Guild Wars 2

Fext.3614:

OK, let me explain.
Do this mental excersise: take Marjory Delaqua and swap her for a male, say a daredevil investigator named Marty d’Eau. Now replay all the dialogues between our Marty and Kasmeer, namely the dialogues related to their relationship.
Do you really like their relationship?
From my point of view, with the lesbian glamour gone, we are left with pretty much abusive relationship, which is not much about love, but about dependency and possession.
I don’t know if there was an intent to show a bad relationship, but I doubt it. This prejudice, that only these who are able to do a service to others or, even better, those who are “keeping their loved ones alive”, can get laid, is twisted to the extreme, yet, sadly, very widespread. It is a model of relationship from the patriarchal society, where the wife depens on her husband in everything and is, practically, dead without their kind protection. Like Kasmeer removed from Marjory custody.

Usualy when you run into some gender /equality issue (and this game suffers from it) the rule of thumb how to get a good point of view is to mentally swap genders of main protagonist. This way you can evaluate, for example, the relationship between, say, devout guardian Megan Thackeray, who deeply loves king John The Barefoot, and the complicated bond between freeminded adventurer Styr Egalkin and his daughter Beryl Styrdottir, who didnot knew who was her father until she was seven, since Styr let her alone with her mother and did not bother to show up… etc., etc.

I don’t know, I still don’t get it. You call it an ‘abusive relationship’, and I don’t know that I’ve seen any cases of dependency or possession involving those two. Kasmeer has needed to lean on Marjory sometimes, and more recently with Belinda dying Marjory has been withdrawing and Kasmeer has been worried for her. I’m not sure where the ‘abuse’ comes in. And I’m not sure what the gender of the characters has to do with anything.

I’m also not sure why your example of gender swapping swaps only Marjory into ‘Marty’, but all the subsequent examples of gender swapping you give are swapping the genders of multiple characters. Why can’t Marty Delaqua be romancing Kenneth Meade? I don’t know, maybe I just don’t get where you’re coming from.

You were forced to relog because a patch was put out for the game. Normally when you volunteer to leave an underpopulated map, you aren’t forced to logout.

Fext.3614:

No, this is just wrong. It is like they decided to use russian style naming, and made Braham like Braham Eirowich Egalkin. The same mistake.

Your mistake is that you don’t understand the culture of the Norn in the game.

Norn are all about fame and creating legends. Eir, as a member of Destiny’s Edge, is a far more famous individual than Borje, who was basically a stay-at-home dad. So Braham is Braham Eirsson.

Sure, the Norse might have different naming conventions in our real world, but they also don’t fight evil plant dragons bent on consuming the world’s magic. Why haven’t you made a topic about how unrealistic all that magic is?

Arenanet staffers have posted elsewhere on this forum that once players become inactive, they no longer contribute to the scaling of an event. That said, they did not share how long a player has to be inactive/defeated/AFK in order to stop contributing. It might take a few minutes, which in the case of a Vinewrath boss is entirely too long.

Even with good Teq groups, you have a chance to get this achievement.

The whirlpools will only begin to appear when Teq is reduced to 75% of his health, as you say. However, the first set of whirlpools will appear right away once Teq is brought to 75%. So once you see the “Determined” buff appear on Teq as he gets to 75%, you need to start looking for the whirlpools, as that’s likely the only chance you’ll have to find them. The NPC giving instructions during the fight will helpfully mention whirlpools dragging people down as well.

The whirlpools themselves are AoE circles like the poison fields, but there’s a visible swirling water inside them, and tendrils reaching up from them. Run into the middle of one of those and stand there. Be careful of dodging, as you can dodge the whirlpool’s ‘attack’ and thus not get pulled down. You don’t have much of a window to get them, but once you know when to look for them (right before Teq flies away for the first battery phase) you should be able to find one and jump in without too much trouble.

