That One Boss / Final Fantasy XIV

A party-wipingly popular MMO needs good bosses to challenge adventurers, and these here are some of the more notorious cases.

NOTE: When adding examples, keep in mind the following:

• The meta context during time of release should be taken into account. Boss fights won't have the same experience when overgeared or played in later expansions due to the fluidity of job design, even with Minimum Item Level in effect.
• Avoid listing examples caused by Unrestricted Party settings, as the very nature of that option can cause strange boss behaviors when sequence broken (e.g. breaking Ifrit's Infernal Nails too fast).
• Extreme, Savage, Unreal, and Ultimate content is not allowed on this page. These levels of content are considered superbosses — they're designed to have more complex and punishing patterns to appeal to the hardcore raiding crowd, and they're all entirely optional in the first place.

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A Realm Reborn

• Coming right before Titan in terms of dungeons and trials is the last boss of Brayflox's Longstop, Aiatar. In addition to using poison debuffs liberally throughout the fight, she also spams a poisonous AoE pool called Toxic Vomit that will quickly overtake the battleground. Leaving the boss on the pools will have her HP regenerate, meaning the tank can't dawdle and has to pull the boss out of the puddles, or risk a long battle. Toxic Vomit was changed in 6.1 to instead have her create a triangle of poison blobs that Burst in an AoE attack. As the fight proceeds, she'll spit two asynchronous triangles each time.
• After fighting your way through the Longstop, Titan awaits, and he's a notorious Wake-Up Call Boss. Many of his attacks involve pushing you off the edge of the arena, and if fall off the edge, you die. This is the first boss where such a thing can happen, so new players who aren't expecting such a mechanic are in for a rude awakening, especially since falling off would leave the players unable to revive, although this behaviour was changed in a later patch. The arena also shrinks significantly throughout the fight. Hard Mode, at least in its early lifespan, is particularly notorious for Landslide's AoE flat out lying due to the dodgy hit detection and latency. Two blue lines signify where the animation will trigger, but not the attack itself. Many a players are subsequently punted off the arena despite seemingly have dodged.
• Garuda deserves a mention. Her attacks are absolutely brutal for melee DPS, and to make matters worse, she has a particularly large cleave. About a third into the fight, she will begin summoning feathers that explode for considerable damage, and can destroy your cover to hide from Aerial Blast. A short while thereafter, two adds will spawn, each with their own scaled down versions of all her attacks. If both aren't killed quickly, Garuda will wipe the party. Ironically, her Hard Mode counterpart is painfully easy by comparison.
• The false Inquisitor Guillaume is this primarily because the fight is essentially an Escort Mission. The boss himself is pretty standard, but your AI companions have to survive, and their AI is basically braindead and will get chomped easily unless you take out the boss's adds pronto. Depending on your gear, you may very well need the Echo Enhancement buff to win, and even then it's not a given.
• Siren from Pharos Sirius is absolute hell for anyone playing the role of a healer. Siren herself doesn't deal too much damage, but the zombies that she summons can quickly mess up anyone if they're not healed fast enough. Siren also has the ability to inflict the Charm status on a random person that can't be cured with Esuna; the only way to get rid of Charm is to have the target's HP completely filled, which means spamming Cure spells. If you fail to remove Charm, then the effect changes where the target loses control over themselves and they attack the party for a few seconds. It's not bad if a magic user is affected since they have weak physical attack power, but god help you if a high-damage-dealing player gets affected by Charm. To make matters worse, Siren can also cause Reduced Immunity, which makes healing magic less powerful for the affected players. And yes, Siren will cause Reduced Immunity on top of Charm as well.
• The Good King Moggle Mog trial, which is required to progress the main story, was so notorious for being obtuse in its mechanics that it had to be reworked twice. The fight has two major phases: the first one is a straight forward Mook phase where you beat down on the King's minions. It's the second phase when the King finally shows up and revives his minions where things could go downhill. In the original version, the minions had to be defeated in a specific order, otherwise either the party will wipe due to a hard hitting attack or the King will get a buff. Also, the party couldn't attack the King until a certain number of his minions were defeated, otherwise he'll wipe the party anyway. The first rework nerfed the party wiping attack and the buff the King gets so that the order in which the minions were defeated didn't matter as much. However, the King would still enrage if you attacked him too early. The second rework did away with the minions entirely in the second phase, replaced with a mix of mechanics, some of which have never appeared before. These mechanics include a room-wide set of AOE attacks that need to be dodged by moving in a specific pattern, and a tank stack (a tankbuster where both Tank players have to stack on each other, because it's a One-Hit Kill any other way). Both of these are mechanics that don't show up again until much later in the game, which can throw off new players.
• Ferdiad, the final boss of Amdapor Keep (Hard). At first the fight is simple, but soon you find out the main gimmick of the fight, that he summons adds tethered to him that expands the range of his AOE attack, which pretty much kills everyone except the Tank. While the first time is pretty easy to avoid, you are not out of the woods yet, as he then spawns a slime add on a player that prevents them from moving and needs to be killed before he can do a One-Hit Kill attack to that party member. Then while attacking he uses several line AOEs at the same time as summoning a couple of energy scythes that track party members and can easily kill them. And if that wasn't painful enough he does his expanding AOE again, this time with a single very bulky add, and also a couple of the slime adds pinning half the party in place. It gets so bad that most DPS just use their limit break on the bulky add.
• The mechanic of The Lost City of Amdapor's last boss, Diabolos, is to hide away in another dimension while it does a highly damaging AOE that applies a debuff stack. Sounds easy, until you realize the only way to get in this other dimension is to open a pair of doors with matching symbols. Okay, still doesn't sound so bad. But then those symbols are only visible for the first 15 seconds of the fight, and they're randomized per pull. While a sufficiently skilled party can ignore this mechanic, trying to do this fight properly definitely puts it in this territory.
