Categories: Garden news

10. Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2 DLC – Trials of Gnomus

Published by
James marcus

This is the main DLC for this game, and the only one that adds any achievements to the game. It can get pretty tough and grind-y in some parts, and you will have to do this over a series of weeks, as I’ll explain below.

The Gnomus DLC added a few new features to the game. First up, you’ll likely have seen this and some of the events that run during your playthrough so far. In your backyard you will see a building adorned with the words Town Hall, to one side of the Flag of Power. Here you see a counter that either shows the days remaining or needed to start the next event. In addition you can see a meter in front of this building, this is the counter for the community challenges. The is only one event going at any one time, and they aren’t always available all the time. The only way to know what even is upcoming and to plan when you can get certain achievements, please follow the link below to the official homepage of the developers. This will show you when they plan to have certain events. Make sure to activate the community events whenever possible and meet the requirements for these, this is explained later in the guide.

http://www.pvzgw2.com/events-calendar

As soon as a mystery portal event opens, you can enter the Townhall and start matches by entering the portal. The three main events that are found in the portal are Cats vs. Dinos, Super Mix Mode and Boss Hunt. Each event have separate achievements related to them.

Cats vs. Dinos is a twist on the standard Team Vanquish game mode. Instead of Plants and Zombies, you will spawn as their Infinity counterparts, with your melee abilities from Infinity changed into ranged attacks. This game mode is a Last Man Standing style mode. The goal of the mode is to have one team vanquish all the members of the other team. When an Infinite Robot is destroyed, it cannot be revived, and you must wait until one team is wiped out before you can respawn. All you need to do for the achievements here are enter a game of Cats vs. Dinos as both teams, and complete a full game, after which you’ll unlock either of the following;

  • Open the Door Get on the Floor

    Enter the Mystery Portal and Complete a Full Game of Cats vs Dinos as a Dino

  • Alright Meow

    Enter the Mystery Portal and Complete a Full Game of Cats vs Dinos as a Cat

When your team destroys the enemy team, they will win the round, or vice versa. To win a whole match, your team must win three rounds. If a round lasts more than two minutes, the space-time continuum will start to collapse and a blue force field will appear, covering the entire map and then start shrinking towards the middle of the map. If you stay outside of the forcefield for too long, you will be vanquished.

Super Mix Mode features random game modes, chosen from the existing mix of multiplayer modes. It will have a random crazy setting which can’t be altered in any way. You’ll also be playing set character or variants. You do not need to have unlocked the variant in order to play them in this game mode (you can even try out variants from specific classes that you may never be able to unlock, such as the Unicorn Chomper). The active Crazy Settings, playable classes, and available game modes change every time a Super Mix Mode event is live. Simply enter and complete a single game to unlock;

  • This is Craaazy!

    Enter the Mystery Portal and Complete a Super Mix Event!

The final mode, Boss Hunt, is one you have played before, assuming you have played through each campaign mission, where you faced off against Captain Smasher and the Royal Hypno Flower. This game mode is effectively the same as that, except harder.

There is a greater range of bosses that have to be defeated. Each time the Boss Hunt even is on, the boss that is a being hunted changes. You’ll get paired up with 3 other random players, however in order to complete the achievements, especially the hardest achievement, grouping up with a team of 3 skilled others using a boosting session here on TA is probably best. This is how I got the achievement.

The difficulty of these boss matches is determined by the type of bait you place to lure the boss, however, you must beat a boss at a lower level in order to unlock the bait for the next level of difficultly (i.e. complete normal in order to unlock hard, and the beat them on hard in order to unlock craaazy). Upon placing the bait, you will be attacked by two waves of basic enemies and enemy heroes, aiming to destroy the bait. The bait has significantly less health than a garden or a tombstone so you must properly guard it. After these two waves, you’ll start a short cutscene, which involves the boss destroying the bait while rising/growing out of the ground. After the cutscene ends, the Boss Fight phase begins.

During this phase, throw everything you have at the boss. You’ll be given a set amount of time to defeat the boss, which varies depending on the boss and the difficulty you’re playing at, but usually ranges from 25-30 minutes. They will frequently summon reinforcements which will spawn multiple regular enemies, all of which can be annoying. Try taking as many of these out as you can while chasing after the boss. Every time a boss loses a quarter of its health, the boss will activate a curse that affects all players in some way, and the Curse phase begins.

During the Curse phase, the boss becomes invincible to all attacks, and you and your allies must complete an objective to cure the curse. In some cases, failure to cure the curse will result in the entire team dying, although this is dependant on the boss that you’re facing, as each boss has a unique curse.

