There’s a lot to talk about with Final Fantasy XIV lately, as the first major batch of job changes for Dawntrail and the job action trailer have been launched, the revised benchmark is out, and Media Tour concluded this week, after which our first major leak of actual information will begin.

But before all of that, I wanted to take a moment to talk about something personal, a milestone I reached a few weeks ago as I knocked out the last mount of the 3 in the collection – Endwalker was my first expansion in FFXIV doing current-content Savage raiding, and with my main raid’s first P8S kill in May (we backtracked due to roster troubles in Abyssos that led to us not finishing P8S P2 before Anabaseios launched) and my acquisition of the P8S mount three weeks ago, I am done with Endwalker Savages. My first expansion raiding for real in FFXIV, all bosses down, all mounts get, full BiS on at least one job. It was an interesting experience, and one that I enjoyed a lot overall.

At first, starting in Endwalker, I didn’t expect to raid Savage at all. The bug hadn’t bitten yet in the early days of December 2021, and even at the point that I uninstalled World of Warcraft in that window and decided that FFXIV was my main game for the time, I didn’t see a path to Savage. I hadn’t read up on much, wasn’t sure of the community around it, and it was a chance invite to join as a substitute for what became my main static that caused the idea to get stuck.

I raided in 3, I guess 4, distinct ways in Endwalker. First, in Asphodelos Savage, largely via Party Finder. PUGging my first Savage tier, even though all but my P3S first kill came in the substitute role I had taken, was an interesting experience. PUGs in FFXIV are generally more open, easier to get into, and easier to start with. In WoW, PUGging means applying to a million groups in batches of 5 at a time and hoping someone takes mercy and brings you in. In FFXIV’s Party Finder, if you see a group you meet requirements for, you can just hit join and it…puts you in the group right away. This is a novel and interesting concept coming from WoW, where credentialism and overpreparedness win the day most of the time – if you wanna PUG something, you better have already done it. My only general rule of engagement with PF for reclearing fights I had already done was to do it as early in the week as possible – and I often queued up at weekly reset time, midnight or 1 AM on Tuesday to get in and get it done. That was a very workable strategy that yielded some great results!

In Abyssos Savage, I finally shed the substitute title and started playing with my main static, who I am still with to this day. I also joined an alt static, that was originally intended to be alt characters, but largely ended up being me on an alt subbing into an existing static with attendance woes – and while the shape and leadership of that group have changed a lot since then, I am also still in this group to this day. So I did some PF reclears this tier, but mostly played with my two statics, locking the experience I would have for the rest of Endwalker – done with being a temporary replacement, done with Party Finder, and in two different teams on two different characters. This is how it was for Abyssos, and this is how it stayed for Anabaseios Savage as well.

In total, I played eight jobs in Savage. I played White Mage, Astrologian, Samurai, Dancer, Ninja, Scholar, Reaper, and settled in, towards the end of the second tier, on my main healer of Sage. I saw every perspective on the fights shy of tank and magical ranged DPS, and I think I gained a lot of appreciation for Savage as a gameplay model for it. Even though Endwalker has some warts in gameplay people love to rag on, I think I’ll always enjoy this expansion’s Savage gameplay as the moment where I finally really stepped into and embraced Final Fantasy XIV as a main contender MMO for me, and unless I do something crazy like start my own raid team (I do have a third full MSQ progged alt on a second account!) or start really getting deep into Ultimate raiding, Endwalker is going to have a lot of sentimentality for me.

Endwalker also proved to me the virtue and value of being a patient raider. My main static took 738 pulls to get down P12S in total, and took 583 for P8S, which is a lot of pulls and literal months of raid time spent mostly working towards and putting time into those two fights. Yet, no one got impatient, no one got snippy, and we made it – both fights down, not just once but enough times for everyone to get their mounts, their full armor options, and to get the 10 kill capstone achievement for the tier. In WoW, this kind of prog would have led to people losing their goddamn minds, and to be fair, in FFXIV, it was a lot of pulls too. I think the thing that raiding in a small, 8-player team, and doing it with two groups per week, has taught me is this: patience and kindness go a long way.

Whether I intended it to be or not, my raison-d’etre in my gaming experience and writing the past 3-4 years has been about cutting out as much toxicity as possible and realigning myself to my interests in a positive and healthy way, and at the point in Endwalker where I started Savage raiding, I still had a lot of doubts about the path I was on. Maybe the toxic individuals who had pushed me out of my old WoW guild were right, maybe I was full of shit or seeing something that wasn’t there. In a strange way, I think I needed to find my way in a game I wasn’t as familiar with and take my time understanding the journey. I spent a solid 8 months raiding in FFXIV, meeting new people, making new friends, and that experience gave me a lot of fuel and fire to come back to WoW. Not because the experience was bad in FFXIV – I very much enjoy raiding in the game and I just ensured that my calendar will be clear and ready to push EX trials at Dawntrail launch to prepare both of my raiding characters! – but it gave me a social dynamic I wanted and needed to see. I was fitting in with new people who enjoyed my company, finding a new appreciation for a calm and patient approach to raiding in an MMO, and being in smaller groups with in-jokes and banter gave me a desire to get back to that in WoW as well. It led me to starting my own raid team in WoW, adding a third raid team per week to my schedule which overflows now with funny, irreverent gameplay that still, somehow, manages to get things done, and none of that really happens if I don’t take those first baby steps into Savage raiding in Final Fantasy XIV.

