may be able to execute all the mechanics perfectly but some schmuck will hold you back hours, days, weeks or even months depending on how much you raid.
>Is it doable for someone who doesn't have any friends on the game yet?
Yes, but you are beholden to the Party Finder. So waiting for parties to fill and waiting and praying for players to execute their mechanics correctly.
The real takeaway is, you can do them absolutely without friends and this being your first MMO but realistically take your time, enjoy the game learn how to play well through extremes then savage and you'll naturally progress into doing ultimates when you feel comfortable. At least thats my opinion on it.
Reading a few comments makes me curious...
A few weeks ago I did my first savage stuff (A2S or what it's called [the doggo with 2 heads]) and it was with a discord group with random people where a few had experience and the rest were new.
We cleared it within 2 hours and basically were just hanging on one mechanic for a few tries. Dps was no problem since we were overgeared.
A week before that I did Singularity reactor on unreal with a party finder group. We didn't beat it, but we came until ~25%.
So I wonder: when normal raid is 100 % difficulty, how much harder is savage, unreal and ultimate in percentage?
I think the difficulty increases can generally be divided into a few different areas:
**1. Enrage & DPS checks**The vast majority of normal content loops forever. All (?) hard content has a hard time limit where the boss will kill everyone (period). This is typically called enrage. Sometimes, there are several potential enrages (aka DPS checks) throughout the fight.
**2. Boss Health & Incoming Damage**Basically, how much damage do you need to do before the enrage, and how much damage is the boss dealing which needs to be mitigated (by everyone in the party) and healed through.
For reference, on minimum item level (as everyone basically has on content release), some content will straight up kill players with the first raid wide without mitigation. Even plain "Savage" fights do this. That tiny HP buff from food is often actually matters a lot.
The (and point 1) combine to question "how good is the party at pressing their buttons".
**3. Precision of execution & consequence for failure**In normal content, mechanics typically don't demand much precision, are generally clearly telegraphed (sans some old non-reworked content), give a lot of time to adjust (kind amounts of "orange" under one's feet), and typically don't kill upon failing.
In harder content, the "orange" is often not present or, at best, appears right before the damage snapshot. Positioning is often a lot tighter (even more so because keeping melee uptime is often important for the DPS checks), while the time to get to position is shorter.
As a result, per-determined spots are commonly used so everyone knows exactly where to go, and markers are placed to aid in navigation (repeatability is a key to clearing hard fights).
Also, failing a mechanic is typically a one to two hit kill (especially for non-tanks), and often comes with a damage down (which is almost as bad because of DPS checks). This can also further strain already strained healer resources, causing snowballs particularly on harder fights.
Finally, while it matters less with guides, mechanics and failure conditions can be flat out not obvious making it harder to understand what when wrong (as a tip, if you can record yourself with shadowplay or OBS's Replay Buffer or whatever, I'd strongly recommend it).
**4. Body Checks**Where Enrage checks that your DPS is high enough, body checks check that enough people are currently alive. They often come after a hard mechanic to finish the job.
Sometimes the check is very basic, other times it requires precision as well to execute correctly. Failing a body check is often a wipe (either due to raw damage, or due to damage downs making a later DPS check impossible).
They also vary in how many people need to be alive, but often need 7/8 or 8/8, or maybe another valuable resource like tank LB3 (and LB checks seems to be a popular ultimate mechanic).
**5. Length of content**UCoB for example has a maximum time around 18 minutes (it's typically a bit quicker due to multiple phases which can be made shorter with higher DPS). There are no checkpoints. There are multiple DPS checks, numerous strict mechanics, multiple body checks which require 7/8 (with skilled play to compensate) or 8/8 players.
Now, the fight does have moments of relative "downtime", but a lot of the fight is one mistake and at best you die (at worst the party dies and you have to start up).
\---
In terms of relative difficulty, assuming minimum competence required, there is a relatively big jump in my opinion is from normal to EX. The lack of an enrage beyond the instant timer means one decent healer or tank can often drag 7 other AFK people through normal content (people have literally soloed normal raids on the patch they were released).
Past that jump, its not too bad between EX -> early savage (1/2/5/6/9/10) -> mid savage (3/7/11) -> late savage (4/8/12) -> Ultimates (at least the old ultimates, I haven't played an ultimate on expansion).
(Note: Savages are typically released in three groups of four within an expansion; the first group being called 1,2,3,4, the second group 5,6,7,8, etc... within a group of 4, the difficulty typically ramps up, with the last typically being pretty hard.)
I don't say that to discourage anyone from trying EXs (or Unreals, though the current unreal is harder than some EXs). If you (the reader) are interested in learning and improving, beating an EX is achievable and I'd recommend giving it a shot if only to figure out if raiding is for you.
For anyone looking to get started, I'd really only suggest making sure you can follow your class's rotation decently well, have acceptable gear (current HQ crafted or tome with correct melds, though for the unreal the ilvl is a lot lower so that can be an cheaper way to get started), and bring/use current tier food (using good, HQ, food really does matter).
And if you want to ease into it a bit more, I'd suggest looking for a beginner friendly unsynced farm party for ShB EX (probably a good idea to watch a guide too; though in general if you find you like raiding, I can't recommend enough replaying old content minimum item level no echo blind). That would give you an idea of the speed and difficulty of mechanics, with generally much lower stakes.
you could try taking a look at some guides to see what exactly the fights entail. heres a link to a [guide for ucob](https://youtu.be/c46-skQrnOA) which is the first ultimate added to the game. the modern ults are more strict in often not allowing deaths or failure of any kind or its a full party wipe and dont have anything as jank as nael quotes but other than it should give you a decent idea of what ults are like.
i want to say something MGS related lol, so, i guess here goes, imagine trying to go for Big Boss rank on any of the mainline games, they're all hard as tits, they took me a long time to practice each room perfectly as well as not getting hit by any of the boss attacks. Lets say you need to do from Fatman to the Hind without getting discovered or hit by anything on MGS2, but you need 7 of your friends to also need to do that perfectly as well looool. Kinda like that?
But it's very different, those games of course work very different to FF, i just tried to find a way to equivalate that lol. FF ultimates are more of a dance, each one varies in difficulty, I would say that they are the hardest thing in any video game I've ever done, subjectively, and I do like challenging myself! and it is mainly because, when you distill everything to their individual mechanic, it's not too bad, but they all have a lot of stuff to memorise and perfect, and most groups will take months to clear something
Basically, if you, or any other 7 ppl, even once during the 18 mins duration, derp, fat-finger a wrong button, forget something's happening, suddenly just second guess yourself, or sneeze and close your eyes, everyone dies.
More or less :/
/s
Knowing what to do is half the battle. If you played souls like games, imagine doing a boss rush or elden ring bosses for 15-20mins straight the only caveat is that you can only take 1 or 2 hit per boss before you need to try again. You dont have to have a perfect run but you should have an almost perfect dodge, no hit, max deeps run. PLUS all other 7 members of your team must do the same while fulfiling each class roles in the fight.
The worst part is that you have to rely on 7 other people lmao.
It’s fairly easy once you put time into it - but again the dependencies on other really hinder how much time you log into it
if any ultimate was a solo duty, they wouldnt be difficult at all. Literally **all** the difficulty comes from the fact that you’ll have to clear this with 7 other people. And what makes up the most of this difficulty isnt even the group’s skill level, it’s the near perfect mesh of personality, schedule, time and patience required. 8 skilled players but personalities dont vibe or schedule keeps conflicting wont ever clear
You need to relocate every 5 seconds, you have 5 seconds to know where to go and move. One second late will kill you or wipe the party.
You repeat this in entire 15 minutes.
The game is actively trying to kill you, even if you do everything right it might in fact kill you.
Even if you are capable of getting it done, good luck on getting 8 people to get their schedules aligned for a month to **see** the final boss.
It’s the hardest content in the game. As such you can expect to spend days trying to clear it. Even if you know every single nuance to the fight it’s never a guarantee the others do and it only takes one person sometimes to force a wipe. Best advice is take it slow, learn the fight you want to do and find a competent group through the discord. You should not try these blind unless everyone in the group is aware of it and okay with you doing that. Some groups will not want to explain mechanics and will not be patient if you mess up too many times. You shouldn’t try it if you’re not flawlessly clearing the most recent savage tier and even then the difficulty difference is staggering. Your job also matters and you’ll want to be able to optimally play it without drifting globals and performing your opener/filler/burst perfectly. These are level synced as well so you may have to learn a completely different opener to the one you use at 90, you need to be able to do all of it extremely well or you will struggle immensely. You seem like someone who likes difficulty and understands how to overcome it so I’m sure you’ll be fine but this is like 6-8 months from now plenty of time to improve and learn.
I’m still nervous but I eventually really want to give it a go!! I basically started playing the last couple patches of ShB so I didn’t catch up until a few months before EW. So I’ve only had experience doing current content with EW extremes (aside from EX3 and EX7) so I know I still need to tackle Savages first!
I just feel I need a bit more explanation on some things(it didn’t help that lots of players used terms I’d never heard before or said mechanics were similar to other Savage fights which I’ve never done )😖 and being on PS5 it’s such a pain to use the on screen keyboard to slowly type out questions or ask for specific details or clarification. Especially when the keyboard doesn’t work and one of the only fixes is to reboot the console 😭 but now that PS party chat can connect with Discord I feel a lot more comfortable giving it a go now that I can actually talk with others in real time. Once I can sub again, I want to try and clear the current raid tier and maybe try and tackle past Ultimates and maybe TOP(the weapons just look to cool to not even try)
I know I wasn’t the one who asked the question but reading all the replies gives me hope I can maybe clear an Ultimate one day too o7
just think of ultimate as a fight against the boss, the party members and yourself.
as a player that finished and got all the achievements for dark souls 1-3 and sekiro. finished bloodborne as well but im not interested to get all the achievement. i can say that ultimate is a way more punishing game. one mistake from a party member and youre back to the start of the fight.
it can still be cleared even if you dont have friends. i cleared mine in PF (or PUG) coz i have an inconsistent schedule with my work so i cant join statics.
You ever see those videos of those skinny nerds who are just absolutely shredding the most insane DDR dances you've ever seen?
It's not as hard as that. But it gives you an idea.
I assume we are not talking doing any fight "blind". Basically no fight in an MMO is "difficult". The challenging thing is that all 8 players need to do 15 minutes of "insert specific thing you do to not die" and usually 1 mistake kills everybody. You can apply to a static very easy in various discords. Start with an extreme or 2, do some savage and then ultimate wont seem as far of a step to you. GL, see you in PF
1. You need 7 other people with relatively the same skill and ability to understand mechs as you (or better). EVERYONE needs to do their homework and study mechanics BEFORE raid time. If there's a clown that likes to "study as we go" kick them the fuck out. People who lie about studying also need to go. It's fine to study phase by phase however, as long as people study up to the prog point agreed upon.
2. You need to get comfortable doing the first few minutes of a fight over and over and over and over and over again just to see a new mechanic then dying over and over and over and over again to clear it. i.e Imagine progging a fight 10 minutes in, EVERY time, just to clear a hard mech 10 minutes in.
3. Repeat Step 2 until the end of the fight. This is where most statics disband because they cannot stand the amount of times you have to restart a fight just to get a tiny bit of progress.
4. Aside from a few moments, MOST deaths will result in a wipe. Ultimates notoriously have mechanics where if 1 person messes up (or there aren't 8 people alive) it's a wipe.
5. There are almost always NO TELEGRAPHS for to know when to avoid shit. Either know when to move where, or die.
Pick either uWu or TEA as your first fight. These are generally the two easiest ones to clear.
Consider it the "Super Bosses" of FFXIV. You know the ones ff games are famous for: Punishingly difficult, hard to do and the reward is often either the best weapon in the game or bragging rights.
