#and you have to beat the buffed version on hard to get the achievement

[dragon-in-spirit]

Well, after bouncing off it hard during the first third of the game a couple times, I finally beat Tales of Zestiria. Not my favorite in the series by any means, but despite the lack of depth to the storytelling and characters, and the weirdly stilted and archaic-but-not dialogue style of half the cast, I actually enjoyed it. The equipment skill system is interesting in theory but terrible in implementation, but once I got the hang of it it wasn't too awful. Gonna run through the bonus dungeon and then finish setting up for a new game+, then see how I feel about a second playthrough or if I'll switch to a different game.

[grandpagreymane]

And by “shortly” I meant like 12 hours - My finished thoughts on Antorus

To chuck a TLDR in here and save you like eight paragraphs - it was fun, but the difficulty roller coasters pretty hard.

Now for the wordy version - I really enjoyed Antorus. Compared to Nighthold and Tomb of Sargeras it’s definitely easier, but we’re also going into this raid off the heels of one of the biggest catchup mechanics in the entire game called Argus relinquished gear. The raid on normal mode drops item level 930+ gear, and thanks to lucky war and titanforges on those relinquished pieces, myself and most of you are already walking into the raid with gear that’s on par with what drops in it. This obviously makes things a lot easier just from the get-go, but Antorus is obviously both mechanically easier on average than Tomb, but also more mechanically forgiving in that even if you do fuck up a mechanic, odds are it won’t cause a wipe. That was my biggest problem with Tomb really, the fact that the mechanics of each boss were too sink or swim and one guy being a fuckup meant everyone else suffered for it. Now I’m not saying that this mechanic doesn’t exist in Antorus at all or even that it’s a bad idea, but the sheer amount of them in Tomb was exhausting. The only mechanics I can think of that punish the entire raid heavily in Antorus are things like CCing the walking adds on Coven, Fusillades on Hich Council, and orbs on Argus. If those aren’t dealt with immediately, you just fucking die.

So while Antorus is easier on the whole than Tomb and Nighthold, the difficulty also spikes up rather suddenly on some bosses, often at basically random with no sense of a real difficulty progression throughout the raid. You have the first two bosses, assuming you did them in order, Garothi Worldbreaker and the Hounds of Sargeras, who are total cakewalks. Garothi is a Patchwerk fight and Hounds are just tank and spank, and then you get to Antoran High Council, which while not hard in any real sense, has about three times as many mechanics as the previous two bosses put together (so like six total) and has a vehicle and usable shield mechanic that will wipe you if you misuse, and you can see why pickup groups will break their backs over it for a few weeks until everyone kinda figures shit out. Then the difficulty curve drops back down even further than Garothi and Hounds for the Defense of Eonar, which I literally didn’t know was a boss until the game told me I beat a boss and the loot box started shining. To call it a boss fight is misleading; it’s more or less killing 6 waves of adds and then getting an epic for it. It’s a joke. The difficulty curve then kinda evens back out around the start again at Hasabel, who has more mechanics than Garothi but those mechanics don’t cause a wipe unless you just flat out decide to not deal with them.

Those five bosses more or less form the first real portion of the raid, contrary to the achievements’ way of dividing the bosses into wings. From there you’ve got Imonar the Soulhunter, who just has a lot of environmental hazards to watch out for and some that need to be tanked to clear the way across his bridge. After that you’ve got Kin’garoth, or as I like to call him, Kinny G. Kinny G’s a longer, more involved fight with a fair bit of stuff to watch out for, but unlike Imonar some of these things will just fucking end your life instead of inconvenience you, and if you die to his laser you’re a goddamned idiot. Still though, fun fight, and managing his robots is also pretty fun to do while dodging Super Monkey Balls and lasers. After Kinny G you’ve got Varimathras, which sounds intimidating as fuck when you read his adventure guide entry but is actually a joke in practice when you clump up and move from side to side for each Dark Fissure, and that’s the second portion.

The third portion of Antorus are the last three bosses, Coven of Shivarra, Agrramar, and Argus. This right here is where the difficulty spikes hard. Starting with Coven, which is a surprisingly fun fight with a lot of mechanics that are easily understood (fire = bad, lightning = die) but also heavily punishing. I don’t mind the hard punishment on these last three bosses though, since they’re the final bosses and SHOULD be absolute ball busters. Thankfully they’re not overbearing in difficulty. Aggramar is easier than Coven in my opinion, if only a little, and also tied with Argus himself for the most beautiful fight in terms of sheer spectacle. Aggramar shoots these massive blasts of flame all the time, and the ground is constantly exploding in different areas while fire swirls around Aggramar and his elementals and it’s really a sight to behold. Taeshalac Technique is also a really fun little tank swapping and raid stacking minigame in the actual fight itself that’s just kinda cool to do. It feels right to get smacked around by a literal god and flung across the arena with a single swipe of his sword.

Now onto Argus himself, which is undoubtedly the hardest encounter of the raid. Now I’ve heard he’s been buffed with the latest hotfix a few days ago, but my only experience with him is from last night and the night before on normal so I can’t really comment on how he’s changed in terms of difficulty before the hotfix. All I know is that for the PUGs I joined, Argus made us stare at the floor a LOT. Argus has four phases total that all can last anywhere from two to six minutes each, making the entire fight pretty long and drawn out. The first phase and the fourth phase are the hardest ones, with the first being easier but pretty tense as you rapidly run out of space due to him making large chunks of the arena kill zones. Luckily phase one goes by quickly if your group manages their titan buffs properly and the AOE damage fields disappear in the transition to phase two. Phase two is your standard “move the bomb debuff out of the raid” mechanic with a twist - one player will be given a HUGE bomb debuff that will one shot them, and one tank will be buffed by the titans to have an aura that halves all damage anyone standing near that tank takes, and also makes the tank huge and golden, and therefore easy to see. How those two work together should be self-explanatory. After phase two, Argus is split up into a bunch of little Algalons who need to be killed before their relatively harmless spell spam kills you. Two of these Algalons get beefed up and are allowed to melee and be tanked, those are the priority kills. All of the Algalons have a debuff that makes them take double damage from a different source; this is honestly inconsequential besides the one that takes double physical damage, because I play a warrior.

After phase three, Argus reforms and just fucking kills you. The end. Just kidding - Eonar puts down a spirit tree and you’re allowed to release your ghost, walk into the tree and interrupt Argus’ long as fuck spell cast to start phase four. Now phase four is the real hard part. Basically, orbs will periodically spawn around the room that must be killed ASAP or you fucking wipe. On top of this, little magic meteors rain down all over the room randomly, so you need to dodge those, and Argus himself keeps doing his Tortured Rage raid-wide attack from phase one throughout the fight. If the orbs aren’t dealt with literally immediately, the raid takes a huge chunk of damage. This phase is more or less a big DPS race to kill Argus and handle the orbs before the ramping AOE damage across the entire raid is just too much to bear. Luckily Eonar’s spirit tree is still active for a while so if someone dies they can just run back, but this doesn’t last forever and only has so many uses, so it’s better for everyone if you just don’t fucking die. My PUGs wiped on phase four for at least an hour until we got some competent DPS with us who could reliably beat the pseudo-enrage that is the raid-wide damage. All in all, Argus was really fun and I can’t wait to go at him again next week.

So yeah, that’s my longpost on Argus. Also I’m clearing Throne of Thunder while typing this and I GOT THE FUCKING CLUTCH OF JI-KUN BOYS!