Final Fantasy Retrospective: Guildhests in Final Fantasy XIV

 

I’m jumping ahead this week like I did when I wrote about Mobius Final Fantasy before it disappeared.  I will be up front in stating that I have no reason to believe that Guildhests are going to disappear any time soon in Final Fantasy XIV, but they’re very old and outdated content and I don’t think that they do what the developers intended for them to do.  They certainly haven’t added any new ones since A Realm Reborn, and even though they’ve reworked a lot of the game’s early content including the Steps of Faith trial a couple years ago, they’ve not touched the Guildhests at all.

Guildhests are a set of fourteen pieces of instanced content that are supposed to teach players mechanics of the game, but the biggest problem with this content is that I don’t think they teach what they set out to teach, and if they do, they don’t teach those lessons very well.  I’m going to run all of them today and then describe the reasons why they desperately need to be reworked, starting with:

 

Basic Training: Enemy Parties

The description when you queue up for the fight suggests that you’ll be learning how to draw single targets from groups of enemies in order to better manage these groups, but the fight is not balanced to make this any kind of a challenge, especially in a party of four.  What’s supposed to happen is that two groups of three enemies each are spawned at the start and players need to fight one, then the other.  Then, a boss enemy spawns around several smaller enemies and the smaller enemies are supposed to be dealt with first.  What actually tends to happen is that players will just rush the entire group and kill everything at once.  Enemies barely tickle, so healers don’t need to heal.  I went in as a White Mage to get these screen shots and I did not touch any spell other than Stone, I did not need to heal anyone at all.

The problem with teaching this lesson like it does is that it teaches it in a party, and the general etiquette of a party in most MMOs is that the tank pulls enemies and holds their attention.  Most melee fighters and all tanks get their ranged pull at level 15, but this Guildhest is a level 10 battle which syncs players to level 11.  In other words, the skills that this Guildhest is trying to teach are not even available yet!  Only a ranged player or a healer would even be able to pull single enemies away from the goobbue that spawns halfway through.

This also tends not to come up in dungeons or raids at all, it more often applies to FATEs with boss enemies.  There are roaming enemies to worry about in the level twenty dungeon Halatali and in several other dungeons, but they’re nothing that a party can’t handle if they accidentally pull one or more of them.  In fact, the dungeon that comes to mind when trying to think of examples of careful pulling is the Aurum Vale, a level 47 dungeon which begins with a large open room full of various enemies including giant frogs that pull you towards them if they spot you.  This is dangerous because if you’re pulled by a frog, you can easily catch the attention of other enemies in the room and then things become very unmanageable, very fast.

This dungeon design was abandoned pretty much as soon as it became clear to the developers that the players of their game really didn’t like the Aurum Vale.  Any open areas in future dungeons, like the one in Holminster Switch, are navigated just as linearly as a winding hallway in any other dungeon.

 

Under the Armor

The next Guildhest is also a level 10 battle that syncs players down to level 11, and is all about managing adds.  Adds are smaller enemies that sometimes spawn as boss battles continue, and typically the tank is supposed to grab them so that the adds don’t massacre the rest of the party, after which it’s the DPS’s job to defeat them before they overwhelm the tank.

If you paid attention at all to the problems with the other level 10 Guildhest, then you know why this one doesn’t teach what it’s supposed to, either.  It’s possible that it’s there to teach the rest of the party to take enemies to the tank, but starting at level 15, a tank can use their ranged attack to pull adds towards them anyway, so most players don’t bother bringing them over.  The adds in this battle also rush over to the boss first before they decide who to attack, so the tank can just use their AOE skill to grab them.  Paladins get theirs, Total Eclipse, at level 6.  Warriors get theirs, Overpower, at level 10.  Dark Knights get theirs, Unleash, at level 6.  Gunbreakers get theirs, Demon Slice, at level 10.  They all also get their tank stances at level 10, so they won’t have any trouble holding the adds once they have them.

