GW2 – Season 3, Episode 6, One Path Ends
738 words.
Apologies for the delay, but my SSD drive failed and caused all manner of random crashing issues for four days. PC problems have a way of pushing all other concerns to the background. Once I finally determined it was the SSD (not so easy, since all tests indicated it was perfectly fine), I installed an older, smaller SSD from an old laptop and reinstalled Windows, so I’ve now got a blank new machine for all intents and purposes. This is the first time I’ve ever seen an SSD fail, but it’s only the third one I’ve ever owned, so I have to conclude they don’t have a very high success rate.
By the way, I probably should have mentioned that all of these posts contain massive spoilers for Living World Season 3. This one probably more than any of the others.
One Path Ends, the last chapter in Living World Season 3, begins with a trip to the temple in Divinity’s Reach, where we find that the Priest of Balthazar is amusingly “drunk on faith” now that Balthazar has returned. Countess Anise speaks some techno-babble about the Eye of Janthir being able to lead us to Balthazar, so we head off to Northern Brisban to find one of Anise’s contacts who also happens to be on the trail of the Eye.
This leads to a White Mantle Hideout and a massive jumping puzzle. The Commander unintentionally voices what we’re all thinking about the Guild Wars 2 story all the time: “Why put your hideout somewhere easy when you can put it up there?” Indeed, why make any part of a story accessible when you can gate it behind arbitrarily difficult challenges?
Then we meet Anise’s contact, Exemplar Kerida, a new character for this chapter whose vocal stylings somewhat resemble Cruella De Vil. She is imprisoned in a Bloodstone trap which is a thinly-disguised brain teaser puzzle. I wasn’t in the mood for a brain teaser so I used the tried-and-true random clicking method, which eventually worked. (I think the actual solution was to click every other anchor point.)
Several fights later we find the Eye of Janthir, and a mini-boss protects herself in another Bloodstone trap mechanic, so then we have to solve the brain teaser puzzle in the middle of a fight. Exemplar Kerida gets caught in another trap, and the Eye floats away. There is also something about “aspects” and Lazarus but I can’t relate it very well because I just plain didn’t understand it.
Obviously the next course of action is to join the Shining Blade, so we go through some super secret oath ritual with Countess Anise and Exemplar Kerida. I think it was so they could tell us more about the Eye of Janthir without breaking their oaths of secrecy. (I don’t understand how that’s in their interests, but okay.) Then we go to the last new map, Siren’s Landing, another part of Orr. Once there, we need to “activate” a series of Reliquaries which basically means completing all the Hearts on the map. Somehow these things are connected but your guess is as good as mine on how.
The last reliquary is Abaddon’s Reliquary, which is apparently where we’re going to find … something. The Eye of Janthir? I honestly don’t know what we’re looking for at this point. In practical terms, we find a bunch more puzzles to solve and some more boss fights, which are at just about the right difficulty for me.
In the last room, Exemplar Kerida reveals she had a secret plan all along, and resurrects Lazarus, presumably the real one, and not the fake one that was really Balthazar. Confused yet? Well, it turns out that Kerida is really Livia, and she has an old grudge against Lazarus. This is apparently something that only people who played Guild Wars 1 will appreciate and understand. The final boss fight goes on for a long time, it has a lot of different mechanics, and there’s a lot of expositional dialog throughout it. For a wonder, I didn’t have much trouble with it.
When it was all over, we learned that most of this entire chapter was a wild goose chase, because Balthazar went to the Crystal Desert. But I guess we got to hang out with a legend from Guild Wars 1 for a while, for whatever that was worth. (To me, not much.)
UPDATE - The Video
Archived Comments
bhagpuss 2017-10-14T17:03:58Z
I wonder how that Priest of Balthazar is feeling now, given the arse he was making of himself…
I’d blanked the Secret Ritual to join The Shining Blade from my mind. I think it may be the single most awful piece of writing in the entire five years of GW2. It was hugely controversial with just about everyone who has even a shred of feeling left for the supposed racial background of their character: humans could mostly handwave away the Death Oath of Loyalty to Divinity’s Reach but for every other race it was utterly unbelievable and for Charr it was openly offensive. As an Asura I took it the way most Asura players seem to have done - as an experiment. Clearly I have absolutely no intention of honoring that pledge and neither would any other Asura. And good luck with getting Norns not to let the cat out of the bag when drunk, and presumably The Pale Tree already knows all about it now from every Sylvari that joined. As for the Charr, at least they’ll bee keeping quiet - if they ever admitted it the Shining Blade wouldn’t need to kill them, they’d be lynched or executed by their own Warband.
Terrible episode, by and large. It’s really only as I read your accounts that I realize just how bad LS3 was. Going through it at the time I was more concerned with the mechanics than the writing but it really is shocking.
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