The Hunt for 58 Seconds

On the Final Fantasy XIV speedrun leaderboards, both the Hard and Extreme versions of Containment Bay Z1T9 have been maxed out at shared 59-second world records for years, runners believing that there wasn’t any more time to be saved in these duties. But after a little bit of creativity, I’ve discovered a way to break the record and achieve the coveted 58-second kill time.

After engaging the boss, it begins a sequence in which the stage is destroyed and it escapes its confinement. However, the boss is not capable of dying in this first phase and will only drop as low as 0.1% HP. Once the arena change completes, the boss can then finally be killed. With that entire phase 1 sequence taking the same amount of time each attempt, you can see the issue here: there are only two possible ways to get a faster time. Engaging the boss quicker, and delivering the killing blow in phase 2 as soon as possible.

The rest of this explanation gets a bit in the weeds for how FFXIV deals with damage application, but I’ll try to keep things simple.

The Machinist job is uniquely qualified to tackle these two areas thanks to the Flamethrower ability it has. This delivers a persistent stream of damage to an area while the flamethrower is active, which means we can use it to either pull the boss instantly the moment the instance begins or to kill the boss instantly when it returns to the stage in phase 2. The one issue with Flamethrower is that it has a 60 second cooldown between uses which can no longer be shortened via the Skill Speed substat, which means we need to choose wisely where to put this valuable skill.

If we chose to open the fight with Flamethrower, the Machinist doesn’t actually have any other abilities that deal damage quickly enough for the duty timer to register a 58 second kill and we’ll get a 59 second clear just like all the other records before us. This is because broadly speaking, damage in Final Fantasy XIV isn’t dealt when you press the button - there is a slight delay which varies with every attack in the game to cause it to occur roughly when the attack animation looks like it should be connecting to its target in most cases.

So why isn’t this a problem if we save Flamethrower for phase 2? Well, because we don’t actually have to deal damage quickly at the start of the fight. All we need to do is make sure that the boss is engaged as quickly as possible so that it starts working through its phase 1 autoscroller. Enter the other part of the Machinist’s job kit: Head Graze. This is one of three similar abilties that all Physical Ranged DPS gain access to, and they all only exist to either apply a status to an enemy or to interrupt an enemy spell cast. It just so happens that the effects of these Graze abilities occur faster than any of the damaging abilities deal damage, thus aggroing the boss and starting the script just that little bit faster.

So combine starting the fight with Head Graze and delivering the killing blow with Flamethrower, and you get the perfect recipe to squeeze out one more second from the in-game duty timer. The coveted 58 second Containment Bay Z1T9.

“Hold up,” I hear you asking. “Other jobs have damage fields they can have active at the start of Phase 2 to kill the boss! What makes Machinist special here?”

And you would be totally right. Summoner could leave Garuda’s Slipstream on the ground which will persist between phases, ready to deal damage when the boss returns. Ninja could drop a Doton for the same effect. But this is where things get really nerdy. These damage fields only deal their damage every “tick” instead of (relatively) continuously like how Flamethrower does. Drop the damage field at the wrong time, and you might have to wait upward of two and a half seconds for it to deal its next damage tick to the boss after it becomes targetable. Flamethrower has a unique property where the ticks for each application of damage in its range occur much faster than any other comparable damage field in the game. You could certainly achieve this record with a similar strategy on another job, but I don’t envy the number of attempts you might need to get it lined up juuuuuuust right.