• Amdapor Keep has the Demon Wall. Those who played Final Fantasy IV or Final Fantasy VII might remember this thing as That One Boss in those games. And in XIV, it's no different. It has the same mechanic as IV and VII where it keeps approaching the party, giving you less and less space to work with as time goes on. And much like previous incarnations, it has a One-Hit Kill move where it repels you away from it, which could potentially knock you off of the edge and to your death. There's no way to avoid being Repelled by the Wall, which means you have to position yourself just right to avoid getting knocked off the edge. That would be bad enough, but it also loves to spam a move that causes Slow and Heavy on you, meaning your skills and movement speed will be reduced, which just makes it even more likely to get Repelled into the abyss.
• The Chrysalis trial has two notable mechanics that causes problems if the party isn't aware of what to do. The first is the boss summons red and black orbs that the players have to pop before they reach the boss. However, popping an orb throws on a stacking debuff that gets overridden if they pop an orb of the other color. While this sounds easy in theory, the orbs spawn randomly so a situation where several orbs of the same color spawn close to where you are isn't unheard of. The second mechanic requires the tanks to soak meteors while the DPS has to take down an add. The problem comes in that the meteors do a ton of damage upon taking them, which is why the tanks have to soak them. Naive non-tank players may think they can help by soaking them, only to die. The other is that often times the add requires a doing a limit break to take down fast enough before the tanks die from attrition due to the meteor soaking.
• The World of Darkness raid in general. Up to this point, Alliance Raids have been easy for new players, with current item levels, stat squish and power creep. The World of Darkness is here to remind you that no, mechanics aren't just for cars:
  • Angra Mainyu. The first gimmick is the boss does an arena wide AOE where half the arena is light and the other half is dark. At first it doesn't matter which side you stand on. However, this applies a debuff that increases the damage if you stand in the same side again and it'll be a while before its cast again leading to players forgetting which one they stood in (the debuff also isn't too obvious about where you stood in). The second is the boss often shoots out a wide laser beam that causes a lot of damage to anyone not a tank. If the main tank isn't good about staying still or the tanks are engaging aggro phallometry, this causes the boss to do its best Modern Warfare 360 noscope impression and take out a line of friendlies. Then there's a look-away doom mechanic that often gets overlooked due to how much is going on and can only be cured by standing in one of the glowing circles. Another mechanic that's instant death involves one player being marked and if a multiple of 3 players are standing in close proximity, they all die when the cast goes off. These thankfully have castbars now, whether or not the party at large pays attention to them is another issue... Finally there are adds that need to be killed, otherwise they explode and do massive damage to the alliance. It's telling one of the easiest mechanics to do is Roulette, an often derided ability in other Final Fantasy games, which simply marks a quarter of the arena for instant death and if done properly, is easy to dodge. Telling, Angra Mainyu is considered the hardest boss in the raid, despite being the very first one, and getting past him usually means a group will be reasonably able to get through most of the other fights.
  • Cerberus, the second to last boss from the World of Darkness raid, is the only boss from said raid that the community finds hard, even as late as Shadowbringers. This is because the fight operates under a strange phase system where Cerberus is chained and muzzled, but breaks out after a certain point. While muzzled and chained, he hits hard but mostly seems like a typical boss fight, but once he breaks free, he becomes incredibly aggressive and hard to manage. He has several quick attacks such as an attack where he swings his tail at anyone behind him, a problem with DPS naturally, but he also has an attack where he turns around and charges in a straight line. While the tell for it is easy to see, his cast time is fairly quick, so if you realize it too late, he may just hit you anyway. The main gimmick he has that frustrates people however, is his One-Hit Kill and how to avoid it: at one point, he'll barf out a purple circle, and spawns an enemy called Gastric Acid, which puts the Mini debuff on the player. The idea is that you get hit with Mini, and then stand in the purple circle, at which point he eats your character and you damage his stomach to weaken him so he can be chained again. However, if you don't have Mini and accidentally step in the purple circle, you get stuck and dragged to the center where Cerberus kills you instantly. Due to these factors, it's seen as harder than the final boss, the Cloud of Darkness, and just behind Angra Mainyu in difficulty.
• The Binding Coil of Bahamut was designed for this, but a few stand out in particular.
  • Turn 5 of the first Binding Coil features Twintania. More than just being a hard fight with several Instant Kill attacks, she is also a Marathon Boss. The two mechanics that stand out though are her Divebombs, which basically require abusing a pit in the corner of the arena to even clear, and her Twisters, which are invisible tornadoes that kill you instantly if you retrace your steps taken during the cast period, or cross paths with someone else's path.
  • Turn 2 of the Second Coil of Bahamut, also known as Turn 7, is another nightmare. Melusine will inflict random members of your party with Cursed Voice, which petrifies everyone in a cone in front of them after the debuff wears off, and casts her own Cursed Shriek, which instantly kills anyone who doesn't line-of-sight behind a Cyclops add, who also one-hit kill anyone who gets in range.
  • Turn 4 of the Second Coil of Bahamut, also known as Turn 9, is considered to be the biggest learning curve boss in the game. In fact, even the last Coil fight against Bahamut is considered to be easier to learn. There's several phases, all of which can be summarized as "Do the thing perfectly or Nael kills you in one hit". Oh, and Twintania makes a reappearance to do her signature Divebombs.

Heavensward

• The Great Gubal Library has a few annoying fights in it that even experienced players can struggle with.
  • The Demon Tome is similar to the Demon Wall in Amdapor Keep, with a few added skills. It doesn't advance and you can't be knocked off the edges, but instead will occasionally cast Disclosure, shut itself, and begin to glow. This signals that you need to run along the sides of the arena to the backside of the Tome, since anyone on the wrong side of the Tome when it reopens will be killed instantly. And the same skill from the Demon Wall that causes Slow and Heavy gets used, meaning your chances of getting to the other side if you get hit with Heavy are slim to none. If that wasn't bad enough, the Demon Tome will cast Words of Winter after a while, which will cover the ground in ice and make you slip and slide in the direction you attempt to go. And then it will cast Disclosure again, meaning you've now got to jet to the other side of the Tome while dealing with ice physics. Even players who know what's coming can still die here if they get hit with Heavy or can't move just right.
