Experiencing new content is always a thrilling experience for any gamer. However it pales in comparison to the stress of charging into the unknown with the mindset to be the first in your world to conquer it. A careful balance of speed and efficiency, players compete with the rest of the server to see just who made the best use of each pull and every cooldown. One must appreciate the intricate spectacle that unfolds as players blindly take on the developers (often sadistic) traps and challenges in a race to be the first ones through.
The members of Team Double or Nothing, a faction of the Elysium free company, were up to this challenge. Refusing to back down from the brutal trials presented, they were the first to clear the Alexander Midas Savage Raid in it’s entirety in the world. Now they’re here to speak about about the preparation revolving around a “World First” raid attempt as well as some insight into how they learn and adapt to the chaos that new content bombards them with.
(Video of the World First Alexandor Floor 8 Savage Kill)
Introduce yourselves!
(Fold) Hello! My name is Foldasaurus Rex. I am currently covering the melee DPS role within our world progression team for Elysium.
(Layla) Hello. I am Layla Bell from teams ‘Updog’ and ‘Double or Nothing’ in the free company Elysium. Many players who I am close to also call me by my other alias: Klops. Before a recent hiatus, I helped create and manage Elysium alongside my co-leader, Gouka Mekkyaku. Thank you for taking an interest in us!
(Sai) Hi there. I am Sai Fujiwara from Elysium’s team Double or Nothing.
How long have you been playing FFXIV for?
(Fold) I have been playing since Phase 4 of the beta testing period for FFXIV, which was somewhere around mid August of 2013.
(Layla) I have been playing FFXIV 2.0 since the second phase of the beta in Summer 2013. Prior to this, I played FFXIV 1.0 just long enough to achieve Legacy status. I have been raiding in FFXIV since the beginning and have happily been a part of every content cycle thus far. However, it wasn’t until July 2014 that I met my current teammates.
(Sai) I started playing during the beta for FFXIV: ARR and have been playing entirely too much ever since!
Did you play any MMOs or other games competitively prior? If so, were you on any world progression teams?
(Fold) I have been part of a progression team in World of Warcraft under the name Unholy Trinity. They were a top 20 US raiding guild at the time I played around Mists of Pandaria.
(Layla) I started playing MMOs when I was twelve years old, actually. My first MMO was Dark Age of Camelot in 2001. It was a game focused solely on PvP and quickly became my competitive outlet in Jr. High and Highschool. I played it for nearly six years! However, when World of Warcraft released its arena-based PvP with the launch of its Burning Crusade expansion pack, I became very interested in that. My focus shifted and remained there until College. Regarding your next question, I don’t think I was good enough to warrant attending any tournaments, really. I held respectable online rankings but never anything I would rate “world class.”
(Sai) I played FFXI briefly around 2004 or so, playing on Gilgamesh as a Tarutaru named Vivaldi. I was not competitive at all though as I only played for a few months and mostly got sidetracked by fishing up 10,000 moat carp for the Lu Shang’s quest… Beyond MMOs, the only games I have played very seriously are StarCraft: Brood War (10+ years) and Go, the board game recently made famous through Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo. I haven’t played or studied nearly as much since getting deep into FFXIV, but in my best shape I am somewhere around the low dan level.
What classes do you play currently? Did any of you have to switch for this raid tier?
(Fold) I cover the melee roles for our group, so I am currently playing Ninja, Dragoon and Monk. Because of the strength of Ninja in this current meta, there was no need to swap roles this tier. Outside of melee, I do enjoy healing in this game and find Scholar to be a personal favorite job of mine.
(Layla) I play tanks! While I am mostly known for being a Warrior player, I like to be proficient in all tank jobs. I am a strong believer in mastering a “role” as opposed to mastering a single “job.” Miunih, a teammate of ours, made the switch from White Mage to Black Mage this recent tier. Given the very short time frame he had to learn a new role, we think he did exceptional.
(Sai) I’m currently playing as White Mage. Miunih switched from WHM to BLM to accommodate the merging of parts of our two different groups into one, he and I both being WHMs at heart. I think he proved that he’s just a solid world first raider regardless of role. Vana switched from playing DRK back to his old main of SCH for this tier and was exceptional.
What kind of preparations do you do personally do to make sure you are ready to conquer raid?
