Hi, buckethead here. Hope you guys are having fun farming the current Burger King raid rn on gl, if not, well, I hope you guys are having fun not farming Burger King then. Anyways, since Jp raids having been receiving some pretty major updates here and there on raids, so I thought it might be useful to make a summary so you guys can have an idea what to expect. I'm not gonna go too much in depth into each boss, but I'll just list some of the more prevalent comps.

I'm just gonna talk about raids that happens after the current BK raid since well, you guys should know much about it already.

Sin Eater(FF14)

Next raid should be the FF14 collab Sin Eater raid.

Sin Eater is like the FF1 death machine raid, a collab raid. Therefore, you will be getting some precrafted items from hosting milestones. However, since the equipment affliated is an UR, it's a pretty hard one to farm, especially considering the recipe is gone after the raid.

Light slash and dark slash are the 2 main favored comp here. Light slash lacks a bit of dmg from not having a def break, while the dark slash comp has a survivability problem from the 2 ranger mobs sharpshooting, and sin eater has a dark killer passive.

Featured units: Thancred, Ramza, SSterne, Vinera, Sterne, Shadowlynx, a bell intensive raid as per usual

CT steal is also not usable this raids since like Death machine, boss has the null CT change passive.

2 Headed Dragon Princess flan

Jp started being able to host raid rooms with passcodes from this raid, so easier to join in on specific rooms.

2Head Dragon

While the 2hd raid features the ff4 units, it is not directly following the FF4 banners and therefore is not structured as a collab raid.

the fat dragon is back and annoying as always. this time, he can not be CT stolen so another raid without CT thieves. However, on the plus side, he lacks the standard resistance against slow and his counter is reduced to only melee range. Hmm, I wonder if that has any connection with Kain's lb inflicting slow and being able to hit from range.

Dark Pierce is the go to comp for this and a full kain comp can auto after manually using bell turn 1. Xiza, DRG Sterne, DRG shadowlynx or Glaciela can be mixed in but they dont really contribute anything that Kain doesnt already cover, also, the first 3 also run the risk of dying to 2hd's dmg, while Kain can just drain back on top of him being already being tankier than the 3. I was running a solo full pierce team with Kain Glaci Aileen Vik which can also one shot the lvl 100 boss consistently so that's something to think about.

Featured unit:Kain, Sterne, Xiza, Glaciela, Shadowlynx, bell yade yada, you know the drill

Princess Flan

for the rare boss, as we are starting to doubt gumi's abilities, they manages to come up with another flan variation, the princess flan, this time with no crown or a cute face. just the good ol disgusting flan but pink, and the texture that is almost indistinguishable from a chewing gum.

also, this is probs the only boss where the supposedly featured unit gets kicked from rooms since they dont contribute enough, so good for you gumi. Princess flan is weaker against missile than slash but ice slash is just filled with way more good units and much more well rounded. while Rosa, lets be fair, just isnt the best boss killer.

CT steal is still a no-no here

Prevalent comp for the Princess flangum flan is actually ice slash with Greg and Lasswell. especially with KoG sub from lasswell, between the 2, they can: clear mobs fast with aoes, reduce slash and ice res, and chain with lasswell's 2 hit skills

Featured Unit:Lasswell, Gilgamesh, Agrias, Soldier Viktora, Rosa(ran in full rosa comps), Lucia(run in Lucia comps, not sure about viability), other than Rosa, the other units also needs bell.

Siren Golden cactuar

This is the raid where raid stacking first becomes a thing in JP. The way raid stacking works is that you can proc multiple raids and leave them in the queue so you can clear them up together later. Up to 10 raids can be stacked up in a queue and you still progress through the host levels as you clear through them. Rare raids do not have an independent queue and are mixed in with regular raids, the difference is that no matter in which order you proc'd the rare raids, they will always be stacked from the 2nd slot in the raid queue, so you can have a few consecutive rare raids to go through after clearing your first normal raid

Obviously, this is a nice QoL to look out for, instead of having to spend a lot of attention on the game constantly, you can auto farm for a certain amount of runs and come back to clear them later.

Siren

Gumi taking notes after the Gum flan. This time, on top of a high slash res, siren was made to be null CT changes and immune to slash res debuffs and elemental res debuffs. On top of her annoying aoe that inflicts sleep

So yeah, as a result, the most viable comp for this is the new featured unit Niv'lu Fredericka lightning missile comp. A special note here is that Niv'lu actually doesnt contribute more than Fredericka given that there's at least 1 Niv'lu on the field, as both just use double shot from gunner after Niv'lu throws in her LB. Shuzelt is an ok MR to fall back to, given he has everything needed except the chaining power from double shot. A comp with 1 Nivlu and some mix of Fred and Nivlu can full auto the stage with the right skill/subjob setup. This comp can also accomodate 1 Lucia, 1 Summer Lilyth, 1 Shuzelt, 1 Cid or 1 Learte, given that the they use the appropiate preventative measures against sleep(Cid's Black Lion's Crest, the rest just staying away from the others) and manual the run.

