Guild Wars 2

While condi is at a nice place now. I think some Power Builds should be buffed. cough Power Reaper cough.

And on some classes I hope that the new Elite Specs will help them with Power Specs because they need a Power Spec. Like Warriors ( Berserker wasn’t meant to be good as a Power Spec ). And I know that for Warriors we need to wait for another expac to hope for a Power Spec

And I guess making this kind of changes would be quite controversial and could hit the game hard.

maddoctor.2738:

They added a second Raid team in the mix, which means we’ll get more Raids. You don’t add a second team to a failure, you add it to a success so it expands and gets even better.

Ok it seems that I’ve missed some Dev post. Would like to see where Anet talked about adding a second Raid-Team. Would be really nice if they did so they can pump out raids faster.

Stephen.1207:

no need for any dps meter there is a golem to test it on to see all that

Which is a benchmark done at perfect conditions.

Golem is good to see the potential of a class or build but its not so good to see if your build is performing good in an actual raid. For this you need to go into the raid and use that build and for this you need a dps meter.

Remember the Ele-Time? Where people just flocked to ele to get DPS even if the ele was doing really bad? The DPS-Meter opened the eyes to many people that most eles are far from doing even mediocre damage and the “Ele= equals god tier dps” perception got a massive hit.

maddoctor.2738:

WARIORSCHARGEING.2637:

I would be shocked if many people knew how to use this properly with out the need of a addon app

You do know that the in game combat log doesn’t add up damage right?
It also doesn’t show boon/buff uptime. It’s basically near useless

Not sure if the guys you responded to was trolling.

Uhhm Balthazar even said himself ( last instance of Flashpoint ) that he isn’t a god anymore. He got cast down, replaced by a new God of War, his divinity taken away ( with this also the blinding aspect ) and now he is looking to gobble up enough magic to be something like a God again.

Carighan.6758:

Haishao.6851:

Remove the tool and people will kick you because you don’t have 25k+ AP

Or 100 LI. Or the wrong runes on your pinged armor.

Or having a class thats not Ele.

TBH if there is a kick, I’d rather see a kick because of actual data and not because of perception or bias. We had an Ele time in raids, where people felt that they had to be ele even though they didn’t like the class, to play raids. which resulted in Eles that couldn’t play their class and having abysmal dps. But even with crap dps people were like " more eles".

Thanks to the DPS-Meters the community saw that other classes are also viable, even more than a bad ele and the accepted composition shifted to more diversity.

Harper.4173:

UnbentMars.9126:

I predict that we will kill Balthazar and Rytlock will take his power to become the new god of war, Kormir-style. Rytlock clearly already knows something that he will FINALLY reveal to us as he mentions it in the trailer, and who else is kitten enough to take that kind of power (besides the PC, but we all know Anet won’t let us do that).

You heard it here first folks.

This is literally the worst thing ever and a complete disregard to old lore.
I get accepting the peace treaty – I get that we have to be a PC with all the other races now.
I can even begrudgingly accept that I can’t join Balthazar in the first PoF mission despite being asked to do so and wholeheartedly wanting to.

But this is too far – to have a Charr as the human god of war – it just completely ruins the old lore for me.
I honestly wouldn’t accept it.

Considering the fact that Balthazar isn’t a God anymore I highly doubt that someone will take his power so I wouldn’t worry that much that Rytlock will take Balthazars place as God of War since someone else already replaced him.

Ashen.2907:

AncientYs.8613:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Excellent Name.9574:

Unidentified gear, why, oh why? It is a redundant RNG throwback to old style action RPGs that serves no purpose in Guild Wars, just adds to tedium and annoyance. Please remove it from PoF release.

Except it was in Guild Wars since inception.

I like it, personally. Saves space.

Good luck.

but it hasn’t been in gw2 before they introduced it back again with PoF so why?

in core tyria and HoT we didn’t have it and we did just fine..

we also didn’t need to bring it back to life from gw1 imo.. and making them unidentified gear and making us identify them for coins is just no fun..

I think salvaging is enough. I don’t want to have to carry extra id kits in addition to salvage kits..

