Yoshi-P Offers A More Detailed Explanation On Final Fantasy Savage Raid Changes

During the last update, the Final Fantasy XIV team made a significant change to the Pandaemonium Abyssos: The Eighth Circle Savage raid, adjusting the boss's HP. At the time of the update, the patch notes explained that due to the amount of time the team that handles the final adjustments had, they over-calculated the HP required to make the fight challenging enough for the best players.

Obviously, some groups managed to make it through the fight before the adjustment, so there’s some questioning why the change was needed. To answer these questions, Yoshi-P published a post on the XIV site last night. He detailed the logic used when determining how much HP to give a boss as well as the reasons why, despite some players successfully making it through P8S, they felt the need to adjust the boss’s HP. For those wondering, a factor in choosing to adjust the HP, despite the success of some groups, came down to two factors. First, some jobs were being excluded from party recruitment. Second, a large enough portion of the player base was becoming disgruntled with how punishing the fight was.

As for what caused the issue in the first place, well it apparently comes down to the fact that the game’s top players are far better at the fights than those testing them. (If you’re wondering, this is generally the case with most games.) When a fight is finalized the developers add a bit extra to the boss’s stats before sending it out into the world. Normally, this includes a +1% to +2% health increase. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but that combined with the fact that the devs spent more time learning this fight than others added up to a significant amount. Of course, the fight would take players longer to learn. The devs took longer than normal testing it and being able to beat it.

The post also answers the question as to why the devs elected to adjust the boss rather than doing some job balancing. The short answer is that adjusting job balancing has an impact on all fights, not just the one in question. And, since the issue was caused by a mistake particular to that fight, the course of action they chose was to adjust the fight.