The Guildhest is also balanced pretty low, so the tank doesn’t even need to grab the adds’ attention.  Most teams just burn the boss down and go on their merry way.  A maximum of three adds will spawn before the fight is over, and two of those don’t even reach the boss in time to be of any help to him.

In most of the dungeons and raids where adds spawn during battles, tanks will typically already know the fights and they’ll remember when to use their ranged pull in order to grab enemies right away.  They will not have learned or practiced that skill from this Guildhest.

 

Basic Training: Enemy Strongholds

This is supposed to teach the “ability to breach enemy stronghold defenses”, but what that just means is it teaches the ability to run a dungeon, since the layout of the Guildhest is basically like that of a normal dungeon.  Players have to deal with three groups of enemies, one at a time, and pull levers to progress.  The final boss at the end is a frog that has to be defeated quickly because adds will join the fight after a certain period of time.  This is, once more, something which I think they intended to have come up in FATEs a lot more often, but after A Realm Reborn, the game introduced flight, so FATEs that required dungeon-style infiltration became next to impossible.

This is technically relevant even today, but players will arguably learn better by actually doing dungeon content rather than preparing themselves with this Guildhest.

The FATEs in question are also a lot easier these days, since flight was eventually retroactively added to the original A Realm Reborn zones and players don’t need to infiltrate the enemy encampments like they used to.  The South Shroud is a good example.  There’s a pair of FATEs where players had to fight through several enemies in order to reach a gate with NPCs as allies to help them along, then they had to destroy the gate and move on to the next one, plowing through more enemies as they went.  They had to do this a total of three times, but with the ability to fly, they can pretty much set themselves up in a corner, fight maybe one or two enemies that spot them, destroy the gate, then fly to the next gate and keep it up until the end.  The second FATE spawns a boss which is also behind a large group of enemies, then when the boss is half dead, he runs and summons his pet tortoise and players are expected to follow him, fighting through many more enemies along the way.  What actually happens is that you can set yourself up in a part of the map where enemies don’t see you, pull the boss with a ranged attack, drop him to half health while keeping a damage over time skill active on him, watch him run to summon his turtle while invulnerable to damage, then when he takes damage from your skill again, he’ll run back to you and let you finish him off.  Then you can fly leisurely over to the tortoise and finish the FATE pretty painlessly.  That’s not the only infiltration type FATE in the South Shroud with a boss at the end, but it’s probably the one that is most infamously nerfed by the addition of flight.

By the way, back in A Realm Reborn, the adds would always join the fight at the end of this Guildhest, but by now, players have enough DPS early on that the adds are a non-issue and don’t even break through their boulders in time to help.

 

Hero on the Half Shell

I plan on documenting as many pop culture references as I can when I finally write more about Final Fantasy XIV on this blog, I just figured I’d call attention to this one because we seem to be very much into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles here on this blog, even if we don’t talk about them as often as, say, the Carmen Sandiego franchise.

This Guildhest is there to teach players about fulfilling objectives beyond just the defeat of enemies, something which doesn’t come up often, if at all.  I can’t think of a single time when killing an enemy in a dungeon results in the failure of that fight, and the same with killing an enemy in a FATE.  To my knowledge, and I would pretty much have to play the entire game again in order to be sure, this may be the only time in the entire game where defeating an enemy in the fight is an automatic failure.

For a battle that tries to teach players that they need to be careful and not kill enemies, it doesn’t come up very often.  There are, I’m sure, other instances where players are supposed to take care about the enemies they kill, but I don’t think it comes up outside of end game raid content like The Howling Eye (Extreme), where killing the Spiny Plume early may result in the party wiping to one of Garuda’s AOE attacks, but it depends on which phase of the fight it is.  It doesn’t result in an automatic failure, it just sometimes hurts a lot.