(Fold) When it comes to vacation time, I like to plan in advance according to how long the team wishes to take off for progression. In the case of this tier, we all agreed on taking two weeks off from work and school to pursue our goals. I also like to mentally prepare myself for each upcoming tier by actually spending time away from the game several days prior to the patch. This helps me clear my mind and prevent any sort of ‘mental burnout’ from the game as we tackle the new content.
(Layla) Preparing for a progression cycle involves a steady dose of planning and scheduling. With the long hours of hardcore progression comes a need for an open schedule. Coordinating vacation days with employers becomes a very important topic of conversation. Usually, we try to “frontload” our work and responsibilities in the weeks prior to a progression patch. This way, we can afford to take time off these responsibilities without hindering our daily lives. Beyond that, preparing the mind is important. Raid progression is a mentally taxing environment. We make sure to receive lots of rest before a content patch.
(Sai) The answer to this falls into two categories, the first being practical concerns with doing long progression hours and the second being job/role aptitude and making sure your skills are sharp. The practical concerns just involve taking the time off, stocking up on food (in real life!) and doing the best you can to adjust your sleep schedule so that you don’t crash badly when alarm clocking the patch. In game, there can be weeks of stalking the market board in advance and coordinating with crafters to make sure that you have all of the consumables that your team will need for progression. Job aptitude largely comes just from playing the game so much, but it is important to always be examining your own play so that you can improve where possible and to stay sharp generally. Ideally you should be going into a tier having full confidence in the mastery of your own class, and yet as little ego involved as possible to get in the way of teamwork and problem solving.
How much time do you make to focus on progression in the first few weeks?
(Fold) As we enter the patch, we usually let our adrenaline propel us right out of the gate and we can easily spend 20 hours for the first day or two, however on a typical progression day we spend at least 14 hours and upwards to 16 if our team has no interruptions that day.
(Layla) The general approach is to free up enough time and energy to be able to raid 16h/day for a week straight. After that, the goal is to raid as much as possible while balancing members returning to school and/or work.
(Sai) For the past several tiers the goal has always been world first for me, and this basically means a schedule of 16 hours per day doing progression until all of the fights are down. It is a bit rare for everyone to be able to get more than one week off though, so depending in circumstances the second week of progression and beyond is usually a bit lighter.
How did you guys form your team and know it was the right fit?
(Fold) Our raid team for this tier was formed rather late in 3.1, so we did not have the time to really ‘test the waters’ to see how the team chemistry played out. However, we all knew each other for quite some time and were all very open to each other’s concerns and criticism. By the time we cleared A5S, I knew we would have a very good shot with our team based on their level of team play.
(Layla) Elysium is made up of many groups of talented players and skillsets. At the conclusion of patch 3.1 and Gordias (Savage), many of our FC members were teamless (myself included). A few of us in EM decided that we would like to try our hand at another progression tier and worked together to create a team that could take on Midas (Savage). As a result, team Double or Nothing was created. At its creation, we were very familiar with each other as players but had never been given the opportunity to raid together as teammates. Fold and I noticed very quickly that the raw talents within the team were higher than any previous teams we had been apart of. We saw that what they lacked in experience they made up for in individual talent. It was our job to help guide these skillsets toward a path and mindset that could compete for World First. Suffice to say, our teammates did an amazing job.
(Sai) There’s a long story here… Our team “Double or Nothing” actually came together very late and easily could not have been a thing. After Gordias, my former team “Koolaid” had gone through a lot of changes, some of which left me holding the reigns. With Midas looming on the horizon, we had many empty roster spots, unclear goals and in general just an incredible amount of uncertainty with the future of the group. It was to the point that I wasn’t even sure if we would have a group at all. Luckily, we were able to convince Layla to come back and play with us. He was instrumental in filling in our remaining roster slots (i.e. Vox, Fold, Miu). Double or Nothing turned out to be the successful marriage of the old world first famous “Updog” (Layla, Fold, Miu), members of my old group (Alice, Rin, Sai), plus a few new talents (Vox, Vana).(Sai) In terms of knowing it was the right fit, the lineup looked extremely good on paper and we had the feeling that the raw talent available was very high. Add to this the knowledge of what it takes to win brought by Updog veterans and the potential is even higher. Beyond this, before any patch the very serious teams will do challenges or speed runs in an effort to simulate more of a progression environment, basically working on team synergy and getting back into the swing of things rather than going straight into 16 hours of progression after being relatively casual for several months. This is important even if you are playing with the same 8 players as the previous tier, but is even more important when you are playing with a new group of people. We were able to spend some time on A3S and A4S speed runs and it was pretty clear from the outset that we had a good fit.
