Epic Conclusion to Janthir Wilds

Not long after yesterday's post, I finished the Janthir Wilds main story quest. I've been working through Everything Else since then.

⚠️⚠️⚠️ This post contains spoilers for Janthir Wilds. Proceed at your own risk! ⚠️⚠️⚠️

Epic Conclusion

I am being facetious; there was no epic conclusion to JW. The story ends as modern GW2 stories often end: abruptly.

We faced down a pair of titans, kicked their ass, and their mom had to step in and prevent us from murdering them. She advises that both sides withdraw, and we take the opportunity to return to bear city and debrief.

Waiting Sorrow returns to the Wizard's Tower, to Dadga's relief and Isgarren's irritation. Waiting Sorrow and Isgarren throw us all out so they can talk about why there are suddenly titans showing up in Janthir.

And that's the end. It's very unsatisfying. It feels like we just got through the introductions -- the actual big bad has been revealed -- and then we're out of runway.

With SotO, we at least managed to hold Amnytas and recover Isgarren by the end. The Kryptis invasion and Zojja both remained unresolved, but it felt like we'd achieved something.

They managed to not kill off any of the new characters: Waiting Sorrow, Stoic Alder, and Poised Arrow. I guess that's something.

What's Next

If we're going to wrap this story up in anything approaching a satisfying way, we're gunna need help, and a lot of it. I hope Malice deploys her legion to the isles; right now, we don't know anything about Momma Titan. If we cover Janthir in Ash Legion, we should have an idea of what her deal is and what's going on with the mursaat city.

It may be interesting if we're able to open negotiations with Momma Titan. Her kids were arrogant, monologuing, mustache-twirling villians. But she was intelligent and understood Tyrians, or at least understood the tactical situation. And they do seem hell-bent on redemption arcs for monsters...

I'm hoping they do not attempt to shove Bangar's trial and the Khan-ur stuff into one of the JW story updates. I think they'll need all the remaining time to make this titan/mursaat story into something.

Homestead

I've been working on achivements, but I have some ideas for the homestead now. I'm gunna set up a gazebo around the planters at the entrance.

One of the big challenges with decorating is that I don't know what decorations to make. The handiwork recipes don't have previews. I tried using some wall segments and I was shocked by how thick they were -- so I think my strategy needs to be "build one of everything and try placing it", to give me a sense of what's what.

The collection boxes are a big time-saver¹. I liked getting all the resources, but harvesting all of those nodes everyday had gotten to be a huge drag.

Wiki

As I go through all the story/zone achivements, I'm trying to find ways to contribute to the wiki. I'm not a regular contributor, but I am qualified to operate MediaWiki, so I'm able to get some rough stuff in there.

I found a neat book about Mabon in the last story instance. I figure the data entry for all of the books has to suck, so I stopped and made a page for it, and the other note in the instance.

As an aside: does anybody know what organization the book is talking about? The book says "the Shroud", and Livia was a member, but that's not ringing any bells. Is that something new?

But: even if I'm not doing the article's infobox perfectly, it's probably way easier for a regular editor to make a few adjustments to the page for consistency's sake, than to go get in the right instance and key all the text in from scratch.

It takes a village to build a wiki. If you're looking for something to contribute: it needs lots of screenshots and locations for the collections!