Hardest Raids in FFXIV – Individual Fights Ranked

Savage raid tiers are judged as a whole, but the fights within them are not equal.

Every tier has a wall — one encounter where progression stalls, parties fracture, and weeks of attempts compress into a single unforgiving fight. This page ranks the hardest individual Savage raid fights in FFXIV, from A Realm Reborn through Dawntrail, using the Eorzean Tavern Guild Risk Model applied at the encounter level.

These are not tier rankings. They are fight rankings — the specific moments in FFXIV raiding history where the game asked the most of the players who showed up.

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The Guild Risk Model – Encounter Edition

At the individual fight level, the Guild Risk Model weights four categories against the specific pressure points of a single encounter rather than an entire tier.

Mechanic Density — How many distinct mechanics must be tracked and resolved simultaneously or in rapid succession.

Resolution Complexity — The cognitive load required to identify safe zones, assign roles, and execute solutions under pressure.

Individual Accountability — How much of the fight’s success depends on each player independently executing correctly, with minimal room for the party to compensate.

Wipe Punishment — How late into a resolution chain a mistake can occur and still cause a full wipe.

Scores reflect difficulty at the time of release, before community solutions were standardized.

→ View the Full Guild Rating Methodology

Hardest Individual Savage Raids in FFXIV

Rank	Fight	Tier	Expansion	Difficulty
1	P12S Phase 2	Pandaemonium: Anabaseios	Endwalker	5.0
2	P12S Phase 1	Pandaemonium: Anabaseios	Endwalker	4.9
3	M4S	Arcadion: Cruiserweight	Dawntrail	4.9
4	E12S Phase 2	Eden’s Promise	Shadowbringers	4.8
5	O12S	Omega: Alphascape	Stormblood	4.8
6	P8S Phase 2	Pandaemonium: Abyssos	Endwalker	4.7
7	M3S	Arcadion: Cruiserweight	Dawntrail	4.7
8	E12S Phase 1	Eden’s Promise	Shadowbringers	4.7
9	P8S Phase 1	Pandaemonium: Abyssos	Endwalker	4.6
10	O11S	Omega: Alphascape	Stormblood	4.6
11	P11S	Pandaemonium: Anabaseios	Endwalker	4.6
12	M4S	Arcadion: Heavyweight	Dawntrail	4.6
13	A12S	Alexander: The Creator	Heavensward	4.5
14	E8S	Eden’s Verse	Shadowbringers	4.5
15	T13 (Final Coil)	Final Coil of Bahamut	A Realm Reborn	4.5

P12S Phase 2 is the only fight in standard Savage raiding to score a perfect 5.0. The distinction between Phase 1 and Phase 2 matters here: Phase 1 is mechanically demanding in its own right, but Phase 2 introduces a resolution framework — Caloric Theory and Pan Genetiaios — that requires every player to independently track their own state while simultaneously executing party-wide positioning. There is no version of this fight where one player carrying execution works. Every mistake is personal and immediately visible.

M4S earns its placement through sheer AoE density. The fight’s sequencing never creates a clear breathing point, and its later phases layer telegraphs at a speed that outpaces reactive decision-making. Players who succeed do so by reading patterns, not reacting to them.

E12S Phase 2 remains the most pattern-intensive fight in Shadowbringers content. The Lions mechanic in particular demands a level of spatial pre-positioning that was genuinely novel at the time of release and has not been fully replicated since.

T13 ranks higher than any other ARR fight by a wide margin. Bahamut Prime’s Twisting Dive sequencing predates modern mechanic frameworks, but the raw coordination it demanded from eight players without modern tooling made it a wall that defined an entire era of progression.

Hardest Fights by Expansion

Expansion	Hardest Fight	Difficulty
A Realm Reborn	T13 (Final Coil of Bahamut)	4.5
Heavensward	A12S	4.5
Stormblood	O12S	4.8
Shadowbringers	E12S Phase 2	4.8
Endwalker	P12S Phase 2	5.0
Dawntrail	M4S	4.9

The gap between ARR/Heavensward and everything from Stormblood onward reflects a genuine design shift, not a difference in player skill. O12S in Stormblood was the inflection point — the fight where FFXIV’s Savage design stopped testing mechanical competency and started testing mechanic literacy. Every difficult fight since then has operated on that foundation.

A Note on Ultimate Raids

This page covers Savage raids only. Ultimate encounters — The Unending Coil of Bahamut, The Weapon’s Refrain, The Epic of Alexander, Dragonsong’s Reprise, and The Omega Protocol — represent a separate difficulty category that exists above the Savage ceiling.

If Savage raids are ranked at 3.5 to 5.0 on the Guild Risk Model, Ultimate raids would require a different scale entirely. They are not harder versions of Savage fights. They are a different kind of content.

A dedicated Ultimate difficulty analysis is planned for a future Tavern archive page.

Guildmaster Notes

The hardest fight in FFXIV Savage history is not a matter of serious debate among players who have cleared the content. P12S Phase 2 is the answer, and most experienced raiders will give you that answer quickly and without much qualification.

What is more interesting is the question of what made it hard, and whether that kind of difficulty will be replicated.

P12S Phase 2 is hard because it refuses to let any single player hide. The mechanic design assumes that all eight players are functioning at full capacity simultaneously. There is no role that carries a heavier burden, no player who can compensate for another’s mistake, no phase where execution pressure relaxes long enough to recover from a misstep earlier in the sequence.

That is a specific kind of difficulty. It is not the hardest in terms of pattern complexity — E12S Phase 2 makes a strong argument there. It is not the hardest in terms of raw AoE density — M4S and O12S both apply pressure at a higher tempo. What P12S Phase 2 does is demand accountability from every person in the room, every time, with no exceptions and no recovery.

Whether that is the right ceiling for Savage difficulty, or whether Dawntrail’s remaining content will push past it, is a question the tier rankings will eventually answer.

For now, it stands.