KotET Chapters 3, 4 & 5 Master Mode

I decided that none of these needed a whole blog post of their own, so I might as well lump them all together.

Chapter three is probably the easiest and fastest chapter of the lot. It doesn't even feature a boss fight! Sure, there's Vaylin at the end, but she doesn't really count since you don't even need to win the fight to progress - like in the fight against Valkorion in KotFE chapter 12, your character's health dipping low enough works just as well to trigger the next cut scene - and as a bonus, with you being on the losing side, Valkorion's interruption actually makes narrative sense too.

The only somewhat aggravating thing about this chapter are the patrols in the corridors, especially the stealthed ones. On my Scoundrel I just skipped most of them, but I gave the chapter another run-through on my Marauder right afterwards and some of those pulls were quite aggravating, though somewhat surprisingly the one that annoyed me the most was actually the lone Knight of Zakuul that jumps around like a particularly hard-hitting bouncy ball. The best advice I can give to avoid frustration here is to simply take each pull as seriously as a minor boss and not be afraid of blowing all your cooldowns to get through each one. They'll come back up again quickly enough anyway, and otherwise you'll just be wasting that time getting downed and having to repair.

Chapter four is similar, with lots of trash and no real boss fights; there are just slightly more mobs. They feature fewer annoying mechanics, but some of the pulls are painful simply because they are quite large, and several ridiculously hard-hitting mobs shooting you all at once can end badly on occasion.

The only tricky thing is the fight near the end to defend your temporary base against the swarming purifier droids, but I already talked about that in my veteran mode post, plus that's the one veteran fight for which I had already uploaded a video too. Still, I decided to add the Scoundrel's point of view as well, just for the heck of it, even though I applied the same basic tactic to beat it. I actually found it a bit easier to just heal myself and dodge the red circles while my little companion army took care of killing things. Any fight where you're dealing with a lot of mobs but have several NPCs by your side seems to be quite well-suited to playing through it as a healer actually.



Chapter five starts off with some more annoyingly large trash pulls, but was otherwise also surprisingly unremarkable. I was wondering whether the fight to subdue the colossal droid would be challenging in some way but I just killed the things that were powering it and the boss never even seemed to land any attacks.

The fight where you control the droid yourself was still fun; the increased incoming damage just meant that I had to hit the ability to shield and repair pretty much on cooldown, but it still felt easily doable.

Now, Aries looked like he might actually present some challenge if you're a melee character, since he won't laser barrage himself on master mode, but as someone with range it was actually shockingly boring. I learned on my first (failed) attempt that trying to melee him was not a good idea as he then suddenly started hitting fairly hard. On my second attempt I stupidly ran off one of the sides and fell to my death. But the third attempt was super easy, just very slow and boring, as I simply ran circles around him, forever avoiding his laser barrage, and very slowly dpsing him down. The only times things got a little hairy was during the intermission phases (but even those weren't too bad) and when I suddenly lost aggro to Vette and he downed her within seconds. However, even that didn't even really matter that much because I could just res her and continue my little run-around.



I can already tell that chapter six is going to be more interesting, however...