KotET Chapter 8 Master Mode

Spoiler: I completed the Eternal Master achievement yesterday! So I have two more chapters to talk about, but I will split them into separate posts again.

To be honest I wasn't sure whether I should give chapter eight its own post, since it didn't really present any real roadblocks, but in the end there were still enough nuisances that I felt it was worth talking about them in their own space. Once again, I played through this chapter on master mode on both my Scoundrel and my Sorcerer in order to gain a broader perspective of where its challenges lie, though it's worth mentioning that both characters were light side. I'm not convinced that Lana and Theron are as useful as Senya and Arcann can be in this chapter - particularly the latter's reflective barrier.

In many ways chapter eight struck me as the opposite of chapter seven - the latter was a tight experience consisting of several challenging boss fights. The former is mostly trash, and lots of it, something that I found very tiresome. Even stealth is of limited use here, as only one of your two companions will share it, with the other one happily running into things and aggroing them left and right. Of course, if you're "lucky" they might die in one of those skirmishes, with no way of getting them back up again other than to either die too or exit the area and come back in again.

So yeah, lots of trash, much of it annoying. However, the worst bit was once again the walker section, more than anything because any time you die you have a pretty long slog ahead of you to get back to where you were, but like me you might also run into "fun" features such as pulls that keep evading or a giant satellite dish that - while passive - kept respawning and putting me back into combat.

The main lesson I learned on my second playthrough was that homing missiles are your friend - by using them to start every pull, you can quickly eliminate a whole bunch of spread-out weenies that would otherwise bring your walker low with their inflated damage output.

The one opponent that had me stumped for a little bit was the so-called siege skytrooper at the end of the second walker section, because he hits so hard that he'll kill you long before you have a chance to do enough damage in return, even if you're using your most powerful abilities. Of course I realised in the end that you don't need to get him down to zero, only to fifty percent, and when he decides to float up into the air, his attacks can be outranged. So whenever he did that, I backpedalled a bit to get out of range and then spent time winding up another overcharged cannon shot before wading back into the fray.

The mini bosses on the ground were fairly unremarkable. I first tried to kill Tyrall Jerikko while ignoring his droids, but the moment he died they turned around and started channeling their siege cutters at me - ow! I vanished right out of that, and on the next attempt made sure to take the droids out first, even though they appear to be non-threatening at this early stage.



There was also this guy called Imperator Sunfell with loads of adds, but they don't hit too hard and if you die after only having killed some of them, those will at least stay dead so you'll have fewer of them to deal with the next time around.

I also ran into the glitch boss, when I managed to rescue Vette before my objective had updated to "rescue Vette", so that when it did there was nothing left to fight and the mission bugged out. Fortunately that was easy enough to fix by exiting the chapter and coming back in again, but unfortunately this also caused a whole load of trash to respawn, something I really could have done without.

For being one of the big bads of the expansion, Vaylin is a fairly unremarkable fight. Honestly, the scariest thing about her is the large number of adds she starts with. At that point your priority should simply be to survive; handily she seems to use her lightning pretty indiscriminately and actually kills off her own followers as the fight goes on.

After that it's just about remembering to stay in melee range, except when she's about to do that big explosion - then you run out, and don't forget to take your companion with you - and always keeping your back against a wall in case one of her Force blasts goes through uninterrupted (that thing has a fierce knockback).