It's time for the second installment of the series where I analyze and review each of Guild Wars 2's raids. This week we're taking a look at the second raid wing, Salvation Pass.
Into Salvation Pass
The story of wing 2 picks up right where Spirit Vale left off. We managed to save some of the kidnapped soldiers after defeating Sabetha, but her words revealed that there was a larger conspiracy beyond just a couple of bandits taking prisoners. Still missing is the squad leader Bennett, who was taken deeper into the Forsaken Thicket alongside others who were "worthy".
The involvement of the White Mantle in this plot becomes more and more explicit as this wing continues, but we'll get to that. First off, there's a big, grumpy monster that just-so-happens to be in our way.
Slothasor
Lore
Slothasor is a giant sloth, and as it turns out, sloths in the Guild Wars universe are absolutely terrifying. It appears to be the result of either the magic released by Mordremoth's death or experimentation by the White Mantle, or possibly both. There's at least one other giant sloth in the world, located far away in the Ring of Fire, implying that these creatures are more likely the result of magic-rich environments than human tampering.
As it is literally just an animal, Slothasor doesn't have much more in the way of lore or personality. It's a very sleepy single mother(?), and our presence in its lair makes it very upset.
The Fight
Slothasor is actually a somewhat similar fight to Sabetha, at least when you look at the mechanics from a top-down perspective. Both fights revolve around a special role which must be performed by multiple players who alternate performing the related task, with the mechanic they perform removing an area-denial hazard from the arena. They're also both fairly complex as far as HoT fights go, featuring a lot of moving parts you'll need to keep track of and a degree of personal responsibility for all players as well.
Let's start with the central mechanic, mushrooms. The arena is filled entirely with Poison Mushrooms which each have a deadly AoE field around them, covering the entire area. Right at the room's entrance is an Imbued Mushroom which can be interacted with; doing so starts the fight and transforms whoever touched it into a slubling. Slublings are strange slug-sloth monstrosities spawned by Slothasor, and as a result, the slub-transformed player is actually considered an enemy to other players, capable of bieng damaged by their skills. While a slubling, you also can't use any of your usual abilities, either; in exchange, you gain the ability to eat Poison Mushrooms. Doing so dispels the poison, creating a safe zone for one minute until that mushroom regrows.
This forms the basis of the entire fight. There are four locations where Imbued Mushrooms will spawn on a timed rotation, so players must run loops around the arena while a few squad members take on the task of clearing a safe path to the next mushroom's spawn location. This is where the personal responsibility of this fight comes in, as in addition to being careful not to murder your slubified teammates, you also need to pay attention to who the tank is at any given time. Slothasor chooses a random player to fixate on and changes targets periodically; if you're chosen as the tank, it;s up to you to keep the boss moving before the ground beneath it ceases to be safe to stand on.
If that sounds bad, there's still one more major mechanic that we've yet to cover: Volatile Poisons. A random player will be marked with this effect every 25 seconds, gaining a special action key. When they press it (or go down), they'll drop an expanding AoE field at their feet. This mean that, on top of everything else we've already covered, you also need to pay attention for when you get marked with poison and quickly run off the group to drop it in a good spot.
This combination of core mechanics already makes for a pretty frantic and complex fight, so you can see why it's often considered one of if not the hardest of the HoT raid encounters. Believe it or not, we haven't even gotten to Slothasor's own attacks yet. It has a few—a cone of fire breath, an attack that will drop several coconuts on every player's position to stun them if they don't run away, and the most fearsome of them all, "shakes". The actual name of this attack is Spore Release, but nobody calls it that. When Slothasor shakes, it'll fling a shit ton of projectiles in all directions that apply a shit ton of very bad ouchie conditions to all players. To top it off, Slothasor also has kids—remember the slublings I mentioned? They'll continuously spawn in the center of the arena, and you'll want to deal with them before they eventually overwhelm you. Put this all together, and you have a boss that can seriously kick your ass on top of a decently complex cycle of core mechanics that need to be handled intelligently.
The final kicker of all this is Narcolepsy. At every 20% HP threshold (and a final time at 10%), Slothasor will stop in its tracks, become invulnerable to damage, and gain a CC bar. This is particularly punishing of bad positioning and can cause a group that's moving too slowly to get stuck even further behind.
