Kill Variety in Plains of Ashford: A Beginner's Guide, With Photographs: GW2

In a comment on one of Ravious's posts over at Kill Ten Rats a while back I claimed it was possible to get all thirteen kills for GW2's Kill Variety Daily in the very first starting area of Plains of Ashford. I also said I'd take screenshots to prove it. It is, and I have.

Since a couple of the creatures can't always be relied upon to be hanging around waiting for you to kill them at need you'll probably prefer to take a few steps just outside the Smokestead gate to the very beginning of the Old Duke's Estate just to save time. I have checked, though, and you can get both the Moa and Harpy kills while standing behind the gate itself, so they count!

It's also very easy to do Daily Events here and I may do a separate pictorial guide to that at some point. For Daily Healer you'll find plenty of Fishers lying down on the job at Lake Feritas and the Armory and Scrapyard events leave flattened charr NPCs strewn all over just waiting for you to soothe them back to life. Gatherer is possible, although its not the easiest place to do it. Kill Count you can do anywhere, of course, and I guess you could Dodge something here although I haven't tried. Crafting and the Laurel Vendor can be done in Black Citadel, which sort of counts, maybe, but for Aquatic and Veteran Kills I'm afraid you'll have to just hike up your robe and travel a few hundred yards into Plains of Ashford proper.

And with that, here's the guide:

1. Wurms

You'll see these ubiquitous little pests as soon as you come down the ramp from The Black Citadel.

2. Rats

In Plains of Ashford you're never more than a few feet from a rat. The Scrapyard teems with them.

3. Flame Legion

The Flame Legion aren't too bright but there sure are a lot of them. They make repeated attempts on both the Armory and the Scrapyard and hole up in caves to the North and East of the lake. Don't worry if you can't find them; they'll come find you.

4. Ghosts

Thanks to the legacy of the Foefire, nowhere in Plains of Ashford is entirely free of ghosts, although the infestation here is mild. Try along the west side of Lake Feritas or up on the ridge near the tunnel to Martyr's Wood.

5. Oozes

Lurking at the back of the Scrapyard (or wrecking yard if you prefer) you'll find plenty of these bile green gloops. Wear a rubber apron.

6. Hyenas

Don't bother him, he won't bother you. Hyenas pad quietly through the scrub in front of Black Citadel and around the lake.

7. Devourers

Devourers are the dominant predator throughout much of Ascalon. Charr have a strange relationships with these oversized scorpions, training them as warbeasts and developing an unlikely fondness for them as pets. You can scarcely go a yard here without stumbling over a lashtail. Fortunately these specimens are extremely docile.

8. Bats

There are three exits from the starting area of Plains of Ashford. The obvious and safe exit is the big metal walkway going south-east from Smokestead. The other two are both tunnels, one behind Smokestead itself and the other going from the eastern ridge through to Martyr's Woods. Both tunnels are infested with vampire bats. Be wary of them. They are probably the toughest non-veteran creatures in the area and two at a time can kill you.

9. Skritt

Now we're getting a little more obscure. I'd spent a long time in the Charr training area before I came across the Skritt. They live in a small cave behind Tela Range, where charr learn to fire cannons. Some unfathomable Skritt logic leads the little charmers to steal the cannonballs from time time triggering an event but there's no need to wait for that. Just pop one for your daily and do the skill point while you're up there if it's your first visit.

10. Flame Elementals

These flame elementals are easy to miss. They appear only when you destroy the Flame Legion braziers that line the paths up to the caves to the north of the lake. Moreover, once you have filled out Latera Painstorm's Heart you can no longer target the braziers so you're reliant on someone else to fan the flames.

11. Spiders

Remember when I said earlier that there are three ways out of the starting area? I lied. There are four. It's just that no-one in their right mind would use one of them. If you fight your way right through Facula Castrum, the north-west flame legion cave where the shaman appears for an event, you'll come to a tunnel. It goes to the extreme north of Martyr's Woods and it's full of spiders. Enjoy.

12. Tar Elementals

This is an old photo from beta. I waited for over an hour trying to get a shot of the tar elementals that spawn for an event in Lake Feritas. No luck. If they happen to be up, pop one. If not, don't fret. Plenty of other things to murder instead.