  • The Everliving Bibliotaph is the dungeon boss, and he's a doozy. At three intervals throughout the fight (roughly 85%, 55%, and 25% HP), Bibliotaph will begin casting Void Call. Platforms on the ground will light up, and they will need a certain number of players to stand on them in order to cancel their summon. One light on the platform means one player needs to stand on it to cancel the summon, two lights means two players, and three lights means three players. If you don't coordinate how to deal with this beforehand, you might not get to the lights in time, which means Void Call will summon powerful adds that can really ruin your day. Plus, Bibliotaph will mark players with targets that will set down a purple void spark which will remain in place for a duration, periodically pulsing to inflict a stack of vulnerability on those in the area. If this spark ends up next to some of the lights you need to stand on, you can pretty much kiss that one goodbye and hope you can deal with the add.
• After its restructuring in 6.3, the Aetherochemical Research Facility went from a breezy final instance to having possibly the hardest final boss of any regular four-man dungeon, period. While the first half of the encounter introduces players to a tether mechanic that dictates when attacks will go off, the second half stacks them in such a way as to require almost-split second reactivity - difficult for anyone, but especially sprouts seeing it for the first time. Reading the attacks wrong or simply not moving fast enough will result in massive damage, if it doesn’t kill a player outright. Afterwards, the boss fires off multiple mechanics that stack on players and resolve in sequence, including chains that will hurt a lot if the attached players don’t run away from one in a timely manner, donut AOEs and a stack marker that requires the team to group together, normal AOEs that require them to spread, and, oh, did we mention a bleeding debuff? Because it’s not like the healers had enough to worry about. And then several of the mechanics reappear, this time resolving in pairs - at the exact same time as a mild but still distracting DPS check. The fact that it’s a requirement to finish the expansion doesn’t keep people from deciding to eat the penalty for dropping out - or even voting to abandon it.
• Flame General Aldynn (Raubahn). Story event bosses aren't usually that difficult, but when Raubahn engages you in the Grand Melee in 3.2, his mechanics wouldn't be too out of place as a dungeon boss or even a raid boss, which is a very nasty surprise for a single-player fight. He routinely rams you into his ring of fire with an unavoidable knockback move, has several crazy AOE patterns, mimics Ifrit's One-Hit Kill nail attack, and you're on a time limit. Your one respite in the fight is that your NPC allies are still healing you from outside the fire, but you can still die very easily from all the attacks Raubahn rapidly fires off.
• Nidhogg from The Final Steps of Fate. In an unusual move for Main Story Quest bosses, Nidhogg's Shade is an ENORMOUS spike in difficulty due to the massively damaging aoe attacks which cover large chunks of the arena, smaller aoes which are powerful enough to kill most players in one hit (often using both of these at the same time, trapping players who try to dodge one into getting hit by the other), and a near constant party wide attack which is likely to kill resurrected players due to how much damage it does stacked with the resurrection weakness debuff. This fight is also the first fight in the MSQ that introduces the stacking marker mechanic, and said attack is a powerful three hit attack that deals high damage even when fully stacked. In other words, if you die once, you're pretty much out of the fight for good. And Halone help you if you happen to fall before the DPS check halfway through the fight.
• Shadow of Mhach alliance raid series. The Void Ark is mostly unworthy of note. Then you get to the Wiping... uh... Weeping City.:
  • Remember Ozma, the murderous marble Superboss from Final Fantasy IX? 3.3 brings it back as the penultimate boss of the Weeping City of Mhach, and it is every bit as brutal now as it was then. It rains AOEs on the party like they're going out of style, it occasionally sticks players with a bomb debuff that deals HEAVY damage if they do anything while they have it, adds will drop in as AOE meteors that need to be carefully place and killed before they self-destruct for raid-wide damage ^note that people still don't place right to this day, good luck!, one of Ozma's forms has exploding energy balls that need to be soaked up by the tanks before they self-destruct for raid-wide damage, and it's possible to fall off of the arena (thankfully Ozma itself can't kick you off, but you can walk off yourself, so gap-closing skills like Corps-a-corps and Shoulder Tackle need to be used with care). Not only that but it has several attacks that aren't telegraphed with cast bars, and you can only find out which one it's going to do by looking at how it's reshaping itself. Several small mistakes will wipe a whole party, and unless your healers have their eye on the ball one unfortunate alliance is going to get two stack markers... Its signature Doomsday attack is ironically the easiest mechanic to deal with since it's only used for a DPS check.
  • Hello again, Forgall! And he brings with him a mechanic where you have to stand in the bad. That's right. You've been training yourself to not stand in the orange, now stand in the green. But only one of them mind. Stand in two and you're just as dead as if you stood in one. And you'd only know this if you'd played Final Fantasy X, since the cast name is 'Mega Death'
  • Deathgaze, the first boss of Dun Scaith, is fought on an airship and the first thing it does as part of its introduction is knocking off the rails. Naturally this means you can fall off. Also naturally this means it'll do attacks that push you back. In addition, every single mechanic or attack can potentially wipe the raid if they aren't careful, meaning just about every part of the fight has some level of instant kill danger to watch out for and the mechanics have to be executed perfectly to avoid dying. It's arguably the hardest fight in the entire raid due to how many ways it can instantly kill you, as well as how it has to be carefully planned out to avoid causing a wipe. One of the worst attacks is when it tries to blow everyone off the stage, unless you are standing by an ice barrier. Unfortunately, you have almost zero warning - so you have to use Arm's Length or Surecast to avoid getting thrown off. An ability which most people probably never even bothered using. This is also one of the few normal difficulty bosses with an enrage. So even if the alliance manages to skirt by through the many deaths, Deathgaze will end up activating the fully fledged danger carpet and it's the Wiping City all over again.
  • Diabolos, the last boss of Dun Scaith. The boss which immediately precedes him would have probably been on this list as well, however, once Diabolos enters his second phase, Diabolos Hollow, he begins to copy her attack pattern only ramped up. To make things worse, for the first part of the battle, Diabolos Hollow has complete damage immunity and guaranteed critical hits. If that wasn't bad enough early in the patch's life people didn't realize the immunity functioned like Stoneskin and required them attack until it broke. As the battle goes on, he gets weird stack markers, and a tank stack that is nigh-on lethal even to overgeared players. The fight is also one of the longest fights in the game that isn't a Savage or Ultimate, having two full phases filled with several dangerous mechanics.
