imagine making this very nearly unbeatable, completly unfair boss, and deciding to : make a very low drop rate, buff it multiple time, nerf tactics used against it and threaten to BAN people who find ways to cheese it. Wow
@@AzureKyle That's what pisses me off more! You know, Square Enix used to be one of my favorite game devs, but over the years they're just relegated to "meh" territory for me and I find that I liked Square Soft a bit more than SE. Now I'm all about FromSoftware's games...
@@m-acyr651 .....and threaten to ban people if they beat their "beatable" boss in any other meathod than the method they wanted players to use. Let's not forget, that after they showed players "how to beat" it...they patched that strategy out, as well......unless that was a different Ultra-omega-Impossible-to-beat-unless-you-use-THEIR-method-super-boss that happened to.
The idea of the devs getting absolutely assblasted about it makes it even funnier “Noooo you can’t just find a novel way to beat this boss you have to do it my way! I’m gonna nerf your entire job as punishment!”
I was a Dark Knight and was lended a Kraken Club from my linkshell for Jailer of Love. I swear I did 30% of its health alone. Massive damage when you do soul eater and blood weapon. With enough Dark Knights, I bet that was a sight to behold for Absolute Virtue
its better than that, each dark night had two clubs, and each club would swing 2-8 times thats 4-16 attacks per normal attack cycle add in blood weapon saping your HP and adding the amount taken into your attack, and drain restoring your HP on hit, and wellll..... you can see how bonkers it is
Absolute Virtue is a prime example of open hostility towards the player base. Every time it was nearly beaten with a proven strategy, Square got pissy and nerfed that strategy. Rinse repeat until the power creep from players made it go from superboss to easy fight. Something like this is used as a cautionary tale for game devs: if you're going to make a very difficult fight that takes hours of a player's life to defeat, make sure it's well balanced. It's a safe assumption that AV wasn't properly balanced, given they nerfed everything *_but_* the boss itself.
@@HoloTWWOriginal Yes since at no point did the devs minded when they did a lot of these strategies, they only minded HERE because they wanted AV to remain unbeatable. Don't forget that the strategy SHOWN BY THE DEVS THEMSELVES was also nerfed when the players began trying it.
@@IaconDawnshire heard stories about that foo. never fought him, but an "18 hour fight" hoo boy. Wish I took part back in the day, sadly those "sweet times" are long gone XD
Are you kidding? Just to get a group together to go get an exp party took 1-2 hours of Looking, then Traveling (safely) to a 'spot' and then Hopefully everyone could stick around for 3-4 hours to grind a couple levels together.
This game was designed to be a time sink. Do you understand how long it took to level back in the day…..? Imagine a day of playing league…. That would not be enough to go from 70-71
@@Darth_Bateman you had no friends that’s why. FFXI is strictly meant to be played by friends, and other people. They took that idea from Japanese high schoolers and found they form many cliques. FFXI revolves around that concept.
@@Darth_Bateman The 2 people that should go back to school are: The original commenter for using a double negative. and... You, for not knowing what an ellipsis is. I will give you a hint: ".." - wrong "..." - Correct "...." - The one you used... very wrong.
To answer the question at the end, I beat absolute virtue during the kraken club strategy in the few days before SE patched it. My linkshell was the first group (of Americans at least) to defeat Jailer of Love on our server. However, there are some things the video didn't quite get right. 1. AV did not have a very low spawn rate; it was pretty close to 1/2. Al'tieu took months worth of quests to gain access to and once you got there it took a very long time to farm the spawn items for JoL. So it was rarely seen. 2. AV did not have low drop rates...in fact it always dropped some items; the first 2 groups to kill it using the wall of justice strategy actually did not get any loot because it died 'unclaimed'. When a monster cannot reach a player on it's aggro table, which was happening literally constantly due to the wall of justice strat, it deaggros and goes unclaimed. If it dies in an unclaimed state, no group gets the loot. 3. AV did not have bad loot...far from it. It dropped the best waist in the game for any melee class (except mnk) during tp building, best haste belt for tanks which was used for most spells, and best haste belt for mages which wasn't as important but had it's uses. It dropped the best ranged item for mages casting offensive spells. It dropped the best ring for all melee users during tp phase. It dropped the best ring for ranged attack. It dropped a very good great katana, second only to the relic which required years of grinding and/or hundreds of millions of gil.Only 2 items weren't sought after; a rod that let you come back to life and a tank ring that increased physical damage but reduced magic damage. There were still fights or parts of fights (like Jailer of Love ironically) that the tank would take almost exclusively magic damage and it was the 3rd best ring to use behind Dynamis Lord's Ring (25% drop rate off the final boss of dynamis. Took 36-64 people and typically only fought once every 3 weeks due to dynamis time constraints) and Defending Ring (
Thx this was the type of insight I was originally looking from the video. Too bad they didn't really get into the mechanics of the now defunct strats to beat the boss.
@@jamin12342people in the comments are so mad that they made a boss that was hard and patched out cheap wins for "no reason" on the premise that the boss had no value other than being a challenge based on what's said in this video You explaining the drops should change a lot of tunes lol. Was it too hard? Yeah, sure sounds like it. Does that mean it'd be a good thing for people to be able to cheese items comparable to ones that took months of grinding and luck? Probably not
@@blackstarksakata5050 dude what kind of comment is this? His reply took maybe 10-15 minutes and you would know that if you could type and read that fast
Absolute Virtue will definitely go down as one of the most infamous bosses in the history of games, and moreso, will go down as one of the most infamous instances of game developers openly hostile towards their player base for not playing the way they wanted them to
The weirdest part is that the game devs offered no ingame conveyance towards what do even do. As it turned out to win you look at your CALENDAR??? and use that ELEMENT???
@@h2ojr1 "It's possible guys, you just have to cast this specific spell on this specific day at this specific time after entering these three exact chat phrases within 30 seconds of the casting!" No wonder the devs took over 12 hours to beat this thing for a demonstration💀
The whole story of Absolute Virtue honestly sounds like that one person that's just never satisfied with what you do, so they keep changing things up. Oh, you did this fight this way? Now do it again but harder.
Lets be real, Square just wanted a "Gacha" boss, dangling the idea that it was "beatable", and they got genuinely pissed when people did it and threw a fit every time they had to work to make it harder.
Pretty much. They wanted their own Kerafyrm, a big unbeatable boss, but then they realized people were smart enough to use specific comps to cheese or get around certain mechanics and they couldn't handle it.
The people who first "did it" exploited the fact that the boss doesn't despawn right away and brought him to an area where they were protected by in game terrain which at the time was a ban-able cheese for a few bosses.
For anyone wondering the "correct strategy" that wasn't found out until later involved a player to use one of their 2 hours that was the same job as the 2 hour the boss used, which locked the boss out of using it, essentially.
Honestly people knew of this strategy even before SE released the video, and then the video confirmed it.... But even after that it still didn't work because of latency, so it seemed like a broken strategy. SE back in the day really didn't understand how bad the latency was connecting from the US to Japan. Or they didn't care. But it really seemed like they were baffled by it, and even more baffled by our poor infrastructure.
@@purrpocalypse People had figured out that using the same 2hr as AV within the 3 second window locked out that 2hr from being used again but hadn't quite figured out that there were patterns to his 2hr usage. And that by locking a few specific 2hrs you could skip locking the others in that chain. Also, because AVs fighting style changed depending which 2hr was active at the time, leaving 2hrs such as Mighty Strikes (Warrior 2hr) and Hundred Fists (Monk 2hr) unlocked would make the right much easier since both gave you 45 seconds where AV wouldn't cast spells or use TP abilities every time he used them, giving your group a break from the deadliest moves he had. The Auto Regen mechanic also gave people problems after the 2 hour time limit was patched in, since it could take up to 30 minutes in order to kill enough of Jailer of Love's adds to fully eliminate one part of AVs Auto-regen, with the other part being eliminated by casting spells that corresponded to the in-game day of the week enough times (fire spells for firesday, ice spells for iceday etc.. essentially). Latency was an issue but it wasn't the biggest factor that kept it from being killed using the proper strategy as it could be compensated for by using your 2hr when you saw AV use the 2hr animation instead of waiting for it to show up in the battle log which one he used. You'd have large link shells bringing in people on wthe jobs they needed the 2hrs for to lock the abilities even if they were level 1 since they could still lock the boss as Y6 as long as you had enough people to execute the strategy, and most kills didn't happen until a new strategy that relied on a new Avatar for Summoner was developed that replaced the Zerg strat they nerfed. And once the level cap was raised it wasn't exactly an accomplishment anymore so there just wasn't a lot of linkshells that had the amount of knowledge, skill, gear, and members necessary to kill AV using the intended strategy before the fight became trivial/irrelevant from the level cap increase. The introduction of Pandemonium Warden as the new hardest boss also took a lot of focus off of Absolute Virtue in the endgame community at that point, besides a minority that would post their findings from their attempts on forums. By then most endgame linkshells had either already killed AV using the wall or Zerg method before the nerf anyway and didn't consider the time or rewards worth the effort. This over-explaination of the history behind the strategy of a old obscure boss is brought to you by a former FFXI addict with too much free time....
@@darkaero I must thank you not only for the explanation of the boss's history, but also the in-game particulars of why it was so impossible. It was really difficult to conceptualize _why_ a boss could cause a group of people to need hours to defeat . . . And why its defeat method was so weird.
The big thing to keep in mind with Absolute Virtue is that you had to spawn and fight SEVEN OTHER NMs as preparation for the encounter. So players who did all that prerequisite work for Absolute Virtue's spawn were worn down already before the 18+ hour encounter even really began. So that even added to the difficulty further. A long, grueling fight that required a HUGE amount of prep, constantly moving the goalposts when strategies came out that were deemed "non-viable", it's no wonder AV is such a legend among FF bosses.
@@MajinBadat That was kind of the point. Surprised it wasn't mentioned in the video, but Tanaka was asked about AV and basically said the whole reason they did it was to give the playerbase a seemingly impossible challenge.
Hearing about how the devs removed the ability to use exploits and whatever means they deemed inappropriate to defeat the boss reminds me of an abusive parent telling you to do something and every time you do it they yell "NOT GOOD ENOUGH!" Sounds crazy. Imagine the hardest part of a boss not being fighting the boss itself but fighting the people who made it.
IIRC, even the 'proper method' they showed players got patched out shortly afterwards. Like, imagine getting so pissy players found exploits to defeat your boss, so you patch the game, and even entire classes, probably ruining a bunch of other stuff in the process (like Nerfing the entire Dark Knight class) just for this one boss.
@@AzureKyle Not just that, but the "proper method" showed in the video was very suspicious and many players theorized that they realized the boss WAS unbeatable normally and used GM commands to kill it.
this shouldn't be held as the hardest boss but the pettiest boss. If I were one of the people who found about the exploit and was deemed as the wrong way to defeat some boss, after hours of using the exploit to kill it, I'll drop them. I can't imagine feeling happier than stop playing the game or rather play other part of the game an not touching this part of the game ever again.
Nope, those nerfs were needed, Dark Knights and Scholars were way too OP. They were able to just brute force an otherwise impossible to beat boss, that's how OP they were. This game was never a balanced game but this was ridiculous. Using one BS to beat another BS doesn't make either right.
this boss was an example of incompetence of the developers, whose demeanor was like whining little boys that were the owners of the ball and take it home because the game wasn't going the way they wanted.
It's not, it only looks that way because of how this guy described everything in this video. Another reason you shouldn't just blindly listen to social media/news as they can bend any story to fit any narrative. Every "strategy" he talked about was an exploit, ESPECIALLY the DK one with kraken clubs. You could slaughter literally every boss in the game using that exploit in seconds to minutes, where they would normally take 20 minutes to hours. There is a reason the DK's ability was nerfed after this was discovered, as with that gear setup and skill combo was well over 20x what any classes DPS could reach (Which is how they killed it in 30 seconds)
@@Tooamazin That user is 100% correct. I say this as someone who played XI since 2001. The kraken club was not an exploit: it was literally how the DRK JA souleater and their 2 hour, blood weapon, interacted. They didn't nerf souleater/bloodweapon UNTIL it was used to defeat AV. Before that, people had used it for years on Kirin and other bosses. They literally got mad that their prized boss was defeated in such a way and nerfed an entire job as a result. Defending Tanaka's horrendous decisions in XI is not a good look.
@@HitoSarg Yes, it was used before on older bosses that weren't relevant/current and hard to beat. The combo was absolutely broken (I played also) and needed to be nerfed, once the GM's saw just how insanely broken the combo actually was, since they were watching every kill of that boss it was then nerfed. Just like any current MMO, if you find some exploit of weapon/ability combo that does INSANE damage compared to anything else and use it to fight old bosses it's pretty hard for them to notice it and the only way it will be noticed is if you get reported. If you use it on any current raid tier bosses and get a crazy fast kill, it will be noticed and looked it, then you will be banned and it will be fixed.
@@Tooamazin "Old bosses" wasn't a thing in XI till Abyssea. People were still killing land kings/Kirin/Dynamis Lord for w. legs, d ring, ridill, etc up until (and even after) the level cap was raised in Abyssea. And they were doing it with TP burn alliances: SEBW+KC DRKs included Let's not try to rewrite history. Tanaka got upset his ultimate boss was beaten with a raid composition that had been widely used up until that point so he nerfed it. Just like a child taking his ball and going home. Tanaka's animosity towards the playerbase, especially NA and EU players, was not just limited to this incident which is why he was canned after making a disaster of FF14 1.0.
@@HitoSarg Bloodweapon wasn't nerfed in the entire game. Absolute Virtue was given a resistance to it that built up over time, so even AV itself didn't fully resist a Bloodweapon Souleater DRK right away. AV was changed to prevent that strategy from working on him, and subsequent bosses implemented later on in the game had similar resistances given to them. However, it was only AV that was changed after the fact.
Everything I've heard about Absolute Virtue just sounds like a poorly designed fight. Having only one specific valid strategy is very dumb, and patching and threatening players who find a different viable strategy is awful. It makes its reputation as the hardest boss in history feel artificial and undeserved.
@@TheEpicNewman Except in this case "cheating and using an exploit" means that through trial and error of slamming their head against this absolute brick wall of a boss, they found a way to beat it. It was only called "cheating and exploiting" because it wasn't a specific intended way. "Cheating and exploiting" against Absolute Virtue means just playing the game you have in front of you according to the rules and skills available, and being punished because you did it in a way they didn't intend you to. Moreover, _having_ one single intended way to beat the fight is what I'm calling bad game design to begin with. Especially something as obtuse as the method revealed here, with no hints or signposting whatsoever (meaning the only way to discover anything is the trial and error that lead to "cheating and exploiting"), and very limited party comps that leave any player who didn't play one of those classes out in the cold. That's not the hardest boss of all time, that's just someone doing a bad job of making a puzzle. All you're really saying is that Absolute Virtue was bad design by design, and if the bad design is what they meant to do, it's still bad design, and a terrible way to treat your playerbase.
@@gorimbaud This: Exactly this. Also, people also just found different ways of beating it and the legit way to do it used to be mugging it with DRK and a club. Which is hilarious that THAT was actually just a cheesey way to do it and they got mad and nerfed the entire job because they were mad about it being used in one fight a specific way If that doesn't scream that something is wrong with the design and direction of your game and how it's supposed to work, I don't know what else would convice you otherwise (This bit in response to the other reply)
Used in game items and class abilities isn't cheating or exploiting, it's literally using the tools provided. They did lots of handholding, including posting a kill video. The devs just threw a tantrum repeatedly that players knew their game better than they did.
All of the strategies that worked were basically exploits, the DK one was an oversight with a specific club that multi-hit 2-8 times and one of the DK's newer abilities was that their next swings would drain life and deal extra damage per hit. So it would proc 4-16 times (dual wielding) adding tons of damage but also leaching tons of HP from them and was meant to be used for just a few swings then turned off. This exploit gave them INSANE damage and broke every single fight in the game and any boss could be slaughtered using this, which is why DK's got nerfed and this strategy was removed.
@@Tooamazin Well yes using a club that had a 0.03 drop rate off a monster you had to pay untradeable, tedious to farm currency just to fight in a level synced fight that limited you to 3 players that needed to be specific jobs to make it easy enough to beat and there was no real way to control loot so any one of the 3 players could ninja loot the club and it was worth so much that it was extremely common to see it get stolen or you could pay 40+ billion gil for it. Multiple years of farming gil legitimately to afford or you could win it in a yearly raffle that only had 1 winner and that winner could choose any of the rarest most insane items in the game. This club wasn't something everyone had access to and 100% the players that used it against absolute virtue got it by buying gil with real money or HEAVY botting continuously for months to achieve it. Any job that could use the Kraken Club was instantly boosted in power multiple times over. I would argue that just seeing that many Kraken Clubs in one place at the same time was rarer than seeing Absolute Virtue get defeated.