13. Moas

Like the good old Moa, for example. For these you have to step just outside the Smokestead gate, where you'll see a pack (herd? flock?) of them careening up and down in that mindless way they have.

I'm not sure why the kill variety requirement was reduced from the elegant fifteen to the rather awkward thirteen. Just in case it ever reverts, never fear! You can still finish it here, although you will have to take just a few paces out into the wider Plains.

14. Harpies

Harpies swoop in for an event that runs regularly even with no player involvement. It takes place immediately to the left of the Smokestead gate as you leave it, right where the mortars are.

15. Marmox

And no, I don't know what the plural of "Marmox" is. For some reason, this lumbering, armored rhino is level ten in an area where everything else, including you, is level six or seven. You might well decide he's not worth the trouble and go further into Ashford for grawl, wargs, bears or minotaurs, just to name a few.

If anyone knows of anything else lurking in the area that counts, please chirp up in the comments and if I can get a photo of it I'll add it in.

RIP ROE : Rubies of Eventide

Today, Justin "Syp" Olivetti covered one of my favorite MMOs of all time in his Game Archeologist column over at Massively.

Rubies of Eventide was a charming, quirky, delightful game that embodied many of the things I most desire in an MMO. An open world that begged to be explored, a wide range of things to do beyond mass slaughter and best of all, unimpeachable internal logic.

It's that consistency of imagination that turns a three-dimensional game into a convincing virtual world. True, the entire world of Rubies of Eventide would fit inside a county the size of Rutland but it felt more like a real place than MMOs a hundred times its size.

I played RoE many times, on and off, over its six-year run. I struggled through beta, when my PC found Rubies far more of a challenge to render than Everquest. Mrs Bhagpuss and I enjoyed a solid run there for several weeks once, establishing some fairly well-developed characters that were later lost in a server merge that happened unbeknownst to us. The character in the screenshot at the top is the Dwarf I made to start over again after that unpleasant surprise.

I never played as much Rubies as I'd like to have done. It was a game I thought I'd always come back to but seldom did. The odd late-night session, an hour or two when my MMO du jour was patching. Then one day I got the urge, went to log in and found it gone.

From what I read on the forums the original and current owner has put the source code out of reach and intends to keep it that way. It's a crying shame. Even today, Rubies of Eventide has more to offer than most MMOs, at least in the things it did best. Maybe one day it will return. I doubt it but then, who ever though we'd see AC2 again?

Gathering Storm, Light Drizzle To Follow : GW2

February tends towards the dismal; the cold, wet stub of winter, with neither January's crisp bite nor March's fresh clarity. It's just the time when you feel the need for something filling, substantial.

Why, look! What's this? It's the February update for Guild Wars 2. Think that'll do the job? Set the fires roaring? Drive out the damp?

Well, hardly.

WvW 

First off, there's a bit missing. A big bit. The WvW revamp fell off. Along with the wheels, some might say. J3w3l at Healing the Masses has an entertaining rant on that. At least we get some sketchy details in the "look what you could have won" section of Colin Johanson's unapologetic announcement.

All pile on the Lord!

The gist appears to be that WvW is being re-tooled to suit Achiever subtypes with short attention spans. Not really my demographic but it's becoming apparent to me that there are really only two ways that Realm vs Realm combat (as we seem to have gone back to calling it since the reappearance of Mark Jacobs under his Camelot banner) can be made to work and that's one of them.

For Realm-based pvp to hold an audience's attention long-term, something has to matter and the choice comes down to what you own or who you are. The Camelot Unchained model is claiming the former - everything is made by the sweat of your fingertips, from each arrow you fire to the very bricks of the city your guild built. Losing hurts. A lot. It's a model for masochists and gaming's not short of those.

Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, much though in its extreme youth it flirted with the hedonic and courted the lotus-eaters, is fast morphing into an Achiever hive. There's nothing that could be done for the pleasure of doing it that couldn't be improved by giving you a badge when you're done. It's the Baden-Powell school of gaming.

Achievements are all over PvE in GW2 and come the end of February March they'll be all over WvW, too. It's not what I wanted but heaven knows we do need some kind of medium term purpose for being there day after day after day, so I'm willing to give it a shot.