Cant you just salvage them without identifying?

You can, did it a few times today. Got a bit too much mats out of the gear.^^

I have seen a few people with problems in the story instance but most were just asking politely on how to do this stuff. Those people got respectful answers and even help.

But here with the OP going totally rude, exaggerating the numbers proclaiming himself as a vet etc. I really didn’t expect helpful answers and yeah. He got what I expected and deserved.

A small advice for everyone who has problems with story steps. Be polite and respectful and people will help you.

Yeah some combinations are a bit “too much” the alternating damage circle should not appear on bounties who are moving around a lot, like the Choya or Baredfang. On other Bounties who aren’t moving that much its quite fun.

Also note:

The Bounties have changing abilities. There seems to be a pool of possible abilities a bounty can have and they get chosen randomly. This can sometimes make a fight easier but also quite hard. A phase shifted Choya is a bit like " fuuuuuuuu", since that guy is also rolling around like crazy.

Some of the abilities aren’t working right now. There is an ability where the boss can drop growing poison field but it never did that. Another would be some fears which also never worked.

SuperduperMLGbsns.9345:

A Charr, that weights 10-20 times more then an asura, has the same physical response but a mount that probably has just 2 or 3 times more the weight of a Charr must have a super idiotic fuzzy movement, sure.
Arguing/defending about physical correctness and realism in a video game about a point that never been a topic in 5 years, in a world where magic exists, trees are a playable race and asurian objects floating the air – I sometimes have no words when I look down at this community.

The question here is, what do you want the mounts to be? Do you want them to be a speed buff with a nice skin or do you want them to feel like riding a mount?

I guess the answer to this question for most people, is not the speed buff. Otherwise the feedback to the mounts would be not that positive. Some negative response to the mounts ( like yours ) boils down to just wanting a skinned speed buff like in the other mmos.

Szaku.1495:

id personally suggest perhaps changing the name to “bandit” like any other map in the entire game, or just go ahead and change those special skills to “chicken” “watermelon” and “child support”…

really, anet?

I don’t see the problem here.

Pache.9406:

Raptors so far animate, move and feel EXCELLENT. They actually feel like you’re riding a big mount and even feel realistic. If you don’t like the feel because you only care about a mediocre speed boost that feels, moves and animates like horse doodoo, then go play WoW or some other game.

Nah, they just need to get used to the way mounts feel here. After some time the organic feel of the mounts becomes a non issue for most of the people complaining now.

I really like the feel of the mounts. In MMOs like WoW mounts are just a speed buff with a nice skin. Here they really feel like you are riding something thanks to the added momentum and the little delay. Sure you get stuck sometimes, I did, but this is fixable and not really an argument against the mounts.

TBH I was against mounts at first because we have waypoints en masse and most of the time mounts are just meh. GW2 did something WoW couldn’t do at all. Making mounts feel organic and this is why I like them even if I was against mounts in the past.

What I really like about the bounties is that they have changing abilities. Fought the legendary twice, both times different abilities. First fight was with hammers and second one with Chak as a summon.

But I think that some abilities aren’t working right now. Stop and go ability never worked and flash freeze also wasn’t working

Yobculture.5786:

“Forsaken Thicket” is just the name of the overall raid that the 4 currently in-game raid wings are in. What you are actually looking for is “Spirit Vale” (wing 1), “Salvation Pass” (wing 2), “Stronghold of the Faithful” (wing 3) and “Bastion of the Penitent” (wing 4).

Forsaken Thicket has 3 raid wings. Bastion is a single wing raid instance. You can see it on the world map and also see it when you enter Forsaken Thicket in Verdant Brink.

Bastion is called wing 4 because of the way Anet is releasing raid instances and wings, but I guess this way of calling will change in the future when Anet is adding more raids, otherwise it could be quite confusing. " W9 lf for…"

CptAurellian.9537:

Also, please keep those “random guy is stupid, group wipes” mechanics out of normal modes. That’s fine for raids and challenge modes, but there are too many stupid people around for normal fractals.

