The biggest complaints being minor mechanical overtunings and it being a little too easy is a very welcome change from the 6.2 and 6.3 discourse

I've only done 9-11 so far, but I really liked them. I loved how every boss is voice acted, the voice lines in P9S are my favorite part of the fight. 10 is a nightmare on PF, but I can appreciate it in hindsight. After Agdistis, this is a good step up. Fighting Themis again is just fun. I loved Fatebreaker but never did it synced, so I'm actually glad we got Fatebreaker 2.0. I'm exciting to start in on 12 next week (and suffer on PF).

2:30 As a MCH OTP (who lacks a real movement ability asides from sprint), I can say that you do have enough time to adjust to the kick if you happen to be on the unsafe side. The thing that tends to catch people off-guard if they are on the wrong side is they forget about the circle or donut aoe (which if you don't get hit by anything else you can live through, but better to not be hit ofc). Also a tip for those that are still confused about that mechanic, the safespots will always be on intercardinals and the 2 safespots are always diagonally opposite of each other. So if one safe spot is NW, the other is SE and vice versa.

Just finished the main story and making my ilvl 640 gear and I’m excited to get into raiding for the first time.

(cleared P10S W1 in PF as a tank) I would add another complaint to P10S besides the heads and Hells, is how Bonds are telegraphed to the players, especially when you're not in voice. Only giving pair or light party debuffs to half and a quarter of the team respectively, without any support like a numbered icon from P8S Snakes, makes it extremely difficult to read and requires toggling the new setting to show teammates' buff timers. There's no way to know the order without the party list unless you memorize the timer in relation to the mechanics. For example, at bonds 1 I know that if we stack center, the "solo spreads first" timer is about 8-9 seconds remaining as I walk across the web bridge, or 11-12 seconds if it's spread second. But without checking the party list for other players' debuffs there is no way to know if it is duo or roles, and even then it feels like memorizing buff timers in relation to mechanic resolution to be outside the scope of savage. Even in my (albeit limited) Ultimate experience I never had to worry about other players' debuff timers as much as in P10S, only my own potentially in relation to others eg. Nael dooms. I feel like duo/roles should either be applied to all players, or have some sort of visual tell that doesn't require checking the party list and comparing two ticking timers. I had to increase my party list size from 90% to 110% just to get the timers right at a glance, rather than stealing undue focus from ongoing mechanics.

Well everyone complained about "lack of healing gimmick" last tier, now they give what is asked.

Tip re: cannons btw -- the knockback is still determined by your position vs the center of the cannon, not the way the cannon is aiming. You obviously still have to get hit by it, but you can angle your knockback even if it's shooting straight (or vice versa).

Not a savage raider so I can't judge that, but story and normal fight wise, they've definitely been the best ones I've experienced.

One of my biggest gripe about this tier is that there is a lot more visual clutter than usual, but other than that I agree that p10 feels like the 3rd circle fight that was swapped with p11 for some reason.

I can understand why people hate the whole door boss design, but I enjoy having a 5 boss tier. Even though P1 is 7 and a half minutes it is super fast paced and they cram a lot of mechanics in that small amount of time. For P2 it could use one or two more mechanics, but I just see it as we are basically getting a 5 boss tier instead of 4 which definitely prefer.

this is my first ever savage tier, i managed to clear p9 in about two days. p10 has been kicking my ass so far, although that might be due to PF? ive seen enrage but any enrage to clear parties has really been a "wipe at bonds 1 or turrets" party haha

P10S might be my favourite savage floor I have done. Really fun time, I just love the ideas they came up with

I decided to jump into P9S and while Levinstrike is a bit of a hurdle at the moment(and I really want prog meteors onwards), I don't actually mind it too much. It feels great when you get it done. P10S looking kinda scary, but I want to give it a try eventually.

