~17 MIN
Intro
Savage raiding in FFXIV has gone through a huge evolution. Some fights feel simple by modern standards, some introduced mechanics that shaped raid design for years, and some were so annoying that you’d gladly skip them in weekly reclears if the group agreed.
In this article, we’re following a full savage-fight ranking discussion and turning it into a clear, structured breakdown. The focus here is not on adding outside lore or rewriting history—it’s on preserving the core points of the original discussion while making them easier to read, compare, and use.
The ranking logic is simple:
- Skip it in weeklies = a fight so annoying or weak that you’d rather not do it at all
- It’s okay, I guess = functional, but not especially memorable
- Good = enjoyable and well-designed overall
- Great = strong encounter design with standout ideas
- Brute Justice tier = the very top, reserved for all-time greats
One important note before getting into the list: Coil Savage is intentionally skipped here at the start. The reasoning is that it works very differently from later savage design, so it makes more sense to come back to it after building a clearer baseline with the fights that followed.
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How the Ranking Approaches Savage Fights
The discussion doesn’t judge fights only by raw difficulty. A raid can be hard and still not be especially fun. Another can be mechanically simple but historically important or uniquely designed.
That means the ranking looks at several things at once:
- how interesting the mechanics are
- whether the fight feels memorable
- how much player agency it gives
- whether it introduced ideas later raids built on
- how painful it feels in practice, especially during weekly clears
That approach matters because FFXIV savage fights are rarely judged by just one metric. Some are great because they are clean execution checks. Others are great because they create real chaos while still remaining solvable. And some are memorable for the wrong reasons.
A1S – Oppressor
Verdict: It’s okay, I guess
Oppressor comes across as the definition of average. It works, it has structure, and it does ask the group to handle a few important ideas correctly, but it never feels especially inspired.
The core mechanic revolves around alarms that drop puddles. Those puddles shrink things that touch them, causing them to take more damage and deal less. At first that looks like a simple hazard, but later the mechanic becomes relevant because the group uses those puddles to shrink incoming nuclear bombs and make the raidwide survivable.
Alongside that, the fight introduces the second Oppressor. The bosses need to be tanked apart and killed at roughly the same time, because one will enrage when the other dies. That is the heart of the encounter. Outside of that, it’s tank busters, AoEs, and a few pressure points.
The main criticism is that the encounter is not especially interesting. Its difficulty mostly comes from damage output and timing variation rather than from especially creative design. It feels serviceable, but not defining. It sets a baseline, not a high point.
A2S – The Gobwalker Add Fight
Verdict: Skip it in weeklies
This is one of the strangest fights in the set because there is no traditional boss. The encounter is built around waves of adds and the use of Gobwalkers.
Players can jump into Gobwalkers and use their actions to control bombs, crowd control certain adds, weaken others, and generally solve the encounter’s resource puzzle. The challenge is figuring out which Gobwalker tools should be used on which enemies and at what time without wasting those limited actions.
That idea is genuinely interesting. A player acting as support through a mech instead of through normal combat skills is a cool concept. In theory, that kind of encounter could have been a unique branch of FFXIV raid design.
But the execution does not live up to the concept. One of the big complaints is that players in the Gobwalker often end up barely engaging with the fight in a satisfying way. In the example being discussed, one player is basically just standing there after finishing what the Gobwalker needed to do. That kills the energy of the encounter.
So while the idea gets credit, the actual weekly-clear experience does not. Pragmatically, this is the kind of floor many groups would happily skip.
A3S – Living Liquid
Verdict: Brute Justice tier
Living Liquid is treated as one of the most important and most memorable savage fights in the game’s history.
This encounter stands out because it feels like a turning point. Earlier savage fights often looked more like old MMO raid design, but Living Liquid starts moving toward more distinct phase-based structure. Instead of learning one mechanic loop, players are effectively learning multiple different fights in sequence.
The fight is also remembered as a brutal wall. It demanded strong DPS, strong healing, and real consistency. It was tight everywhere.
Several major mechanics introduced here would go on to become iconic. Hand of Pain is one of the clearest examples: hands must be handled in relation to one another, and failing that relationship causes disaster. The fight also includes a tornado phase where Living Liquid becomes untargetable and the raid instead has to manage other enemies while dealing with crowd control and pressure. It also brings in magnets and other layered interactions that later became familiar parts of raid language.
What really elevates Living Liquid is not just that it is hard. It is that the fight creates an intricate dance out of mechanics that are individually understandable. That is often the mark of strong encounter design in FFXIV. The pieces are simple enough to identify, but when combined they become demanding and memorable.
One especially brutal moment is the phase where a healer effectively gets removed from play. That pushes healing pressure even further and adds another layer to the encounter’s identity.
In the ranking, this is peak savage design—historically influential, mechanically memorable, and still one of the most respected fights in the discussion.
A4S – The Legs, Dolls, Nisi, and Pentacles Fight
Verdict: It’s okay, I guess
This fight gets a much more mixed reaction.
Its core structure revolves around killing the boss’s legs one by one. Every time one leg dies, the others heal, and the group gets a short opportunity to damage the core. That alone already creates a stop-start rhythm that feels different from standard boss fights.