Ahh the detonating players who keep detonating outside the bubbles. Whenever I see one now, I go inside the bubble so I don’t die due to the bomb being dense. ( was quite surprised that this worked when I tried it on a run with a very dense bomb )

TexZero.7910:

Maybe its just me, but from what i’ve seen this just exposes how bad players actually are.

I don’t find anything in the fractal particularly hard or complex, but i’ve seen countless players down/die even when playing things as safe as trailblazers necros all because they refuse to read/perform mechanics.

Personally i wouldn’t change anything about the fractal, keep it like this and weed out the weak.

Seen quite a lot of people ignoring AOE’s and detonating all over the group.
I don’t mind the failure to get the blooms right since those orbs tend to get stuck, but ignoring AOE’s?

Rising Dusk.2408:

rolls eyes This stupid meter is going to get all DPS meters banned for everyone with all the problems it goes through violating Chris Cleary’s terms.

IIRC Chris said that he would be happy to get more things being allowed for DPS-Meters but he first needs to see that the devs for the meters can be trusted.

And clearly the BG dev can’t be trusted. That guy even told Chris that he would remove some of the violating features from his Meter when Anet implements the features themselves.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

BuddhaKeks. You’re being too generous with saying it came out of left field.

The only thing that hinted at it being Balthazar pretending to be Lazarus was Lazarus’ heavy use of fire magic. But even then… Marjory said she sensed death from him, right? And in GW1, Lazarus was an elementalist alongside a necromancer (at different points in time) so… yeah, the only “hint” was buried by apparent red herrings.

And apperently Anet thought this fire magic hint would have been enough to hint at Balthazar, which isn’t since Lazarus also was, like you said, and Ele in GW1. ( yes they said in the guild chat that this was a hint to Balthazar. )

For the use of fire to be a hint the fire should have been a different color like the divine fire from Season 2. ( so we could have been speculating if that abnormal fire color would have been due to the absorption of the bloodstone-detonation or some other means )

Using Headbutt and Arc Divider now feel like the game is a bit lagging. Should rename the Berzerker to Lagzerker.

It feels really slow and the animations don’t really fit now becaus it looks laughable now.

Turk.5460:

Walhalla.5473:

…since before the patch both had quite slow cast times…

lol k

Ooops. Slow wasn’t what I wanted to type but quick.

Headbutt and Arc Divider nerfs look like they were purely PvP motivated since before the patch both had quite fast cast times with good effects. So it may make sense on a PvP standpoint since with a longer casttime the enemy has better chance to react.

But on PvE, this nerf makes absolutely no sense. If they felt that both were too powerful for PvE then we would have seen a normal damage nerf and not this.

Its another example of skill negatively affected in the whole game because of one game mode. Split pls Anet. The animations just look stupid and its ruining the fluidity of the rotations.

draxynnic.3719:

(Come to think on it, this does make me wonder about possible links between bloodstone madness and the madness of many of the magical creatures that survived the Jade Wind…)

After seeing this I watched the Factions cinematic trailer which showed us how Shiro killed the emperor , absorbed his magic and then got wounded where he leaked magic like crazy. His death then was practically a magic nuke.

This nuke had a really big radius. It would have affected a big chunk of Maguuma if the positions of his death and the Bloodstone were switched. Not the raduis a bloodstone detonation would have ( The Maguuma Bloodstone would have destroyed a chunk of Tyria without Balthazar )

So Shiro had a crapton of magic in his body. More than what most of the people here would think would be possible and also more than Xera had. ( And she had enough mesmer magic to do some reality warping kitten but not enough to detonate in a nuke. )

I also think that there is a possible link between creatures surviving a blast of uncontrolled magic of this magnitude and then going crazy. Both, the creatures that survived the Jade Wind and the Pact Soldiers and White Mantle in Bloodstone Fen survived a magic detonation and their mind got affected by this. But the Bloodstone crazed people have one difference. They are craving for magic and want more and more. Something I don’t see with the creatures that survived the Jade Wind.