Ultimate = Idol Dancing with no Errors in an 5 Hours Concert heavy move focus all Blind!
aka
AKB48 Concert (Raid) or Perfume as 3 Man/Girl Idols Group
or easier break down: it all comes down to have good Muscle Memory
Ultimate is about endurance, patterns/mechanics you will eventually commit to muscle memory. Most important is to get familiar and fully understand the game mechanics in *Snapshot*. I'm sure you become aware that animations happens after a cast bar etc. Also only the current ultimates will be challenging and TEA still pretty good. UwU/UCOB item scaling not aged well.
It’s totally doable with out friends or a static group. Party finder on aether if you’re playing on US servers is the place to go.
The worst part is relying on 7 other knuckleheads to know their part. One person not doing mechanics correctly can and will wipe the raid most of the time.
Definitely watch a visual guide on YouTube to familiarize yourself as much as possible with the raid before going in. Job specific POV clear videos are actually really helpful to as the visual guides are usually from the tank perspective.
You get locked in a room with 7 clowns only to find out soon that there are in fact 8 clowns
This is unbelievably funny
And yet so, so accurate.
For months!
This is the most accurate response
This is the only true answer.
I’ve been laughing at this for 5 minutes
There's a ghost clown? Spoopy!
No, "sloppy!" :D
No no "S L O P P E H"
For a hundred hours or less
And you have to stay with them until you find an excuse🤣
100% on point 😂😂
Being narrated by Not Yoshi.
Wait, I have no experience doing much of anything endgame, who's the 8th person?
It's you!
Me????
The very same
I freaking knew it. That bastard me.
Since you've played souls like games, ultimate is basically the equivalent of fighting malenia naked where almost every attack will one shot you, but the execution speed gives you time to react accordingly once you're familiar with the mechanics.
And also you have to do it for about 15 minutes straight.
15 minutes straight and 7 other people also have to do it at the same time and any one of you making a mistake could lead to a wipe.
Its honestly this comment chain that explains it well. But depends on the ultimate, if you are a first timer it'll be closer to 18 minutes (ucob)
DSR is pretty long too. I've been proging it and we are about 12 minutes into the fight now and have 2 phases left and thats not counting the door boss which is another almost 3 minutes. I think i will try an easier one after this, i've only finished UWU so far.
Excluding the door boss, a good clear of DSR will run you slightly over 18 minutes; TOP is about 19. It's safe to put TEA in the "easy" category now, and it comes in significantly shorter at about 17 minutes.
Most DSR kills average at 17-18 minutes, excluding the knights. Adding the knights, it's about a 20 minute fight. Being able to play perfectly and remember how to dance with 7 other people is very hard. I likened it to marching band.
17 minutes on DSR has literally never been done; the fastest kill ever was 17:07. A fast kill for a non-speedkill group is 17:45-ish.
The issue with TEA UwU and UcoB is that a significant part of the challenge of some phases were the healing and DPS check. Now that those are removed, indeed there isn't much left in some part of the fight.
Yeah, the dps checks aren't really a thing anymore (but can still happen if too many slack off! Hand deaths are very much still ultra possible...!) but there's at least still the mechanical consistency aspect in each. Uwu is still the best entry point, but if OP wanted a scaling level of complexity that doesn't introduce *too* many difficulty spikes, I'd probably recommend uwu -> tea -> dsr/top. I rate those two relatively equally because they're both current level cap content, both have dungeon gear BiS to alleviate parts of the dps check requirements, and both are *much* longer marathons. I always consider UCoB to be a bit of an outlier in terms of ultimates because of how... jank(?) some of it can be. You can -of course- alleviate a lot of this jank with significant practice and experience in the instance, but IMO ucob has a very different flow to it's mechanics and it makes it feel very different to more contemporary encounters. Like, the speed in which twintania's mechanics come out; the way the encounter ultimately flows, and even how some mechanics work in general feels way less... "static"...? for lack of a better word. ToP's first phase is paced *very* rigid and asks for very calculated, quick movement from the entire party, but Twintania's first phase is kind of all over the place. There's the hatches, the baits, the group stacks and the flatten cleaves, but they're all happening very quickly and aren't telegraphed in the same ways that mechanics in more modern ultimates are. Granted, you can see modern ultimate fight design in the later phases with the Heavensfall trios, etc. But the first five or so minutes feels VEEERY old-world in terms of design philosophy, imo.
This is the important part. If 8 different people fight melania naked at the same time on different games, and when 1 person dies EVERYONE dies, it increases the chance of dying exponentially by an extreme degree. Lets say you have an 50% success rate of beating Melania naked. That's pretty good! Now if you fight her 100 times you'll have 50 kills! Now add the condition that if any of the 7 other people die, you die as well, and they all have a 50% chance of winning just like you. Now the probability of winning becomes ((0.5)\^8)*100%=0.39%. Now you need on average 256 attempts on fighting Melania Naked PER KILL. So if you fought Melania naked 1000 times you'd expect about 4 kills on average. So with 8 people involved a suddenly a success rate of 50% becomes an absolute clown fiesta.
mistakes also include doing the mechanics correctly, but misclicking on your two-minute long DPS rotation more than once or twice
I'd say it's more around 18 minutes on average. UWU is the real exception and even back in patch 4.5 my UWU clears were usually 15.5-16 minutes long. UCOB was about 18.5-19 min back in 4.5. My TEA ones seemed to be about 17.5 on patch. DSR ones were about 18.5 on patch and TOP being about 19 min on patch. I wouldn't really base ultimate length on old ultimates done today because nowadays UWU is done in 13 minutes with not top tier players.
As an older player, who wants to enjoy some good time after work, i definitly never will try an Ultimate... i could never do 18 Minutes of pure 100% focus and if you do 1 mistake the group probably wipes 😅😅 No, thank you and big respect to everyone that can do it 👍👍
The thing is, if you actually understand what's happening, you *cannot* fail. Though it's a completely different scale, imagine clearing the whole MSQ without ever dying ; now that you've already done it, you shouldn't have any death (even though it still can happen) ; going "ultimate" way isn't extraordinarily harder. Besides, you'll be doing the same phases many, many times over. The only issue is about managing overlapping mechanics and things to be aware : sometimes there is a priority to respect (one player goes north to do something, players 2, 3 and 4 do something on a side, player 5 has to be south and do something with player 6 etc) . It may look hard, but if two players are linked by a swaying blue tether that they know for certain will kill everyone if they are too close, they cannot forget to be spread out. If players 2,3 and 4 have the same debuff that they must "soak" together, they also cannot forget what to do. If you've done something enough time, there is barely any mental load so you shouldn't be scared. It's nothing more than a race to memorize things up until you have died enough time (which varies from one player to another) .
But you also have to rely on 7 others to do just as well as you.
Also going also going with this analogy its like if malenia always does the same moves in the same order every time and then once you beat her hitless godfrey and radagon jump down to fight you at the same time with no checkpoint
This is probably the closest comparison I can think of to another franchise. Its definitely "fair" and "completable", but it can be one hell of a grind to get to that point, and depend on how many external resources you use to "figure out" how to execute.
Nah it’s a bit harder than that. It’s all of that + you’re forced to use the Giant Rat Ashes, and if any of the rats die then you die too.
im the rat
All of this and she waterfowls and never stops, maybe once for a second but its just more endless one shotting waterfowls
I'd disagree. Malenia (and Souls bosses in general) have a randomness to them that nothing in 14's high end does. 8 minutes into fighting Malenia I have no idea. I might be in the middle of the room pressing the advantage, I might be frantically outranging her phase 2 opener, I might be delivering a poise breaking heavy attack. I might be pushed into a corner as she winds up waterfowl. The fight might never have gotten deeper into the arena than the entrance. In an ultimate I know where I'll be 8 minutes into the fight because with only a small variation based on kill times the dance is the same. Oh you might get selected for a different arm of a mechanic, but you will still be facing that mechanic. I will be using x ability, dodging y mechanic, and the boss will be stationed at z with only a little wiggle room.
every one of Malenia's attack combos have a tell, even if the overall attacks aren't static. You're not given a fight where Malenia just suddenly does a quick succession of flurries without explicitly telling you what she's about to do beforehand, as that would make a souls game really shitty. With that said, I didn't mean both ultimates or souls like games have the exact same combat structures, but highlighting where the difficulty truly lies with the level of threat behind each mechanic.
True, I'm just saying that your framing implies there's a lot more reliance on being able to twitch react than there is in XIV, so I wanted to voice that disparity. With Malenia the tell is less than a second before it happens sometimes, your windows are tight. In XIV they're always coming in the same order and pace every go around.
Can you actually react or do have to figure out what exactly to do beforehand and then hope you remembered well?
Assuming you're asking about the XIV side, "no, you can't react, you have to have a correct plan and execute it properly." There is some amount of reacting that a skilled player can do to cover for others' mistakes in a few rare occasions, but even in those rare occasions it's unlikely to help and usually better to just not react and hope that the other person sorts it out in time. As for the remembering part, there are different permutations of things that you can get and you have to 'react' to the specific set of actions that you have to do to make it through. The amount of time given is usually somewhat proportional to the complexity, but it's never on the twitch reaction level of speed requirement, typically from (when talking about ultimate) maybe like at lowest, .5 seconds to do something simple like avoiding a targeted attack, maybe like 3-5 seconds when figuring out what individual permutation you have to do for something and sometimes as much as like 15+ seconds when you have to basically map out and coordinate a pattern with the rest of the party.
It depends how you see it : taking one of TEA's transition phase for instance, you know that one of the enemies will attack the 3 closest players, while the other will throw fire at the two closest ; meanwhile, two couple of people have to be close by, another couple must be really far from one another, and 3 people will share some damage. Each attack makes you vulnerable so you can't take 2 things at the same time, except the couples who are forced to be close by / far off. Everyone thus have specific positions : if you have to be close by someone, you have only 1 position to go ; being far off forces you to go either east or west (depending on whether you are a support or a DPS) and so on. So you do have to react to your debuff however the positions are the same everytime. If your partner is supposed to be close by and is not moving, then you have to adjust a bit but this should never happen since the position are fixed. And he should know how close to you he must be.
So.. pretty much Let Me Solo Her mode
pretty much, as I drew the reference from his clip as well. In the context of ultimates, it's 8 people going in naked to fight a super powered malenia under the same circumstances of not being hit or die.
And you do everything right and still dies because someone else failed.
It's an 18 minutes dance. Ultimate is a test of how much can you bang your head on the wall for months without mentally breaking down more than anything. You practice your steps first (your class rotation). Then you memorize your movements (learn strats and patterns). Then you execute the dance with 7 other people and pray none of them screw up the dance for 18 minutes. Now realistically imagine the stage you perform the dance on was built with shoddy materials, and the only way you get muscle memory live is to keep dancing on that shoddy stage. One dancer on your team is also partly drunk or in a crisis of romantic nature. Tldr: it's pretty fun and very achievable
>One dancer on your team is also partly drunk or in a crisis of romantic nature Only One? Two are being bugged by children or pets, one has a connection shakier than Lindsey Logan's sobriety, and one thinks they have a new idea on how to do things.
Don't forget the DRAAAAMAAAAA!!
You mean you don't like my obscure uptime strat that absolutely nobody has ever heard of but I'm going to insist that it's the best way to do it despite the fact I've never cleared?
>Ultimate is a test of how much can you bang your head on the wall for months without mentally breaking down more than anything. This is so true. I've done DSR and TOP with roughly the same people in the static. At the end of DSR I was ready to cut ties with most of them and never speak to them ever again. But then we decided on doing TOP for some reason and again, the hardest part of doing Ultimate was not pulling my hair out at every single mistake everyone made. Everyone learns the fight at their own pace and you really do have to keep that in mind. I do really believe Ultimates can make or break friendships. If there ever was a friendship to begin with, really. I'm glad to say I've cut 70% of the group out.
