Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail's Futures Rewritten Ultimate Raid was what the raid scene needed, for now

It's always a little awkward for me to write about the Final Fantasy XIV raid scene; on one hand, it's not like many folks that even play Final Fantasy XIV in games media do savage raids on content, let alone Ultimate Raids. Part of me wonders how much the playerbase as a whole even cares about the state of the game's raid scene. I even said as much when I covered 7.1's new (Chaotic) Cloud of Darkness raid a few months back - with the current state of Dawntrail as it stands, it feels like its only the players that engage with mid-tier and high-end raiding that are feeling great about Dawntrail's slate of content at the moment. At least for now, anyway.

With the imminent release of patch 7.2, it seems like things are about to change, and I'm willing to bet by the time Shade's Triangle launches the overall tune about Dawntrail will begin to shift across the wider playerbase. It feels like as far as battle content goes, it feels like Final Fantasy XIV is on the right path - and despite my own qualms with certain aspects of Futures Rewritten (Ultimate), it was probably the first real step leading the way. 

If you're not into Final Fantasy XIV raiding, chances are you don't understand what denotes the difference between a Normal Raid, a Savage Raid, an Alliance Raid, and an Ultimate Raid. The recent addition of Chaotic Alliance Raids probably don't help matters much, either. In XIV, endgame content revolves around high-end 8-player - Full Party - content. Each expansion will over the course of its patch cycle receive 3 "tiers" of normal raids, each with 4 fights each. While the "Normal" difficulty of these fights are balanced around the casual player, upon completion of a Normal Raid tier players unlock a completely optional "Savage" difficulty version of these fights. While Alliance Raids are geared for casual players, and Chaotic Alliance Raids offer another means to get stronger gear, they're merely a side dish compared to the main attraction when it comes to endgame content in Final Fantasy XIV.

Savage Raids are what drives the gear treadmill for reaching best-in-slot gear during each even-numbered patch. They're also usually balanced to be the hardest at the start of a raid tier's release, with weekly tomestone gear and drops from earlier fights in the tier making each attempt at the fights easier and easier with every weekly lockout. This is, for all intents and purposes, the "endgame" loop for Final Fantasy XIV; players group up either on Party Finder or with a "static" group of 7 other players to tackle each raid tier, week by week. Some hardcore players go for clearing the tier on week 1, when the fights will be the hardest; others will merely attempt to get their clears in by the time the next raid tier drops, when the gear rewards from the tier are no longer relevant for current content.

Ultimate Raids are a tier of difficulty even beyond Savage Raids. To begin with, in order to even attempt an Ultimate Raid upon its release, you must have cleared the Savage Raid tier from the previous patch. Secondly, the fights are explicitly balanced around BiS gear from the previous tier. Unlike most other content in the game, it's expected that players have the best possible gear equipped, in addition to current high-quality food buffs and potions to buff their dps during a group's aligned 2-minute burst windows. If you don't know how to play your job, chances are you wouldn't even be able to unlock an Ultimate Raid on release. Even if on the off chance you did, it's fully expected that you know what you're doing. Especially on party finder, if you join a group without a serious intent to meet a listed group's prog point, you're likely to end up on multiple player's blacklists.

Unlike with Savage Raids, there's essentially no loot advantage to clearing a fight. Clearing an Ultimate Raid, especially on-patch, is merely a matter of pride; players do it for the love of the game, dumping potentially hundreds of hours over the course of several months into getting a clear. Players clearng an Ultimate Raid on release do it because they explicitly love raiding in Final Fantasy XIV, and want the game to offer a challenge that forces them to engage with their entire toolkit, coordinating with 7 other players in a way that even Savage Raids can't offer. Needless to say Ultimate Raids are a source of major passion for the XIV raid scene, and things can get personal rather quickly when the world first raid race gets involved. 

Last week, I cleared the latest Ultimate Raid in the game, Futures Rewritten (Ultimate). FRU, for short. While this was my first time actually clearing a fight on content, it's far from my first rodeo with Ultimate Raiding. I *almost* cleared Dragonsong's Reprise on-patch, and I got about halfway through The Omega Protocol before calling it quits. Even if FRU was my first proper clear, I'm sure anyone would agree that I've had enough experience with Ultimate Raiding to give some impressions of the fight as a whole, and how it may compare to fights we've seen in the past. If it delivers on what Ultimate Raiders want, if it was the right fight for the playerbase as it is right now, and if there's anything specifically raiders may hope the next Ultimate Raid might bring to the table.

