Park Resonant Down and Probably Really Time to Push the Story Forward

I think (think) that the only things that reset when you clear a zone's Resonant are the assaults and all the monsters, while it looks like things like resource crates and such are just there whenever you want to grab them. Thus, having done a good circuit around the Park and feeling like I had more or less done everything that would be reset, I followed through on taking on my next boss.

While I got the first Resonant (the one in Downtown that is still kind of part of the tutorial) in a single go, the ones in Central and Western Incursion Zone took me four attempts each. The Park one took me three, so I guess consider that progress.

At this point, though, while I know there are other zones to discover, I've done all the Resonants in each of the zones I've had access to, meaning I think I really do need to progress the story in order to get access to more of the world.

Let's talk about that boss:

The Collective is a hybrid Patterned and Mold - all the Resonants are Patterned (I may have actually been mistaken over whether the Patterned would really be an enemy faction, as I might have misinterpreted a video of a minor puzzle in which you hit patterned objects as an actual fight) but the Pattern doesn't seem to eliminate the Mold like it does the Hiss (again, the effectiveness of the Pattern does make me wonder if it is related to Hedron/Polaris).

The Collective is fought in a giant room where you'll be using Shift to jump onto the walls and ceilings. Initially, the giant mold clusters with disturbingly human-like faces just shoot spores at you while giant tendrils poke out of the ground (also made up of cluster-faces, and bearing a bit of a resemblance to Mold-1, appropriately enough). Unlike other boss fights, there are no helpful blue dots on the health bar where you get healing back for hitting certain percentages, but there are regular Mold enemies that spawn over the fight, which will help you top up your damage and even can grant you Dominance for executing them.

I believe the fight starts with just one tendril, and when it's dead, one of the four spore clusters on the main boss becomes exposed. This is the pattern: tendrils and then spheres. However, starting on the second phase, the two tendrils poke out of the walls, and you need to use Shift to get onto that surface and fight that tendril (dodging the spores shot by the other tendril and the slams by the one that's nearby, and also fighting other Mold enemies). Once the tendril dies, the main boss spews out dangerous spores that will cause that entire surface to build up the Infection debuff, so you want to get the hell out of dodge asap and shift to a different surface (there are also gravity nodes you can use).

Once both tendrils are down, you go back to the phase where you can take out one of the clusters. The third phase, all but the "floor" get tendrils, so you need to fight three of them before returning. The second attempt, I got in trouble because I cleared the right and left sides without realizing the ceiling had a tendril, and so I had to wade through the nasty yellow spore-spew, which contributed to my death (the other issue was that I thought I had to clear all the little Mold minions back on their surfaces, which were all full of spew to get the final spore cluster, but I think I just did not see it and could have finished).

The final phase, there are just two tendrils on the "floor" surface, so you need to be able to dodge them both as you attack them.

While I died nearly as much as I had on the other bosses, the challenge here was simply figuring out the sequence rather than execution, and so I would rate this as quite a bit easier than the Dancer and the... what's the one in the factory, the Outcast?

I do really hope there's a way to re-fight bosses somewhere in the game.

Also, I am heading back to the Evacuation Zone for main story reasons, but as far as I can tell, this is the one zone without a Resonant (which maybe makes sense given that it's where the Hiss resonance is strongest). This does make me wonder if the mission that I did to rescue Arish reset the zone.