This is also one of the Guildhests that does generally proceed how it was designed.  First, a Gil Turtle spawns around several smaller enemies that need to be killed, then the Turtle has to be weakened approximately halfway.  A Fire Sprite spawns that players then must kill, and the loot it drops has to then be used to light some herbs on fire to send the Turtle to sleep, ending the fight.  It can be a bit difficult getting the Turtle to be placed directly on the herbs, especially if the tank brings the Turtle over to the herbs before the Fire Sprite spawns, which most tanks do these days without realizing that if they accidentally pull the Turtle too far, they’ll be killing it with auto attacks while they try to position it properly, thus failing the fight.

This is also a fight that can be failed if you use your damage over time abilities and the Turtle’s health ticks down to zero even when you stop attacking it, so I tend not to bother with them.

 

Pulling Poison Posies

I didn’t comment about the level of the previous two Guildhests, but they’re level 15 fights.  This one is a level 20 fight.  Why is this important?  Because the enemies in this battle throw poison around as if it were Halloween candy and until Esuna was dropped down to a level 10 spell, healers couldn’t clear the poison from party members who received it.  Fortunately, this was a change that was very welcome, especially since there are other low level fights in the game where poison is a danger, so having Esuna so early is a much needed help.  Otherwise, players have to carry around Antidote and put it on their hotbar.  At low levels, this might not be too much of a hassle, but at higher levels, sacrificing a spot on your hotbar for an item of any kind is rather inconvenient, what with everything else that needs to fit there, and having to go into your item menu to use items from there also feels inconvenient.

That said, Esuna also doesn’t typically get put onto healer hotbars because it’s not a DPS skill and the only times it really matters are when players mess up a mechanic and get hit with negative status effects that they shouldn’t have, or are hit with Doom in a few very specific fights.  Doom is cleansed in a number of ways, though, and it’s also on players to know which way goes with which fight.  There are fights where Doom is cleansed by stepping on a platform and healers have to do nothing but pick players up off the ground who fail to do this, there are fights where Doom is cleansed by healing the player up to full, which automatically removes the debuff, and there are fights where Doom is cleansed specifically by Esuna, but presumably this means that a Bard could heal it with The Warden’s Paean as well.  The one problem with that is that Doom will often be applied to several people at once, and The Warden’s Paean can only be used once every 45 seconds, meaning healers absolutely need to be helping out with the cleansing of debuffs or else players can and will die.  Not every fight that uses Doom as a mechanic use it as a punishment for the inflicted players not knowing the mechanics, so letting the players drop to the ground usually means that the healers are being deliberately negligent.

This Guildhest begins by spawning a group of weak enemies and once they’re dead, the main boss spawns.  The boss will also constantly spawn adds and also place patches of poison on the ground that will gradually do damage to anyone standing in it, so tanks need to pull the boss out of these patches so that melee players won’t have to suffer.

This fight can actually be made a lot easier, completely at random, because if the party includes two ranged DPS, both them and the healer can bait the boss into tossing the poison patch on the ground away from the tank so that the tank doesn’t have to move.  It can, admittedly be a bit hard on the tank to have to constantly move the boss, since it’ll toss its poison patches often enough during the fight to cover a substantial portion of the arena, and melee players are stuck having to chase after the boss.  This is why tanks try not to pull the boss around a map too much during any fight in the game.

I think this Guildhest is supposed to teach that it’s sometimes necessary to pull enemies to a different part of the map but not that it’s always a good idea.  It won’t be.  Most enemies can be tanked where they’re found, but admittedly, there will be times when enemies in dungeons need to be pulled out of AOE patches that damage the player, and in some rare cases, drawn towards spots in a dungeon where enemies will take more damage.  The best dungeon that comes to mind for the former is The Lost City of Amdapor, and for the latter, the Dzemael Darkhold from A Realm Reborn is probably the best example, although this mechanic also only rarely comes up in comparison to the former.

