Our weekly raid reviews were interrupted by the release of Code of Creation, but we're back to continue with wing 4! Nothing can stop us now, except maybe this season's anime review. That article will almost certainly come before wing 5, actually.
Into the Bastion of the Penitent
Wing 4 is an interesting case when it comes to the overall narrative of the raids. Wings 1-3 told a continuous story that bridged the gap between Heart of Thorns and Living World Season 3. Wing 4, on the other hand, released during the run of LW3. Its story is still a continuation of the previous raids, but it could be said that the "main plot" until now was concluded with the death of Xera. This wing is more like a detour to check in on a different aspect of the White Mantle storyline, one that didn't fit neatly into either the main story or the continuity of the earlier raid wings.
This wing takes place an undisclosed amount of time after the events of the 'Out of the Shadows' episode of LW3. After the huge bloodstone explosion that marks the beginning of the main story plotline, Glenna found a strange portal in the area which transported her to the location of the wing. Unbeknownst to her, the bastion is deep in Janthir, and her investigation is about to give her a lot more than she bargained for.
Cairn the Indomitable
Wing 4 has four encounters—fitting, right?—and it's the first and, to date, only wing to not feature an event encounter, unless you count Samarog's pre-event, which you shouldn't, because that'd be silly. The first of the four bosses you'll encounter is Cairn.
Lore
Cairn is a Jade Construct—one of the artificial footsoldiers created long ago by the Mursaat. A small number of them can be found in GW2, usually guarding areas related to their creators. As it turns out, "Cairn the <adjective>" is an established naming scheme for Jade Construct bosses dating back to the original Guild Wars. Beyond that, there isn't much in the way of lore specific to this Cairn. He's just a glorified guard dog.
Tutorialization
Cairn has a smart, subtle bit of tutorialization with its Celestial Dash gimmick. This is a SAK skill players can use during the fight to cross long distances extremely quickly. This is quite useful for Cairn, since the fight features a stacking debuff that decreases your movement speed, greens you'll need to run out from the boss to reach, and knockback-dealing auto-attacks that heavily punish being at range.
The Celestial Dash is actually given to you before you reach Cairn, however. You can use it to traverse the path down to him, and as an additional hint to its function, Glenna will also use the same skill. Very smart, team!
The Fight
Now, let's talk about those mechanics in more depth. As mentioned above, Cairn is a fight all about movement. Every second, players gain a stack of Unseen Burden, a debuff that decreases their movement speed by 1% per stack, up to a max of 99. Most of Cairn's attacks also apply additional stacks of this debuff, with Spatial Manipulation in particular applying 25. While Unseen Burden slows your walk speed, it doesn't affect dodges or movement skills such as Celestial Dash, so you can still use those to get around.
That brings us to the main attack you'll need to watch out for, Spatial Manipulation. This is a dangerous raidwide attack that will float players in addition to applying stacks of Unseen Burden. To avoid it, you must stand in the green circles around the arena. There are three ways greens can appear, and Cairn always uses Spatial Manipulation immediately after they spawn. Sometimes Cairn will summon greens with various numbers of dots above them; for a green to protect you, there must be at least as many people in it as the number over it. Sometimes Cairn uses an attack called Energy Surge, where it rapidly teleports around the arena and damages anyone between its teleport points, leaving a green behind at each; players generally stay in the middle until he returns there to avoid getting knocked around. Finally, if it lives long enough to use an attack called Orbital Sweep, it'll summon a set of greens without numbers right afterwards. Successfully standing in a green also cleanses some Unseen Burden from you.
So, we have a mechanic that makes it harder to move around, a mechanic that requires you to move a lot, and a SAK skill that you can use to jump around quickly. All pretty simple so far, so to mix things up Cairn has two mechanics to punish you for staying too far away from it and one to mess with your positioning. First are its auto-attacks, Meteor Swarm. This attack sends several large projectiles out in a cone, and they knock you back. You can avoid them by standing close enough to Cairn, indicated by a compass pattern on the ground of the arena. Second is Shared Agony.