From there, the fight layers in several mechanics. Jagd Dolls and other adds have to be handled carefully. Doll feeding appears here in an early form, where enemies are brought into another add and exploded based on remaining HP rather than through a simple pass-fail binary. Nisi also makes its first major appearance. Two versions exist, and if they touch, they explode. The group has to maintain them for a long time, trading them repeatedly while also surviving the damage-over-time pressure they bring.
That Nisi maintenance is what gives the fight its strongest identity. Later, the raid uses Nisi to soak pentacles and avoid enrage conditions. So players are spending minutes preserving the ability to solve a later mechanic, all while under constant damage pressure.
That said, the overall opinion lands in the middle. The fight does some things wrong, even if Nisi management itself is considered genuinely interesting. It is not treated as bad, but it is not placed among the greats either. The best way to describe it is that it has one memorable system surrounded by a fight that never fully rises above “okay.”
A5S – The Transformation Puzzle Fight
Verdict: Good
This encounter earns praise for being a real puzzle fight with player agency.
The boss shifts between large and small forms, and damage optimization changes depending on that state. At the center of the arena is a pole that spawns puddles in the cardinal directions, each tied to a different transformation or utility effect. One clears poison, others transform players into different forms, and those forms are then used to solve the encounter’s mechanics.
Bombs appear in patterns and can be manipulated into more manageable outcomes. Adds behave in different ways. The minotaur wants to eat nearby pigs and gets dangerously strong if allowed to do so. Later, poison from a snake becomes part of the solution to killing that same minotaur. Another enemy uses gaze mechanics. Multiple small systems overlap, but each one is learnable.
What makes the fight stand out is that there are multiple valid ways to approach its problems. It does not feel like one rigid dance where there is only one accepted answer. That freedom, combined with clear mechanical identity, makes it memorable in a good way.
It also benefits from having movement, puzzle-solving, and timing all matter without becoming unreadable. That balance is why it lands in the “good” tier.
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A6S – The Four-Boss Sequence
Verdict: Great
This fight is built around four bosses fought back to back: Blaster, Brawler, Swindler, and Vortexer. If you wipe to one of them, you go all the way back to the beginning. That structure alone gives the encounter a lot of identity.
Each boss brings its own mechanics. There are mines and hidden mines, clone dives, arm-based tells, cannons, drills, orbs, arithmetic-style height mechanics, enumerations, thunder and water interactions, and more. Each segment has its own internal rules, and then the fight asks the group to chain them together.
The result is a fight with strong variety. It feels like a sequence of self-contained challenges rather than a single repeated pattern. That makes it exciting, but still coherent enough to judge positively.
It is also positioned clearly above A5S in the ranking. The speaker uses that comparison directly: A5S is good, but A6S is better, so A6S has to sit higher.
That is why it lands in “great.” It is mechanically diverse, distinct, and memorable without feeling like chaos for the sake of chaos.
A7S – The Jail Fight
Verdict: It’s okay, I guess
A7S is viewed as the weakest fight in its raid tier, even though it still has some creative ideas.
Its defining mechanic is the jail system. Different jails do different things, and different roles are better suited to handling each one. One involves being unable to move while dealing with an add. Another includes knockback pressure. A green jail requires standing on a poison vent to stop the entire raid from being affected. The encounter constantly asks the group to get the right people into the right jails and resolve them correctly while everything else continues.
That is a decent idea on paper. But the final opinion is that the jails are simply not very interesting, especially given that they are the encounter’s signature mechanic. The tier around it is praised for offering lots of choices and multiple ways to solve problems, but A7S itself does not make the most of that strength.
So while it still has useful mechanics and some identity, it does not rise above “okay.”
A8S – Brute Justice
Verdict: Brute Justice tier
Brute Justice is treated as untouchable at the top. In this ranking, there is no tier above it.
The encounter earns that spot because it feels like a culmination. It combines major robot mechanics, trios, hidden phases, layered debuff handling, timing, execution pressure, and spectacle. It also has enormous emotional value in the discussion, being described as a favorite savage raid and one of the all-time greats.
The fight asks players to handle all kinds of mechanics in sequence and combination: numbers that dictate how many hits players need to take, jail handling, HP requirements for tanks, orb and tornado interactions, chakrams, enumerations, water mechanics, and more. Everyone has something slightly different to do, and many of the solutions depend on carefully balancing debuff counts and timing.
That kind of complexity could easily become unreadable, but here it instead becomes the encounter’s strength. It feels demanding in a satisfying way.
There is also a big emphasis on the hidden savage-only surprise factor. At the time, seeing Brute Justice reveal more than expected was a huge community moment. That spectacle matters. A top-tier fight is not just solved by math—it is remembered because it creates a real reaction.
For this ranking, Brute Justice is not merely great. It is the benchmark.
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A9S – The Add-Tether and Lava Quadrant Fight
Verdict: Skip it in weeklies
This is one of the few fights the discussion openly labels as bad.
The boss sits in the middle, adds tether toward him, and the raid has to prevent those adds from being consumed. The main mechanic involves activating devices to bring the adds to life and then killing them in the correct quadrant of the arena so environmental hazards destroy them instead of allowing the boss to absorb them.