So what is it exactly about Kasmeer and Marjory that you hate? You should let us know in detail so we can decide how seriously to take your suggestion!

Thanathos.2063:

1G + 10S spoon + karma + greens and yellows isn’t nothing for those ~15min

You get 2 gold per Tequatl kill, not 1 gold. There’s a second gold piece hidden inside the exotic Dragon Chest, in addition to the more easily seen one looted from the big open world chest.

Sadly, the above is incorrect. Or, at least, only partially correct.

There is a damage threshold that must be reached, but for most characters this is achieved in just two or three hits. If you’re a condition-based class with low direct damage it might take a bit longer. But with what you’re saying here, that’s not the problem you’re running into. The bigger problem you’re having, and one that’s not well-known among the player base yet, is that only a certain number of players can actually receive loot from a given enemy at a time. And damage is not the threshold used to determine who gets it.

Aside from that minimum “2-3 hits to get credit” mentioned above, loot is given on a first come, first served basis. The first players to hit a given enemy reserve their right to get loot by doing so. People who are trailing a bit behind in a large group (50 plus players, at least) and hit the enemy late will not get loot, no matter how much damage they do. They’ll get event credit fine, but no champion loot bag. There is apparently some kind of limitation in the system that prevents loot from being given out to too many players at once.

There is one way to bypass this. Parties. As Belzebu said above, players join parties to help to get credit for kills. The common perception is that you get more champ bags when partied because your group’s damage is pooled, but that isn’t the case. Instead, as long as one player in your party is among that first 50(ish) players to hit the enemy in question, that player will qualify for the loot drop and share his rights for the loot drop with others in his party. This allows the normal limitation for ‘maximum players who can get loot’ to be exceeded, and it’s a big reason why people assume that they aren’t getting champ bag drops because they aren’t doing enough damage, rather than the real reason of simply tagging late.

There’s inevitably going to be responses here saying that I’m wrong. To those people, I encourage them to test things out themselves, at a heavily zerged event such as Frozen Maw. Fight the boss twice, under two different circumstances. First, go there solo without a group, ignore the pre-event portals/guards/etc. and stand ready to tag the Champion Shaman once he becomes vulnerable (pack a stunbreak or Stability in case you strike too early and get launched away). Hit him a few times, deal maybe 2000-3000 damage to him just to be safe, then back off and walk away and idle for the rest of the fight. You’ll get a champ bag from his corpse when he dies. Next, come back the next day with a full group of five who are all going to try this experiment together. Go do the ‘close the portals’ pre-event together, and when the Shaman becomes vulnerable, have your whole group stop by where the portals were for about five or ten seconds to let everyone else engage the boss, and only then charge in. Go for max DPS on the Shaman, break out your Hundred Blades and your Lava Fonts and your Backstabs and everything else you can bring to the table. It won’t matter, when it dies none of you will get a champ bag off his corpse despite your party dealing tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of damage.

It’s a simple test that’ll prove the real reason why people don’t get champ bags. I’ve submitted this as a bug report in the past, and seen others do the same thing, but as of yet there has been no response or acknowledgement from Arenanet. It might simply be too deeply ingrained in their game engine to be easily fixed. But in the meantime, to avoid suffering from it, you need to make sure that you engage and tag the enemies you want loot from very quickly when you’re travelling in a zerg. It’s not something that comes up too terribly often, since 50 plus players are required before anyone starts missing out on loot, but with world boss trains and WvW zergs, it certainly can hurt people.

You can still do dungeons and world boss events. Depending on how long ago you left, doing dungeons might even be more profitable than it was before, as straight-up coin rewards were added for completing individual paths as daily rewards. Doing CoF1 will give you 1.3 gold, for example. You can’t repeatedly run CoF1 like you used to, but doing it once and then doing other quick dungeons like SE1, CM, etc. will give you direct injections of gold, along with whatever loot drops in the dungeon.

