Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail has succeeded in delivering the game's best Savage Raid Series
It's no secret that with Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, I've become a bit of a raiding freak. I opted to clear the expansion's first raid tier week 1 on Party Finder in order to get my review out as early as possible, I ended up covering the last raid tier for our sister site NovaCrystallis, and of course I wrote about my thoughts on the expansion's first Ultimate raid last year as linked above.
There's much to be said about how lopsided Dawntrail's content cadence has been; Occult Crescent rightly should have had a more casual version of the Forked Tower: Blood for players to engage with at launch, and content like Chaotic didn't quite meet expectations for players not as tuned-in to the high-end raiding pipeline. While things have improved with Cosmic Exploration and Pilgrim's Traverse, it's more than fair to argue that it may have been too little and too late. All the while raiders have been absolutely feasting this entire expansion.
While Light-Heavyweight felt like a relatively "safe" tier, it was fun and a joy to reclear. Fights like Brute Bomber and Wicked Thunder felt like a good cadence for difficulty, with the only real complaint to be had was that the tier was simply not balanced around how absurdly good Pictomancer was at the start of the expansion. Cruiserweight was an absolute gem of a tier, with every fight being a highlight; Dancing Green was one of the best first fights in a tier in ages, with Sugar Riot taking the community by storm so much that her iconic Yan adds have been made a mount, a minion, and even a marketable plushie.
It's still early days for the current, and final, Dawntrail tier - but besides some lingering issues with The Tyrant and the theming of the Lindwurm's fight, it's fair to say that Heavyweight has also been a massive success, sticking the landing for the series as a whole. The Xtremes have continued the tradition of Sugar Riot in making a creative and engaging second fight that stresses player skills beyond just their rotation, and Idyllic Dream - the cornerstone mechanic of Lindwurm's second phase - feels like a revelation for what Savage Raids can be, even if many of us speculate it started its life as a rejected mechanic for Futures Rewritten (Ultimate).
The Arcadion has been a fun, inventive, and at times liberating raid series - and puts to practice the team's claims that Dawntrail's main focus would be on combat design first, with next expansion to focus on job identity. Even then, some of Dawntrail's specific raids have given specific jobs time to shine; fights with physical raidwides that make Paladin and Warrior's mitigations more useful than Dark Knight and Gunbreaker, multi-target fights that give Jobs with stronger cleave potential a time to shine. Even healers are given specific moments, with certain fights benefiting more from a Sage, or a Scholar, or an Astrologian to name a few examples.
If I have even just one takeaway, it's that Dawntrail's fight design has proven that the dev team understands how to design fights that allow specific jobs to play to their strengths, even if each individual rotation might still remain homogenized. It's a good first step, and gives me hope that things are on the right track for 8.0's job updates; in order to understand how to make jobs feels different, and feel good at their niche, they always would have needed to show an understanding to design fights that appeal to those existing differences, while not going to far to the point where jobs end up excluded.
In that sense, Dawntrail has been a massive success. Alongside some promising story developments alongside 7.4, it feels like the road to next expansion - and to North America Fanfest - is looking strong. I can't wait to see what the future of Final Fantasy XIV has in store, and that's not something I fully felt I could cosign for most of Dawntrail's patch cycle. We're still about a year off from whenever the next Final Fantasy XIV expansion drops, but one thing's for sure - the team has a hell of a raid series to follow-up on. Here's hoping whatever comes next can be just as good as the Arcadion was, when all is said and done.
RPG Site received game time for the purposes of this article.