@@OtakuWrath Right, it was just so rare and so few people had the club that once enough people in the same group were able to all use them and show off that dual wielding those basically gave you 10x your normal DPS. That was when Square realized that DK's drain ability was busted with multi-hit weapons and nerfed that ability (to only proc once per swing I think? Can't remember) so they could still make weapons like that later and not have the same problem.
@@TooamazinI wouldn’t say it was an exploit just an oversight on an already insanely rare weapon. If you could get enough people there with kraken clubs you deserve to win
I think one of the most important contexts to remember here is that it was 2004, in a time before the rise of TH-cam and proper infrastructure for video based internet. This meant that most of the data we had about these fights was shared in through text based forum posts, with supplemental screenshots at best. Videos existed, but the ability to record, host, and share them was a rare luxury. So a lot of speculation ended up going back and forth, based entirely on someone's memory of such a chaotic fight. Something else to remember is that Chains of Promathia was probably when the game was the most difficult across the board. Leveling a job in FFXI was not a trivial task at the time, mostly achieved by grinding open world mobs in a party of 6. So you needed to find a decent party setup with 5 other similarly leveled people, and hope that one of the few open world spots for grinding reasonably killable mobs wasn't occupied by another party. CoP did basically nothing to alleviate this like other expansions and content packs did. Level Sync was reserved for specific instanced fights, while Equipment Sync was not in the game at all. And the story campaign itself was brutal in this regard, which was REQUIRED to even reach Lumoria in the first place. The 8 chapters of the story had various level caps throughout it, which meant you typically needed 6 properly geared players at each specific level to progress. If you entered a level 30 fight with level 35 gear, the gear would unequip, full stop, unlike the stat scaling that most modern MMOs see today. All that is to say, the privilege to even have access to Absolute Virtue in 2004 was reserved for the games most hardcore players. In many ways, you couldn't just throw more players at the fight to try and figure it out. Compare that to the Ultimate raids that XIV sees today, where it might take a reddit thread a week to hammer out the details and see a first win, and you'll understand how different the MMO world was back then.
Yep. I switched from FFXI to WoW around the time Burning Crusade came out once I heard that you could make it to max level completely solo if you wanted to, without having to wait or worry about finding XP parties, level cap quests, or AF gear that everyone said was mandatory.
Best comment I've seen in a long time. People don't understand that information was much harder to get back then. You couldn't just google "how to beat xyz" or watch guides on youtube. Nor could you just keep trying the same fight over and over until you figured it out like you can in FFXIV. Every attempt for any difficult fight required items that were difficult and time consuming to get that would be consumed upon your single attempt, which slowed the learning process substantially. FFXI itself was an already very hard game at the time. Anyone who actually managed to even get to level 75 was already an incredibly good player possessing a huge amount of skill and knowledge around their chosen job.
What's even funnier is, their "legit" way was impossible for anyone who wasn't a dev due to latency, cause the devs are barely 3ft away from the servers. What's even more funnier is, they nerfed their own "legit" way of playstyle cause others started doing it.
I was going to make a joke about how that's essentially a Savage raid but at least Savage raids have some really whack ways to cheese mechanics that afaik never got nerfed (Tanks eating DD from P1S Intemperance...even though the mechanic is fucking easy). Although I did just find out they nerfed a 12 year-old cheese strat from an ARR dungeon that I'm really salty about getting nerfed.
I was one of the team members that won the Ballista Royale in Seraph, with all of the horror stories of absolute virtue I never even tried going anywhere near him in my entire 7 years of playing lol.
They stopped doing ballista royale by the time I got into ballista :( one of the guys I'd always play with though was in it. Was a Galka Monk named Lysol from Fairy/Sylph
this is confusing me, cause Seraph didn't win the Ballista Royale, Siren server did, on both the JP and NA side. and Siren faced Pheonix server for the NA finals do you mean you just represented the Seraph server for the tournament?
@@Vailsiren they've since took the interview stuff down but I promise I have no reason to lie xD I played for 7 ish years and even had my Stars cap that you win for besting all the teams in your own world
Something I'd like to point out, that the video did not, is that one of the ways to stop Absolute Virtue from using job 2hr (now 1hr) abilities was to pop the same one yourself, which locked him out of ever using it again on that spawn as far as I know. This was the latency mentioned, doing it too late would be ineffective. This meant for every one you wanted to lock out, you had to bring that same exact job in your composition. This would be completely unheard of in modern MMORPGs, especially XI's cousin, XIV. It's the main reason that I'm hesitant to go back to XI, even though I loved it, because XIV is built on the idea that ANY job can do ANY content, it's entirely reliant on the player's skill with that job. to put it a different way, your proficiency with your toolset determines your success. That's how superbosses should be designed in MMORPGs.
@@yuffington what they should have done is provided challenges that required specific 2hrs to overcome. For example, it uses Mighty Strikes, Hundred Fists, and Blood Weapon. You have your tank use Invincible to counter. It can't deal damage, so it doesn't heal. All those effects wear off at the same time Invincible does. They could even do something with benediction where they warn the players he's "about to heal, but a strong series of blows could break its concentration!" Indicating they need to perform a LV3 skillchain and Magic Burst, to test how coordinated they are, or just have the SAM do a solo skillchain. It could cast Chainspell but become vulnerable to stun, thus allowing a Chainspell stun RDM to lock it down until it falls off.
I mean, less unheard of for XIV. Every job has its niche, but if the point was to lock it out from doing specific jobs, then the idea would be to bring people who like the "off-meta" jobs and are good at it. Dancer does some of the worst damage, but if they dance partner the right jobs in time for their burst, they're invaluable. Edit: Because some "I Have to be Right, All the Time" weirdo brought it up, I will clarify. DNC does not do enough DPS to solo anything. Their DPS is effectively based solely on who their Dance Partner is, meaning they always have the opportunity to do high damage if they're paying attention. Likewise, parsing is a terrible model to use as your "who is good at DPS right now" scale because, as from top parse being achieved by getting boosted by the entire party giving their buffs to that one person, ALL PARSES ARE CLEARS. Meaning even low parse is usually HIGH ENOUGH for the content! Unfortunately, Parse is a scourge that cannot so easily be removed. I'm muting this because of some "Simon Cowell" wannabe who refuses to accept that they don't understand what I was saying. Which was, "You can play as whatever class you want in 14, as long as know what you're doing, even as the lowest DPS. Just make sure you do your job _right."_
@Simon Cowell because me being... wrong about DNC specifically is... going to what exactly? Make someone upset? Like you? People play the jobs they want in 14, regardless of DPS. At the time, my statement was true, and today it isn't. Congrats. You corrected someone in a random Comment Chain. The one who sounds like they "want to be part of the conversation" is you.
@Simon Cowell Hold on, I went back over what you said, you used Parse as your example. First of all, I never brought up MCH. I brought up DNC only as an example of my point that some jobs can be very bad, but can still have their uses. I said that DNC by itself is bad. It is. Fullstop. Parse proves the OTHER half of my point, which is WHEN PAIRED UP WITH PEOPLE. If someone the DNC is partnered with is getting all the single-target buffs to inflate their parse, which is how people GET the top parse, then the DNC is gonna go up their with them. But you have to do it right. In a vacuum, that DNC is still shit. You can't do solo-content with it, WHICH WAS MY POINT.
Absolute Virtue always sounded like a monster of legend to me, similar to the The One Sin in .hack. But now after watching this video and seeing the comments, it’s clear this boss was more of a shiny toy that Square wanted players to dream about beating and not actually defeat. Kinda sad to see that was the actual reality but I guess I should be happy I never dedicated myself to this game that hard to get this far
I remember tanking Jailer Of Love for the first time as a PLD/RDM in the 75 cap, and once we won, AV spawned. Everyone left after JoL died lol. I engaged AV solo just to say I fought AV. Died in moments.
I think I also heard that some people who tackled Absolute Virtue (or Pandaemonium Warden) for such a long period of time actually became ill to the point of vomiting due to dehydration, which also led to SE making changes to the boss.
I think the boss where that happened was Pandaemonium Warden, but Absolute Virtue absolutely could have, and probably did, have that happen to a few groups as well. Either way, the fact that a boss of AV's level of difficulty existed at all, nevermind existed twice, is insane to me.
Almost! I believe that news actually revolved around Pandemonium Warden, and entirely different but similarly absurd super boss from the 3rd expansion, Treasures of Aht Urhgan. It was briefly mentioned in the video, but it was the uproar over the length of the PW fight that ended up nerfing BOTH Pandemonium Warden and Absolute Virtue to the 2 hour time limit.
Well, the fight with PW was the one that got all the headlines. I'm sure there were people feeling negative effects of sitting on a screen for 20+ hours with no breaks
@@thalandor46 Well, in either case, despite being an MMO, no boss (or superboss) should be that impossibly difficult or time-consuming, even with a whole squad of players. I'm pretty sure a lot of people got their patience tested to their limit and then some from that. Mind you, this is coming from someone who hasn't played XI (I play XIV, though).
The really insane thing about AV isn't necessarily AV itself being stupid OP, it was that the ENTIRE Chains of Promathia expansion in which AV even existed was, at that time, only reached by such an insignificantly small portion of the playerbase that most people that even played FFXI hadn't even acquired access to the region, much less fought its big baddie. The Chains of Promathia expansion was released Sept. 21, 2004. The Game's next major expansion, Treasures of Aht Urghan was released Apr. 18, 2006. Then another expansion, Wings of The Goddess was released in November 2007. And in June of 2010 the first of 3 'Add on' packs was released Vision of Abyssea. That's alot of years right? 2004 to 2010. Well by 2010 less than 1/5th of the player base had actually completed CoP and even had access to the region AV occupies owing to the punishing environmental and tactical difficulty of the initial missions in that expansion. I recall some fanfest notes in which a dev mentioned that something like half the player base hadn't even made it past what was essentially the 'first mission' in the expansion. and this is in like 2009/2010. It was that difficult. You had to have the exact specific jobs, those people had to all be on at the same time and willing to dedicate 2-3hours of prep work just to get to the arena for the first boss. In a level capped area. With no recovery point. Meaning you could spend 2 hours getting to the boss floor only to have a stupid-OP monster 12 levels above you dispel your White Mage's reraise effect, kill them, and render the whole run a wash. Or your Tank d/c. any of 1000 things could go wrong. Oh, and you had to do that 3 times. And that was just 'Chapter one'. Lumoria wasn't even accessible until 'Chapter 8'. So few people had actually progressed in CoP content, that SE would reflexivly use it as an excuse for not producing more content in the expansions people actually liked (RoZ, ToAU, WoTG). A dev literally justified a lack of content creation by stating that so few players had completed CoP that there was 'plenty of content' for those players and they should do that. Basically if you missed out on the initial hype of CoP, finishing it was a grueling task of spending HOURS trying to build a group with very skilled players, with particular jobs, for very specific functioning strategies. HOURS trying to fight through the artificially over powered areas owing to the level caps, to then try your hand at the boss of that chapter. Many failed so many times and wasted so much time on CoP missions that they'd simply given up on completing it in favor of less artificially tedious content in ToAU/WoTG. And the people who had managed to hack through it had zero intention of going back and helping others. Took weeks of dedication. So in June of 2010, coinciding with the Visions of Abyssea 'addon on' which put the level cap at 80, almost 6 FULL years after initially released and two full expansions later (some would argue 3), Square Enix did a radical patch of the Chain's of Promathia content which removed the level cap from all areas associated with the expansion. And there was a mad dash for folks that had given up on CoP to finally complete it. And even with that, the mission fights themselves were still no picnic. The fights were the same toughness, it was just 'getting to the fight' was made way easier. That's how bad CoP was. 6 years after its release it had to be radically altered top to bottom so that more than the try-hard, no-lifers could actually experience the content they'd paid for 6/10ths of a decade earlier.
It's worth noting that the FFXI dev team were actively and overtly hostile to the playerbase, and AV is a great example of how that hostility was manifest in the game design. The disdain they had for the players was obvious in their dev videos, and they deliberately refused to make badly needed QoL improvements until years after someone did it first, such as adding a minimap and support for windowed mode _only after_ a patcher (Windower) was created by players to add those features. Player suggestions were pretty much ignored, and any time a player figured out how to cheese some system the dev team focused its energy and effort into defeating that approach rather than investigating whether and why it was required in the first place. It was almost like FFXI was a personal pet project for a handful of people and they resented the millions of interlopers that dared intrude upon it. The same team worked on FFXIV 1.0, and the tremendous number of technical issues aside, it was an unmitigated disaster that dealt a lot of damage to Square Enix as a company, and was only undone when a new team was assembled that actually cared about both the game and the players of that game, and FFXIV: A Realm Reborn (version 2.0) and the soon-to-be-five major expansions that followed were the result of their efforts.
I'd heard that the relationship between 11 players and the devs is a bit....fraught, especially in comparison to the relationship between 14 and the devs (ie; 11's director calling the players "customers" instead of "players" like 14 tends to, much more....impersonal, businesslike) and I've never heard the specifics of the devs responses to people actively trying to fix/have fun within what they were given so I feel like it really encapsulates a lot of the differences between the 2 mmos. Seems like the people in charge of this thing had active contempt for the player base at the time, honestly.
Contempt isn't the right word most XI players would use, as that implies the devs are actively trying to do things to create bad experiences for players as "payback" for whatever reasons. To most XI players, saying the XI devs had contempt is like saying FromSoftware has contempt for their players in the Souls series. The early years of XI is a relic of the past in terms of development direction. Things were intentionally made to be difficult and they actually weren't as power tripped as people in the comments suggest. Players played Ninja as tanks, which was completely different from their original intent. Zerg strats were a thing in other endgame content without being nerfed. AV and PW were literally intended to be the hardest content to ever exist in the game, so there's going to reasonably be some bias on the matter from the devs. It is without a doubt pretty bad about the DK and Kraken club nerfs on AV, but things like with exploits and bans related isn't exactly unreasonable. Most MMORPGs do that today if people cheat lol. It was a very different mentality back then from what it is today. Mistakes were definitely made, but that's why people learned from them. That said, some things that people consider "mistakes" of games like XI are part of the reason why people complain about the games today. Struggle and some degree of unfairness or imbalance actually make games more memorable and enjoyable (to some degree). Frustrations are absolutely part of the journey. Ask any FromSoft fan or other difficult games of the past (e.g. Super Meat Boy).
Wow, lots of memories from playing endgame during this time in FFXI - I've been apart of a few attempts to take AV down in my time - of course, only bringing it to 79% before we were Manafont/Chainspell meteor spammed. I remember standing in Upper Jeuno watching the chat spam too fast to read, players completely hyped about AV being taken down on an entirely different server. It was like reading a ticker flying out of the machine, with people reporting moment by moment what was going on. This was during the era of wall of justice kills. One thing I don't think I noticed was mentioned in the video was how hard and how much effort and time was required to bring AV from the Jailer of Love spawn to the Jailer of Justice spawn to set up a wall of justice kill - there were aggressive monsters from below the floor and in the skybox, there were also a large number of curious, fish-like monsters that would follow you, if your party used AoE spells you could suddenly have a horde of angry fish following you so you needed to be 110% aware the entire journey to the other side of the map, all while AV is casting horrible, party-wiping spells constantly. It was like moving a full raid of 36 people across the map together, in formation. Everyone had to be on top of their jobs of supporting the tank party with debuffs and add killing, all while the tanks juggle staying alive and maintaining enmity on AV, otherwise it would deaggro and very quickly begin walking back to its spawn, erasing a large portion of progress. This explanation doesn't even put in to context the extremely long casting times, the pure lack of natural mp5 (you relied on other mages), and punishing distance requirements to cast spells - this required tight, constant, and informative communication between all players, with a shot-caller who has a keen sense of foresight. To play well in endgame, you had to be pre-emptive, not reactive. To say just moving AV in to position is difficult would be an understatement. I also believe the first AV kill reported in this video using the wall of justice was actually the second, though I could be entirely wrong because it has been 10+ years, was actually achieved by linkshell of japanese players. The strategy was translated to our english players through forums - I remember delving deep into bluegartr and killingifrit forum threads during this time looking for strategies to lead my own linkshell to victory, as the way to beat AV was pure mystery at this point. If anyone was running high level HNM endgame during 2006 and can correct me if I'm wrong, please feel free to! But I distinctly remember the discussions surrounding the translated texts and screenshots of the JoJ wall trick with japanese text on the screen. (For context for non-FFXI players, there was a strong divide between JP and EN players, we all shared the same servers, but our information and knowledge of the game did not get shared very often. We had a mutual respect for each other but japanese players and western players played the game very differently!) Thanks for the fantastic video on one of the most legendary creations I've ever seen in a video game! This really brings back a lot of good memories running my linkshell through all of the 75 cap endgame experiences - Jailer of Love was a fantastic fight I always loved participating in. To have the mysterious and terrifying absolute virtue spawn immediately after JoL dies and start romping on your alliance of players, running in fear of their lost experience points as they try to escape the wrath of the raging celestial Aern - it was really the time to be playing FFXI. Here's to hoping we see classic servers one day, I'd love to take another walk through the land of Vana'diel as I knew it.
