This page details how to get the highest mastery points for the gold medal during the Trial of the Bear at the Hamtunscire - Uffentune Mastery Challenge.

How to Get the Gold Medal¶

Trial of the Bear Objectives¶

Use Golden Flame and Fire Strike Effectively¶

This is a fairly simple trial compared with other Mastery Challenges, but the most important thing that you’ll need to be aware of how to properly use the melee abilities provided to you: Golden Flame and Fire Strike. The former has the following description: “Attach an explosive to an enemy that detonates after a short delay.” You also get the upgraded version of this ability, which allows you to shove enemies away in a specific direction of your choosing.

With the above description in mind, one of the best ways to use the Golden Flame ability is by attaching the explosive to one enemy, then shoving them into one or more others in the area. It will only take a few seconds before all of the enemies within range will be set on fire when the explosion hits. However, it’s unlikely that the explosion and resultant fire will finish off most enemies, so you’ll need to carefully hit each enemy to bring them down to a low amount of health while the fire keeps burning. You’ll need to kill every enemy during this trial with fire, and a direct hit with your melee weapon or an arrow won’t count as a fire kill.

The Fire Strike melee ability has the following description: “Applies fire to your right-hand melee weapon. Enemies that catch fire will suffer additional damage over time.” The upgrade for this ability also creates an arc of fire in front of you whenever you use the ability, which is one of the most reliable ways to set an enemy on fire during this trial. In general, you should reserve this ability and only use it when you have one or more enemies on low health, who you can’t risk a direct hit on. When at low health, the fire damage from the arc should apply enough fire damage over time to finish them off.

Fire Strike Example¶

You should save Fire Strike to kill enemies who have low enough health so that you can’t risk hitting them with direct strikes:

Scythe of Tribulation Fire Damage Modifiers¶

The Scythe of Tribulation is the only melee weapon available to you during this trial. It has two extremely useful modifiers which will help you to inflict fire damage on enemies when other methods (such as from the above abilities) fail. The modifiers are as follows:

• Set your weapon on fire after a successful Light of Heavy Finisher hit
• Chance to ignite your weapon on parry

You can rely on the first modifier to set your weapon on fire as you begin hitting any enemy at full health. This is the simplest way to cause an enemy to die from fire damage, since your weapon will soon inflict a damage over time fire debuff. You can then hit the enemy just a few more times with the weapon, or alternatively shoot them with your bow, to ensure that they die of the fire damage before the debuff expires.

Light / Heavy Finisher Fire Kills¶

You’ll notice in this gif that you should only hit the enemy with direct hits as much as you need to bring their health low enough so that the fire damage debuff finishes them off:

The second modifier is useful if you’d rather play more defensively, since you can consistently parry incoming attacks from multiple enemies, waiting for your weapon to ignite. When it does, you can finish the enemies off by hitting them a few times and then waiting for the fire debuff to do the rest.

You probably won’t need to use your bow at all during this trial, but it does have one use in terms of bringing the health of an enemy low enough for a damage over time fire debuff to finish them off, without the risk of killing them outright, since it does less damage than your melee weapon. You can also draw your bow near a raging fire on the ground, or from any other source of fire that the tip of your arrow can reach, to ignite your arrow and apply a damage over time fire debuff from your next shot. The use case for this is limited, but it’s good to know if you need to resort to your bow for any reason.

So long as you’re careful not to kill any enemies with a direct hit, make good use of your special abilities and weapon modifiers, you should find this trial fairly easy. The only potential danger comes from killing an enemy without fire damage, so keep this principle in mind. If an enemy is on low health to the point where you can’t hit them again without risking their death, you can roam around the area and dodge attacks or hit other enemies on high health to fill Adrenaline Slots, allowing you to use Fire Strike to create an arc of fire damage in front of the enemy. This should be enough to finish off any weakened enemy without the use of a direct hit.