What is the hardest MMO fight you ever had?

Yeah cop expansion takes the cake for me. Everything listed above plus the actual fight against promathia at 75 was a beast.

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Originally Posted by Socomlord

Yeah cop expansion takes the cake for me. Everything listed above plus the actual fight against promathia at 75 was a beast.

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Promathia was the easiest fight of the grand majority of CoP..

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Originally Posted by Ghishlain

Back at 75 Era for XI, I feel the real legitimate challenges of the game were the CoP story fights (because they were level capped) and the RDM Maat fight while still capped at 70. There were varying degrees of challenge but these would probably be the steepest of the bunch.

I don't count PW and AV as a "challenge" because I felt SE just added them just to troll the player base and tell 'em "hah, try and beat these invincible walls of death". I imagine there was some legitimate way to beat them but no one could figure it out and then the level cap raised and Perfect Defense was added, and welp, that's that.

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PW was beat plenty of times before level cap, my linkshell being one of them, so was AV....you could argue the dark knight KC zerg method which was nerfed after was the only time but still it was beat, and im pretty sure it was even beat after that by Excellence Linkshell.

Me vs All my real life roles and responsibilities

FFXI was built around hard content (at lvl 75) it had a plethora of content that could be and honestly would be considered difficult if put into any modern day mmo. Vrtra was hard if you didn't have at least 20 competent people and even still if 2 of them derped it would cause a wipe. Jormungand was a tad hard if you didn't know what to do either. Bahamut fight in the Riverne the BCNM was hard if you didn't have strong enough characters to RDM Chainspell STUN>ZERG. and even still that wasn't 100% success rate. I honestly don't think FFXIV could ever be hard based on how the battle system is. They need a complete overhaul of the battle system to really make it possible for fights to be difficult.

Every fight in 14 right now is determined by "Can u hit buttons fast enough" and can you run fast enough, that's about it.

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Originally Posted by Queezy

PW was beat plenty of times before level cap, my linkshell being one of them, so was AV....you could argue the dark knight KC zerg method which was nerfed after was the only time but still it was beat, and im pretty sure it was even beat after that by Excellence Linkshell.

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Ummm..no AV was only beat pre-'nerf' with justice exploit. Also PW wasn't cleared 'plenty' before his nerf either.

Unfortunately I can't think of anything overly "hard" in XI. It was a very VERY slow paced game, where you spent a majority of time simply waiting for your cooldowns to come back up. Despite things being a massive grind, it was very casual in the difficulty department. Players were generally pretty awful as a result, which did make some things seem hard. Your average player couldn't gear their way out of a wet paper bag (I mean appropriate gear, not "the best". I.E they stacked STR instead of haste and accuracy), they had trouble hitting a cooldown once every 3 minutes, and god forbid you expect them to use a WS at 100%. One of my main dyna LSs had 2 DRGs and a relic SAM doing 50%+ of the damage out of 20 or so DPS, because there were people with floored accuracy rates and the like. Needless to say the currency drops barely covered the cost of the glass. Meanwhile there were actual good groups full clearing with less than an alliance in half the time.

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Originally Posted by Symbiant

Noting beats Pandemonium Warden when it first came out period. I think this article says it all. http://www.wired.com/2008/08/pandemonium-war/

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I like how they skipped the part where it was bugged, and that is why it was hard. He's supposed to go through each phase once, not infinitely. After they unbroke it, he got smashed to pieces regularly by the top linkshells with little effort.

WildStar Raid is Extreme

Turtle general in ragnarok

Manaya core hm from tera

Hard and fun fights (everything i mention was done when it was the hardest) in FFXI was Maat fight i did it as mnk and it was so close to dieing i survived with 50hp, another fight was superman and his little brother, all CoP, and alexander

Setting up play-online account :P

The hardest fights I've been in were hard for the wrong reasons lol

They were clearly meant to sell premium resurrection items from the micropayment shop

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Originally Posted by Queezy

PW was beat plenty of times before level cap, my linkshell being one of them, so was AV....you could argue the dark knight KC zerg method which was nerfed after was the only time but still it was beat, and im pretty sure it was even beat after that by Excellence Linkshell.

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The ways to kill these mammoth NMs was was considered an exploit by S-E and thus nerfed into the ground. While you can argue the semantics of "yes, they were killed", I personally believe S-E nerfing the "exploit" into the ground kinda illegtimizes the kill, and I'd imagine many would feel the same.

[Edit] I have personally never heard of anyone killing PW / AV in a fashion envisioned by S-E, but at the same time, I will admit that I wasn't keeping up well with the raid scene at the time. First time I heard about PW was during it's 16 hour stint with a LS that couldn't beat it within that time frame, and then kinda went to learn about AV from there. Leaves me to believe that very very few Linkshells, if any, actually beat these two in the way S-E wanted them too.

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Originally Posted by Ayanno

Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden from FFXI.

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Which one was abandoned after (straight) 18 hours if fighting by an entire link shell a couple years ago?

Having never made it to AV PW in FF11. The closest mmo boss for me was Dark Falz on very hard mode. (Before the game hacks broke PSO).

One the L50 Iron Giants which were out at tranquil during the Beta testing. I think the level cap was 35 and the giant was L50. We were there for literally 3-4 or more hours. Towards the end there was easily a couple of hundred of us there, even Yoshi-P dropped in for a while. We managed to get it down to about 20% when the testing servers closed. I wish we could allowed to post pictures of that, but it was during a pre-P3 session so the testing agreement thing is still in place. Anyone else still remember that.

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Originally Posted by Kotemon

Which one was abandoned after (straight) 18 hours if fighting by an entire link shell a couple years ago?

