FFXIV Mythbusters | What if Cerberus Ate EVERYONE?

A for Always in the Belly B for Belly C for Can you get in the Belly already?

What happens when Cerberus eats everyone? Tummy hurty.

the first time i did cerberus i had no idea about the mechanics. someone called out to the raid for "everyone in belly" so i spent the entire fight standing directly under that stomach. turns out it's a decent way to avoid taking hits when you don't know the mechanics, at the very least.

A=Appetite B=Belly C=Consume

A thing you did not see here with Cerberus is that in a full 24-man, once Cerberus has eaten enough people (I believe its 12, might be 16), a message pops up saying that Cerberus is sated, and at that point he'll refuse to eat more people until people leave the belly. You did see part of that behavior with the smaller group size with the boss refusing to eat more players, just not the message itself it looks like.

Look, Cerberus hasn't had company in a long time. He may be hungry, but he's also a lonely pupper.

One little-known fact (at least on my DC) that you might enjoy presenting as a myth: The third boss of Rabanastre (Rofocale) has one of those gauge-based raidwides, but it's also proximity-based! Thus you can avoid most of the damage by waiting for him to stop flying and then running to the sides

One of my favorite little tidbits that I know of is in Qitana Ravel. You know that area RIGHT before the final boss room where there are enemies, and off to the side are gorillas that're throwing aoes at you until you kill them, they jump in, and then you kill them to unlock the way to the boss? You can actually get those gorillas to spawn early. It's a little hard to coordinate unless everyone knows what to do, but it's a thing that you can do. What causes it to happen, is if nothing is in that final room. So, the easiest way to make it happen is to have everyone wait outside the room, the tank runs in to pull the mobs, and then drags them back out onto the path leading into the room. Once nothing is in there, the gorillas will jump in and become targetable, letting you aoe down ALL the mobs, all at once vs having to do it in 2 seperate packs. :)

Never thought there would be this much hidden depth about the mechanic where you willingly enter an otherworldly hellhound's stomach to weaken it from the inside but I suppose that's Final Fantasy for you.

A - Abelly, B - Belly, C - Cbelly and all forms of it has actually existed since ARR. All that mattered was leaving tanks and healers outside to deal with adds. Back then people did know the mechs, many of us just thought the way it was split was dumb lol Especially since, you know, Chains is not during the belly section. You do chains AFTER the belly is done so giving C an entire mech everyone is there for is dumb lol

Props for tempering your claims with "but I didn't check exhaustively" disclaimers!

You could use BLU to have all 5 outside players die before Cerberus can poop them out to figure out how he reacts to nobody alive being present. If I had to guess, it'd be like Alexander Prime who simply waits for you to get back. Also, Ceberus could never eat everyone, eventually you'll get the message 'Cerberus's hunger is saited' and he'll stop. Since you're not getting that message I did some digging on old videos and from what I can see his limit is 12 players, since you're obviously not hitting that wall it seems like you're bumping up against a second layer of protection. Mind you, one other question is what happens if 24 small players stand in the vomit. I suspect that would trigger his instant poop response and this situation is possibly it's primary purpose.

Nice to know how Level X abilities work, i never stood inside them and i don't think i ever saw ppl standing there either so i just assumed Level 100/150 was just a name to represents a very powerful spells, not representing a math problem. Just imagine if the ability was reversed and instead it demanded the 100/150 to be matched instead of avoided

The Cerberus experiment is weirdly interesting. I never would have thought they'd program it this way. Definitely agree with the alternate Cerberus strat tho. In groups with a lot of cutscene watchers, my fc mates and I just always go. (Unless one of us is main tank of course.) There's been several times where we're group B anyways then I'm one of like 3 people inside lol.

The level 150/100 abilities are a pretty neat callback to the old console games that did the reverse. If your level was multiple of the spell level, the spell affected you. So level 5 death was cast on you, you die if your level is a multiple of five. Since everyone in a raid is usually synced to be the same level, that would get everyone all the time - so they flipped it the other way to make it an actual mechanic. Neat!

I think my favorite part of this entire series is how completely nonplussed your character looks while scrolling their tomestone in the intro.

I do have another fun fact about how Cerberus in the original ARR-version was. There were multiple bugs when people got eaten and things happened: For one, if someone was eaten and moved behind the killed/not-killed stomach-walls, they were not ejected from the belly, as the 'loading area' with the dots was never crossed. As a second one, there was a bug when Cerberus died while just eating people, they would be put in the stomach, which stopped working as intended and instead, the players were trapped in an infinite limbo of 'being eaten'. Using /return was moving them back out to the entrance. Since there was no 'join players in combat' by force and you could still decline back in the days, it was troublesome. Especially, because the 'exit'-loading zone was not working anymore as well. Today, both got fixed. It still is possible to lock yourself behind the stomach wall-adds at the side, but you get force-teleported out now, as if you have been...'pushed out'.

Angra Mainyu is also unique (as far as I know) in that its doom-inflicting gaze attack is the only one that doesn't activate upon finishing its cast, but instead when the actual animation plays out.

Remember, A - Always in the belly, B - Belly, C - C you in the belly

Cerberus truly is a good boy, doing his best not to overeat and upset his stomach