 

Stinging Back

This is the other level 20 fight, but that level doesn’t really matter here.  What does matter is that this fight is here to get players used to searching for enemy healers in battle so that they can clear a fight faster by limiting how much and how often the enemy can recover.  In practice, healers are rarely, if ever, added to a dungeon to spice things up.  I’m currently drawing a blank; as far as I can recall, the only times I’ve seen enemy Conjurers in a dungeon, I can only remember them attacking the player, I can’t remember them actually casting healing spells.

Enemy healers actually come up more often in solo story battles and do what they’re designed to do, heal the enemy.  It’s definitely a good idea to target them first, and that’s what this fight is designed to teach.  That said, it’s designed so that players will learn not to focus so much on burning down the boss that they get tunnel vision and forget to deal with the adds.  This Guildhest used to be balanced much better to allow for the mechanics to punish players who try to ignore them, since enough healers would spawn that they’d actually be able to outpace player damage, requiring them to be killed if players want to actually finish this.

Nowadays, though, focused players can burn the boss down after dealing with only some of the healers and a few of the other numerous adds.  Player damage is outpacing the ability for the enemy healers in this Guildhest to keep up.  What’s supposed to happen is that players fight through several enemy parties, some of which include healers to focus on, and then fight the boss.  The boss spawns several waves of adds, all of which includes several healers and these healers used to be able to heal him back up to nearly full before they could be dealt with.  What actually happens is that the boss can be burned down even with adds still spawning and active.

What this Guildhest accidentally teaches, now, is that burning down a boss is always the best tactic no matter what.  This is very much against the spirit of the game, but players don’t care, because it gets them in and out of dungeons and raids faster.  If you’re not following the meta, the most efficient tactics available to fight your enemies, you’re seen as deliberately wasting the time of your fellow players.  Although the developers working on Final Fantasy XIV are doing their best to make sure that no one job can trivialize content above all other jobs, that doesn’t stop players from devising tactics that trivialize content which isn’t meant to be trivialized, and actively avoid content if it can’t be trivialized in any manner.

 

All’s Well that Ends in the Well

I don’t even know where to begin with this one.  It might be trying to teach players about dealing with debuffs that prevent them from attacking, but in practice, these kinds of debuffs typically don’t happen outside of mechanics that players are supposed to be paying attention to or cutscene style battle transitions.  Actually being silenced, pacified or otherwise prevented from attacking in battle is not something that typically comes up unless players fail a mechanic, and as a consequence of their inaction, these debuffs are also rarely used anyway.  Most of the time, players just take damage and earn a stacking debuff that raises their susceptibility to damage.

The objectives that pop up when the battle begins (and which no one reads) suggests that this might’ve been the fight meant to teach how valuable Esuna is, by making Esuna the difference between dealing damage and not dealing damage, but there are enough examples before this level 25 fight where Esuna is useful that there’s no reason to learn how to use it fifteen levels after receiving it.

The objectives also suggest having half the party fighting the boss, Briaxio, and half the party fighting the adds that spawn in order to manage things at the very end, but parties of four don’t get split, ever.  No dungeon has ever required two players to do one thing and two players to do another thing, especially when it comes to dealing damage.  I don’t think even the single player games did that outside of one gimmick boss in Final Fantasy V and the part in the final dungeon of Final Fantasy VII where the party has to split up and will bring back items when they join up again.  I don’t count the part where the party in Final Fantasy IX has to split into four groups to fight four fiends at the same time, since the player only actually controls Zidane and Quina’s battle, and presumably the other boss fights happen off screen.

Nowadays, this is treated as a one pull fight.  The tank rushes through and pulls everything including Briaxio.  Anything that doesn’t get taken care of on the way by the ranged players will get burned down with the boss.  Only one set of new adds will get to even join the battle before Briaxio is dead.  There used to be several sets to contend with, but not any more.  Briaxio dies far too quickly.

