u/ikinaosu

Guo Xin on Legend difficulty is frankly ridiculous.

I was hyped going into this boss from his storyline because the build up to the battle was great. His first phase is pretty manageable too, and the whole arena with his soldiers chanting made the second phase's energy palpable.

But the second phase is where the fun ends for this boss. This phase has a myriad of frustrating issues. He has a whopping 22 different attack variations, with the spinning kick + bow + air lightning red attack reaching 11 parries with delayed timings you need to not take damage and counter his red attack at the end. Worse, if you get hit by his attacks even just one of them can deal 45k damage. At max breakthrough and 2+ goose, he can still wipe you just midway into his combo. His aggressive attacking patterns also give you little room to flask up when he does punish you. Worse still, yellow lightning flashes everywhere while he's attacking. Although it gives the general insane aura, it ends up being a distraction and obscuring his attacks which some of the time don't even have an obvious tell to begin with.

A few attemps in I finally get to stagger him and deal non-poison damage. Well turns out when you deal a deathblow before 75% health, his HP is capped so it doesn't even deal damage. If he's not staggered, his HP milestone attacks will instantly refill his Qi gauge which I spent quite some time whittling down. It just feels so demoralising.

Lastly, issues specific to my device. I'm playing on a Steam Deck with the Lite version. This game is not really optimised yet, so I have to lock the game at 30 FPS to get smooth framerates. The minimal input latency hasn't been much of a problem with most bosses I've fought, even Tian Ying was manageable once I understood his mechanics, but this boss demands a really fast reaction time especially with his some of his yellow attacks which is really affected by latency. The 800p resolution also probably makes his 50% red attack flurry from above hard to see unless you go really far from he (although I don't know if this is truly impacted by screen resolution or just cope from me lol). Finally, sometimes after dying on phase two I have wait for a 60 second loading screen before going back to the start of the boss battle. Very long loading times in between phases is a reality I've had to accept playing in the Lite version of WWM, but it's doubly frustrating for this boss.

In the end, I used co-op assist for the first time. Some kind experienced jianghu whales wanderers helped me out with the battle and even then they got wiped on the second phase, with all of us having to get revived once. Eventually, they helped defeat the boss I was struggling so much with, and at least I was greeted with a very cool cutsene which makes this boss one of the best in the game backstory-wise.

Were Guo Xin a non-mandatory boss, I probably would've had patience with him and wandered off to complete other missions and bosses before coming back to him when I have all the time in the world. That's why him being mandatory to progress to Liangzhou combined with the other issues I described made me have less patience with this boss compared to other tough bosses like Tian Ying. I do feel a bit guilty for beating him "the easy way", but I realised that I avoided hours of frustration that I could now spend on exploring Liangzhou and fighting other challenging but fun bosses that are still realistic for me to beat in a reasonable time.

Did any of you have the same experience fighting this boss on Legend difficulty?