Final Fantasy 14 Community Spotlight: Neverland, The First Team To Clear Dragonsong's Reprise (Ultimate)

thegamer.com:

For players looking for the greatest challenge that Final Fantasy 14 has to offer, you can’t get a more punishingly difficult experience than Ultimate raids. These consist of notoriously difficult gauntlets of bosses that eight-player teams must defeat in one run, and are something that players can’t even attempt until they have completed the prerequisite — and also very difficult — Savage raids.

Given the high bar, Ultimates are naturally not geared towards casual players, and instead you’ll find dedicated teams battling it out to become the very first to defeat each new Ultimate as it launches. Dragonsong’s Reprise (Ultimate) was recently added in patch 6.11, starting a new race to see who would score the world's first clear, a victory that was eventually claimed by team Neverland.

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“It feels very surreal considering the circumstances of our group participating in this race,” Neverland tells me. “One month before the release of Dragonsong's Reprise, we were all very unsure if we could even do it at all due to previous members in our groups leaving the game or choosing a lower frequency raiding schedule. So when we cleared first there were a lot of emotions going through everyone's mind.”

With such a massive undertaking ahead of them, the team had to prepare accordingly. As well as ensuring a week free from work and other commitments so they could throw themselves into the raid with gusto, Neverland prepped by revisiting older content and doing their homework.

“We agreed on setting a week aside for Dragonsong's Reprise, which luckily for us turned out to be just right,” the team explains. “In terms of food and snacks, we agreed beforehand to prepare light food and