If this is Tuesday it must be Hills

I'm much more firmly on board with the addition of more short-term objectives. I love jumping Sentries and killing Yaks and taking supply camps has yet to stale. It's the long-drawn-out Keep sieges that I'm losing patience with, or rather the repeated taking and re-taking of the same ones. Having a wider range of ad hoc targets sounds good in principle, at least.

This weekend should have seen WvW's Year Zero, of course, the full points reset that would have seen Sorrow's Furnace rise from the depths of T8 to first place in T1. I was quite looking forward to watching it play out, in the morbid way someone lacking empathy might look forward to a natural disaster. The WvW ranking table may well be as full of design flaws as a Dreamliner, but only a heartless theoretician could imagine the way to fix them would be to turn off the engines in mid-flight.

So, it's probably just as well that ANet made a U-Turn instead and flew the good ship WvW back to the safety of the old rankings. As any politician will tell you, though, U-Turns always make you look weak and that's certainly how I read this one. Hearing that they can't get the maths right to improve things so they're just going to leave them as they are hardly inspires confidence, either.

The Gathering Storm

Ominous, isn't it?

Moving on from WvW to what's actually in the February update, we come to the next installment of Flame and Frost. I second The Egg Baron. Someone hold a mirror to the mouth of the "Living Story", I think it might have died. A slow build-up of tension is all very well but this is like watching a glacier. Has anything changed at all in the last week?

Honey, is this yesterday's paper?

For this to work there need to be incremental changes at least every couple of days - I'd say daily. Instead we get the same inane, incoherent, logically inconsistent, unconvincing refugee mummer's play day in, day out, with the prospect in almost three weeks' time of this:

"more refugees hobble down from the Shiverpeaks. The storm there gains momentum, but the forces of good are beginning to rally".

Anyone know why we're here?

Oh goodie. More refugees and our side is "beginning" to think about doing something about it. I can hardly contain my excitement. I really hope this is ANet taking my earlier advice and under-promising. I'll be happy to eat my words and apologize for doubting them when they come through with the second half of that package and over-deliver.

And so on to 

The Rest:

A new PvP map. 

Since I have yet to set foot on a PvP map at all, I scarcely tremble at the prospect of a new one. Still, more maps are always welcome, I guess.

Two Team Rated Play in PvP

Otherwise known as Fair Fights. This might tempt me into PvP, although fear of getting pwned isn't what's stopping me now - that would be lack of interest.

Guild missions 

Mmm, maybe. If they are what The Egg Baron fears, events started by guilds that anyone can hop on to, then that's good. If they are exclusive to guild members, that takes GW2 further down the road I came to it to avoid. More information required. (What I want for guilds are more options of what to do with Guild Influence. There are only three of us in our guild and one of those hardly ever plays and yet we have 23k influence banked. Once we buy the Deep Cave there's nothing left we want).

Choose Your Own Daily Achievements

Not unwelcome, although since I like all the dailies I wasn't exactly clamoring for a change. No, it's the Monthly I have a problem with, not the Daily. Let's get some choice in there so I don't have to go in dungeons and dungeoneers don't have to do WvW.

And that's yer lot. Thin gruel, isn't it? 

Back To Base : DCUO

What would make you log back into an MMO you haven't bothered with for a while? Nostalgia? Bribery? Novelty? Sentiment? Boredom? I don't really do boredom, but any of the rest work on me and in the past week several old favorites have had a try at reeling me in again.

In Guild Wars I was back to check on my Anniversary presents. A couple of months too early as it turns out but my visit wasn't in vain - I found some still unopened  from last year.

My timing was better in Vanguard, where there were 60-slot chests waiting for everyone. Now I just need to rebuild my Qalian beach villa, not to mention the second home we paid subscribers are entitled to under the New Deal. I'm going to rebuild my Thestran hunting lodge. I'll get right on it just as soon as I can work out some means of keeping the rent paid when I only play once in a blue moon.

Can I get an appointment to view?

Most disappointing by far was my return to Argo. It wasn't there. Well, strictly speaking it is there until the first of March, when it closes down for good, but my client no longer patches so I can't log in. Our friends at Allaplaya, gaming subsidiary of everyone's favorite Megacorp PSS1, cry a few crocodile tears as they explain that, hey, no-one was playing Argo anyway and we got these shiny new games like Planetside2 and DCUO that you're rilly gonna love...

Think I'll keep my capes in the top drawer...