Agony picks the person furthest from Cairn every 20 seconds and applies a continuous AoE circle to them. This will gradually drain the target's HP while doing heavy damage to other players in the circle; those with Agony will want to stay away from other players. Up to three players can have it at once, after which the first Agony target loses it when a fourth person is targeted, and so on. If the group is stacked together on the compass, there's just enough room for the three players with Agony to split up in different directions. Most groups will do this, and it's also common to have certain players deliberately bait the Agonies.
To mix up players' positioning, keep them moving between casts of Spatial Manipulation, and create situations where they can potentially get hit by Meteor Swarm or an Agony, Cairn will frequently use Displacement, which creates several AoEs under players' feet. After a few seconds, these will activate and teleport anyone hit to a random spot around the arena, similar to the blue mechanic in Vale Guardian.
Finally, there's one last rarely-seen attack of Cairn's called Orbital Sweep. This is a simple move where it extends to cover the arena and spins in a circle; just dodge through it. Seeing this mechanic at all is quite rare, as Cairn only uses it after a long timer; most groups will kill it long before Orbital Sweep becomes available, and even groups with low DPS will likely only see it once if at all.
Altogether, this sounds like a solid fight with mechanics that work together well. The unfortunate thing is that, similar to Xera in the previous wing, you can completely ignore this fight's main gimmicks, and without them the rest of the mechanics all fall apart. As it turns out, you can counter the movement-reducing effect of Unseen Burden with movement speed buffs, including the generic Swiftness boon. This makes it trivial to completely ignore the debuff, especially considering you also have Celestial Dash and other movement skills to rely on.
It also happens that Spatial Manipulation doesn't actually do much damage, and the float effect can be negated with stability. We're already ignoring Unseen Burden, and that means we can now completely ignore Spatial Manipulation. Agony is easy to solve, and since we're never leaving the compass for greens the players with it don't even need to reposition once they're in their assigned spots. Most groups do way too much damage to ever see Orbital Sweep, and many groups have specific players bait Agony. That means that, when played optimally, the only mechanic most players ever have to deal with in Cairn is Displacement, which is as simple as sidestepping an AoE before it goes off. If you're lucky, you also get to use Celestial Dash once to move to your assigned spot if you get an Agony.
Sadly, Cairn suffers the same fate as Gorseval, where practically everything it can do is solved and, as a result, the fight almost exclusively consists of burn time. Worse, Cairn doesn't have any split phases, so it can't even rely on those to mix things up like Gorseval and Xera can.
Challenge Mode
All of wing 4's encounters have CMs, so we'll go over them as well and give them their own scores.
There are two main changes to Cairn in CM. First, players must use their Celestial Dash skill once every 10 seconds, or else the skill will activate automatically and send them straight forward. Being moved when you don't want to is obviously pretty bad in this fight, so players generally avoid this by using the SAK off-cooldown. This is a really annoying mechanic either way. Forced movement on failure is more frustrating than it is actually dangerous, and being forced to waste your SAK when you don't want to move can prevent you from being able to use it when you do need to. This also essentially adds the SAK to your rotation, which is very disruptive in a way that just unfun more than it is interesting.
The other significant change is that, upon reaching 99 stacks of Unseen Burder, players will become petrified and lose access to all skills except for Celestial Dash. This effectively forces you to do greens, as the strategy of ignoring them will cause you to get stacks extremely quickly. I actually really like this change, and if this were all the CM did it would be a really good one.
Verdict: 5/10, 4/10 (CM)
Cairn might be the only case in the game where I think the Challenge Mode version of an encounter is worse than normal mode. Or maybe I'll end up looking really dumb for that statement later. Either way, I don't really like it. Being forced to spam Celestial Dash is just annoying, and the positive effect of actually having to do greens isn't enough to balance out how dumb that is.
Mursaat Overseer
After defeating Cairn, the squad must venture deeper into the bastion. They'll find the scene of a massacre which, crucially, is not Glenna's fault. One trip to find a shovel later and they break into the recreation sector and come face-to-face with the second boss, which is... a statue. In a way, I guess Cairn was also sort of a statue?