• Alexander raid series:
  • Quickthinx Allthoughts, leader of the Goblin Illuminati, engages you personally in Alexander: The Arm of the Son (Midas' third floor). The fight's difficulty comes from the sheer number of mechanics everyone needs to know. First off, he has four cages around the arena that Quickthinx drops players into, each with their own gimmick that has to be followed, or someone/everyone will die. Healers can't target people blocked off by the cages, and anyone too close to the abductee gets taken with them, which almost always ends in a wipe. Self-destructing adds also spawn during this and have to be burned down before the go off. Secondly, Quickthinx will constantly fire off party-wide damage moves, one of which is as laser with no AOE marker. Third, Quickthinx's pet cat will periodically waltz into the arena and spawn a "True Heart" which, if not destroyed before it reaches Quickthinx, will severely boost his AOE power to lethal levels, forcing the Tank to drag him around the arena so the Heart doesn't reach him. He also drops giant iron balls during this phase that do a painful 9999 damage to anyone they touch, forcing constant dodging. Fourth and finally, his "Uplander Doom" attack stacks vulnerability on the current main Tank, forcing frequent tank-swapping — not normally an issue, but he has a bad habit of doing this when the cat and iron balls are out, which can lead to keyboard/controller/whathaveyou-breaking moments if the iron balls happen to get between the off-tank and Quickthinx before he can take aggro. The whole party has to be on its toes for the whole fight, or Quickthinx can cause a wipe with little warning. Lots of players quickly called it the hardest fight of Midas, and some are just dreading what the Savage version will be like...
  • Cruise Chaser in Alexander: The Heart of the Creator, while unanimously a fun boss with a fun theme, can still be maddeningly difficult due to the coordination the party needs to survive. A large number of his attacks are AOEs, and he can throw out two of them at the same time, or even three in the later phases of the fight, so anyone unprepared to move at a moment's notice is likely to be killed - and some of these AOEs are targeted directly at players, so anyone standing beside them is likely to die too. He also spawns several types of exploding adds: a robot buddy that detonates for huge party-wide damage if it isn't burned down quickly, a pair of canister bombs that can't be destroyed and instead must be hid behind to avoid a mass confusion attack and will eventually explode for unavoidable damage, and a bunch of "Lapis Lazuli" orbs that must be burned down before he casts his Signature Move (while also throwing out a Photon before said Signature Move for good measure). Cruise Chaser's (optional) Savage incarnation is considered even harder than Savage Alexander Prime, exchanging the exploding canisters for double the AOE patterns.
  • Speaking of Alexander Prime, the last boss of the Alexander raid series is notable for having strong auto-attacks, a cleave tank buster that can almost one-shot the raid if not careful, and the fact it requires a Tank's Level 3 Limit Break to survive its ultimate attack at a specific moment to not die. The second phase of the fight involves Alexander pulling off a Time Stands Still while it teleports away somewhere and does a wide laser beam attack. As the fight progresses, its previous mechanics start stacking up with freeing time. Lastly, there's a phase where four of its minions portal out of the arena, and four members of the party must go after them. Preferably the four DPS players should go, since if any one of the minions survives, the party wipes. Basically, Alexander has a lot of mechanics that can cause a Total Party Kill, and you can get wiped out even if you're doing everything right because of another player's mistakes.

Stormblood

• Susano, the level 63 trial, has mechanics that involve good movement and/or positioning to make it easier for other players to handle. For example, one of the mechanics involves marking a player, pushing them back, and forming a thin line of safety through the marked player and the boss. If the marked player was at an unfortunate position at the time, this can cause the mechanic to damage the rest of the party. He's also a Wake-Up Call Boss because starting with Susano, failing mechanics and/or getting hit with certain attacks in a boss fight starts applying stacks of Vulnerability Up, which causes you to take more damage for each stack you have. This is very slow to remove and resets the timer if you gain any more stacks, requiring you to be on your toes at all times for overlapping AOE patterns.
• For many players who skipped Alexander, Lakshmi can be a Wake-Up Call Boss since this is the first time you have ever had to use the ATB-mechanic to survive. She'll occasionally use attacks which are each a One-Hit Kill unless the player uses their Vril to shield themselves from it, then pick up another one in the form of a glowing orb. It's not uncommon for players to have moved the ATB-mechanic part of their HUD to a different part of the interface and accidentally miss it when they pick up Vril, or even know when to use the Vril since Lakshmi's only hint (past her "Group Hug" attack) is moving to the centre of the stage. A player might take cues from everyone else using their Vril, but if they can't figure out how to use the Vril in time, they're toast.
• 4.1 has a rematch against the primal Lakshmi, as she suddenly appears right in the center of the Ala Mhigo alliance's meeting room with several of the Scions and world leaders in attendance, this time as a solo duty. The primal will constantly spawn orbs of aether that advance towards the NPCs that are behind you. If even one Echo-less NPC gets touched by the aether, they become tempered by the primal, and the quest fails. The aether clusters grow in number as the battle goes on. Although you have an NPC (and later a second NPC) helping you destroy them, your ability to attack the aether is on a short cooldown. This can be disastrous if you don't time it right or don't hit the aether when they're bunched up. With the Echo on Very Easy mode, the aether-attacking ability covers the entire arena, which makes the battle much easier. But if you don't want to take the help, it's fighting a primal along with an Escort Mission, and it's a huge headache.
• The Mist Dragon, the last boss of The Burn. This thing was a Warm-Up Boss in Final Fantasy IV; here, it's a Wake-Up Call Boss. It has several room wide attacks that are difficult to dodge, either because they are ones players end up placing themselves, or cover just about the entire arena. All of them are difficult to dodge due to the small arena, and will freeze you if caught in it, requiring another player to break you out of while also placing Vulnerability on you. It also makes ice circles on the ground which stick around for a while that usually target the tank, which limits the space you can move, and can create AOE markers that, for the first time, go out in a specific direction based off a pulsing arrow, making it hard to tell initially just where you can go to avoid it. It also has two unique phases to it. This first is where, much like IV, it turns into mist and will auto-counter any attempts to damage it in mist form. But it's also a DPS check where you must kill three dragon heads that slowly fill the arena with an AOE that, if not quickly dealt with, will hit everyone. The second phase is forcing you to find where the dive attack AOE is coming from to avoid being hit. All of these are things a Trial boss would have in difficulty, and it wipes a large number of parties simply because of how mechanically intense the fight is for a MSQ boss.