 

Flicking Sticks and Taking Names

The other level 25 battle involves dodging a constant barrage of bombs while killing enemies.  I’ve been using ranged classes so far in this article, and this fight seems designed to make things easier on ranged players in comparison to melee players.  Learning how to pay attention to and dodge AOE attacks is definitely at the forefront of this battle, but I think this Guildhest might also be teaching players when to deal with enemies first and when to deal with objectives first.  I’m not sure which order we’re meant to be doing first, though.  Most melee players are stuck dealing with the objectives anyway, but ranged players can take out enemies and make forward progress that much easier on everyone else.

According to the objectives at the beginning that no one reads, the barricades that the party needs to break through can take damage from the goblins’ bombs, so players should be baiting the goblins into blowing them up.  Otherwise, this plays similarly to Basic Training: Enemy Strongholds, except with the gates being placed in front of the enemies rather than the other way around, and the boss at the end doesn’t spawn adds, he just tosses ever increasing amounts of bombs that can easily be avoided since it takes a while for them to actually blow up.

This Guildhest might be aided by making the actual lesson clearer, but that could easily be said about most of the Guildhests.  The applications of this particular Guildhest are also non-existent, because I can’t think of a single battle in the game where players have to avoid taking damage while dealing with obstacles before they’re able to attack the enemies on the other side.  Most obstacles aren’t being protected by ranged enemies, and dodging bombs is so rarely a thing in dungeons that one might as well just treat them like any other AOE.  I remember bombs coming up in Brayflox’s Longstop (Hard), but that’s probably because everyone remembers the boss fight at the very end.

 

More than a Feeler

This is one of the fights that I remember would go wrong so often that I used to find myself dropping into an in progress party having trouble with it every so often when Guildhest Roulettes used to be considered worthwhile to run.  It’s the first level 30 Guildhest and as far as I can tell, it’s supposed to teach players to pay attention when the game’s dialogue tries to give them more information during a battle, and that only some adds need to be dealt with, the rest can be ignored.

How things work in this fight is that a classic Final Fantasy enemy known as the malboro or morbol, depending on the translation, must be fought and killed, but throughout the fight, various bubbles will spawn and players specifically need to kill the Stale Bubbles while ignoring the Acid Bubbles.  Presumably, players will be dealt damage when the Acid Bubbles are burst, but it’s so little damage that most players don’t seem to care, as evidenced by this chat log I accumulated from running the battle.  Stale Bubbles need to be killed quickly, or else they’ll spawn Rotten Jam, and this is where things tend to go south quickly.  A good party might be able to make it through by just burning the boss, because that’s been a trend today as I’ve been writing this article, but if enough Rotten Jam spawn, it becomes too much for even the best healer to deal with and players are stuck kiting the Rotten Jam around the arena until they can be completely killed so that the party can try again with the boss.

No, I’m not deliberately getting a screen shot of that.

I think a lot of players ignore the mechanics of this fight because the NPC delivering most of the instructions is a sour character who belittles the player as often as he can, and that goes against many players’ perception that they’re the most awesomest person in the history of Eorzea.  If Tiroro is unwilling to suck the player’s dick, the player is unwilling to give them the time of day.  I know that’s a rather crude explanation, but I think it’s probably what’s going on here.

Plus, most of these Guildhests can be burned down while ignoring mechanics nowadays, so there’s that, too.  Believe it or not, even though I started this article with the intention of pointing such a thing out, I’m honestly surprised by just how many of these get burned down now.

This fight goes right back to the whole “don’t kill Spiny” part of The Howling Eye (Extreme) mentioned above, because there’s consequences if you do kill the Spiny Plume, but it also shows you what the consequences are of just ignoring adds entirely if they aren’t immediately doing anything to you.  The same Extreme fight also features the Satin Plume which will put everyone to sleep if it’s not killed quickly, along with other Plumes which need to be killed as well in order to better manage the fight.