Champion enemies also drop special loot bags now, which may have already shown up before you left the game (they’re around 1.5 years old themselves), so killing champions is now more rewarding than it was in the past.

And the world boss train is still the world boss train. Most world bosses are on set schedules now, making it easier to know where to be when, but also meaning there’s occasionally some waiting between spawns.

On the note of world bosses, Tequatl the Sunless was revamped around the time you quit. That encounter is much tougher now, but players are experienced at it and can usually win (particularly if you show up early to get an organized instance). Killing Tequatl will reward you with two gold in outright coin, plus over 20 pieces of equipment, including three guaranteed rares or better. You might want to check out Tequatl as a result!

that baby stealing dingo.7216:

Why in the world would Zealot’s gear be treated differently than everything else? I don’t get it.

It’s not treated differently than everything else. Celestial and Nomad’s are other stat allotments that need to be crafted and can’t be bought/sold on the Trading Post.

I don’t know if it’ll help Signet of Rage, but you can make the Aegis effect vanish simply by sheathing your weapon. Go and set a keyboard button to “Draw/Sheathe Weapon”, and that’ll make the Aegis graphic go away.

You can get level 80 exotic backpacks for Guild Commendations as well.

You set that utility slot to auto-attack. Hold control and right-click it to disable it. You may want to enable it on your #1 skill via the same method, as it is by default.

Some Collection bugs were fixed. Among them was one that after the release of Collections awarded people with achievement points for Black Lion Collections at random, without actually having the skins unlocked.

The bugs were fixed in today’s patch, and any unduly awarded AP were removed in the process.

Some Collection bugs were fixed. Among them was one that after the release of Collections awarded people with achievement points for Black Lion Collections at random, without actually having the skins unlocked.

The bugs were fixed in today’s patch, and any unduly awarded AP were removed in the process.

The Bug Reports forum has a few people talking about it.

I lost 4 AP myself, and in my Black Lion Collections tab I no longer have entries for Fused, Sclerite, Zodiac or Jade Dragon weapons, skins that I never actually owned but that the game awarded me credit for. It’s not too hard to connect the dots.

Some Collection bugs were fixed. Among them was one that after the release of Collections awarded people with achievement points for Black Lion Collections at random, without actually having the skins unlocked.

The bugs were fixed in today’s patch, and any unduly awarded AP were removed in the process.

Things are often released to media outlets and the press before they’re given to the unwashed masses, that’s been true for a long time. The advent of Youtube and Twitch just mean that the ability to be a ‘media outlet’ is available to more people than it ever has been. Someone who posts content for a game on Youtube and does a lot of (usually free) marketing work for a game company might wind up getting the same perks that a traditional media outlet or a website gets. It is what it is, it’s smart business.

The Quiver of a Thousand Arrows initially had a set of stats that included Magic Find, back when it was a statistic on equipment. When Magic Find was removed from equipment, all old gear that had Magic Find on it instead allowed players to choose their own stats to replace it. The Quiver, along with There With Yakkington, some of the Hallowe’en skins and a few other Mystic Forge recipes, were never updated to get new ‘base’ stats, so the stat selection option remains even for new items that are created now.

And yes, this does mean that at current prices no one should make the Quiver of Swift Flight or Koss on Koss when the cheaper Vicious Claw recipes provide identical skins and (depending on your choice) stats.

Brother Grimm.5176:

EDIT: on the issue of WHY the convention is for AFTER the event, keep in mind that the Ogre Event requires you to zone out of the existing Metrica and then back in. This could possibly result in a new zone for the player.

No it doesn’t. The Steam Ogre event is in the normal Metrica Province zone map, just very high in the air. There is no loading screen to travel to the Ogre, but there is a loading screen when you leave the platform, because you’re being placed outside the reactor afterwards. That loading screen is simply due to the distance you’re moving, it doesn’t mean you’ve left the zone and are re-entering it. There is no chance that you will be placed in a different Metrica zone unless your game crashes for some reason during the load and dumps you to character select or desktop.

