When you decide to playFinal Fantasy 14, you’re probably well aware that it’s a commitment longer than the free trial that includes the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60. You understand that you are going to dedicate a lot of time to the game.
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Whether you want to learn new strategies on the latest extreme trial, or you want to run DPS on a dungeon roulette and are prepared to wait 30-plus minutes, there’s going to be a fun time sink in the game. It’s better to know which dungeons and trials will take up a chunk of the time you’ve dedicated to the game, right?
8Limitless Blue, Bismarck
The problem with the Bismarck fight isn’t that he’s hard, but rather that he leaves a lot of downtime in between times you get tostand on top his backand directly damage him. He has the unfair advantage of flying just out of reach of the parry while he sends thralls to your floating island.
Even his limit break kind of has you just standing around, waiting to be either blasted by water or electrocuted. This trial would have rated higher for how much Bismarck wastes your time, but the fight’s only saving grace is having a rage timer you have to race against. Miss one of the harpoons even once, and you’ll wipe and have to start the fight over again.
7Fist Of The Father (Savage)
This savage raid truly created division among the hardcore Savage raid runners and casual players who wanted to give Savage content a try. It. Was. Brutal. Those who kept trying can tell tales of how many times they had to run the same raid on repeat, as well as other groups who just broke up when they decided enough was enough.
While the fight itself has the typical running time of 90 minutes (a normal amount of time for a raid), that’s not where the relentless battle gets its reputation from. On average, it took well-practiced groups roughly a month to finally clear it. Some were even running raids daily, spending hours running the fight just to figure out the best way to tackle the mechanics. The only reason this scores so low on the list is that the fight itself is the normal length.
6The Porta Decumana
Square decided that the Ultima WeaponFight needed a significant upgrade to keep up with the power creep of each patch. Boy did this fight deliver. Ultima Weapon has plenty of new moves to keep you busy, but his HP has also increased, making him a damage sponge. This isn’t a dig at the mammoth-sized weapon, rather, it was an update that he long deserved.
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To fully appreciate the mechanical marvel that is Ultima Weapon, Square decided to make the mid-fight cutscene unskippable. That’s more for new players who haven’t seen this part of the story yet, but Ultima is going to make sure you don’t forget who he is.
5Construct Seven, The Ridorana Lighthouse
Construct Seven is widely known for being a progression-stopping bucket of bolts, and for doing various, hard-hitting AOE attacks that pack a punch. It’s a robot with a preprogrammed function, so it would be unreasonable to get upset at it for doing what it was made for, right? It’s not like it’s a personal attack or anything.
At least, it wasn’t until it decided to perform some calibrations with some good old prime math. Construct Seven drops your HP to one, an immediate cause for panic as you are brought so close to death before asking you to find your prime HP number or suffer a debuff before quickly launching into an attack that could wipe your whole single-digit HP party if you don’t heal fast enough. Math being the catalyst for defeat feels like a cruel joke.
4The Cloud Deck (Extreme)
12 minutes doesn’t seem like a lot of time for most of the activities in your day, like doom-scrolling social media for example. 12 minutes can feel like ten seconds and you wouldn’t notice until two hours later, or maybe catching up with a friend you haven’t heard from in a long time. 12 minutes suddenly doesn’t feel like it would be enough.
However, if that 12 minutes took place on top of an airship held hundreds of feet from the safety of the ground below, andyou had to defeat a giant, mechanical monster of Garlean design, then twelve minutes can feel like forever. In the Cloud Deck extreme, you have 12 minutes before Diamond Weapon decides to hit enrage and wipe your party.
3The Steps Of Faith
When the last patch before Heavensward dropped, it gave us The Steps Of Faith. It was a straightforward event where you had to stop Vishap and the horde that accompanied him from crashing the gates of Ishgard. Boy, if it were only that easy. Not only does the winged beast take a gigantic amount of damage to stop, but you have to worry about getting stomped by its feet in the process.
What makes it long though, is how slow Vishap moves up the bridge, as if to show you that he’s taking his time because you can’t stop him. On top of that, he’ll stomp the ground under you and cause you to be stunned for several seconds while he merrily continues on his way. Not to mention every time you die and respawn, you have to run the entire length of the bridge. Every. Time.
2Sophia, Containment P1T6 (Unreal)
Sophia is one of the Warring Triad creatures found in Azys Lla above the mountains in Abalathia’s Spine along with the Sea of Clouds. The trial has always had a sort of learning curve you had to figure out even from the default story mode. There’s managing the adds and trying to stay alive and on the scale that she can otherwise knock you from.
It’s one of those fights where you could have the mechanics down and the numbers to either keep up heals or pass the DPS check. All it takes is that odd person or two to run just a little slower to the marked spot on the map. Next thing you know, the whole party is wiped, and this marks the fourth time. So, you queue up to start again. Then again. And again. On average, it takes several attempts just to gain one clear.
1Angra Mainyu, The World Of Darkness
Everyone who was there to witness the apocalyptic carnage that was the Crystal Tower series of alliance raids knows that there were a lot of wipes to this boss. Hell, there were even times when the fight could go on for the whole 120 minutes if people didn’t know the mechanics. The raid was brand new, so that meant most people who were excited to finish the OG Crystal Tower storyline were instead met with rage and disappointment.
Enter the bane of everyone’s existence: Angra Mainyu. The first boss of the raid, Angra Mainyu has several attacks that aim to deliver certain death: Mortal Gaze causes Doom if you aren’t careful, and it also casts a flat-out death spell that is guaranteed to take you out if you aren’t doing the proper mechanic. It was hell, and it still can be if you have just a couple of new people in the raid.