Completely agree that 10 and 11 feel like they're in the wrong slots - it was a bit of a nice break after 10 prog though 12s1 was the best by far for me. I thought I hated 12s2 but really I just hated Neverland strat, once we went to hexagons for caloric the fight fell over and it was a fun clear They way overcompensated for the damage issue in p8s1 though. Not a single fight had a real DPS check it felt like, we never saw enrages outside pulls with tons of deaths edit: holy shit I had no idea the angels flying away signaled beams vs aoe order LMAO we just stood in position for beams and waited for it to happen

As a healer who cleared P9-P11 week one in Party Finder: Fights are great in terms of going down on a boss fantasy and everything seems to be much better conceptually. Like you are looking at the boss and you know what to expect. In terms of execution it is fun to learn them and do it, especially P11, as someone who didn't play Savages in Shadowbringers. But man, healing in Party Finder is though. I accepted I'll parse grey just because I need to do Spreadlo/Additional GCD heals on anything. That + progress sets being basically min Piety made me go OOM on some tries and get Ethers for the first time in my game time xD

With p10s, you need a huge luck for PF not to screw any of the mechanics. The stack or spread with side lasers usually kills. if they didn't get killed far earlier. since there's no strat, can't really explain how to pass those.

also i gotta say the 12 transition is the coolest since exdeath surely, very rad

I'm really enjoying p10s, even in PF. Although the damage is.. kinda high. As a rdm if my food falls off unavoidable damage *will* instant kill me. If you do not have any tome armor pieces you'll also just... die with food. Obviously a shield healer can "fix" this, but... oof.

I like that after abyssos, they made playing melee really fun. Many mechanics have a "safe way" to do them and "max melee" way to do them rewarding great positioning.

I cleared P9S and just had my last kill group for P10S fall apart. P9S Is a very hit or miss in PF, I personally had to work over 20 hours, where at least 14 of those were dealing with fake groups that could not pass LC1. But I also had an FC mate who did it in 3 hours and even whined it was too easy, while I was still stuck in there x'3 P10S I agree, it is fun as hell. I do however fear for my sanity having to grind this in PF, soooo many "meme" deaths. It is rediculess, this is not a hit towards the boss, far from it, it is a great boss but dear lord is PF a hellscape week one, and likely going forward >.> As I mentioned, I just called my last PF kill group for P10S minutes ago, it is 2:37 AM where I am, I am headed to bed and accepting I do not get a week one clear of P10S T.T great video Mr.Happy, I look forward to seeing the rest (one can hope) if the PF RNG smiles upon me x'3 Note: I am on Europe-Chaos.

Caloric Theory 1 bug where you get a stack going into exaflares just made so many pulls frustrating. Praying you don't get the bug so you can prog further or else, wipe, do shapes and caloric 1 again... >:c Made 12-2 way less enjoyable to prog but whatever, got the week 1 clear

11s being less brain needed was a healthy break from 9/10. So I like the fight more than the rest this tier.

Personally on P12s phase 1, i find the limit cut to be overtuned on damage but otherwise it's a great fight. P9S was a fun entry boss that's relatively stress free, P10S was VERY creative with the Tank launch and the web mechanics, and while P11S was more standard it was just a fun fight thematically. I actually find it on point that Themis would challenge your fundamentals in fair judgement rather than pull weird gimmicks, though the light-dark balance could've used a second mechanic. Some kind of Tsukuyomi-esque thing, perhaps? All in all a great tier to wrap up the expac. Nice call on the Harrowing Hell being proximity based btw, will definately try it. Might explain why I (healer with lower max hp) survived while some dps died.

honestly i have to agree, P10S is an amazing fight. I had noticed they were messing with more "arena manipulation" mechanics starting in P2S, and while it was very cool and interesting, the fight itself was a snoozefest. And then they completely dropped the ball with P7S, fight was *terrible*. But third time's the charm, and while it is a little *too* hard for a second fight, it doesn't bother me as much with Hippokampos and Hegemone being very tedious and boring and easy.

the one real problem I have with this tier is that for the 1st 3 bosses it feels like the fight ends at the 15% mark. p9 after the second limit p10 after harrowing hell and p11 after whatever the last mech was called. each boss just goes back to its opening mechanic loop for like a minute and a half.