Lore
The recreation sector reveals the twisted history of this prison. The room itself seems to have been created for the entertainment of the guards, who would make the prisoners play deadly games. It's unclear what the Overseer itself is. Just another construct, or perhaps it contains the soul of an actual Mursaat, still waiting to rope more into its cruel games?
The Fight
MO is probably one of the simplest fights across all of the raid wings, but it's one I consistently enjoy in spite of that. Let's go over the mechanics, starting with the arena itself. The fight takes place on a 4x4 game board, with the boss itself almost being a chess piece. To go along with this, the boss also has four pawns at its disposal, and most of the mechanics revolve around these. The statue itself does not attack, though it pulses damage to nearby players through bad vibes alone.
At the beginning of the encounter, four Jade Scouts will spawn at the opposite end of the room, one for each row of tiles. Throughout the fight, these will slowly advance forward. They can be attacked, but "killing" them just stalls them in place for a while until they recover. Each time a Scout moves onto a new tile, the tile is activated and begins to glow orange, dealing continuous damage to anyone who stands there. If a scout manages to pass the squad and reach the other end of the board, it promotes into a Jade Soldier, a hostile add whose movement is no longer constrained by the board. It still activates tiles it passes over, but will pursue and attack players. Additionally, soldiers explode and deal major damage on death, meaning you can easily wipe if you kill multiple at the same time; to prevent this, most groups use ranged attacks to "kill" and stall the scouts. Shortly after a soldier dies, it's replaced by a scout that repeats from the beginning.
When players first enter the arena, they'll see three interactables waiting before the statue: Dispel, Claim, and Protect. Each of these grants a SAK skill to the player that takes it, and the fight begins when all three have been taken. Jade Scouts will occasionally get an orange shield around them that prevents all damage; Dispel is used to remove this. Claim is used to deactivate glowing tiles, giving the squad somewhere to stand; the player with claim is also the tank whom the boss will follow. Finally, Protect is used to create a protective dome for 5 seconds that renders players immune to all damage, most notably from Jade Soldier explosions and the spike mechanic we haven't mentioned yet; Protect is also who the soldiers fixate on. As it has a super long 3-minute cooldown, Protect can essentially only be used once per fight.
The only other mechanic is the spikes. This mechanic works on a 10-second loop. 5 seconds into the fight, an indicator will appear for the first set of spikes; 5 seconds after that, spikes emerge from the marked tiles, instantly killing any player hit by them. 5 seconds after that, the indicator for the next set of spikes appears, and so on. The patterns of spikes become more dangerous and complex as the fight goes on, though almost every pattern has at least one of the four central tiles as a safe spot. The spikes force the squad to move, and the player with Claim will need to be proactive to ensure the safe spots aren't on fire.
Challenge Mode
Aside from some HP scaling on the boss and its adds, this CM adds only a single mechanic. Blues work similar to the spikes, marking four tiles in a pattern and triggering after a few seconds, then repeating every 30 seconds after. Where they differ is that solving this mechanic is actually the inverse of dealing with spikes—to survive, you must stand on the blue instead of avoiding it. Furthermore, the locations of blues are locally loaded, meaning they're different for every player.
This adds a nice bit of additional action and complexity to the fight, but where things can get really interesting is when blues and spikes overlap. The cooldown between spikes gets reset when the boss hits an HP interval of 25%; depending on your group's DPS, this can cause situations where spikes and blues go off at the same time. Recognizing when this happens, and whether it's survivable, adds a whole additional layer of skill to the encounter. Blues activate 3 seconds after appearing, unlike spikes which take 5 seconds to go off; this means many situations that look impossible are actually survivable with proper timing. That said, sometimes you will find that blues and spikes line up perfectly in a way that's guaranteed to kill you; in this scenario, the group will need to take advantage of Protect. The shield can defend you from spikes, but not from failing a blue, so it must be placed in the very middle so players can split up across whichever of the four central tiles has their blue on it.
Verdict: 7/10, 8/10 (CM)
This fight is very simple, relatively so even on CM, but it just has a really nice rhythm to it. The way spikes works guarantees you have something to worry about every ten seconds, which creates a nice balance of burn time and movement. If you aren't handling one of the three SAKs it can get a tad boring, especially if your squad is efficient with its movements and thus doesn't need to move on every spike pattern, but I find I consistently have a good time with it.
