The Ropalolyst – The Worst Best Boss or the Best Worst Boss?

Ah, Nightwave. Bless its cotton socks. It exists to give us free things and remind us of things we’d forgotten about. In this case, an elite Weekly task was to simply kill the Ropalolyst. A very easy 7,000 standing for anyone who’s completed the Sacrifice. Except… ugh, the Ropalolyst fight is bloody awful, for all the wrong reasons. A great fight, but easily ruined. And still broken, a year later.

Don’t fight the Ropalolyst on public matchmaking!

The Ropalolyst can be a very buggy fight for anyone who isn’t the host. Oh, the fight can bug out for the host player as well, but it’s everyone else who is in trouble.

So, what should be a simple fight ends up taking ages. The Ropalolyst can decide not to attack the large “lamps” and not charge them. The lamps can refuse to charge after being hit. Sometimes the Ropalolyst can get stuck in the centre and not fly towards the lamps. And then you have all the problems with mounting the Ropalolyst and flying it into a glowing lamp.

Just yesterday, while doing the fight with some randoms, I had half my team complain the boss was invisible, and one of my team mates got stuck on its back, essentially knocked out of the fight.

The bugs are still there at the end though. Even after defeating the Ropalolyst, I’ve seen players be stuck in the ground or in some sort of animation, so they can’t actually make it to extraction.

Pro tip: Fight the Ropalolyst solo.

You don’t actually need that much for the Ropalolyst either. It’s basically a more convoluted Eidolon fight. I’d recommend taking an Amp that has some reach, plus a sniper rifle with Radiation on it, to shoot the Ropalolyst’s nodules. Tanky frames are also handy because there’s a lot of damage flying around. Not from the Ropalolyst itself, but from the enemies it spawns.

Bugs aside though, the Roplalolyst has other issues.

While the idea of riding on the back of a flying sentient and crashing it into a lamp is cool, the Ropalolyst fight is kinda problematic. It’s weirdly convoluted.

Actually, I say that, the fight is actually fine. You shoot the Ropaloyst, you trick it into charging the weapons, you stun it and you shoot off its nodules, then you zap the bastard with a giant laser. When it works, that all seems pretty exciting. It’s the random spawns around the Ropalolyst and the weird additional mechanics that make the fight odd.

For example, you can’t use movement abilities. They just get cancelled out. If you want to travel, you HAVE to use the zip lines towards each platform. There’s also the issue of the extra enemies, which can spawn and damage you while you’re in a cut scene. Now, the way you can avoid that damage is to switch to your Operator, but that’s not an option if you were the person who crashed the Ropalolyst into the giant lamps.

I should also point out that some of the enemies are Amalgam Heqets, which can spawn clones of you, which can kill you before you’ve even regained control of your character.

And then there’s Natah, taking up half the screen.

I’d actually forgotten just how bad this was. Literally everyone else in the game uses the small boxes to the left or right. Why can’t Natah do the damn same? It’s obnoxious and in your face. And if you’re going for shock value, it fails to be shocking after the very first fight. Natah’s face is just a big, purple blur that everyone is ignoring.

But her story isn’t even that interesting! It’s another betrayal from someone who has already betrayed us. Oh, Natah was mind-controlled into not killing the Tenno and saving them? That means very little now that Natah has 100% defected back to the Sentients, who would OF COURSE tell her that she was mind-controlled.

Natah though just rambles on and on, and not even in a particularly interesting way.

The problem is, the Ropalolyst fight COULD be really good. But in terms of playability, it’s as bad, if not worse than bosses like Vay Hek and Sargus Ruk. And those two are old bosses, not new ones released in 2019…