The first raid for Final Fantasy XIV’s new Endwalker expansion is coming this week along with update 6.01. Fans will have to survive eight hours of the MMO being offline for maintenance but when it’s back up they’ll be able to try out Pandaemonium at last.
The first Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker raid release time is December 21 at 2:00 AM PST / 5:00 AM EST / 10:00 AM GMT / 7 PM JST, which is the same time as update 6.01 drops. Before that, the game will be offline for a full eight hours of maintenance – not that many will notice, that’s about average for queue times since the Endwalker expansion launched.
As previously confirmed in the last roadmap, when the 6.01 patch drops on Tuesday it’ll give access to the first high-end raid for the Endwalker expansion – Pandaemonium, or specifically the normal difficulty of the raid’s first tier, Pandaemonium: Asphodelos. Two weeks from then on January 4, 2022, the Savage difficulty will drop with version 6.05.
Pandaemonium will be the first raid of Endwalker but it won’t be the last. The Alliance raid Myths of the Realm has already been announced, and the first of three tiers for that will be arriving in update 6.1 later in 2022. The Heavensturn New Year event will almost certainly drop at the beginning of 2022 too, although that won’t bring any new parts to the raid content.
Before all this goes down, the very seasonal Starlight Celebration is running in Final Fantasy XIV right now – if you can get into the game to experience it, of course.