Slothasor is a very snowball-heavy encounter. It's very easy for a single mistake—killing a slubling player, placing poison in a bad spot, moving too slow as the tank, getting downed by a coconut or shake—to snowball into a series of other failures that send everything out of wack. It's a rather difficult fight to learn, and the sheer chaos of it has made it rather resilient to powercreep, to a degree. Once you learn the fight and its many intricacies, though, you realize it's a very controlled chaos. There's a lot of randomness to this fight, but none of it is designed in a way that's outright unfair. You need quick thinking and good reactions to make it through, but if a group knows what they're doing, they can take this chaotic encounter and make it really look like a walk in the park.
I'm personally a really big fan of Slothasor. The difficulty is great, the mechanics are very unique, and I love how it rewards your ability to think on your feet. There are also a handful of strategic decisions you can make to improve your chances, such as whether you have your slublings eat around the edge or through the middle. A teammate getting temporarily turned into a targetable enemy also makes for some really funny interactions. The vibe I get is that this fight is relatively unpopular, and I can understand why with its chaotic nature, but from a design standpoint I think it's really solid.
Verdict: 8/10
Prison Camp
Most players call this encounter "Bandit Trio", but I'm pulling out the government name, which should already give you a preview of my opinion on this encounter. Don't make me turn this car around, 'Protect the caged prisoners'!
Lore
The bandits of this camp are holding more of the prisoners you've come to save. It seems to specifically be a sort of holding area for the worthy before they're taken to actually be sacrificed. These are a separate crew than Sabetha's, though there seems to be a close relationship between the two. One of the three named bandit champions that appears during this fight, Narella, uses similar attacks to Sabetha and has a journal stating that she's Sabetha's apprentice and seeking revenge on us.
Zane and Berg have less lore in comparison. Based on his dialogue, Zane seems to be the leader of the camp, and based on his skills he may be a thief or revenant. Berg is the character we know the least about, except that he's allergic to bees.
The Fight
Prison Camp is an "event encounter" as opposed to the boss encounters that make up most of raids. The main mechanic is that there is a cage full of Pact prisoners in the center of the camp, and this cage has its own health bar. The bandits are trying to kill the prisoners before they can feed you any information; if the cage dies, you lose.
Players will generally start the fight in a very specific way, using a launchpad outside to land on top of a watchtower along the camp's walls. From here, there's a bit of setup necessary to make things go smoothly. One team glides down to the ground and clears out the bandits already in the camp; the other has the more important job, killing bandit snipers on the bridges above the camp, knocking down beehives, and collecting oil kegs. After that, players usually stack in a corner to trick the AI of the remaining snipers, who will all run right up to the players in order to attack.
This opening is the most interesting part of the fight, as there's a lot you need to do all at once and there's a lot of prep you can do to make the later phases easier. This also represents the encounter's fatal flaw, however—since these tasks can all be done immediately, the optimal strategy is to do so, thus leaving the squad with nothing important to do for the bulk of the rest of the encounter.
This issue is exemplified best by the Bandit Snipers. Their gimmick is that they have extremely long-range attacks that can hit targets from across the entire arena, making them a constant threat you'll need to account for. The intended strategy was definitely for players to spend time inbetween the boss phases clearing out snipers, but this aspect of the fight is completely negated by how easy it is to lure them all to one spot. I discussed this briefly with Gorseval last week, though that boss suffers much less from this problem than this encounter does, but if an encounter requires players to go out of their way to play poorly for it to remain fun, that's a surefire sign of poor design. Problems with boring solutions are simply poorly made problems, and it's never players' fault for using the best solution and "ruining" the fight for themselves.
Let's continue with more of the actual mechanics. Aside from the cage gimmick, this fight centers on three separate bosses that spawn on timers. Each of these bosses is weak to one of the three interactable objects that can be found around the arena: beehives, warg cages, and oil kegs. They each also have powerful attacks that can do serious damage to the cage, encouraging you to kill them quickly and in specific positions.