However, the trouble with finding these examples of fights that benefit from knowledge gained from Guildhests is that there’s always just one or two fights that do benefit from it.  You could argue that fights like The Navel (Hard) where players can just dodge the AOE from Bomb Boulders without needing to kill them also benefits from this knowledge, as well as fights like The Pool of Tribute where players are trapped in an Ama-no-iwato and the rest of the party needs to kill the correct one to prevent the party member from dying but can ignore the two decoys that also spawn.  Those types of situations are few and far between, though.

 

Annoy the Void

Speaking of a boss that can be burned down nowadays, Buso is basically a pushover that can be burned down.  Also, hello again, Tiroro!

This Guildhest is presumably there to teach players more about managing fights, but it’s incredibly easy to burn Buso down without even worrying about the mechanics of the fight.  The Blue Flames supposedly strengthen the boss and make him less susceptible to damage, according to the objectives, but it’s not very noticeable, and players can get away with burning him down.  Adds that spawn also bring forth more Blue Flames when defeated, so tanks are supposed to pull Buso away from the Flames so that they don’t cause him to “unleash a powerful attack” when one is extinguished, but the days when people paid attention to these mechanics are long over.

I also honestly can’t think of a time when this actually comes up at all in the game.  It almost sounds like the classic Tonberry mechanic, but the game blows its Tonberry load in The Wanderer’s Palace, a level 50 dungeon, while also introducing lore into the game through the Scholar job quests that Tonberries are actually transformed Eorzeans, victims of a war from long ago, and recent developments in the game have given them hope that they’ll be able to return to their original forms.  After The Wanderer’s Palace, Tonberries don’t come up again in the game outside of the Scholar quests.

 

Shadow and Claw

At level 35 comes a Guildhest that appears to teach players that sometimes it is perfectly okay to burn down a boss and ignore its adds, even though the game provides several examples of fights where players ignore adds at their own peril.  As has already been demonstrated, though, this is a strategy that most players adopt when participating in Guildhests and honestly, it’s what players generally do in dungeons anyway, so there isn’t a lot of point in auditing this particular one.

It mainly consists of adds that constantly spawn and which need to be avoided because they’ll unleash an AOE and despawn, along with one add that flies around the boss arena, unleashing an AOE without a telegraph.  Players basically need to burn the boss down while trying to avoid all AOEs to win.  It’s pretty easy, especially with a healer to mop up damage from the flying add, who doesn’t deal enough damage to be much of a threat, nor does it add any stacking debuffs that make players take more damage.  Ironically, that sort of thing might make the fight more relevant to players than it actually is.

 

Long Live the Queen

I am assuming that the other level 35 Guildhest is meant to teach that sometimes, adds will remove themselves by exploding and can be ignored, as long as you dodge the explosion, but at the same time, if players can DPS them down before they explode, they can avoid taking the damage in the first place.  This kind of lesson pertains the most to the optional Level 38 dungeon Cutter’s Cry, where bombs are often discovered and can be either destroyed before they explode, or left to explode in peace as long as the players avoid the telegraphed AOE.

That said, it sort of feels like this is a final exam of sorts, even though there are two Guildhests left after this one.  It makes me wonder if there were always meant to be more of them beyond these initial fourteen, but the team didn’t see any point in adding any more once Heavensward began full development.

This Guildhest has a couple phases to it, making it more involved than Annoy the Void, and arguably more worthwhile.  The first phase involves dealing with various bombs by either killing them or letting them explode, and defeating several flan-type enemies called Red Marshmallows that can put party members to sleep.  I think the only job that can even remove that status effect if the healer gets hit with it is a Bard, so if your healer gets slept, you’re pretty much stuck waiting for it to wear off or for them to get hit by an AOE.  This spell can be interrupted, but there are three Red Marshmallows and the tank ability Interject is only available once every thirty seconds.  Paladins have a second interrupt in Shield Bash, but not all tanks are that lucky and that still leaves one Sleep spell that seems guaranteed to go off.