(Screenshot from their Alexander Turn 5 Savage clear)
Were there tryouts done prior to making the team to make sure people knew their classes and had excellent game knowledge?
(Fold) Our tryouts were done in the form of ‘speed kills’ or ‘time attacks’ as the JP community calls it. It was our first way to see how the team played together, how they handle criticism and how well we would mesh together for the upcoming raid. It was expected that each member come into the team with a certain level of game knowledge, and we were all comfortable with each other’s level of play based on the time we spend together throughout the game elsewhere.
(Layla) We did not hold tryouts for individuals while creating the team, per se. We held a tryout for the team as a whole. We wanted to make sure that we worked well together as a unit and that healthy team chemistry would be possible. This was accomplished mostly through a series of Gordias (Savage) speedruns or “time attacks.” We worked very hard on optimizing fights such as Living Liquid and the Manipulator before patch 3.2’s release.
(Sai) We tried the group out as a whole through our pre-patch preparations, but in terms of individual trials, not so much. However, this was only because everyone in the group was pretty well known to everyone else from the outset. Although we may not have all raided with each other in an official capacity previously, all of our players were essentially known quantities to the point that trust in their abilities was implicit. Layla, Fold, and Miu’s credentials go without saying given their past achievements. Alice and I had previously been a part of DnT’s world 3rd group for T13. Rin and Vox did not have much experience with top finishes, but their skills speak for themselves and could not come with any higher endorsement.(Sai) I would say that our Scholar Vana was the only question mark to some extent as he was initially an unknown quantity to everyone in the group aside from me. I had the great fortune of meeting Vana while filling in for a more casual group (where he was actually playing as DRK, not SCH). Given that no one else was really familiar with him, it was one of the bigger question marks as the group was forming and one of the main things we were looking at while trying the group out in A3S speed clears. He very quickly extinguished any doubts and proved himself to be an amazing addition, easily one of the most adaptable players I know. We now bow to Vana sama!
A lot of e-sports teams and players prepare for their opponents and normally have footage on them, how do you guys tackle new content without knowing it? Do you record yourselves and review the footage after every wipe?
(Fold) I believe the current format that Square Enix uses to release new raids is what attracts us to the game. Each new tier always feels like a mixed bag. We do not have any knowledge of who our competitors are or what challenges lie ahead of us for the tier, and the best we can do is use our prior knowledge of the game and apply it to the newer raids. The term ‘think like a developer’ comes to my head when describing how our team figures out and handles mechanics. We all record our footage locally and thoroughly review it whenever we hit a brick wall. From there, it is our job as a group to use our game sense to identify each mechanic and figure out a solution to it that best fits our group’s playstyle.
(Layla) This is the best part of progression raiding! You have to be prepared for whatever unknowns the developers have in mind. Recordings play a large role in learning how to progress through a fight. Revisiting and revising strategies to better accomodate newly learned information is commonplace the further you progress into a fight. A lot of this information is learned through processes of trial and error. Using video recordings, we are better able to turn anecdotal evidence into information we can rely on. The frequency in which recordings are used and studied varies from fight to fight.
(Sai) It basically comes down to listening to everyone’s ideas. There are a ton of smart and talented players in the group, so generally when something new is encountered at least one or two players will have an idea of what was going on just from the first glance. Sometimes mechanics are solved immediately on the next pull just based on this. If not and we have several different ideas, we tend to proceed first with whatever is most plausible or has the most support within the group. Often times it takes several points of view to put together the full picture of a mechanic.(Sai) A good example would be the Blinder and Supercharge Mirages in A6S. You need to listen to what happened to everyone and compare situations in order to figure out what is really going on. The worst feeling during progression is without a doubt when you exhaust all ideas for how a mechanic might work and yet still do not have a solution. This can be really frustrating, and happened for example with “Compressed Water” on Vortexer for the longest time before we needed to conclude that it seemed to be a bug. Sometimes the best you can do is sleep on it and try to imagine new approaches. I remember we had at least one case where we finished the night and had everyone go think of whatever ideas they could come up with. The next morning we compiled a list of those and started again with what seemed most plausible.