  • The above gets even worse when trying to get the dragon's Blue Magic spell, Cold Fog. Not only does it require dealing with the boss as the glassiest of glass cannons in the form of the Blue Mage, which must survive in order to learn the spell, it also requires the party to deliberately fail the DPS check, leaving the whole party frozen for ten seconds with a debuff and letting the dragon go absolutely ham on them. It's not at all uncommon to either have an unsynced party run the thing (multiple times if necessary), running a mixed BLU/tank/healer party to carry the Blue Mages, or a combination of the two. It says a lot that many players save this spell until after the Masked Carnivale, which rewards Blue Mages with their only resurrection spell.
• Also in 4.4 is a solo duty where you have to fight Sadu. She uses some Villainous Valor to keep getting back up after beating her, each time having slightly more HP than the last. Most of this isn't that bad, but her last phase automatically puts a strict one-minute time limit on the fight before an instant kill meteor impacts. The problem is this phase also has her spamming all the AOE gimmicks she has been using throughout the fight at once, leading to a frantic situation where the player has to not only avoid the stacking AOEs but do enough damage to her in time. Even if she does Cast from Hit Points to revive her adds, there is barely any time to even rely on that. Immediately after the fight with Sadu, you have to play as Y'shtola in a fight against Magnai where you also have to make sure Hien stays alive. While this part is thankfully more merciful, wiping out at any point means starting at Sadu all over again.
• Proto Ozma, the final boss of the already-brutal Baldesion Arsenal, takes and scales up all of the mechanics from its predecessor from the Weeping City of Mhach^note the only change is that the Cube's exploding orbs are now a Tank mechanic, as Baldesion Arsenal can have more than three Tanks) and then adds a few more to the mix. The first is a new transformation, "Stellation" (star), that does not follow the aggro table and requires the party to stack for its auto-attacks, and has an attack that deals heavy knockback on what is already a narrow fighting arena. Second, Ozmashades will periodically spawn at the back of the platforms and perform one of the three transformation attacks in conjunction with Proto Ozma's attacks, creating some vicious mechanics dances. Last but certainly not least, the base Sphere form is no longer a breather phase, capable of shaving half of the Main-Tank's HP off with a single auto-attack, and more importantly requiring everyone to stand on buttons around the arena to get a buff so that Proto Ozma's Black Hole doesn't evict people from the dungeon. This is especially painful due to Baldesion Arsenal's limit to how many boss attacks you can be hit by and its restriction on revive skills, so if you're dead when Sphere comes up, you're screwed. And if one of the buttons goes unpressed, everyone is screwed.
• Return to Ivalice alliance raid series:
  • Hashmal, the second boss, is considered to be the most difficult boss of The Royal City of Rabanastre. Many of his attacks can cleave and will probably instantly kill anyone that is not a tank. Hashmal will also charge up an attack that will have one of his arms light on fire and if you are not on the opposite side, his attack will either instantly kill you or do heavy damage and give you a heavily damaging Burns debuff that will kill you after one or two ticks. Hashmal will also summon two pillars that he will cut down and will instantly kill anyone that gets squashed by them. Following that, the boss will bring up a command tower that must be destroyed quickly or his ultimate attack will kill everyone instantly. Not only is this sequence a DPS check, Sand Spheres will also appear as a second DPS check where they will cause heavy damage to the entire alliance if they're not destroyed in time. If more than one Sand Sphere goes off, it's probably an instant wipe. Complicating matters further, Hashmal will also summon two golems that will spam hard hitting AOE attacks that will only grow stronger every time, so the alliance needs to burn them down quickly before everyone dies. It's not unheard of for alliances to use their limit breaks on the golems just to prevent any more damage going out. Uncoordinated parties generally fail here.
  • Construct 7 in the Ridorana Lighthouse raid is considered to be tough for two reasons. One, it has an attack that shoots Frickin' Laser Beams in a circular motion which will kill you if you don't outrun it plus the boss uses it for a longer duration in the second part of the fight. Two, the boss has a lot of AOEs as well as attacks that will target random players that will also hurt others standing near them. Three, it will use a gimmick where it reduces everyone's HP to single or double digits and then require you to stand in a circle (marked with one, two, three, and four dots) that boosts your HP by a certain number while doing multiplication math problems, such as requiring your HP to be in multiples of four. Botching it will have the boss's follow up attack either hurt a lot or just outright kill you. In the later portions of the fight, not only does the boss bring back the multiplication gimmick, you also have to use prime numbers!
  • Remember Cidolfus Orlandeau, the Game-Breaker of a Cool Old Guy from Final Fantasy Tactics? Boss 3 of Orbonne Monastery. The Thunder God has a huge number of mechanics that can catch many first time players off guard. He starts the fight with Cleansing Strike, which brings the entire alliance down to just 1 HP and inflicts Doom, which will kill everyone in 10 seconds unless they are healed back to max HP. The boss also auto attacks all of the tanks at once constantly, so healers from every alliance have to keep on top of healing their tanks. The Thunder God will then use several attacks which requires players to be positioned in certain ways; he can either attack the outermost portion of the arena, the innermost portion of the arena, attack one whole section (circular areas) of the arena, or attack whole sections one by one. Next up, his Crush Weapon attack will mark someone and they have to constantly run away as the attack will follow them and hit multiple times, which will kill the player in 2 or 3 hits if they can't avoid it. Crush Helm has all the tanks suffer Magic Vulnerability Up, which makes the next attack very likely to kill them unless the tanks have their defensive moves popped up and/or the healer removes the debuff in time. Another attack the boss has needs everyone to stand in a circle (3 per circle) to minimize damage from his next attack, which will get a damage increases if there are not enough people standing in the circles. Another attack he'll use involves a mechanic similar to Ozma where the boss will drop an AOE circle on a player and if the circles touch each other, the entire alliance will get hit for big damage and a bleeding debuff. He has a tether attack that contrary to what might seem logical cannot be grabbed by the tank. It is a multi-hitting attack that applies a defense down buff, and one to two stacks of it will cause the tank to be melted by the boss's auto attacks. It has to be passed between the DPS and healers between each strike to be successfully handled. Lastly, the boss will use Crush Accessory where the entire platform is covered in damaging ice and each alliance then has to kill the Icewolves that appear or they'll explode for massive alliance-wide damage. Needless to say, the Thunder God quickly grew notorious for being a PUG killer, so much so that the devs went out of their way to nerf him in Patch 5.21—and even with those nerfs, he can still ruin an unprepared party's day.
