Guild Wars 2

Today, after doing 3 fractals, instead of being given the option to go back to the lab, my group got sent to a fourth fractal. Is this supposed to happen? Advanced mathematics or a bug?

Specifically, these were the fractals we did:

• (0) Started the Grawl / Volcanic fractal, but one player had to leave right at the start, so we went outside and got a new player.
• (1) With the new player (party of 5) we did the Svanir / Snowblind fractal.
• (2) Next we got the Dredge / Underground Facility fractal. One player got disconnected half way through and couldn’t come back, but we finished it without him.
• (3) After that, we got the Colossus / Cliffside fractal, which we completed with the 4 remaining players. At this point we expected to get sent to the lab, but, instead…
• (4) We got the Jade / Solid Ocean fractal, which again we completed with the remaining 4 players.
• Finally we were given the option to teleport to the lab.

Does the fact that a player leave (see step 2 above) reset the counter? Note that we did not go out at any point after (1).

The Solid Ocean one is a boss… I assume you fight it or another boss every 3. Im only at 4 myself as of now.

It’s the bonus fractal – you get extra tokens and chance at nicer loot. You get it after every even level fractal completion.

Weird, I have a couple of characters at level 5 and never noticed going through 4 in a row before.

Also, the loot was pretty normal stuff (I think I got a rare hammer with the highly original name “Hammer”).

What makes it a “bonus”, exactly? If we choose to go out we’ll still have the progress recorded? If not, it’s not really a “bonus” as much as one extra fractal you have to do while hoping that no one gets disconnected or needs to deal with some real-life issue.

If you start with a fresh character, it goes like this:
lv1: 1-2-3 – get to lv2;
lv2: 1-2-3-boss – get to lv3;
lv3: 1-2-3 – get to lv4;
lv4: 1-2-3-boss – get to lv5
…

You can kill the boss over and over if you intentionally choose an even number diff level before entering.

The bonus nature lies in the daily chest you get after killing the boss the first time that day – it pops in the place of daily/monthly/map completion chest, and can yield extra tokens, bags of gold or ascended rings (lv10+).