Genshin Impact's hardest boss fight is so nuts that basically nobody can clear it

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You can get the event rewards just fine, but the pinnacle challenge is on another level

Genshin Impact
(Image credit: MiHoYo)

The Genshin Impact Legend of the Vagabond Sword event has reached its climax, and the final fight is so absurdly difficult that even players who've spent tens of thousands of dollars on the game can barely clear it. 

The Vagabond Sword has basically been a boss rush, with a new boss variant rolling out each day for the past week. We've gotten souped-up versions of the Primo Geovishap, Oceanid, and Maguu Kenki bosses, and the day-seven finale, the Wanderer's Threefold Challenge, pits you against all three back-to-back-to-back. Individually, these fights are challenging. Altogether, they're a nightmare. But the bosses themselves aren't the real problem. 

Like previous boss events, you can enable modifiers in Vagabond Sword fights to increase your score multiplier. The most basic modifiers boost the health and defense of each boss, but you can also set a tight time limit, make special attacks more common and powerful, or add unique handicaps like self-damaging effects. With all the modifiers enabled, even the simplest fights become grueling duels that require far more planning and execution than normal Genshin Impact content. 

The good news is that you only need to kick on maybe half the modifiers to earn enough points to get all the event rewards. The rest just provide extra difficulty for the sake of it, which brings us to the mad lads taking on the final fight with everything enabled. 

The most devastating modifiers in this fight straight-up double the cooldowns for all your skills and make your ultimate abilities much slower to charge up. To make things even more limiting, all three bosses gain extra resistance to pyro, cryo, and physical damage, severely nerfing top DPS characters like Hu Tao, Ganyu, and Eula respectively. The rest are just sadistic cherries on top. Your shields are weaker, your healing is reduced, some enemies gain health regeneration, there's an extra samurai in the Maguu Kenki phase. It's obscene. Just the ass end of an ass-kicking. Forget the straw that broke the camel's back; the camel was flattened into a 2D sprite several modifiers ago.

The fully loaded Wanderer's Threefold Challenge is far and away the toughest encounter in Genshin Impact history, to the point that famous speedrunners like Tony To have rightly declared that "this is disgusting." I've struggled to find even 10 videos of people clearing this gauntlet, and all of the victors have clearly spent thousands of dollars on the game, if not tens of thousands. They've got five-star weapons, characters, and artifacts beyond the dreams of avarice, and even they are limping to the finish line. Thank the archons that we mere mortals don't have to do everything at once just to claim the event rewards. I got enough points to clear out the shop and then some, and that's enough for me. 

The Genshin Impact update 2.0 reveal stream is set for July 9 according to leaks. 

Austin Wood
Austin Wood
Senior writer

Austin has been a game journalist for 12 years, having freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree. He's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize his position is a cover for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a lot of news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.