Final Fantasy XIV's new Chaotic Alliance Raid is yet another feast for well-fed raiders

About a month ago, I wrote about my thoughts on Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail patch 7.1, and concluded that while it's been an excellent patch for raiders, that perhaps players that aren't keen to tackle these challenges may have been left out in the cold. That still rings true, but for raiding sickos like myself, patch 7.15's new Chaotic Alliance Raid is a very welcome change of pace, with appropriately spec'd rewards. New Best-in-Slot equipment, multiple new mounts, and one of the most impressive hairstyles in the game - all wrapped up in engaging 24-player content that forces you to engage with combat in ways that you won't find most anywhere else in the game.

Let's back up a step; what makes Chaotic so interesting is twofold. One, outside of Field Exploration activities like Eureka or Bozja, we haven't had mid-core to high-end content with more than 8-players before. Similarly, up until now on-content we usually have only ever had 2 sources for Best in Slot (BiS) gear; Savage Raid drops, or Augmented tomestone gear. While that has and will continue to be more than enough for on-content Ultimate raids, it means that usually there's some sort of compromises players will have to make, when some hypothetical gear with different sub-stats would be slightly better for BiS. Because of weekly lock-out and caps for how many limited tomestones you can get a week, this also means that the grind to get BiS can be especially annoying, depending on how quickly you've cleared the raid tier, whether you're in a static that decides who gets loot when, and how much you engage with the game outside of raids.

In Endwalker, we had additional high-end content added outside of Savage Raids, but Criterion Savage didn't really offer any additional gear that would be relevant to players for BiS; the rewards themselves were inadequate, and outside of players looking to attempt them for the love of the game, the content quickly was abandoned. Chaotic solves that issue twofold; in addition to more rewards such as mounts, a hairstyle, and a minion - it also adds in a new armor set that can replace BiS for some gearslots. Even for gear that isn't BiS, it offers an easier and more consistent way to get current iLVL cap gear, which would still be more than enough to start tackling FRU - the most recent Ultimate raid.

Frankly, the gear alone would be enough reason for folks to want to run the content. The fact that there's multiple cosmetics attached as well is just icing on the cake; the new hairstyle is highly desirable, and has been going for around 20 million gil on the marketboard - more than the price of a medium housing plot! It helps that while the content is difficult - perhaps two difficult for it to be so easily accessible, frankly - it's just an engaging fight overall, that has some fascinating mechanics that really forces players to practice situational awareness in ways you wouldn't otherwise see outside of Savage difficulty raids, or even Ultimate. That's both a blessing and a curse, though; while most of my experience with the raid was through a full 24-man static, Party Finder has been unusually toxic this go around; even more-so than usual. When some of the fight has soft body-checks, I suppose it makes sense that players might get angsty about any little mistake.

To be more specific; some of the mechanics that make the fight so interesting for 24-player content also makes it especially difficult without a premade group. Whether it's "PvP tiles" in the central arena which requires every player to be cognizant of both their own tile's invisible countdown timer they'll need to refresh as well as your other party members, leaving the lane open for traffic for players from other Alliance's when necessary, and more - or the tight dance that players have to practice on the outer platforms. It's the type of Alliance Raid design I hope that normal Alliance Raids can crib from on a less taxing scale. 

Put that way, Party Finder's grousing can be mostly chalked up to growing pains, I'd wager. While it's still very true that XIV should be retooling its patch cycle to bring newer content an expansion brings earlier into the patch cycle, for Chaotic I'd bet that it being new content meant that many different players had different ideas for what it might be. Now that we all know what to expect, I'd imagine that later fights using the same framework will be a much less messy affair. The experiment has undoubtedly been a major success!

That does leave a few lingering questions, of course. Now that there's an alternate source of on-content ilvl cap gear, it begs the question why Savage is still on a weekly lockout, a patch and a half past when it was introduced. Anyone that's still struggling to clear Savage likely isn't because of not meeting the DPS check, frankly, and Party Finder is absolutely suffering for groups now that Chaotic is around. Why would I personally want to help a group clear any of the fights of the tier, when I don't stand to gain any gear from it, and when I could otherwise be using that time in (Chaotic) Cloud of Darkness or FRU? It's a baffling decision, to put it mildly.

Regardless - raiders were already feasting in Dawntrail, and that continues to be true. While the overall state of XIV is in a weird space, raiding sickos like myself are as happy as can be. Perhaps in a few months time the rest of the game's content can catch up to the party; Dawntrail's best times are yet ahead of it, and for the moment I'm quite enjoying my time with it. Now if only Party Finder could stop filtering me on FRU...