Quote Originally Posted by Canadane View Post
Sorry I didn't mean to dismiss or ignore anything.
Ultimate fights haven't been made any easier. Their ilvl locked, and as far as we know won't be unsyncable. These fights will retain their challenge and the rewards their merit. (at least unless SE decides to let us unsync these afterall)
Other 1.x items weren't part of a savage-like tier fight. They weren't even offered as a reward when signing up to do this. It was awarded to players covertly afterwords as thanks for doing the best of the best. By all accounts, it's a trophy status item. Ifrits Battleaxe is not a trophy item, for example. Sure it was in 1.0, but the fight was not intended to be near impossible like some others are.
Thing is that Ultimate is a completely new concept, we don't know how SE is gonna deal with it in the future, but we do know how they have dealt with every other challenging fight in the 4 years prior to Stormblood, and it goes in line with how they are dealing with Rivenroad. If Rivenroad is a savage-like fight then what they are doing is no different than what they have done with other savage-like fights, if anything I think the event is gonna take longer to complete than what it takes to do T9 unsynced. If Rivenroad was still accessible you'd probably be able to unsync it faster than any of the current coils just due to its age / item level tuning.

Speaking of the difficulty, only Amiral Benson tried to make a direct comparison to ultimate but kept citing server issues and pings as to why the fight was difficult, but that's not mechanic difficulty like our current ultimate. From what I've seen of the fight in videos it's closer to an XIV extreme primal than a savage fight and the main difficulty came from how terrible the game was at the time. If they were to add that same fight right now with the exact same mechanics but item level tuned to what we have now the fight wouldn't be hard at all.