It works the same for waypointing within a zone. It doesn’t matter if there’s a loading screen for doing so, you’ll stay on the same map. If you’re fighting Tequatl and are killed, you can safely waypoint to Brooloonu Waypoint and return to rejoin the fight, you won’t get shunted onto a different map.

It does also help if no one is Blinding Shatterer. When Shatterer is affected by Blind, the spell to encase people in crystals will miss.

The reward for finishing Episode 6 on multiple characters is getting extra Black Lion Keys, rather than Glove Boxes. You will need to buy the extra Glove Boxes for 1000 crests, if you can’t find them in Bandit Chests/Greater Nightmare Pods.

That said, you paid your 200 gems for the episode to get access to the Carapace Gloves in any form. Without the episode, it’s impossible to buy them even for bandit crests.

Rata Sum was ‘ruined’ because it inexplicably had targetable ambient creatures in one location despite being a city zone where ambient creatures are supposed to be tagged as friendly.

Open world zones are supposed to have targetable ambient creatures, and the Maize Balm item exists to take advantage of those.

Mirta.5029:

How about the achievement where you have to complete all 5 pres for Jormag? Anyone have tips on finding an empty overflow? I tried to at least tag them and failed severely, because 2 of them spawn close to two different wps and you’ll use up too much time wping, but running won’t work either.

There is no achievement for doing all five pre-events for the Claw of Jormag.

You’re probably getting that confused with the achievement for doing the entire ‘Breaking the Ice’ meta-event chain in the southern part of the zone. There is an achievement for doing all five events for that chain.

Lots of spots, anywhere there’s a lot of ambients. Brisban has a few good locations, with Godslost Swamp likewise ranking up there.

Just don’t try it in Ebonhawke. The Zelda Chickens are not amused.

Shiki.7148:

Thing is, if i drop incompatible loot in a dungeon i do not want to wait 2-3 weeks until i get the kitten thing sold because there is already hundreds in the TP.

Then fill a buy order, and you’ll get your coins instantly.

There will never be direct trading. The Trading Post and its 15% cut out of all transactions is the single best hedge against inflation in the game. Without that, everything in the game would cost far more than it does now, to say nothing about all the spam that would be caused, and the investment of time required by the Arenanet staff to combat both spam (what happens when someone doesn’t use the trade channel) and the scams.

Direct trading will never happen, and people suggesting it are displaying a gross lack of knowledge of how the game economy runs.

Well, this is a game where you don’t have a traditional trinity of ‘tank/healer/DPS’.

Any class can be built to be tanky with equipment/trait choices, but the classes that are the most innately tanky would be the Warrior (highest HP/best armour), the Necromancer (highest HP and a second HP bar via class mechanic), and the Guardian (best armour and many defensive buffs/options). But those shouldn’t be your only options. Thief is a class that has the lowest HP, but if nothing ever hits you because you’ve got a pile of dodges, evasion and blindness effects, then that winds up being just as good as a Warrior that face-tanks everything. And better, when fighting enemies that will kill you in one hit regardless of your HP.

You get rewards when you win ten games.

That said, if you don’t like it and say you’re forcing yourself to play it, then don’t play it. Missing out on a handful of AP and laurels is not the end of the world.

Sagat.3285:

Changes to defiance or PvE in general came out??

We have absolutely no official word on changes to Defiance, but in the HoT streams they’ve done so far, the champion-level enemies have a different looking status bar, with a blue bar of varying length running along the bottom of it. It’s not something many people made note of, but in the last stream Jon talked about not wanting to target the Legendary Wyvern while fighting it because there were things that they shouldn’t be showing.

It could be Defiant being reworked into some kind of ‘diminishing returns’ stun system for champion enemies. Or it could be something completely different and unrelated to that at all. We don’t know yet, but isn’t that the fun of speculation?

