A Smidge of History: Twintania World First

[Renathras]

The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDJde_SZfNw

Found a Reddit thread talking about it, too: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...n_5_world_1st/

I'm not wanting to start a fight (genuinely not), just happened to be looking for more historic videos (as I have before) about ARR content where Healers weren't using Cleric, and I stumbled across this one. World First Twintania kill.

Neither the WHM nor the SCH "danced" into or out of Cleric. How many damage spells did they even cast? No DoT uptime; around 12:30 I see the SCH (POV) casting Bio 2, Miasma, and Bio and refreshing them towards the end of the fight. Maybe I'm not squinting hard enough, but I don't see an Aero on the boss, either. And this wasn't a group of scrub casuals doing content an expansion later. This was the World First kill of the final boss of First Coils, the first true raid in the game's history back when there was no Savage because the "normal" raids were savage on their own.

Sure, you can say "players were just bad" if you want...but this was how the game was played, so that's irrelevant.

.

I'm more posting this with a different point: People that say Healing in FFXIV has always been as it is now, with WHM and SCH being Cleric dancing combat healers from the start evenly splitting time between healing and damage:

The first clear of the first raid, at the time the hardest content in the entire game...says otherwise.

So when people say that they liked the game when it was more this way, or liked the Healers back then, or that the game has changed, they aren't out of line or living in a parallel universe. It really WAS different back then, and this really WAS the way it was played at the time.

.

Has it changed?

Of course.

But those people aren't wrong or living in an alternate reality who point out what it once was and what its roots (and I mean 2.X roots, not 1.X) were.

[Semirhage]

*shrug* and I recall clearing Twintania back during 2.x dancing in and out of Cleric, using damage spells in between heals. There are always factors involved. Lower ilvl. Less theory crafting culture. Playing things safer for a first clear. The point beyond that is, downtime potential is a thing that only increases over time in a piece of content for any given healer.

Healing downtime is a massive part of RPG healer history. Always has been.

[Post]

The damage Twintania deals on the tanks is such that they have to stay on top of it pretty constantly to avoid tanks dying to autos, plummets and Death Sentences, especially once infirmity gets thrown into the mix after around 84% of the boss's hp (3:26 in the video, when the first Neurolink hits the ground). Before this, they have heals split among both tanks so they're playing cautiously because they can.

Additionally, the phase that the boss is in depends on when THEY push it, contrary to bosses that are on rails, typically StB and beyond. If they push the Neurolink at a bad time, it'll throw off their whole plan. You'll notice that many of the Death Sentances that Twintania is trying to cast during Fireball/Conflagration phase (between 84% and when she flies into the air to do divebombs) are not going off, despite them having a roughly 30 second cooldown. She casts one at 3:30 (it's the animation where she arches her back and whips her tail at the main tank, you can see his infirmity debuff on the party list which reduces healing received) and the next one is timed to be interrupted by the main tank moving into the Conflagration to become unattackable, despite her still being fixated on him as the target (~4:00). This happens again with her starting the cast at 4:36, but she's again thwarted by him entering the Conflagration, and the Death Sentence is unable to complete. Again it happens at 5:09, 5:53, and 6:24.

You'll note both BRDs also allow their DoTs to drop off because they're trying to control when they push the 2nd Neurolink as well, because they don't want someone trapped in the Conflagration when she takes to the air.

On top of this MP conservation is a concern, particularly for WHM who is not MP neutral at all if they're dpsing the whole time at this point in the game. On top of the WHM's Shroud of Saints usage (Old Lucid Dreaming), the BRDs are replenishing their MP using Mage's Ballad at 2:35 and 6:17, ahead of the phase transitions, and at 12:07 after they're made to cast 3 rezzes.

They only narrowly beat enrage (you can see the room flash at 13:45, she was about to wipe them), and on the parts of the fight where they're not trying to time the push (the way they were handling it they could have easily loaded Twin up with DoTs during Conflagrations since their damage was unnecessary to break them in time, and after the add phase had their SCH not immediately gotten Twistered) they certainly could have benefited freely from more healer damage on the boss, but as you can see they didn't *NEED* it. Perhaps they decided against it when they discovered that healer damage was not enough to allow them to skip a Conflagration before Divebombs, thus not saving them any time towards enrage because of how they wanted to control the flow of the fight.


I'm saying all this to provide context to you to help you understand why they weren't dealing more damage, beyond the fact that, you know, they'd probably only been playing the game for about 60 days. Additionally, Conflagration "Firestorm" was adjusted in some capacity following their clear, I'm not really sure how. I don't think it was made to be a tighter dps check, but perhaps it was, or perhaps players were less able to mitigate its damage overtime or ultimate effect after the change: Yoshi P said "Having said that, the fact that status ailments are effective against Firestorm essentially takes away its disadvantages, which ultimately upsets the balance of this encounter. As we make overall adjustments to the difficulty of this encounter, this aspect of Firestorm".

