Guild Wars 2

The obsidian shards are STUPIDLY only sold at the Balthazar Temple. Which of course is never uncontested. Ever. Even when I guest at another server. Balthazar temple is still contested. The event chain to get it is ridiculous because it keeps breaking or bugging out. Moral of the story – make the Obsidian Shards available across all temples and in other vendors (that are as easy to obtain as Karma)

Actually there are two other places that I know of for obby shards you can buy outright. Fractals merchant with fractal relics, and Moto next to the super adventure box in rata sum using bubble baubles. The latter you can easily get lots of them fast if you have multiple characters.

You can also use karma to buy orrian jewelery boxes from any karma vendor in Orr and have a chance, fairly high imo but is rng, of dropping them. Bonus is you can also get lodestones from here.

There’s one additional place you can buy Obsidian Shards outright, which is from the Laurel vendor.

I would call that a lot of availability. Hell, I didn’t even know you could get them with baubles.

+1. I’ve been checking the temple every time I’m on, every 30 or so minutes, for the past few weeks, and it’s been contested every single time.

jwaz.1908:

There’s one additional place you can buy Obsidian Shards outright, which is from the Laurel vendor.

For laurels. Who in their right mind would waste laurels on obsidian shards when karma is so insanely easy to farm, I have no idea.

There is a thread in the event forum where people post uncontested Balthazar’s on their server. I got all my shards by guesting a few times.

Dude, go SAB. forget balth
Save yourself much effort, both farming the karma and looking for available temple.

balthazar used to be the only way of obtaining the obsidian shard, but thats not been the case since before fractals.
you have:
-balthazar
-fractals
-laurels
- orrian karma boxes (see any karma vendor in orr) (high chance to get them from these boxes)
- super adventure box

you spent months gathering karma and other legendary components. you can wait a couple days/weeks for a temple to be uncontested. just check that wp on the map every time you log on, one of these days you can go there.

Try to organize a group to free it, my guild loves doing since even if it fails (which it’s prone to do) the bag farming is great, I make 100 in no time wearing MF, but no doubt it can be a pain when you just want obsidian shards and as it stands karma is still the faster way to acquire it. There’s a thread though that keeps regular updates of uncontested Balthazar temples.

SAB is the easiest source of orb shards you’ll ever get. It takes ~ 6 minutes to farm 250 baubles (1 bubble), so ~ 10 shards per hour.

For what it’s worth, I got to do the Balth temple for the first time last night which was a new experience for me but I can see why people avoid it.

Escort quests are usually way down on the low end of fun and this is the escort quest from hell. We managed by the skin of our teeth on the absurd final escort leg, in no small part thanks to some good commanders (Thanks again Atoma!)

I’m sure my attitude would be far more negative if we had failed and I had wasted all that time for nothing.

I’m really glad there are other options to obtain this mat. I’ll likely go for the Orrian boxes method if I need more.