Finally, after approximately four months of at least weekly (often twice-weekly until fairly recently) attempts, my group of Final Fantasy 14 Savage Raiders has cleared the raid we’ve been struggling with. The Burden of the Son (Savage), also known as “A8S” is now behind us and we can all claim a very specific and probably pretty useless expertise given how this expertise is tied to a nine-year-old fight. That said, Brute Justice (the name of the final boss of A8S) is infamous for being a difficult fight in the “Savage” tier of raids, often referenced as the prototype of what would eventually become the “Ultimate” tier of raids and clearing it without the Echo (which gives you a boost to damage and HP for every failure until clearing the raid is a given) is a fairly rare accomplishment often claimed only by most serious of raiders. Well, there’s also the “Minimum Item-level No Echo” (or MINE) variant that is truly the most difficult version of the Savage raid, but the thing that makes this raid special is that actually winning the fight isn’t that hard. What’s difficult is getting the mechanics perfect because anything less than that can either immediately result in a party wipe or start a slow spiral towards a party wipe as additional resources are needed, focus is drawn away from the mechanics, and things aren’t killed as quickly as we’d like (forcing the group to face more mechanics). Any kind of clear for a Savage raid is brag-worthy, but we’ve got a special claim beyond even clearing it with No Echo: we did it while it was (and still is, as far as I know) bugged.

This fight is the combination of several fights you’ve already had if you’re doing the entire raid series. You fight one guy that will absolutely destroy you if you get hit by some of its attacks, if you fail to kill some things it summons in the right timeframe, or get hit by an orb it summons and leashes to you. Once you’ve chase that guy off, you fight a sequence of four robots that will also wreck you with attacks or their special moves, then you fight all five things combinated into a megazord mech that will roast your entire party, punch you into oblivion, use any of the special moves from the sub-parts, and introduce a bunch of new moves that will also kill you. All while occasionally tossing in mechanics that will just kill the entire party automatically if they mess up. Like I said above, the savage version of this raid (for reference, a raid in Final Fantasy 14 is usually one part of a 12-part series of battles that sometimes have short preambles, with the hardest fights being at the end of every set of 4 raids) is often help up as the game’s developers dipping their toes into the next higher teir of difficulty to see if the community was interested in it (and could handle it). Which they were (and could), which is why the fight has essentially been considered “solved” for almost a decade. If you look it up online, though, all the text guides for it are either wrong or out-of-date (I’m not sure which since I can’t find a history of the raid or the documents, but my guess is “wrong” since most of them exist on websites that only became popular after the raid would have released) and there are no recent videos explaining the raid. Everything is from a long while ago and none of it has been updated or even reinvestigated. After all, why would anyone need to? The fight is solved and it’s not like anything is going to change for a fight that old.

Which is why it took us two weeks to realize that a mechanic we couldn’t clear for the life of us was actually bugged. We weren’t messing up! One of the steps in the guide no longer worked the way it was supposed to and the general chaos of the fight meant that there were enough ways we could have messed up that it took almost a dozen tries for us to realize that the person we’d gently chastised for being out of place the first night had noticed the problem immediately. See, in this part of the fight, a bunch of player characters have a status on them that only decreases when they take damage. In order to remove that status (a “stack” since it has a number that increases or decreases) and clear all of the other mechanics that could wipe the party out, there was a very specific path everyone had to take in order to trigger everything appropriately and without getting anyone killed. One of those things, that would still kill us all and still did a huge amount of damage, wasn’t decreasing the stack like it was supposed to, meaning three people still had one stack remaining by the time they were supposed to have zero. Which, of course, caused the entire party to wipe.

Once we identified the problem, it was easy to develop a new means of meeting the needs of the mechanic. There are, after all, plenty of sources of damage in the mechanic and all we had to do was reroute things a little bit for three players and heal one of them a bit more than normal. Easy-peasy. It’s just that this came at the end of four months of struggling, so realizing the fight was bugged and that the fight was no longer “solved” caused a bit of mild hysteria. We were all exhausted, after all, so it’s quite understandable. But we were able to work through it, create a new graphic (one of my fellow raiders improved my crude updates to the original graphic), and then literally cleared it the next week even as we were proving that the workaround we’d figured out for the bug actually worked the way we wanted it to. Turns out that, once we knew what we were doing and why things weren’t working, we were able to haul out a victory. It took an extra hour beyond our usual 2-hour play session, but we cleared it just in time for my birthday weekend (and, coincidentally, the birthday weekend of one of the other players)! We literally decided to give it one more try before quitting for the night and cleared it on that run. It was truly a glorious moment of pure competency and skill that will forever solidify in my mind that this little group of players can do any raid we set our minds to. I hope none of the other raids will take four months (and they probably won’t since our time from Solid Group of Consistent Players to victory was approximately a month and half that time was spent failing because of a bug), but I’m confident we’ll pull through in the end.

Nothing I’ve ever done in a video game has made me feel as accomplished as this particular feat. This is, after all, a raid that gives even Serious Raiding Groups a lot of trouble. And we cleared it in two or three weeks, once we finally had a reliable group that was able to make it to each session (though, admittedly, we’d all had lots of practice by then). We’ve had so much practicing with one of the most difficult fights that we’ve developed good communication and raid awareness. Sure, not all of that expertise is extensible to other raids, but we’ve primed ourselves to learn and adapt and the one session we’ve had since then has proven it. We were able to take a barebones guide and turn it into a winning strategy for the next raid boss in about an hour. We even went into the next raid in the set after that one and, with no guidance to our names, figure out at least half of it through trial and error and sound strategic planning. I’m sure when we look up this raid to create our text guide (and watch the video), there’ll be things we can improve on from our initial runs, but I think that we’re all staying on our toes at this point for things that don’t match up to guides that are almost a decade old after encountering such a frustrating bug in A8S. While I’m sure this change wasn’t intentional (though I’m unsure of whether the answer will ultimately be “fix the bug” or “adapt the raid’s soution”), it’s still strange that such an old fight was altered by the recent game patches. It’s difficult to conceive of how that might have happened, but I’m sure it was something that was ultimately dumb and overlooked because it impacted a raid from four expansions prior (to the current expansion). Regardless, we all earned our victory photoshoot after that and I’m excited to see where this group goes next, once we’re finished with this raid series.