Thank you for your thoughts, Mr. Happy.

What is a door boss?

As always fun to watch, love seeing tank go flying.

GREASY ALEXANDER! OMG, I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when I heard that.

After clearing this tier myself my ranking is P12 1 - P10 - P12 2 - P9 - P11. They really dropped the ball with P11 - it feels like they just forgot to give it mechanics half the time and I agree with you; they should've made Themis balance light and dark a whooooooooole lot more. It's literally his thing. P12 2 was great fun to figure out blind, but I can just feel it's going to be the same as P8 2 in that reclears are just not going to be as fun as the door boss preceeding it as it falls into the trap of just giant puzzles over and over that are rather easy to resolve once you know how.

I don’t want to be hyperbolic, I really don’t, I know it’s week 1 and recency bias is huge. But I truly believe p10 is a harder fight mechanically than p8. There’s nothing in hephaistos with the strict timing and coordination of Bond debuffs going off at the same time as the half room cleave right after pillars. 25+ hours of clear parties and I never saw enrage. Humanity isn’t capable. I’m hurting 😅

That lock in on the turrets in P10S is the worst part of P10S as a tank player, I've had people take the turret and it hard locks on them and they shoot it sideways

The p10 towers are fine with the 2221 pf strat, the only issue is that when you get the (1133) pattern tanks need to sprint after the first knockback to do it consistently. And I gotta say, it seemed like a lot of my co-tanks this week had sprint unbound or something.

I really really like p10s, but I'm PFing this tier and it's got so much going on that's just PF kryptonite. I can already feel myself starting to feel a lot worse about it because it's such a mess in PF and that really sucks

5:40 I call him Asking Alexander

Best tier in Endwalker and it isn't even close. Asphodelos was ok but Abyssos was garbage. This tier was so much fun and the doorboss in particular is an all-time fight.

i really think that they need to do something more like e4 savage

P10 mechs def feel great and fun but the dmg feels pretty overturned week 1... especially for harrowing

looking forward to guides ty for breakdown

P10 is on par for ultimate for a tank. What we have to do in pretty insane.

Unfortunately i had to skip this tier dhe to severe burnout.I need the break because im gonna attempt top clear again in 6.55

im moving through a bit slow due to a limited static schedule but so far this tier seems pretty great. im coming off a tier + two ultimates on dnc and playing healer for this tier though which certainly is putting me through my paces compared to the comfort of dnc lmao

I kind of hate levinstrike now. I have been in 8 "kill" parties with JP strat which is the most brain dead imo. And most of the time we still died on levinstrike or even before that. I dont have that kind of patience.

It was happy brambles all along.

Nice!

I feel ever since say Perfect Alexander the last fight of the final tier of a savage raid, other than a couple very difficult mechanics the fight is essentially a 'victory' lap for players. Maybe that is the reason why Happy & a few others are somewhat disappointed in the 2nd phase of Athena. Or perhaps the devs wanted to go ham on mechanics but since this is coming off an Ultimate they dialed it back a bit....regardless still a solid raid tier. Maybe in saying the best one since Stormblood.

Has to be easier so people can get axolotl

Bet the patch after tonight is prolly the P10 Lasers adjusted

There is a bug in p12s p1 when Athena teleports during tankbusters, in p8s p1 boss would turn slowly which didn't mess up the melee positionals.

