The Hardest Boss In Video Games History

imagine making this very nearly unbeatable, completly unfair boss, and deciding to : make a very low drop rate, buff it multiple time, nerf tactics used against it and threaten to BAN people who find ways to cheese it. Wow

The mental image of a bunch of Dark Knights ganging up with clubs to beat the absolute shit out of Absolute Virtue gave me a chuckle.

The sheer malice behind this thing’s design will never not leave me speechless.

FFXI message when you logged on: Please don't destroy your life by playing our game too much. Also FFXI: Absolute Virtue

This is like the MMO equivalent of a DM getting mad and godmodding

lol this is like a DM throwing a fit and punishing players for coming up with a better idea, even though they never said you couldn’t do it that way before.

Absolute Virtue is a prime example of open hostility towards the player base. Every time it was nearly beaten with a proven strategy, Square got pissy and nerfed that strategy. Rinse repeat until the power creep from players made it go from superboss to easy fight. Something like this is used as a cautionary tale for game devs: if you're going to make a very difficult fight that takes hours of a player's life to defeat, make sure it's well balanced. It's a safe assumption that AV wasn't properly balanced, given they nerfed everything but the boss itself.

It's like beating a child at a game: 'Uh, no that didn't count'

Absolute Virtue will definitely go down as one of the most infamous bosses in the history of games, and moreso, will go down as one of the most infamous instances of game developers openly hostile towards their player base for not playing the way they wanted them to

Lets be real, Square just wanted a "Gacha" boss, dangling the idea that it was "beatable", and they got genuinely pissed when people did it and threw a fit every time they had to work to make it harder.

"You can beat the boss, you just have to play the game exactly how we want you to play the game, and not improvise at all." -The Devs, probably.

The whole story of Absolute Virtue honestly sounds like that one person that's just never satisfied with what you do, so they keep changing things up. Oh, you did this fight this way? Now do it again but harder.

I feel like absolute virtue is a really cool idea on paper, but was implemented in just the WORST ways. A zone wide superboss that needed you to kill a number of other high powered monsters just to unlock it, taking powers from each slain monster and using them. Super cool. Making that same boss unkillable without a 2 day playtime and a super hidden exact way of doing it, while also punishing everyone who finds ways around said way of doing it? Bad. Theres gotta be a balance in all fights. This one took that balance and threw it to the moon. AV and pandemonium warden are the best examples of why there needs to be reigns put on combat designers sometimes.

