Tonight, after eight months of weekly progression, our Guild Wars 2 raid static finally killed Harvest Temple Challenge Mode!

I want to write that sentence again, because I have been waiting eight months to write it. Tonight, after eight months of weekly progression, our raid static finally killed Harvest Temple Challenge Mode!

The static

We raid together as Glory Holders (GH), with most of us also flying the Please Rub Me (RUBS) guild tag during the rest of the week. We’ve been a tightly-knit core group group for years now — mostly the same people, same nights, same Discord, same friends, friendship, love and laughter. End game raid content in this game is the hardest thing GW2 has on offer, and doing it with the same friends week after week is, for me, the entire point.

HTCM is one of the toughest of the toughest raid encounters in Guild Wars 2. It is a long fight with many different phases, each more complicated and difficult than the previous. Part of the point is to see how long you can maintain concentration and focus and near-perfect execution. There are so many different specialized roles and each person is absolutely crucial to the success of the group. Unlike strike missions and other content, if you lose just one of the group, you might as well /gg and start again. It’s one of the encounters you queue up after you’ve cleared everything else and you’re looking for the next wall to bonk your head against. We found the wall. We bonked our heads against it for eight months.

What the fight actually looks like

For the uninitiated: Harvest Temple is a multi-phase encounter where the group cycles through aspects of all five Elder Dragons — Jormag, Primordus, Kralkatorrik, Mordremoth, and Zhaitan — before facing Soo-Won herself in the final phase. Every dragon phase has its own unique mechanics, its own positioning, its own ways to wipe the group, and Challenge Mode layers additional mechanics, faster timings, and far less margin for error on top of an already very difficult normal-mode fight.

If you want to actually understand what we were doing for eight months, here are the resources we leaned on the most:

• The Hardstuck HTCM guide — the standing reference for CM strats, comps, and per-phase callouts.
• GuildJen’s Harvest Temple guide — covers both normal and challenge modes, great for first-pass familiarization.
• Vallun’s Soo-Won CM video guide — phase-by-phase visual walkthrough, invaluable when text descriptions don’t quite click.
• The official GW2 Wiki page — boss timeline, mechanic names, and the canonical reference for what each ability actually does.

What eight months of progging looks like

I have done a lot of things in this game I am proud of. None of them took eight months.

Our first Dhuum CM kill — at the time, the hardest thing we’d ever attempted — took a few months of progression. When we finally got that one, the feeling was extraordinary: relief, release, pride, and a lot of love for the friends I’d been failing alongside for weeks. I assumed for a long time that Dhuum was going to be the high-water mark.

HTCM was different. Eight months is long enough that “we are progging HTCM” stops being a thing you do and starts being a thing you are. There were nights of slow improvement. There were MANY nights that felt like we’re making little or no progress. Thankfully, there were very few nights of feeling like going backward. There were stretches of weeks where the same mechanic ate us alive in the same phase, and the only way through was to come back the next week and do it again. Static raiding only works if everyone keeps showing up, and somehow — through real-life schedules, work travel, kids, holidays, all of it — everyone kept showing up.

That’s the thing I want to remember most about this kill. Not the mechanics, not the strategy, not the build refinement. The fact that our little core group kept choosing each other, every week, for eight months, on a fight that for most of those weeks did not love us back.

Tonight

We’d been pulling for about an hour and a half when it happened.

We always joke around in Discord while we play. Bad puns, tangents, dunking on each other’s pulls, the whole bit. It’s most of why I love these people. But as we started stringing together cleaner attempts tonight, the chatter thinned out. By the last few pulls, ten people who normally cannot shut up went almost completely silent. The final five minutes of the kill attempt were the quietest five minutes I have ever spent on Discord with this group.

And then the final boss died.

For about thirty seconds, ten people who had been silent yelled directly into their microphones. Not coordinated yelling. Not words, really. Just the noise that comes out of you when you’ve been holding something for eight months and you finally get to put it down. Same exact feeling as the Dhuum CM kill, scaled up to match how long we’d been working for it.

To see the mechanics, boons, buffs, DPS, patterns, and the rest, the full DPS report from the kill is here.

Yay us

I love this game. I love this group more. Eight months of weekly raid nights is a real chunk of life, and I got to spend it with people I genuinely look forward to haning out with every week, on a problem that was hard enough to be worth solving. I genuinely and deeply love all of you!!!

Onward to the next wall. And I love that we have our group that will make that wall fun!