Maybe devs don’t think this way but I feel like it’s a really big disappointment to have p12s p2 just be okay and not amazing. For me those fourth bosses are the highlight of every tier and it’s just unfortunate that they couldn’t make phase 2 mindblowing. Like you said it’s not bad but I see so much more potential

Minor nitpick: The third syllable in Anabaseios is pronounced "bahs", not "base". It's actually part of the P12 song and pronounced that way. On topic though, as someone who's cleared P11S week one in Party Finder, I think this tier is really good so far and agree with a lot of your points on the first three fights. I think P10S is gonna be an absolute nightmare for PF reclears because there are so many mechanics with different strats and no standard and PF is incredibly illiterate. P7S had this exact same problem for War's Harvest (as in the very last mechanic of the fight) where people would not read the description, do the wrong strat for War and wipe the party, throw a tantrum, and leave. P11S is thankfully getting standardized strats really quickly, which is part of why it does feel like mechanically P10S and P11S are out of order.

Without this type of content, the game is no fun. But I don't have the time to commit to a fixed group. So I have no choice but to do it in PF. However, it's so shitty that in PF one person can f it up for everyone. Thus at the same time, I'm already dreading to start it as well🤮. Frustration, here I come.

Such a great tier

I really like this tier. Only done p9 through 11 so far but I enjoy it a lot. I don't think anything is overtuned so far. P10 is not a problem dmg wise if everyone is good. P10 should indeed be No. 3 though. At least as a Tank it feels like a lot more work with much tighter timings, mit management and need for healers who actually use their heals when compared to P11. Especially in Pf P10 feels a lot more like P3 hell than P11 does.

I like levinstrike but it would be better if you still had to dps the boss while performing the mechanic.

It’s Rufus talking about the Shadows of Man. Vincent couldn’t possibly know what they are as they only surfaced after the Nibelheim incident, which Vincent was in deep slumber for.

I miss your guides. At least you actually make an effort to optimize and check your videos before posting. Now people are just rushing videos out with shitty strats and sometimes even flat out wrong info, causing PF to be in such a mess that's hard (and perhaps impossible) to clean up once the damage's done.

I feel this tier NEEDED to be this simple, while still offering challenge in terms of mechanics. DSR, Abyssos and TOP has EXHAUSTED raiders as well as the poor job balancing heading into abyssos. Paladin was useless, even the band-aid fix didn't help much. MCH was just not viable, WAR struggled, DRG and RPR i believe both had issues, iirc. Casters, holy cow, it was better for some groups to forego casters altogether and just have MNK/SAM/NIN early on. (Note: I actually don't blame the devs, I blame covid messing up much of EW development. Covid hit six/seven months after shb. ShB was essentially done, it was all hands on deck for EW at that point) As for the fights themselves, PF, within the clear for P9S, and I vastly prefer this to P5S and abyssos already. P5S felt so unbalanced, as did 3/4 of that tier. The only fight that felt balanced was P6S and that fight was awful. P5S was just an endless barrage of damage that healers struggled to heal through, specifically in the early weeks. I feel people forget just HOW MUCH it did. A tank with 89k HP is taking nearly 40k a tick of damage back then and how in this blue rock we call Earth balanced? Yes, people cleared, yes people found strats that worked, but....I don't agree that was well balanced at all. Especially since before each TB was Ruby glow. High damaging, insta killing most week oners, with a bleed iirc on everyone. Should've been the second fight with how much of a wall Carby was a whole. Levinstrike, meanwhile, I actually really like. Mario Kart is simple, prefer Oppo, and the JP strat is also viable (Though a bit overrated by those who consider themselves 'hardcore' its weird in PF rn, I swear). Yes, there's a body check afterwards, but I can still survive it with 2 people dead. I can cover a healer as a paladin, tank the damage, heal us both, and still keep going. We'll fail the DPS check, most likely, but we're still progging. That distinction makes levinstrike SO MUCH better than Devour....And the fact that you're not putting all of your faith into a dorito..... So far, yes, it is easier. MUCH easier....but we got 2 insanely difficult ultimates. I'm fine with a breather, especially with FFXVI coming out, before the next patch/expansion.