Presumably, players should be able to use Silencing Potions on these Red Marshmallows as well, but this is literally the only time when such a thing would be even necessary in the entire game.  They also have a two minute cooldown, so a couple players would need to be carrying them so that the party would be able to silence all three Marshmallows at just the right times.

After the Marshmallows comes the Bomb Queen and several of her minions.  In this phase, it’s definitely more worthwhile to focus on the Queen and let the rest of the bombs explode, so it functions pretty much no different than Flicking Sticks and Taking Names.  The only difference is that the bombs will actually seek players out, so ranged players baiting them away from the boss may make things easier for the tank, but this is still another fight that is bound to rely heavily on movement, sort of like Pulling Poison Posies.  You could at least argue that stacking the mechanics together like this does offer some sense of progression, but it feels more like a test instead of a lesson plan.

 

Ward Up

Presuming that Long Live the Queen was the final exam for beginner players, the advanced lessons begin here with a Guildhest that has often frustrated players, because they’ve gotten used to ignoring instructions, doubly so in the age of “burn boss, ignore adds”.  This Guildhest is here to reinforce earlier lessons about paying attention to objectives, and is rigged to punish players by prolonging the fight if they fail to understand what they’re supposed to do.

The objective here is to kill five voidsent, but killing them one at a time will only result in them coming back, as voidsent typically do (this is surprisingly relevant to the post-Endwalker patch content), so players need to defeat all five of them at once or else the fight will last forever.  Well, not forever.  Every Guildhest has a time limit before the party automatically fails.  But forever is definitely what it feels like when a party doesn’t pay much attention.

The problem here is that one voidsent will gain an immunity buff for a while, meaning the rest need to be whittled down until they’re at low HP, but not finished off until the fifth voidsent can be hit again.  Once this happens, the party is supposed to kill the fifth voidsent and finish off the rest at roughly the same time.

This lesson comes back in an interesting way in Thornmarch (Extreme), where players are expected to whittle down the HP of eight Moogles that are supporting Good King Moggle Mog XII as low as they can before finishing off one or more of them.  The King will replenish his Moogles’ HP from his own and remains otherwise immune to taking damage.  This happens a second time in the fight, leaving him at what players hope is a low enough amount of HP that they can kill the Moogles and then finish the King off.  The king loses his immunity when all of the Moogles are dead, but as soon as one of them dies, he starts casting an enrage ability that wipes the party.  I don’t know of very many other fights that require this level of coordination, where adds must be kept alive but need to be beaten to within an inch of their lives.

I suppose in general, this Guildhest is trying to get players to pay attention to fight mechanics, but I don’t think there’s any helping a player who gets this far into the Guildhests without having already learned that lesson from Hero on the Half Shell and More Than a Feeler.

 

 

Solemn Trinity

This is the big one, the eight player party, and I assume it was meant to be the Guildhest that trains players to function in an eight man team, but outside of raid bosses, most content is for four players only.  The big exception are the Alliance Raids, which are for twenty four players in three teams of eight, but these teams are made up of one tank, two healers and five DPS, and Solemn Trinity asks for two tanks, two healers and four DPS, just like raid bosses do.

This is also the one that typically takes the longest to queue into.  It gets to the point where players simply don’t do it because it requires eight players to deliberately want to do it (I don’t recall it showing up in Guildhest Roulette except on a very rare occasion).  The other day, I saw someone asking for help getting into this Guildhest in the game’s Party Finder, and that’s what inspired me to write this article in the first place.

Solemn Trinity contains crates that the party must defend from giants who are hell bent on destroying them for… reasons, I guess.  Random enemies will often destroy an Eorzean’s things just because, and I often see this come up in both Levequests and FATEs.  I don’t think that players need to learn how to defend property in this game because they’ll likely have learned it many times before this battle.  Both Ward Up and Solemn Trinity are for level 40 players.

