Finally fucking beat Nightfall.

Guild Wars story spoilers for all campaigns abound and un-spoiler-tagged.

Here's me dancing behind the portal in the Throne of Secrets, the special area you get taken to after beating Nightfall. I was trying to wait for the credits to end, but got impatient. Normally when you walk through a portal you go somewhere, but here, you have to talk to the NPC standing directly in front of it (the one I have targeted). Weird.

Holy crap that took forever.

And yes, that's the best picture I have.

Everything was fine up until the Realm of Torment, where my computer suddenly decided to shit itself every 10 seconds. I could only fix this by turning the graphics down all the way. I pressed on and hit a brick wall at Gate of Madness, the penultimate mission.

Why the brick wall there? Well, to beat the mission, you have to fight the end boss from Guild Wars Prophecies and the end boss from Guild Wars Factions. Simultaneously. The Lich is a pansy compared to Shiro, his skill set is slightly different from the end of Prophecies and he doesn't have the annoying requirement to be killed on the center of the bloodstone or he respawns with full health. I can easily take him down while Shiro beats on random heroes or henchmen. Shiro doesn't have a couple of the skills he had in the end of Factions but overall is a much bigger threat than the Lich.

The best time to do the bonus (capturing the gods' shrines) is actually between killing the Lich and killing Shiro. You just run around the end area of the mission, killing random Margonite groups and capturing the shrines they're guarding, with Shiro in tow and beating on you the entire time. He's not really that much of a threat until you engage him directly.

Engaging him directly is where I ran into the brick wall. He has these two stances, one gives his attacks life stealing equal to the highest damage he takes while it's active and the other makes him teleport around like crazy whenever he's hit. The latter isn't actually all that hard to deal with. The former is a bitch and a half, and on top of that, has a slight nuance. I decided to use Triple Shot (bow attack, shoots three arrows at the same time with a slight damage penalty per arrow, overall it amplifies damage) on him while he had it active, and discovered that now his attacks had three separate life stealing amounts. Party wipe, I decide to give it a break.

So yesterday morning I did it again (my patented technique of putting it down for a while and then picking it up again) and made one slight change: My two warrior heroes had been using two completely different builds, one adrenaline-based, the other energy-based and containing the all-important attack Wild Blow, which ends the target's stance when it hits. I basically just swapped out the adrenaline build for the energy build, had double the Wild Blows, and steamrolled Shiro.

And that was just the next to last mission. I still had the Nightfall campaign's end boss, Abaddon, left to defeat. There's a lot of story, but basically Abaddon is a god who was confined to the Realm of Torment by the other five gods. He's trying to break out and wreak havoc, and you're there to stop him. After getting served by him just to get that out of my system, I wiped once and then wiped the floor with him. He's actually pretty challenging, being invulnerable until you kill some stuff to chain him down so you can wail on him for a little bit, then he breaks free of the chains and the process repeats. He's also attacking you the entire time, though most of his attacks are negligible in the long run. I had a harder time with Gate of Madness, to be honest.

So yay I finally have Hard Mode unlocked in Nightfall and can do Sunspear/Lightbringer point farming so I can max out those titles.

I love my party build that I used in the last two areas of the game, the Desolation and the Realm of Torment. It's fairly straightforward, but it works wonders. It all revolves around the hero necromancer spamming Order of Pain on the entire party, which only lasts 5 seconds but adds armor-ignoring damage to any physical damage attack. The rest of the party was just themed around that, dealing physical damage, and using attacks and skills that add on extra bonus damage, since bonus damage ignores armor. This party really cranks out the damage, and I like that.

I'm too lazy to link all the Guild Wars terminology I used, but you can look it all up on GuildWiki.