Muchacho.2390:

Slowpokeking.8720:

draxynnic.3719:

Slowpokeking.8720:

Risen Priestess of Lyssa: Zhaitan will devour you, just as he devoured our gods.
Risen Priestess of Lyssa: My goddess was mere prey for the dragon. Despair!

Farnax, High Priestess of Lyssa: Zhaitan eats gods!

Remember this?

ArenaNet uses the unreliable narrator, the Risen aren’t exactly unbiased, mesmers are known for mind games and deception, and NPCs in-game directly laid doubt on those lines. I don’t think they have any credibility.

They have credibility now after what happened.

What do you mean?

Balthazar didnt seem really afraid or even angry at the elder dragons. To me he sees them more like a big magic source. Whoever weakened him i highly doubt it was an elder dragon.

This is what I think. He wanted the magic from the Elder Dragons for himself after he lost his godhood. And I didn’t even see one hint of him being afraid of the dragons. They are just a source and he wanted the right tool to get the magic. ( Army and Commander at first but after he noticed the machine he went straight for it )

I’m also thinking about it. The “pretending to be Lazarus” thing makes sense… well at least at the beginning to get close to the Bloodstone and its magic.

After he got the magic, he could have dropped the act but instead decides to cause a schism in the White Mantle, just to get a few fanatics, well I guess that he didn’t expect to cause a schism but to make the whole Mantle following him. And then the zealots seemed to be too troublesome or were close to discovering his real identity. He then hired mercs and imprisoned and killed White Mantle members.

The moment where he discarded the mantle should have been the moment to drop the disguise. And Marjory shouldn’t be the reason to keep the disguise.

So why did he kept the Lazarus disguise? The only reason I can imagine is that he feared to get spotted by the one who usurped him/took his magic.

ianervan.7915:

Fluffball.8307:

If Jesus or Buddah were in my way and it was a situation that called for me killing to achieve the safety of the world I would obviously do it. I am an atheist but I have to imagine a religious person would come to the same conclusion. Or maybe not, religion is pretty irrational. The logical choice would be to save the world.

That would be the logical choice for an atheist: to save the material world and destroy the spiritual. The logical choice for a religious person would be to side with Jesus or Buddha and destroy the world.

So you are saying that a normal religious person would go full genocide just to side with Jesus? Thats a fanatic you are describing not a normal religious person who would go full nope on Jesus.

FrizzFreston.5290:

The plot twist was more that we’re not going to kill all the elder dragons than that it was that Lazarus is Balthazar.

Whether it’s magic being number 1 or number 2 doesn’t seem at all relevant at this point.

I think the biggest bomb dropped, and quite a good one, was the fact that Balthazar right now isn’t a god anymore and that he lost his divinity some time ago.

The first twist, Lazarus = Balthazar, was quite poor due to the fact that there weren’t any hints towards Balthazar.
But the last one is quite good, there were quite a few hints that Balthazar wasn’t that powerful anymore. Him draining the Bloodstone Magic was one ( well after the reveal it becomes a hint. ) Also his failure of killing Marjory is a big one. He used his power with the intend to kill and she… survived. Granted she isn’t the average Joe who would drop dead by just sneezing but a quite powerful Necromancer who can survive quite the punishment.
This reveal also opens up the possibility of more, and good, story points. Also we get to speculate more which is always fun

For the “Dragons weaking Gods” Theory, I have one question.

How?

The Gods are beings from the mists or even another world who left Tyria around 1330 years ago which was called the Exodus. They had some communications with Tyria but weren’t present in the world. And after Abaddon got killed and Kormir joined their ranks they also cut their last ties to Tyria.

So they would be quite far away from the Dragons since they were either travelling through the mists or messing up with another world.

And being made out of magic doesn’t mean that the Elder Dragons can consume them/their magic. We already have beings made of magic that can’t be corrupted or consumed in the game and I would suggest that the Gods are also immune.

Ider.1276:

Walhalla.5473:

The ritual was mentioned by Bauer after “Lazarus” came there, so its safe to assume that the ritual idea came from Balthazar, disguised as Lazarus.

Once the ritual is complete, we can proceed with our leader’s virtuous pursuits!