Moo.3408:

Deep? I have to fill up space right here

I presume he means Deep Freeze.

Each spoon is 10 silver you wouldn’t have received before the update that added them. It was added to the loot table containing the Superior Rune of the Sunless, Fang of Tequatl, Bone Fragments of Tequatl and other such drops (minis?), filling in the spot that would otherwise be empty when none of the above things were rolled. It isn’t taking the place of anything, it’s just giving you some more coins when none of the above items are rolled… and more coins than if the Superior Rune of the Sunless gets rolled in its place.

There’s no need for a healer. Rather than taunting and needing to deal with the auto-attacks, you just stun and don’t need to deal with any attacks. You know.. what people are doing right now.

Deep Freeze might be the best stun, but there’s no harm in organized groups continuing to use whatever stun they have available to stop big attacks.

That depends on what the final energy regeneration for Revenant looks like. I can guarantee the regen isn’t going to be as fast as what we’ve seen in that stream when the game is in our hands.

You do also underestimate how much Deep Freeze people can have. It’s a 30 second cooldown, but there are two Ice Bows created when it’s activated. With enough stripping of Defiance (hello, Headshot thief) Deep Freezes can be landed at 15 second intervals using two Ice Bows, keeping the boss monster stunlocked for a third of the time.

That’s not ideal, because it means people are holding onto their Ice Bows after the Deep Freeze rather than doing better DPS (besides Ice Bow 4), so it’s probably more realistic to say it’s two Deep Freezes per 60 seconds instead, which is still a sixth of the time that the enemy is locked down. That’s still preferable to Taunt, as Taunt… does not lock the enemy down. A Taunted enemy is still attacking, and possibly with powerful attacks. What’s Subject Alpha’s auto-attack?

You can’t do Taunt multiple times, either, against champion tier enemies.

Do you know what else is a ‘status effect’? Daze. Stun. They have icons that show up that aren’t conditions.

Defiant is going to work as it normally does against Taunt. Though from the looks of the expansion previews, Defiant itself is going to be seeing some changes…

Moo.3408:

It’s extremely clear: now comes diversity in pve builds. You will now need a taunt/stability tank. YAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY, and a healer to back that up, causing condis and condi remove.

What would you ever need Taunt for in PvE that couldn’t be done better with Deep Freeze?

As a recent creator of Incinerator, the only way I can turn its footfalls off is to swap to my second weapon set that doesn’t have Incinerator equipped.

But as mentioned above, not all Legendaries have footfalls, and some of them that do have footfalls are less noticeable.

Well, then it was Eternity.

The only items that affect your footprints are Legendary weapons and the Preserved Queen Bee. From your description, it’s clearly not the latter.

Meteorlogicus, perhaps?

It does, yes. The actual poison ball flying through the air will inflict damage when it hits someone, and only after it lands will the AoE appear on the ground around it about a second later.

To answer the initial question, if you want to stand back and use big damage nuke spells, the class to pick is probably… Elementalist.

You just want to use a Staff as your weapon, rather than Daggers.

Staff Elementalist mostly sticking in Fire attunement with offensive gear and Fire Magic traits is going to output a lot of damage. It’s going to be a bit one-dimensional compared to what a Scepter or Dagger Elementalist can output, but it’s there to play and it’s certainly very good at what it does.

Rentapest.6503:

I walk away with blues/greens and maybe 2-3 rares IF I’m very very lucky.

It’s all well and good to complain if you feel the loot isn’t good enough, but lying about things doesn’t help.

The exotic Dragon Chest you get from killing Tequatl the Sunless always, every time, has three rares inside. You are not getting “2-3 rares if you’re very very lucky”, you’re getting at least three rares every time you kill the dragon, as long as you aren’t killing him multiple times in the same day. The only time the exotic chest won’t have three rares is if one is an exotic instead.. and if the chest does contain a Tequatl’s Hoard or another Ascended weapon or armour box, it will still have those three rares in addition to that. That’s how guaranteed they are.