• While technically it might qualify as a Final Boss, 4.56 brings us the resurrection of Zenos yae Galvus, via Ascian, which involves a very lengthy (if simple) fight where the player takes control of Hien until the Warrior of Light can do their Big Damn Heroes thing. From there, the fight requires a hard DPS check which is very difficult for a lot of classes, a check which outpaces even the aforementioned Sadu fight. And if the player fails the DPS check, they have to do the Hien part all over again. Thankfully, these days it's a simple task to get gear which makes the check trivial, but upon release it required a lot of grinding or an answered prayer to even have a chance.

Shadowbringers

• The third fight against Ran'jit has you playing as Thancred, who is defending Minfilia. This battle is difficult not just because Ran'jit is a Damage-Sponge Boss, but because there's a lot of mechanics that make the whole fight feel like a drag. Thancred doesn't deal much damage as a Gunbreaker, forces you to rely on a recharging potion to recover HP, and occasionally needs to go invisible to avoid being detected by Ran'jit. The whole time, Ran'jit will still be spamming large AOE attacks that cover a lot of the arena. You'll need to dodge for a few seconds and position yourself before using the Duty Action to end the effect and deal a sizable chunk of damage. If you get hit at any point while Thancred is invisible, the invisibility will wear off, and you've got to try it all over again. In addition to Ran'jit hitting like a truck, the sheer amount of HP he has means it really feels like the fight should end ten minutes before it actually does. It's not uncommon to hear people switching to "Very Easy" mode for this Duty not just because of its difficulty, but because they just want it to be over with as quick as possible.
• Lightwarden Titania, the first Trial boss of Shadowbringers, earned a fairly infamous status not long after the expansion's release:
  • Their abilities when solo are fairly straightforward, with their most dangerous attack in phase one being a wide cleaving tankbuster that can easily cause deaths if the tank isn't paying attention. The add phase, on the other hand, is very difficult because three adds are summoned and must be killed.
  • This is one of the first times outside of "Extreme" or "Savage" that both tanks have to tank something at once - and spread out. This puts pressure on the healers, who also have to watch the DPS burn down the third add, which is a rarity for this particular game. What's worse is that if the party happens to be squishy (which is very likely due to the number of magic and ranged DPS) meaning the boss will chew through them like paper and force the tanks to blow cooldowns best reserved for the next phase.
  • And what's more, once the adds are taken down, they're revived with increased size, health, and damage - and the group only has until Titania's Ultimate bar reaches 100 to kill them, or else the party wipes and it's time to start over. Most parties will require a Limit Break to deal with the adds in time; the DPS check is tight considering Titania's normal mode is fought relatively early in the Shadowbringers story, requiring players to be aware of how to best deal damage while staying mobile enough to deal with the AoE attacks from both Titania and their summoned adds as well as multiple stacking mechanics. The fight is therefore something of a Wake-Up Call Boss for newer players who either coasted through older fights with overgeared parties or else boosted their accounts to 70, skipping all the content that came before.
• From the Eden raid series:
  • The Voidwalker on the second floor gave people trouble for weeks even when people had little to no trouble with the other floors. The reason is its main gimmick is a huge trolling one. While the Voidwalker casts the usual single target area AOEs, stackup markers, and look-away mechanics, it does them with a delay added to it. That is, it appears to be casting the spell, but it won't actually go off until seconds later. This totally trips up players who up until this point are used to acting immediately to the mechanic. But since the mechanic doesn't actually go off right away, they often go back to their rotations, not realizing they have to do something later or they forget what they're supposed to do.
  • The Idol of Darkness on the seventh floor tended to trip people up with two mechanics. One of them is something the boss does that teleports your character in a certain direction. This isn't so bad the first time around as you just have to make sure you don't fall off the arena. But other times this happens requires you to make sure you teleport in a safe zone due to an AOE about to go off. The second is more of an amalgamation of mechanics. The gist of it is the boss will send four-columns of bird-things across the arena in a certain order. These birds may go into color-coordinated portals. Naturally you have to remember which teleporter was taken in which order to dodge. Then it has a mechanic where the players are given a light or dark debuff and the birds have a light or dark element to them. The player has to be hit with the opposite color. Which isn't so bad until this combines with the portal mechanic and the debuff you have switches to the other color (so a light-debuffed player has to get hit with a dark elemental bird wave, which gives them a dark debuff). The portal mechanic is despised by many in the community because it requires micro-managing knowing what portal connects where, what portal the birds went through, which birds went first, and what element you have, all at the same time. As such, it ends up being seen as an extremely difficult fight that causes a ton of wipes.
  • The 11th floor has Fatebreaker, whose fight consists of gimmicky mechanics with almost no "standard" mechanics. The gist of it is they indicate an element they're using, followed by the attack itself. This starts of as a combination of three possible mechanics and two elements. But halfway through the fight it adds a third element (though it only affects two of the mechanics). And the elements are chosen more or less randomly, so you have to pay attention to what element its using prior to the mechanic, which can be easily overlooked if you're tunnel visioning or there's a ton of stuff going on. In addition it brings back the mechanic from Mist Dragon where it obscures the arena and you have find a safe spot by running around the arena, finding out where it's at (Fatebreaker won't be visible unless you're basically on the edge of the arena close to it), and standing where it's not at.