i don't really like this tier as a higher ping player. they made mechanics resolve really quickly this time. in theory, i think that's fine but ffxiv's game engine is ancient and bad. i get clipped so often by rockbreaker out first, the p10s towers, 1 platform spread into role stack, and so on and so forth. the fact that even low ping players encounter issues such as the turrets and caloric is, i think, indicative that they are pushing the engine past the breaking point of what it can handle. ffxiv is just a very janky game in terms of server ticks and movement and mechanics resolving and i think they need to improve the game engine first before they start doing these super tight mechanics

My biggest problem with P9S is as a DPS there is just too much time of doing next to nothing just to do a near braindead mechanic, really only ever having to really worry about two real mechanics, one of which the boss is untargetable and the other of which isn't particularly hard. Like P5S mechs weren't that hard but felt like there were way more of them, way more variety in them, and they weren't nearly as braindead. I dunno, P9S was really meh and probably the worst first fight this expansion imho. Luckily it follows up with the banger of a fight that is P10S.

I liked your take more than those guys on mogtalk. You're kinda dissin on P11 too, but you're doing it more... in a friendly manner. Those guys were like completely crapping on the their saying it was good, was ok, but they were constantly complaining it wasn't hard enough. They did say to swap 11 and 10, and I don't disagree. Not the first time we've heard/seen that. But the majority of us aren't here to play an ultra hardcore puzzle game. It's an RPGMMo. Not a puzzle game, it's not Portal. EDIT: I am sure I speak for a fairly sizable quantity of people when I say that I feel a bit insulted and discouraged when you end-game top their people are belittling the teir's mechanics regardless of its accuracy. In addition, I personally feel highly discouraged to play ymy preferred role of healer when trolls or people with a valid point, as the thing with TOP, that apparently you can complete content without healers. Compeltely invalidating my preferred role. I know it's only possible with top their people as it requires near perfect execution. But that's not the point, the fact the game is designed even that it isn't just a troll thing but a valid point has driven me away from healers in general. That and the the Adventurer in Need almost always seems to be tank.

Zero shot you actually think P10S is any good at all. It's actually the worst fight made in about 6-7 years for SE

P10 sucks as a TANK, i hate it, other fights are awesome

I'm kinda saddened by it, less for the fights, but more for how the fights make the community react. I'll preface by saying my situation is kinda dumb. I'm the type that wants to get in the fights and try to piece them together myself, whether or not I'm good enough or cool enough. Not uncommon. Problem 1: I don't have a static. So I'm stuck with PF. As I said before, I like to try to figure things out myself. For me, watching a video where someone is telling me the whole fight kills most of my enjoyment. Overkills it when it's still fresh content. Problem 2: Not a common sentiment in PF. Less than 12 hours after the content dropped nearly every party required you to watch someone's video. (Who. The hell. Is Hector?) Problem 3: PF being PF. My stubbornness makes it hard to find a group. Setting aside my stubbornness kills my enjoyment. Enter the next issue. PF is indecisive as hell. In order to get into any party, i don't have to watch one video. I must watch minimum 16. I want to bash my head against the fight and hopefully break it before it breaks me, not take a damn college course on it. So I'm screwed. Tldr: I'm too anti-social to find a proper static, probably suck too much to figure it all out, i don't want to do research papers before floor tanking. So I have to just bow out on week one having accomplished nothing. Which does wonders for the depression I've been trying to suppress. I'll go try to soak up the river I've cried now. Hopefully i have enough toilet paper.

Congrats on the clear!

For me it was a pure nightmare, so I gave up on it. Some mechanics are so overtuned that it just killed all the fun for me, since I had to rely on pf. I think it's definetely more enjoyable for statics or full fc parties but I don't have this kind of luxury. It frustrated me so much, I stopped playing after one week of torture without making considerable progression. Especially P9s has some very questionable design and it felt artificial. I didn't expect it to be a cake walk but I don't appreciate ultimate difficulty shit in savage.

Gotta love how in his review he has to humble brag about people copying there strat while playing dumb that mario cart is a very common pug strat.