We fought Asura at Final Fantasy 14 FanFest 2023 — here’s how it went

polygon.com:

At Final Fantasy 14 FanFest 2023 North America, attendees were given the opportunity to challenge Asura, the upcoming Primal Trial that will appear through a new content patch. As one such attendee, I took this opportunity in hand and fought my way through the FanFest online queue (which required attendees to uninstall and reinstall the app to get it working properly) to mark my place in line with other prospective Warriors of Light to tackle this new Trial.

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For those unfamiliar with Trials, they’re effectively 8-man boss fights players can participate in. These instances are arguably my favorite part of Final Fantasy 14, so I was super eager to fight Asura and see what she’d bring to the table by comparison to previous Trials such as Heavensward’s Nidhogg, Endwalker’s Golbez, or Stormblood’s Susano. Waiting in line I ended up pulling together a group comprised of James Galizio of RPGSite, and the following Warriors of Light: Thallan Gildeford, King Ma, Ishtar Valentine, Worstluck NA, and Kini Solis. The final four in that line-up are five-time Legends, which means they’ve cleared all currently available Ultimate fights — some of the hardest pieces of content in the game.

Waiting in line we discussed what Job Classes we would be playing, and I assigned myself the role of White Mage, since it was what I was most comfortable with and had the most experience in. While I do enjoy playing Tank as Gunbreaker and DPS as Summoner, I jumped in as a White Mage as I had for previous Battle Challenges (notably Thordan and Susano at Gamescom when those fights respectively appeared). After setting up our hotbars, making sure we had the right skills in the right places, and chatting amongst ourselves, we were ready to jump