Worst boss fights

What do you consider to be the worst boss fight/s in this game?, solo instance,epic trial,normal, savage,24m,dungeon all are allegible even the trash mob bosses.

My 3 worst are

1.Towering Oliphant (Dusk Vigil 1st boss) for the sheer Randomness of you can be stunned for 30s flat taking its moves.
2. Middy Savage - No one I have ever talked to liked this one just horrible, was always laggy for my group no matter what.
3. Ran'jit thancred edition, unnecessarily long, boring with 4 buttons and not even allowed to be the satisfying final bout due to we must kill important npc who has more character growth with thancred than us.

I think #3 is on everyone's list if only because it's long for no reason.

That said

1. First boss of Sastasha Hard. Esuna or people gonna probably die, but this be the only place Esuna alone could dry your MP up(back when it took ages to beat that boss)
2. Yeah, I don't like 9S

Here are mine.

I am not a fan of the solo story fights that just seem unnecessarily long, most of them well designed mechanically though. Just the amount of health the bosses have could be reduced drastically for story/quest bosses. Basically all the role quest and solo story bosses in Shadow Bringers.

Alexander 3 Savage. Boss was just absurdly over-tuned to the point you needed an optimal group setup or just be vastly overgeared it to meet the dps checks. Was less then 5 groups on my server who even cleared it the first 5 months it was out, most considered A4S to be easier. This thing broke so many statics and killed so many guilds that were from the ARR days.

Steps Of Faith.

Even when people do this fight right, they use the cannons, they use the Dragon Killers and all that stuff... is this really any compelling? Is this what people want?

When you think about fantasy, fighting a giant dragon is probably one of the first ten images to come to your mind. The concept is here, but the execution is devoid of any of the wonder your mind might conjure. Somehow they took the pinnacle of fantasy, and removed all the fantasy from it, leaving a remarkably boring encounter. You would imagine fighting a dragon would have like... the great heroes of a fantasy adventure climbing onto its back to find weak points in its scales or trying to confuse it into tripping itself. Instead, in all the glory of a the technology reminiscent of an early 2000s MMO, we swing... at the AIR underneath it while it slowly wanders on drunk. Not even the boss is interested in the fight.

Oh wait. What was that? There's an alternative? Oh right, there is! If you thought your kit at 50 was boring enough, congratulations! You are on cannon duty! Your entire DPS kit is replaced with one button, which is somehow even more lame than the DPS kit of a healer. Oh, and I know you cannot hold in your glee, but abate it for a moment longer, because it gets better. You get to march on up to a tower and fire the Dragon Killer! You pressed the button! Now you can... gingerly walk your way down, because the game wouldn't have you jump down... That would be too cool and heroic-like.

They reduced the HP of the encounter at some point, which makes it go faster, but that doesn't really do anything to make it more fun. It's still extremely lame. When I see stuff like the way we can cling onto Shinryu, or even climb onto BISMARCK, it makes me want to see them go back and completely redo the way this plays out. Let's have the tanks trip it while the DPS climb onto the back. Let's have the WoL cling onto the Dragon Killer when we fire it into the iar. Anything but swinging at the air and firing cannons. The technology has improved a lot since this encounter and I think we can do better.

Every single solo instance for PLD class quests. And most solo instance fights, I can't stand them. Paladin fights drug on forever it seemed, I did not like the banter between the npc's and "me" I guess, the fights take forever, are boring and if you fail one (I was new) you get to start from the beginning and do all that over again. I actually like MSQ roulette, even if it's the same cut scenes over and over for the xp, I feel it's a decent trade off, I'm willing to endure, and the extra poetics are great for getting off gear either for your lower level classes or lower leveled retainers or whatever else you'd use them on.

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

My 3 worst are

3. Ran'jit thancred edition, unnecessarily long, boring with 4 buttons and not even allowed to be the satisfying final bout due to we must kill important npc who has more character growth with thancred than us.