  • Captain Smasher spawns several Cursebearers and you and your team must kill all of them within 90 seconds, otherwise you will all die instantly.
  • Royal Hypno-Flower transforms your whole team into goats, and you have to find and eat all Poly Leaves on the map to break the curse.
  • Sasquatch spawns a number of Healing Burgers in the map that it can eat and regain some health. You have to destroy all of them before he reaches them. Upon successfully destroying the burgers, Sasquatch starts charging an attack called Hunger Pang’s Inferno that will kill the players in one hit. The players must locate a yellow circle that appear somewhere in the map and capture it to grow a garden, which protects everyone inside it, before Sasquatch unleashes the inferno. If Sasquatch’s health is low, it will spawn some Gargantuars and will not start spawn Heal Burgers until most of Gargantuars are defeated.
  • Spooky Squash spawns in a Hungry Bucket that you must use to collect all Sour Candies within 50 seconds.
  • The Champion Explody Gnomes use a curse that slows you down and remove the use of all of your abilities. This curse is broken by finding the Gnome Shrine on the map and using the Gnome Brand.
  • The Yeti King will start to dance. In this time you’ll have to find and destroy all snowman-shaped sculptures before the countdown reaches 0, although destroying one gives extra time, until no more show up, which interrupts the Yeti King’s dance and deploys his reinforcements.

Once the curse is cured, the Boss Fight phase resumes. You’ll have to repeat the Boss Fight phase and the Curse Phase a few more times, until you wipe out the health of the boss.

In terms of strategies, as the plants, I would recommend having 2 Sunflowers (especially Vampire and Stuff variants) and then two other characters, preferably Peashooters (especially the Ice or Toxic variants), although it really depends on the personal choice of those you play with. However, the party variants are best avoided, as are Cacti and Chompers, which aren’t great in this mode. With Zombies, it’s a similar strategy, with two Scientists to keep everyone topped up on health then two more depending on those you are playing with. However, it’s best to avoid the party variants again, and also to avoid Captain Deadbeard and his variants.

If you can complete this on each difficulty, you’ll earn each of the following achievements when you finish the mode;

  • Boss Battle

    Enter the Mystery Portal and Defeat a Boss Hunt on Normal Difficulty

  • Boss Battle Specialist

    Enter the Mystery Portal and Defeat a Boss Hunt on Hard Difficulty

  • Boss Battle Boss

    Enter the Mystery Portal and Defeat a Boss Hunt on Craaazy Difficulty

Also, for completing three matches of any of the above modes, you’ll earn;

  • It’s Not a Door…it’s a Portal!

    Complete 3 Mystery Portal Matches

and then from earning 25 rainbow stars, you’ll earn;

  • Somewhere Over the Rainbow

    Collect 25 Rainbow Stars from the Mystery Portal

Finally, you’ll get Community Challenges. First up, in order to participate in these, you have to actively go and press the button in front of the Town Hall, and then compeltet the basic quest it provides in order to earn any rewards or be counted as taking part. The community as a whole will be given a large task to complete (for example, something like kill 1,000,000 Zombies) and you’ll have to do a small quest in order to be counted (so e.g. you need to kill 100 zombies to participate). As soon as you completed the participation quest, you can see the grand total of contributions and can win chests, depending on how well the community collectively performs. There is a total of 3 stages; Bronze, Silver and Gold.

Each time the next threshold is met, you’ll unlock access to a chest, and then you can go and claim it. The community is what determines how quickly one achievement takes, as you have to open 5 community reward chests. This could take 5 different community challenges, or it could take 2 (unlocking 3 chests in one challenge then two in the next one). Taking part in three community challenges will unlock you;

  • Team Player

    Meet the Contribution Requirement for 3 Community Challenges

and unlocking 5 community challenge chests will earn you;

  • Together we Win

    Open 5 Community Challenge Reward Chests.

So with all that out the way, we’ll start the rest of the trials. Before anything else, make sure you have at least 25 Gold Stars from quests. Head towards the Town Hall and pass through the doors. Once inside, head to the right and speak with the Seagull to trade your 25 stars for a key. Note that once you’ve bought this key, you can speak to the Seagull at any time (when the Town hall doors are open) to trade in 7 Gold Stars for 1 Rainbow Star. Before you leave, if you have a look behind you, you should see a series of three chests, each of which require Rainbow Stars to open. Once chest requires 10 Rainbow Stars, the next requires 30 and the last requires 50. Completely ignore the 10 and 30 chests, these are a waste of Rainbow Stars. Whenever you get 50 Rainbow Stars, come and open this chest, where you’ll have a 70% chance to earn once of four differently colour keys. After opening a chest, you’ll be given a sticker pack, then heard to the sticker machine to open it and claim your rewards (and hopefully a coloured key). You can either go and open the new area and keep returning with all of the keys separately, or you can try to earn all four keys before continuing. You can do this either way, and I’ll assume that you have unlocked the required keys from now on.