It does make sense why he appeared as Lazarus before the White Mantle back then. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to get near that Bloodstone.

Bauer didn’t directly mentioned who this leader was. It could be Xera.
As for Balthazar, he obviously had some of gods powers before absorbing Bloodstone. Otherwise how he would know about the secret White Mantle project? He is obviously non omniscent or mindreader (because there was no way we could trick such a being with our mirror trap). So, how exactly B. got to know about Lazarus reanimation project? Obvious and logical answer: plot hole. “I am a fan who tryes to patch the plot holes instead of payed story writers” answer: he had some god powers left, like teleportation or invisibility, and used them for reconnaissance. With these he could join the ritual without any disguise.
But, one more time, even if he impostered Lazarus before the ritual, why continue the sharade in Ep2 when he wanted to gain our trust and there was noone besides us in egg chamber?

Sorry but Xera wasn’t his leader. Xera was the High Inquisitor of the White Mantle, leading the Inquisition Branch of the Mantle. And Bauer was someone who, while loyal to the Mursaat, disliked the Inquisitors. And Bauer is from the Justiciar Branch, he wouldn’t call Xera his supreme leader even in his nightmares.

Clearly the Ritual was there to power up Lazarus/Balthazar. ( its even confirmed by the devs in the AMA that he came to the Mantle for this reason ) There was no other reason for doing such a ritual.

How Blathazar knew about this is a good question and since he wasn’t a god at that time I don’t have an answer. Also its weird that he didn’t drop the disguise after he gained the magic from the bloodstone. ( devs were explaining it but it doesn’T make that much sense and there were no hints about this in the game )

Ider.1276:

Gorgaan Peaudesang.8324:

Balthazar wanted the Bloodstone in the first place (he would have been immensely weak at the time), so he had to trick the White Mantle in order to gain their trust.

First, we don’t know if he used mursaat disguise before absorbing bloodstone. He didn’t need to wisper anyone anything, WM would carry on with ritual anyway and it would fail because of the aspect switch. Balthazar just needed to be near epicenter during the explosion, and thats not a hard thing even for weakened god.

The ritual was mentioned by Bauer after “Lazarus” came there, so its safe to assume that the ritual idea came from Balthazar, disguised as Lazarus.

Once the ritual is complete, we can proceed with our leader’s virtuous pursuits!

It does make sense why he appeared as Lazarus before the White Mantle back then. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to get near that Bloodstone.

So for Balthazar.

We know that until the end of this episode he wasn’t a god anymore. He was just some angry being who lost its divinity and who wants to become a god again ( or at least something as powerful as a god ) And i guess disguising as Lazarus for his first steps to become a god again would make sense.

Why?

To get the magic in the Bloddstone and absorb it and the safest way was to use the fanatics who were working on a bloddstone already aka the White Mantle. Going there as himself would only result in White Mantle attacking or even killing him.

After arriving there he apperantly told the Matnle about a ritual, a ritual that would give him the power of the Bloodstone, the Mantle was working quite a few days for this, making preparations etc etc.. Thing is, if you are a God who would obviously be powerful enough to absorb an absurd amount of magic without going insane, why the preparations?
2 possibilities: First the magic from the Bloodstone would even corrupt a deity
Second: Balthazar wasn’t a god at that time and just absorbing this stuff would have some result that wouldn’t be nice to him.

So after the ritual and the explosion Balthazar had what he wanted from the Bloddstone abd he could have dropped the Lazarus act. But why didn’t he? Perhaps there are reasons for this but since there are no obvious reasons stated or even hinted at, I don’t know what I should think about the Lazarus act after the first episode.

Not sure why you are blaming Ogden. He is just one Dwarf with no way to keeo Primordus at bay by himself. There was a whole army of Dwarves but even if they are stone they can be killed and the Dwarves have no way to replenish their numbers.

And the Deldrimor Dwarves kept Primordus busy for a long time. For more than 200 years, but its clear that they were fightig a losing battle and someday they would all perish.