First up is Berg, who spawns near the eastern gate. His only notable attack is a frontal AoE similar to those used by Mordrem Guard Punishers. He is allergic to bees, and as such takes massive damage and defiance break if you throw a beehive at him. There's also a niche optimization you can do here, which is to have a power revenant be the one to use the beehive. Throwing the bees counts as a player skill, and it benefits from the assassin stance's 'Impossible Odds' skill, letting you rack up some truly insane DPS.
Next is Zane. He spawns at the southern gate, and it's very important that the entire squad is there and ready to fight him when he appears. He will frequently shadowstep to random players, and the large cone attacks he uses are all but guaranteed to instakill the cage if they hit it. His spawn location is out of range of the cage, so just keep him there and you'll be fine. He's weak to the Tortured Wargs, friendly NPCs that can be released by interacting with their cages. Players usually go out of their way to open as many cages as possible right before Zane spawns.
Before we move to the last boss, Narella, I'd like to comment on an issue with Zane that's caused by the fight's other mechanics. In addition to the three bosses and the waves of generic bandit enemies, there are two main mechanics that will threaten the cage. One is Bandit Saboteurs, tough enemies who will try to plant a bomb on the cage, dealing sever damage. They gain a CC bar when they start working; either break it or kill them to stop their attack. The other mechanic is mortars, which are basically knock-offs of Sabetha's cannons. A mortar crew will periodically set up at one of a few locations outside the camp, and a player must use a Sapper Bomb and launchpad to head outside and destroy the mortar before it does too much damage to the cage.
This brings us to the problem with Zane. As mentioned, he likes to shadowstep to random players. There's a mortar that spawns right before he does, and... well, I think you can see where this is going. Sometimes he'll try to teleport to the mortar player while they're midair after using a launchpad. This doesn't result in a wipe, since they're launching in the opposite direction of the cage, but it does mean Zane teleports out of the rest of the squad's reach, and you just sorta have to awkwardly stand there for a while and wait for him to teleport back to you. It's incredibly silly and unintuitive and I can't imagine why they didn't hardcode him to not be able to do that, or at least make that first mortar spawn further away in the timeline.
Back to the bosses, the third and final is Narella. She uses a flamethrower like Sabetha, and she spawns flak and Fire Tornadoes. Her damage output is incredibly high, especially if you get caught in multiple attacks at once, and this is the most likely spot for the fight to fail as a result. She's weak to Oil Kegs, which can be thrown at her to light her on fire and deal heavy damage. If you're a speedrunner, this is also the only part of the fight that matters to you, since it ends when she dies and there's no way to make her spawn sooner.
This facet of the fight is where all of its main issues really stem from. The encounter is heavily scripted, with the spawns of Saboteurs, mortars, and the three bosses all happening at very specific points on the timer. In most fights, there's a sense of reactivity, of push and pull—you get better at the fight, you handle mechanics in a better way or do better DPS, and as a reward you get a faster or safer clear. That isn't the case in Prison Camp, since if you care at all about optimization, only the last thirty seconds or so really matter. The fight has very little replay value as a result, aside from the desire to replay for fun or rewards—but the fight isn't fun, and its rewards aren't that great, either. I haven't done Prison Camp a single time since the raid UI gave us the ability to skip encounters.
Speedrunning and replay value aside, this design choice also has the effect of making the fight really long and boring. I mentioned earlier how you can handle all of the important setup right at the beginning, giving you nothing to do between the boss spawns; that wouldn't be an issue if you could force the bosses to spawn more quickly. Instead, you have to wait a minimum of six minutes, most of it spent literally just standing there doing next to nothing. God forbid your team wipes to Narella, forcing you to wait around again before you get another attempt at her.
Verdict: 3/10
My rating this encounter lower than Spirit Woods may seem a hot take to some, but I genuinely much prefer the woods to this. The rift capturing segment is just as long and boring as this encounter is, but at least everything after that is fine. I'm mostly ambivalent to Spirit Woods, but the Prison Camp makes me actively upset.
Matthias Gabrel
Salvation Pass ends with an encounter that somewhat combined the design philosophies of Sabetha and Slothasor—the use of a central, timed gimmick that requires all players to pay attention, the necessity for a player carrying out a special role, and the general chaos of many overlapping mechanics.
