Patch 6.5: Growing Light (Early October 2023 pt 1, mid January 2024 pt 2)

[Prothescar]

No doubt it'll come to NA eventually but EU prolly in the cuck shed again

[Anoat]

Item level sync of 570 for “The Final Day”, long overdue. Hopefully they do similar ilvl caps for other expansion end boss raids so they don’t get steamrolled.

[Anoat]

Ultimate raids are not included in free trial of Stormblood. Would have been funny to see bot RMT with Ultimate titles, alas

[Anoat]

Full patch notes are up. PLD, RDM, RPR, BRD got potency buffs (though nothing major), nada for everything else. They did say not to expect much from this one since they are waiting for the big overhaul in 7.0

[Gokulo]

MSQ:

Spoiler: show

People were afraid Zero would end up Zeromus and die, instead she became Cecil, lol.

[Lokus]

Alliance raid looked very nice but man, it was hella easy. No raid wipes, no "Surprise Motherfucker" that would kill 8+ people. Any mech that people messed up on, they survived with a vuln stack that wore off before the next mech that might have caught people off-guard. Didn't even reach LB3 in any fight besides the last boss.

[Anoat]

Alliance raid looked very nice but man, it was hella easy. No raid wipes, no "Surprise Motherfucker" that would kill 8+ people. Any mech that people messed up on, they survived with a vuln stack that wore off before the next mech that might have caught people off-guard. Didn't even reach LB3 in any fight besides the last boss.

You’ll get that on day one, give it a couple days as the casuals do it and that’ll be the real test

[Lokus]

Even considering casuals, the raid was easy. The EW 24-mans have been pretty braindead and undertuned. The bosses die shortly after they are done with their tutorial cycle.

[Gokulo]

Even considering casuals, the raid was easy. The EW 24-mans have been pretty braindead and undertuned. The bosses die shortly after they are done with their tutorial cycle.

I kinda don't mind that. Nier raid have been kinda annoying and tiring to do tbh, also the android/robot enemies got old pretty quick. This felt a lot more refreshing and enjoyable to run.

[Lokus]

I like my alliance raids with a little bit of chaos.

[Anoat]

Did they recast Ryne’s voice actress with the Tataru voice actress cause they sound really damn similar now

[Kaslo]

She sounded fine to me

[Vaspinne]

The final 24-man raid was fun. Visually they went all out for this series, it was a treat. Not really all that hard but I enjoyed it.

Story spoilers

Spoiler: show

When in doubt, ASCIANS

[Anoat]

24 man raid thoughts

Spoiler: show

Think 2nd boss fight on the ocean floor was the most interesting. Raid boss being a megazord of all 12 and having to remember all their mechanics was fun, that said the fight is so damn flashy I think I’m gonna have to turn off effects next time just to see what’s going on. It was like a RDM LB3 every other ability! Aglaia remains the best out of the 3 on this raid tier imo but new one wasn’t bad. Still better than the NieR raids.

MSQ talk

Spoiler: show

Victory thru the power of friendship, barf. I like the implication that Golbez (the original one) was a shard of Azem. Was nice to finally see Gaia pop back up in MSQ. Looks like new job will be Green Mage based on that tease with Krile. And they teased female Hrothgar, cheeky bastards. I imagine they’ll unveil it officially at EU fan fest in a couple weeks.

[Anoat]

First alliance raid roulette after patch, get Syrcus Tower fml

[arus2001]

Statistically speaking, it's going to remain the most likely given MSQ requirement and the fact other raid lines can be avoided save Ivalice if you want Bozja.

Always found the bitching about it dumb between raids not really being worth it in general and hardly being fun. The former is something fixable, but the latter is where you're going to have community in-fighting because "harder" doesn't mean "better" for a lot of people.

So, I'm generally seeing SE caving to an overreaction, but also implementing this "fix" poorly because it's locking out people on alt jobs or overleveled if going through MSQ and not buying tier appropriate gear off the board they don't need in their current story progress. Short of another hotfix, I'd expect queue times to eventually worsen as some folks just swear off the raids entirely. Also wouldn't be surprised if they wind up removing MSQ progression restrictions for older tome gear to compensate for the gear thing while adding the later ones to the main city vendors they added a bit back.

[Prothescar]

The problem isn't lack of reward or "fun", the problem is everything besides the crystal tower/void ark raids takes too fucking long because of how spongey they made shit in SB/ShB. Ivalice/Nier raids easily have double the run time of CT/ST/VA. The additional tomes help but may not be enough (personally im fine with the 100~120 causality). All they really have/had to do is lower the HP of all the shit in there or give an echo. People aren't running this shit for the gear, they're running it for the EXP, materia, and tome rewards from the roulette. Adding higher lvl tomes that you only get if you queue while capped won't help with the people running roulettes for XP, making the raids faster or additionally scaling EXP higher based on which raid you get would.

[Anoat]

Yeah I think Aglaia and Euphrosyne actually go faster than NieR raids, Tower at Paradigm’s Breach is the worst offender and iirc was the catalyst for them doing a stat squish with Endwalker. They looked at final boss HP pool and were like yo this is too much.

[Prothescar]

yeah 100% myth of the realm raids are faster than nier and ivalice ones, especially the new one. all the bosses in this newest wing are pretty fast besides the last one and theres minimal trash

[Rulke]

Well, guess I'll chime in. I'm letting my sub run out for the first time ever at the end of this month. I've been hanging around since EW hoping the story would regain my interest but the more I've reflected on it, EW was just so satisfying as a closure to the game for me. I mean, if it was a single player FF it would be "the end" for sure. I always just feel my character would have retired after saving the world- spend retirement fishing or gardening As a player I just could no longer buy into the "oh noes, how will I defeat so-n-so" after the enemies like the Endsinger. Anway, thoughts:

Alliance raid:

Spoiler: show

This story was what kept me subbing this long- I really liked it. The lore was fun and the fights were great (glam too ) I feel the last few gods got shorted on development because we didn't really get to spend any time wandering the world with them. Just the brief interaction before the fight (save Deyrk ofc). As a patron of Llymlaen I was p. bummed. Like other said, I thought the last raid was too easy over all. They needed to shorten the cast timers by like 3 seconds and up the damage of attack by 10%. Or maybe I ran with a great group on day 1. The finale was easily the best thought I did enjoy the mechanics of Llymlaen's fight a lot too. I totally fell for the red herring of the opo-opo being Oschon. boo

msq :

Spoiler: show

as was said above, SE really laid the power of friendship on thick. I liked returning to the 1st but it felt a little hollow because in game we can return whenever we want. I was really hoping we'd see the other dragons involved somehow with Vtra's quest. I guess really each one is pretty solitary in general but I've aways loved how SE wove the dragons into everything. Final fight was a lot of fun though.