Samarog
Sick art by @Efnyea
After defeating the Mursaat Overseer, players must complete another pre-event. This time they're faced with a door blocking their progress. There are two ways to get through. If there's a Thief in the squad, they can pick the lock; otherwise, you'll have to collect four key fragments from rubble around the recreation area. Once you're through, you're treated to a cutscene as Samarog awakens.
Lore
Samarog might actually be the single most interesting boss so far lore-wise. One of the most interesting things about him is that he belongs to a race of people we know literally nothing about except for "Samarog is one of them". We've never seen another member of his race and don't even know its name.
As for Sammy himself, he actually has a pretty interesting backstory. Glenna theorizes that the prisoners in the bastion were captured by the Mursaat, who employed a combination of torture and promises of power in attempts to sway the prisoners into serving them. Samarog was one of these inmates, and he gained the Mursaat's favor for his strength and ruthlessness, and he was made the kingpin of the prison; one could say he was the only success among the Mursaat's activities here. He continued to loyally watch over the bastion well after the Mursaat were gone, even slaughtering most of the other prisoners when they attempted to escape; you can see the result of this battle in the hallway before MO. The only other survivors were a Jotun, Guldhem, and a human, Rigom, both of whom Samarog enslaved to his will by unknown means, linking their very lifeforce to himself.
The Fight
Samarog's another relatively simple fight. The main gimmick is that the edge of the arena is covered in a field of spears. Standing in this area deals massive DoT to you, and getting tossed into it instantly kills you. This brings us to Samarog's own attacks. He has one where he sweeps his spears in front of him, and another where he slams them down to create a shockwave; getting hit by either will launch you backwards, impaling you if you land in the spears.
The core of this encounter is avoiding these attacks so that you don't get thrown around, particularly into the spears. This can be accomplished by keeping Samarog in the center and standing behind him, but how do you control where he's facing? Similar to Slothasor and Matthias, Samarog frequently changes the player it's fixated on rather than having a single consistent tank. The first target is the first player to enter the arena; after that, the tank will be whoever's standing the furthest after Samarog finishes using his Brutalize mechanic.
What's Brutalize, you ask? At every 10% HP interval, Samarog will pounce on his fixated target. During this time, the target is locked in place and can't use skills, and Sammy becomes invulnerable to damage and gains a defiance bar. The rest of the squad must quickly CC him before he kills their ally. Once either his bar is broken or his target dies, he becomes damageable again and chooses a new fixate.
There are, of course, some split phases to mix this up. At 66 and 33%, Samarog will run off into an alcove beyond the wall of spears and summon two adds, Guldhem and Rigom. When Rigom dies, he explodes and returns to 100% HP unless Guldhem is dead. Damage dealt to Guldhem is also dealt to Rigom, and Guldhem is immune to his share of the damage unless Rigom explodes on Samarog. Thus, the solution to this phase is simple: push Rigom into Samarog's alcove, kill Guldhem, then kill Rigom.
There are just a handful of other mechanics that you'll deal with during the main phases. Throughout the whole fight, large AoE spears will occasionally drop down across the arena; you can kill them to clear the area back out. Starting after the first split phase, you'll start seeing what's commonly called the "friends mechanic", where two players are marked with a large and small green; they must stand together or else take heavy damage, and must also take their AoEs away from the rest of the group. Finally, starting after the second split phase, Samarog gains a third attack where he slams his spears down to knock down enemies, though this is way easier to dodge and way less dangerous than the others, so its existence kind of just makes this phase easier. His other two attacks do, however, become more dangerous in this phase if you fail to dodge them, now stunning you and throwing you further away.
Challenge Mode
While the base fight is one of the easiest in the raid wings, Samarog's challenge mode is often considered the hardest of wing 4. There are a few key differences here. The friends mechanic is present from the start and much more difficult, as the target with the large AoE is immobilized and will leave behind a spear AoE. Speaking of spears, they can no longer be killed, but spawn in a fixed pattern; combining this with how the greens will fill the arena with additional spears, precise positioning and intelligent tanking are extremely important in this CM.