Having never made it to AV PW in FF11. The closest mmo boss for me was Dark Falz on very hard mode. (Before the game hacks broke PSO).

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Pandemonium Warden. Some of the members became ill, fainted/vomited after raiding for too long and it went into the news.

Absolute Virtue is no better either. A boss that can use Benediction on him/herself isn't particularly funny (although it can be sealed).

Defending a relic keep from 200+ other players, while at the same time trying to take back regular keeps in order to strengthen said relic keep, as well as keep a supply line for materials going to repair and strengthen keep doors. Then do this for hours and hours on end until the enemies finally gave up.

DAoC at its best :)

I've never been very good at 'hard' content. I'm not nearly that pro at the game to fight the toughest of the enemy elite. That being said, I think my hardest battles were some of the voidwatch enemies in FFXI. Those things had all kinds of nasty tricks, like death spells and so forth which made fighting them a real difficulty.

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Originally Posted by Reves

Manaya core hm from tera

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Yes this xD I'll never forget this fight. That 1st horse ride down to the plexus...the fear ><

Quite interesting about those FF11 fights, feel sad for FF11 players xc

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Originally Posted by Starrywisdom

Ummm..no AV was only beat pre-'nerf' with justice exploit. Also PW wasn't cleared 'plenty' before his nerf either.

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wrong and wrong

FFXI imo had some of the hardest and most memorable fights. The usual AV and PW have been mentioned already, but the whole of CoP was difficult as it was all level synced, you could not over level or overgear the content. My single worst fight was CoP's Airship fight before level capping was removed, I think it took me over 50 times to beat it but this could have been down to bad luck, badly timed pumps, stacking pumps etc. but nonetheless it was a very fun fight.

just exploring new areas was harder in ffxi then boss fights are in ARR lol... i think Yoshi really will not change his baby-hand-holding-direction...

FFXI The Eco-Warrior quest I think it was Bastok was as hard as Absolute Virtue. Also the CoP quest line. Some of those were hard as hell.

So, on the topic of PW / AV from XI fame, I decided to do some research just to see how valid my own opinion was and came up with the following thoughts and stats on the whole thing.


For the matter, I've changed my thoughts from "AV / PW being only killable via exploits" to
(1) PW can be killed, it just takes time, dedication, and skill
(2) AV can be killed, it just takes time, dedication, and skill, and a lot of luck if you do it legitimately (There's a report that AV used Benediction SEVEN TIMES in the course of a 30 hour fight)
(3) AV was killed in a variety of ways, all deemed to be exploitable
(3a) Wall was used to immobilize AV, making him just a punching bag for death (apparently TONS of people were jailed for this)
(3b) Modus Veritas allowed SCHs to stack a Helix up to UNGODLY damage, allowing near instant death of AV (patched so this ability couldn't be stacked)
(3c) DRK KC spam (leading to the, imo, hilarious death of AV in around one minute) - I do believe this was patched to make AV less susceptible to Souleater damage? I could be mistaken in this respect

I don't think these two behemoths is as killable as some would like to think, but is doable for some high tier players (back in the days). Overall, I find AV to be much less controllable over PW, namely due to the fact AV could (1) Benediction and (2) "I'm just gonna wipe you out" via Chainspell Meteor or Mijin Gakure or just, yeah.



Here are some stats I compiled using AV and PWs drop data and finding out how many people had possessed X equipment before Abyssea was introduced (June 6, 2010). I used FFXIAH Ownership history to determine the dates people had first possessed an item, with the respective number being in parenthesis.

Pandemonium Warden
Shenlong's baghnakhs (18) - February 6th, 2009 to May 24th, 2010
Nanatsusayanotachi (7) - August 11th, 2009 to May 20th, 2010
Hachiryu Haramaki (22) - June 28th, 2009 to May 17th, 2010
Dorje (14) - October 30th, 2009 to May 15th, 2010

Absolute Virtue (Not full drop table used)
Futsuno Mitama (15) - July 1st, 2008 to May 13th, 2010
Ninurta's Sash (44) - July 4th, 2008 to April 15th, 2010
Aureole (34) - June 6th, 2008 to June 6th, 2010
Minerva's Ring (36) - September 12th, 2008 to May 13th, 2010

Bear in mind that ownership will skewed to be lower than shown for PW because of the fact AH only acquires data if the player chooses to allow their data to be scanned.

Conversely, AV drops will most likely be higher than recorded due to the fact most AV gear is tradable, so who knows how many of those owners were legitimately killed AV or just bought the item from someone else who had it, etc.

Random tidbits
PW was reportedly first killed in January 2009
A blog's report on AV data collection from LimitBreak LS in the 2006 era

TLDR: Opinion changed from "AV/PW can't be killed legitimately" to AV / PW can be killed, not as "farm status", here's some random info / stats to go with the opinion.

Every FFXI battle ever

Kirin and his regen from hell

http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/raise...9_original.jpg

and his four friends of hate

http://zam.zamimg.com/ffxi/i/images/...o-Summoned.jpg

http://zam.zamimg.com/ffxi/i/images/...u-Summoned.jpg

http://zam.zamimg.com/ffxi/i/images/...u-Summoned.jpg

http://zam.zamimg.com/ffxi/i/images/...u-Summoned.jpg

I've yet to have "IMO" a real fight in this my first/last and only MMO. Most fights in FF 14 are not fights. The fights in FF 14 are like a "D*monic game of Simon Says" I hope for more Solo stuff in the new expansion that allow "you" the player to have more of a say in how the battle play out. Right now all it takes is one or two BAD dancers to ruin the fun.