• The boss from the Seat of Sacrifice Trial, the Warrior of Light Elidibus. He has a lot of powerful moves that the player needs to be careful of, ranging from fire debuffs that deal tremendous damage if you move, to summoning a Dragon to attack half of the arena. About a third of the way through the first phase, he employs not one but two mechanics that can easily cause a Total Party Kill. The first is a button-mashing Quick Time Event where if even one player fails, the entire party dies. This is followed by the boss using his own Limit Break, which outright requires a Tank's Level 3 Limit Break as a counter in order to barely survive it. If the Tanks are new or forget to fire off the LB3, it's another wipe, and you go right back to the start of the battle to do it all over again. Thankfully, there's a checkpoint if you wipe after surviving the boss's Limit Break, though it can be a small mercy considering he adds even more frantic attacks and gets summons that can do even more additional mechanics.
• Red Comet, the Red Chocobo from Bozja, is the absolute bane of the Southern Front. Every one of its attacks is a potential One-Hit Kill, and the AOEs of its attacks are everywhere, giving very little room to dodge without getting blasted to the Seven Hells and back. Players who know how to fight it still fear it, and anyone going into it blind is likely going to die repeatedly. Using Reflect can protect you from most of its attacks, but you'll still gain stacks of Vulnerability Up every time you are hit, making you into a Glass Cannon if you get hit when you're not under Reflect — plus, if you want a chance at dueling Lyon, you have to do those mechanics correctly and not get a single Vulnerability Up stack at all, so cheesing it with Reflect is out of the question.
• Trinity Avowed is considered the hardest boss of the Delubrum Reginae raid for several reasons. For starters, many of their AOE attacks cover a huge area and give little warning before they go off. Getting hit with them twice results in an incurable Doom debuff that will kill you in seconds. Then there is their Hot and Cold mechanic, which gives every player a status effect that makes them either too hot or too cold. Players need to balance their temperatures by intentionally getting hit with an attack of the same intensity but opposite temperature, with failure to do so resulting in death. This is made harder by the confusing forms these attacks can take. One form forces the whole party to stay on one end of the arena while the attacks travel down a Ghost Leg Lottery path. Another form has them stand in the middle of the room and slash everything on one side of them with a flaming/freezing sword: which side they will strike is indicated by their raised sword, which can be difficult to make out against their busy character model. All of these traits add up to an extremely lethal boss where a single misstep can spell your doom.
• The YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse raid series is based off of NieR: Automata, including several characters, enemies, and bosses from the Drakengard and NieR franchises. Even if you know what you're doing, the entire series is brutal.
  • The Puppet's Bunker has two in particular.
    • The second boss fight is against three flying ships: 724P-operated Superior Flight Unit (A-lpha), 767P-operated Superior Flight Unit (B-eta), and 772P-operated Superior Flight Unit (C-hi). Each alliance is responsible for one corresponding to the first letter of the boss's name; until one of them is defeated, the other alliances can't even damage the other units (ex. A-lpha can be damaged by Alliance A, but attacks from Alliance B or C will do nothing). There's several mechanics that can be spilled into the area where the other parties are at, and a number of the AOE markers are hard to properly avoid as a result of the enclosed area each Alliance has. Infamously, a line stack-up mechanic where the boss shoots out a laser. If this is aimed at another party, expect that party to have several fatalities due to taking two (or more) lasers. Not helping is that it an attack where all three will summon a sword, and attack everything on that side, meaning you need to figure out where all three blades are aiming to avoid being hit.
    • The third boss fight, 905P-operated Heavy Artillery Unit. It also has "aimable" lasers, one is a conal that targets several DPS players, the other marks two tanks with a tank busting beam. Another mechanic has it mark three players, jumping on them with an small AOE, with the last person targeted becoming the safe zone as the boss immediately does a donut-style AOE attack after. So while the targeted players have to get away from the alliance, they can't stray too far because the safe zone will be out of reach. Then there's the cavalcade of arena-based mechanics that require spatial awareness, ranging from bullets, Pods that strike the arena based on the program that is uploaded, and circles that require a certain amount of players to soak damage, or they risk hurting the entire alliance.
  • The Tower at Paradigm's Breach is the final of three parts, and it's appropriately difficult. However, the Red Girl is tough even by that standard. Besides shooting out the same red orbs as other bosses in the raid, she also requires you to learn about white and black coloring; black destroys white, and white destroys black. This is important, as Warriors of Light need to destroy certain color blocks to escape otherwise-inescapable One-Hit Kill attacks by attuning to the right color and smashing the blocks. Halfway through, the Red Girl also turns you into tiny polygonal ships, making the fight into an Unexpected Shmup Level where you have to navigate the ship and destroy a core before the fight can keep going. Finally, there's zones around the arena that instantly kill you the moment you touch them. And the Red Girl may become a puppetmaster to force you to move in a direction towards these kill floors, while you can do nothing but watch it happen. It's not a question of if you'll die, but how many times you'll die. Also, several players who played the raid shortly after the release of patch 5.55 reported experiencing seizure-like symptoms from this fight, including motion sickness, nausea, headaches, dizziness, and vomiting. While Square Enix quickly issued a patch to correct the problem, the fact is that this fight might physically hurt you to play it.

Endwalker

• Zodiark, your first Trial boss even incomplete as he is, lives up to his reputation of being a serious threat. While his basic attacks that either cover half of the arena or shoot out in a cone aren't too hard to deal with, soon enough he starts trapping the field and then rotating it around without being able to move once he starts the flip — if you don't carefully position yourself, most DPS and Healer classes will die. Then he starts weaving multiple attacks together, and it becomes an utter nightmare of balancing and juggling everything at once. He's also a boss that has a repeated attack stack, and it hurts; if your party doesn't have the defenses and the healers don't work the whole time it's going off, people will drop like flies as it hits like an absolute truck, over and over for several seconds.
