I apologize in advance because this is largely unedited but these are the thoughts coming to my head as I’m writing this. I will also take this time to apologize for any language deemed offensive. The one thing I WILL NOT apologize for are the spoilers to every raid because too much time has passed. I also don’t apologize if anything seems elitist but there’s been a lot of time now and groups should be clearing unless you went through a reform recently. For the casual players, it’ll probably be a funny read because of how stupid easy I’ll make everything look. Currently we are in weeks 14 and 15 depending on when this comes out.
How the rest of this will continue is from my perspective of the fights and I’m not really good at this game. I’m also the laziest player alive so a lot of strategies involved are catered to that (O4S).
We’ll start with floor one. This is where the discussion ends because all it’s just normal mode without rails. This fight took all of twenty minutes because I had to use the bathroom. The hardest thing about this fight is that you clear it so fast that you forget what the mechanics are and I’m still struggling with that to this day.
Omega 2 savage – It is EX Primal difficulty but as long as you know who’s going up for direction bombs and who’s going up for a lot of other things then it’s ridiculously easy. This fight really only did damage in week one and then everyone got gear so it became even easier. I can see why groups wipe on this floor a lot just because of how much people can forget in a week.
Omega 3 Savage aka Hallie Berry’s Cupcakes is kind of fun with the tile set change but otherwise all the mechanics aren’t hard to remember. There is still huge spikes in damage that might make healers have to work a little bit but this is the definition of a fight that you can overgear to make it easy. Animal farm should always be heals-tanks-DPS. Play the mechanics, LB when you can, and you’ll win. Your group really shouldn’t be stuck here despite the trappy nature of the fight unless you just started the tier than I understand.
O4S – Written here to make the control + F easier
ExFaust is the hardest fight of this tier because of the RNG of the black holes. I think everyone should have the boss outside of the middle to make it good for melee. I also think the clock method sucks balls for tank and healer fires and everyone should adopt the flower method since you don’t have to clip people by running from their clock positions. The Flower method ensures that tanks and healers will be on time for the stack and that one tank doesn’t drift too far from the boss. If you prefer the clock method, that’s up to you but you should probably adopt flower. For the flares, just have tank flare SE and everything works itself out. The RNG of the Black Holes can be difficult because of the cape but you’ll be okay outside of that. If your healers can’t keep up, you need to boot them because they are trash. If your group has been consistent in attendance and has more than five clears on O3S and you still can’t get to NEO, I would just reform or PF your clears at this point because your group in its current form is not going anywhere.
In my video I was freestyling it but please use this other method otherwise you’ll cause too much damage to the party. Also my raid group didn’t have loot drops so everything seems spicier than usual.
Pugs will ultimately use the clockwise method so just be mindful of that. If you want to make it even easier, just pick a quadrant and play from there.
NEO Exdeath. I don’t think this fight is hard at all but I actually find the aggro management to be extremely fun. Most of the mechanics are super easy to learn but the only strategy that should be used for Grand Cross Delta is the uptime strategy. The video guides are complete garbage when they explain GC Delta so it’s better to use MS Paint to do it. I’ll be posting some stuff about it but I learned it a little differently. GC Omega is only hard because people get intimidated by the amount of debuffs but in reality you just play one mechanics at a time. Whatever the healers decide for that one should be what the raid plays although I suggest just removing the debuff on the first mechanic. A lot of this fight reminds me of Sephirot EX except it’s remade in a form where everything looks more intimidating.
Grand Cross Omega is literally “lightning don’t stack and spread out, beyond death stack”.
Pugging NEO isn’t too bad in PF because they stick to a strategy and just want to clear. I actually find pugging NEO to be way better than rolling with some groups just because of how consistent the strategies are. Most statics have their strats wrong.
My actual opinion of the raid tier is that it is way too easy. Maybe Ultimate Coils will bring some of the difficult raid atmosphere back and I really hope it does. NEO is designed to be memorizable and the only thing that can be dicey is the aggro control otherwise mechanically it isn’t very hard. Honestly, the fights just seem boring and I only raid because I like the people otherwise I would’ve quit in week four. I’d rather watch Super Mario 64 speedruns than raid. If you haven’t beaten it by now, you have a better shot in PF because your static would need to reform and it’s week 14 maybe 15.
How would I compare this to Alexander Creator Savage? Honestly, Creator Savage was harder except for A9S being easier than O1S because I hate ice sliding. I wonder why a lot of groups are having difficulty with Omega Savage when it’s so much easier.
As far as 4.1 is concerned, it’s a catch-up patch to me and there isn’t anything remotely interesting about it except for a 24-man raid I’ll do twice (maybe). I don’t think Shinryu is a primal I actually care for but because I beat the content quickly it’s a useless primal to me. I’m doing daily hunts because I don’t want to spend savage books to get Glazes.
I’d like to thank all of you for reading this and I hope a lot of what I said cleared up any confusion about O4S mostly. I’ll end this with a drawing that depicts how hard I beat this tier. Good luck in progression!
Thank you Kajo Saito!