Fascinating to watch and also it's reminding me what a love hate relationship I had with ffxi and the dev team's frothing hatred of players. Looking back on all of the years I sank into it, I realize I only really enjoyed the friendships I made and almost nothing about the actual gameplay. I'm so grateful that FFXIV was saved from this by Yoshi P.
FFXI for the longest time was a constant HATE relationship from the Devs side towards its own player base. Find an activity that's enjoyable? Nerfed it! You like fishing? We broke it (in the excuse of making it harder on RMT fishbots) except now you've got a stupid mini game and the fishbots actually fished out all the good stuff you wanted, so fishing's no longer a relaxing side hobby for the downtime. You like crafting? Nerfed it! Oh you need money? Well, we've removed practically all viable ways to make money so now you're stuck with the AH (and basically creating a stronger market for RMT). Oh, you like gear drops? Nerfed that too! Any little bit of enjoyment you have, we'll nerf it and make it no longer enjoyable, just to spite you and make it take longer do get anything done. Yeah... FFXI became more like a 2nd job for a long while. the ever diminishing return of time spent to fun gained was always widening.
For any curious, the loot for the first kill of Absolute Virtue ever was only a Light Crystal. A garbage item. While it wasn't uncommon for extremely hard bosses to drop literally nothing, this still made people wonder if it even had its speculated loot table enabled - things like Mars's Ring or Ninerta's Sash were assumed to be on it but not known for certain yet. It possibly having no loot table only furthered speculation that it wasn't supposed to be defeated yet.
Rukenshin's (BTL officer) Live journal entry addressing the controversy and spawn by spawn updates are still up. Sadly the images are down due to PhotobucketLol. It's still a pretty in depth two part read though
Honestly they shouldn't have lied and said people were fainting/throwing up to make the fight seem more hardcore. At the time the community thought that would make the game look better since we were so accustomed to harder=better. Surely a fight that hard would help the game make a comeback after WoW's launch, right? Of course it backfired and they had to nerf and ultimately ruin the game.
I still remember then the first Spawn Key for Pandeminium Warden was traded to a ??? outside of the city. A Goblin spawned and died in 1 hit. The ??? was mistakenly left in from the Devbuild. The Linkshell got reimbursed by a GM after a while but the whole thing was absolutely hilarious.
This and a few other instances in XI, and how XIV was for 1.0, is how you can tell the difference in caring for the player base between then and now with Yoshi-P and his team on XIV.
Indeed. Heck, I remember how Tanaka, the former game director, claimed the reason 1.0 bombed hard was because us western players were super crappy at the game and didn't know to play it well and correctly like the Japanese players, painting it like the failure was due to whining rather than...well, bad design and development fueled by hubris
@@apexreactions4231 It really wasn't good though. The only decent part of the whole game was the fraternity of the brotherhood and that's it. Unless you view it as a Skyrim type of thing. Then I can see your argument. I don't think the modding scene would've been big though.
I loved the mythos surrounding this guy within the playerbase. One of the most enjoyable elements of the NM system in XI (in my opinion, at least) was the way it promoted discourse, and caused their legend to spread throughout the community. This said, I never managed to topple this chap, but he remains one of my favourite bosses of the franchise to this day. Shout out to the Titan server that was!
I loved that AV brought the community together like no other. Everyone wanted to be the guy who figured out "the way" to beat it and even people who never even stepped foot into Lumoria were getting in on the brainstorming. It was incredible.
Despite Square throwing a hissy fit every time AV was defeated, FFXI still holds a special place in my heart and one of my favorite games of all time. It’s one of those “you should have been there to understand” type games.
FFXI's one of those games where the term "The struggle was REAL" was not just empty words for those who've experienced it for a good amount of time. Still its always funny seeing someone die, de-level and suddenly become naked because they no longer meet the level requirement for their equipped gear and is now dead on the ground in pretty much VERY hostile territory even for well equipped players is always an amusing sight. Also, its always been weird when you check a mob and it says "Even Match" yet when you try to fight it, its more on the level of "I'm gonna wipe the floor with your sorry butt" if you try to take one of them on solo at most points in the game back in the days. That level check system lies, you'd be lucky to survive an "easy prey" fight most times!
Just a reminder that FFXI has a classic fan server Horizon opening on December 17th 2022, which is basically going to relive FFXI from it's 2004 launch up until current content with a permanent level 75 cap, meaning the game-ruining 99 level cap set after Abyssea will be regeared to function entirely with level 75 gear, so all of your gear will be relevant forever. It's gonna be massive, I highly encourage anyone who missed the original FF11 boat give it a shot! And it's free! And Square Enix isn't interested in pursuing a classic server (since it would cost too much and be too much work and FF14 already makes infinite money from casuals), so you don't have to worry about losing anything in a cease & desist order. And the folks working on it are very talented programmers who have been doing this for years on other private servers.
FF7 was my first rpg, so beating Ruby and Emerald was a huge deal to me. I stumbled around for so long trying to figure out what to do, so when I finally cracked it, my 10 year old mind was blown.
Got wiped from Ruby Weapon on the first time I saw the tiny red worm, then got wiped again after preparing myself, then kicked his ass the 3rd time around after forgetting about him and grinding for level and master materias. Emerald in the other hand was pretty easy for a super boss.
I remember the bullshit around this boss. It was essentially "The Sleeper Dragon" all over again. Devs didn't think of "everything" so when the boss did get destroyed, they had tantrums and fits with some GMs healing the boss, buffing it, and even debuffing the players or teleporting them. With one GMs despawning the boss when near death. I digress... Absolute Virtue and Pademonium Warden were...impo proof that FF11's dev team held nothing but contempt for the players and had no idea how MMOs truly worked. It was bad enough that FF11 was an unofficial survival-horror MMO (everything was devastatingly deadly, and players were frighteningly weak. You prayed nothing saw, heard, or smelled you during every trek in the game. You prayed a super boss wouldn't spawn on your boat. Literally an MMOs where 98% of the time, players were sneaking around, avoiding enemies.) but the devs making enemies and then patching them to ensure they defeated the players were beyond egregious. I've never forgiven the FF11 team for that. My LS used to joke that Absolute Virtue's true ultimate ability was to patch the game and buff itself.
that reminds me of a short story by fantasy author Mercedes Lackey, where a genuine monster got into a MMO server, because their "lore" was TOO accurate, and they were worried that it might escape into the real world, if it managed to collect the right items. at one point the monster actually managed to steal a GM's invincibility for a short time, and kill his unkillable character. then it LOOKED AT THE PLAYER AND LAUGHED AT HIM! (as if it could see out of his screen) they needed help from a genuine magic-user to deal with it. she had previously helped them by putting a Jinx on the "chinese gold-farmers", so that they never got any decent loot.
I remember tackling this boss so many times, and it took us several years till we figured out how to beat it. We managed to best it before the level cap increase after finding out you could lock him from using his 2hours multiple times, although it was very unforgiving as AV still had to use each of his 2hours at least once to lock them. If Absolute Virtue uses invincible for example, if a player on the hate list used invincible within a couple of seconds, it would prevent AV from using invincible again. This still meant that he would be able to use Chainspell, Benediction, Manafont & hundred fists for example all at least once in the fight, all of which were almost guaranteed to wipe parties. Our strategy had us bring along more than the full alliance of players, and we had one specific party that would pop the him, and all attack him just once to make sure they were on the hate list, before letting the 2nd PT in the alliance engage (the main tank PT) and then the original spawning PT would drop the alliance. The spawning party would consist of 6 jobs of who's 2hours were the main focus to be locked, BLM RDM MNK WHM PLD SMN, and since these 6 players were on the hate list, even though they were no longer in the main alliance, if they used their 2hrs after AV it would lock his 2hrs.
They were definitely full of hubris, and they were overly focused on the Japanese market with 1.0. They ignored WoW completely and just went with the "Well we have the best game in Japan, and Japan is the best, so we don't need to try hard."
@@alterrondo4179 Bad? Laughable. For every way its well designed, its also terribly designed in 2 others (Not including all the garbage left over from 1.0)? Absolutely.
After hearing about the "Dark Knight Kraken Club Zerg while buffed to the teeth with Bards and Corsairs" strategy my linkshell allied with one of our competing linkshells (who we already had a mostly-friendly relationship with from a previous Dynamis alliance) to utilize this strategy to defeat AV. Much like the video shows, it wasn't terribly exciting and was clearly a "cheese strat," but it was still cool to get the win and the "Virtuous Saint" title for my character. I was even lucky enough to be the recipient of the "Bellona's Ring," which, while totally underwhelming stat wise for the effort (it was basically a Sniper's Ring +2), was a pretty cool trophy item.
The fact that square enix made a boss that was so hard it literally broke the news is just as crazy as it is also hilarious and awesome. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to dying every five minutes in Strangers of Paradise on lvl 300 missions on Bahamut difficulty.
The Randomly-spawning Notorious Monsters in FFXI are literally something I wish more games had. I >love< the idea. From the unique drops, to the naming schemes, to just giving fun to exploring and danger to certain areas. Like, its probably the one single thing that kept me playing XI for as long as I did, because a lot of my free time was spent camping all the different and unique NMs in this game, no matter how good or bad the drop was lol. It was such a fun experience. But yah, fudge me, Absolute Virtue and the sheer amount of hate the Devs expressed at the playerbase when they found a strategy to beat him that didn't involve their convoluted 18 hour long 2-hr locking RNG fest of a fight was something I got to experience firsthand. Absolute Virtue should be a required case study for game devs on how not to design a super-boss, and how not to treat your playerbase when they defeat him. Then they should look at Pandemonium Warden too. Anyway, I solo'd Absolute Virtue the other week when they introduced the Sea campaign for the cosmetic weapons and boy did it feel good to kick his butt, but never came close in the 75 era.
I miss NMs/Rare Monsters in MMOs that have random spawns/specific conditions. The problem with them existing in modern MMOs though is the fact that in the olden days of rare spanws/NMs a server would usually have a few hundred to a few thousand players total on it at most and usually a few hundred playing at the same time (barring special events and the weekend). This meant that stuff like NMs or world chests or open world dungeons that had timed spawns/loot would likely be open for a random group of players or a few friends trying to get something. The content was also designed to be grindy and hard to get through causing less competition on top of the already small player-base. In the more popular modern successful MMOs you tend to see thousands of players online at once and everything is tracked with some kind of third party tool or website. Randomly stumbling upon something or needing to keep a personal calendar for something you were looking to get/kill is a hard sell these days. Especially given the demand everything has on everyone's time. Even high schoolers have less "free time" or patience now than they did 20 years ago, everything is instant gratification or "if it takes more than a couple hours it's too much time," which to a degree is fair.
I was on the Pandemonium server and used Blue Grtrs strats a lot. I never fought AV but I definitely heard the nightmare stories about him. I retired from the game with AV being one of the few HNM I never challenged but at least it sounds more doable now.
you can solo AV now with i119 gear (using trusts but I bet a RDM could solo). He's a joke now. Warder of Courage, the i119 version, though... Not too bad actually; if you can manage to zerg it!
@@RaxiazRedux I retired from the game officially shortly after the last expansion so I'm not sure what i119 gear means exactly. I have no plans to return but I'm glad the game is still running and older content can be experienced still.
I appreciate the background you gave before you got to the boss itself as even though I've played games with such bosses I literally never noticed things like optional bosses, among other things, until you pointed them out; a proper context for someone who games but hardly knows what they're doing. Awesome video.
I remember absolutely virtue and when they first introduced it. I played on carbuncle and i knew the first American player on my server to get an amanomurakumo. I actually introduced him to the game, aladwar was his name. I had a theory early on how to beat absolute virtue...I suggested using 2 hour abilities in some way. I didnt have a way to communicate the idea to larger shells because I was stubborn and I didn't have much clout other than training some of the best on my server. I come to find out years later I was 100% and years ahead of people.
I remember that gold dragon from DnD. It's attack was "WOW" or something. Devs were like "yeah it's beatable, watch this video", but it took them 18 hours and zero lag. This is exactly like New World devs who overtuned bosses for such a long time that players wanted them to prove it's doable. They tuned the content down BEFORE making their video. Dishonest fucks.
I played FFXI for 12 years from NA release. I was a 4 song Gjallarhorn Bard with all my RME weapons (left before Aeonic was a thing). I'd been a part of all the high end content up to that point. Feeding Kirin with Hymnus after a bad wipe. LS Dynamis runs on Fridays. The disaster that was Jormungand's release. Pandemonium Warden... Nyzul Isle... The super diesel crystal dragon... Etc, etc. Of all the nonsense we endured over the years, Square's utter refusal to allow AV to be beaten was downright disgusting. I was in a linkshell called HiddenPower at the time and part of our crew was hit by that swing of the hammer for the wall. In my opinion, AV and PW were blatant and gross displays of ego. The PW scenario ended horribly though and created nasty PR that forced them to change the way they went about encounter design from then on.
@@AzureKyle i feel like time limits are a natural development of the medium but I agree that having an encounter take 18+ hours to beat is nonsense, no matter what MMO you're playing that's just ridiculous
@@myhr2320 Yup, so you don't end up spending too much time in it. Though, you don't usually come anywhere near that. The only times I've ever timed out were from Savage raids, Extreme trials, and Bozja. Though I did get close while doing Puppet Bunker raid blind on patch day.
I believe Pandemonium Warden was close to impossible at first, too. Back when I was playing this game, I read the article about the first LS to down him. It took somewhere around 48 or 72 hours of straight combat. Something like that. They had to force a nerf, because some of the LS were hospitalized. Some of them got really sick and were puking in the middle of the fight. I believe this is also when they rolled out the warning on the loading screen about taking breaks, drinking fluids, and sleeping lol.
Link shell was Beyond the Limitation. I played with some of them outside of my own LS time when I was on Seraph. Those guys were awesome. Many quit the game after that fight.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Kerafyrm. Sony did a similar thing with a one-time spawn unkillable boss in Everquest. One PvP server's top guilds agreed that any guild who triggered the spawn would be destroyed from then on by the others. Kerafyrm stayed unspawned on that one server for a couple years, till expansions made players powerful enough that they could use a legit method to defeat it: a couple hundred players, with a mass of clerics spamming their free rez and pet classes having a swarm of pets zerg rush the boss in melee. After a couple hours, when the boss was almost dead, Sony despawned it... The fight was legendary, with people from all servers paying attention because it was finally being spawned on that last server. There was an uproar, Sony apologized, reset the event, and gave the server another go the next day. They downed Kerafyrm, and the loot table was empty, since Sony never thought it would be killed. EDIT: The old model still looks great too, the awakened crystal form with the colored head. Imagine that thing rampaging across the realm, screaming that it was going to kill everyone and everything while doing so.
5:14 Small correction, there were in fact 7 Jailers (Faith, Prudence, Temperance, Hope, Fortitude, Justice, and Love), which would then lead into Absolute Virtue, making AV 1 of 8 NMs in Lumoria, not 1 of 7 🙂
Some dev teams actually applaud players for finding innovative shortcuts and hacks - taking the time to find these exploits shows high investment in the game, after all - so it's kinda crappy that these guys did the opposite. Like, no argument that it was a hard boss.. but sounds like it was hard in a bad way if you know what I mean:/
Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden are easily the most difficult bosses that video games never mimicked the same way as these two. Glad to see that Absolute Virtue didn't cause insomnia and/or hospitalization compared to the Pandemonium variant.
Actually, it did. Pandaemonium Warden had a group of players that ended up in the hospital due to fatigue and dehydration after a FAILED 18-hour encounter with the boss. Bear in mind, Pandaemonium Warden was introduced AFTER Absolute Virtue and everything that came with AV, so SE KNEW what might happen with long, drawn out encounters like that. It was the bad press from PW that ended up leading to AV and PW being heavily nerfed and made "beatable" in the realistic sense.
Can't imagine the devs have much goodwill left among the gaming community after making an invincible boss, lying and saying it was possible, and then *banning* people who actually beat it.
At the time we loved it, the game, and the devs. We weren't angry about these things, we just kept going. No one was upset at all. Gaming has changed a lot since then, but at the time? We signed up for this game because of how excruciating it was. That was the selling point, you know? The big disappointment now is that gamers would just cry about QoL instead of embracing it.
FFXI is one of the most hardcore MMO's still operating with dev support. You literally (once) needed a solid party of 5 to lvl in the open world after roughly level 12. This boss was hell, I didn't even fight it, I was just a member of a support linkshell. But I heard of the horror.