(Sai) In terms of recording, yes, most players do record, but we would only review the footage of a wipe if it is a new mechanic we are trying to figure out, if we are unsure of the cause of the wipe for some other reason, or if we are mapping out timings for cooldowns. In general there is much more review of footage as you are encountering things for the first time, but that falls off as more of the fight is understood and mapped out.
How would you rank the raids released so far?
(Fold) I would probably rank it something like this (From #1 being best to #6 worst):
Second Coil (Savage)
Second Coil
Midas (Savage)
Final Coil
Gordias (Savage)
First Coil
I would rank Second Coil (Savage) at the top. Despite it being ‘filler content’ for patch 2.3, it was a challenge that Square Enix threw at us unlike any other. I believe this was their testing phase for what would later become Alexander normal and savage, and personally I found it to be their hardest content they have ever released in the game.
(Layla) There are multiple things to consider when ranking raids. I am going to shy away from comparing difficulties as I don’t feel it’s important to a discussion. The concepts of fun and entertainment should play a large role in a raid’s ranking. Next to that, we have the quality of fight designs. If I were to respect both of these, my ranking would be as follows: Second Coil (Savage) > Final Coil = Second Coil > Gordias (Savage) > Midas (Savage) > Binding Coil
(Sai) This is difficult for me in certain places, but I’ll just say: SCoB, FCoB, Midas, Gordias, BCoB. The reason it’s somewhat difficult is because, for instance, I loved A3S but did not much enjoy anything else of Gordias. In the same way, Twintania was awesome and yet I don’t think there is much else that is amazing in BCoB, so it’s hard to choose between the two.
Would you count the EX primals in bosses released? For example, Sephirot and Nidhogg were released with this raid tier.
(Fold) I would count them as filler content. While I do find the EX primal encounters to be very fun, I feel as though the main focus of progression for the community is focused on the raids themselves.
(Layla) I typically do not view EX Primals as premier raid content, no. Sephirot is an exception to this as it played a major role in Midas (Savage) progression.
(Sai) I typically think of EX primals as something separate since the general level of difficulty and time required to clear is much less. However, these are still really fun and definitely fill an important role in the game even if I would not count that towards saying there were 6 bosses this tier, for example.
Bahamut Coils only had one difficulty and Alexander Gordias and Midas had normal and savage modes. Did Alexander normal mode make it easier for your team to learn and guess the mechanics of savage? If you think normal mode is a spoiler, do you think it should go back to the way the Coils were setup with only one difficulty in fairness to the race?
(Fold) I do believe both Gordias and Midas normal modes gave us a slight advantage when it came to figuring out mechanics. Normal mode was sort of the “testing phase” for some of the mechanics that we would see in some of the Savage mode turns. The main difference between these two raids is that Gordias NM was released two weeks before Gordias (Savage), while Midas Normal/Savage was released at the same time. This made it very important to obtain a firm grasp on the Midas NM mechanics for the brief time that we spent in there. To answer your main question, I don’t feel as though it was a spoiler of any sorts as we still encountered the same amount of mechanical roadblocks that we encountered in Bahamut Coils.
(Layla) When it comes to progression raiding, the multiple difficulty tiers of Gordias were the only outlier. Midas and Midas (Savage) behaved fairly similarly to the single difficulty tiers of Coil. This is because Gordias and Gordias (Savage) were released two weeks apart from each other and the Midas raids were released at the same time. While Midas introduced mechanics that are present in Midas (Savage), the learning curve of Savage was figuring out how to deal with multiple mechanics concurrently. I think that this approach is ideal.
(Sai) It definitely does help a bit as you get a general conception for the outline of the fight and the sorts of things you may see. That being said, I think the impact depends a bit and was different between Gordias and Midas. In Midas, I think that the impact was extremely minimal since you basically walked into normal mode, 1 shot everything (or very close to that) and then proceeded to savage mode. Since the time spent in normal versus savage is miniscule, I don’t think it affects the outcome. In Gordias, normal mode was out for two weeks before savage and so the diligent teams went in and practiced while trying to glean as much information as possible for what savage might be like. In this case I think it makes a bigger impact and it would not surprise me if members of Updog would attribute for example their A2S WF to this due to practice and planning with the gobwalker driving. That being said, I still do not think it changes the overall result of who downed A4S first because the further you go in the tier, the longer the fights take to down, and the more insignificant anything from normal mode becomes. All this being said, I don’t really have a personal preference. The current system seems fine to me, but I didn’t really have any complaints with the previous system or even the savage second coil system.
