Closing Fantasy 14’s Solo Solely is one in all my favorite problem runs ticking over on YouTube proper now—largely due to how completely unbelievable it’s. For context, RathGames has been taking over the MMORPG on his personal with out outdoors assist—no market board, no buying and selling, no events, and no responsibility assist NPCs.
It is a downside, given the principle storyline is suffering from necessary bosses and trials designed for 4, eight, or typically 24 gamers.
RathGames, who I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with earlier than, has overcome these obstacles with ingenuity earlier than—for example, the 24-person Alliance raid Crystal Tower, which one could not even queue for with out different gamers, was achieved by way of different “solo solely” problem run gamers who saved their interactions to a minimal.
Article continues under
Watch On
The most recent activity in query was the penultimate boss battle of Shadowbringers, Hades, and the transfer Captivity. Just like the Susano battle RathGames overcame with a over-levelled Pictomancer, Captivity locations a celebration member in a jail that must be damaged by way of injury by your teammates. Which is an issue if you haven’t any.
Captivity can technically be skipped if one manages to get Hades’ second part under 30-odd % of his well being earlier than he finishes casting it, however even after levelling a wholly separate job to degree 100 and gearing it out with one of the best equipment he might scavenge, RathGames was nonetheless simply over midway there. The sport’s injury scaling had lastly caught as much as him: It was an inconceivable DPS verify.
Enter the time-honoured custom of multiboxing. Certain, RathGames might name for assist from different Solo Solely problem runners himself, however that’d be admitting defeat—and whereas he wanted two gamers’ price of harm, there wasn’t something within the (self-imposed) rulebook that mentioned he could not be each gamers on the similar time.
He then proceeds to disclose that, in secret, he’d spent over 193 hours (far shorter than the 1,008 from his first Solo Solely playthrough—the wonders of optimisation) levelling up a wholly completely different character below the identical stringent ruleset, doing each single nail-biting, agonising problem twice, simply so he might say he’d accomplished all of it himself.
I reached out to RathGames over Discord, and he revealed to me the deep cowl he needed to enter to realize this feat, explaining that Solo Saviour “was made final July and took 233 days to arrange”—that journey itself shall be its personal video.
I needed to make a spreadsheet that had every assault lined up with the opposite lessons’ subsequent transfer after to attempt to wrap my head round it.”
“[It was] exhausting,” RathGames says. “I needed so badly to inform folks, I used to be so nervous about being noticed whereas strolling round. Actually made me really feel on edge any time I logged in.” Actually, he was in such deep cowl, he needed to invent a wholly new problem run simply to maintain his stream viewers occupied and unaware.
“I did want a hiatus to complete Savior. I used to be nowhere close to prepared once we hit the wall, I even went and did a whole new problem, chat instructions solely, to pad for time.” That problem, thoughts, was its personal particular type of purgatory.
As for the time he shaved off the run as much as Hades—round 815 hours price—he credit “not simply my information however your complete solo neighborhood’s! People have accomplished an unbelievable job optimizing the run, and since I knew all of the fights already issues had been loads simpler.”
Relating to adhering cleanly to FF14’s phrases of use (no third-party applications, in different phrases), RathGames needed to do it the quaint means—with quick fingers and a single keyboard: “I alt-tabbed. I had each video games on the identical monitor, and alt-tabbed each couple seconds.
“Motion was the simpler half. The rotations had been depressing to study. I needed to make a spreadsheet that had every assault lined up with the opposite lessons’ subsequent transfer after to attempt to wrap my head round it.”
It is an absurd feat—and made all of the extra cracked by the way in which during which it mirrors the themes of Shadowbringers itself. On the tail-end of the growth, the Warrior of Gentle melds with Ardbert, an alternate-universe model of themselves, to assist save each his and their very own planets from Hades.
In a way, RathGames has needed to do exactly that—weaponise the expertise of two completely completely different solo-only runs to meld collectively and overcome his foul foe. I can not wait to see what left-hook methods he pulls out of his pocket to sort out, as promised, the ultimate season of Solo Solely—which is able to see him tackling Endwalker to tie all of it off.