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That one was so awful. I had to do that 3 times because it was so long, I have to stop and figure out how to re enable the pet/mount hotbar hotkeys. I had disabled the pet hotbar because it interfered with my gathering jobs and just mouse clicked all these companion fights, but Thancred's fight was just something else, I was worried I was wearing my mouse out manually clicking all the attacks. Maybe coincidence but my mouse broke the same week. But I needed my hotkeys back for that battle, it was so repetitive.

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

2. Middy Savage - No one I have ever talked to liked this one just horrible, was always laggy for my group no matter what.

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I actually liked O10S, and Alphascape in general. Besides 9 I consider them all memorable.

Fights that I dislike tend to be the ones that forget they are in a game and not a movie. Constant downtime and transitions just feel jarring. Hades kind of disappointed me because of that, and Eden's really long cutscenes are something I could do without.

Steps of Faith, of course.

Maybe not the worst, but low level bosses with invulnerability (Tam Tara, Halatali) aren't fun. Total invulnerability is usually overkill, and they just gain it out of nowhere. I would have preferred something a little more complex that didn't tend to negate your attack midcast.

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Originally Posted by Sauteed

Every single solo instance for PLD class quests. And most solo instance fights, I can't stand them. Paladin fights drug on forever it seemed, I did not like the banter between the npc's and "me" I guess, the fights take forever, are boring and if you fail one (I was new) you get to start from the beginning and do all that over again. I actually like MSQ roulette, even if it's the same cut scenes over and over for the xp, I feel it's a decent trade off, I'm willing to endure, and the extra poetics are great for getting off gear either for your lower level classes or lower leveled retainers or whatever else you'd use them on.

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I don't know if you're including GLA in PLD, but I really didn't like GLA quests. At least now GLA has AoE, which makes them about 10 times faster.

Gladiator quests were eh, but PLD for me was just so grueling. I hated doing them.

Byakko. Not a lot going on, unappealing boss model, long sort of transition, and extremely boring unecessarily long fight unsynced

Also the second level of the new Eden raids. The Garuda one, whatever it's called. The spinning arena in the later phase actually makes me physically sick to look at, and the bright garish colors are so... bright and flashy and awful that it's hard for me to even see some of the mechanics at all.

Every Zenos 1v1 purely because they take so freaking long.

And much worse than Zenos, every Ranjit fight. The second one dragged on for WAY too long. Was frustrated and bored by the time I cleared it. Cool concept, meh execution.

Pretty much any of the boss fights in the MSQ roulette dungeons. They're meant to be the finale for ARR though they lack any actual weight due to how quickly the bosses melt and how little threat they actually provide.

Cape Westwind beyond a shadow of a doubt for me, because there's really no other boss these days where you can so utterly ignore mechanics /AND/ beat the encounter in a minute or two flat. It really needs a retune at this point because it's just easy EXP when you get it in the Trial roulette.

Beyond that the new version of Steps of Faith. While that encounter was always going to become easier with age, the fact that they nerfed it into the ground just after releasing it has certainly not helped matters. You actually had to think in the original version. Now it's just 'hurr durr don't bring the dragons into the cannon fire, it doesn't matter anymore'. The only time this instance is even remotely 'challenging' is if everyone agrees not to touch the dragon piercers and even then it just makes it longer.

Oh, trust me, depending on the group, the mechanics STILL matter lol

Is "the other 7 randoms on every Ex trial" a valid boss? :3

Every single fight with a cut-scene or transmission phase lasting more than 10 seconds. For some reason SE keeps adding them in. They're terrible design.

Progging a fight with a 30+ second long intermission accompanied with a boring add-phase, obviously referencing shiva here, is enough to make me want to not bother.

That dumb slime from Copperbell. You just sit there until you can blow it up (with the super slow spawning bombs) into small enough chunks to kill it. ZzzZZzZzZzzZz...

Thancred vs Ran'jit, easily, though Hien vs Zenos is a close second, or any fight where I have to play as someone else tbh. Come on SE, even if we never played the job, I think we can handle more than 3 buttons.

*cries in healer*

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Originally Posted by ElazulHP

That dumb slime from Copperbell. You just sit there until you can blow it up (with the super slow spawning bombs) into small enough chunks to kill it. ZzzZZzZzZzzZz...

