It's a doozy

Last week the Unending Coil of Bahamut (Ultimate/Super Savage) was released in Final Fantasy XIV. The idea, as per the developers, is to provide hardcore players something to do until the next major raid tier drops (4.2) -- and I think they've succeeded in that goal.

While most content at large in any given game is cleared within one or two days by the upper crust, no one in the world has cleared the Unending Coil yet. Billed as an all-stars celebration of the first Bahamut raid of sorts, this fight sees multiple "end tier" bosses resurrecting and being presented in a remixed fashion sequentially, then all at once at some points.

The clip below pretty much showcases the reaction of some of the more hardcore players who have approached the mid-point of the fight (most groups haven't even cleared the first part). Mind, this entire encounter, based on datamining and estimations from current groups, is said to be around 20 minutes without checkpoints. It's also important to note that right now players can't overgear for this encounter as it's tuned for the max item level in the most recent patch, 4.1.

I'm okay that a lot of people won't even clear this, as the MMO community at large has been asking developers to provide this level of challenge for a long while. Square Enix has said that if no one bests it in roughly two weeks they may look at tweaking it, but otherwise they have no hard plans to make it easier. It seems like Unending Coil won't quite go down in the history books like Final Fantasy XI's Absolute Virtue did (mostly for the wrong reasons), but it's creating a decent amount of buzz so far this past week.