Samarog also gets one new attack. When all 12 of his spears have spawned across the arena, he'll call them all towards him, filling the entire arena with dangerous AoE arrows. If you've been boxed into a corner or dropped some poorly placed greens, avoiding this can be tricky. It should be noted that spears continue to fall during the split phases, and Samarog can call the spears to him in these phases as well.
I summarized the changes very easily here, but it's hard to really sell just how much harder this makes the fight. Most groups memorize a specific pattern of movements to ensure they don't run out of space in each phase, and every single player needs to be positioned properly to avoid dropping spears in inopportune locations. Being unable to just keep Samarog in the middle also makes his attacks much more dangerous, as you'll often be in positions where failing to dodge will result in your death.
Verdict: 7/10, 10/10 (CM)
Similar to MO, Samarog might be simple, but it just has a really nice flow to it. You can trivialize its attacks with stability, but that at least requires a bit more planning and additional thought/effort compared to fights that just passively stop working due to DPS powercreep. When done normally, this fight constantly keeps you moving, and even when optimized it maintains a fast pace due to how frequently you need to swap between doing damage and dishing out CC. The split phases are a nice way to slow down for a more puzzle-oriented mechanic, as well.
Samarog CM is our second ever S-tier fight per my rankings. The CM basically solves all the problems with the normal fight, removing most of the counterplay you can use to trivialize/ignore normal mode mechanics and heaping even more onto you. It demands precision and coordination in a way that not even many of the CMs harder than it do, and doing it properly is incredibly satisfying. There's also juuust enough wiggle-room that you don't need to follow the standard strategy exactly and can clutch your way out of some mistakes. In terms of overall design—how it ties all the mechanics together and responds to players' actions—I think this is a perfect fight.
Deimos
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Lore
Deimos has some pretty interesting lore, and he's also the focus of a significant retcon from SotO. He is a high-ranking demon of House Nephus, brother of Cerus and Peitha, and one of the favored followers of Eparch, the Midnight King who rules over the dimension of Nayos. He participated in a number of incursions into Tyria and played a hand in killing several key members of the Wizard's Court. During one of these incursions, he would find himself unable to return to his homeland.
As it turns out, the Bastion of the Penitent itself was originally built by Isgarren. It was only later taken over by the Mursaat, who used it as a prison. As the bastion is located partially in the mists, Deimos was able to enter; once he did, however, he was trapped, unable to leave. He chose to take full advantage of this situation, playing along with the Mursaat's schemes and taking root in the mind of their prized prisoner: Saul D'Alessio, the founder of the White Mantle. The Mursaat wished to turn him into a puppet, and Deimos's part in this plan was to subject Saul to eternal torment, even keeping him alive for several hundred years.
Deimos and Saul would outlive even the Mursaat who set this plan in motion, but Deimos was more than happy to maintain this situationship. As a demon, he feeds off of emotions, and Saul's grief and suffering were an especially potent meal. This twisted bond was so strong that it even molded Deimos's appearance, granting him choking hands and chains representative of Saul's own vices.
At least, that's how it played out if you ignore that Deimos uses the same model, complete with Saul symbolism, in the Lonely Tower fractal that takes place at least 500 years before he meets Saul. I choose to believe that this is just because it would be impractical to make a whole second model for him just for the fractal; having his appearance be molded by his connection to Saul is the best way to tie together the pre- and post-SotO versions of his lore, and it seems consistent with the way demons interact with people's emotions as well.
The Fight
Though there are several iconic and very impactful mechanics in this fight, I can't relly identify any of them as a "core gimmick" around which the rest are designed. There's a bit of a throughline with Samarog, as both have an attack that will toss you off the edge of the arena, but beyond that Deimos appears to be mechanically lacking a "theme". A hodgepodge of mechanics like this should make for a middling fight, but somehow, Deimos just... works. We'll get more into that later, and what ties these mechanics together; let's go over the actual mechanics.