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Also this one. Though other 'unorthodox' fights are rather fun, like Livia, or the Simon Says golem in Bardam's Mettle. I'd like more of those

I don't like any fight where the mechanics limit how quickly you can kill the boss and/or can actively punish you for having high DPS (Like Haukke Manor hard's final boss).

I'd like to add the Alexander fight that's literally just endless adds. :| No one even does the bomb mechanics anymore with the gobwalkers, so its literally just kill adds until they stop spawning more adds.. Ironically this is the one i seem to get the most out of normal raid roulette, and its so mind numbing..

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Originally Posted by Shinklet

Every single fight with a cut-scene or transmission phase lasting more than 10 seconds. For some reason SE keeps adding them in. They're terrible design.

Progging a fight with a 30+ second long intermission accompanied with a boring add-phase, obviously referencing shiva here, is enough to make me want to not bother.

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Honestly, yeah. I wouldn't mind it much if it was just a one and done thing and the fight checkpoints after it, but because it doesn't and you have to see it every time, it's just really annoying and feels more like a punishment :/

Fights with gear syncs so high that tank busters feel like auto attacks and mechanics don't even matter, it's really hard to say which one is worst. The game has tons of those.. I understand that having a sync above minimum is good so you can feel your character's power as you get better gear, but there are countless encounters where it's so lax that the content isn't even enjoyable anymore.

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Originally Posted by ElazulHP

That dumb slime from Copperbell. You just sit there until you can blow it up (with the super slow spawning bombs) into small enough chunks to kill it. ZzzZZzZzZzzZz...

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All of the bosses in Copperbell are pretty terrible. The worst part of them, though, is that they are actually all potentially interesting. There's an interesting idea in there for each of them that could/would actually make them better than the vast majority of cookie cutter bosses in the rest of the game but not because they're stuck in ancient, low level content.

Every single boss in Neverreap.

I'd say Ifrit, Garuda nd Titan NM, not for the mechancis but because getting them in Leveling roulettes sucks for people trying to level alts. Its a waste of the exp bonus IMO.

I also think Ultima Ultimate was a missed oppotunity for not including Leviathan, Shiva and Ramuh, but I haven't touched that fightand likleynever will.

For actually bad bosses? Well when you can and had been cheesed by waiting for the enrange and then then just spamming heals, you're now exactly the mos the challenging of bosses Allagan Rave Node. On the other end of the spectrum we have Titan in general prior to certain nerfs.

Almost forgot. Deathgaze Hollow is almost bad as Titan with his Void Death sucking you in twice to endure you die unless your hardware is up to snuff.

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Originally Posted by Synaesthesia

Fights with gear syncs so high that tank busters feel like auto attacks and mechanics don't even matter, it's really hard to say which one is worst. The game has tons of those.. I understand that having a sync above minimum is good so you can feel your character's power as you get better gear, but there are countless encounters where it's so lax that the content isn't even enjoyable anymore.

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I've never really understood why they made the item sync for the final fights so insanely high that the bosses end up dying faster then the trials preceding them.

It makes for a rather underwhelming finale if you don't get them done close to the expansion's release before people outgear them horribly.

Dusk/Stone? Vigil (Hard) with the Temple Knights against the armored dragon.
Ran'jhit
Bardam's Simon Says because while I thought the Indiana Jones moments were cool, that one very much was not.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I've never really understood why they made the item sync for the final fights so insanely high that the bosses end up dying faster then the trials preceding them.

It makes for a rather underwhelming finale if you don't get them done close to the expansion's release before people outgear them horribly.

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I'm not sure either, Other than for convenience or lack of regard when they made the max ilevel equal to that of the stronger gear in all relevant instances. Though SE at least learned to tune the mechanics to take that into account (no amount of gear will save youif you failed mechanics at Dun Scath and Orbonne)

MSQ's roulette's a lost cause though,unless they want to make ARF, Ala Mhigo and Aumarot 8 mans

Anything with stupid Quicktime Events where it's basically "mash X as fast as possible to not wipe". If it was just a single player game it would be no problem, but when you throw in the uncertainty of internet connections and lag... a battle that until then was going fine... could go pear shaped simply because the game didn't register the button presses fast enough (and of course that is me most of the time). And unfortunately SE seems to be throwing it into boss fights more and more now, although luckily ShB it was far less used than SB was. Lakshmi, Susano, Shinryu... even Hades.... were all let down due to having QTEs. Quicktime Events are the bane of gaming.