If you feel that your three plus rares aren’t enough for the investment you put in for Tequatl, then you don’t have to fight him. You can potentially get more rares faster by hopping between Breaches, as long as the instances can regularly kill all the bosses. It’s your choice to continue attending Tequatl kills. And since enough people are attending them that instances are filling up 30+ minutes in advance, it seems that there’s a lot of people who feel that the content is either fun enough or rewarding enough.

I notice you also didn’t mention the 2 gold you get in straight-up coin every time you kill Tequatl. Is that beneath your notice?

RoseofGilead.8907:

With the exception of containers from PvP, MF doesn’t affect the contents you get.

And that’s the relevant part. “With the exception of containers from PvP”. When PvP Reward Tracks were introduced in April, we were told that the containers you earn from the would be affected by Magic Find, because the containers simulated drop rolls for X number of killed NPCs. So, say, a Veteran Inquest Golemancer Container would have the contents of 5 or 10 dead Inquest Golemancer enemies inside, giving you 3-9 items of varying quality, from junk trophies to Bags of Alchemical Materials to salvage items to blue and green equipment (or, if you’re lucky, better).

And that’s exactly what the Living Story instance rewards do too. Enemies in the Living Story instances don’t drop any loot, no matter how many of them you kill. Instead, when you finish an instance for the first time on a character, you get loot bags related to the NPCs that you fought in the instance. Ghost loot bags for when you help Rytlock fight Duke Barradin, Mordrem loot bags for most of the instances, Inquest loot bags for some of the early Dry Top instances, and so on. And those work just like the PvP containers. The Ghost loot bags contain Dust and ghost junk items and equipment, but never bags inside bags, because ghosts don’t drop bags. The Inquest ones, on the other hand, can drop the various crafting materials Inquest drop (Totems/etc.) but can also drop Bags of Alchemical Materials, just like an Inquest PvP container can drop. But you’ll never see a champion loot bag drop a Bag of Alchemical Materials.

You’ll need to trust me here. I’m not one of those loonies who says that Magic Find affects world boss chest loot or champion loot bags or jumping puzzle/dungeon chests. When they introduced Reward Tracks, they created a new type of loot that could be affected by Magic Find to fill a void in a part of the game where Magic Find didn’t currently affect anything. Going forward from there, when they brought in the new system for Living Story Season 2, when they made the choice to stop enemies in the instances from dropping loot, they took their new loot system from PvP and applied it there as well.

It’s pretty easy to test. Save up the containers from a few instances and bring them to the Silverwastes to open along with your PvP goodies. You’ll notice the difference.

I don’t know if it’s ever outright been stated by the devs, but it’s pretty obvious from looking at the contents of the loot bags that that’s what it is. They aren’t like champ bags where you get “1 green or better, crafting items, occasionally Unidentified Object/1 Scroll of Experience/1 Champ Bag Exotic”. The things you get out of them are purely random with just a few exceptions, such as the guaranteed Ecto per bag from the instance where Marjory gets her greatsword, and the guaranteed rare from the episode-ending achievement bags.

Like, whenever you get the Mordrem bags, you usually get a few Potent Venom Sacs in them, but sometimes you’d get a Powerful Venom Sac. That’s the same as getting a Veteran Snow Troll container from Shiverpeaks track PvP, and usually getting Potent Blood but sometimes getting Powerful Blood in it.

There is one other exception that the Wiki doesn’t note. The new loot bags that you obtain from Living Story Season 2 instances operate similarly to the Structured PvP loot bags, simulating a number of rolls on the loot tables of certain creature types. As such, Magic Find will affect those as well.

Basically, if you open a bag and get junk items like Sprockets or Globs of Gooey Goop, then that’s a bag that Magic Find effects.