Now you have the key, I would suggest switching to the Imp or one of his variants. As the Imp, you have a jump and hover ability that allows you to hop and then levitate over small gaps before your boosters give out. this is endlessly useful in these trails to come.

Head down into the sewers towards the Chamber of Gnomes. If you are yet to go through the new areas in the Chamber of Gnomes, that unlocked after you collected the 54 Golden Gnomes, then do it now, if you want. If not, head to the large wooden door opposite the Chamber of Gnome’s, the one with the huge padlock on it. Use your recently acquired key on the door to unlock it and open up a whole new area. Enter the portal, move forward and upwards and venture inside this new area where you should unlock;

  • The Secret of Secrets

    Discover the Secret Area…What can it be?

This new area is where you use the coloured keys you earn from the 50 Rainbow Star chest. I’ll refer to this area as the Trials Hub. When you first arrive here, head down the path that forms in front out you into the central area. You’ll see a large portal in the ground in front of you, then a large statue of Gnomus in front of you in the temple. If you take facing the temple while standing in front of the portal as being North, you’ll find four separate paths to the North East (Green Portal), North West (Gold/Yellow Portal), South East (Red Portal) and South West (Blue Portal). At the end of each of these paths is a colour-coded door. Head up to the statue of Gnomus and start a short cutscene welcoming you to the trials.

Before you start any of the trials, have a pen and some paper ready.

Each colour-coded door is opened by the key of the same colour. Each door will lead to a trial that you must pass. Each trial is different, and will take a certain degree of skill, some trail and error (and a fair bit of patience) to complete. If you fail a trial, you’ll be taken back to the beginning of it and have to start it again. At the end of each trial, you’ll enter a large room with a set of stone slabs levitating in the sky. Make note of the order of these stone slabs in order from top to bottom, and the colour of the door you have entered.

The order of these slabs is needed for later, and the order of the slabs is different for every person who plays the game.

If you accidentally miss one of the slab patterns, it is possible for you to enter a trial room as either a Pirate or a Cactus and use your drone to fly to the room and view the code again. After making note of the code, exit the completed trial.

I’ll give the best guide I can for the trials, however, they are best explained using videos, which I have also attached. These will likely be more help that my words.

The Trials

Yellow Key of Precision: Yellow Portal – Trial of Shooty-Shooty

By far the easiest of the four trials! Use the switch in front and run on the platform. On here you will see a huge arch/ gateway in front of you with a symbol on it at the top. In order to continue and open it, you will need to shoot the targets on the rotating stone slabs to the left and right of the gateway, making sure that the symbols that you are shooting match the symbols on top of the gateway. Each portal gets harder since you need to hit more targets and the slabs rotate faster. You have a time limit to complete this trial, as you will do with all the other trials. If you struggle to do this, the best character you can use is either the Kernel Corn, or the Agent Pea, each of which have a fast rate of fire or fast reload speed. As soon as you finish it, you will enter a room with a huge column of symbols on stone slabs. These are the stone slabs that you need to make note of. beginning from top to bottom.

Green Key of Agility: Green Portal – Trial of Balance

A little bit harder, but again rather straightforward. In this challenge you need to jump across ledges, each getting considerably harder the farther you get. The Imp however makes this rather much easier as he can jump across some of the gaps. You can actually fly past some of the smaller gaps and levitate onwards to the next platform. Another trail where some trial and error, determining what gaps you can make and what aren’t viable, will help you reach the end before the timer expires. While the Imp is also best for this, you can also attempt this with the Citron in his Ball form.

Upon reaching the end, another code awaits us.

Red Key of Doom: Red Portal – Trial of Hot Doom

This trial is a fair bit harder than the first two. You’ll be greeted by four sets of 3×9 platforms. These platforms will light up in orange and red. Landing on an orange platform will result in you being instantly vanquished. These platforms turn on and off in different patterns, that you can try and learn. You have to jump between platforms and make sure you don’t land on a platform when it is orange. If you do, as mentioned above, you’ll die and have to restart the challenge. The first few sets of these are awkward but bearable. However, the final set of these platforms is hard. You’ll likely die multiple times, whether you fall off the ledges, or get burnt or run out of time, then have to restart the whole trial. The final pattern consists of two orange platforms and a red platform. The order of columns is right, centre, left, centre. If you jump following this pattern, you should be able to make it across. Other than using the Imps jet-pack to keep you in the air if a burning platform gets a bit close, there isn’t much else that can be done other than learning the patterns and getting a bit lucky. The Imp really is the best character for this and can save you from accidentally hopping on platforms.

After you manage to beat the trial, you’ll earn your third well-earned code.