To answer the question at the end, I beat absolute virtue during the kraken club strategy in the few days before SE patched it. My linkshell was the first group (of Americans at least) to defeat Jailer of Love on our server. However, there are some things the video didn't quite get right. 1. AV did not have a very low spawn rate; it was pretty close to 1/2. Al'tieu took months worth of quests to gain access to and once you got there it took a very long time to farm the spawn items for JoL. So it was rarely seen. 2. AV did not have low drop rates...in fact it always dropped some items; the first 2 groups to kill it using the wall of justice strategy actually did not get any loot because it died 'unclaimed'. When a monster cannot reach a player on it's aggro table, which was happening literally constantly due to the wall of justice strat, it deaggros and goes unclaimed. If it dies in an unclaimed state, no group gets the loot. 3. AV did not have bad loot...far from it. It dropped the best waist in the game for any melee class (except mnk) during tp building, best haste belt for tanks which was used for most spells, and best haste belt for mages which wasn't as important but had it's uses. It dropped the best ranged item for mages casting offensive spells. It dropped the best ring for all melee users during tp phase. It dropped the best ring for ranged attack. It dropped a very good great katana, second only to the relic which required years of grinding and/or hundreds of millions of gil.Only 2 items weren't sought after; a rod that let you come back to life and a tank ring that increased physical damage but reduced magic damage. There were still fights or parts of fights (like Jailer of Love ironically) that the tank would take almost exclusively magic damage and it was the 3rd best ring to use behind Dynamis Lord's Ring (25% drop rate off the final boss of dynamis. Took 36-64 people and typically only fought once every 3 weeks due to dynamis time constraints) and Defending Ring ( <1% drop rate off of King Behemoth which spawned once a week and only 1 group could kill meaning it dropped less often than once a year). Also, it was nearly the only boss who's full loot pool was tradeable; most pieces of gear were bind on pickup (rare/ex). Considering how the boss was nearly never killed it's gear was worth a ridiculous amount of gil (tens - hundreds of million gil) 4. This isn't really something that was wrongly stated, but rather not stated. I think understanding the ridiculousness of fighting absolute virtue should be better explained. It wasn't like a WoW boss where you needed to avoid standing in the green shit, or get better gear to out heal/tank his damage, or get stronger dps to outpace his regen...At full strength he was simply unkillable. He would 2-4 shot tanks depending on gear. His full regen was so high that 15 dps in best in slot gear would barely be able to fight against it. His regular moves were area of effect spells that would 2 shot everyone, and he would use a 2-hour ability every 30 seconds that would effectively start one shotting people. Some examples including spamming instant cast spells that 1 shot/2 shot people. 3 Dragons that exploded dealing 3 times a tanks health to everyone in range. Spamming meteor that 1 shot everyone except tanks in visible distance of him. Using 3 abilities in a row, 2 of which would kill even tanks. Super high attack speed that made his attacks near instant. OR defensive abilities such as healing to full, no melee damage for 30seconds, no damage at all for 30 seconds. 5. The clues that Square Enix gave were NOT that cut and dry...they gave us a video of them killing the monsters spawned by JoL (which was part of the fight) and then them spamming spells and using 2 hours randomly...Even when people did understand what they were trying to tell us, testing the theory was difficult due to how long it took to get pop items and simply the fact that the game didn't tell you if you had done anything right. It's not like there was a buff that showed his hp regen or an indicator that said he couldn't use his 2 hours anymore. 6. The kraken club strat wasn't something that someone thought of and it worked out, Square enix nerfed absolute virtue's health by a LOT. I think it was originally 100k hp and they brought it down to like 50k. The strat was regularly used to kill monsters that had a lot of hp or just took a long time as a way to cheese out a win in 1-2min instead of the hour+ it might have taken with the preferred strat. Some examples include Kirin, King Vinegaroon, Dynamis Lord, and less successfully on Vrtra. The idea was you got multiple different buffer classes to use their 2 hour abilities to buff the party, everyone would build tp who was a melee damage dealer to use their weaponskills when it spawned, and all the melees would use their 2 hour abilities at the start. The whole buffing process took longer/more coordination than the fights itself, but you could only do it once every 2 hours and it was more risky than a controlled fight as you only have one shot at it and if a devastating move kills a lot of people you've lost. Until SE nerfed AV's health, the strat wasn't viable for two reasons. 1) the buffs would wear off before even the most decked out of groups could kill him even if he was standing still. Kraken club drks (top dps) would do about 10k with their 2 hour buffs, and you'd only have 10 dps spots in your 18 man alliance. Kraken club dropped off a monster that spawned once a day with a <1% drop rate meaning optimistically 2 showed up on the server per year. It was rare for a linkshell to have more than 2, and even 2 would be difficult. Finding 10 was just not possible server wide. 2) He doesn't stand still; one bad two hour ability kills everyone or completely negates damage. Even if you got lucky on 2 hours, he's still going to be spamming AoE abilities that after 2 shots would wipe the party or start meleeing damage dealers for over half their health. Once they lowered his hp by so much, it became possible to win with the kraken club strat...you still had to get lucky on 2 hours, have ridiculously strong damage dealers, and an armada of healers outside the party. Keep in mind, you could also attempt to do it once every 2 hours. After I think 2 days, they patched his health to 66k and made dark knight's 2 hour (which made the kraken club strat viable) deal diminishing returns in damage depending on how many people were using it on a monster.

For anyone wondering the "correct strategy" that wasn't found out until later involved a player to use one of their 2 hours that was the same job as the 2 hour the boss used, which locked the boss out of using it, essentially.

Hearing about how the devs removed the ability to use exploits and whatever means they deemed inappropriate to defeat the boss reminds me of an abusive parent telling you to do something and every time you do it they yell "NOT GOOD ENOUGH!" Sounds crazy. Imagine the hardest part of a boss not being fighting the boss itself but fighting the people who made it.

I actually fought this thing when it was current content. It taught me that SE, or at least FFXI's particular devs, truly despise humanity.

Square acted like a childish DM angry that his players figured out ways to beat their souped up boss monster easily.

Imagine finally coming up with a strategy on how to take this dude out and then being punished for doing so and having your job nerfed in effect.

Everything I've heard about Absolute Virtue just sounds like a poorly designed fight. Having only one specific valid strategy is very dumb, and patching and threatening players who find a different viable strategy is awful. It makes its reputation as the hardest boss in history feel artificial and undeserved.