Supreme.3164:

Problem is….you won’t be able to use the healing skill twice, did you see that each skill/utility has a CD on top of energy consumption? The main heal showed so far has 30s CD, the utilities had like 50s+ CD and skill 4-5 something like 25s+, skill 3 on hammer was 15s CD and mace skill 3 was maybe 20s CD.

Revenant will play like a GW1 profession, a bad player will soon run out of energy and die easily, a good player will make appear as revenant is actually spamming skills all this thx to superb energy management

The utilities most certainly did not have 50 second cooldowns. That’s the Energy cost of the utility. Most of the Revenant utility skills shown didn’t have any cooldown at all. Inspiring Reinforcement, the stone road/Stability utility, has a 5 second cooldown. It’s actually the only utility from both the Jalis and Mallyx set that has any sort of cooldown.

The weapon skills do have cooldowns, but except that one, the utility/elites don’t. That said, I wouldn’t panic yet. This is a very early, pre-beta build. Energy regeneration and costs are going to be tinkered with, as are the traits. I mean, the one trait of “stun break when swapping legends” is stupidly broken as is, given that it also removes activation time for legend swapping and there is no cooldown on legend swapping either, meaning it’s a constantly available stun break. Internal cooldowns will be added to most of the traits, energy regeneration will be dropped across the board, and the class will become more balanced by the time the game sees release.

It’s not an armour skin, it’s the Vestments of the Lich outfit.

Even the Wiki isn’t coming through for me here, so I’m going to post this in the hopes that the community can.

A while back during one of my rare incursions into World vs. World, I found myself in possession of a Steal skill that wasn’t familiar to me. It took me a while to realize that it was from a Warrior that I’d used Steal on while underwater, during a fight to defend Bay. The skill, whose name I forget (and isn’t listed under Steal on the Wiki, even from NPCs), was essentially Eviscerate. I saved it for a while to show off to other people by linking it, then used it when capturing a tower to deal five digit damage on the poor champion.

Of course, that got me thinking. Is Warrior/Whirling Axe the only Steal skill that isn’t usable underwater and thus gets replaced? Most of the others seem like they’d work fine underwater, except maybe Healing Seed. Has anyone done any tests on this? Are there other professions that give different returns on Steal when you use it underwater against them? If anyone has the connections across multiple servers needed to pop down to Bay and test this out, that would be much appreciate to assuage my curiosity!

This would be a lot easier to test if Raid on the Capricorn was still a thing…

Aidan Savage.2078:

Also, that’s IF defiance applies to status effects, which Taunt is.

Defiance applies to status effects. ‘Stun’ and ‘Daze’ are status effects, are they not? They certainly aren’t conditions.

Teragriff trails are meant to stop ranged attacks. They absorb projectiles.

HenleyLegoMan.4987:

I’d like sensible replies, none that state I should go do event to open them because I don’t recall having to do this for any other part of LS.

You have a short memory then, because back in Episode 3 there were a lot of open world events that had to be done for the Living Story. Several in Iron Marches to learn about Mordrem, an event chain in Frostgorge Sound to prove yourself to the Norn, and then the relic collection throughout Ascalon for Rytlock. All of those steps involve doing open world events.

While the Frostgorge event chain from that episode might prove tricky to solo, the single event to open the Skritt tunnels in Silverwastes can be soloed quite easily. It’s an event you need to do in order to obtain Carapace Boots, anyway, so having the game nudge you in that direction is a good thing if you want to complete that armour set.

Torsailr.8456:

All jumping puzzle and open world reward chests have 2-9 empyreal fragments in them. I don’t believe if there’s any further breakdown based on location or difficulty.

It does break down more than that. Some jumping puzzles only give 2-4 Empyreal Fragments, while other jumping puzzles give 6-9 Empyreal Fragments. There are none that give 5.

All four JPs in Caledon Forest give 6-9 Fragments. In Lion’s Arch, Urmaug’s Secret gives 2-4, but the pirate JP gives 6-9.