I'm very happy to say it appears Argo isn't vanishing altogether. It's a quirky, likeable MMO as I wrote a while back and one that I definitely wasn't done with. Like NeoSteam, another MMO I still miss, Argo will carry on in its homeland but as was sadly not the case for NeoSteam, it looks likely that Argo's new provider will make it available to all, no matter where in the world they happen to log in from.

It's my tail. Wanna make something of it?

I'll just have to try and make the effort to play it this time, before it does finally disappear for good. MMOs are odd beasts. Sometimes it's "use it or lose it" as it was for The Matrix Online or Lego Universe; other times worlds roll on seemingly forever despite the apparent lack of interest. It would be unkind to name names. If there's an old favorite you haven't visited since, well, you can't remember when, probably best not to leave it too long. Things are getting rough out there.

A Hero casts no shadow

The fourth in my flurry of re-visits certainly doesn't look to be in any danger of folding its tent right now. DCUO was a game that most observers felt had launched with the wrong payment model and it duly floundered as a subscription title. A deft F2P conversion, combined with server mergers that appear to have done what server mergers should, namely stabilize and concentrate the population, seem to have left the game in a good place.

As it happens, I do have a subscription. Rather, I have SOE's All Access which, along with the merciful removal of the mandatory PSS1 requirement (yes, them again), means I can slip into my cape any time I fancy. It also means that , as a Legendary member, I don't have to pay extra for the recent Home Turf DLC, which brings instanced housing in the form of lairs and bases. Of course, I only found that out after I'd wasted ten minutes fiddling with the Station Store trying to figure out how to buy it. Sometimes you just can't give your money away.

Table - check. Chandelier - check. Mirror - hmm, I got a clock.

I wasted a further fifteen minutes running through the tutorial on a new character. The only two characters I have in DCUO, a level 19 hero and a level 11 villain, are on a PvP server and much though I enjoyed the mayhem while I was playing regularly, for infrequent pleasure trips I really would like to be able to fly around gawping at Metropolis without three or four level 30 muscleboys introducing my face to the sidewalk every five minutes.


What I didn't notice was that you have to be level 12 before you get the mission that gives you your base. If I'd paid attention to Tipa I'd have know that. So, now I have a homeless level 3 Hero on a PvE server and level 19 on a PvP server who's too nervous to leave his  Art Deco lair.

I could get a bowling alley in here

At least his new base looks great. There's a lot of space, several floors, big windows (pity you can't see out), huge potential. I placed my three free pieces of furniture, which was quite the flashback to EQ2 circa 2005. I checked the broker to see what I could buy but it seems things you'd be embarrassed to throw in a skip go for six figures and my total fortune in DCUO is about $5k. I just hope the minimalist look is still in in Metropolis.

Do you take pocket lint? It's all I got.

The best thing was that I immediately remembered just how much I like DCUO. And a couple of fights reminded me just how bad I am at playing it. My "skills" will come back to me, I'm sure. I hope so because I need to do some Alerts so I can steal confiscate a sofa or two. Although judging by general chat I'd better brush up on my Russian or my Turkish before I join any groups. This on a North American server, I should add.

A Sunday Morning Stroll Through Orr: GW2

Since Monday's update I've been meaning to take a trip down to Orr. I hear it got a makeover. Adjusted population density, improved loot, reduced crowd-control abilities and new animations for the Risen, the works. Probably trimmed Zhaitan's claws while they were about it, keep the old boy looking fresh.

Sometimes changes like this don't quite come across but I'd heard good things. Jeromai at Why I Game was waxing positively lyrical. The first time I ever went to Orr (and how long ago that seems) was on a Sunday morning, so with some symmetry I woke up the same character who made that journey, my ranger, and sent him off to do what rangers do best; explore! (Quiet in the back there!).

I took the waypoint express to Signal Peak at the easternmost tip of Orr's most northerly promontory and from there I meandered all the way down to Shipwreck Rock, which is the furthest south you can go. Took me about four hours.

The three maps known collectively as "Orr" are Straits of Devestation, Malchor's Leap and Cursed Shore. Straits begins as lush swampland and ends in bare, brown rock. Malchor's Leap is a weird, ghostlike, ruinous landscape. Cursed Shore looks like it sounds. The northern end of Straits is relatively normal but the further south you go, the fewer living things you meet. By the time you get to Cursed Shore about the only things left alive are players and The Pact.