You've seen the title of this article, so of course you already know the answer. Despite being a very flawed Ultimate Raid, I'm of the opinion that FRU was what the raid scene needed right now, with some important caveats I'll go over later. The one-two punch of DSR and TOP both being the most difficult Ultimate Raid at their release was already burning players out, with TOP's challenge proving exhausting following the grueling Abyssos raid tier seeming like a breaking point for many players. On content it had the roughest DPS check of any Ultimate; while Ultimate Raids have traditionally had DPS checks, they've never been as strict as TOP's were upon release, which combined with certain phases of the fight running headfirst into systemic issues with Final Fantasy XIV's ability to keep track of player buffs and debuffs. The combination of these oversights, a hefty DPS check and a particularly difficult early half of the fight made TOP infamous for its difficulty, when DSR had already been recognized as the hardest fight the game had ever seen.

Naturally, not every raider felt the same way - but it was definitely the right call for the health of the raiding scene to dial back the difficulty with FRU. Under ideal circumstances the DPS check is comparable to DSR at release (assuming you ignore the Pictomancer in the room), and mechanically there's less immediate wipes for failing a mechanic; offering players a chance to better understand what might have gone wrong in a pull instead of a mistake immediately filling the screen with effects, leaving players to rewind through recordings to run an autopsy on their failed attempts. As a result, FRU is a much more pleasant fight to tackle over the course of progression. It feels like the fight wants you to clear it, while TOP challenged you to surmount it.

There's room for both types of fight design to exist, even at the upper echelon of Ultimate Raiding. As a companion to the previous Savage Raid tier, FRU feels like the perfect follow-up to what clearly was an attempt by the dev team to get more players interested in Savage Raiding, by offering a raid that pulls back the heat from DSR and TOP - offering a better on-ramp for players that might want to get into Ultimate Raiding for themselves. Even if it feels like some aspects of the fight may be an overcorrection, I'd still classify FRU as a success if that really was what the team was going for with it.

The main issues I have with the fight are the DPS check when paired with a Pictomancer, and what feels like a lack of mechanics that truly stress Tank and Healer's toolkits. As far as DPS is concerned, it's a tricky problem - part of what makes Pictomancer so beloved isn't just its absurd DPS potential, but rather what makes it broken, and how it rewards skill expression for players. Pictomancers greatly benefit from the downtime mechanics that are a mainstay of Ultimates, as they can prep their most powerful abilities without directly targeting a boss. As for support classes, it's very uncommon for a boss to auto-attack Tanks outside of the final phase, and even when they do they pale in comparison to the damage that M4S's auto-attacks dished out on week 1. Tankbusters don't hit hard enough, and outside of specific party comps it feels like players only ever need to actually mitigate a fraction of the damage that the boss puts out beyond using your tank invulnerability cooldowns.

As far as I see it, the easy solution would also help mitigate some of the problems players have had with the relative stress-free nature of some of the fight's mechanics. In DSR, Phase 3 was so tough during prog because it was a full uptime phase, where players had to constantly keep up their rotation while dealing with one of the fight's more strict mechanics. Even without shaving down Pictomancer's identity, if the next fight was filled with uptime phases, this would go a long way to killing two birds with one stone; if support classes have to worry about their healing and mitigation actions while keeping up DPS during a mechanic, suddenly regardless of any actual changes to damage output Tanks and Healers alike will find themselves feeling more engaged with the fight as a whole. Pictomancer's DPS evens out in FRU at Phase 5, which by no small coincidence is also full uptime. Even if it might be a "band-aid" solution for now, it would still make it far easier for the dev team to balance the DPS checks when the Pictomancer problem would mostly solve itself with full uptime DPS checks.

It's anyone's guess what the dev team will try with the next Ultimate Raid, but the popular assumption is that the next fight will be themed around Shadowbringer's stoy; if that's the case, then it doesn't take a genius to realize that the team will want it to be a highlight of Dawntrail's patch cycle. Hopefully if that's the case it'll be the perfect capstone to coincide with Creative Studio 3 delivering on what the rest of the playerbase wants, and not just us raiders. Futures Rewritten was a pleasant and rewarding Ultimate Raid, and I'm ready for the rest of the playerbase to receive some of the same attention we've been receiving. Despite it all, Dawntrail still has the potential to become the best Final Fantasy XIV expansion yet.