Before I raided Savage, I had this urge to put everything on a relative scale, and I wrote about Savage as a comparative point of difficulty between WoW modes of raiding. While it is something you can compare, Savage raiding is quite different than raiding in WoW. WoW’s raiding is often an individual performance, where the best guilds in the race to world first are about unifying strong, highly-skilled individual players and giving them a framework to contribute to a team. While there are a lot of moments where you need to do things as a team, so much of WoW’s raiding and mechanical challenge boils down to personal responsibility, and the limited opportunity to recover a pull that is going sideways in WoW is a feature of that kind of raiding ideology. There is teamplay in WoW, to be sure – but Savage in FFXIV is on another level of that. So many mechanics demand that your team, in whatever component units – the full party, light party groups of 4, or partner stacks – have complete trust in each other that you’ll arrive where you need to be, stacked up or spread out as makes sense for the fight and mechanic in question. WoW has a lot of room for improvisation, which is where I think the personal responsibility component is heavier – but in Savage raiding, you’re so often committed to a specific way of handling a mechanic such that improv is a mistake. While I think you could stack-rank the mechanical complexity of the two, I don’t think it matters that much.

FFXIV’s Savage raiding also introduced me to the joy (and terror) of puzzle mechanics. A lot of the hardest Savage fights are difficult not just for tuning or overall layered complexity, but for centerpiece mechanics that must be solved precisely to win. In a lot of cases, these mechanics have multiple viable solutions, but you need to match up people, locations, and times precisely to pull off the major fight mechanics. This isn’t always handled well – most of the puzzles I dealt with in Endwalker involved a layer of debuff vomit onto the raid, where you need to check 3-4 debuffs, match up timer durations on certain debuffs with color or other elements, and then those would help dictate where your precise role was. While I’m not a fan of the methodology in all cases (the debuff usage as the primary tell here gets very tedious to read on-screen and isn’t always the clearest), the overall gameplay is an interesting tweak on placement and positioning that isn’t as simple as standing in one place most of the time or having a designated spot you return to at specific points. I also, generally, appreciate the tuning and overall attention to detail on FFXIV’s Savage raid design. The DPS checks are tight but fair (except the obvious issue that cropped up with the P8S check in week 1) and tuned around what a well-balanced raid comp can do the first week of the raid in an item level equivalent to that which drops from the normal-difficulty version of the same raid. FFXIV’s item level and gearing curve is generally far less aggressive, with fewer choices but also a more defined path, and so you can see a clear way to push a group past inconvenient barriers – gear up and fight on. At the same time, gear never really saves you from a mechanics check, especially if you need to gear up more past the tier’s starting point in order to clear a fight in the first place, and that’s kind of nice. This design paradigm makes the gearing treadmill feel like less of a chore and necessity – getting practice in on the fights and getting better at your job and how to play it in Savage is the only real way forward (until big Echo hits when the tier is mostly or entirely irrelevant, at least).

Yet in spite of all these skill-focused, difficulty-maintaining design decisions, I would argue that one of the best things about Savage is the accessibility. Every PF I did in Asphodelos had at least someone who was struggling to keep up, and both of my static groups have at least one player who is, politely, behind the curve on keeping up with the fight mechanics, and at varying points throughout Endwalker, I was this person too! Yet Savage still sees reasonably good clear rates because the design lets you dip in and out as needed. While there are some cons to immersion and overall sense of place with how FFXIV handles raids (every boss fight is a standalone instance with a single room and no trash, unless you go back to Heavensward and before), the approach to getting into content is great, because you’re not committing to storming a castle with a dozen other people but instead fighting a specific encounter that you can insta-zone in to, fight for as long as you want (with the instance timer forcing a timeout if you go too long), and then leave when you win or are otherwise done. PUG raiding in FFXIV, at least for someone on Aether as I am, is vibrant and thriving in large part because of this – you can do hard content and not be forced into a huge time committment spent not doing fights or managing logistics – you go, it’s the fight right away, you pull until you can’t no more.

In fact, the only real bad or iffy parts of my Savage experience is something that is largely an Endwalker problem – the prevalance of body check mechanics is too damn high in Savage (and hard content in EW in general) and it does hamper that recoverability that FFXIV raiding is supposed to lean into. So many times, there are healing, mitigation, or mechanical checks that have personal responsibility, followed immediately by a mechanic that requires all 8 players be alive to assign debuffs or handle components of the mechanic, but with almost no recovery time between bopping everyone on the nose and then starting the body check. Functionally, it means that you can often have an exceptionally good pull be ruined by one player not handling their personal responsibility, which can create tensions in a group if things like that happen a lot to individual players. I say Endwalker problem, but my hope is that Dawntrail raiding brings some changes to see these kind of things happen less.

Overall, I am so delighted to have finally taken a step into the high-end content of Final Fantasy XIV, to better understand the game and its systems, and to have a chance with a new expansion coming out to see how my skills have grown over the last 3 years!