There is also the Full Metal Faust segment, which adds pressure and hits hard. The lava quadrant rotates over time, so the group must decide where and when to kill Faust based on damage output and arena state. Later, an alarm appears and drops a shrinking puddle, which the group uses to survive Double Scrapline by becoming small enough to avoid a full-arena hit.
That all sounds more interesting than the final ranking suggests, but the verdict is still harsh. The speaker describes being very disappointed by the fight and reaching the point of calling it outright bad rather than merely mediocre. That is why it drops to the bottom tier.
Not every fight with moving parts ends up fun. In this case, the whole package just does not come together in a satisfying way.
A10S – The Telegraph and Button Fight
Verdict: It’s okay, I guess
A10S centers around readable telegraphs and arena buttons.
The boss uses four main telegraphs tied to different responses: stack, spread, in, and out. Sometimes those happen back to back. Around the arena are buttons that root players, fire ice along the sides, or bring hammers down. At certain moments the boss spins around the arena, and players have to bait that motion properly before using the ice mechanic to “cool him down.”
There is also knockback handling tied to the root effect, and the fight spends much of its runtime repeating recognizable patterns.
The discussion acknowledges that this fight does have some cool ideas—especially the spinning fire-based section—but the overall impression is still only average. It works, it is readable, and it has some execution value, but it is not strong enough to be pushed into “good.”
So this is another solid-but-unspectacular savage floor.
A11S – Cruise Chaser
Verdict: Great
Cruise Chaser gets a strong ranking because it is a high-execution fight that stays fun.
The fight includes optical-sight style patterns, add management, limit cut, photons that reduce players to 1 HP, and tower protection during the final phase. One of the most interesting parts is how damage thresholds matter. Push the boss too little and you get a nasty phase you do not want. Push too hard at the wrong time and you skip the wrong mechanics. That gives optimization real meaning.
The tower mechanic at the end is also a highlight. Three towers each have health, and incoming mechanics gradually wear them down. Some damage is unavoidable, but some can be assigned or redirected intelligently. That means the group has agency in deciding which tower to preserve and which one can be allowed to suffer.
The verdict here is that the fight may not be the deepest puzzle encounter, but it is a very fun execution fight. Clean movement, consistency, damage control, and group coordination all matter. That is enough to earn “great.”
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A12S – The Final Alexander Fight
Verdict: Great
A12S closes the sequence on a very strong note.
The fight opens with an add phase that hits hard and quickly asks the group to prioritize targets. Killing enemies fast enough directly changes incoming raid damage, so early execution matters. Later sections bring in defamation-style puzzles, stack and distance mechanics, radiant-style in mechanics, role-based jails, crystal setup, invisibility interactions, and a notoriously tense late mechanic that many groups simply wanted to skip rather than learn properly.
One of the standout points is the crystal setup phase. Crystals pulse when the boss comes near them, which means players can use them to track the boss after he teleports and becomes invisible. That kind of environmental information system is clever and gives the fight an extra layer of planning.
The late section is especially feared because it comes at the end, after a long fight, and layers huge amounts of movement, puddles, stacks, raidwide damage, and other pressure together. That design is memorable, but also punishing enough that it influenced how later fights were built. The takeaway from the discussion is that this mechanic was scary enough to shape future encounter philosophy.
That combination of pressure, memorable execution, and strong mechanical identity is why A12S lands in “great.”
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The Final Ranking at a Glance
Based on the discussion, the Alexander savage fights land like this:
Brute Justice Tier
- A3S – Living Liquid
- A8S – Brute Justice
Great
- A6S
- A11S – Cruise Chaser
- A12S
Good
-
A5S
It’s Okay, I Guess
- A1S – Oppressor
- A4S
- A7S
- A10S
Skip It in Weeklies
- A2S
- A9S
What This Ranking Says About FFXIV Savage Design
One of the most interesting conclusions from the discussion is that even the lower-ranked fights are often still decent by the standards of FFXIV raiding as a whole. The bottom of this list is not full of disasters. It is mostly full of fights that are merely average when compared to very strong company.
That says a lot about the game’s raid design. Even when a fight is placed in “it’s okay, I guess,” it often still has at least one mechanic worth remembering. The real dividing line is whether the whole encounter comes together in a satisfying way.
The best fights here do a few things particularly well:
- they create memorable execution without becoming random
- they build layered pressure out of understandable mechanics
- they give players meaningful assignments and agency
- they leave a lasting impression long after progression ends
That is why Living Liquid and Brute Justice sit above the rest. They are not just hard. They are defining.
Final Thoughts
Looking back at these savage fights makes one thing clear: not every raid becomes a classic, but the best ones shape how players think about the game for years.
Some fights are worth revisiting because they introduced mechanics that later became raid staples. Some are worth remembering because they were full of choice and player agency. And some are remembered because they were such a pain that skipping them in weekly reclears felt like the smartest strategy possible.
If there is one consistent lesson here, it is that the most beloved savage encounters are the ones that combine challenge, identity, and execution into something unforgettable.
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