Just a reminder that FFXI has a classic fan server Horizon opening on December 17th 2022, which is basically going to relive FFXI from it's 2004 launch up until current content with a permanent level 75 cap, meaning the game-ruining 99 level cap set after Abyssea will be regeared to function entirely with level 75 gear, so all of your gear will be relevant forever. It's gonna be massive, I highly encourage anyone who missed the original FF11 boat give it a shot! And it's free! And Square Enix isn't interested in pursuing a classic server (since it would cost too much and be too much work and FF14 already makes infinite money from casuals), so you don't have to worry about losing anything in a cease & desist order. And the folks working on it are very talented programmers who have been doing this for years on other private servers.
It's funny to me that they wanted to reduce the amount of time spent fighting bosses for the sake of player health, but Yiazmat in the very next installment would take up to 4 hours to defeat. At least with the gambit system in FFXII you could set up gambits and walk away, letting the game play itself.
Besides the gambit system allowing you to walk away, Yiazmat specifically had mechanics to allow you to walk away in-game, as well, keeping his health total after you leave. Even if it's taking you ridiculously long to kill Yiazmat, it isn't like you have to do that time consecutively.
I’ll be honest, I don’t even care what ya’ll upload. Your content, voice, and editing is just so pristine that I can put ya’ll on a playlist and relax, even if I’m at work. Keep up the amazing work. I legit live for your videos.
Malenia thinking she's the hardest boss with at least a million people defeating her solo within a few months. Meanwhile... There is Absolute Virute who took years to defeat with a full party attacking
The difference being, one is made for Solo Play and was designed to be difficult to defeat by any build while still providing sufficient gaps in her defense to allow skill to shine through no matter the build. And the other was designed to be deliberately nigh-impossible unless you had the exact right team with the exact right commands at the exact right time and if you beat it without doing that the game devs patched your strategy out. That's not Super Boss territory, that's bullshit. To get the same level of bullshit, we'd need to make Malenia absorb all Sorceries and Incantations, her attacks aren't parryable, she immediately shatters all guards, her health regen is constantly on, she has 99.997% Damage Reduction against Piercing and Striking, is immune to all status ailments, and god help you if your Summon brought anything more than a Katana to the fight. And then they patch out the Summons too. Now does that sound like a well designed Super Boss meant to test your abilities and tenacity in this game to the limit? Or does that sound like shoehorned in bullshit?
@@purrpocalypse Not really, A big draw behind a lot of Fromsoftware's games is that you can really play the way you want to. Make things as challenging or as easy as you are able. And in the few games where that's not the case like Sekiro, they instead give everyone the same toolset but craft the entire experience around being able to use that toolset from its basics to its more advanced tools. This concept for a Malenia fight is pretty well the antithesis to all of that. A fight built around only allowing a single build in a game to work, in a game where the individual tools are not that far developed because they built for Quantity. People already complain about the Elden Beast absorbing Holy Damage effectively removing one broad type of build rather than letting any build challenge the boss. This version of Malenia would go down in history as the worst Fromsoftware boss. Without a single doubt in my mind.
I remember meeting a Blue Garter member in XIV with several ARR world’s firsts about a year ago. Didn’t believe him at first, but his Lodestone checked out. Like meeting a living legend tbh
To be fair that isn’t even remotely a legitimate way. Kraken club was one of the rarest weapons in the game. Like thousands of real life dollars to buy one. Having one made you a legend. To see one in action was a tale you told your LS. Having a gang of DRK’s curb stomping AV was hilarious but never once considered when designing it. It is like making a hard boss for 6 people and they cheese it into 30.
in my opinion, the problem with absolute virtue isn’t that the devs had an intended strategy, it’s that the intended strategy was too obscure, practically impossible to figure out without being told it by the devs, the way they nerfed exploits by touching content outside of av, and being unwilling to change the timing windows to account for lag on the live servers. i get why they wanted a boss that was genuinely hard to beat
Fun Fact: Killing the Moon Lord with a Lawnmower on the absolute easiest difficulty in the game (Journey with Lowest Difficulty Sliders) takes about 30 Hours. Classic takes about 60 and Expert takes about 90. Master and Legendary will take over 100+ Hours to kill Moon Lord with a Lawnmower.
I was in a LS on Migard called PlusOne and we were part of the joint effort to take him down using the wall. Virtuous Saint title will never be topped for me in gaming bragging rights
Theres gotta be some people out there who raised up a dark knight to the highest possible level to slay absolute virtue and finally did so, only to get nerfed. I'd probably quit.
The only problem with AV once we learned how the fight was supposed to go, was the response time needed to counter AV's actions. I was a part of many of the strategies that got nerfed. The way to kill him was not possible due to server lag and actually seeing him do his 2hr's was too delayed to react to the chat log.
We only were able to kill it once the summon Alexander was released. Perfect defense and a zerg fight. Could only have like 1 DRK in the alliance due to the patched method.
I was going to say “No, Galdera the Fallen from Octopath Traveler is the hardest JRPG boss” but no, Final Fantasy XI bosses makes hard bosses from single player JRPGs look pathetic, especially Absolute Virtue.
Yeah, that whole Absolute Virtue thing is a prime example of why I pretty much prefer old-gen console games over MMO's and such. Being able to get a whole game with a one-time payment, no server lag, and no developers changing things in the middle of the game when legitimate exploits are figured out!
I feel always proud an honor to be able to have the title it gave, though I was lucky enough while farming at lv 99 with some friends, someone spawn it, and shouted for folks to join his alliance if we wanted the title, so I was lucky to get a spot and help out for a few mins and got the title. But I do remember all the talks around it, and how hard everyone had it to beat, and how it got nerfed, etc.
Wait, wasn't there also a mechanic that players found (or did SE tell us?) that you could cancel out AV's 2-Hour moves by having a party member using it before him? I thought that was how you were supposed to prevent the Benediction bomb(s)
You had to have someone use their SP move within a couple seconds of AV using the same SP move. It was basically impossible to do it fast enough without being right next to the servers for 0 latency.
Y'all wanna know something crazy? There have been reports of players becoming PHYSICALLY ILL from trying (and failing) to kill this thing for hours! Say what you will about bosses like Yiazmat and the Adamantoise, but at least you can pause those games for a bathroom break or whatever!
Solid video, was pretty neat hearing the different methods people used to beat this boss, plus the back and forth between the devs/players. That's being said I think there could have been a bit more of a deeper dive on what the boss actually did that made him so difficult; I felt like I didn't have enough context to really grasp what made this fight so difficult, outside of it taking actual years for players to kill the thing.. You mention how the devs would patch the boss because they weren't happy with how the players were clearing the fight, but never really mention what the "intended way" of clearing the fight actually was. Outside of the brief mention of how the method demonstrated in the dev's demo video wouldn't be possible in real servers, there isn't very much details on what they were doing, or why that was the case.
The most frustrating part is the developer response. As long as the strats are within the parameters in the game's code, it should not be considered cheating, and should instead be praised as players learning the game well enough to discover how to defeat it in their own way. I can understand banning and other such punishments due to mods that cheat, such as the TOP debacle in 14, but if it's within the limits of the game as the devs designed it, then they should accept the solution the players discovered rather than throw a fit that they're not beating it "the right way."
i'm still playing this, just got home from work logging into FFXI and then seeing this one youtube. I remember the days of attempting Absolute Virtue back in the 75 cap era. basically impossible.
Just a reminder that FFXI has a classic fan server Horizon opening on December 17th 2022, which is basically going to relive FFXI from it's 2004 launch up until current content with a permanent level 75 cap, meaning the game-ruining 99 level cap set after Abyssea will be regeared to function entirely with level 75 gear, so all of your gear will be relevant forever. It's gonna be massive, I highly encourage anyone who missed the original FF11 boat give it a shot! And it's free! And Square Enix isn't interested in pursuing a classic server (since it would cost too much and be too much work and FF14 already makes infinite money from casuals), so you don't have to worry about losing anything in a cease & desist order. And the folks working on it are very talented programmers who have been doing this for years on other private servers.
So let me get this straight. The intended method of winning basically involved having a group of people all having TAS levels of timing and RNG in an environment with variable command input lag. The odds that everything would line up that way in such an environment, and even with everyone playing perfectly, you are more likely to win the jackpot on a lottery. Yes it is technically beatable, but the odds are almost non existent of being beaten in such a way. I am halfway convinced that they created this knowing people would find work arounds and cheese. In other words that they basically used it for bug testing, and that is probably why the first method was allowed at first, so that they can collect data to patch an unintended game mechanic.
I actually beat AV last month with 2 friends. The tank was the party leader so when he got charmed he killed me while our third ran away cause the charm dispelled the trusts. Once the charm wore off we got the kill
Reminds me of a few bosses from the early days of everquest. One had am item called something like ring of the cheater as the only loot drop because the devs thought the boss was unkillable. And another boss, a dragon called the sleeper was only fightable once per server and a pvp server still hadn't woken theirs long after most servers did. So all the big guilds got together to wake and kill it but GMs shut the server down right before they did
I remember reading about that once per server dragon. It seemed absolutely amazing and I would love to see the concept in an MMO again. Nit just because it’s one per server, but because, what I read about it years ago, is that once you wake it up, if you fail that one encounter, it goes on a heckin rampage through the entire world. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the concept actually filled me with dread for some reason. Like a primal fear. I wish I could’ve been there, but I feel it would have been too terrifying to experience.
@@chaocobojun2098 yeah you were supposed to fail killing it. Then it would rampage through the server killing all the other dragons because they imprisoned it.
@@CosmicChris Correct names were; Boots of Sad Exploitation, Cuirass of Sad Exploitation, and Earring of Sad Exploitation. These dropped off Lord Inquisitor Seru before he was able to be reached legitimately and guilds were gravity fluxing into his area to kill him. The loot was changed after the Arx key was introduced and the exploit was fixed.
I've never seen a developer team try so hard to make a boss near impossible, then essentially gaslight their players into thinking they suck. Only to reveal it took them 18 hours of trying to do it themselves... How. Then anytime they thought outside the box to win or get close to. Not only did they probably not get any good drops but then get threatened? You really can't make this stuff up it's incredible.
Great video though I would love more info about Pandemonium Warden. Maybe another video? Do you have any sources as well-- not that I don't trust you or the video, it's just I found it ridiculously hard to research AV.
Any of the link shells I was in before the level cap was raised to 99 didn’t attempt Absolute Virtue. After the cap was raised some people fought it, but I wasn’t there. I did however take part in a fight with Pandamonium Warden which we did defeat it.
Just a reminder that FFXI has a classic fan server Horizon opening on December 17th 2022, which is basically going to relive FFXI from it's 2004 launch up until current content with a permanent level 75 cap, meaning the game-ruining 99 level cap set after Abyssea will be regeared to function entirely with level 75 gear, so all of your gear will be relevant forever. It's gonna be massive, I highly encourage anyone who missed the original FF11 boat give it a shot! And it's free! And Square Enix isn't interested in pursuing a classic server (since it would cost too much and be too much work and FF14 already makes infinite money from casuals), so you don't have to worry about losing anything in a cease & desist order. And the folks working on it are very talented programmers who have been doing this for years on other private servers.
FFXI was a crazy experience in general, some of the HNM were truly "impossible to gauge", fighting Ultima, Bahamut, AV will be some of the greatest memories I have in gaming. What made it all the sweeter was having some of my best friends by my side. Though we've moved on with our lives I'll never forget them. -Kalandera Eternal Light / Horizon LS Midgardsormr
You could also mention the Modus Veritas debacle, in which many linkshells were actively prepping and leveling the Scholar job in order to abuse the ability to one shot AV and other bosses which Square caught and nerfed before it could ever see the light of day. At 12:29 you the linkshell you mentioned was called Excellence, interestingly enough was lead by Stanislav Vishnevskiy who is the current CTO and co-founder of Discord.
This design philosophy and unwillingness to bend is what landed SE in hot water when they developed FFXIV 1.0 and put Hiromichi Tanaka, the producer for XI, in charge. As a result, the game flopped, they fired Tanaka, and had to build an entirely new game from the ground up.
Ah yes, a boss so long and hard that you would have to sacrifice yourself in real life to defeat him. Even for the dreaded Mayumushi avoidance from one of those "I wanna be the Guy" fangames, at least it's almost 4 minutes in length and you can take breaks if you die.
imagine making this very nearly unbeatable, completly unfair boss, and deciding to : make a very low drop rate, buff it multiple time, nerf tactics used against it and threaten to BAN people who find ways to cheese it. Wow
They wanted an unbeatable boss.....enough said.
@@johnhanzelyjr And then taunt players that it was, in fact, beatable, but with their PROPER method.
@@AzureKyle That's what pisses me off more! You know, Square Enix used to be one of my favorite game devs, but over the years they're just relegated to "meh" territory for me and I find that I liked Square Soft a bit more than SE.
Now I'm all about FromSoftware's games...
@@AzureKyle A "proper" method that is basically impossible in reality because of server lag might I had
@@m-acyr651 .....and threaten to ban people if they beat their "beatable" boss in any other meathod than the method they wanted players to use. Let's not forget, that after they showed players "how to beat" it...they patched that strategy out, as well......unless that was a different Ultra-omega-Impossible-to-beat-unless-you-use-THEIR-method-super-boss that happened to.
The mental image of a bunch of Dark Knights ganging up with clubs to beat the absolute shit out of Absolute Virtue gave me a chuckle.
The idea of the devs getting absolutely assblasted about it makes it even funnier
“Noooo you can’t just find a novel way to beat this boss you have to do it my way! I’m gonna nerf your entire job as punishment!”
I was a Dark Knight and was lended a Kraken Club from my linkshell for Jailer of Love. I swear I did 30% of its health alone. Massive damage when you do soul eater and blood weapon. With enough Dark Knights, I bet that was a sight to behold for Absolute Virtue
RIP Dark Knight
your clubbing was too epic
@@justinh7560 As a WHM, I can assure you you did way more than 30% of its health. Now stop moving out of my range so I can Haste you!
its better than that, each dark night had two clubs, and each club would swing 2-8 times
thats 4-16 attacks per normal attack cycle
add in blood weapon saping your HP and adding the amount taken into your attack, and drain restoring your HP on hit, and wellll.....
you can see how bonkers it is
Absolute Virtue is a prime example of open hostility towards the player base. Every time it was nearly beaten with a proven strategy, Square got pissy and nerfed that strategy. Rinse repeat until the power creep from players made it go from superboss to easy fight.
Something like this is used as a cautionary tale for game devs: if you're going to make a very difficult fight that takes hours of a player's life to defeat, make sure it's well balanced. It's a safe assumption that AV wasn't properly balanced, given they nerfed everything *_but_* the boss itself.
Angy DM syndrome is the worst crutch for devs who don't even like their products
@@zachhawn8720 100% Correct. Even WoW has better DMs/GMs, and they had some very notorious events happen in their game.
So the devs wanting players to beat something a certain way is bad?
@@HoloTWWOriginal Yes since at no point did the devs minded when they did a lot of these strategies, they only minded HERE because they wanted AV to remain unbeatable.
Don't forget that the strategy SHOWN BY THE DEVS THEMSELVES was also nerfed when the players began trying it.
@@AzureRoxe how is reducing the fight time limit a nerf? At no point did it ever say that it was impossible to defeat the boss in the time limit
FFXI message when you logged on: Please don't destroy your life by playing our game too much.
Also FFXI: Absolute Virtue
Don't forget Pandaemonium Warden
@@IaconDawnshire heard stories about that foo. never fought him, but an "18 hour fight" hoo boy.
Wish I took part back in the day, sadly those "sweet times" are long gone XD
Are you kidding? Just to get a group together to go get an exp party took 1-2 hours of Looking, then Traveling (safely) to a 'spot' and then Hopefully everyone could stick around for 3-4 hours to grind a couple levels together.
This game was designed to be a time sink.
Do you understand how long it took to level back in the day…..?
Imagine a day of playing league….
That would not be enough to go from 70-71
@@Darth_Bateman you had no friends that’s why. FFXI is strictly meant to be played by friends, and other people. They took that idea from Japanese high schoolers and found they form many cliques. FFXI revolves around that concept.
The sheer malice behind this thing’s design will never not leave me speechless.
I know….isn’t it beautiful?
Never not leave you speechless? If that is the way you speak, being speechless is probably better.
@@Adaephonable it’s a double nega- …. Go back to school.
@@Darth_Bateman The 2 people that should go back to school are:
The original commenter for using a double negative.
and...
You, for not knowing what an ellipsis is. I will give you a hint:
".." - wrong
"..." - Correct
"...." - The one you used... very wrong.
@@Adaephonable ……
This is like the MMO equivalent of a DM getting mad and godmodding
Comets fall, everyone dies.
"The boss regains all health and I'm changing his stats on the fly. Go f--k yourselves" -Square DM, 2005
@@the_exegete Square really rolled a buncha dice, sighed and said "the strategy fails."
I just saw the video and I was thinking the same exact thing. The devs were unnecessarily salty.