Olveyn.2894:

Well the elder dragons were draining magic from all Tyria. They might as well drained enough to weaken all the gods. Balhazar may be the one looking for the magic to restore himself to godly power.

How would the ED’s weaken some entities that come from another world and are lurking somewhere in the mists?

I guess there are still some reasons why he didn’t reveal himself, which could make that twist better but we have to pull possible reasons out of our ass now.

Don’t forget what Balthasar said at the end. He literally told us that he lost his godhood to something or someone. We don’t know to whom but the one(s) responsible for this could still search for him to finish him off or something like that. So if he just went to Kryta saying. " I’m Balthazar. I’m mighty. Worship me" I guess he would have been found by the one who took his godhood. At least he could have feared it.

And yes I’m pulling out reasons out of my ass now to make it more logical in my mind xD

Mickey Frogeater.1470:

Hopefully he helps us against the other Six Gods just as he helped the Reapers against Dhuum. In all honesty Balthazar is no different from Dhuum in my opinion so surely Grenth would have no trouble helping us fight him(Grenth is already at war with Dwayna and Melandru you know).

Grenth is at war with Dwayna and Melandru? Where did you get this information?

Konig Des Todes.2086:

T

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

Basically, after the machine is stolen by Not Lazarus, she runs a simulation of what would happen if the machine is used since she couldn’t run a small-scale test a second time, and it turns out that Tyria will go bye bye if even one more Elder Dragon is killed.

So we have to stop Not Lazarus from using the machine, and that’s the plot of episode 5!.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

For non-English users, to abate something means to weaken or make less intense. So Balthazar was weakened. “Dimmed my light” – godhood results in blinding those who look upon them.

Balthazar just told us he lost his divinity.

And we didn’t defeat him, we just defeated his two hounds, using the Elder Dragons’ energies. Balthazar is still alive, having absorbed not only a bloodstone’s magic, but enough of two Elder Dragons’ magic that they were put back to sleep.

Or at least, one Elder Dragon’s magic that it was put back to sleep. We’re not sure Jormag is asleep.

Or how long they’ll be asleep.

We may find out that their champions quickly raise them up again with so much magic in the world.

So we have an Ex-God on a rampage. Question is, who usurped Balthazar? Menzies? A god doesn’t lose his divinity because he sneezed or due to a visit from Scarlet. It could be that Menzies togerther with his followers was susccessful or some primitives on another world were too warlike and just took his power.

I don’t like that twist that Balthasar was using the Lazarus guise because it feels like a twist for the sake of a twist, even though some of the stuff back then makes a bit more sense now but still it doesn’t really feel… right.

Nick.6972:

It gets better. Apparently, the fact that we barely took down a weakened human god in GW1 – Abaddon, doesn’t matter anymore. Screw that. Out heroes are capable of soloing Balthazar. Wonderful continuity.

Balthasar is not dead. Confirmed by a dev in the AmA.

Just defeated and likely to come back.

Well we know for sure that the Forgotten used divine magic and that sort of magic could shield locations against dragon minions or even hurt the champions extra hard. Also their artifacts can not be corrupted or consumed, as seen in Arah.

Exalted, who are also beings of magic also are immune to corruption and consumption due to forgotten weaving some divine magic into them.

But back to topic. The plot twist to Lazarus is not really that great, it felt like it was a plot twist just to have a plot twist. There were enough indications for LAzarus being the real one and not a god going rampage, even though I like the concept of Gods being our enemies. Could have been done better, like giving subtle stuff in the other episodes so after seeing this plot-twist we would see that everything makes sense.

Lahmia.2193:

The Gods are magical beings that are powered by (you guessed it) magic!

Dragons consume magic. Gods don’t like this. Gods want their power back.

Gods are made out of divine magic. Divine mgic is immune to dragon consumption and corruption

Inc.4753:

While I agree that there is some merit to the ‘Lazarus=Lazarus’ theory based on the recovered journals, there are several things that, to me, make this very unlikely:
- The way the PC reacts, without any doubt.
- The way the Story Journal describes the Confessor’s End instance (“Evidence scattered around the manor confirmed our suspicions that the being we know as Lazarus is an imposter…but who is he?”).
- The way the teaser trailer focuses on the issue.