Non QTE releated - Titan in any form is probably the worst though due to those damn landslides and being knocked off the edge... urrghhh... who thought that was going to be a good idea?

I like middy savage in theory. But fuck does it suck as a tank, the random mandatory tank swaps are the worst, especially with his super strong tank buster. If you get the first tankbuster then get forced to be tanking for the second one, it's the worst.

Otherwise cuff of the father normal is easily my least favorite fight in the game. It's so dull, it's just a giant add pull with some bomb pulling.

Gordias Savage - Arm of The Father - Living Liquid. Thing broke my static within one month, and then we had to reform the group with new people about every month after that until we finally beat it 5.5 months after it came out. It made me never want to tackle another fight for that long ever again, so when Ultimates came out and people say, "Oh common learning time is like 4 months of 12 hour prog every week." I went with the hard pass.

Guildhest - Annoy the Void - and then any of the ones similar to it where you have to kill a boss. The guildhests are supposed to be teaching you to respect add phases and mechanics, but the mechanics are so loose in there, even before all these wild super potencies we have on weaponskills and spells these days, that you never ever had to respect them or learn at all. This sort of design choice echoed on into almost all other content where mechanics are often times kept so loose that people actively look for ways to ignore them so that the boss remains as training dummy as possible. God forbid you interact with it a little more than just hitting it as hard and fast as possible.

Any fight that they nerfed - Yeah, kind of a cop out answer, but a lot of great fights were made into pushovers like this and absolutely ruined because of it. Steps of Faith originally had enough HP with dangerous enough adds that it actually consistently would get to the 3rd Dragon Killer even with doing everything well coordinated. Having to shoot it in the chest with both of the bridge binding chains to keep it rooted so that a third party member could drop the dragonkiller on it without wiping the party was pretty dang cool. Add management mattered, and things really felt dire. I really liked that Vishap was so big and powerful that it could ignore you, as its only goal was to take down Ishgard's barriers. Being stepped on originally dealt like 4500~5000 damage, and was pretty much death for healer/DPS.
Siren in Pharos Sirius having to be Silenced or Stunned when it did Lunatic Voice to prevent the originally unremovable healing effect received down debuff while also flinging the charm on people where if they weren't full healed, they started attacking each other. To top it off, the adds spawned and more adds spawned, the crawling types could seize and immobilize your tank and healer completely. Quite a rough fight originally, especially if you had no BRD or PLD once she went stun immune.
Sunken Temple of Qarns laser telegraphs, final sting, and Qarn Facer spawns...

The winner is that 2nd boss from stone vigil hard, with the stupid cannons and the reflect thing. Ugh.


The other dumbest thing I've seen is the last boss of Dohn Meg with the ridiculous tightrope walk thing.

Easily Steps of Faith. I get what they were going for, but an auto-scroller with no actual mechanics wasn't really a solid idea. I'll also second Copperbell's slime boss because it just devolves into 3 people just standing there doing nothing outside of maybe hitting the spriggan once.

It has been mentioned before but some MSQ bosses can be boring. In my case that was Zenos/Elidibus at the end of SB where you control Hien.
Hien who is you know the lord of his people and a great samurai right? Nope have 4 skill that take a painful time to come back. Same for Thancred against Ran'jit.

I'm also not fond of fights that consist in waves of mobs after waves of mobs like the second boss in Amaurot or that one Alexandre raid.

But one thing I hate is bosses who decide to "Aight Imma go out now" and become untargettable for several seconds, several times during the fight, only to come back and have a phase change that is underwhelming and you just stand there wondering why they did that. Looking at you Garuda and Ravana.

Special mention for reskins or just straight up copy pasting like a certain Cúchulainn (why that name btw?) that you fight twice in SHB with the same moveset!