Yea thats when ppl should say ok I'm done with this and un sub lol
It's like beating a child at a game: 'Uh, no that didn't count'
To answer the question at the end, I beat absolute virtue during the kraken club strategy in the few days before SE patched it. My linkshell was the first group (of Americans at least) to defeat Jailer of Love on our server. However, there are some things the video didn't quite get right.
1. AV did not have a very low spawn rate; it was pretty close to 1/2. Al'tieu took months worth of quests to gain access to and once you got there it took a very long time to farm the spawn items for JoL. So it was rarely seen.
2. AV did not have low drop rates...in fact it always dropped some items; the first 2 groups to kill it using the wall of justice strategy actually did not get any loot because it died 'unclaimed'. When a monster cannot reach a player on it's aggro table, which was happening literally constantly due to the wall of justice strat, it deaggros and goes unclaimed. If it dies in an unclaimed state, no group gets the loot.
3. AV did not have bad loot...far from it. It dropped the best waist in the game for any melee class (except mnk) during tp building, best haste belt for tanks which was used for most spells, and best haste belt for mages which wasn't as important but had it's uses. It dropped the best ranged item for mages casting offensive spells. It dropped the best ring for all melee users during tp phase. It dropped the best ring for ranged attack. It dropped a very good great katana, second only to the relic which required years of grinding and/or hundreds of millions of gil.Only 2 items weren't sought after; a rod that let you come back to life and a tank ring that increased physical damage but reduced magic damage. There were still fights or parts of fights (like Jailer of Love ironically) that the tank would take almost exclusively magic damage and it was the 3rd best ring to use behind Dynamis Lord's Ring (25% drop rate off the final boss of dynamis. Took 36-64 people and typically only fought once every 3 weeks due to dynamis time constraints) and Defending Ring (
Thx this was the type of insight I was originally looking from the video. Too bad they didn't really get into the mechanics of the now defunct strats to beat the boss.
thanks for this informative post
@@jamin12342people in the comments are so mad that they made a boss that was hard and patched out cheap wins for "no reason" on the premise that the boss had no value other than being a challenge based on what's said in this video
You explaining the drops should change a lot of tunes lol. Was it too hard? Yeah, sure sounds like it. Does that mean it'd be a good thing for people to be able to cheese items comparable to ones that took months of grinding and luck? Probably not
how much time do you have? first you beat the boss mow you write this?
@@blackstarksakata5050 dude what kind of comment is this? His reply took maybe 10-15 minutes and you would know that if you could type and read that fast
Absolute Virtue will definitely go down as one of the most infamous bosses in the history of games, and moreso, will go down as one of the most infamous instances of game developers openly hostile towards their player base for not playing the way they wanted them to
The weirdest part is that the game devs offered no ingame conveyance towards what do even do. As it turned out to win you look at your CALENDAR??? and use that ELEMENT???
Even the devs aren't sure of themselvea what to make of the boss lmao
@@h2ojr1 "It's possible guys, you just have to cast this specific spell on this specific day at this specific time after entering these three exact chat phrases within 30 seconds of the casting!" No wonder the devs took over 12 hours to beat this thing for a demonstration💀
@@h2ojr1and even with THIS method, which they deemed the correct way...the nerfed the strategy after people managed to defeat AV with it. XD
The whole story of Absolute Virtue honestly sounds like that one person that's just never satisfied with what you do, so they keep changing things up.
Oh, you did this fight this way? Now do it again but harder.
it was more like: "bullshit, that's not how you are supposed to beat it! THIS is how you are supposed to beat it!"
@@granmastersword except they never tell you how you're supposed to beat it they just modded themselves a win recorded it and showed it to us
Lets be real, Square just wanted a "Gacha" boss, dangling the idea that it was "beatable", and they got genuinely pissed when people did it and threw a fit every time they had to work to make it harder.
Pretty much.
They wanted their own Kerafyrm, a big unbeatable boss, but then they realized people were smart enough to use specific comps to cheese or get around certain mechanics and they couldn't handle it.
sounds like an aggressively railroady GM
@@AzureRoxe you can tell these dev's never once played DnD
if you put a stat block on it, players *WILL* find a way to kill it
Gotcha would be the correct word to use there. Gacha refers to gachapon (a type of toy capsule dispensing machine) and gacha games.
The people who first "did it" exploited the fact that the boss doesn't despawn right away and brought him to an area where they were protected by in game terrain which at the time was a ban-able cheese for a few bosses.
For anyone wondering the "correct strategy" that wasn't found out until later involved a player to use one of their 2 hours that was the same job as the 2 hour the boss used, which locked the boss out of using it, essentially.
Honestly people knew of this strategy even before SE released the video, and then the video confirmed it.... But even after that it still didn't work because of latency, so it seemed like a broken strategy. SE back in the day really didn't understand how bad the latency was connecting from the US to Japan. Or they didn't care. But it really seemed like they were baffled by it, and even more baffled by our poor infrastructure.
@@purrpocalypse People had figured out that using the same 2hr as AV within the 3 second window locked out that 2hr from being used again but hadn't quite figured out that there were patterns to his 2hr usage. And that by locking a few specific 2hrs you could skip locking the others in that chain. Also, because AVs fighting style changed depending which 2hr was active at the time, leaving 2hrs such as Mighty Strikes (Warrior 2hr) and Hundred Fists (Monk 2hr) unlocked would make the right much easier since both gave you 45 seconds where AV wouldn't cast spells or use TP abilities every time he used them, giving your group a break from the deadliest moves he had. The Auto Regen mechanic also gave people problems after the 2 hour time limit was patched in, since it could take up to 30 minutes in order to kill enough of Jailer of Love's adds to fully eliminate one part of AVs Auto-regen, with the other part being eliminated by casting spells that corresponded to the in-game day of the week enough times (fire spells for firesday, ice spells for iceday etc.. essentially).
Latency was an issue but it wasn't the biggest factor that kept it from being killed using the proper strategy as it could be compensated for by using your 2hr when you saw AV use the 2hr animation instead of waiting for it to show up in the battle log which one he used. You'd have large link shells bringing in people on wthe jobs they needed the 2hrs for to lock the abilities even if they were level 1 since they could still lock the boss as
Y6 as long as you had enough people to execute the strategy, and most kills didn't happen until a new strategy that relied on a new Avatar for Summoner was developed that replaced the Zerg strat they nerfed. And once the level cap was raised it wasn't exactly an accomplishment anymore so there just wasn't a lot of linkshells that had the amount of knowledge, skill, gear, and members necessary to kill AV using the intended strategy before the fight became trivial/irrelevant from the level cap increase.
The introduction of Pandemonium Warden as the new hardest boss also took a lot of focus off of Absolute Virtue in the endgame community at that point, besides a minority that would post their findings from their attempts on forums. By then most endgame linkshells had either already killed AV using the wall or Zerg method before the nerf anyway and didn't consider the time or rewards worth the effort.
This over-explaination of the history behind the strategy of a old obscure boss is brought to you by a former FFXI addict with too much free time....
@@darkaero 👍
@@purrpocalypse this is the answer everyone was looking for. Look no further, up vote this one.
@@darkaero I must thank you not only for the explanation of the boss's history, but also the in-game particulars of why it was so impossible. It was really difficult to conceptualize _why_ a boss could cause a group of people to need hours to defeat . . . And why its defeat method was so weird.
The big thing to keep in mind with Absolute Virtue is that you had to spawn and fight SEVEN OTHER NMs as preparation for the encounter. So players who did all that prerequisite work for Absolute Virtue's spawn were worn down already before the 18+ hour encounter even really began. So that even added to the difficulty further. A long, grueling fight that required a HUGE amount of prep, constantly moving the goalposts when strategies came out that were deemed "non-viable", it's no wonder AV is such a legend among FF bosses.
Another big thing is the Jailer of Love, which was another infamously powerful NM.
Only to die horribly once it either summoned THREE giant wyverns or activated Chainspell & Manafont simultaneously and went into Meteor spam.
Didn't keep my crappy LS from taking part in a kill. Only took us like 10 DRK's and 2 and half hours.
@@Malacite Or just crush your hopes when you get him to 10% and he uses Benediction.
@@MajinBadat That was kind of the point. Surprised it wasn't mentioned in the video, but Tanaka was asked about AV and basically said the whole reason they did it was to give the playerbase a seemingly impossible challenge.
Hearing about how the devs removed the ability to use exploits and whatever means they deemed inappropriate to defeat the boss reminds me of an abusive parent telling you to do something and every time you do it they yell "NOT GOOD ENOUGH!" Sounds crazy. Imagine the hardest part of a boss not being fighting the boss itself but fighting the people who made it.
IIRC, even the 'proper method' they showed players got patched out shortly afterwards. Like, imagine getting so pissy players found exploits to defeat your boss, so you patch the game, and even entire classes, probably ruining a bunch of other stuff in the process (like Nerfing the entire Dark Knight class) just for this one boss.
@@AzureKyle Not just that, but the "proper method" showed in the video was very suspicious and many players theorized that they realized the boss WAS unbeatable normally and used GM commands to kill it.
this shouldn't be held as the hardest boss but the pettiest boss. If I were one of the people who found about the exploit and was deemed as the wrong way to defeat some boss, after hours of using the exploit to kill it, I'll drop them. I can't imagine feeling happier than stop playing the game or rather play other part of the game an not touching this part of the game ever again.
@@DumbestDumbFool Have you ever heard of the Sunk Cost Fallacy?
Nope, those nerfs were needed, Dark Knights and Scholars were way too OP. They were able to just brute force an otherwise impossible to beat boss, that's how OP they were. This game was never a balanced game but this was ridiculous.
Using one BS to beat another BS doesn't make either right.
this boss was an example of incompetence of the developers, whose demeanor was like whining little boys that were the owners of the ball and take it home because the game wasn't going the way they wanted.
It's not, it only looks that way because of how this guy described everything in this video. Another reason you shouldn't just blindly listen to social media/news as they can bend any story to fit any narrative.
Every "strategy" he talked about was an exploit, ESPECIALLY the DK one with kraken clubs. You could slaughter literally every boss in the game using that exploit in seconds to minutes, where they would normally take 20 minutes to hours.
There is a reason the DK's ability was nerfed after this was discovered, as with that gear setup and skill combo was well over 20x what any classes DPS could reach (Which is how they killed it in 30 seconds)
@@Tooamazin That user is 100% correct. I say this as someone who played XI since 2001. The kraken club was not an exploit: it was literally how the DRK JA souleater and their 2 hour, blood weapon, interacted. They didn't nerf souleater/bloodweapon UNTIL it was used to defeat AV. Before that, people had used it for years on Kirin and other bosses. They literally got mad that their prized boss was defeated in such a way and nerfed an entire job as a result.
Defending Tanaka's horrendous decisions in XI is not a good look.
@@HitoSarg Yes, it was used before on older bosses that weren't relevant/current and hard to beat. The combo was absolutely broken (I played also) and needed to be nerfed, once the GM's saw just how insanely broken the combo actually was, since they were watching every kill of that boss it was then nerfed. Just like any current MMO, if you find some exploit of weapon/ability combo that does INSANE damage compared to anything else and use it to fight old bosses it's pretty hard for them to notice it and the only way it will be noticed is if you get reported. If you use it on any current raid tier bosses and get a crazy fast kill, it will be noticed and looked it, then you will be banned and it will be fixed.
@@Tooamazin "Old bosses" wasn't a thing in XI till Abyssea. People were still killing land kings/Kirin/Dynamis Lord for w. legs, d ring, ridill, etc up until (and even after) the level cap was raised in Abyssea. And they were doing it with TP burn alliances: SEBW+KC DRKs included
Let's not try to rewrite history. Tanaka got upset his ultimate boss was beaten with a raid composition that had been widely used up until that point so he nerfed it. Just like a child taking his ball and going home.
Tanaka's animosity towards the playerbase, especially NA and EU players, was not just limited to this incident which is why he was canned after making a disaster of FF14 1.0.
@@HitoSarg Bloodweapon wasn't nerfed in the entire game. Absolute Virtue was given a resistance to it that built up over time, so even AV itself didn't fully resist a Bloodweapon Souleater DRK right away. AV was changed to prevent that strategy from working on him, and subsequent bosses implemented later on in the game had similar resistances given to them. However, it was only AV that was changed after the fact.
Everything I've heard about Absolute Virtue just sounds like a poorly designed fight. Having only one specific valid strategy is very dumb, and patching and threatening players who find a different viable strategy is awful. It makes its reputation as the hardest boss in history feel artificial and undeserved.
People cheated and used an exploit to beat it, and FFXI was a no handholding game so expected to have potentially one way to beat a fight
@@TheEpicNewman Except in this case "cheating and using an exploit" means that through trial and error of slamming their head against this absolute brick wall of a boss, they found a way to beat it. It was only called "cheating and exploiting" because it wasn't a specific intended way. "Cheating and exploiting" against Absolute Virtue means just playing the game you have in front of you according to the rules and skills available, and being punished because you did it in a way they didn't intend you to.
Moreover, _having_ one single intended way to beat the fight is what I'm calling bad game design to begin with. Especially something as obtuse as the method revealed here, with no hints or signposting whatsoever (meaning the only way to discover anything is the trial and error that lead to "cheating and exploiting"), and very limited party comps that leave any player who didn't play one of those classes out in the cold. That's not the hardest boss of all time, that's just someone doing a bad job of making a puzzle. All you're really saying is that Absolute Virtue was bad design by design, and if the bad design is what they meant to do, it's still bad design, and a terrible way to treat your playerbase.
@@gorimbaud This: Exactly this. Also, people also just found different ways of beating it and the legit way to do it used to be mugging it with DRK and a club. Which is hilarious that THAT was actually just a cheesey way to do it and they got mad and nerfed the entire job because they were mad about it being used in one fight a specific way
If that doesn't scream that something is wrong with the design and direction of your game and how it's supposed to work, I don't know what else would convice you otherwise (This bit in response to the other reply)
@@TheEpicNewman it's not cheating if there is no legitimate way to beat it
Used in game items and class abilities isn't cheating or exploiting, it's literally using the tools provided.
They did lots of handholding, including posting a kill video. The devs just threw a tantrum repeatedly that players knew their game better than they did.
Imagine finally coming up with a strategy on how to take this dude out and then being punished for doing so and having your job nerfed in effect.
All of the strategies that worked were basically exploits, the DK one was an oversight with a specific club that multi-hit 2-8 times and one of the DK's newer abilities was that their next swings would drain life and deal extra damage per hit. So it would proc 4-16 times (dual wielding) adding tons of damage but also leaching tons of HP from them and was meant to be used for just a few swings then turned off.
This exploit gave them INSANE damage and broke every single fight in the game and any boss could be slaughtered using this, which is why DK's got nerfed and this strategy was removed.
@@Tooamazin Well yes using a club that had a 0.03 drop rate off a monster you had to pay untradeable, tedious to farm currency just to fight in a level synced fight that limited you to 3 players that needed to be specific jobs to make it easy enough to beat and there was no real way to control loot so any one of the 3 players could ninja loot the club and it was worth so much that it was extremely common to see it get stolen or you could pay 40+ billion gil for it. Multiple years of farming gil legitimately to afford or you could win it in a yearly raffle that only had 1 winner and that winner could choose any of the rarest most insane items in the game. This club wasn't something everyone had access to and 100% the players that used it against absolute virtue got it by buying gil with real money or HEAVY botting continuously for months to achieve it. Any job that could use the Kraken Club was instantly boosted in power multiple times over. I would argue that just seeing that many Kraken Clubs in one place at the same time was rarer than seeing Absolute Virtue get defeated.
@@OtakuWrath Right, it was just so rare and so few people had the club that once enough people in the same group were able to all use them and show off that dual wielding those basically gave you 10x your normal DPS. That was when Square realized that DK's drain ability was busted with multi-hit weapons and nerfed that ability (to only proc once per swing I think? Can't remember) so they could still make weapons like that later and not have the same problem.
@@TooamazinI wouldn’t say it was an exploit just an oversight on an already insanely rare weapon. If you could get enough people there with kraken clubs you deserve to win
I think one of the most important contexts to remember here is that it was 2004, in a time before the rise of TH-cam and proper infrastructure for video based internet. This meant that most of the data we had about these fights was shared in through text based forum posts, with supplemental screenshots at best. Videos existed, but the ability to record, host, and share them was a rare luxury. So a lot of speculation ended up going back and forth, based entirely on someone's memory of such a chaotic fight.
