A Time For Heroes
“A Time for Heroes” is Eye of the North’s curtain call: a short, brutal showdown with the Great Destroyer that cashes in everything you’ve been working towards since that first earthquake split Tyria open. After uncovering your enemy’s nature and hunting through Destruction’s Depths to reach the Central Transfer Chamber, you’re sent back to the Eye, then on into the Destroyers’ heartland for a final push that will decide whether Tyria survives or burns.
The mission itself wastes no time. As soon as you step out into the cavern outside the Central Transfer Chamber, the Great Destroyer is there—huge, molten and backed by a retinue of Destroyers that will happily tear an unprepared party apart. The arena is ringed with lava and dotted with rocky outcrops, and the ground shakes under his attacks; positioning is everything, because an incautious pull can leave you pinned between the boss and a fresh wave of adds. His skill set is simple on paper but dangerous in practice: heavy single‑target damage, punishing party‑wide spikes, and, most importantly, Lava Wave—a move that makes him invulnerable for a while, heals him, and spawns more Destroyers if you let it go off.
That Lava Wave mechanic underpins most of the accepted strategies. One school of thought says: do not interrupt the Great Destroyer at all, except to shut down Lava Wave, because any other interrupt or knockdown triggers an extra pulse of AoE punishment on your whole party. The other, more aggressive approach uses the Asuran PvE skill Pain Inverter to turn his own damage back on him: you deliberately spike him with interrupts and knockdowns while Pain Inverter is up, watching his health evaporate as he effectively kills himself with reflected damage. Either way, the fight becomes a test of timing and discipline as much as raw numbers: focus‑fire the right targets, manage your rupt skills carefully, and don’t panic when the red numbers start flying.
Party composition matters. Guides tend to recommend strong party‑wide healing—skills like Heal Party or Spirit to Flesh—and some form of persistent protection, whether that’s Protective Spirit, Shelter, or a stout spirit‑spam Ritualist, because the damage spikes otherwise chew through even well‑armoured teams. AoE is less valuable than you might expect; the Great Destroyer himself is a single big target, and most of the adds can be handled by heroes and henchmen if you’ve brought solid bars. Common solo‑with‑heroes strategies use an Any/Monk or similar caster focussing on protection and Pain Inverter, backed by a stable of Mesmers, Necromancers and Ritualists to provide interrupts, armour‑ignoring damage and extra layers of defence.
Narratively, “A Time for Heroes” is doing more than just giving you a final boss to whittle down. In the wider Eye of the North story, the Great Destroyer is the nemesis of the Great Dwarf, and the Dwarves’ last stand against him—Jalis Ironhammer and his warriors turning themselves to living stone to fight in the depths—is framed as the end of their age, win or lose. The mission compresses that wider alliance into a single, focused moment: Norn, Asura, Ebon Vanguard and Dwarves have all played their part to get you here, but when you step into the chamber it’s you and your party facing a primordial force that has already cost Tyria dearly. When the Great Destroyer finally falls and the Destroyers lose their coordination, the sense is not of an effortless victory but of something barely won at great cost.
For many players, that combination—a mechanically demanding encounter, an evocative arena and a clear link back into the lore—makes “A Time for Heroes” one of Guild Wars’ standout finales. It wraps up Eye of the North’s themes neatly: ancient knowledge put to use, disparate factions fighting side by side, and ordinary heroes pushed right up against the edge of what they can survive. Long after the chest has been opened and the copper points banked, it’s the image of that last battle in the Central Transfer Chamber—the lava, the roar, and the brief silence when the Destroyer finally collapses—that tends to linger.