Fights nowadays aren't as demanding on MP management or tank HP, and often the first clears are not the strongest clears. There're plenty of moments during this fight where both healers aren't casting anything at all for periods longer than 5 seconds, not even auto attacking.

This is how one group managed to clear a fight that many others had since cleared while their healers dealt damage using Cleric Stance. I'm not sure this makes the fact that Cleric Stance and the capacity for healers to deal respectable damage has always existed in any way 'irrelevant.' The roots of 2.0 are that healers have always been capable of contributing damage, even on the hardest fights in the game, such as this one. They just likely chose not to for reasons stated above.

It was different back then, but not different on this core aspect that healers could contribute meaningful damage.

[ForsakenRoe]

Wasn't Twintania bugged on release? Or at least, the accusation made? I assume that would potentially be a factor in how 'safe' the healers played. Plus it was right after the 'rebirth' of the game, and both the devs making the content and the players challenging it had yet to settle into the swing of 'how much can we get away with' on either side. We can see that the pendulum swung far to the other side because Second Coil got nerfed (the 'savage' we have now being 'pre nerf form' afaik), it stands to reason, at least to me, that the devs made Second Coil 'oops a little bit too hard' harder in response to the results from the first raid

As an aside, here's a random clear (so old it doesn't even have Stoneskin 2 yet) I found which includes a fair amount of Cleric even from the WHM. And while I type this, and it's in the background while they deal with the Dreadnought phase after the adds, I can still hear the telltale splashing sound of the Fluid Aura getting popped. In fact, there seems to be as much Physick (at least, that's what I assume 'medecine' is from the SCH), as there is Stones being thrown. Sorry, I mean 'Extra Terre'. As an aside, FR's 'extra, mega, giga' for spell naming is pretty great, Fire 3 doesn't have as much 'oomph' in the name as MEGA FIRE would, does it

edit: Having looked at about 5 more clear vods (WHM POV) this one I linked was coincidentally the one that was against the grain, most players favored a more 'paly it safe and don't risk Cleric' style. Even the SCHs. This however should not be taken as 'this means DPS was not the intention for healers back then' as there was one clear vid where the DPS players had like 6 deaths between them, the tanks were full Shield Oats uptime, and the healers did not DPS, and the party STILL cleared before enrage. If anything, you could argue that the DPS didn't have to DPS either! I think it means that, back then, the devs were just not as good at tightly tuning the encounters, or more likely, purposely made the decision to keep the enrage lax because they did not know the skill level of the playerbase, new as it was. That, or they felt it'd scare all the players away if the raids were soulcrushingly hard (which turned out very true with Wildstar just one year later)

here, like 5 more clear vids for people to peruse (with varying amounts of callout triggers and DMCA'able music):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R2OUcPtxOs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sTi_jfihy8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZUOSFWA1hg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8SkEQpjK2o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71ev6Ty2vKA

[Post]

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...Bahamut-Turn-5

Long and short of the accused bug was that "Twister", a move that basically creates an invisible, one-shotting landmine beneath random players, was difficult to figure out. As far as I was able to ascertain talking to players that did it in 2.0 it snapshot some time randomly during the cast rather than during the end, and if you ran TOO FAR from the point it snapshot, it would ALSO explode and kill you, not simply requiring that you keep moving as the cast completes/not stack them up as a group. You can see how the SCH in the video dies to it when they run a bit late or in a straight line, but survive when they do a curve, because they stayed closer to the point of origin.

This video you linked was from 2.1, just judging by the gear they're all wearing (no glamour yet), the fact that they decided to bring a WAR and, and of course the date in the description (why wasn't this the first thing I checked?).

[Canadane]

/spectacles
Ackshually world first was actually completed accidentally with a glitch that the group threw out the weapon after reporting it.

[Renathras]

*shrug* and I recall clearing Twintania back during 2.x dancing in and out of Cleric, using damage spells in between heals. There are always factors involved. Lower ilvl. Less theory crafting culture. Playing things safer for a first clear. The point beyond that is, downtime potential is a thing that only increases over time in a piece of content for any given healer.

Healing downtime is a massive part of RPG healer history. Always has been.

Right, but that's not the point.

The point is, this was a legitimate way to play the game at the time.

Again: I'm not saying the game hasn't changed. Rather the opposite - I'm saying the game HAS changed.

[Sebazy]

I've said it many times, but T5 prog was a wildly different kettle of fish to anything we see now for a whole heap of reasons.

For reference, my FC's first kill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88jcHeEij38

One interesting difference I didn't notice before. We had our SCH's Miasma the Dreadknight add to help guarantee a slow on it. They didn't for whatever reason.

On track, you are right in that the game has changed, but T5 was pretty unique in it's own right as well.

To name a few:

The biggest one was that MP was at an absolute premium especially for WHM. In my clears I had 0 zero dots or stones on T5 because I didn't want to risk the MP. I couldn't even use PPPs or Fluid Aura most of the time because I just wasn't close enough.