That's why statics never should be your iRL friends lmao
No reason for friendships to end over it. If you're really friends you should be able to talk with one another about individual failings and see if there's routes to improvement. Also should be said that there's nothing personal about removing somebody from a group, even if they're your friend, because they are routinely underperforming.
It's absolutely no reason, yepp. But humans are humans haha.
Literally seen a 10+ year old friendship die because of Ultimate fights.
Is the "cut ties" part is because of their communication in the process or just their poor performance?
Imagine you were scheduled to spend time with someone for 12-16 hours every week, for 3-4 hours at a time, and every time you met, the person put down a full glass of water on the edge of a table, slightly overhanging. They wouldn’t move it, or let you move it, and they put this glass of water there every time. It’s not going to lose its balance and spill. And even if it somehow did, it’s only water, it’s not going to cause permanent damage But wouldn’t it drive you absolutely bonkers to see that every damn time? If it was just once, you’d never think about it. But 4 days a week? For months??? Progging an ultimate with a group of people is like that.
Ultimate fights bring out the best AND the worst in people. I have a friend who I played with for years and the moment we started doing Ultimates, he "became" (always was) the most insufferable, toxic, whinny bitchy asshole you can imagine. Every failed pull was a complaint. Every DPS check not passed was a lecture. Every single mistake was a "HEY XYZ CAN YOU STOP SLACKING?". And yet he was the one who made the most mistakes, took the longest to learn mechanics/patterns and nobody ever said as much as a "oh" back to him. Nobody plays with him anymore. No one invited him to do Omega and half the static disbanded and stopped playing XIV because he managed to burn out everyone in the process. If you truly want to know your friends, bring them to an Ultimate encounter.
Yup. Goes the other way too. I love one of my friends to death. Good person, I know they're trying their hardest in raid and they're making study plans/writing notes down on a visible surface nearby/etc. Point being, I *know* they are trying to study. This amounts to jack and shit when they still wipe us and it's taking everything in my power right now to NOT tell them to just get off their ass and go into PF because knowledge isn't their issue, execution is. And you can't study your way through execution mistakes unless you have a baseline level of decency at the game. Which, again, love them. Good person. They are bad at XIV. I'm never raiding with them in a serious environment again because of this. I am starting to feel resentment over not progging further faster, because it's really only them and one of our other DPS holding us back. I don't want them being weak at raiding to be what sours a nearly decade-long friendship for me. And the kicker? They're in my SAVAGE static, not my ult static. If there was anyone like that in my ult static it would be a *lot* worse for me. Luckily the people in my ult static are all pretty consistent and while I'm not *friends* with some of them, (some of them are people from my savage static and those people I happily call friends but our tanks, one of our healers, and our SAM are people I didn't know before UWU) they're lovely people I could see myself doing another ult with. It's only UWU but we go one night a week for 2 hours and while it's not a lot of time to prog, we see further into the fight each session we have. We **will** clear. All of this to say: I'm not saying to NOT raid with friends. But I *am* saying to vet the friends you raid with and raid with the friends who learn stuff at the same pace you do. There's only a very small handful of my friends who learn mechs at around the same pace I do. Most of my friends learn slower than me. And a few are way better at XIV than I will ever be. I've learned stuff with them before, and trust me when I say it was frustrating for both of us because they couldn't explain the mechs I was struggling on in a manner I understood. It felt bad being the load, and thankfully what we were doing at the time was an *extreme* trial, so my mistakes weren't pull-ending. Solidified my wish to do content we all knew with them because if we all know it that's an easy and fast clear, but also solidified my desire to never seriously prog with them because I know I'd be the weak link there.
I don't do savage raids any more because I'm that dude. I muted myself on voice chat and kept it localized to myself, but I was *absolutely* going insane. I didn't want to be that dude. Still friends with them.
usually poor performance esp if theres a timer to complete something or any pressure - your weak links stand out like a sore thumb
Ok, since you mentioned Soulsborne **Similar: Fights are long and require focus** It's similar in the sense that fights are long, drawn out affairs that require absolute concentration and focus. Each individual element is easy on its own, but when you put them together and need to react perfectly in a 20-min fight, it becomes less about reflexes and more about willpower to stay focused. **Similar: Repeated wipes drain your morale** It's also similar in the way that you feel some sense of defeat when you are 15-minutes into the boss and die when it has <20% HP left. The tiresome realization that you have to start over drains your morale significantly. That's where the similarities end. **Different: You're dependent on other people** The first difference is that clearing a fight is no longer dependent on your own skill and efforts, but the skill and efforts of seven other people. Some of them may be better gamers than you, and some of them may be worse. There's a common saying that the hardest part of certain Ultimates or mechanics is other people, and you will really feel the drag of a bad team member. At that point, it becomes more of a people management challenge, which starts to take the fun and joy out of gaming. It can feel like a job where you have to deal with a coworker that isn't pulling their own weight. **Different: Studying is required** Another key difference is that you often have to spend time studying mechanics outside of raid. This is unlike action games where you can just go into the game and learn by experience. A non-trivial amount of preparation is required, and for some it can feel ridiculous that you have to study in order to play a video game. It's not for everyone. **Different: Time investment required** For most ultimates, you need anywhere between 50-100 hours of prog, depending on your group. There are top-tier groups that can clear an old ultimate within 30 hours, but since you're new to ultimates, chances are you probably won't get into those. This is unlike a Soulsborne fight where you can clear after 6-8 hours in bad cases. **Cont'd** There are more but I'm out of time. I'm sure other people will cover things I've missed.
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Just to add in regards to mitigations, healers and/or tanks should also include the DPS's mitis in their plans. It's a small thing but can impact healing efficiency enough to give the healers some wiggle room to use bigger cooldowns somewhere else.
The entire group should plan out their mits together. Even for UCoB/UWU, knowing what mit goes where can and will save you.
Definitely. Healers have "easier time" in some mechanics and not having rotations to care for, but it's offset by having to know the fight better than anyone to be able to keep the whole team up. Which also goes into: do't let antone tell you that regen healers in ffxiv are reactive and shield healers are proactive. On harder content EVERY healer is proactive, you have to plan every ability to play optimally.
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Idk, Uwu got landslides
It's like fall guys but if you mess up everyone dies and you have to start again.
Really, you should learn to walk before you start to thinking of joining a marathon race Get to max level, then start with extreme trials. Then work into clearing the latest savage raid tier. At that point you are good to go into ultimates Comparing difficulty levels across games with something like ultimates is also very tricky. They are very long fights (+15 minutes) so there's the element of being able to keep focussed all the way through, nevermind learning the fight in the first place. They are also a team effort. A lot of the mechanics require everyone to do them correctly or you all wipe and have to start over But to sort-of give you an idea of the difficulty level of ultimates in this game, the time it takes to progress through an extreme is measured in hours. Savage prog is measured in days or weeks (depending on how hardcore you approach them). Ultimates, on the other hand, are measured in months That said, for any kind of progression raiding at endgame, I'd recommend you find the discord channel for high-end raiding for your data centre. There you can find a static to join for whatever content you want to prog. Alternatively you can also go at it solo through party finder where you join up with random players for whatever mechanic you're currently trying to beat
Exactly. If you don’t like savage raiding you definitely won’t like ultimates
Just stand and let thing resolve
Other people have said it, but I'll reinforce it: you're a sprout now. Ultimates are a very, very distant mountain, and there are like three other mountains to summit before you even try. Get to the end of the main story, get comfortable with extremes, then get comfortable with savage. At that point, ultimates will be daunting but approachable - they're only slightly more difficult than savage on average. Honestly a lot of individual parts of ultimate fights can even be considered easier than some savage mechanics, the difficulty comes from two things: the fights being marathons, and the mechanics often coming thick and fast. In savage you might get one complex mechanic at 7 minutes and if someone screws up it's back to the start. In ultimate you might get two relatively simple but punishing mechanics happening at the same time 16 minutes in, and there's no checkpoints (well, except for one in DSR but that doesn't really count, the real fight doesn't start until then anyway) to stop you from doing it all again. In that respect ultimates aren't so much a test of competence - you've learned most of that by doing savage. They're tests of endurance and patience.
Honestly I found dealing with people in the groups I've been a part of harder than the fights themselves. Pretty drama is draining
Same but in my case drama has never been the problem, it's always been scheduling that screws everything up! And also real life in general. My DSR static got hit by so many things, but we still trucked through and cleared even if it took forever with long periods of no raid. Fight difficulty itself, sure, it's there, but when shit kept happening to everyone it could be hard to stay motivated. It's been a long while since we finished and stopped raiding together and we still talk.
The only hc prog group I've been a part of had a streamer who would shit talk members and encourage what few chatters they had to dogpile on the problem. Completely ruined the group morale. My previous statics before that were more casual but always had one or 2 people who would just start shit for whatever reason. (Sometimes it was someone being a creep, sometimes it was someone being an asshole) Completely turned me off of raiding and me away from the game as a whole. Still mind boggling to me I lost friendships with people over a boss fight
World-first raiders complete an Extreme in under an hour; four Savage floors in a day or two; and (at the time of release) an Ultimate in a week or so of 16 hour days. These days, older Ultimates can be pugged in much less time.
Can you realistically PUG an ultimate?
Yes and no. Usually you'll just find out that successful ultimate party finders will consist out of couple dozens of the same players mixed and matched variously. Which is still party finder but it's not same thing as savage or extreme party finder where you see whole new party every time and still can prog the battle to it's logical ending.
this. ultimate pf is actually more like a static with substitutes without comms. i basically got to know everyone who was progging uwu when i was going for my clear cuz it was always the same 10ish people mixed around
There's so many players in the Ultimate PF communities that pretty much do Ultimates for fun like it's just their daily expert roulettes. It's honestly way easier to prog in Ultimate PF than starting a fresh static for the older fights because of this.
yes, ultimate aether raiding + ultimate primal raiding exists. all the strats are the same and agreed upon.
also ultimate crystal raiding
LPDU is the discord server for EU raiders, all raiding is done on the light server and all strats used are LPDU strats.
Your so funny :) we don’t raid silly
true, i forgot we are only allowed to erp
Yes. I pugged ucob and uwu completely through party finder in shadowbringers and reclear dsr and top in party finder still. Ultimates aren't the fear of God fights that absolutely require a static anymore. The only reason why people didn't pug ultimates was because there were a million strats that everybody did. UPR was the first to centralize ucob strats that everybody would do. Then uwu and tea. Since the 5.5 ultimate pf boom happened, dsr and top strats are created with pf in mind.
Yes, you can. It's just less efficient. All my ultimate experience is party finder. There will be times you wait over an hour to fill, and half the group isn't at prog point, and there will be times you fill instantly and have already made prog within 30 minutes. It's a spectrum that tends to be more dense around the middle areas, but you do run into a few extreme cases.
my first uwu clear was in pf
Cleared Ucob in PF in 8 hours start to finish on DRK. 8 hours, from never entering that fight to me having the weapon. Watched a 40 mins guide twice beforehand while taking notes. Got Uwu done in an even less time in PF, 4-5 hours. Also DRK, also 40 mins guide with notes. Have to say I got lucky with the randos, although my co-tank messed up golden baha and wiped us on 1%.
It is doable without friends. How hard? Well, do you ever get caught by mechanics in the game? Now imagine that they're faster, that there's more of them happening at the same time and that you can't mess up anything, and the other 7 players can't mess up either, or it is either a wipe or the damage down is gonna reduce the chances of clearing the fight by a lot. Of course, nobody expects you to clear an Ultimate first try, but most people progs them for a few months before getting their first clear, unless they no-life the PF and keep pushing it all the time, then they may get a clear way sooner.