The EX primals reward weapons to tackle the raid tier but do you feel like they should be counted towards progression whether it’s racing for World First or progression at all? Why?
(Fold) I think the idea of EX Primals rewarding stronger weapons is a very interesting concept. It encourages groups to make very good use of their time. For example, when an emergency comes up with a single player or if we are planning on taking a break, an excellent use of time management would be to invest in getting these EX Primal weapons during our raid downtime.
(Layla) So far, the only Primal that has directly affected progression is Sephirot. I think instances like this are healthy for the game’s raiding community as it makes raid teams think about their progression non-linearly. I would like to see SE explore the concept of releasing multiple instances at the same time again in the future.
(Sai) I think that the current system of treating them as separate encounters in which people are free to compete in for a separate WF title is probably the best. It would be confusing to try and count them towards the overall WF race for the tier because they are not a linear part of the progression tier. For example, Double or Nothing got WF on A5S and A6S without ever stepping into Sephiroth EX. Many of us hadn’t even been in normal mode. Other groups would choose to do Sephi before A5S or perhaps before A6S depending on their judgment. Given that it is not linear and that the primals take much less of a time investment, just keeping track of the actual raid tier floors seems to make the most sense.
Do you think the raid content relies too much on getting weapons to tackle them?
(Fold) I would say Gordias (Savage) was the only tier that required weapons to clear. I would throw SCoB Savage in there, but that was a unique raid in the case that it was tuned exactly at 110, so weapons were assumed to have been acquired before entry. Living Liquid (A3S) was cleared by our team without weapons, however the enrage timer was incredibly tight without them. A week 1 kill –could- have been possible, but it would have required very risky strategy, incredibly tight rotation optimization and a bit of luck with our overall group damage and LB generation. Manipulator (A4S) is an entirely different scenario. The fight was tuned at a much higher item level and certain damage requirements for safe phase transitioning made it so that weapons were extremely helpful through progression. However, a Chinese group did prove that it was possible to clear with i190 (Ravana) weapons much later into the year (China received the patch around late January, so this team had plenty of time to prepare and polish an effective strategy) – Nevertheless, this team’s incredible execution proved that with enough practice, the content could be cleared without weapons.
(Layla) The developers have been changing the ways they tune fights with every new tier so it is difficult to provide a succint answer. This most recent Savage tier finished the week weapons became available. However, my team is of the opinion that Brute Justice did not require weapons to clear and that, had we played better, we could have cleared it without them the week before. The only time I have felt that a fight was overtuned was while encountering the absurd “HP checks” of the Manipulator in Gordias (Savage). It took the World First and Second teams over five weeks of gear just to have enough HP to survive the fight!
(Sai) That’s a good question. As an overall statement I would say that everything has been just fine aside from Gordias which sticks out for having a clear gear wall in A4S that Lucrezia and Updog were both waiting behind to proceed. This coupled with the stringent DPS requirements in A3s put a lot of strain on most groups during Gordias. For Midas, I would say it was definitely not too dependent on weapons or other gear to clear, at least if we are speaking about the race for WF. We were still working on and figuring out some of mechanics and coordination for the last parts of A8S all the way up until we got a bunch of 240 weapons and killed it. In other words, the weapons obviously help, but it was a mechanical progression all the way through. At no point did we hit a wall due to a lack of DPS or even HP, although A8S got pretty dangerously close with HP. FCoB was even more of an obvious case given that it was completed in the first week. BCoB and SCoB are a bit further off now, but the rate at which T9 was cleared seemed reasonable to me, and BCoB was more blocked behind buggy twisters than gear.
Looking back at Coils, what were your favorite moments?
(Fold) This one is an easy Bahamut Prime win in my book. The music and atmosphere of this fight are stellar. I mentioned it before, but witnessing Teraflare accompanied with the beating heart of Bahamut took me out of the fight for that brief moment and left me speechless. It made me forget that I was actually raiding, because I did not experience a sensation like that in any other MMO that I have played.