I personally feel it could just as well be a soul that has taken possession of Lazarus’ body at the moment of resurrection, but that is just as much a guess as all the other theories out there.

Some of the reactions come because it is assumed that noone can even see Mursaat without being ascended, which is wrong. Mursaat can chose to make themselves visible. ( If the assumption were true then Saul would have never been able to see them, thus there would be no White Mantle )

And what evidence? The letters from and to Caudecus? Bauer told Caudecus that he switched the artifacts, but since Bauer is loyal to Lazarus we don’t even know if that is true.

Also the way the trailer focuses on the issue can also be a distraction.

I’m still with the " Lazarus is Lazarus" theory.

The “No it can’t be” reaction from Kasmeer can be a reaction to just everything, it could be Kasmeer seeing that Marjory is with Lazarus etc etc.

But whats really important. First Lazarus doesn’t need all of his pieces to be resurrected or to be himself. Its seen in GW1 where he was there killing people while not even complete.

Second, the one who switched the artifacts was Justiciar Bauer, who was in the end, loyal to Lazarus and not Caudecus, he would never do something that could harm the real Lazarus.

Looking back at the memoirs I think that he even met Lazarus because if this would be Caudecus then his sanity at the end of " Out of the Shadows" wouldn’t make any sense.

2 Zephyr, 1329 AE

Our supreme leader arrived today. We have been ordered to tell no one for fear that interlopers will interrupt his grand plan. The moment of our vengeance is at hand.

This was before the explosion and a few days after that, he talked that there was some ritual being planned. If Caudecus was there he would have been caught by the explosion and there wouldn’t be any possibility for him to keep his sanity at the end of the episode. He clearly arrived after the explosion.

Once the ritual is complete, we can proceed with our leader’s virtuous pursuits!

Virtous pursuits? This is something said by someone else at the end of this episode

Lazarus: The human seat of power and its current monarch are inconsequential. We are destined to face more virtuous pursuits.

The supreme leader Bauer mentioned wasn’t Caudecus. It was Lazarus, he never called Caudecus the supreme leader just confessor.
I would say, the ressurection at the Stronghold of the Faithful was a success but something made it more complicated and I guess that something wasn’t the raiders killing Xera, it was the corrupted aspect from Lazarus, that was still active and weakening him. He needed something to repower himself and probably cleanse that corruption. Something a ritual at the bloodstone could provide. We have enough magic here and if prepared properly, the ritual could make sure that Lazarus wouldn’t go insane by the bloddstone magic.

Why not updating the dungeons? The guys from the old dungeon team are either fired, left Anet or are now developing something different for GW2 ( most likely all 3 ).

Also the code of the dungeons seems to be a complete mess. Bugfixing for the dungeons took quite a while back then and in one of the recent AMA’s Anet “joked” about the dungeon scripts. Perhaps they even have to built them from scrap just to update them in a meaningful way.

That position is where the new raid instance “Bastion of the Penitent” is.

Next map, perhaps second half of Ember Bay. Map name not really in the middle of the map, but more like on the northern border of playable Ember Bay

Well there is an Anet thread called Bastion of the Penitent Raid Wing.

But if they called it Raid on Reddit then even they don’t know on what to call it.

Lahmia.2193:

To encourage profession diversity, all 9 professions must be brought to a raid. 1 profession may be duplicated.

Thats not encouraging. Thats forcing. While I’d love much more class diversity, I want it to be encouraged by balance from Anet and not forced by some stupid rule. The Mirror Comp is a balancing problem, something that can be solved by balancing the classes and we’ve seen Anet taking the steps in the right direction, even if the steps are too small to make a big impact.

Forcing diversity could also make some boss fights awkward.

Amaimon.7823:

have you considered there is no wing 4? problem solved

Every time I see someone saying Wing 4 I wonder if I completely missed a Wing of the Forsaken Thicket since the Bastion is not a wing by definition but a raid without any wings.

But since even Anet is calling it a wing…. much cringing.