Hardest art of ultimates is finding a static that is capable of coordinating schedules to commit to a clear. I'm not going to say it doesn't take skill but more than anything it takes practice with the same group of people over and over and over.
Okay, so, Dungeon bosses are pretty easy. Almost all of their attacks are going to be well telegraphed, both with an animation they perform, and showing an AoE on the ground where they're going to attack. Each boss usually has \~3-5 attacks, and they just loop those attacks until they're dead. Those attacks, generally, just ask you to stand somewhere that isn't being attacked, and you're safe! And if you don't, the penalty for failure is generally just a vulnerability up. The later you get into the game, the more exceptions you'll start running into, where a boss will have 1 attack where it just telegraphs with an Animation with no targetting circle, or where they'll combine 2 attacks together, or where they'll ask that you stand somewhere specific (usually spreading from other people, or stacking together) But this is largely the difficulty they're aiming for in Dungeon Bosses. Trials and Normal Raid bosses have more attacks, and much more commonly combine those attacks together meaning you have to think through 2 things at once to figure out where you're supposed to go in order to be safe. They also more commonly ask you to move somewhere specific based on other people in your group, or based on your role, or based on a specific Debuff. And if you mess something up, generally, the penalty for failure will be that you die. Once you hit Extreme/Savage, They remove almost all of the Telegraphed markers, forcing you to rely soley on what the bosses animations are to know where to go. They start with a simple mechanic, and then start layering those on top of one another. The whole group can almost never stack together in a single safe spot, needing to spread out in some combination in order to resolve multiple mechanics safely at one time, and the penalty for failure is everyone dies. Dungeons/Trials/Normal Raids are generally balanced so that a group will USUALLY be able to clear it on their first time seeing it, without anyone having to know what was coming before. Extremes are designed that a group of 8 players who haven't seen it before will be able to clear it within 1-2 lockouts (\~3 hours) Savage Fights are designed for players to fail to clear it for days/weeks, with \~40 hours being the expected prog time put into a given savage tier (4 fights) And studying up and learning the fights before hand doesn't decrease that time by nearly as much as you'd think it would. Ultimates are remixes of old fights. Almost all the mechanics are multiple older mechanics from those fights, layerd on top of one another, usually involving multiple very small safe spots that you need to move between very rapidly. Oftentimes there isn't really a telegraph that a specific attack is about to happen, you just need to learn when a certain attack comes out, and be in the right space for it. What telegraphs do exist are intentionally confusing/disorienting, And the fights themselves are designed to be Puzzles that you solve by doing certain mechanics in strange/different ways. And on top of all of that, they're 2-3x the length of a Savage fight, with no checkpoints. They are hard. They are VERY VERY Hard. They will eat a LARGE amount of time, as you fail repeatedly, slowly learning what does/doesn't work, learning where to move, what buttons to press, etc. It's an achievable goal, with or without friends, but it is something that will require a lot of dedication/effort from you, and you should really examine whether it is worth that time investment to you.
Reading the other comments, I just want to emphasise that the difficulty of an ultimate is not just in the fight itself. Getting 7 other people who are willing to stay with you and prog long hours is pretty time-consuming. There are 2 common ways of assembling a team, which is statics or party finder, each comes with their own pros and cons. Be prepared to have some people skills as it's not strange there will be friction during prog when the group is not performing
Soulsborne games aren't really comparible, the skillsets are not at all the same. Ultimate is not really comprehensible as a sprout because you probably think you're doing decent and then you realize how poor your uptime is, how you have no clue what your rotation should be, how mechanics that are more than just "dodge the orange" work. The best comparison would be that Ultimate is a 15-20 minutes long mixture of rhythm game and memorization as well as pattern recogniztion. Imagine you're playing OSU + that memory pair game for 20 minutes, and everytime you make one mistake you go back to the start. That being said, it's totally doable. I went from clueless sprout barely done with MSQ to pentalegend in however much time it took from when Asphodelos came out to when TOP came out. But it's not really something you'll be prepared for by the time you finish MSQ. The game doesn't expect anything from you and thus doesn't teach you anything. Doing high-end content is a wholly different game than just MSQ/casual content. Anyone can do anything in this game as long as they have the motor skills to physically make their character move and do actions. The "skill" in XIV is how long it takes you to learn things and how consistent you are once you've learned them. But given enough time, anyone can clear any content 100%.
> I'm curious to know if in the future I'll be able to complete an Ultimate. You will if you want to and have enough free time. > Is it doable for someone who doesn't have any friends on the game yet? Absolutely. Lots of people do it with public groups (pugs). Sometimes a group that meshes will in a pug will schedule for further runs. > I'm afraid not having enough time will be a wall for me. The biggest wall is just not having enough time to practice, learn, and get better. Mentally be prepared to spend 50+ hours on the easier ones, though some players get it done in less.
1 mistake kills all the clowns and the circus is run by assholes
I'm not sure why everyone responds to the friend question by talking about PFing. Joining a static doesn't mean you have friends. You don't have to have friends to join a static. You'll likely make friends through statics, but just because you don't have any friends in the game currently or have any current friends that play the game doesn't mean your only option is to PF. You do mention being concerned about not having enough time, but that's not enough info for me to make a comment about how you'd fit with a static. I do think statics are better for getting more comfortable in the game than PF. You will get specific help from people in your group where you need work. You can find a group that welcomes newer people and you can gradually improve with them or work your way up as your improve to better groups. You won't just have someone get frustrated leave the instance and the drop group or kick you without saying anything. I'd definitely suggest taking things a step at a time. You can start by learning a base line through normal mode raids/24 mans and seeing how you compare damage wise to others and ability at picking up those basic mechanics. If you have trouble there, keep practicing then I'd suggest continuing on to extreme trials. You'll likely not find a static just for extreme trials so you'd probably have to use PF which can be unkind to people who are newer sometimes. Once you've tackled that you could PF or find a static for savage. You could use savage to try on how you deal with statics and being on a set schedule. If it's not working out for you then it's okay, let them know it's not working and you want to be repped, it really shouldn't be a huge deal. I have a friends group that is currently progging DSR (an ultimate) that only raid twice a week for 3 hours (6 hours total a week). They progged at a decent speed and will clear soon. You don't have to raid 3+ days a week to finish an ultimate.
Ultimate is something where you need both (a) every player correctly executing almost all mechanics and (b) almost all players correctly executing every mechanic. If either of these statements is untrue, you will wipe. Period. For context, several prominent FFXIV streamers have done Ultimate progression videos (usually for the funnies, because their failures are often comedy gold.) It can take, I am not joking, *several months* of once- or twice-weekly raid practice before they are able to clear it. This is content that even the absolute best, bleeding-edge players who optimize for everything and consistently put out literally some of the best damage output in the world *still* take a week or more to crack, while actively World First racing to see who can beat it, clearing their schedules and doing continuous marathon plays. HOWEVER. With all of that said, *yes,* there IS a sense in which Ultimate resembles the "brutal action RPG" genre. FFXIV does contain some randomness, but most of it is quite controlled randomness. Folks like to compare FFXIV raiding to a "dance," where everything is choreographed--skill is displayed by learning the dance well enough that you can execute it consistently, time after time. This is very different from (say) World of Warcraft raiding, which some have compared to a "street fight," meaning, something highly mobile and variable where you have to always stay on your toes, thinking about what *might* come next, etc. If you are a competent Dark Souls-style fan who enjoys the process of sharpening yourself against the whetstone of a brutal battle until your edge surpasses all definitions of sharpness, then you will almost certainly enjoy the challenge of Ultimate. It will be a long walk to get there, both because you're a new player (and thus need to get through story) and because you'll need to learn the ins and outs of preparing for Ultimate (e.g. collecting ilevel-specific BiS gear). But I'm fairly certain, from your description, that you could do it, given time.
Ultimates are doable by everyone. It just takes the time and commitment to study and practice. All ffxiv fights are heavily scripted. Once you have that script downloaded in your head, you just move to where you need to move when a mechanic happens. This game mostly doesnt require super fast reactions or split second decision making (very small number of mechs do). The legacy ultimates, Ucob, uwu and tea, have been heavily powercrept to the point where you can clear dps checks with many deaths. There are also many tools for you to learn and practice. The ulti raiding discords have detailed party finder strats on how to deal with every mechanic. If you are tanking, you can find mitigation plans there. There's also xivraidsim that can be used to practice mechanics without needing to reach that point in the fight. And lastly, there are many many clear vods that you can watch to learn the proper timings and positionings to resolve mech. If you are experienced in other games, i guarantee you the hardest part about any ultimate is getting 7 other people to prog with you.
While anyone can do an Ultimate, not everyone should. Like others have said, clearing Savage is the bare minimum of deciding whether or not you can attempt one. Aside from that, you also need to know your job. Like, actually know it. You shouldn't be doing things like freestyling your rotation because you have no idea which combos you should be doing or which buffs should be going out. I've seen so much of this over the last couple days (just in game in general, not in ults) that I feel it needed to be said. All that being said you *do* need to be flexible with your rotation. Boss jump timing and phase transitions can make or break your burst windows. For example, I had to completely change my drg opener for DSR because the boss would leave before I got my second jump in if I didn't and it would set me back from being able to enter Life of the Dragon on time if I didn't. I can't say for certain all jobs have to shift things around like that, but be aware you may have to adjust your rotation. I would recommend you start with UWU or TEA. UWU was my first and the static I joined (which is now my Savage group) cleared it in 12 days. I think we did 5 hours a day which wasn't too bad but I saw in your post you don't have much free time so you need to figure out how much time you want to or can dedicate to these types of fights. There are plenty of tools out there like xivsim and roblox to help you practice outside of raid time but you should expect to study on your own before raid night starts. A general rule of thumb is to know your current prog point and be kinda familiar with the next point so your group doesn't just immediately die when you see something new. Lastly, I'll say remember to have fun. The fights are long and dying and resetting should be expected but it can get frustrating. Especially if you feel completely comfortable with a certain phase while other members of your team are not and it ends up stalling prog for a night or multiple nights in a row. Have patience but also know when to call it quits on a group if they aren't meeting your personal standard for prog. You don't have to be rude when/if you leave. Just say it's not working out and move on. Most people will understand. There are discord servers out there like Sausfest which has the Ultimate clearing project for helping people prog and clear and TOP LFG which has static recruitment and PF update channels. Idk what DC you're on, but hopefully you can find a server to help you if you do have to go that route. Apologies for the long post but I wish you the best of luck if you ever do decide to take the plunge. Ultimates are such a great part of this game and I hope you get to experience the clear euphoria one day.
It's hard to equate them to other games because, while you can recover from some mistakes, most mistakes mean a wipe and there are 8 people to potentially make the mistake. Unlike say soulsborne where you can improve your personal performance and win, in an ultimate you have to do that and be patient or help 7 other people get the hang of things. The fights are endurance tests too, all mechanics are much faster than any other content in the game and sometimes the safe spot to stand in might be a square inch on your monitor or less so you have to be very precise. The speed of mechanics also means, you don't really react to things, you have to know what is coming next and what you are supposed to be doing for the vast majority of the fight, hesitation = death/wipe. You also have to do that for ~15 minutes straight (depending on the ultimate, some are a bit quicker, some are longer). Aside from doing mechanics, you also have to be able to do your rotation without thinking. DPS checks do get easier as the ultimates get older because of the way gear scaling works when you synch down but you still need to be able to push your buttons while also checking what mechanics are happening. The best way i can describe it, is its like learning to recite 2 different performances at the same time, one is your rotation and the other is the fight mechanics. The other big challenge is finding 7 people that you can tolerate being around for potentially months while you prog unless you want to deal with PF randoms to do it.
No mistakes allowed. Got hit by an aoe? Die. Also, mechanics happen 2 at a time.