The fight opens with a neat intro sequence. The Eye of Janthir will target someone with a green; they and anyone else in it will get transported down into a demonic realm containing four chains at the edge of the arena. All four chains must be destroyed to progress; an invulnerable Deimos in the center will try to knock players off the platform with an AoE cone. When one chain is destroyed, everyone will be transported up; you have a second or so of wiggle room, meaning it's possible for coordinated groups to destroy all four in one go.
While this is happening, a Shackled Prisoner is located in the center of the arena above. Adds called Greeds and Prides will continually spawn around the edge and move towards him, dealing damage and disappearing if they reach him. Greeds can mostly be ignored, but Prides do significant damage. When the chains are all destroyed, the Shackled Prisoner becomes Saul, an NPC who will fight alongside you and must be healed. Deimos himself will also arrive.
Deimos is a toughness-tanked boss, and lring him away from the center is important due to a mechanic we'll get to later. In addition to needing a tank, this encounter is always played with a second special role called a handkite. The kite's job is to handle the Soul Feast mechanic, usually just called "hands"; persistent AoE's are continually spawned under the feet of whoever's furthest from Deimos, so the kite's job is to be the furthest, stand on the edge of the arena, and stack as many of these in one place as possible so the squad doesn't run out of room. This requires quite a bit of survivability and a method of blocking attacks, but the kite can't take more toughness than the tank, requiring some coordination of builds.
Deimos starts the fight with just one other attack, Annihilate. This creates a circle of cone AoEs that, similar to the attack used in the demon realm, knock players back. These AoEs hit in a cascade starting in front of Deimos and expanding in both directions. Players generally either roll through this attack, tank it with stability, or block it with aegis; for the latter two methods, you'll want to be careful to only be standing in one cone.
Starting at 90% HP, Deimos will begin using Mind Crush every 40ish seconds. When he starts the 5-second channel of this skill, a small protective dome will appear in the center, and Saul will play a voiceline. Players who don't either stand in the ward (quickly) or use a block (this is why the handkite needs one) will be downed.
At 75, 50, and 25%, a random player (except the tank or handkite) will get a green, just like in the intro phase. Down in the demon realm, players will be faced with a ghostly manifestation of one of Saul's sins. Once they get it to 50% HP, it'll transport them and itself back up to the main platform to be fought alongside Deimos; at the same time, all the hands currently on the arena will start moving towards Deimos, adding an extra hazard while also clearing the board. The first add, the Thief, will steal players' boons if he isn't CC'd quickly. The Gambler occasionally disappears and summons three fake clones; the real one wields a staff, the others halberds. The Drunkard will occasionally teleport layers around if he isn't CC'd.
In high-skill groups, the player marked with the third green is often left as a sacrifice. Rather than take the squad down with them to kill the Drunkard, they'll go in alone and simply try their best to survive while the others phase Deimos. Particularly skilled players might even be able to solo Saul.
Now, the rest of the mechanics. Starting at 75%, Deimos starts spawning Demonic Tears which shoot unblockable projectiles at players. You can walk into one to destroy it, but you'll gain the Tear Instability debuff, preventing you from doing so again for 1 minute. Tears also appear down in the demonic realm. Starting at 60%, Deimos will start using his most dangerous mechanic, oils. The nearest non-tank player to him is occasionally targeted with a circular AoE. After a few seconds, it becomes active, and remains active for 30 seconds. Oil does heavy damage and expands when touched, and can get big enough to nearly cover the entire arena; this is often a wipe for most groups if it happens. An oil spawns every 15 seconds, meaning there are two at any given time. At 40% , Prides and Greeds start appearing again and will go after Saul.
The final phase begins at 10% HP. Deimos will become invulnerable and exchange some words with Saul, and then everyone is brought down into the demonic realm. A massive version of Deimos appears off one edge of the arena as a wall boss. During this short final phase, players must deal with Demonic Tears, oils, and a pattern of three attacks where Deimos slams his fists down on the platform, dealing heavy knockback. The impact of these attacks is famously disjointed from the animation, making it best to either block them with aegis or negate the knockback with stability. If your group did the sacrifice strategy for the third green, you'll also have to deal with Saul down here.