Instead, what I think is happening is that this is supposed to get players used to functioning in an eight player team, splitting up to deal with threats in different parts of the map.  The main struggle in this Guildhest is that several waves of enemies spawn and it’s up to the party to defeat them and make sure the crates survive intact.  The last couple waves also spawn boss enemies, so presumably one tank grabs the boss and the other tank grabs the miscellaneous enemies, each healer follows a separate tank and the DPS divide evenly as well, but like with the rest of the Guildhests, players simply do too much damage to the adds now for this kind of co-ordination to even be necessary.  The bosses also melt relatively quickly, so the real lesson here is that even in a party of eight, you can just burn all your enemies to the ground.

It’s no wonder most players don’t touch the end game raid scene or quit in frustration after experiencing two wipes in one of the current level Extreme battles that they themselves have no knowledge of what the mechanics are, if this is how the game’s supposed tutorial levels are treated.

So what can be done to fix these?  The developers could readjust the difficulty of the fights so that enemies have more health and deal more damage, pretty much scaling them up to how powerful low level players have become over the years.  For example, most players just tank the damage from bombs in Flicking Sticks and Taking Names while breaking down the barricades because they figure that their healer will heal them back up.  If players actually had to dodge the bombs or else take massive damage and possibly die, it might encourage them to care about the mechanics again.  The only fights that seem alright as they are, but which probably should be scaled up anyway for completion’s sake, are Hero on the Half Shell, Long Live the Queen and Shadow and Claw.  The fights’ mechanics are still shown off very well and players should easily be able to get a sense of what’s going on.

This is assuming that these Guildhests are to remain in the game as is, for the lifetime of the game.  They should probably simply be removed at this point, but then players of the PlayStation 4 version who haven’t yet popped the two Guildhest trophies will be forever locked out of the Platinum Trophy unless the list gets changed somehow.  The earliest they could probably remove the Guildhests entirely without breaking any PSN trophies will likely be in whatever the expansion will be that turns off PlayStation 4 support, because the PlayStation 5 trophy list does not include Guildhests.  This is not happening this summer, as far as we’ve been promised, but the question will likely come up again when the next expansion is getting ready to be released, probably in 2026.

Although it has been many years since A Realm Reborn, another possibility the developers should consider is expanding the Guildhests in order to teach more relevant lessons, possibly showing off mechanics that players need to learn in order to properly function in a party.  Stacking mechanics, spreading AOEs out, anything that has become relevant to players who finish the fourteen Guildhests and are ready to learn more advanced lessons.  This will help new players in both A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, possibly Stormblood depending on how many Guildhests get introduced, to learn various mechanics that were introduced in the years since the Guildhests stopped being relevant.

If the Guildhests are expanded, what they could do to Solemn Trinity is to readjust it into a four-player instance so that it doesn’t take forever to fill up, and then continue the Guildhests as four-player content.  There are many reasons that Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium were rebalanced into four-player dungeons, but one major reason was that they were literally the only two eight-player dungeons, and every dungeon introduced in the game since then have only required four players to enter, even the final dungeon of the original story arc at the end of Endwalker.

To be fair, the eight player requirement is definitely not why Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium would sometimes take a while to fill up, but it certainly didn’t help.

Another aspect of the Guildhests that need some attention are the lessons being taught and whether they’re appropriate for players to even learn.  What should happen is that tanks learn their ranged pull at level 10 or even a little earlier so that they can properly direct the relevant Guildhest and maybe also get practice with it outside of Guildhests, well in advance of their first dungeon.  A few of the Guildhests with overlapping lessons should also probably be retooled or changed entirely in order to teach other relevant lessons early players should know.

At this point, the Guildhests are not very good at what they do, nor do players really take heed of the lessons being learned, if they’re being taught well (or at all) in the first place.  For this content to become relevant to new players once again, something needs to be done, preferably in Dawntrail but they could always do it in one of the patches as well.  For now, this is the state of such content in 2024.