All the colors of the rainbow, in oils

It's been so long since I last went to Orr, for reasons I outlined all the way back in October, it was hard to tell if anything had changed. Truth told, I barely remember the place other than to recall that while I didn't outright hate it I did find it wearing. Back then I summed it up as "laborious, unattractive and somewhat dull".

Well, it made a better impression this time. The northern half of Straits of Devestation almost seemed like a pleasant place for a picnic. Whole areas had no aggressive mobs at all, just harmless, flittering insects and grazing herbivores.

A bridge too far?

That all changed once I crossed Compass Bridge to the Shark's Teeth Archipelago. From there on the Risen undead start to swarm, although nowhere near as thickly as they used to do. I remember having some considerable difficulty on this stretch of the journey last time, as evidenced by the skill points left undone. This time I wasn't just able to fill those out, I even completed a longish escort event flagged for "Group" almost entirely solo. Ok, a couple of people joined in for a while as they passed through but pffft! Pretty much did it all on my own.

Orr just makes me feel blue...

Straits gets a thumbs up and I'll certainly be going there again to have a good poke around but then it was always the most accessible of the three. Malchor's Leap, however, seemed just as bad as I remembered it. Lot of undead chickens, everything painted purple or midnight blue and crowds of Risen blocking every possible path. If there's anywhere in Tyria I dislike more I can't bring it to mind right at the moment and if it's gotten any better with this polish pass then I couldn't spot it. I didn't hang around long. After a couple of failed events and less than half an hour I put my murrellow on passive and ran for the border.

Wow, you just shot up since last I saw you!

So it was that I came at last to Cursed Shore and my, how it's changed. Fewer undead, better map markers. That about sums it up. The roads are clear enough to travel and the undead grew a lot bigger, which means they not only look more interesting, they're a darn sight easier to see.

Malchor's aside, then, all in all I felt it was a much improved experience. Whether its sufficiently improved to merit regular visits, that's another question entirely. I enjoyed my day out and with more time to stop and look around in relative peace it's easier to see that the same exquisite care and attention to detail has been taken in Cursed Shore as on any other of GW2's gorgeous environments. It's still almost all undead all the time, though, which still wears out its welcome after an hour or two. And its still mostly purple, except where it's brown.

While I was down there I took a punt on one of the new Orrian Jewellery Boxes. Had I looked at Dulfy's guide beforehand I probably would have saved my Karma, but hey, what else do I have to spend it on? I spent 4550 karma on my Jewellery Box and inside I found three drops of liquid karma worth a total of 1200 points and three pieces of nameless junk that sold for fifty copper each. Shan't be doing that again.

Still, what kind of a Sunday stroll would it be without a few coins thrown away on ice cream and buns, eh?

The Sky Is Falling! : GW2

Pai was ranting, quite rightly, about misleading CGI trailers for MMOs.  I feel the same way about over-excited press releases. It's "under-promise, over-deliver", guys! You're all getting it the wrong way round!

The opening of the first installment of GW2's new Living Story had hundreds of players running around Wayfarer's Foothills asking each other in Map chat "Where's the Event?". Being told that they were standing in the middle of it did little to calm an increasing atmosphere of irritation and disappointment.

To quote the Press Release:

"The sky falls and the ground shakes in the lands of the north. Charr and norn refugees crawl from the wreckage of their homes in the Wayfarer Foothills and Diessa Plateau, struggling to find shelter in the south. The call goes out for volunteers to assist the victims in this time of need, when earth and sky seem to have become the enemy…"

No it doesn't! No they don't! The earth and the sky are just the same as they always were except for some sporadic, localized blizzards, handily placed out of anyone's way. The refugees are walking along the same paths we've all been using, the ones that pass by the same lodges and settlements that are carrying on the same business they've been carrying on for months.

Exactly which homes have been wrecked? If the refugees are struggling to find shelter, why don't they stop in that big lodge over there where they have more ale than they know what to do with? Or maybe just nip across the border to Diessa and warm up with a beer and half a roast ox at Meatoberfest?

I begin to lose patience with Map chat

Why die of cold and exhaustion in the snow when not fifty yards away happy, laughing, joking Norns are drinking beer by a massive fire? Did anyone think this through? Doesn't look like it.