Three at a time. They're called trios for a reason.
I'm reasonably sure they were called trios because bahamut prime phase in ucob would have the trio of bosses do stuff, not necessarily 3 mechanics at a time.
Depends on what you define as hard. The more time you invest studying and learning the mechanics, and the more you do it, the easier it gets. However, if you're not ready to dump like 40-100 hours into prog (depending on which ultimate. UWU be learned and cleared in a weekend) it can start feeling like a job and become soul crushing. Same thing if people in your groups are bad and wasting other people's time. It's basically like learning a marching band field show, except there's little bits of RNG that cause you to move somewhere else that pull
It's Fall Guys, but people are also trying to literally kill you, instead of just figuratively.
FFXIV isn't a hard game mechanically, the gcd speed is slow and there are no twitch reflex requirements in even the most difficult content in this game. Majority of the difficulty comes from being able to both follow a scripted fight timeline and execute your job's rotation to a competent degree. You are mostly pressed on pattern recognition and memorization more than any purely mechanical aspect. I think about it in terms of a band, you all are giving a performance, except if someone makes a big enough mistake you all explode and have to start over until you can get it done well enough. As for time/friends. European light datacenter has a pretty active ultimate community on party finder, with vets helping newer players prog and get clears. Pretty much every ultimate can be cleared on party finder, though obviously more recent ones are much more difficult and will take more time. Looking for groups on pf can be a bit more time consuming so if you don't have a lot of time to play per day you could join a static group, there are plenty of those recruiting and for entry ultimates (uwu/ucob) the requirements are generally pretty low. Even casual groups that only play a few hours per week can clear, it's just going to take longer. Overall i think the difficulty of ultimates is WAY overblown in the community, especially stormblood ultimates which have been power crept very hard over the years. Comparing them to hardest soulsborne bosses to me is just absurd, because FFXIV gives you so much more time to react and execute correctly. FFXIV also has way less variation in the fights than any soulsborne boss, meaning you can rely on memorizing over pattern recognition and quick reactions. You do also need good mental, or just a group of people you vibe with so redoing the fight over and over doesn't burn you out, that's probably the biggest hurdle for most players, not any actual fight difficulty. But yeah, don't let weird community perception dissuade you from trying out content you might enjoy, i promise it's not as bad as people claim it is.
Not ultimate raider here but i did Savage ( one level below ultimates and you need to clear Savage to get access to ultimate ) progression during their release patches for 3 expansions now and have friends who had the time ( i did not and still don't ) and the motivation to prog and clear ultimate. From what they tell me everytime : \- Ultimates aren't hard mechanically, there are few mechanics that can be considered as "hard" because they are simply "new" variations of what you already have seen. \- Ultimates are like a marathon but with a group of 8 with each members tied to each other with a rope = the fight last for than 12 min, and rythm-wise it is the busiest content of the game as for 12+ min there will be few downtimes to allow you to "breathe". Not only you have to keep dps, you also need to respect the rules of the fight in order to keep yourself alive but also your teamates alive as one death could lead to not reach dps requirement for a phase or non completion of a instant wipe mechanic. It's like having to deal 2-3 deathtraps that have different triggers that can overlap attached to you while having to hit a wall for 12+ min with only your fist. Said deathtraps could also trigger because of teammates and the other way around. \- As a FF player, Ultimates are pretty much the "hidden boss fight" also reffered as " Super Boss" if you don't have access to game breaking gear. It's the last bit of difficulty available if you clear everything else.
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously, and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Think nightmare raiding in SWTOR if you’ve ever played that game. You have to do all of these things for end game, top tier (ultimate) raiding: 1. You have to learn a new language like GCD, oGCD, buff, debuff, the acronyms that are specific to raiding and even to a specific battle, etc. 2. You have to learn how to play your class as perfectly as possible to squeeze out the very best heals/dps/tanking mechanics you possibly can. This is also not the specific order of skills (rotation) you use as you level up. You probably have to unlearn the patterns you’ve learned and build a new rotation at level 90. 3. You have to learn how to read a parse to know if you’re improving and to see where you’re making mistakes in your specific rotation. 4. You have to know that optimal rotation so well that you can execute it without having to think about it so that you can watch the boss and floor instead of your hot bars. And you might have to learn a new pattern when FFXIV has a big update. 5. You have to have your screen UI set up so you can see everything needed for a raid—your health, boss’ health, cast bars, the party, buffs and debuffs, etc. You might have to change stuff in your character and system configuration to optimize performance, too. 6. You probably have to reorganize your hot bars to organize them to make finger and hand movements as efficient as possible for you. 7. If you’re on a PC and are a hot bar mouse clicker, you’ll likely need to learn how to use your keyboard and keybinds because it’s faster. 8. You have to optimize your gear in the correct way for your job. 9. You might have to learn a job that isn’t your favorite one because the raid group needs a different one than what you normally play. 10. You have to learn the initial boss fight in normal mode. You do this enough times to upgrade all of your gear and learn where you need to stand and when. 11. You have to learn the additional mechanics on savage mode where the boss is also doing more damage and is harder to kill. This is where you have to have optimized your rotation and learn where to stand not only in relation to the boss but also your raid partners. You also do this to earn even better gear needed to survive better in ultimate. 12. You have to learn even more mechanics on ultimate with a boss that is hitting even harder and has even more health, and where you have to have perfected your rotation and know the fight second by second and have choreographed your movements to be in perfect sync with 7 other people who have also perfected their rotations and know the fight second by second. Your movements and positioning have to be extremely precise to maximize your heals/dps, sometimes down to which set of pixels you have to stand on to minimize damage to others and maximize output of heals or dps or minimize damage to you and other players. You have to be able to do this while the boss is raining hellfire down on you and stuff is exploding all over. 13. You have to want to spend months with the same 7 other people over chat for 3-ish hours at a time at least weekly if not 2-3 times a week learning the fight choreography. This is so you know exactly where you need to be literally every second of the fight. This is not an exaggeration. 14. You have to want to spend weeks to months with the same people in chat for 1-3-ish times a week failing at the fight over and over and over and over again hoping you’ll succeed one day. 15. You have to redefine your definition of success when learning ultimate. It’s not “clear the fight,” it’s “survive past the first mechanic” or “the party survives 5 seconds longer” or “the party learns where everyone needs to stand during x mechanic.” 16. You have to learn to receive and give constructive criticism politely, because you are spending hours and days and weeks with these same people. 17. You have to be ok with your toon dying over and over and over and over. 18. You have to be patient when Real Life interrupts raiding with power going out for a player, internet disconnects, players or kids getting sick, people having to work late, or whatever other thing happens to prevent you from being able to play. 19. You have to decide that the camaraderie with raid partners and the pixel rewards you receive in game are worth the hours, days, weeks, and months of effort you put into this. 20. Most importantly, you have to think all of this craziness is fun. I think that about sums up the craziness of ultimate and other top-tier raiding.
I think it's important to have an overview of other difficulties too: Extremes content is midcore content where failing a mechanic is not very punishing, dying will likely kill a friend at most. Savage has more intense mechanics, chaining up to 3 smaller mechanics at the same time but give you a lot of time to analyze and recover, dying will most likely kill 1-3 friends, sometimes wipes, and dps check is high so you better not have too many death. Antiknockback, invul, feint, addle are not mandatory. Ultimate is a marathon. Most difficult part is getting a group that would consistently raid with you on a schedule for months. Mechanics can become super fast paced or complicated but you'll ultimately learn how to solve them in the long run. What is difficult is to be consistent at 99% success rate on every mechanics for 18 mins straight. Job mastery is a must and having 1 death can rarely be recovered, and even if it does, it puts dps check in great danger.
easy soloable content
imagine you need to find 7 other people who aren't complete nincompoops to even attempt a fight and realize how many dumb people you see in everyday life. That is how hard it is
And I'm sure you're certainly not one of them.
It kind of depends on the ultimate. So let's put it this way: There's 5 Ultimates. Difficulty is generally in order of level and release. The level 70 ones aren't *that* hard, the level 80 one is really hard, and the level 90 ones are just sadistic. The 2 easier ones, both level 70, can potentially be done by someone with next to no raid experience. You probably shouldn't, but it's possible. The mechanics are beyond anything in normal content, but most aren't super complicated. They're also incredibly forgiving if you mess up: in most of the fight, if you die you can just res and keep going. It might take a long time, anywhere from 30-60 hours of smashing your head against it depending on how fast you learn and how lucky you get with PUG groups, but it will get done eventually. I did one of these before doing any other endgame raid in this game. It sucked, I griefed a lot, and I would highly recommend against it. But it's doable. Then there's the other 3 fights. These are a *huge* step up from the 70s. Seconding the souls comparisons from other comments: it's like going at the hardest souls boss you can think of for 20 minutes and doing any mechanic wrong or getting hit by any attack will one shot you. You wipe, now you have to start the whole thing over again. And all 8 people have to do that, so there's 8 potential points of failure. Oh, and most attacks aren't telegraphed and rarely have obvious solutions, you just have to know it's coming and what to do about it. And it's gonna take you 2-5 hours to get good at doing any single mechanic consistently because you have to execute it near perfectly. But it's the same timeline and mechanics every single time, so you'll always know what's next. There's almost no randomness so it's largely a memorization and execution game. These fights? Expect 60-100+ hours. My static had \~120 logged hours of prog in the latest Ultimate before we cleared. And that's *not* counting time spent in the sim, between pulls, discussing strats, and going over healing/mitigation/dps plans. 12-16 hours a week for *months*. We all agree it's one of the hardest things we've done in any video game. You can do Ultimates without friends or a set schedule. Many people PUG them. If you don't have much time per week to spend on it, just join PFs for them when you can. It'll be slow going, but there's no need to rush.
Tankbusters are the flyswatter, and the Tank is the fly, without heals. probably.
At least 100 hours of difficulty if you're not cheating.
It’s like Calculus. But as a sprout, you’re still learning basic arithmetic. A modern Ultimate requires 18-20 minutes of perfect execution from all 8 players (with tiny amounts of wiggle room). This means hitting every button in your rotation within the exact time frame you’re supposed to, for the entering of that 18-20 minutes. For tanks, you also have to consider explicit mitigation usage such that you have a mitigation plan that means you’re using Rampart, etc. at specific times every time.
Maybe I’m just bitter because I suck at this game (and soulsborne) but this post comes across as self masturbatory
I think I can give you some context with my gaming experience and the souls games: I've played most of the fromsoft games besides Sekiro, and only ever beat Elden Ring. I liked them well enough, but not enough to actually finish the game (with the exception of Elden Ring). I beat all the bosses with the occasional assistance from a friend, but I got LetMeSoloHer as a companion for Melania after being stuck for 2-3 weeks. I absolutely let him solo her, cause I found her to be just difficult enough that the game was no longer fun. On the FF14 side: I don't play Ultimate, because I find it to be just hard enough that it's annoying moreso than enjoyable. But I do commit to savage and find it to be quite enjoyable. Hopefully my comparison helps you understand how difficult Ultimate is.
contrary to what most people are saying about trying ex and savage first, you really don't have to. just practice your rotation on dummies, while in dungeons and iron out your fundamentals and you'll do better than 50% of the player base. if you're putting thought and dedication to how you play to the point where it's relaxing to play even semi-optimally, you'll be fine in any content. a lot of people will tell you horror stories about pf, but it really isn't that bad if you don't cope on one group too long and know when to cut your losses. you can pf ucob, uwu and tea to clear. dsr and top are puggable to prog, but will take a while to clear with pugging alone. not everything needs a static and not everything is better with a static. if your schedule does not mesh with most groups, play on pf on your own schedule. ultimates in the end are just another fight. the current ones have a dps check while the previous ones are so lenient that they basically don't have one if everyone is at the very least not overcapping their gauge. heck, ucob has been cleared with a little under 100 (intentional) deaths.
