Worst boss fights

[Stepjam]

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.

[Vyrerus]

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...

[XiXiQ]

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.

[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. 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.

[Esmoire]

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.

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.

[AxHell]

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!

[KageTokage]

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.

[Mansion]

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.

[Eldevern]

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.

[Recon1o6]

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