N.B. This will include spoilers for Final Fantasy XIV’s Dawntrail expansion.

Among the habits I picked up during the COVID-19 pandemic was playing Final Fantasy XIV with my partner and a close friend of mine. During the initial months, another friend reached out to let us know she was happy to assist us with anything while we progressed through this story-heavy MMO, and she started affectionately calling us her sprouts. I will preface this journey with the fact that I am rarely someone who plays anything on a hard difficulty. While I can find mastery of a game fun to play around with, extremely challenging content is just as apt to frustrate me. So imagine my surprise when my group’s FFXIV mentor (we’ll call her Ming) reached out to ask if we’d be interested in trying the latest hard content.

The way FFXIV is structured, harder content is a revision of content that is available on normal difficulty. Bosses, who are normally relegated to Trials, get extreme versions, which offer various ways of eking out and grinding for gear upgrades (as well as flashy mounts). Raids are 8-person content that see you go through a story in three different sets of four fights each. The current series sees you fighting in an arena against fighters who augment their powers with animals through regulators (a system by which they were previously given functional immortality). These then have a harder mode called Savage, which again give out a drip feed of equipment upgrades that are quickly outdated as new content comes (though given the patch cycle is every four or so months, you have some time for that gear to be best in slot).

I’ve never raided in an MMO before partially because I am not a particularly social creature in MMOs, and partially because the time commitment was not something that interested me. So I figured it would be useful to jot down my progress with this, as it no longer seems daunting to someone who was fairly certain this was content they would just never see beyond watching videos of people playing through them and marveling at the coordination.

There were a few things I did to prepare for this step up in content. My partner and I have been tackling new content near the end of the last expansion and then throughout this one blind, meaning we would not look up boss move sets or strategies when entering new content and just tackle it as it came. While I don’t feel FFXIV is very good at explicitly telling you how its systems or visual language works, there are certain patterns, tells, and configurations that just become standard as you fight your way through 100 levels of content. For Savage we looked up strategies, since it was a step beyond anything we tried.

Second was learning the ins and outs of my class that I would be playing (Warrior). There are the three typical type of classes for an MMO/group fantasy game: tank, healer, and DPS, with me taking on a tank role. In the meta of the game, everything has started revolving around what’s called the 2-minute meta. Various classes have buffs that fit perfectly within a two minute window, so you shift the skills you use into this very set pattern and then perform it while keeping an eye out for mechanics that will kill you. Easy in theory, requires a lot of practice to feel comfortable. I will note that FFXIV doesn’t do the best job of teaching you this meta, partially because it doesn’t seem to have a system in place for expression via builds, and seems to fight on what it wants to be, with classes seemingly constantly adjusting to various cheers and jeers of the player base.

So Ming’s group got together and we entered M1S (the first of this raid series, and the savage variety). What followed was quickly finding out how panicked folks can get when confronted with new information. Despite having watched videos and making my way through new content with barely a scratch (or sometimes collecting vulnerability stacks while playing tank that I only survived by virtue of innate damage reduction), Savage was a lesson that mistakes can be far more deadly. What then happened is that for three weeks we met up, progressed in the fight, learned the various dance steps to a fairly standardly telegraphed set of attacks, and whittled down the Black Cat (the boss of this particular raid) until we killed her within seconds of dying ourselves.

What I’m happy to report is that we’ve met for two weeks after our first successful clear and managed to defeat Black Cat within two tries, before moving on to M2S, where we are making progress but finding ourselves slowly learning those dance steps. M2S has us fight a bee lady who speaks in a Southern drawl for no particularly discernible reason (Dawntrail did give us Fantasy Texas, but the voices there don’t even seem to speak in a drawl).

What happened next was mostly expected: dying early to some mechanics we just didn’t understand yet. Then learning those steps and progressing to die to the next mechanic we had not yet practiced and were figuring out as we managed to share damage incorrectly, kill ourselves, and just generally laugh at the shenanigans that ensued. What really helps here is having a group that isn’t prone to passing the blame and instead patiently explaining missed mechanics. Mistakes happen! Folks can easily misread something or have so much going on that they miss an important cue that is the difference between being at full health and taking slight damage or suddenly finding your character face planted with 0 HP. On our Discord voice channel it is common to hear, “Wait, what does she have stored?” as she telegraphed a move several seconds ago while you were engaging with entirely different mechanics.

We’ve not yet finished the Bee Lady and her infectious song, but there’s hope! As someone who remembers running the very first dungeon in FFXIV without their tank stance and having a patient fourth player guide our initial group of three through the ins and outs of the duty, a casual running through of this content is perfectly manageable! We’re only meeting for two hours on a weekly basis, but it’s amusing learning where we need assistance, who is best at spotting mechanics and calling them out, and understanding better how to do things we’d not ever encountered in more normal content.

So if you are on the fence about ever trying Savage, I think it’s entirely possible to learn with a patient enough group. However, it will require practice and leaning on outside resources (a complaint I frequently have about FFXIV). Here’s to hoping we see the end of M4S (the currently available content for this raid series) and get to try the others as they release.