Lore
Matthias is a high-ranking member of the White Mantle, and the person who's been performing the ritual sacrifices that Sabetha was capturing prisoners for. He also has Squad Leader Bennett, the guy we've been trying to save this whole time, and is very close to sacrificing him when we arrive.
In addition to attempting to revive Lazarus through human sacrifice, Matthias has also been overseeing strange experiments with bloodstone. The Mantle primarily uses this magic-rich material for sacrifices, but Matthias has been experimenting with imbuing bloodstone shards into living things—and once his research bore fruit, he underwent the same experiment himself.
Tutorialization
One thing I appreciate about Matthias is that the game does a very good job at priming you for his mechanics—teaching you the core concepts before you see them here. He uses the same Fire Tornadoes as Narella. He has a poison mechanic that works very similarly to Slothasor's, even down to being dropped on-command with a SAK. He requires a lot of CC, which you will have also needed against Slothasor and the saboteurs in the Prison Camp. In a lot of ways, Matthias feels like a test of all the skills you've learned up the point where you reach him, and that's exactly the way the final boss of a raid ought to feel.
The Fight
Matthias is a very chaotic fight with a lot going on from the very beginning. It's not really possible to even identify any of his mechanics as the "main" gimmick, as there are several vying for that position. We'll start first with one that's likely to end your run in the first 5 seconds of the fight if you go in blind, his Blood Shield. He will periodically grant himself many stacks of this buff, making him entirely immune to damage; at the same time, he'll start shooting rapid-fire bloodstone shards at players. His shield can only be broken by using certain skills to reflect the shards back at him. If you miss this window, you'll have to wait a bit until he starts shooting shards again, and if nobody in your squad has a reflect, you lose.
This is the 'special role' I mentioned, though in the grand scheme of things this is a very simple one, you just need to bring a single skill and use it at the right times. That said, it is a vital role to the encounter. Matthias isn't the first fight to ask you to bring specific utility effects, but it does introduce the idea of some effects being actively detrimental. You can completely grief your group if you use a projectile destruction skill to block the shards instead. There's also another attack where Matthias shoots out a circle of shards which buff the damage of anyone who gets hit by them (how nice of him!); this can also buff him if you reflect them back, so you're also punished for being overzealous with your reflects and using them at the wrong times.
Next up for major mechanics, we have Corruption. A random player will periodically get an AoE applied to them which continuously damages them and anyone nearby. To cleanse the Corruption, that player must walk into one of the four fountains located along the outer walls of the arena; that fountain becomes bloodsoaked and can't be used again until the other three have been used. This mechanic is simple, but it's paired with Unstable Blood Magic, which everyone just calls poison. UBM is the mechanic I mentioned earlier that's basically identical to the poisons in Slothasor; you'll need to be careful to identify whether you've had Corruption or a poison applied to you, then react appropriately, as dropping a poison on a fountain could be disastrous.
The final main overarching mechanic is that Matthias bends the elements to his will, shifting between three phases that alter the fight with a passive debuff applied to all players, an environmental hazard, and an associated attack that Matthias will use. Each of these phases lasts for 20% of Matthias's HP, starting with a snowstorm, followed by a heat wave and finally a downpour.
In the ice phase, players are slowed down and icy AoEs appear across the arena which can be destroyed if you inflict them with burning. Matthias will use Oppressive Gaze, an attack where he shoots an orb in a straight line that deals massive damage. This attack is always aimed at the first person to have entered the arena (until they down, at which point he'll choose a new target), which takes the cake for the second-funniest targeting mechanic in all of gaming. OG has a tendency to hit a single person twice and thus instantly down them, so some groups will have its target specifically kite it away from the others.
In the fire phase, players take damage when they stand still and Fire Tornadoes prowl around the arena. These tornadoes can be extremely dangerous, as if they catch you you'll be stunned for a couple seconds as you spin around the tornado; this can delay you from dealing with mechanics are fling you into a mechanic you're trying to avoid. Matthias's exclusive attack during this phase is Unstable Blood Magic, the poison we discussed earlier.
In the storm phase, players will gradually gain stacks of Downpour as they move around. At 10 stacks, the debuff becomes Unbalanced, and any additional movement will knock the player down for a while; if you stay still, the debuff just goes away. A Storm Cloud that does heavy AoE damage rotates around the arena in the exact area you'll usually want to be standing in, and Matthias uses Zealous Benediction, an attack where he applies a standard spread AoE to 5 players. It's easy to mix these AoEs up with Corruption, as they're the same size and color, so you once again have to pay close attention to determine which mechanic you have.