T5 absolutely wouldn't let you stack the group up for most of the fight. After Divebombs you spent the rest of the fight spread out to handle Twisters and Dreadknights.

Further compounding the 2 issues above, Mage's Ballad was absolutely vital for this fight, but reaching the healers could be problematic at times.

Furthermore, BCOB bosses dealt really spiky erratic damage on the tanks. At times it's not much different to today, and at other times you'll see the tank go from full to 20% in less than a GCD. Swings could crit and most bosses had additional mini tank busters that were on their own cooldown with no telegraph whatsoever. These would generally auto queue and land instantly with a melee swing immediately as Death Sentence hit.

On the flipside, the damage checks were comparatively lenient. Honestly, back then the adds were the real DPS check, not Twintania herself. Failing to kill the Dreadknight fast enough snowballed things and even the Divebomb snakes actually warranted Nei dotting them in that video.

Using T5 to suggest that healer's or even WHM's specifically didn't use cleric stance in ARR is kind of unfair though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlKKLpQSzZs

Here's an early MTQ video covering Wanderer's Palace. You can tell it's super early in the game's cycle because they haven't figured out that you can lock mobs out with boss gates yet. Lo and behold, the WHM is stance dancing somewhat consistently on the bosses. Look down in the comments and you'll see a rando pointing out that it's worth having the WHM Holy and Blizzard II spam the trash as well (When I was grinding here for Tomes, my preferred group setup was double WHM to clear trash the quickest).

Between the Solitude healers, we used to get into the habit of DPSing on heart phase for Titan as well. You can even see it in the video where I tanked TitanHM: https://youtu.be/q5TDzbqfEAo?t=218

As for if healers not consistently DPSing was down to the game or players simply getting better. IMHO it was a mix of both. DPSing as a healer in early BCOB progression really wasn't a good time all told. But we also clearly got significantly better at the game over the course of the expansion. Tricks like PPPs, the Titan HM safe spot or locking trash out of dungeons with boss doors were probably the best examples of this in action. SE had their work cut out keeping us in check over the course of ARR

Also it's important to stress, healers not DPSing in ARR was absolutely legitimate, IMHO it was a legitimate way to play right up until SB's launch. But it's also important to understand that as we progressed, it steadily became less and less optimal to ignore healer DPS. Perhaps never genuinely problematic, but certainly sub par.

Additionally, the phase that the boss is in depends on when THEY push it, contrary to bosses that are on rails, typically StB and beyond. If they push the Neurolink at a bad time, it'll throw off their whole plan. You'll notice that many of the Death Sentances that Twintania is trying to cast during Fireball/Conflagration phase (between 84% and when she flies into the air to do divebombs) are not going off, despite them having a roughly 30 second cooldown. She casts one at 3:30 (it's the animation where she arches her back and whips her tail at the main tank, you can see his infirmity debuff on the party list which reduces healing received) and the next one is timed to be interrupted by the main tank moving into the Conflagration to become unattackable, despite her still being fixated on him as the target (~4:00). This happens again with her starting the cast at 4:36, but she's again thwarted by him entering the Conflagration, and the Death Sentence is unable to complete. Again it happens at 5:09, 5:53, and 6:24.

This is a really important point that I completely forgot about.

We mostly remember fights like LeviEX and IfritEX being ones where too much DPS could actually cause problems, but a lot of ARR bosses were like that including T5. T7 was another great example where pushing a phase transition at the wrong time could be hugely problematic to the point of likely causing a wipe.

[Post]

Solid post.

I just wanted to add that Accuracy was also a stat until StB that healers needed to be conscious to cap if they wanted their dps to be effectual or else a certain % of their attacks would just miss, except for DoTs that had no direct damage component (Bio and Bio II and Combust I/II, not Miamsas or Aeros). This necessity only existed in certain Extreme Trials and all (8 man) Raids, and this contributed to the hesitance of healers dpsing. Furthermore, if a healer chose to dps but without using Cleric Stance, it was always incredibly wasteful. Healers dpsing without Cleric Stance active then is exactly like trying to heal using SMN's Physick today.

Once again, though, the game was different not because healers could not or did not dps, but because it wasn't as required. The point Renatheras is harping on is that the culture was less prevalent or enforced. "Legitimate" only means "conforming to the rules," and as the rules didn't require healers to always dps, it's no surprise that many of them didn't. It doesn't mean that most didn't or all didn't or even that it was better not to.

Other changes by the devs have contributed to this culture beyond just making Gordias and Midas Savage tiers incredibly tightly tuned for dps, from cooldowns resetting automatically on release/duty (re)start, to the impact of NIN's Trick Attack (now Mug) and other synergystic party damage buffs into the 2 min dps window singularity we have today. The more damage is amplified, in a short time, the more costly it is to not dps in those periods, the more it's demanded that everyone contribute during them.

[Canadane]

It was removed in SB, not Stadowbringers.
I will not allow this retcon of abbreviations to overtake our games history.