KotFE Chapter 15 Master Mode

Now this one was interesting. I had a hunch that it was going to be, specifically as I remembered more than one of my guildies (most of whom are pretty good players) spending some time wiping to the Gemini Captain, but at the same time I was hoping that it wasn't going to be that bad because I didn't really remember having any major issues on veteran mode. Master mode was pretty bad though.

First off, I thought that the chapter as a whole was pretty full of death traps. Some of it was probably me playing a bit derpily I guess, such as wiping twice to the Ship Defense Droid that ambushes you at the start of the chapter. I recorded it afterwards to make myself feel a bit better about it, as if I had overcome a significant challenge.



I was a bit taken aback by the speed with which some of the trash respawned. At one point I got a bit distracted and went semi-AFK for ten minutes or so, and the trash pull in the place where I had parked myself actually respawned twice during that time.

Or how about the room with those giant red lasers? I know, it should be obvious to not let them touch you, but when they barely tickle you on story mode it's easy to start slacking. On master mode even just clipping the edge of one was a one-shot.

In the reactor room I died when a strong skytrooper appeared while I was also trying to navigate the weird lava things, which was clearly too much for me to deal with at once. And that room with the gas traps that spawn little droids to repair them has killed me at least once on pretty much every difficulty I think.

The Skytrooper Constructor was kind of interesting to me because he has this move where he summons some adds via the assembly line controls, which is technically interruptable, but since it's always preceded by a massive knockback with a long-ass stun, it's never been particularly practical for me to do so and it's not like allowing him to call the adds really matters on the lower difficulties. On master mode however I found them sufficiently distracting that I actually used my stun breaker and immunity bubble to free myself and interrupt the cast twice. It's interesting when the higher difficulty makes you think about approaching a fight differently if nothing else.



But then the Gemini Captain... oh boy. If you want an indication of how often I wiped on her I'll just say that I killed the eight skytroopers that you have to deal with at the entrance of the room every time often enough to complete all three ranks of the Galactic Rampage conquest objective that night. I also stayed up way too late because I refused to give up, but coming away victorious in the end was worth the lost sleep.

I went through a slightly weird journey in terms of finding out how to deal with the fight. I started by making a couple of attempts as dps, with Senya set to healer, but quickly decided that this was infeasible with the boss's knockbacks sometimes sending us to opposite ends of the room and Senya being very sluggish when it came to returning to me, presumably because of the current issues with companion AI - though on second thought Senya is a melee fighter, so she shouldn't have been affected (as much)?

Anyway, I decided that swapping to heals, with Senya set to dps, was going to serve me much better, especially as it had worked just fine for me on veteran mode. However, I just couldn't make any progress. In fact, as I fed her companion gifts between attempts to get her influence level up, while waiting for heroic moment to come off cooldown, I found that my performance only seemed to get worse. As Senya's dps increased, she started to push the Captain through the phases more quickly, which led to her skipping some of her special moves... but somewhat ironically, some of her specials are actually easier to deal with than her regular attacks and provide a much needed break to regain some health, so her not performing them only made things harder instead of easier.

Plus the phase in which the Captain splits in four wasn't working out as expected. I had this memory from story and veteran mode that the challenge was to hit the "right" Gemini, which would then cause the others to disappear. However, it didn't seem to work that way, and sometimes I could see Senya make a beeline for the correct Gemini just to watch her three copies murder us both within seconds anyway. I decided to have a look at how Aeyix did it again, and it made me realise that actually the key was to hit all the fakes in quick succession to make them disappear.

It immediately struck me that this was never going to happen with Senya as dps, simply due to the delay between telling her to attack something and her actually doing it. So I went back to dealing damage myself, with Senya healing me... and one-shot it on the next try. (It's worth noting that I'd had enough time to get her up to influence level 50 by that point though.)



In terms of general advice, all I can say is that as noted above, most of her specials, such as the poison cone she does, are not really a problem. The issue is how hard she hits with the standard attacks shooting from her palm (not sure about the exact name of the ability), which come very quickly and hit my Sage for about 20k a pop, which was more than I could outheal for any length of time even in 248 gear, so it was a bit of a challenge to always survive just long enough until she'd take another break to do some drawn-out special ability.

The split was the deadliest thing though, and I quickly learned to save every damage reduction cooldown I had for it (I took both the utilities that grant you a brief window of damage reduction after using Cloud Mind and Force Mend), while rushing around and trying to hit all the copies as quickly as possible to make them disappear.

Only one chapter left to go - I'm quite excited for it now actually.