Something else to remember is that Chains of Promathia was probably when the game was the most difficult across the board. Leveling a job in FFXI was not a trivial task at the time, mostly achieved by grinding open world mobs in a party of 6. So you needed to find a decent party setup with 5 other similarly leveled people, and hope that one of the few open world spots for grinding reasonably killable mobs wasn't occupied by another party. CoP did basically nothing to alleviate this like other expansions and content packs did. Level Sync was reserved for specific instanced fights, while Equipment Sync was not in the game at all. And the story campaign itself was brutal in this regard, which was REQUIRED to even reach Lumoria in the first place. The 8 chapters of the story had various level caps throughout it, which meant you typically needed 6 properly geared players at each specific level to progress. If you entered a level 30 fight with level 35 gear, the gear would unequip, full stop, unlike the stat scaling that most modern MMOs see today. All that is to say, the privilege to even have access to Absolute Virtue in 2004 was reserved for the games most hardcore players. In many ways, you couldn't just throw more players at the fight to try and figure it out.
Compare that to the Ultimate raids that XIV sees today, where it might take a reddit thread a week to hammer out the details and see a first win, and you'll understand how different the MMO world was back then.
Yep. I switched from FFXI to WoW around the time Burning Crusade came out once I heard that you could make it to max level completely solo if you wanted to, without having to wait or worry about finding XP parties, level cap quests, or AF gear that everyone said was mandatory.
Best comment I've seen in a long time. People don't understand that information was much harder to get back then. You couldn't just google "how to beat xyz" or watch guides on youtube. Nor could you just keep trying the same fight over and over until you figured it out like you can in FFXIV. Every attempt for any difficult fight required items that were difficult and time consuming to get that would be consumed upon your single attempt, which slowed the learning process substantially.
FFXI itself was an already very hard game at the time. Anyone who actually managed to even get to level 75 was already an incredibly good player possessing a huge amount of skill and knowledge around their chosen job.
I actually fought this thing when it was current content. It taught me that SE, or at least FFXI's particular devs, truly despise humanity.
"You can beat the boss, you just have to play the game exactly how we want you to play the game, and not improvise at all." -The Devs, probably.
naw u have to be really clever to beat it any other way and once you have it evolves it’s a never ending battle
A lot of players act like this for making parties, "you must play these jobs in this specific way or you are a LEECH".
What's even funnier is, their "legit" way was impossible for anyone who wasn't a dev due to latency, cause the devs are barely 3ft away from the servers.
What's even more funnier is, they nerfed their own "legit" way of playstyle cause others started doing it.
I was going to make a joke about how that's essentially a Savage raid but at least Savage raids have some really whack ways to cheese mechanics that afaik never got nerfed (Tanks eating DD from P1S Intemperance...even though the mechanic is fucking easy).
Although I did just find out they nerfed a 12 year-old cheese strat from an ARR dungeon that I'm really salty about getting nerfed.
I was one of the team members that won the Ballista Royale in Seraph, with all of the horror stories of absolute virtue I never even tried going anywhere near him in my entire 7 years of playing lol.
They stopped doing ballista royale by the time I got into ballista :( one of the guys I'd always play with though was in it. Was a Galka Monk named Lysol from Fairy/Sylph
I miss Seraph! It was sad the day the server shut down, I went back to San D'oria around the AH for when the timer ticked down.
this is confusing me, cause Seraph didn't win the Ballista Royale, Siren server did, on both the JP and NA side.
and Siren faced Pheonix server for the NA finals
do you mean you just represented the Seraph server for the tournament?
@@Vailsiren they've since took the interview stuff down but I promise I have no reason to lie xD I played for 7 ish years and even had my Stars cap that you win for besting all the teams in your own world
@@Vailsiren - Yes. He meant that his team won the right to represent Seraph in the server vs. server phase of the tournament..
Thanks for using my amazing Bubbly Bernie footage, this is a blessed day
Something I'd like to point out, that the video did not, is that one of the ways to stop Absolute Virtue from using job 2hr (now 1hr) abilities was to pop the same one yourself, which locked him out of ever using it again on that spawn as far as I know. This was the latency mentioned, doing it too late would be ineffective. This meant for every one you wanted to lock out, you had to bring that same exact job in your composition. This would be completely unheard of in modern MMORPGs, especially XI's cousin, XIV. It's the main reason that I'm hesitant to go back to XI, even though I loved it, because XIV is built on the idea that ANY job can do ANY content, it's entirely reliant on the player's skill with that job. to put it a different way, your proficiency with your toolset determines your success. That's how superbosses should be designed in MMORPGs.
It basically wasn't possible to lock unless you were in Japan near the data centres.
@@yuffington what they should have done is provided challenges that required specific 2hrs to overcome. For example, it uses Mighty Strikes, Hundred Fists, and Blood Weapon. You have your tank use Invincible to counter. It can't deal damage, so it doesn't heal. All those effects wear off at the same time Invincible does. They could even do something with benediction where they warn the players he's "about to heal, but a strong series of blows could break its concentration!" Indicating they need to perform a LV3 skillchain and Magic Burst, to test how coordinated they are, or just have the SAM do a solo skillchain. It could cast Chainspell but become vulnerable to stun, thus allowing a Chainspell stun RDM to lock it down until it falls off.
I mean, less unheard of for XIV. Every job has its niche, but if the point was to lock it out from doing specific jobs, then the idea would be to bring people who like the "off-meta" jobs and are good at it. Dancer does some of the worst damage, but if they dance partner the right jobs in time for their burst, they're invaluable.
Edit: Because some "I Have to be Right, All the Time" weirdo brought it up, I will clarify. DNC does not do enough DPS to solo anything. Their DPS is effectively based solely on who their Dance Partner is, meaning they always have the opportunity to do high damage if they're paying attention.
Likewise, parsing is a terrible model to use as your "who is good at DPS right now" scale because, as from top parse being achieved by getting boosted by the entire party giving their buffs to that one person, ALL PARSES ARE CLEARS. Meaning even low parse is usually HIGH ENOUGH for the content!
Unfortunately, Parse is a scourge that cannot so easily be removed. I'm muting this because of some "Simon Cowell" wannabe who refuses to accept that they don't understand what I was saying.
Which was, "You can play as whatever class you want in 14, as long as know what you're doing, even as the lowest DPS. Just make sure you do your job _right."_
@Simon Cowell because me being... wrong about DNC specifically is... going to what exactly? Make someone upset? Like you?
People play the jobs they want in 14, regardless of DPS. At the time, my statement was true, and today it isn't. Congrats. You corrected someone in a random Comment Chain.
The one who sounds like they "want to be part of the conversation" is you.
@Simon Cowell Hold on, I went back over what you said, you used Parse as your example.
First of all, I never brought up MCH. I brought up DNC only as an example of my point that some jobs can be very bad, but can still have their uses. I said that DNC by itself is bad. It is. Fullstop. Parse proves the OTHER half of my point, which is WHEN PAIRED UP WITH PEOPLE.
If someone the DNC is partnered with is getting all the single-target buffs to inflate their parse, which is how people GET the top parse, then the DNC is gonna go up their with them.
But you have to do it right. In a vacuum, that DNC is still shit. You can't do solo-content with it, WHICH WAS MY POINT.
Absolute Virtue always sounded like a monster of legend to me, similar to the The One Sin in .hack. But now after watching this video and seeing the comments, it’s clear this boss was more of a shiny toy that Square wanted players to dream about beating and not actually defeat.
Kinda sad to see that was the actual reality but I guess I should be happy I never dedicated myself to this game that hard to get this far
I heard so many stories about AV while I was really into FFXI.
They were all horror stories.
I was there for the first fights... im still scarred
@@agentnorth2758 same here lol. Even to this day, ffxi memories run strong
I remember tanking Jailer Of Love for the first time as a PLD/RDM in the 75 cap, and once we won, AV spawned. Everyone left after JoL died lol. I engaged AV solo just to say I fought AV. Died in moments.
@@donnyyasu2764 You're a braver player than most!
I think I also heard that some people who tackled Absolute Virtue (or Pandaemonium Warden) for such a long period of time actually became ill to the point of vomiting due to dehydration, which also led to SE making changes to the boss.
Yeah, one of the battles against him lasted almost 24 straight hours and they only realistically failed because some were getting sick.
I think the boss where that happened was Pandaemonium Warden, but Absolute Virtue absolutely could have, and probably did, have that happen to a few groups as well. Either way, the fact that a boss of AV's level of difficulty existed at all, nevermind existed twice, is insane to me.
Almost! I believe that news actually revolved around Pandemonium Warden, and entirely different but similarly absurd super boss from the 3rd expansion, Treasures of Aht Urhgan. It was briefly mentioned in the video, but it was the uproar over the length of the PW fight that ended up nerfing BOTH Pandemonium Warden and Absolute Virtue to the 2 hour time limit.
Well, the fight with PW was the one that got all the headlines. I'm sure there were people feeling negative effects of sitting on a screen for 20+ hours with no breaks
@@thalandor46 Well, in either case, despite being an MMO, no boss (or superboss) should be that impossibly difficult or time-consuming, even with a whole squad of players. I'm pretty sure a lot of people got their patience tested to their limit and then some from that. Mind you, this is coming from someone who hasn't played XI (I play XIV, though).
The really insane thing about AV isn't necessarily AV itself being stupid OP, it was that the ENTIRE Chains of Promathia expansion in which AV even existed was, at that time, only reached by such an insignificantly small portion of the playerbase that most people that even played FFXI hadn't even acquired access to the region, much less fought its big baddie.
The Chains of Promathia expansion was released Sept. 21, 2004. The Game's next major expansion, Treasures of Aht Urghan was released Apr. 18, 2006. Then another expansion, Wings of The Goddess was released in November 2007. And in June of 2010 the first of 3 'Add on' packs was released Vision of Abyssea. That's alot of years right? 2004 to 2010. Well by 2010 less than 1/5th of the player base had actually completed CoP and even had access to the region AV occupies owing to the punishing environmental and tactical difficulty of the initial missions in that expansion. I recall some fanfest notes in which a dev mentioned that something like half the player base hadn't even made it past what was essentially the 'first mission' in the expansion. and this is in like 2009/2010. It was that difficult.
You had to have the exact specific jobs, those people had to all be on at the same time and willing to dedicate 2-3hours of prep work just to get to the arena for the first boss. In a level capped area. With no recovery point. Meaning you could spend 2 hours getting to the boss floor only to have a stupid-OP monster 12 levels above you dispel your White Mage's reraise effect, kill them, and render the whole run a wash. Or your Tank d/c. any of 1000 things could go wrong. Oh, and you had to do that 3 times. And that was just 'Chapter one'. Lumoria wasn't even accessible until 'Chapter 8'.
So few people had actually progressed in CoP content, that SE would reflexivly use it as an excuse for not producing more content in the expansions people actually liked (RoZ, ToAU, WoTG). A dev literally justified a lack of content creation by stating that so few players had completed CoP that there was 'plenty of content' for those players and they should do that.
Basically if you missed out on the initial hype of CoP, finishing it was a grueling task of spending HOURS trying to build a group with very skilled players, with particular jobs, for very specific functioning strategies. HOURS trying to fight through the artificially over powered areas owing to the level caps, to then try your hand at the boss of that chapter. Many failed so many times and wasted so much time on CoP missions that they'd simply given up on completing it in favor of less artificially tedious content in ToAU/WoTG. And the people who had managed to hack through it had zero intention of going back and helping others. Took weeks of dedication.
So in June of 2010, coinciding with the Visions of Abyssea 'addon on' which put the level cap at 80, almost 6 FULL years after initially released and two full expansions later (some would argue 3), Square Enix did a radical patch of the Chain's of Promathia content which removed the level cap from all areas associated with the expansion. And there was a mad dash for folks that had given up on CoP to finally complete it. And even with that, the mission fights themselves were still no picnic. The fights were the same toughness, it was just 'getting to the fight' was made way easier.
That's how bad CoP was. 6 years after its release it had to be radically altered top to bottom so that more than the try-hard, no-lifers could actually experience the content they'd paid for 6/10ths of a decade earlier.
thats horrendous. thanks for the essay!
It's worth noting that the FFXI dev team were actively and overtly hostile to the playerbase, and AV is a great example of how that hostility was manifest in the game design. The disdain they had for the players was obvious in their dev videos, and they deliberately refused to make badly needed QoL improvements until years after someone did it first, such as adding a minimap and support for windowed mode _only after_ a patcher (Windower) was created by players to add those features. Player suggestions were pretty much ignored, and any time a player figured out how to cheese some system the dev team focused its energy and effort into defeating that approach rather than investigating whether and why it was required in the first place. It was almost like FFXI was a personal pet project for a handful of people and they resented the millions of interlopers that dared intrude upon it.
The same team worked on FFXIV 1.0, and the tremendous number of technical issues aside, it was an unmitigated disaster that dealt a lot of damage to Square Enix as a company, and was only undone when a new team was assembled that actually cared about both the game and the players of that game, and FFXIV: A Realm Reborn (version 2.0) and the soon-to-be-five major expansions that followed were the result of their efforts.
I'd heard that the relationship between 11 players and the devs is a bit....fraught, especially in comparison to the relationship between 14 and the devs (ie; 11's director calling the players "customers" instead of "players" like 14 tends to, much more....impersonal, businesslike) and I've never heard the specifics of the devs responses to people actively trying to fix/have fun within what they were given so I feel like it really encapsulates a lot of the differences between the 2 mmos.
Seems like the people in charge of this thing had active contempt for the player base at the time, honestly.
Contempt isn't the right word most XI players would use, as that implies the devs are actively trying to do things to create bad experiences for players as "payback" for whatever reasons. To most XI players, saying the XI devs had contempt is like saying FromSoftware has contempt for their players in the Souls series. The early years of XI is a relic of the past in terms of development direction.
Things were intentionally made to be difficult and they actually weren't as power tripped as people in the comments suggest. Players played Ninja as tanks, which was completely different from their original intent. Zerg strats were a thing in other endgame content without being nerfed. AV and PW were literally intended to be the hardest content to ever exist in the game, so there's going to reasonably be some bias on the matter from the devs. It is without a doubt pretty bad about the DK and Kraken club nerfs on AV, but things like with exploits and bans related isn't exactly unreasonable. Most MMORPGs do that today if people cheat lol.
It was a very different mentality back then from what it is today. Mistakes were definitely made, but that's why people learned from them. That said, some things that people consider "mistakes" of games like XI are part of the reason why people complain about the games today. Struggle and some degree of unfairness or imbalance actually make games more memorable and enjoyable (to some degree). Frustrations are absolutely part of the journey. Ask any FromSoft fan or other difficult games of the past (e.g. Super Meat Boy).
Wow, lots of memories from playing endgame during this time in FFXI - I've been apart of a few attempts to take AV down in my time - of course, only bringing it to 79% before we were Manafont/Chainspell meteor spammed.
I remember standing in Upper Jeuno watching the chat spam too fast to read, players completely hyped about AV being taken down on an entirely different server. It was like reading a ticker flying out of the machine, with people reporting moment by moment what was going on. This was during the era of wall of justice kills.
One thing I don't think I noticed was mentioned in the video was how hard and how much effort and time was required to bring AV from the Jailer of Love spawn to the Jailer of Justice spawn to set up a wall of justice kill - there were aggressive monsters from below the floor and in the skybox, there were also a large number of curious, fish-like monsters that would follow you, if your party used AoE spells you could suddenly have a horde of angry fish following you so you needed to be 110% aware the entire journey to the other side of the map, all while AV is casting horrible, party-wiping spells constantly. It was like moving a full raid of 36 people across the map together, in formation. Everyone had to be on top of their jobs of supporting the tank party with debuffs and add killing, all while the tanks juggle staying alive and maintaining enmity on AV, otherwise it would deaggro and very quickly begin walking back to its spawn, erasing a large portion of progress. This explanation doesn't even put in to context the extremely long casting times, the pure lack of natural mp5 (you relied on other mages), and punishing distance requirements to cast spells - this required tight, constant, and informative communication between all players, with a shot-caller who has a keen sense of foresight. To play well in endgame, you had to be pre-emptive, not reactive. To say just moving AV in to position is difficult would be an understatement.
I also believe the first AV kill reported in this video using the wall of justice was actually the second, though I could be entirely wrong because it has been 10+ years, was actually achieved by linkshell of japanese players. The strategy was translated to our english players through forums - I remember delving deep into bluegartr and killingifrit forum threads during this time looking for strategies to lead my own linkshell to victory, as the way to beat AV was pure mystery at this point. If anyone was running high level HNM endgame during 2006 and can correct me if I'm wrong, please feel free to! But I distinctly remember the discussions surrounding the translated texts and screenshots of the JoJ wall trick with japanese text on the screen. (For context for non-FFXI players, there was a strong divide between JP and EN players, we all shared the same servers, but our information and knowledge of the game did not get shared very often. We had a mutual respect for each other but japanese players and western players played the game very differently!)
Thanks for the fantastic video on one of the most legendary creations I've ever seen in a video game! This really brings back a lot of good memories running my linkshell through all of the 75 cap endgame experiences - Jailer of Love was a fantastic fight I always loved participating in. To have the mysterious and terrifying absolute virtue spawn immediately after JoL dies and start romping on your alliance of players, running in fear of their lost experience points as they try to escape the wrath of the raging celestial Aern - it was really the time to be playing FFXI.