After getting it multiple times in roulette lately, I've grown rather annoyed with Leviathan on normal because of the fact that having to trigger the shield manually to avoid wiping seems really arbitrary. I've had multiple instances of people causing a wipe by jumping the gun and triggering it when he was just doing a dive instead of his ultimate.

If they add an unreal difficulty, I'm hoping they just change it so the shield will automatically protect you as long there's enough energy in it and that the gyre spumes are treated more like a traditional add phase where your survival is guaranteed as long as they all die in time.

O10S still makes me angry. I hate it when a boss is made artificially longer through phases with little to no gameplay. Middy jumping away for dives is one of these. Same for the add phase. It's not even hard, just a pain all along. I prefer a punching sandbag like O6S that does not do much, but at least you can keep the DPS going on.

All boss fights with either a cutscene or a mini game in Ext or Savage difficulty is a big no for me. I get it, it's used for cooldown reset most of the time. That does not make them enjoyable however. The current one being E8S, but Hades, E1, Suzaku, Byakko fit that description.

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Originally Posted by Metsonm

Easily Steps of Faith. I get what they were going for, but an auto-scroller with no actual mechanics wasn't really a solid idea.

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Yeah. Sometimes I feel designers focus too much on crafting something unique and different, which is respectable, but unique is not always good. Steps of Faith has a lot of ideas you see nowhere else, but the actual product isn't fun to play. Seems like something that would sound really cool if you pitched it, though the actual experience is boring.

My pet peeve is probably Titan (Ex and Eden).

And... Aurum Vale. It's not my pet peeve but I really but really don't enjoy it at all.

Copperbell's slime- stupidly designed even back then

Livia in her mount+Enhanced colossus you need to stun+ ultima weapon phase 1- invincibility is stupid

Serial jointed command model- I swear that thing kills more players than the rest of the raid combined

Arcanist level 30 duty the second barber. I did this yesterday and its proof that the pet removal was a shit idea. My carbuncle can no longer tank and the vul buff is pitiful. Plus my npc ally is an idiot and doesn't heal her carbuncle either. Very painful duty trying to kill the second barber before he heals or I have to heal and he removes my progress

T9 its an awesome and fittingly difficult fight against nael. Its so difficult at level many have ptsd triggers when ruby opened.

Gordias 3 and 4: Those dps checks were a little too tight and mechanics were hard to understand.

The kraken. Its always sodding me flung through the air and out of combat

Ramuh savage: The margin of error on this fight is despicable for an entrance raid. A momentary bit of lag will wipe the party easily and its got two of the clunkiest mechanics I have seen in raids. Chain lightning and fury's 14

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

Any fight that they nerfed - Yeah, kind of a cop out answer, but a lot of great fights were made into pushovers like this and absolutely ruined because of it. Steps of Faith originally had enough HP with dangerous enough adds that it actually consistently would get to the 3rd Dragon Killer even with doing everything well coordinated. Having to shoot it in the chest with both of the bridge binding chains to keep it rooted so that a third party member could drop the dragonkiller on it without wiping the party was pretty dang cool. Add management mattered, and things really felt dire. I really liked that Vishap was so big and powerful that it could ignore you, as its only goal was to take down Ishgard's barriers. Being stepped on originally dealt like 4500~5000 damage, and was pretty much death for healer/DPS.

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I don't mind Steps of Faith getting nerfed because it was obnoxious. I don't mind normal fights having a dps check, and the idea of the fight. But I'm ok with the nerf for one reason.

In the majority of fights with a dps check, if you hit a point and know you won't make it, you can wipe and reset. With SoF, you can't do that. Even if you know you got no way to kill it in time, all you can do is sit and wait for it to drag its butt to the end so you can fail and retry. And thats tedious as hell.

In no particular order: A2(S), Garuda in every iteration, Steps of Faith, Howling Atomos, Cuca Fera, Towering Oliphant, Hades (NM and Extreme) because of the excessive cutscenes and O10S.
Honorable mentions: E3S (Black Smokers dude), Titania (NM and Extreme) and basically every solo duty, always longer than needed and boring.
There are many bad fights now that I think about it (but many good as well fortunately)