Neverland Raid Group has cleared the Final Fantasy XIV Dragonsong Ultimate, claiming the World First kill on FFXIV’s hardest raid.
The Dragonsong War has been refought, and the Ultimate defeated, as the static Neverland Raid Group clears Final Fantasy XIV’s most challenging fight ever. The group cleared the raid around 15:00pm local time, or 06:00am PST. With their victory, they’ve dethroned some of Final Fantasy XIV’s best raid groups from their Ultimate domination. They’ve also claimed a World First kill for the European Data Center.
The team surprised many by clearing the fight ahead of Thoughts Per Second (TPS), Entropy, and other World-First statics also vying for World First. In a race that has taken just under seven days-an unprecedented amount of time for a Final Fantasy XIV raid race-the raiders and watching fans have been subjected to some of the most unique mechanics we’ve ever seen.
Pain and Time Travel
Ultimate fights in Final Fantasy XIV are the most difficult raid content in the game. With the entire fight pushing close to 20-minutes in duration, with the need for constant perfect execution, it’s truly one of the hardest challenges in MMOs.
The premise behind Ultimates in-game is that they are retelling of your past battles, embellished with new elements thanks to a storyteller known as the Wandering Minstrel. In the Dragonsong War Ultimate, you must relive the fights from the entire expansion of Heavensward.
For raiders this has meant revisiting one of the emotional cruxes of that expansion, rescuing a fallen comrade. To make matters worse, if you fail to rescue this comrade, you’ll be trapped in a time loop, fated to relive their death again and again. In mechanical terms, if you fail to save an NPC in the Ultimate, the raid will reset back to a previous stage and force you to relive it again.
And in a fight that veers into eight stages… that’s pretty brutal
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Menacing Dragonsong Ultimate Mechanics
While the Neverland raid group managed to clear the Ultimate, video of the clear hasn’t yet been uploaded. What’s more, almost none of the leading World-First raiders for Final Fantasy XIV stream their progression, meaning we’ve not had a chance to see all the mechanics.
But so far, we’ve heard about:
- Multiple comrades rising from the dead to fight or help you.
- An infinite time loop if you fail a mechanic.
- A specific attack that snapshots damage in a completely different way to any other attack in the whole of FFXIV.
- Appearances from minibosses and dungeon bosses from all across the Heavensward expansion
- Lots of heartbreak.
Overall, this Ultimate has made many non-hardcore players look enviously towards the most difficult challenge in Final Fantasy XIV. A chance to turn back time and save your dead friends in-game is going to be too much for many to turn down. So you can expect to see a lot of Ultimate pug groups as the Endwalker Expansion continues.