• Hermes, from the dungeon Ktisis Hyperboreia wreaks havoc with wind magic that, in addition to dealing the usual damage, can toss players around the arena - potentially knocking them into other AoE attacks and taking even more damage, or into the outskirts of the arena, where they'll continuously take damage until they move closer to the center again. Later in the fight, he'll start casting True Bravery (which ups his damage output considerably for his next few attacks), before following it up with Trimegistus, which deals unavoidable damage to all party members. Fortunately, he can be interrupted by stunning him while he's casting True Bravery. Unfortunately, most players probably won't have stunning abilities mapped to their hotbars, since most bosses stopped using interruptable spells after A Realm Reborn. He'll drop meteors onto the field, which the players will need to hide behind in order to avoid a massive blast of air he sends across the arena, then rotate around the rock to avoid the second blast of air. Not too terrible, except that all but one of the meteor rocks will have cracks in them, causing them to be destroyed after the first blast and leaving players wide open to the second if they picked the wrong rock to take shelter behind. But worst of all? In addition to the usual vulnerable stacks that almost every boss adds to players who fail the mechanics, this boss adds an incurable status ailment to any player who gets hit by his wind strikes, causing them to take significant damage over time until the effect ends, giving healers even more to deal with in addition to all of the above. Perhaps its appropriate then that Hermes later becomes Fandaniel, who is controlling Zodiark during the above trial.
• Hydaelyn, the last trial before the Final Boss of Endwalker, uses massive AOEs that hit like a truck with the gas pedal floored. The boss starts with attacks that are signaled with red, green, or blue images; red means get close, green means get far away, and blue means stand diagonal. Mess up any one of them, and you'll be lucky to survive, since you've only got about 1.5 seconds to move to the right spot. There's also a double-tankbuster, which needs both tanks to get close to each other; one tank trying to brace the hit isn't enough, since it's going to be a One-Hit Kill even with mitigations fired off. Halfway through, the boss will start summoning waves that sweep the field, which are slow-moving projectiles that can hit multiple times. The waves can hit the same player multiple times, and multiple waves are summoned at once, requiring you to do a very delicate dance to avoid them all. And when the boss gets low on health, multiple waves and stacking mechanics will start being applied at the same time. This will leave the entire party running for dear life, and give the healers barely any time to fire off their spells for the damage that can't be avoided just to keep everyone alive, since even one mistake is almost a guaranteed death.
• The Hippokampos, the second boss of Pandæmonium Asphodelos, is widely considered the hardest boss of the raid set due to a combination of powerful and consistent AOE attacks, overlapping mechanics, and the small arena you have to work with. The bosses main mechanics are that its head will throw out an AOE in the direction it faces, while the body does an AOE centered on its self, requiring the party to move to the opposite of the head, while staying just far enough from the body to avoid being hit by the AOE, and an attack where all but four grates and the connecting walkways become flooded with water that inflicts a painful DOT who steps in it, which limits the amount of space you have. The boss cycles through between AOE markers the raid has to separate to avoid overlapping, stacks that require stacking together to not take damage, and a stacking Tankbuster that both tanks have to stack in, while still confined to a small area to walk, and having to still watch out for the head and body AOE mechanic. The boss also has a nasty proximity attack that it uses right before a party wide stack as well, meaning if players aren't prepared, the tank can potentially kill their party. It also loves throwing out powerful room wide and unavoidable AOE attacks that can almost one-shot anyone who isn't at full HP. All of these mechanics combined make it very easy to die and snowball into a party wipe due to having so many mechanics to worry about in what are tiny pathways to move through.
• Hegemone, the boss of the Sixth Circle of Abyssos, is easily one of the hardest fights of the four Abyssos raids. The boss will periodically cast Aetheric Polyominoid to make the tiles of the zone into danger floors, and may also cast Aetherial Exchange to cause the tiles to tether in pairs, and swap just before they fire off. Choros Ixou is an attack which will cover half the arena in a massive blast, which is almost a One-Hit Kill in terms of damage. There's also Transmission, where the boss tethers to players, and they will be infected with a Glossomorph debuff. At the resolution of the debuff, players will be frozen in place and fire a conal AoE that reaches across the arena, dealing high damage. It's pretty easy to avoid this by just turning to face the edge of the arena when Transmission fires off, but anyone who doesn't know it's coming is going to be in for a nasty surprise the first time it happens. Finally, there is Strophe Ixou, where the boss rotates and fires off cone AoEs that either cause Confusion or another Glossmorph debuff in addition to causing Vulnerability Up. If you're hit by Confusion, you're stuck in place for a few seconds, which will almost certainly mean getting hit by Strophe Ixou more than once, which will almost certainly mean death. And naturally, all of these attacks start to stack as the boss gets lower in health, leaving you with very little room to maneuver and even less time to make decisions about where you need to stand.
• The boss of the Storm's Crown trial in patch 6.2, the Empress of Winds, Barbariccia, from Final Fantasy IV. The boss starts out by using wide AOE attacks that cover the entire arena, which can easily trip up someone who's never done the raid before. Partway through the fight, the boss will also trap four pairs of players in circles that will heavily reduce their movement speed even while they're in the circle, cause a damage-over-time debuff if they leave the circle, and fire off more AOE attacks while they're trapped. That would all be bad enough, but then the boss goes One-Winged Angel, and that's when the fight really starts. In addition to harder AOE patterns, the boss sends them out in hectic, rapid-fire fashion. There's no cast bars and no timers for any of these moves, making it something of an Interface Screw on top of being punishing. In fact, the boss fires off these moves so quickly that caster DPS classes like Red Mages or Black Mages become nearly unusuable, simply because there's almost nowhere to stand to cast a single spell, much less a spot to build up any kind of offensive momentum. Finally, this phase also summons mini-tornadoes that can knock you into the air, which can drop you directly into another AOE attack, leaving you unable to react in time. And the boss brings back the binding mechanic too, while all of this chaos is flying at you at high speed. There's even a few attacks that you can't predict even if you know what you're doing, because where the attacks will fire off is random, so even repeated runs of this boss might catch you off-guard. All this means that the chaotic second half of the fight is one where you can't let your focus drop for an instant if you're trying to keep yourself or your team alive.
• 6.4's trial Golbez can catch a lot of first timers off guard who might not be paying attention to his specific casts and positioning. For one the boss several times in the fight can cast Crescent Slash, a huge cleave that hits the entire arena in front of the boss and has little tells aside from its cast timer. The real challenge though comes from after a third of the way through the fight where he starts doing rapid tandem attacks with the Azdaja turned Obsidian Dragon requiring both careful watch on what the boss is casting and where the dragon is going to end up. Another difficult attack is his wind orb attack which he creates four clones that each summon a series of wind orbs where the party has to position before each side goes off. What side goes off first though is the order of the creation of the clones, which can be very easy to miss at first.