Here's to hoping we see classic servers one day, I'd love to take another walk through the land of Vana'diel as I knew it.
Do u play XIV? c:
Reading your response is like I'm back there again. 14 years ago.
Fascinating to watch and also it's reminding me what a love hate relationship I had with ffxi and the dev team's frothing hatred of players. Looking back on all of the years I sank into it, I realize I only really enjoyed the friendships I made and almost nothing about the actual gameplay.
I'm so grateful that FFXIV was saved from this by Yoshi P.
FFXI has been saved from it as well. Thank you Matsui!
FFXI for the longest time was a constant HATE relationship from the Devs side towards its own player base. Find an activity that's enjoyable? Nerfed it!
You like fishing? We broke it (in the excuse of making it harder on RMT fishbots) except now you've got a stupid mini game and the fishbots actually fished out all the good stuff you wanted, so fishing's no longer a relaxing side hobby for the downtime.
You like crafting? Nerfed it!
Oh you need money? Well, we've removed practically all viable ways to make money so now you're stuck with the AH (and basically creating a stronger market for RMT).
Oh, you like gear drops? Nerfed that too!
Any little bit of enjoyment you have, we'll nerf it and make it no longer enjoyable, just to spite you and make it take longer do get anything done.
Yeah... FFXI became more like a 2nd job for a long while. the ever diminishing return of time spent to fun gained was always widening.
@@cocodojo gotta make sure the players keep renewing that subscription, heh. It's like pay2win but pay2sinktime2paymore
For any curious, the loot for the first kill of Absolute Virtue ever was only a Light Crystal. A garbage item. While it wasn't uncommon for extremely hard bosses to drop literally nothing, this still made people wonder if it even had its speculated loot table enabled - things like Mars's Ring or Ninerta's Sash were assumed to be on it but not known for certain yet. It possibly having no loot table only furthered speculation that it wasn't supposed to be defeated yet.
A video on Pandemonium Warden and the controversy surrounding it would be neat.
I remember watching BTL fight him. They did that shit for like 30 hours.
@@timmer6287 poor strategy. At least they won though.
Rukenshin's (BTL officer) Live journal entry addressing the controversy and spawn by spawn updates are still up. Sadly the images are down due to PhotobucketLol. It's still a pretty in depth two part read though
Honestly they shouldn't have lied and said people were fainting/throwing up to make the fight seem more hardcore. At the time the community thought that would make the game look better since we were so accustomed to harder=better. Surely a fight that hard would help the game make a comeback after WoW's launch, right? Of course it backfired and they had to nerf and ultimately ruin the game.
I still remember then the first Spawn Key for Pandeminium Warden was traded to a ??? outside of the city.
A Goblin spawned and died in 1 hit. The ??? was mistakenly left in from the Devbuild. The Linkshell got reimbursed by a GM after a while but the whole thing was absolutely hilarious.
The level of trolling SE performed with this boss is unparalleled
This and a few other instances in XI, and how XIV was for 1.0, is how you can tell the difference in caring for the player base between then and now with Yoshi-P and his team on XIV.
Indeed. Heck, I remember how Tanaka, the former game director, claimed the reason 1.0 bombed hard was because us western players were super crappy at the game and didn't know to play it well and correctly like the Japanese players, painting it like the failure was due to whining rather than...well, bad design and development fueled by hubris
@@granmastersword difference between trying to be "Nintendo hard" and "actually respecting the players" lol
I'm thrilled they are making FF16. That was literally the only way I was going to buy that game after 15.
@@holographicfrog1503 15 would have been one of the best games of all time if they followed through with the modding tool and I will die on this hill
@@apexreactions4231 It really wasn't good though. The only decent part of the whole game was the fraternity of the brotherhood and that's it. Unless you view it as a Skyrim type of thing. Then I can see your argument. I don't think the modding scene would've been big though.
I loved the mythos surrounding this guy within the playerbase. One of the most enjoyable elements of the NM system in XI (in my opinion, at least) was the way it promoted discourse, and caused their legend to spread throughout the community.
This said, I never managed to topple this chap, but he remains one of my favourite bosses of the franchise to this day.
Shout out to the Titan server that was!
I miss FFXI. My main was RDM and I miss especially the music and just lounging around in the fields relaxing. Shout-out to Carbuncle server!
I loved that AV brought the community together like no other. Everyone wanted to be the guy who figured out "the way" to beat it and even people who never even stepped foot into Lumoria were getting in on the brainstorming. It was incredible.
Shout out for titan from Zaros!
@@TenchiHawkwing Would have been better is AV actually was beatable rather than being a cruel prank played against the player by the devs.
Shoutout from a Carbuncle who moved to Asura!
Square acted like a childish DM angry that his players figured out ways to beat their souped up boss monster easily.
Despite Square throwing a hissy fit every time AV was defeated, FFXI still holds a special place in my heart and one of my favorite games of all time.
It’s one of those “you should have been there to understand” type games.
FFXI's one of those games where the term "The struggle was REAL" was not just empty words for those who've experienced it for a good amount of time.
Still its always funny seeing someone die, de-level and suddenly become naked because they no longer meet the level requirement for their equipped gear and is now dead on the ground in pretty much VERY hostile territory even for well equipped players is always an amusing sight.
Also, its always been weird when you check a mob and it says "Even Match" yet when you try to fight it, its more on the level of "I'm gonna wipe the floor with your sorry butt" if you try to take one of them on solo at most points in the game back in the days. That level check system lies, you'd be lucky to survive an "easy prey" fight most times!
Just a reminder that FFXI has a classic fan server Horizon opening on December 17th 2022, which is basically going to relive FFXI from it's 2004 launch up until current content with a permanent level 75 cap, meaning the game-ruining 99 level cap set after Abyssea will be regeared to function entirely with level 75 gear, so all of your gear will be relevant forever. It's gonna be massive, I highly encourage anyone who missed the original FF11 boat give it a shot!
And it's free! And Square Enix isn't interested in pursuing a classic server (since it would cost too much and be too much work and FF14 already makes infinite money from casuals), so you don't have to worry about losing anything in a cease & desist order. And the folks working on it are very talented programmers who have been doing this for years on other private servers.
This makes me feel like defeating Ruby and Emerald in FFVII wasn't such a big deal. And I guess it wasn't overall. But to me it was..
They were as a 10 year old lol
@@David-nd4to Amen 🙏
FF7 was my first rpg, so beating Ruby and Emerald was a huge deal to me. I stumbled around for so long trying to figure out what to do, so when I finally cracked it, my 10 year old mind was blown.
Got wiped from Ruby Weapon on the first time I saw the tiny red worm, then got wiped again after preparing myself, then kicked his ass the 3rd time around after forgetting about him and grinding for level and master materias. Emerald in the other hand was pretty easy for a super boss.
@@mrdude88 emerald is the easiest of the bunch
I remember the bullshit around this boss.
It was essentially "The Sleeper Dragon" all over again.
Devs didn't think of "everything" so when the boss did get destroyed, they had tantrums and fits with some GMs healing the boss, buffing it, and even debuffing the players or teleporting them. With one GMs despawning the boss when near death.
I digress...
Absolute Virtue and Pademonium Warden were...impo proof that FF11's dev team held nothing but contempt for the players and had no idea how MMOs truly worked.
It was bad enough that FF11 was an unofficial survival-horror MMO (everything was devastatingly deadly, and players were frighteningly weak. You prayed nothing saw, heard, or smelled you during every trek in the game. You prayed a super boss wouldn't spawn on your boat. Literally an MMOs where 98% of the time, players were sneaking around, avoiding enemies.) but the devs making enemies and then patching them to ensure they defeated the players were beyond egregious.
I've never forgiven the FF11 team for that.
My LS used to joke that Absolute Virtue's true ultimate ability was to patch the game and buff itself.
Skill issue.
@@Player-dw3pe Yes, clearly these devs lacked essential encounter design skills.
that reminds me of a short story by fantasy author Mercedes Lackey, where a genuine monster got into a MMO server, because their "lore" was TOO accurate, and they were worried that it might escape into the real world, if it managed to collect the right items.
at one point the monster actually managed to steal a GM's invincibility for a short time, and kill his unkillable character.
then it LOOKED AT THE PLAYER AND LAUGHED AT HIM! (as if it could see out of his screen)
they needed help from a genuine magic-user to deal with it.
she had previously helped them by putting a Jinx on the "chinese gold-farmers", so that they never got any decent loot.
I remember tackling this boss so many times, and it took us several years till we figured out how to beat it. We managed to best it before the level cap increase after finding out you could lock him from using his 2hours multiple times, although it was very unforgiving as AV still had to use each of his 2hours at least once to lock them.
If Absolute Virtue uses invincible for example, if a player on the hate list used invincible within a couple of seconds, it would prevent AV from using invincible again. This still meant that he would be able to use Chainspell, Benediction, Manafont & hundred fists for example all at least once in the fight, all of which were almost guaranteed to wipe parties. Our strategy had us bring along more than the full alliance of players, and we had one specific party that would pop the him, and all attack him just once to make sure they were on the hate list, before letting the 2nd PT in the alliance engage (the main tank PT) and then the original spawning PT would drop the alliance. The spawning party would consist of 6 jobs of who's 2hours were the main focus to be locked, BLM RDM MNK WHM PLD SMN, and since these 6 players were on the hate list, even though they were no longer in the main alliance, if they used their 2hrs after AV it would lock his 2hrs.
This doesn’t surprise me but it’s so interesting hearing the development history of this boss!!!
Given how they handled this whole situation I'm not surprised that XIV 1.0 turned out the way it did
They were definitely full of hubris, and they were overly focused on the Japanese market with 1.0. They ignored WoW completely and just went with the "Well we have the best game in Japan, and Japan is the best, so we don't need to try hard."
game is still bad to this day. Square devs are some of the worst lmfao
@@alterrondo4179 Bad? Laughable.
For every way its well designed, its also terribly designed in 2 others (Not including all the garbage left over from 1.0)? Absolutely.
After hearing about the "Dark Knight Kraken Club Zerg while buffed to the teeth with Bards and Corsairs" strategy my linkshell allied with one of our competing linkshells (who we already had a mostly-friendly relationship with from a previous Dynamis alliance) to utilize this strategy to defeat AV.
Much like the video shows, it wasn't terribly exciting and was clearly a "cheese strat," but it was still cool to get the win and the "Virtuous Saint" title for my character. I was even lucky enough to be the recipient of the "Bellona's Ring," which, while totally underwhelming stat wise for the effort (it was basically a Sniper's Ring +2), was a pretty cool trophy item.
Lmfao
The fact that square enix made a boss that was so hard it literally broke the news is just as crazy as it is also hilarious and awesome. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to dying every five minutes in Strangers of Paradise on lvl 300 missions on Bahamut difficulty.
The Randomly-spawning Notorious Monsters in FFXI are literally something I wish more games had. I >love< the idea. From the unique drops, to the naming schemes, to just giving fun to exploring and danger to certain areas.
Like, its probably the one single thing that kept me playing XI for as long as I did, because a lot of my free time was spent camping all the different and unique NMs in this game, no matter how good or bad the drop was lol. It was such a fun experience.
But yah, fudge me, Absolute Virtue and the sheer amount of hate the Devs expressed at the playerbase when they found a strategy to beat him that didn't involve their convoluted 18 hour long 2-hr locking RNG fest of a fight was something I got to experience firsthand. Absolute Virtue should be a required case study for game devs on how not to design a super-boss, and how not to treat your playerbase when they defeat him.
Then they should look at Pandemonium Warden too.
Anyway, I solo'd Absolute Virtue the other week when they introduced the Sea campaign for the cosmetic weapons and boy did it feel good to kick his butt, but never came close in the 75 era.
I miss NMs/Rare Monsters in MMOs that have random spawns/specific conditions. The problem with them existing in modern MMOs though is the fact that in the olden days of rare spanws/NMs a server would usually have a few hundred to a few thousand players total on it at most and usually a few hundred playing at the same time (barring special events and the weekend). This meant that stuff like NMs or world chests or open world dungeons that had timed spawns/loot would likely be open for a random group of players or a few friends trying to get something. The content was also designed to be grindy and hard to get through causing less competition on top of the already small player-base.
In the more popular modern successful MMOs you tend to see thousands of players online at once and everything is tracked with some kind of third party tool or website. Randomly stumbling upon something or needing to keep a personal calendar for something you were looking to get/kill is a hard sell these days. Especially given the demand everything has on everyone's time. Even high schoolers have less "free time" or patience now than they did 20 years ago, everything is instant gratification or "if it takes more than a couple hours it's too much time," which to a degree is fair.
I was on the Pandemonium server and used Blue Grtrs strats a lot. I never fought AV but I definitely heard the nightmare stories about him. I retired from the game with AV being one of the few HNM I never challenged but at least it sounds more doable now.
you can solo AV now with i119 gear (using trusts but I bet a RDM could solo). He's a joke now. Warder of Courage, the i119 version, though... Not too bad actually; if you can manage to zerg it!
@@RaxiazRedux I retired from the game officially shortly after the last expansion so I'm not sure what i119 gear means exactly. I have no plans to return but I'm glad the game is still running and older content can be experienced still.
I appreciate the background you gave before you got to the boss itself as even though I've played games with such bosses I literally never noticed things like optional bosses, among other things, until you pointed them out; a proper context for someone who games but hardly knows what they're doing. Awesome video.
I remember absolutely virtue and when they first introduced it. I played on carbuncle and i knew the first American player on my server to get an amanomurakumo. I actually introduced him to the game, aladwar was his name.
I had a theory early on how to beat absolute virtue...I suggested using 2 hour abilities in some way. I didnt have a way to communicate the idea to larger shells because I was stubborn and I didn't have much clout other than training some of the best on my server.
I come to find out years later I was 100% and years ahead of people.
This boss is so legendary that even non players like me know the name of him and heard stories
I remember that gold dragon from DnD. It's attack was "WOW" or something.
Devs were like "yeah it's beatable, watch this video", but it took them 18 hours and zero lag. This is exactly like New World devs who overtuned bosses for such a long time that players wanted them to prove it's doable. They tuned the content down BEFORE making their video. Dishonest fucks.
I played FFXI for 12 years from NA release. I was a 4 song Gjallarhorn Bard with all my RME weapons (left before Aeonic was a thing). I'd been a part of all the high end content up to that point. Feeding Kirin with Hymnus after a bad wipe. LS Dynamis runs on Fridays. The disaster that was Jormungand's release. Pandemonium Warden... Nyzul Isle... The super diesel crystal dragon... Etc, etc.
Of all the nonsense we endured over the years, Square's utter refusal to allow AV to be beaten was downright disgusting. I was in a linkshell called HiddenPower at the time and part of our crew was hit by that swing of the hammer for the wall. In my opinion, AV and PW were blatant and gross displays of ego. The PW scenario ended horribly though and created nasty PR that forced them to change the way they went about encounter design from then on.
And that's why, even now in FF14, they have time limits for every grouped piece of content. Whether it be dungeons, trials, Bozja/Eureka, raids, etc.
@@AzureKyle i feel like time limits are a natural development of the medium but I agree that having an encounter take 18+ hours to beat is nonsense, no matter what MMO you're playing that's just ridiculous
I remember your LS name from back then :)
@@AzureKyle Interesting, I always wondered why you would have time limits in FF14's dungeons. The more you know!
@@myhr2320 Yup, so you don't end up spending too much time in it. Though, you don't usually come anywhere near that. The only times I've ever timed out were from Savage raids, Extreme trials, and Bozja. Though I did get close while doing Puppet Bunker raid blind on patch day.
I believe Pandemonium Warden was close to impossible at first, too. Back when I was playing this game, I read the article about the first LS to down him. It took somewhere around 48 or 72 hours of straight combat. Something like that. They had to force a nerf, because some of the LS were hospitalized. Some of them got really sick and were puking in the middle of the fight.
I believe this is also when they rolled out the warning on the loading screen about taking breaks, drinking fluids, and sleeping lol.
Link shell was Beyond the Limitation. I played with some of them outside of my own LS time when I was on Seraph. Those guys were awesome. Many quit the game after that fight.
The funniest thing about FFXI is how hard the devs hate the community, there's an abundance of stories like this
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Kerafyrm. Sony did a similar thing with a one-time spawn unkillable boss in Everquest. One PvP server's top guilds agreed that any guild who triggered the spawn would be destroyed from then on by the others. Kerafyrm stayed unspawned on that one server for a couple years, till expansions made players powerful enough that they could use a legit method to defeat it: a couple hundred players, with a mass of clerics spamming their free rez and pet classes having a swarm of pets zerg rush the boss in melee. After a couple hours, when the boss was almost dead, Sony despawned it... The fight was legendary, with people from all servers paying attention because it was finally being spawned on that last server. There was an uproar, Sony apologized, reset the event, and gave the server another go the next day. They downed Kerafyrm, and the loot table was empty, since Sony never thought it would be killed.