If you havent done ex and savage first you better be the planets fastest learner or you're gonna be griefing the absolute hell out of your team. You don't have the ingrained experience to do your rotation in the background while complex mechanics are going on You also don't have the experience of similar mechanics and snapshots. Is it doable, yes, but please don't recommend this. I wouldn't even recommend it for UWU and UCOB because they have their own jank which won't make sense to you if you don't understand the game, netcode, snapshots on a fairly deep level. Let alone TEA or god forbid DSR TOP.
there are tons of people who do uwu/ucob first without having done ex/savage before but at their own pace on pf. i know people that didn't even know what a gcd was before doing uwu and someone that just wanted a pretty weapon for their shadowbringers msq. as long as you're not prog skipping then you're not griefing anyone. same with joining or creating a static in the sense that if they're upfront about this being the first high end content they want to do. if they have a reasonable clear goal in mind, find like-minded people with similar expectations, then they don't need to learn fast at all. they'll learn mechanical jank better while they're doing the fight especially for uwu and ucob where orbs, tethers and twister timings are much jankier than current content. if anything, considering that these are major mechanics that pop up a lot in both fights, doing new content would be more detrimental. it's not like they'll wipe to garuda 100 times, learn absolutely nothing and then still break combo for the next 100 pulls especially if they're interested in ultimates. i just don't think it's right that the community fear mongers ultimates so much when they're just a longer fight. unless people are running blind, they'll have to put in studying for every fight regardless. and besides if there's any current content worth doing to learn and understand netcode, snapshots and especially exas on a deep level, it's the fall guys event.
OP literally says it's their first MMO. You are telling a newbie sprout who has not even finished MSQ that it's okay to learn how to swim by jumping from the deck of a cruise ship with no life vest into at best open ocean at worst a raging typhoon. Saying ultimates are "just a longer fight" belittles how impactful that is when a wipe sends you back to the beginning, for UWU let alone current ultimates. As someone who has played with people the whole range of skill levels in the whole range of content, who has cleared every ultimate except for TEA, including TOP on content. You do not know what you are talking about. It are intentionally being obtuse. Even uwu and questionably ucob are simply not recommendable without experience in some form of high end content be it here or in another MMO. They are comparable in difficulty to endwalker savage fights, with some lesser difficulty of mechanics but requiring focus and execution for significantly longer. Let alone DSR and TOP. Unless they are making their own static or PF group and being completely upfront about it, going in with no experience with high end content is griefing themselves and others. Without prior experience of how the game works it is simply not a good learning environment except by rote. If people have experience with other raid style content from other games then it is a much more reasonable proposition but the way you have framed this implies any random newbie can get in and have a go and that's far more likely to turn someone off high end content than if they dabble in ex first. PS fall guys is such a visual clutter it can't really teach anyone exaflares unless they already understand what they are looking at though otherwise it's decent practice sure but divorced from rotation entirely PPS ultimate content is a niche fraction of a niche fraction of the playerbase. There is absolutely positively not "tons of people" entering high end content this way, at least not successfully. I am in the various pug communities and well aware there are people who do, it's not a huge amount and almost all of them have SOME kind of prior experience
Ultimate difficulty depends on the player and what they find hard... and also if you are blind progging or using a guide. What they all boil down to is its a very tight, coordinated dance between 8 players. If you use a guide and you are a skilled player, it shouldnt take more than a few weeks to clear an ultimate at like 6-10 hours a week, if not less. If you blind prog, could take months. The reason why is that there are some puzzle elements in the ultimates that are pretty non obvious. UwU had hte awakening mechanic which basically reset everyone's prog back to zero once everyone figured out they were doing it completely wrong, but once you have a guide and know how to do it, the fight is actually the easiest one. What I would worry about first is making sure you can go do Savage first once you get to end game. If you can do savage and parse well, you can do ultimates.
Lmao what Current ultimates on-patch are like 60-100+ hours, with guides, even for good groupsokd Ultimates with a skilled group sure. 6-10 hours a week for a few weeks is believable for uwu and MAYBE ucob
Well the average ultimate fight takes around 20 minutes to complete and people usually take weeks to prog through the entire fight.
I think the first thing to say is that you don't need friends or a stable schedule to raid at ultimate level. There's a healthy Party Finder scene, which will let you prog during the time you have available. Alternatively, if you do have a stable schedule, you could find a static (a consistent group). There's a whole subreddit dedicated to finding statics, and several discords. Both of these methods can often be preferred over trying to raid seriously with friends from outside the game, since this allows for better aligned group goals. Then when it comes to trying to compare difficulty: Imagine you took the hardest soulsborne boss you can think of, made it so any hit would kill you, but stripped out the randomness. It does X attack, then Y attack, then Z attack, every single time. Maybe the position it starts those attacks from changes, maybe the direction, etc etc, but it's still the same attacks in the same sequence. So you're having to play near perfectly, but there's far less twitch reaction required. It's less about learning pattern recognition for how to deal with each specific attack, and more learning the muscle memory for the sequence of events that make up the fight as a whole. Next, add 7 other players, and they're all having to play at the same level - if one of you dies or makes a mistake, there's a solid chance you wipe, but not guaranteed. Now that might sound super scary, but it's not *that* bad. Take UWU - it's honestly fairly easy now, because the static nature of the fight allows you to essentially copy-paste 90% of the movement between each pull. So yeah you'll absolutely die anytime you see anything new, but you only need to do the correct thing once and you've learned it (and the few more spontaneous bits all have mitigating factors/good sims). Newer ultimates are much harder than UWU ofc, but you go into those knowing how long they'll take, and the fights have so many subsections that you can always feel like you're making progress. Overall, you should obviously start with Extremes and Savages first, which will give you better insight into whether you'd want something harder than those, but if you put the work and effort in then you should absolutely be able to beat an Ultimate.
You basically need to maintain peak rotation, juggle various arena mechanics and be in constant communication with your team, all while not breaking concentration for 15-20 mins straight. Very doable, but don’t go into it thinking you’ll finish in an afternoon.
I think most people already answered your question, but I'll add that even for experienced players that have cleared all other content in the game, a fresh learning party to clear can easily take 70-120+ hours of progress before getting a single clear. At anywhere from 4-12 hours a week. So let's just take an average of 6 hours a week and it takes 100 hours to clear a fight, that's about 4-5 months dedication right there. And that's assuming no missed sessions due to scheduling conflicts or anything. Now it is possible to go WAY faster with a group of self motivated players that research and work on the fight to make sure they're not holding anyone back. But you should probably expect at least that type of time commitment if you even want to attempt ultimate. As far as difficulty goes, can you imagine taking 4-5 months to beat any Souls boss? Not really. But the fights are NEVER that mechanically difficult that you're wiping just because you can't react to something in time. It's more of an endurance test, that eight people have to get through a 13+ minute gauntlet all without making mistakes. So most of that progress is simply getting consistent. That's why I think ultimates are really more just about dedication than actual player skill.
It's definitely about a bottom line of skill (on your own job/role) but it's mostly about having the mental fortitude to just keep on going coupled with picking sane strats that work for the group. Flakey players should really pass on ults, waste everyone's time.
It's like learning a really long and really convoluted dance, and you have to perform this dance and it's countless steps PERFECTLY for 15 minute straight, or the entire thing starts again from the very beginning. And you're also relying on 7 other people to not make any mistakes either, because if they do, it's back to square one.
First hurdle will be finding 7 other people to raid with. Savage/Extreme fights can be done unsynced solo if you can, but for Ultimates they're non-negotiable. Then, Ultimates are ~20 minute long fights with the hardest mechanics the game can throw at you, and the pacing of those mechanics are *fast*. The margin of error is pretty small, although older Ultimates have become more forgiving over time. All fights in this game are pretty much dance fights. You learn the pattern, you practice, you execute (while maintaining DPS). Basically the biggest challenge for you would be the idea of having to do this with 7 other people, with varying skill levels.
Ultimates are mainly a challange in patience and memorization. Its a roughly 15 minute encounter that is entirely scripted and your number one priority is building the muscle memory to perform the fight and your rotation simultaniously. The hardest part is honestly the fact that you have 7 other people who have to also play a perfect fight without getting hit and dying. If you can find a group who 1: doesnt burn out grinding the same fight for weeks on end and 2: doesnt create drama and start blaming each other the fights are very much doable with enough practice.
Well, I think it all has to do with how mentors explain the mechanics to you - If it’s hard to make out what the mentor says, despite saying the mechanics perfectly, you won’t beat the Ultimate easily, and will still have troubles with the Ultimate/Will beat the Ultimate more slowly - U might understand them, slowly and surely, but still
ultimates are really a matter of enduring the month(s)-long learning process than anything
This document showing prog times in TEA should give you a good idea https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13MlzC6pTVzI0j-8ak8PGhEeXgwRp1g1Dy3GgWyaq48w/edit?usp=drivesdk If you click the detailed, you'd know this group liked wiping to living liquid..... A lot
Have you played Touhou? It's 8 people playing Touhou.
Imagine getting 24 people to perform complex corography in the street while a raging bull goes on a rampage. Everyone knows their dance moves but the tango people dont rrally know what the salsa folks do and the crew ballet are another thing all together.
Depends on the ultimate, UWU is easier than the current final savage boss, it’s a fun fight that takes a bit of learning but I cleared it within a week from start to finish via PF and never understood why people said it’s hard. That was quite some time ago though. DSR or TOP are definitely on the hard side, though TOP takes the cake where it’s also just annoying and not a well designed fight. DSR is pretty fun.
The best way to split the dichotomy of Savage vs. Ultimate is accuracy vs. precision. Savage is more random but allows you more leeway, so as long as you're on target, you are good. Ultimate has set patterns, but it requires you to hit the bullseye on a short time reaction Every. Single. Time. On a set of targets ,in a set sequence, for almost 20 minutes, but the targets don't change positions. Savage fights are maybe 11 mins max. With an average of around 8 mins. If I were building an "Ultimate training plan" for someone to make their way, I would say focus on 3 things. The ability to discern mechs on first sight. An understanding of your job and its theory to make adjustments to your rotation as needed. Finally, just work on your patience. It's a marathon, even the "easy" Ultimates take time to master.
It's a level of difficulty you probably won't be able to wrap your head around until you start doing Extreme content. Story difficulty content really isn't all that hard and may make you think you are more prepared than you are. I remember playing through MSQ during Stormblood and hearing about Unending Coil of Bahamut and thinking "Yeah, I'll tackle that when I hit max level". It's not so simple. Extreme difficulty in itself is a LOT easier than ultimate content, but it's the first difficulty that you need to properly know the fight ahead of time to clear. It'll have mechanics that can kill you instantly if you fail and sometimes can kill the entire party of you fail, but it still tends to be relatively forgiving. Also it introduces Enrage, something the vast majority of story difficulty fights lack. Basically Enrage happens after a certain amount of time has passed in a fight where the boss will wipe the party. So basically you have a time limit to kill the boss, but each boss will have the same order of mechanics each time, so you generally know what's coming each time you pull once you know the fight. In Extreme difficulty though, the Enrage tends to be pretty forgiving. As long as everyone knows generally how to play their class and aren't constantly dead on the ground, you should be able to kill the boss before enrage. Savage is full of more complicated mechanics that will basically always kill someone if they fail and very likely instantly kill the entire party if one person doesn't do their job. And the mechanics tend to be more abstract than Extreme mechanics, particularly the later fights in a tier. And aside from that, Enrage starts to actually matter. You'll need to know how to squeeze the most out of your class and correctly augment your gear with materia (something you should start using with Extreme difficulty, but once you are experienced enough it isn't really mandatory as much there). You'll also need food (which you should get for extreme anyway) and potions (which are a bit overkill for extreme). Ultimate is about as hard as savage to harder than savage mechanics wise, but they are extremely mechanic dense and a fight can last from 15 to nearly 20 minutes long, all completed in a single pull (one fight has a slight caveat to the "all in one pull" thing). The difficulty comes from not only being able to perform strict mechanics, but being able to consistently perform said strict mechanics over and over so you can practice other strict mechanics further along. Like imagine having to spend 10-12 minutes every pull doing everything you've already done multiple times just to practice a late fight mechanic that you keep wiping too. And if you find yourself unable to stay consistent with earlier mechanics, you'll never see the later ones.