Deimos's seemingly disparate mechanics actually work really well together, and it's for a similar reason as why I like Samarog CM so much—it's all about positioning. Everything the fight throws at you is intended to either demand you have very specific positioning or attempt to disrupt you out of that positioning, and it results in an encounter where long-term strategy and individual reactions are both equally important. If you do it well, Deimos can be an incredibly calm and relatively simple fight; if people start making mistakes, it becomes a frantic mess. Even in the worst-case scenarios, it's almost always still possible to clutch up in this fight, and that makes for very satisfying moments.
Let's look briefly at just how much this fight demands in terms of positioning. First, there's a tank and handkite who must be on opposite sides of the arena. With Deimos's Annihilate attack, you generally want to be standing between him and the center to minimize the risk of being brought down. Mind Crush forces everyone to run to the middle, and other mechanics, like Annihilate and oils, serve to disrupt your positioning and potentially render the ward unsafe. Greens need to be positioned properly to not steal the tank away, and Demonic Tears and Prides require some players to occasionally break formation. Every aspect of the fight is about controlling your movement, standing in the right spots, and finding the right opportunities to slip away and handle something before coming back. Even the Sauls massively benefit from good positioning, as it's much better to lure him over to Deimos and cleave them down together than to stand there and keep fighting him individually. The Gambler gives you another task to break formation for, and the Drunkard can completely ruin everyone's positioning if not dealt with properly.
Challenge Mode
Alright, I'm already eating my words from Cairn, 'cause from a design standpoint... I think Deimos CM might actually just be an objectively worse fight than normal mode. The only mechanical change here is that Saul no longer escapes his prison, instead being stuck in the center as the Shackled Prisoner the entire time. This means he won't help the squad out with healing or damage and, most crucially, won't be able to create the ward that protects players from Mind Crush.
As we established earlier, Mind Crush can be blocked, so without the ward you have no choice but to deal with it this way. This is a neat additional challenge, but it's usually solved just by having the healers apply aegis to everyone, and it comes at the cost of a lot of the fight's identity and strategy. Pretty much any fight becomes more simple and less interesting when played optimally, and I've harped on several fights which suffer a lot from that. Deimos is no different, but this CM basically just forces you to make the most impactful optimization by using aegis instead of the ward. This means your positioning matters a lot less, and a layer of strategy regarding making sure that oils don't cover your safe zone is completely lost. Having everyone block the attack is a different challenge, not necessarily a harder one, and I think it's much less interesting than normal mode.
Verdict: 9/10, 8/10 (CM)
While the lack of the ward does make the CM less cohesive and interesting in my opinion, it's still got all the rest of Deimos's iconic mechanics and stellar design. This is a really strong fight either way. I certainly don't dislike the CM, and it was only through writing this review that I realized how important the ward is to Deimos's design and identity.
Conclusion
Wing 4 concludes with Saul being freed from his eternal torment at Deimos's many, many hands. The Eye of Janthir, which had been leading the Commander and company through the raid, abandoned Saul and stopped sustaining him, leading to a bittersweet ending as he is finally laid to rest. To avoid causing a political uproar, the fact that Saul lived all these years was not made public, and he was quietly buried on Krytan soil.
Wing 4 is a really great wing, and I think it has the strongest average score of any of them so far. I'm not sure if any other wing will top it in that regard. This is also the first wing to make consistent use of Challenge Modes, which is a huge boon to its quality and replayability. I really hope that one of the things ANet gives us in the upcoming maintenance period is CMs for the bosses of wings 1-3.
We're probably gonna have another break from these reviews next week as I instead release my seasonal anime review, but after that we'll be moving on to wing 5! Oh, but before I forget, we need to update one last thing:
Tier List
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Every tier got at least one new addition this time around. Well, except for F-tier. I really don't think anything is ever gonna go there.
I hope this was an enjoyable read. For wing 5, I'm going to count the three statues as separate encounters—because, really, they are—meaning we'll have eight additions to the list once again, including the two CMs. In the meantime, feel free to roast me for my hot takes or discuss your own opinions below. Thanks for reading!
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