Featured Unit: Niv'lu, Fredericka, Shuzelt, Cid, bell something something

Golden Cactuar

The golden cactuar raid this time features the new summer unit, Summer Kitone. However, it ended up being pretty much viable for everyone, with a team full of high lvl mages(blend between Rain, medi, Salire and Skahal), we struggles to not clear the boss in one run, even on auto. the most important thing is to have a few aoe mages to clear out the mobs first.

CT stealer is no-no and not really useful.

Featured Unit: Mages, preferably with a good aoe, mages dont need bells.

Golem Tonberry

this raid introduced JP to another major raid update. this mainly contains 3 big changes:bonus drops, rare pity meter and bonus units.

whenever you clear a raid stage, in addition to what you normally would get, you have a chance(independent for each participant) to get additional mat drops depending on the level of the boss, for example, the max level Golem has a chance to drop an additional 30 of the MR ember and 10 water megacrysts, same as max lvl tonberry

rare pity meter makes it so that you get a guaranteed rare raid proc for every 20 normal raid procs. this does not prevent you from procing rare raids normally but the pity gauge is reset whenever a rare raid is proc'd.

bonus units increases the amount of raid medals the player gain from the raid and increases the bonus drop proc chance. with the new banner units increasing by 50%, designated old UR units by 30%, and designated old MR units by 20%. This only applies to the player bringing the unit and other players are not harmed by you not bringing a bonus unit at all assuming you dont hurt the dmg. also rare and normal share the same pool of bonus units.

the first 2 changes are simply amazing, the bonus rate is roughly 10% according to what I feel, which means that you gain roughly 40 megacrysts instead of 30 every 10 runs, not even accounting for rare raids. for rare raids, as many of you will have noticed, procs far less than 1 per 20 so you end up not only hosting more rares but with more rares available to join as well, this drastically boost the amount of mats you can farm with the same efforts

the bonus unit is where the problem starts. bonus units not only increases the points you gain from killing each boss, but also from hosting, you get a significant advantage over someone running a weaker or no bonus just by hosting from 1 to max lvl, so it makes it impossible for those people to really compete on the point leaderboards, that said, I dont quite understand why you want to really go for leaderboards, but I digress. What's more is that it significantly restricts the comps that are active during this raid. This is probs the only raid where I almost never saw a single major variation in the comp run at high level bosses. Although the previous problem wont kill your raid experience without a few limited pool of units, this definitely will.

the good part about this is that for people with the bonus unit, grinding the equipment is even easier, I literally finished the mats for the new UR equip in 3 days of raiding without even using lapis refreshes or buying with medals, but it's not the best change for everyone for sure

bonus units for golem and tonberry:

50% bonus:HLL, Lardo

30% bonus:Howlett, Oelde

20% bonus:Helena, Adelard

Golem

Golem is finally able to be CT stolen again, and he is actually not immune to a bunch of stuff, and not even that fast, but his 30 base def and 20 def/spr buff after a hp threshold is quite a pickle on top of his 25% slash res and 35% missile res.

as I said, golem's favored team is highly one dimensional, it's just wind magic comps including Halloween Little Leela and Howlett, with a few ppl running Helena or Ayaka. A Halloween little leela party alone can clear the stage, if all 4 are decently raised, you can even full auto. Howlett increases the overall dmg with his lb wind imperil but requires a few turns of manual to bell and lb, or you can just auto and spam Jamming edge and hope your team is competent enough to clear without you running out of ap. Helena needs to manually apply deshell and then use imperil on the boss, while ayaka just spams holy after deshell. on that note, a full holy team can also do decent but it's by no means easy to find a room with that.

Featured unit: Halloween Little Leela, Howlett, Helena, as most of them start with 75% ap, they dont need bell, except for Howlett, who can use one in weaker teams.

Tonberry

tonberry on the other hand, is quite a handful compared to the last rare boss. With both 30 def and spr on top of a massive 100k hp pool, more than doubling the last cactuar's 45k, and not like the cactuar is that much tankier in terms of def/spr, with only 40 in each.

That said, people are a lot more lenient about what you can bring into a tonberry room, most fire units are accepted, even if not the featured fire brawler. that said, dont bring the golem's featured units here as the ice tonberry counters wind and is probs gonna get you kicked from pubs. If you are gonna freeload, at least show some respect to the host.

Featured unit:Lardo, and other fire units in general, bell recommended

and that brings us to where JP is at rn, so just think about which unit you want to save for for future raids. although JP is still pumping out qols to improve the grind rn, the general trend is definitely moving towards content being tied to the latest unit.