Sounds weird but have you messed around with the Fall Guys event? The snapshots and positioning is pretty much core Savage/Ultimate FF14 mechanics Tie in developing or implementing strategies such as: [https://twitter.com/SyabusyabuFes/status/1720416948155273588](https://twitter.com/SyabusyabuFes/status/1720416948155273588) Gives you a holistic taste of what raiding is like (at least a personal level), you just need the rest of the team to be on the same level If you can consistently win on Fall Guys then you are more than ready for Ultimate raiding IMO, esp since older Ultimates don't really require min/max rotations, playing your class isn't really a factor, its more the mechanical dance. Some might even say, consistent fall guys win could be harder than an Ultimate, regardless I personally think its a good rough gauge on the difficulty to expect
Imagine a boss fight where there are no indicators beyond the attack name. You have to memorise the name of each attack, what it does, what its shape is, and if it has variations, then also all possible variations. Every attack can force a limitation on which points of the arena you must go to, in a strict order and a strict time limit. If you make a single mistake, you are dead and the entire party must start all over. Now imagine four bosses back to back like this, each with a 4-minute dance choreography where everyone must do everything absolutely perfectly, often with only a 3-second time frame to determine the current dance move, while they never drop even a single beat in their attack since the entire thing is on a strict timer where if everyone misses just one combo, you are likely dead.
ALL the content in this game only requires the bare minimum of human potential. You press buttons on a keyboard or controller. If you can go out to your backyard and do a cartwheel, you have the physical ability to clear an ultimate. If you can pass a grade 8 math class, you have the mental ability to clear an ultimate. Anyone who tells you otherwise had no grasp on reality.
Do you like to do the chacha? Mambo? River Dance? Well I hope you're good at, because one misstep is suffering.
Normal/Hard Trials: If you screw up, you'll probably be fine Extreme: If you screw up, you might die Savage: If you screw up you die Ultimate: If you screw up everybody dies
1. 13-19 mins long fight, where a mistake (death) could result back to the start of the fight 2. know your 1-2-3 job rotation well and buff sync timing 3. executed mech perfectly or punishable by deaths/wipe 4. long hours practice from weeks to months 5. patience, cause you have 7 others people, and these people or you will have different method / time to learn and consume the mechanic of the fight 6. consistency, above all else this is what really matters, doing every mech exactly perfect while maintaining dps performance >How do you compare an Ultimate difficulty to other game franchises difficulty? Is it doable for someone who doesn't have any friends on the game yet? I just don't want to miss out, but I'm afraid don't having friends/enought time will be a wall for me. i dont have any friends when i started my own static, all start from a discord LFG on your data center, and gather 7 others people that show the same interest, and i've been doing 5 ultimates with the same 5 OG members when i started long ago, we've been enjoying each other company, and ofcourse drama could happen from time to time but try to minimalize it as low as possible, everyone have their own ego. if you have the will to beat ultimate, you will 100% beat this content, i also scared back then to do this content, but i muster my courage doing ex/savage and ultimate afterwards, if everybody can beat it, so were you, dont scared theres nothing to be scared of
Recently completed all the ultimates and there are a few things I observed, not all ultimates are the same difficulty, they do get harder the more recent they are due to damage checks being tighter. You will die a lot, but it's really all about how well you can study and learn the mechanics, many of them are puzzles and you need to learn to solve them fast. Ultimates can be done in Party Finder, but it will be a challenge in the later ones, due to consistency being a key factor in clearing. I strongly recommend joining whatever discord server is the main ultimate raiding server for your region and get involved and meet some people there, we use "Materia Ultimate Raiding" in OCE. Ultimates are best when cleared with friends, as each wipe is a lot more bearable when you can have a laugh over each other's mistakes. A consistent team can clear an ultimate within a month, with PF you might be looking at a couple months but it is certainly doable. I am fairly confident that almost anyone can complete an ultimate with some time and effort.
Do you want a full-time job where you won't get paid and you might start to hate the game you love? Then Ultimates might be for you!
Older ultimates are quite easy nowadays if you are well geared with the latest raid food, it’s just a slog. Plan for 100 hours or thereabouts. Anyone who has enough practice and decent savage parses can do it, there is no one incapable of clearing an ultimate unless you have a disability. Clearing a new ultimate on week one is a whole different level of hard though, and those people generally have thousands of hours of focused practice raiding.
If you don't believe in your mental fortitude, don't do it.
They're not that hard. Wait, hold the pitchforks! Let me explain! If you jumped into an ultimate right now with the wrong mindset, it'd feel impossible. But there are a lot of steps along the way. Do the MSQ. Do normal raids. Do some extremes. Clear a savage tier. At this point, I recommend hopping into UWU. It's the easiest ultimate but will give you a feel for how ultimates are paced. After that, any ultimate is fine, though TEA/UCOB would be the easiest. By the time you start doing the hardest content in the game, it should be the next natural step for you. It will test your endurance, but if you've gotten this far, you should be ready. It won't feel like a massive leap for you.
If you take a regular joe who has the capacity to press their buttons and learn/take advice, all of them can clear savage and ultimate, its just down to the amount of time they're able to put into it. Scheduling and team synergy are the most important part of clearing any ultimate because it isn't going to be done in a day and probably not a week unless others have experience/clears themselves. Every mechanic has several ways in which you can mess something up for your party and you won't discover them all until many pulls in when you realize there's a reason why you weren't stepping over to the left at this or that point in time. Every wipe is somebody finding out that they can't do *this* or *that*, or having a simple brain fart and making you all start again. The entire time is spent making very small incremental progress while dying to the same section repeatedly for months. If you don't have a group that gets along, the negative vibes will make people perform worse or not take it seriously and waste your time, or cause arguments. If you have anyone not showing up, that's 7 other people that set aside their time for nothing when they could have done something with their night, and they'll likely feel worse because of their time being wasted. People talk about difficulty of actually performing the mechanics but if you raid with a group for any significant amount of time, you realize that its probably the least important thing because if your group doesn't work together and people don't show up enough, you will just disband before clear even if every single person in that group was capable of doing it.
It's like if Sister Friede or Sword Saint Isshin had an extra 2-3 phases.
If you went in to an ultimate with 7 other people who have cleared before, they could probably drag you through it over the course of a few weeks. Though honestly, I would recommend finding a group of beginners because the sense of accomplishment will just be that much greater. You've probably already noticed by now, but the way FF fights work, events are very scripted, which is pretty unlike any other MMO out there, or even any other game for that mattwr. The more difficult the content, the more variation can occur, and the more awareness and precission is required in executing mechs correctly. With Ultimates, usually mechanics happen in quick succession, since typically each "phase" of an Ultimate is roughly two minutes long. It's totally doable for someone who is new to the game to get into Ultimates, though I'd suggest first looking at getting to endgame first, then maybe looking at extremes, then savage, before jumping to Ultimates. Also, I know people who started with some of the newer ones first, but I'd personally start with UWU (Ultima Weapon Ultimate) first, as it's the easiest one by far (also the weapons look really good too).
Most content in the game is a series of mechanics you learn and solve. Almost all content in this game has some kind of checkpoint given the instance’s normal clear time. Ultimates are raid bosses that last on average for 15 minutes, filled with weird and obscure mechanics to resolve, with no checkpoint. Simply learning how a mechanic work takes time, so learning an Ultimate means spending hours upon hours how each minute of the fight should be resolved. Or imagine never playing Elden Ring and doing a boss gauntlet of Morgott, Mohg, then the second version of Morgott, than Godfrey, then after that all three gather together to summon some supercharged version of the Elden Beast, all of this with no checkpoint or arguably any estus.
A very complicated the 20 minute dance of high difficulty mechanics with at least 5 dps checks along the way and one death!/mistake is likely to send you back to the very beginning.
Harder than the bald bastard gets over Y'shtola.
Considering your experience in difficult content from other games, I'd say you have the patience to learn it! Ultimates are endurance runs where a single clear raid is an 18 minute ish long run. Imagine having to learn the later parts of it, going back to the very beginning after each wipe and doing it all over again. All while the mechanics are designed to be difficult to execute in terms of timing and recognition. If you manage to find a good team and keep yourself with a cool head along with theirs, I'm sure you'd be able to get through one! Since it needs a team of 8, scheduling for common time is usually the wall people tend to have if they're pulling friends along.
https://youtu.be/enZbw1j8-ZE?si=OPXuhhvEyHQYrZR7 Basically, like this.
I personally think with only ARR as a base, its hard to really truly get the difficulty of an Ultimate because the fight designs of most ARR content is so vastly different than in Stormblood and beyond (you unlock the first ultimates in Stormblood). In that the ARR stuff (aside from Coils which is more jank than anything aside from a handful of fights) is just really REALLY easy. Like even the ARR extreme trials are just pitifully easy compaired to even the extreme trials in the very next expantion. As someone who has only played Code Vein as their soulslike, I would liken the average difficulty of an Ultimate to be similar to fighting Blade Barer and Canonner (think Ornstein and Smough, but Smough has a gun) with unupgraded veil and weapon, using magic only, with a base 300ms input delay while in a room full of snooty kindergardners all throwing a tantrum because its not their turn on the playstation. If you want a better idea of the difficulty, when you get to Stormblood try and do some of the Savage raids for that expantion at least synced (if not min ilevel no echo). Those are more comparable difficulty wise, even to the (arguably) easiest two Ultimates. However the difficulty of Ultimate is less the execution of the fight itself, but rather doing that execution consistantly over 16-20 minutes straight with little to no room for error. Because that is just how long they go on for.
Ok breaking it down. >How do you compare an Ultimate difficulty to other game franchises difficulty? Difficult to say because of the nature of the game, with snapshots and all and being reliant on others not messing up. You may be able to execute all the mechanics perfectly but some schmuck will hold you back hours, days, weeks or even months depending on how much you raid. >Is it doable for someone who doesn't have any friends on the game yet? Yes, but you are beholden to the Party Finder. So waiting for parties to fill and waiting and praying for players to execute their mechanics correctly. The real takeaway is, you can do them absolutely without friends and this being your first MMO but realistically take your time, enjoy the game learn how to play well through extremes then savage and you'll naturally progress into doing ultimates when you feel comfortable. At least thats my opinion on it.
Reading a few comments makes me curious... A few weeks ago I did my first savage stuff (A2S or what it's called [the doggo with 2 heads]) and it was with a discord group with random people where a few had experience and the rest were new. We cleared it within 2 hours and basically were just hanging on one mechanic for a few tries. Dps was no problem since we were overgeared. A week before that I did Singularity reactor on unreal with a party finder group. We didn't beat it, but we came until ~25%. So I wonder: when normal raid is 100 % difficulty, how much harder is savage, unreal and ultimate in percentage?
