Expedition: Gaping Jaw Trivia Quiz

Answer: Adel

As with all expeditions, the name of the boss is not present until actually fighting it. When fighting Adel, a large health bar will appear at the bottom of the player's screen and "Adel, Baron of the Night" is assigned to it.

Answer: Baron of the Night

Where Tricephalos being the Beast of the Night was pretty easy to rationalize, Adel being the Baron of Night takes a bit more thinking to understand.

In the game's lore, Adel was identified as being an apex predator on an island full of similarly feral, angry and aggressive monsters. Adel was *the* predator that nothing and nobody dared mess with. Adel was forced to migrate from his original territory with the coming of the Night's Tide, which incidentally killed everything on his homeland except for Adel himself- likely a working of Heolstor the Nightlord in some way.

Adel being the top dog of his homeland likely explains the 'Baron' title. Alternatively, the word Baron is defined by Merriam-Webster as "one of a class of tenants holding his rights and title by military or other honorable service directly from a feudal superior (such as a king)", and in this sense, the 'feudal superior' would clearly be Heolstor the Nightlord.

Answer: Poison

Although not statistically proveable, Adel's weakness to Poison is the single most exploitable weakness in the entire game if fighting his regular, and not his Everdark, version. In first phase of the regular fight, if poisoned, Adel will be forced to stand completely still and vomit up the poison, as he will essentially be briefly really, really sick. During this time, players have all day to just lay into him with their strongest attacks, completely for free. In the world record speedrun in particular, the holder(s) (this record has been tied at the time of writing) are able to straight up end the entire fight by applying Poison once, then straight up killing Adel outright before he is able to recover. No other boss offers this type of downtime as a reward for exploiting their weakness.

Although there are very few weapons in this game that come with Poison already on them, there are plenty of Poison camps which typically spawn in Limveld. Here, the player can likely find a weapon, infused with Poison, they can use to fight Adel with.

Alternatively, if the player has cleared the Sentient Pest Expedition, the Night of the Wise Relic will allow players to start with their weapon automatically having been infused with Poison.

Answer: Lightning

During his second phase transition, Adel will channel electricity within his jaws, slowly reach them high, and clench them instantly causing a huge lightning explosion and ensuing storms around him. Through this, it will be pretty clear that attempting to conquer him with Lightning will make this fight way harder and take way longer to win than it needs to.

As such, typically great weaponry like the Dragon King's Cragblade or Bolt of Gransaxx must ride the bench for this fight.

Answer: The Duke's Dear Freja

The enormous two-headed spider in all of her glory, can simply manifest as a Night boss. Mechanically, this fight is nearly an exact replica of its original version that came out all the way back in 2013. It differs in two subtle ways: Freja's spider minions will endlessly respawn unlike "Dark Souls 2" where they only respawned once, and the small spiders themselves actually do have a grab attack that they simply lacked in the older game.

Freja herself is completely unchanged, making this fight out to be absurdly easy beyond initial comprehension; how is a fight that came out more than a decade prior, in a much slower paced game, supposed to pose a threat? Even in the original, this was not the hardest boss ever by any means.

Answer: Gaping Dragon

Centipede Demon and Knight Artorias do appear in this game, but not as part of the Gaping Jaw Expedition. The former can appear under the Sentient Pest Expedition, the latter as part of the Dreglord Expedition.

Gaping Dragon, unlike The Duke's Dear Freja, does not even harbor subtle differences between itself and its very original form, crafted in 2011. As such, this fight is similarly very easy especially for a Nightfarer with range, such as The Ironeye or The Recluse. But even melee characters such as The Raider or The Wylder should be able to dance circles around this early 2010s boss pasted in a mid 2020s video game.

Answer: Commander Niall

The key distinguishment between Commanders Niall and O'Neill is that the former uses Frostbite, the latter uses Scarlet Rot. The former also uses melee knights to aid him, while the latter mainly has skeletons with bows shooting at the player from afar.

If not Commander Niall, the Night 2 boss could also be an Ancient Dragon or a duo fight featuring a Crucible Knight and a Golden Hippopotamus.

Answer: Tornado

Funnily enough, players actually need to enter the tornado's eye in order to avoid damage from this sequence. Being outside the tornado will create a permanent (until inside) damage over time that will kill very quickly, necessitating fast reaction and locating the center of the tornado.

The tornado will rage on until Gaping Jaw dispels it with its lightning jaw-induced explosion. Unsurprisingly, Gaping Jaw can freely venture in and out of the tornado at no cost, adding another element of danger if the player is too slow to reach the tornado by the time it becomes active.

Answer: It deals more damage briefly

When grabbing players between its jaws, Gaping Jaw will heal for about 5% of its health bar and receive a boost to the damage it deals temporarily. However, in doing so, Gaping Jaw stands completely still to chew on whoever its victim is. During this time, the victim's teammates should fervently attack Adel, as doing this can let them free their ally before Adel can heal for the full 5%, or finish chewing them entirely to death.

Co-op teams which seek to speedrun this fight will actually feature individuals intentionally allowing themselves to get grabbed, as to make it easier for their teammates to lay into Adel for free with their hardest hitting attacks.

Answer: Landing Critical Hits

The first two traits of this relic are literally "Improved Critical Hits" and "Improved Critical Hits +1" while the third is "Critical Hits Earn Runes" so needless to say, players taking this relic should communicate this to their team if applicable, so the team can allow them to get the critical hits.

Critical hits, in this game, are ripostes and back stabs. Players choosing Dark Night of the Baron may want to consider finding a parry shield or powerstancing two heavy weapons, as to best open themselves up to reap the rewards. For this reason, The Wylder who starts games with a parry shield, or The Raider whose dormant power will easily let him find two Colossal Weapons to powerstance, are in good shape to capitalize off this relic. The Duchess is fast, nimble and wields daggers with a high Critical damage modifier to seek out backstabs with, making the relic work well on her too. Frankly, this is not a bad relic on anyone, as its benefits are applicable to anyone and getting value out of it is not conceptually difficult.