Blue Key of Recall: Blue Portal – Trial of Recollection

This is the hardest unless you have an eidetic memory. Upon starting this challenge and dropping down, you will see a gateway with 3 symbols on it. Remember the order of these three symbols. In order to reach the next one, you will need to jump on the platforms up ahead that have the symbols you just saw upon them. You can only touch the platforms that have these symbols in the order they were displayed from left to right. Failure to jump onto the right panel or falling and getting vanquished immediately results in failure of the entire trial.

This first one might be easy, but there are still a few more gateways to go. The second portal has a total of 5 symbols that you need to remember and then jump across using. The last two gates each have 8 different symbols that you’ll need to remember the order of then use to cross. All of this topped off with the fact it is still a timed trial and you only have a 1:10 to pass them all. You can’t even skip some of the platforms, as you need a correct sequence in order to open the gate up ahead.

There aren’t all that many tips to give for this one. The best advice if you’re struggling to do this solo is to have someone else join you in the room to shout out the symbols that you need, or to memorise the second half of the symbols for you if you memorise the first half etc.

If you manage to do this, you’ll be rewarded with your final set of stone slabs.

Armed with all your codes, head to the portal in the middle of the Trails Hub. You will likely want to change your character now, I found the upcoming challenges to be a lot easier using a Vampire Flower to keep my health topped up, but you can chose whatever character you wish.

Jump into the portal in the middle of the Trails Hub. This will teleport you to a new area, the Guardian Room. In here, take the codes you received from completing the trials and head to the central circular panel of the floor. You’ll see that it is surrounded by the symbols you have noted down from the trials.

Walk on the symbols you saw on the columns after completing each challenge, beginning from the top. After you put in all 8 symbols, prepare yourself for a fight and then interact with the lever to activate a portal. Once the portal opens, waves of gnomes colored similar to the guardian summoned will spawn, pursue and attack you. You must survive 4-5 waves of these gnomes until the guardian appears. A coloured Gnome Guardian, the colour corresponds to the trial you got the code from (Red Trial for Red Guardian etc) will spawn with another load of their minions, and the minions won’t stop coming until you defeat the Guardian.

Once you activate the lever, run away from the circle in the middle of the floor as, a few seconds later, this is where all the enemies spawn from. Once they spawn, you’ll want to always keep moving, otherwise, you’ll die pretty quickly. The best path that I found is following the outside wall all around the area. You can use the pillars as a bit of cover from any enemies attacking from the middle, and it funnels all the enemy gnomes into a close group, so you can turn around and fire and almost guarantee every shot will hit home. Try to focus on the Gnome Guardian, and on the gnome that bombard you from a distance. Those that run up and chase after you are less annoying, although be sure to take them out if they get a bit too close, especially the Explodey Gnomes.

In order to continue, you have to beat all 4 coloured guardians, each of which his summoned using their own specific code. This will most likely take a few attempts, and it will be hard and relatively long. To help you, when you reach corners, feel free to plant some pots or grow some bots to aid you, whether they are for health or for firepower. If you do die, after respawning, simply hit the start button and you’ll be back into it (if you quit out of the game, you’ll have re-enter the same code you already have in order to summon that boss again).

Upon beating a Guardian, you will see a cutscene showing that one of the Gnome Statues in the Trials Hub area has been destroyed, which reveals a coloured portal. You can either choose to visit this portal first, or you can defeat the other four guardians and unlock all the portals at once. When you enter each coloured portal, you’ll see a chest at the end of the path in front of you, but you’ll also see the set of symbols that you entered in order to summon the guardian with one big difference. Two of the symbols will be reversed and facing the other way. Compare it with the code you noted down before and find what the missing symbols are. You need to make up a final code using all the missing symbols. There will be two symbols missing in each coloured portal, and they’ll all be in different spots. After visiting every portals (and opening the chests) you should have a brand new full code. Head back down the portal armed with this new code and prepare for the last major fight.

Enter the last code and defeat the Rainbow Guardian in the same way that you have defeated the other Guardians. After defeating this last Guardian, you’ll have another short cutscene, showing the statue on the throne exploding and a Rainbow portal opening. After entering this portal, you will see two chests at the end of the path, one on each side. Each chest has 5 locks, each of which need 15 Rainbow Stars to open, meaning that you need 150 more Rainbow Stars to open both chests. Grind these stars out, and then open the chests to claim two new completely playable characters, the Torchwood and the Hover Goat-3000.

All you need to do for your final achievement is to return to your backyard and then switch to both of these characters. Once you’ve run around as both characters for a few seconds you will pop;

  • More Secrets?

    New Faces from Craazy Places

Congratulations, you have finished Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2!

You can chill more in multiplayer now 😉

This post was last modified on 13/10/2023 14:39

James marcus

Garden Courte is a blog written by [James Marcus], a passionate gardener and writer. She has been gardening for over 20 years and has a deep understanding of plants and how to care for them. In her blog, she shares her knowledge and experience with others, providing tips and advice on gardening, plant care, and more.

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Published by
James marcus

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