COVID-19 Changed How I Deal With Raiding in FFXIV

Raiding in Final Fantasy XIV is a strange process. 8 people in a single, mechanically complex encounter, struggling and failing to fight a boss for hours upon end until you get the run that goes right. And then you do it again the very next week. You do it over and over again, trying to get better times on the clear, make fewer mistakes and get the missing pieces of gear you need for whatever jobs you feel like you have fun playing. It is less an exercise in spontaneous precision, and more a learning process, seeing if you can adapt to, like learning an instrument, playing badly until you play it right.

I have done the hardcore stage raiding on and off through my many years playing Final Fantasy XIV. From the Omega series, to Eden to Pandaemonium, my career had ups and downs, with the ups outweighing the downs, as long as the static group I ran with was able to keep their spirits up. Endurance was the name of the game as much as it is pattern and position memorization. I remember fondly figuring out how to deal with the, admittedly stressful time-delay mechanics in the Eden series and having a mechanic, involving stack mechanic markers exploding while you  then immediately had to stand in position for the following explosions on each party member to keep your crew from exploding and the raid having to start over. It’s less pronounced in the Extreme Trials but the system is largely the same. How well can you and your seven friends or strangers work together to both learn new mechanics without wanting to slap yourself or them. 

My static and I parted ways after clearing the Anabaseios raids from the Pandaemonium series of raids. People were exhausted, myself included and we weren’t clearing the fights we needed to clear as regularly and stably as we wanted to. People were moving, end of semester was hitting for a bunch of us, and people felt like they definitely needed a break. I needed a break too, for a different reason. I had caught COVID-19. 

I was practically immobile for a week after contracting it. I believe my case was mild, too as I did not lose any sense of taste or smell, nor was I coughing as badly as many of the stories I had heard about the infections. By the time the worst of it passed, however, I began noticing changes in my own systematic experience. 

One of the many issues in contracting COVID-19, specifically is a decreased immune system, for sure, but the long COVID brain fog experience, is probably the most frustrating. My memory became, well, foggier and my short term reaction times felt slower than usual in almost every way. This was my biggest point of friction with the raids as we kept trying. 

Anabaseios, in particularly the 3rd and 4th fights of the Anabaseios raids, called P11S and P12S by the community, have a lot of what are called “body-check mechanics.” Mechanics that demand every party member be both alive and in perfect position by a certain point in the fight. These are fights that I had gotten down, that I felt secure in. And all of a sudden. I was standing in things I never stood in before and getting hit the wrong direction by knock back mechanics sending me flying straight into the abyss. The raiding break was, for me at least, a chance to try and figure out what had happened and maybe try and regain my mental faculties a little.

Dawntrail’s new raid series, with its harder Savage tier launching on July 30, 2024, was my first foray into truly hard content since contracting COVID. It was frustrating, to say the least. I was making the same mistakes, over and over and over again. The first mechanic of the fight, the one that is usually the easiest to overcome with minimal preparation and memorization, kept messing me up. Needless to say, later mechanics, including one that could kill the entire raid with a misplaced knockback effect, sending us right back to the beginning of the fight, were just as rough. All of this came to a head when I realized something.

I was getting more and more frustrated with myself as it went on, between my inability to process what was happening and the feeling that I was in fact letting down every one of my friends who had come with me on this attempt. My reaction speed was still as bad as it had been after my first infection, and my mood about it had only gotten worse. Watching the damage down ticks, the increased vulnerability stacks and my countless deaths rack up I started losing track of the fun there was to be had. It wasn’t clicking fast enough, or at least, as fast as it had in the past. I parted ways with that crew after two timer lockouts and I haven’t been back into the Savage tier since.

My experience with COVID and raiding in conjunction have given me a realization. Things that once came easier to me might not come as easy anymore, maybe ever again, and I’d need to put in more time and effort and practice for things to click. Time that random players in this game who have no stake in me as a person might not feel inclined to give. If I was getting that frustrated in a group of friends, I would probably feel far, far worse in a group of complete strangers.

I don’t know if this is the end for my hardcore raiding adventures. I don’t think that it is, but it sure does feel like things may not be the same for me as time marches on. All I can say is, wear a mask, and try to be patient. Relationships to hobbies may change but you can at least try to keep your body from deciding that for you.

Final Fantasy XIV and its newest expansion, Dawntrail, are available now on PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S/X.