(Layla) This is easy! My favorite moment by far was the first time we saw Bahamut Prime channel Teraflare on our party. It is an incredible spectacle and I encourage anyone who hasn’t seen it to go and do so! Thematically speaking, Final Coil is unrivaled in its visuals. (link to our picture in case you would like to use it: https://i.imgur.com/GMq0wvk.png)
(Sai) My favorite moment was during T13 when we stacked the entire group while trying to figure out how Akh Morn worked… and then busted out laughing when we all died in a pile. “That’s certainly not it!” To hit a few more highlights, SCoB in general was a blast for me. I remember feeling shortly upon arriving in T6 that the complexity of the raid content was going in a positive direction and getting a lot more interesting. This is the only MMO I have ever played seriously, so much was new and interesting to me. In particular, I found T7 extremely interesting, where the main hurdle was coordination and attention to mechanics so as not to kill each other. T7 Savage was absolutely amazing, ramping up the mechanics and coordination requirements even higher.
Did the story of Coils make you want to raid more because you wanted to see what was next?
(Fold) It wasn’t until Final Coil of Bahamut until I started to piece the lore together, so before that I played first and second coil almost entirely for the content. I had a vague idea of the lore behind the coils, but the new image of a reconstructed Bahamut after the completion of first/second coil made me want to play in Final Coil for both the content and the conclusion of the story
(Layla) Personally speaking, I feel that Coil drew a larger crowd of raiders strictly because of the illustrious story and themes behind it. It screamed “Final Fantasy” in its delivery. My interest in raiding is to continually challenge myself in pressure filled environments. However, I know many players who raided for the sole purpose of completing the storyarc of Bahamut.
(Sai) Nope… Sorry! I’m kind of boring in that way. For me it has only ever really been playing the actual encounters, the challenge, the competition, and the teamwork. Unfortunately, when you’re racing you have to skip all of the cut scenes and it isn’t quite the same to go back and watch them later, so I rarely do.
When I was starting to play the game, I noticed a lot of clears were done in the same week of release. In terms of actual content difficulty, did you feel like the entirety of the raid was correctly tuned? Do you feel like the developers should balance raids around this?
(Fold) Well out of the five tiers of raid content that SE has put out thus far, only Final Coil was cleared by two teams on the same week. While I do feel like Final Coil was tuned too low, I believe Square Enix chose this path to make the lore more accessible for the playerbase. I am glad that they introduced the normal mode raid setting because it allows the company to tune their hardcore content much higher than the Coil raids but still provide both the story and bosses for players who may not be interested in Savage.
(Layla) To clarify, the only raid that was cleared within a single week was Final Coil. Lucrezia, a Japanese Free Company, claimed World First Bahamut Prime Sunday morning of the first week. Our team came in second place twenty-one hours later Monday morning. I don’t really concern myself with how difficult a raid tier is. I am only concerned with the race itself. The race functions independent of difficulty. The Final Coil race took the form of a thrilling sprint to the finish line. To me, this is just as exciting as any other tier.
(Sai) FCoB was the only tier that actually went down in a week, and it was a whirlwind ride of a tier. My group at the time got world 3rd after Lucrezia and Collision (Layla’s group). I loved that tier and that race though, so it doesn’t really bother me. T13 still provided an intense challenge in the first week and continued to do so for less hardcore groups for months to come, so I think it’s just fine. The main detractor for me would be very long tiers like Gordias that stretch on for weeks and weeks. I think that it can be difficult for developers to predict exactly what the players will do and how quickly they will progress. Humans can be pretty surprising. That being said, aiming for somewhere between 1 and 2 weeks at the highest level of competition is ideal. Any less than a week would be a bit of a let down. Any more than 2 weeks and people have to get back to work!
What did you feel like was done correctly with the raid?
(Fold) I like dragons xD
(Layla) The atmosphere of the Coils of Bahamut is second to none. The feeling of journeying further and further underground to the core of the Allagan system where Bahamut resided created an entirely separate sense of raid progression. You are progressing through a raid’s storyline and the environment around you portrayed that. This, to me, is their crowning achievement in raid design. I have not found the same magic in their Alexander raids.
(Sai) Although I didn’t watch any of the cut scenes, the atmosphere of the encounters themselves were amazing. The final turns of each tier (T5, T9, T13) were all very special, and especially the culmination with Bahamut and Teraflare with the “Answers” theme song ramping up. SE really did a great job of making the finale to the tier feel like it was on an epic scale.
This concludes part one of the interview, you may follow Elysium and their progress at https://twitter.com/elysiumffxiv and for the author you can follow him at twitter.com/genocast. Thank you and stay tuned for part two!