You'll notice that these three phases each cover 20% of Matthias's HP, leaving 40% left over. Once you reach this point, Matthias will transform into a huge bloodstone monstrosity; he'll start flipping through the three phases on a 30-second timer from here and will use Oppressive Gaze and Zealous Benediction regardless of the weather; both those attacks also become more dangerous. A new hazard is also added to the mix—Surrender, a spirit with a small AoE around it that cross the arena in a straight line but does massive damage. Different groups lovingly refer to these spirits as "John Cena", "Baywatch", etc; a second starts appearing at 20%.
With aaall of that covered, there's just one more major mechanic to go over: Blood Sacrifice, which is easily one of the single coolest mechanics in the game. Matthias will periodically select one random player to attempt to sacrifice; they'll be teleported to the middle of the room, immobilized, and prevented from using skills, all in addition to becoming an enemy and gaining a CC bar. The rest of the team must quickly CC them before they get sacrificed, but you also need to be careful not to outright kill your friend. The way this mechanic works makes for some really fun interactions, like Guardians using the Sanctuary skill to CC themselves out of the sacrifice, or Mesmers using the Signet of Humility skill to turn their squadmate into a moa. As another fun fact, Matthias stops using this mechanic once he enters the abomination phase, but depending on timing it's possible for one last sacrifice to occur; if it does, he actually has separate, rarely-heard versions of the sacrifice voicelines in the abomination's deeper voice.
Matthias is all about chaos. Before doing a bit of extra research for this section, I honestly didn't even know that the hadouken, poison, and spread mechanics were phase-locked; when you're actually in the fight, it just feels like a frantic series of constant motion, so you aren't exactly paying attention to which mechanics are coming when, just trying to deal with them all. Matthias is really good at handling burn time, as well; aside from a mechanic like Corruption requiring you to step away, you're able to continue damaging the boss at basically all times unless you yourself make a mistake, but you're constantly making small adjustments to positioning to deal with mechanics and follow him around. Unlike most bosses, Matthias actively changes position throughout the entire fight; this is because he periodically fixates on the furthest player from him. This helps a lot to make the fight feel even more frantic and active.
I love the frantic feeling of Matthias, but it also has its flaws. I mentioned earlier how Oppressive Gaze can randomly hit you twice and down you; if the attack was consistently a guaranteed down, that'd be one thing, but the bug just makes it annoying to deal with. Downpour is also a mechanic that I'd classify as just annoying and not really fun. The knockdown penalty is overly long, making it insanely punishing—unless you have a stunbreak, in which case you can just ignore the mechanic entirely. Being incentivized not to move also just meshes poorly with literally every other aspect of the fight, particularly the Storm Cloud that's present during the same phase. Matthias can also sometimes fixate on a player running to an edge with a poison, which is something I feel like he should be hard-coded to not do; it's annoying to account for and just slows down the fight.
Verdict: 7/10
I quite like the fight overall, but these handful of issues do drag it down a bit. If the hadouken bug and his poison fixates were fixed, I think it'd easily be an 8/10 fight for me, but I wouldn't put it any higher.
Tier List
Time to update our list. Wing 2 adds three more encounters, bringing us to a total of seven entries so far. As a reminder, here's how the scores I've given correlate to the tiers:
- S: 10/10
- A: 8-9
- B: 6-7
- C: 5
- D: 3-4
- F: 1-2 (I don't think anything will end up here)
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Conclusion
Once again I had a lot of fun discussing the fights, and in the case of Matthias I actually came away from this review knowing much more about the encounter than before.
I've been putting some thought into wing 3's review. I'm going to count it as four encounters (Escort, KC, Twisted Castle, Xera), and I think I'll also give McLeod his own spot on the tier list, since his portion of escort is completely divorced from the rest of the encounter. He'll still be factored into escort's overall score, of course, just also receiving his own individual verdict. More on that next week when we actually get to it.
Thanks for reading, and hope you enjoyed. Join us next time for Stronghold of the Faithful!
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