FFXIV Raid Rankings – All Savage Tiers Ranked by Difficulty
Final Fantasy XIV has released 18 Savage raid tiers across six expansions, and not all of them are created equal.
Some tiers introduced mechanics that defined an entire era of raiding. Others pushed coordination, execution, and role discipline to limits that even experienced groups struggled to meet. This page ranks every Savage raid tier in FFXIV using the Eorzean Tavern Guild Risk Model, from A Realm Reborn through Dawntrail.
Quick Navigation
- Complete Raid Archive
- Hardest Individual Raids in FFXIV
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- Guild Risk Model Methodology
The Guild Risk Model
Raid tier difficulty is evaluated using the Guild Risk Model, a weighted scoring framework that measures mechanical pressure, coordination demand, and failure escalation across an entire tier — not just its final encounter.
Tank Risk — Survivability pressure, tankbuster density, and positioning requirements across all four fights.
Healer Strain — Sustained throughput demand and the availability of recovery windows between damage events.
DPS Responsibility — Movement mechanics, target priority, enrage pressure, and individual execution requirements.
Wipe Punishment — How quickly a single mistake escalates into a full wipe or unrecoverable party state.
These categories combine into a five-point difficulty score applied to each tier as a whole. Individual fight rankings are covered separately on the Hardest Raids in FFXIV page.
→ View the Full Guild Rating Methodology
FFXIV Savage Raid Tier Rankings
| Rank | Raid Tier | Expansion | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pandaemonium: Anabaseios | Endwalker | 4.9 |
| 2 | Arcadion: Cruiserweight | Dawntrail | 4.8 |
| 3 | Eden’s Promise | Shadowbringers | 4.8 |
| 4 | Omega: Alphascape | Stormblood | 4.7 |
| 5 | Pandaemonium: Abyssos | Endwalker | 4.7 |
| 6 | Arcadion: Light-Heavyweight | Dawntrail | 4.6 |
| 7 | Eden’s Verse | Shadowbringers | 4.6 |
| 8 | Pandaemonium: Asphodelos | Endwalker | 4.5 |
| 9 | Omega: Sigmascape | Stormblood | 4.5 |
| 10 | Alexander: The Creator | Heavensward | 4.5 |
| 11 | Eden’s Gate | Shadowbringers | 4.4 |
| 12 | Omega: Deltascape | Stormblood | 4.3 |
| 13 | Alexander: Midas | Heavensward | 4.3 |
| 14 | Final Coil of Bahamut | A Realm Reborn | 4.2 |
| 15 | Alexander: Gordias | Heavensward | 4.2 |
| 16 | Second Coil of Bahamut | A Realm Reborn | 4.1 |
| 17 | Arcadion: Heavyweight | Dawntrail | 4.1 |
| 18 | Binding Coil of Bahamut | A Realm Reborn | 3.9 |
Anabaseios sits alone at the top because no other tier in the game combines its level of mechanic density with that degree of individual accountability. P12S Phase 2 remains the single most mechanically complex encounter in standard Savage raiding — not because any individual mechanic is the hardest in isolation, but because the sequence never offers a clean reset point. One mistake in the wrong place cascades through the entire resolution chain.
Cruiserweight and Eden’s Promise share 4.8 for different reasons. Cruiserweight’s M4S delivers layered AoE sequencing that strains spatial awareness across the entire party, while Eden’s Promise earns its score through E12S — an encounter whose Phase 2 pattern recognition demands remain among the highest in Shadowbringers content.
Arcadion: Heavyweight ranks lower than expected for a final tier despite containing strong individual fights. Its overall tier score is pulled down by M9S and M10S, which are mechanically lighter than the standard set by M11S and M12S. The Binding Coil of Bahamut scores lowest not because it lacks difficulty, but because its design language predates many of the mechanical frameworks that later tiers are evaluated against.
Expansion Raid Difficulty Comparison
Savage raid design has evolved significantly since A Realm Reborn. Early tiers tested gear thresholds and basic role execution. Later tiers shifted the difficulty axis toward mechanic resolution, spatial awareness, and party-wide coordination that applies equal pressure across all eight players.
| Expansion | Peak Savage Tier | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| A Realm Reborn | Final Coil of Bahamut | 4.2 |
| Heavensward | Alexander: The Creator | 4.5 |
| Stormblood | Omega: Alphascape | 4.7 |
| Shadowbringers | Eden’s Promise | 4.8 |
| Endwalker | Pandaemonium: Anabaseios | 4.9 |
| Dawntrail | Arcadion: Cruiserweight | 4.8 |
The jump from Heavensward to Stormblood is the steepest in the game’s history. Omega: Alphascape introduced a style of mechanic design — particularly in O12S — that redefined what Savage coordination looked like. Every expansion since has operated within that framework, iterating on it rather than replacing it.
Endwalker is the only expansion to produce a 4.9 tier. Whether Dawntrail matches or exceeds it will depend on what Arcadion: Heavyweight’s later fights ultimately deliver.
Guildmaster Notes
Ranking Savage raid tiers is harder than ranking dungeons, and not just because the content is more complex.
Dungeons are experienced by everyone. Savage raids are experienced by a fraction of the playerbase, and the fraction that clears them tends to remember them differently than the fraction that did not. A tier that took a coordinated static three months to clear feels different in retrospect than it did at week two, when the mechanics were new and the community had not yet standardized solutions.
This ranking tries to measure difficulty at the point of first contact — before community resources existed, before macro strategies were settled, before the tier was understood. That is the most honest version of the question.
What emerges is a picture of a game that has pushed its own design ceiling steadily upward since Stormblood, with Endwalker producing the peak of what current Savage difficulty looks like. Anabaseios is not the hardest content in the game — Ultimate raids exist for that — but it is the hardest the standard Savage tier structure has ever been.
Whether that ceiling holds, breaks, or shifts sideways is a question only the next expansion can answer.