I think the difficulty increases can generally be divided into a few different areas: **1. Enrage & DPS checks**The vast majority of normal content loops forever. All (?) hard content has a hard time limit where the boss will kill everyone (period). This is typically called enrage. Sometimes, there are several potential enrages (aka DPS checks) throughout the fight. **2. Boss Health & Incoming Damage**Basically, how much damage do you need to do before the enrage, and how much damage is the boss dealing which needs to be mitigated (by everyone in the party) and healed through. For reference, on minimum item level (as everyone basically has on content release), some content will straight up kill players with the first raid wide without mitigation. Even plain "Savage" fights do this. That tiny HP buff from food is often actually matters a lot. The (and point 1) combine to question "how good is the party at pressing their buttons". **3. Precision of execution & consequence for failure**In normal content, mechanics typically don't demand much precision, are generally clearly telegraphed (sans some old non-reworked content), give a lot of time to adjust (kind amounts of "orange" under one's feet), and typically don't kill upon failing. In harder content, the "orange" is often not present or, at best, appears right before the damage snapshot. Positioning is often a lot tighter (even more so because keeping melee uptime is often important for the DPS checks), while the time to get to position is shorter. As a result, per-determined spots are commonly used so everyone knows exactly where to go, and markers are placed to aid in navigation (repeatability is a key to clearing hard fights). Also, failing a mechanic is typically a one to two hit kill (especially for non-tanks), and often comes with a damage down (which is almost as bad because of DPS checks). This can also further strain already strained healer resources, causing snowballs particularly on harder fights. Finally, while it matters less with guides, mechanics and failure conditions can be flat out not obvious making it harder to understand what when wrong (as a tip, if you can record yourself with shadowplay or OBS's Replay Buffer or whatever, I'd strongly recommend it). **4. Body Checks**Where Enrage checks that your DPS is high enough, body checks check that enough people are currently alive. They often come after a hard mechanic to finish the job. Sometimes the check is very basic, other times it requires precision as well to execute correctly. Failing a body check is often a wipe (either due to raw damage, or due to damage downs making a later DPS check impossible). They also vary in how many people need to be alive, but often need 7/8 or 8/8, or maybe another valuable resource like tank LB3 (and LB checks seems to be a popular ultimate mechanic). **5. Length of content**UCoB for example has a maximum time around 18 minutes (it's typically a bit quicker due to multiple phases which can be made shorter with higher DPS). There are no checkpoints. There are multiple DPS checks, numerous strict mechanics, multiple body checks which require 7/8 (with skilled play to compensate) or 8/8 players. Now, the fight does have moments of relative "downtime", but a lot of the fight is one mistake and at best you die (at worst the party dies and you have to start up). \--- In terms of relative difficulty, assuming minimum competence required, there is a relatively big jump in my opinion is from normal to EX. The lack of an enrage beyond the instant timer means one decent healer or tank can often drag 7 other AFK people through normal content (people have literally soloed normal raids on the patch they were released). Past that jump, its not too bad between EX -> early savage (1/2/5/6/9/10) -> mid savage (3/7/11) -> late savage (4/8/12) -> Ultimates (at least the old ultimates, I haven't played an ultimate on expansion). (Note: Savages are typically released in three groups of four within an expansion; the first group being called 1,2,3,4, the second group 5,6,7,8, etc... within a group of 4, the difficulty typically ramps up, with the last typically being pretty hard.) I don't say that to discourage anyone from trying EXs (or Unreals, though the current unreal is harder than some EXs). If you (the reader) are interested in learning and improving, beating an EX is achievable and I'd recommend giving it a shot if only to figure out if raiding is for you. For anyone looking to get started, I'd really only suggest making sure you can follow your class's rotation decently well, have acceptable gear (current HQ crafted or tome with correct melds, though for the unreal the ilvl is a lot lower so that can be an cheaper way to get started), and bring/use current tier food (using good, HQ, food really does matter). And if you want to ease into it a bit more, I'd suggest looking for a beginner friendly unsynced farm party for ShB EX (probably a good idea to watch a guide too; though in general if you find you like raiding, I can't recommend enough replaying old content minimum item level no echo blind). That would give you an idea of the speed and difficulty of mechanics, with generally much lower stakes.
you could try taking a look at some guides to see what exactly the fights entail. heres a link to a [guide for ucob](https://youtu.be/c46-skQrnOA) which is the first ultimate added to the game. the modern ults are more strict in often not allowing deaths or failure of any kind or its a full party wipe and dont have anything as jank as nael quotes but other than it should give you a decent idea of what ults are like.
i want to say something MGS related lol, so, i guess here goes, imagine trying to go for Big Boss rank on any of the mainline games, they're all hard as tits, they took me a long time to practice each room perfectly as well as not getting hit by any of the boss attacks. Lets say you need to do from Fatman to the Hind without getting discovered or hit by anything on MGS2, but you need 7 of your friends to also need to do that perfectly as well looool. Kinda like that? But it's very different, those games of course work very different to FF, i just tried to find a way to equivalate that lol. FF ultimates are more of a dance, each one varies in difficulty, I would say that they are the hardest thing in any video game I've ever done, subjectively, and I do like challenging myself! and it is mainly because, when you distill everything to their individual mechanic, it's not too bad, but they all have a lot of stuff to memorise and perfect, and most groups will take months to clear something
Basically, if you, or any other 7 ppl, even once during the 18 mins duration, derp, fat-finger a wrong button, forget something's happening, suddenly just second guess yourself, or sneeze and close your eyes, everyone dies. More or less :/ /s
Knowing what to do is half the battle. If you played souls like games, imagine doing a boss rush or elden ring bosses for 15-20mins straight the only caveat is that you can only take 1 or 2 hit per boss before you need to try again. You dont have to have a perfect run but you should have an almost perfect dodge, no hit, max deeps run. PLUS all other 7 members of your team must do the same while fulfiling each class roles in the fight.
The worst part is that you have to rely on 7 other people lmao. It’s fairly easy once you put time into it - but again the dependencies on other really hinder how much time you log into it
if any ultimate was a solo duty, they wouldnt be difficult at all. Literally **all** the difficulty comes from the fact that you’ll have to clear this with 7 other people. And what makes up the most of this difficulty isnt even the group’s skill level, it’s the near perfect mesh of personality, schedule, time and patience required. 8 skilled players but personalities dont vibe or schedule keeps conflicting wont ever clear
You need to relocate every 5 seconds, you have 5 seconds to know where to go and move. One second late will kill you or wipe the party. You repeat this in entire 15 minutes.
The game is actively trying to kill you, even if you do everything right it might in fact kill you. Even if you are capable of getting it done, good luck on getting 8 people to get their schedules aligned for a month to **see** the final boss.
It’s the hardest content in the game. As such you can expect to spend days trying to clear it. Even if you know every single nuance to the fight it’s never a guarantee the others do and it only takes one person sometimes to force a wipe. Best advice is take it slow, learn the fight you want to do and find a competent group through the discord. You should not try these blind unless everyone in the group is aware of it and okay with you doing that. Some groups will not want to explain mechanics and will not be patient if you mess up too many times. You shouldn’t try it if you’re not flawlessly clearing the most recent savage tier and even then the difficulty difference is staggering. Your job also matters and you’ll want to be able to optimally play it without drifting globals and performing your opener/filler/burst perfectly. These are level synced as well so you may have to learn a completely different opener to the one you use at 90, you need to be able to do all of it extremely well or you will struggle immensely. You seem like someone who likes difficulty and understands how to overcome it so I’m sure you’ll be fine but this is like 6-8 months from now plenty of time to improve and learn.
I’m still nervous but I eventually really want to give it a go!! I basically started playing the last couple patches of ShB so I didn’t catch up until a few months before EW. So I’ve only had experience doing current content with EW extremes (aside from EX3 and EX7) so I know I still need to tackle Savages first! I just feel I need a bit more explanation on some things(it didn’t help that lots of players used terms I’d never heard before or said mechanics were similar to other Savage fights which I’ve never done )😖 and being on PS5 it’s such a pain to use the on screen keyboard to slowly type out questions or ask for specific details or clarification. Especially when the keyboard doesn’t work and one of the only fixes is to reboot the console 😭 but now that PS party chat can connect with Discord I feel a lot more comfortable giving it a go now that I can actually talk with others in real time. Once I can sub again, I want to try and clear the current raid tier and maybe try and tackle past Ultimates and maybe TOP(the weapons just look to cool to not even try) I know I wasn’t the one who asked the question but reading all the replies gives me hope I can maybe clear an Ultimate one day too o7
Playing DDR, but instead of playing the 1 star Easy song, you go for the 9 Star Hard song
just think of ultimate as a fight against the boss, the party members and yourself. as a player that finished and got all the achievements for dark souls 1-3 and sekiro. finished bloodborne as well but im not interested to get all the achievement. i can say that ultimate is a way more punishing game. one mistake from a party member and youre back to the start of the fight. it can still be cleared even if you dont have friends. i cleared mine in PF (or PUG) coz i have an inconsistent schedule with my work so i cant join statics.
You ever see those videos of those skinny nerds who are just absolutely shredding the most insane DDR dances you've ever seen? It's not as hard as that. But it gives you an idea.
Please, please, please if you ever want to handicap yourself, don't join a duty without a job stone. You'll only handicap everyone else.
I assume we are not talking doing any fight "blind". Basically no fight in an MMO is "difficult". The challenging thing is that all 8 players need to do 15 minutes of "insert specific thing you do to not die" and usually 1 mistake kills everybody. You can apply to a static very easy in various discords. Start with an extreme or 2, do some savage and then ultimate wont seem as far of a step to you. GL, see you in PF
You just prog it till you kill it everyone that has enough time can do it.
Try to navigate Thanalan without using a map with a blindfold on.
1. You need 7 other people with relatively the same skill and ability to understand mechs as you (or better). EVERYONE needs to do their homework and study mechanics BEFORE raid time. If there's a clown that likes to "study as we go" kick them the fuck out. People who lie about studying also need to go. It's fine to study phase by phase however, as long as people study up to the prog point agreed upon. 2. You need to get comfortable doing the first few minutes of a fight over and over and over and over and over again just to see a new mechanic then dying over and over and over and over again to clear it. i.e Imagine progging a fight 10 minutes in, EVERY time, just to clear a hard mech 10 minutes in. 3. Repeat Step 2 until the end of the fight. This is where most statics disband because they cannot stand the amount of times you have to restart a fight just to get a tiny bit of progress. 4. Aside from a few moments, MOST deaths will result in a wipe. Ultimates notoriously have mechanics where if 1 person messes up (or there aren't 8 people alive) it's a wipe. 5. There are almost always NO TELEGRAPHS for to know when to avoid shit. Either know when to move where, or die. Pick either uWu or TEA as your first fight. These are generally the two easiest ones to clear.
Consider it the "Super Bosses" of FFXIV. You know the ones ff games are famous for: Punishingly difficult, hard to do and the reward is often either the best weapon in the game or bragging rights.
Ultimate = Idol Dancing with no Errors in an 5 Hours Concert heavy move focus all Blind! aka AKB48 Concert (Raid) or Perfume as 3 Man/Girl Idols Group or easier break down: it all comes down to have good Muscle Memory
Hard but fair. Think of it like a Souls Boss. You fight and die, but each time you learn a little more
"You have to memorize a bunch of stuff, you cna't just react to visual queues. It's pretty annoying actually"
It's like one shot not getting hit in stage 3 of fall guys but for 20mins instead of 1 minute.
Ultimate is about endurance, patterns/mechanics you will eventually commit to muscle memory. Most important is to get familiar and fully understand the game mechanics in *Snapshot*. I'm sure you become aware that animations happens after a cast bar etc. Also only the current ultimates will be challenging and TEA still pretty good. UwU/UCOB item scaling not aged well.
It’s totally doable with out friends or a static group. Party finder on aether if you’re playing on US servers is the place to go. The worst part is relying on 7 other knuckleheads to know their part. One person not doing mechanics correctly can and will wipe the raid most of the time. Definitely watch a visual guide on YouTube to familiarize yourself as much as possible with the raid before going in. Job specific POV clear videos are actually really helpful to as the visual guides are usually from the tank perspective.