Final Fantasy XIV’s director provides a formal statement, and shares context behind Hephaistos nerf

The Pandæmonium Abyssos Savage raids are some of the toughest content in Final Fantasy XIV right now, and when they were first released, the final boss was even stronger than the development team initially thought. On September 13, after having been out for less than a week, the team gave the final boss in the Abyssos: The Eighth Circle, Hephaistos, a nerf, a rarity in the game’s history. Today, Naoki Yoshida, producer and director of Final Fantasy XIV, has issued a statement about that nerf and clarified the decision further.

Yoshida shared his statement on the Final Fantasy XIV website. Here, he breaks down how the balancing team approaches these Savage battles, how they create the difficulty of an encounter, and how they make it slightly more complex than their balance teams can handle. After all, the top raiding groups in Final Fantasy XIV are the best in the game; the team wants to give them victories that are won “by-the-skin-of-your-teeth.” The balance team achieves this by providing the boss a “little bit extra,” which translates to a one to two percent increase in health pool value.

Following these routine adjustments, the Final Fantasy XIV community struggled with this battle, and the development team went forward to adjust Hephaistos’ health pools. The hope was to ensure the Final Fantasy XIV community didn’t feel they were restricted to using specific DPS jobs, ensuring all jobs in the game were capable of contributing to every raiding party.

The health pool adjustment, while a nerf, was done because Yoshida believes the team miscalculated the difficulty. “The adjustment to Abyssos: The Eighth Circle was never intended to be a ‘nerf,’ but merely the correction of values that were set inappropriately for a fourth-stage Savage raid, to begin with,” Yoshida states.

When the nerf was initially announced, members of the Final Fantasy XIV community asked why the team was adjusting the encounter, not the Jobs in the game. “Attempting to ameliorate this by buffing certain jobs without making changes to the raid itself would have negatively impacted overall balance with each role,” Yoshida shared. “Unfortunately, adjusting all jobs in such a short period is also not feasible.”

These difficult Savage raids in Abyssos have been a learning moment for the Final Fantasy XIV team. Yoshida promises to take this experience forward and hopes to use what he’s learned to bring about more balanced and engaging encounters for the Final Fantasy XIV community to enjoy in future updates.