EDIT: The old model still looks great too, the awakened crystal form with the colored head. Imagine that thing rampaging across the realm, screaming that it was going to kill everyone and everything while doing so.
I think its dumb when they force you to play their way only.
I remember the 30 hour fight. The killingifrit forums were going crazy. This is some incredible nostalgia, thanks for making this.
5:14 Small correction, there were in fact 7 Jailers (Faith, Prudence, Temperance, Hope, Fortitude, Justice, and Love), which would then lead into Absolute Virtue, making AV 1 of 8 NMs in Lumoria, not 1 of 7 🙂
Some dev teams actually applaud players for finding innovative shortcuts and hacks - taking the time to find these exploits shows high investment in the game, after all - so it's kinda crappy that these guys did the opposite. Like, no argument that it was a hard boss.. but sounds like it was hard in a bad way if you know what I mean:/
Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden are easily the most difficult bosses that video games never mimicked the same way as these two. Glad to see that Absolute Virtue didn't cause insomnia and/or hospitalization compared to the Pandemonium variant.
Actually, it did. Pandaemonium Warden had a group of players that ended up in the hospital due to fatigue and dehydration after a FAILED 18-hour encounter with the boss. Bear in mind, Pandaemonium Warden was introduced AFTER Absolute Virtue and everything that came with AV, so SE KNEW what might happen with long, drawn out encounters like that. It was the bad press from PW that ended up leading to AV and PW being heavily nerfed and made "beatable" in the realistic sense.
My LS had a much easier time with PW than with AV, although we did get both when the level cap was raised to 80.
It was PW, and not AV where that happened.
@@TenchiHawkwing My bad.
IDK about PW but AV really isn't that hard a boss.
It was only that hard because no one knew what the mechanics were.
Square was so pissy about people who beat ot. It's like a child on the playground whinging that their character is sooooo much better than yours.
Can't imagine the devs have much goodwill left among the gaming community after making an invincible boss, lying and saying it was possible, and then *banning* people who actually beat it.
They did have goodwill, the game was hard, people knew it and the bans happened to people who openly cheated to beat AV
At the time we loved it, the game, and the devs. We weren't angry about these things, we just kept going. No one was upset at all. Gaming has changed a lot since then, but at the time? We signed up for this game because of how excruciating it was. That was the selling point, you know? The big disappointment now is that gamers would just cry about QoL instead of embracing it.
@@purrpocalypse The sense you achieved things was amazing, you earned everything.
FFXI is one of the most hardcore MMO's still operating with dev support. You literally (once) needed a solid party of 5 to lvl in the open world after roughly level 12.
This boss was hell, I didn't even fight it, I was just a member of a support linkshell. But I heard of the horror.
Just a reminder that FFXI has a classic fan server Horizon opening on December 17th 2022, which is basically going to relive FFXI from it's 2004 launch up until current content with a permanent level 75 cap, meaning the game-ruining 99 level cap set after Abyssea will be regeared to function entirely with level 75 gear, so all of your gear will be relevant forever. It's gonna be massive, I highly encourage anyone who missed the original FF11 boat give it a shot!
And it's free! And Square Enix isn't interested in pursuing a classic server (since it would cost too much and be too much work and FF14 already makes infinite money from casuals), so you don't have to worry about losing anything in a cease & desist order. And the folks working on it are very talented programmers who have been doing this for years on other private servers.
The real final boss will always be devs who get angry when players outsmart them
It's funny to me that they wanted to reduce the amount of time spent fighting bosses for the sake of player health, but Yiazmat in the very next installment would take up to 4 hours to defeat. At least with the gambit system in FFXII you could set up gambits and walk away, letting the game play itself.
To be fair, 4 hours is very different from 18 hours. Plus, you can pause the game.
Besides the gambit system allowing you to walk away, Yiazmat specifically had mechanics to allow you to walk away in-game, as well, keeping his health total after you leave. Even if it's taking you ridiculously long to kill Yiazmat, it isn't like you have to do that time consecutively.
it should be noted that both Yiazmat and Absolute Virtue came out in the same year. Not the 2h version, the 20 hour version.
Yizmat health didn't regenerate when you stopped the fight, so you can do it in sessions, and it was a single player game.
I’ll be honest, I don’t even care what ya’ll upload. Your content, voice, and editing is just so pristine that I can put ya’ll on a playlist and relax, even if I’m at work.
Keep up the amazing work. I legit live for your videos.
Malenia thinking she's the hardest boss with at least a million people defeating her solo within a few months. Meanwhile... There is Absolute Virute who took years to defeat with a full party attacking
AV is on another level
Yozora in KH3 remind is a pretty impressive “super boss” too.
The difference being, one is made for Solo Play and was designed to be difficult to defeat by any build while still providing sufficient gaps in her defense to allow skill to shine through no matter the build.
And the other was designed to be deliberately nigh-impossible unless you had the exact right team with the exact right commands at the exact right time and if you beat it without doing that the game devs patched your strategy out.
That's not Super Boss territory, that's bullshit.
To get the same level of bullshit, we'd need to make Malenia absorb all Sorceries and Incantations, her attacks aren't parryable, she immediately shatters all guards, her health regen is constantly on, she has 99.997% Damage Reduction against Piercing and Striking, is immune to all status ailments, and god help you if your Summon brought anything more than a Katana to the fight.
And then they patch out the Summons too.
Now does that sound like a well designed Super Boss meant to test your abilities and tenacity in this game to the limit?
Or does that sound like shoehorned in bullshit?
@@LeviathanTamer31 It sounds like a memorable experience that would make the game better, honestly.
@@purrpocalypse Not really, A big draw behind a lot of Fromsoftware's games is that you can really play the way you want to. Make things as challenging or as easy as you are able.
And in the few games where that's not the case like Sekiro, they instead give everyone the same toolset but craft the entire experience around being able to use that toolset from its basics to its more advanced tools.
This concept for a Malenia fight is pretty well the antithesis to all of that. A fight built around only allowing a single build in a game to work, in a game where the individual tools are not that far developed because they built for Quantity.
People already complain about the Elden Beast absorbing Holy Damage effectively removing one broad type of build rather than letting any build challenge the boss.
This version of Malenia would go down in history as the worst Fromsoftware boss. Without a single doubt in my mind.
I remember meeting a Blue Garter member in XIV with several ARR world’s firsts about a year ago. Didn’t believe him at first, but his Lodestone checked out. Like meeting a living legend tbh
I get Square Enix being upset with the first time people beat it because of the exploit, but them nerfing the dark knights strat is such BS.
Skill issue.
To be fair that isn’t even remotely a legitimate way. Kraken club was one of the rarest weapons in the game. Like thousands of real life dollars to buy one. Having one made you a legend. To see one in action was a tale you told your LS. Having a gang of DRK’s curb stomping AV was hilarious but never once considered when designing it. It is like making a hard boss for 6 people and they cheese it into 30.
in my opinion, the problem with absolute virtue isn’t that the devs had an intended strategy, it’s that the intended strategy was too obscure, practically impossible to figure out without being told it by the devs, the way they nerfed exploits by touching content outside of av, and being unwilling to change the timing windows to account for lag on the live servers. i get why they wanted a boss that was genuinely hard to beat
its kind of lame how game devs kept moving the goal post when people found a way to beat him legitimately
Fun Fact: Killing the Moon Lord with a Lawnmower on the absolute easiest difficulty in the game (Journey with Lowest Difficulty Sliders) takes about 30 Hours. Classic takes about 60 and Expert takes about 90. Master and Legendary will take over 100+ Hours to kill Moon Lord with a Lawnmower.
I was in a LS on Migard called PlusOne and we were part of the joint effort to take him down using the wall. Virtuous Saint title will never be topped for me in gaming bragging rights
This fight was insanity. Pandemonium Warden was a nightmare to.
Theres gotta be some people out there who raised up a dark knight to the highest possible level to slay absolute virtue and finally did so, only to get nerfed. I'd probably quit.
The only problem with AV once we learned how the fight was supposed to go, was the response time needed to counter AV's actions. I was a part of many of the strategies that got nerfed. The way to kill him was not possible due to server lag and actually seeing him do his 2hr's was too delayed to react to the chat log.
We only were able to kill it once the summon Alexander was released. Perfect defense and a zerg fight. Could only have like 1 DRK in the alliance due to the patched method.
I was going to say “No, Galdera the Fallen from Octopath Traveler is the hardest JRPG boss” but no, Final Fantasy XI bosses makes hard bosses from single player JRPGs look pathetic, especially Absolute Virtue.
Yeah, that whole Absolute Virtue thing is a prime example of why I pretty much prefer old-gen console games over MMO's and such. Being able to get a whole game with a one-time payment, no server lag, and no developers changing things in the middle of the game when legitimate exploits are figured out!
I feel always proud an honor to be able to have the title it gave, though I was lucky enough while farming at lv 99 with some friends, someone spawn it, and shouted for folks to join his alliance if we wanted the title, so I was lucky to get a spot and help out for a few mins and got the title. But I do remember all the talks around it, and how hard everyone had it to beat, and how it got nerfed, etc.
The true Superboss of all games is the developers, not the game enemies but those behind the creation.
Wait, wasn't there also a mechanic that players found (or did SE tell us?) that you could cancel out AV's 2-Hour moves by having a party member using it before him? I thought that was how you were supposed to prevent the Benediction bomb(s)
believe that was what was shown in the dev. video but the strict timing made it very hard to pull off with latency players would have.
You had to have someone use their SP move within a couple seconds of AV using the same SP move. It was basically impossible to do it fast enough without being right next to the servers for 0 latency.
Y'all wanna know something crazy? There have been reports of players becoming PHYSICALLY ILL from trying (and failing) to kill this thing for hours! Say what you will about bosses like Yiazmat and the Adamantoise, but at least you can pause those games for a bathroom break or whatever!
Solid video, was pretty neat hearing the different methods people used to beat this boss, plus the back and forth between the devs/players.
That's being said I think there could have been a bit more of a deeper dive on what the boss actually did that made him so difficult; I felt like I didn't have enough context to really grasp what made this fight so difficult, outside of it taking actual years for players to kill the thing.. You mention how the devs would patch the boss because they weren't happy with how the players were clearing the fight, but never really mention what the "intended way" of clearing the fight actually was. Outside of the brief mention of how the method demonstrated in the dev's demo video wouldn't be possible in real servers, there isn't very much details on what they were doing, or why that was the case.
The most frustrating part is the developer response. As long as the strats are within the parameters in the game's code, it should not be considered cheating, and should instead be praised as players learning the game well enough to discover how to defeat it in their own way.
I can understand banning and other such punishments due to mods that cheat, such as the TOP debacle in 14, but if it's within the limits of the game as the devs designed it, then they should accept the solution the players discovered rather than throw a fit that they're not beating it "the right way."
i'm still playing this, just got home from work logging into FFXI and then seeing this one youtube. I remember the days of attempting Absolute Virtue back in the 75 cap era. basically impossible.
Just a reminder that FFXI has a classic fan server Horizon opening on December 17th 2022, which is basically going to relive FFXI from it's 2004 launch up until current content with a permanent level 75 cap, meaning the game-ruining 99 level cap set after Abyssea will be regeared to function entirely with level 75 gear, so all of your gear will be relevant forever. It's gonna be massive, I highly encourage anyone who missed the original FF11 boat give it a shot!
And it's free! And Square Enix isn't interested in pursuing a classic server (since it would cost too much and be too much work and FF14 already makes infinite money from casuals), so you don't have to worry about losing anything in a cease & desist order. And the folks working on it are very talented programmers who have been doing this for years on other private servers.
@@ChaseFace I’d rather keep retail alive for as long as possible
So let me get this straight. The intended method of winning basically involved having a group of people all having TAS levels of timing and RNG in an environment with variable command input lag. The odds that everything would line up that way in such an environment, and even with everyone playing perfectly, you are more likely to win the jackpot on a lottery. Yes it is technically beatable, but the odds are almost non existent of being beaten in such a way.
I am halfway convinced that they created this knowing people would find work arounds and cheese. In other words that they basically used it for bug testing, and that is probably why the first method was allowed at first, so that they can collect data to patch an unintended game mechanic.
I actually beat AV last month with 2 friends. The tank was the party leader so when he got charmed he killed me while our third ran away cause the charm dispelled the trusts. Once the charm wore off we got the kill
I imagine when you mention to a ffxi veteran the name alone they would probably get vietnam flashbacks and the horrors they felt
Reminds me of a few bosses from the early days of everquest. One had am item called something like ring of the cheater as the only loot drop because the devs thought the boss was unkillable. And another boss, a dragon called the sleeper was only fightable once per server and a pvp server still hadn't woken theirs long after most servers did. So all the big guilds got together to wake and kill it but GMs shut the server down right before they did
I can't seem to find info on that Ring.
Are you absolutely sure that is the name? Because that sounds amusing lol.
I remember reading about that once per server dragon. It seemed absolutely amazing and I would love to see the concept in an MMO again. Nit just because it’s one per server, but because, what I read about it years ago, is that once you wake it up, if you fail that one encounter, it goes on a heckin rampage through the entire world. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the concept actually filled me with dread for some reason. Like a primal fear. I wish I could’ve been there, but I feel it would have been too terrifying to experience.
@@chaocobojun2098 yeah you were supposed to fail killing it. Then it would rampage through the server killing all the other dragons because they imprisoned it.
@@CosmicChris Correct names were; Boots of Sad Exploitation, Cuirass of Sad Exploitation, and Earring of Sad Exploitation. These dropped off Lord Inquisitor Seru before he was able to be reached legitimately and guilds were gravity fluxing into his area to kill him. The loot was changed after the Arx key was introduced and the exploit was fixed.
@@kevinchappell7966 I am just laughing because I'm reading the stats. " -99" On EVERYTHING. That's hilarious.
I've never seen a developer team try so hard to make a boss near impossible, then essentially gaslight their players into thinking they suck. Only to reveal it took them 18 hours of trying to do it themselves... How. Then anytime they thought outside the box to win or get close to. Not only did they probably not get any good drops but then get threatened? You really can't make this stuff up it's incredible.
Great video though I would love more info about Pandemonium Warden. Maybe another video? Do you have any sources as well-- not that I don't trust you or the video, it's just I found it ridiculously hard to research AV.
This was a fantastic and wonderfully informative video! I'd love to know more about other superbosses.
Any of the link shells I was in before the level cap was raised to 99 didn’t attempt Absolute Virtue. After the cap was raised some people fought it, but I wasn’t there. I did however take part in a fight with Pandamonium Warden which we did defeat it.
We defeated it 75 cap years ago with DRK zerg 16 times before patch. Took a while farming all the jol pops. Excellence LS
Always love to see XI content!
Just a reminder that FFXI has a classic fan server Horizon opening on December 17th 2022, which is basically going to relive FFXI from it's 2004 launch up until current content with a permanent level 75 cap, meaning the game-ruining 99 level cap set after Abyssea will be regeared to function entirely with level 75 gear, so all of your gear will be relevant forever. It's gonna be massive, I highly encourage anyone who missed the original FF11 boat give it a shot!
And it's free! And Square Enix isn't interested in pursuing a classic server (since it would cost too much and be too much work and FF14 already makes infinite money from casuals), so you don't have to worry about losing anything in a cease & desist order. And the folks working on it are very talented programmers who have been doing this for years on other private servers.
FFXI was a crazy experience in general, some of the HNM were truly "impossible to gauge", fighting Ultima, Bahamut, AV will be some of the greatest memories I have in gaming. What made it all the sweeter was having some of my best friends by my side. Though we've moved on with our lives I'll never forget them.
-Kalandera Eternal Light / Horizon LS Midgardsormr
You could also mention the Modus Veritas debacle, in which many linkshells were actively prepping and leveling the Scholar job in order to abuse the ability to one shot AV and other bosses which Square caught and nerfed before it could ever see the light of day. At 12:29 you the linkshell you mentioned was called Excellence, interestingly enough was lead by Stanislav Vishnevskiy who is the current CTO and co-founder of Discord.
Never knew that about Stanislav, that's really funny and interesting, I remember him/Excellence from Hades
This design philosophy and unwillingness to bend is what landed SE in hot water when they developed FFXIV 1.0 and put Hiromichi Tanaka, the producer for XI, in charge. As a result, the game flopped, they fired Tanaka, and had to build an entirely new game from the ground up.
Ah yes, a boss so long and hard that you would have to sacrifice yourself in real life to defeat him.
Even for the dreaded Mayumushi avoidance from one of those "I wanna be the Guy" fangames, at least it's almost 4 minutes in length and you can take breaks if you die.
Yes, truly the final boss of super bosses: a hostile dev team.