Bobby Stein, an ANet developer, eventually popped up on the forums to clarify:

"The Flame and Frost story content progresses over time. You will not see everything today, tomorrow, or even the next day. Expect subtle changes at first." 

Fine. I'm more than happy with that. It's a good approach. It might have worked better if you'd said that in the Press Release so we were out there looking for small, incremental, unspectacular changes, not The Apocalypse as advertised.

MMO players are horribly impatient these days and very hard to satisfy, let alone impress. Under-promise, over-deliver and you're in with a shot. Maybe someone'll try it one day.

Sitting On My Laurels: GW2

"Flame and Frost: Prelude" GW2's elegaically-named January update arrived last night. ArenaNet tell us it's the smaller of the two updates they're working on at the moment and if that's true then February's must be a real monster.

The official Press Release gives the flavor, the forums have the Patch Notes and Dulfy has the detail. What I have is a few hours of puttering about and a lot of unanswered questions.

It's quiet. Too quiet...

As soon as we logged back in Mrs Bhagpuss and I set off like a pair of hyperactive Kate Adies, charging past the incoming refugees to gawp at whatever dangers they might be fleeing. Except... what refugees? There were none. All through Wayfarer Foothills and Diessa Plateau Norns and Charr continued their obsessive beef&beverage-based activities amid the usual small wars.

Prelude to nothing yet, then, and as I write this early afternoon of the following day, to nothing still. No sign, either, of the Heralds that

"will begin appearing in cities across Tyria shortly after the January 28th update to keep adventurers apprised of the events currently underway that are driving the Living Story forward"

Depends how you define "shortly" I guess. Probably means the same as "Soon". Although:

"Persistent world content related to the story of the refugees has been added to Wayfarer Foothills, Diessa Plateau, the Black Citadel, and Hoelbrak."  

Past tense, not future.

But then, time is out of joint in Tyria. It must be because although we couldn't find any refugees we did finish two dailies in a single day. After months of pleasurable permanence the familiar Daily routine got a hefty shake-up yesterday. From now on we should see a different set of tasks each day, with a handy checklist in the top-right corner of the screen. I'm not entirely clear yet on how these will rotate; whether it's seven sets, a randomized five from a pool, made up on a whim by a bored Dev or what. Time will tell.

Last night's set included 25 underwater kills, which I was happy to see since I had, not fifteen minutes earlier, bought both a Rare Spear and Speargun on the Trading Post for cheap and was itching to try them out. The requirement to complete ten Combos with an Ally was more problematic. Much conversation ensued, both between me and Mrs Bhagpuss and the general population of Diessa Plateau as everyone tried to remember what a Combo was and argued about who counted as an "Ally".
 

Timing. It's all in the timing.

That one took a long time and it was never really clear what gave an update and what didn't, but it got done in the end. All that was left was to craft ten Green Wood Planks and the first of what I expect will be many Laurels was mine.

Laurels? Oh, they're the new currency. We seem to get a new currency every month. Unlike Ugly Socks, though, Laurels look like something worth hanging on to. A Charr going by the unambiguous if unimaginative name of "Laurel Merchant" has appeared next to Craxus the Karma vendor in Fort Marriner and even a brief perusal of his copious stock suggests Laurels are going to be highly worth collecting.

For a start-up business operating out of a wagon he has one hell of a range. I barely know where to begin describing it. Mini-pets, crates of Exotic armor for all classes, superior crafting tools, unidentified dyes, Ascended jewellery, Infusions, it's quicker to list what he doesn't sell. He even sells WvW siege blueprints, although buying those with Laurels would seem to be the equivalent of using £20 notes to start a fire because you fancy a slice of toast.

My name? You don't need to know my name.

There's a good range of prices. There are things you can get for just a day or two's work: boosters for xp, magic find or coin, the crafting tools and suchlike. Less than a week gets you ten dyes or a box with two pieces of Exotic armor. If you want Ascended jewellery you can figure on getting around one piece a month from dailies alone. With five slots to fill, that's not unreasonable, and there's another 10 Laurels for doing the Monthly to shave a month or so off that schedule.

If you want Goedulf or the magnificently-named Chauncey von Snuffles III, an overweight cat wearing a Derby hat and a bow tie who "placed second in the Divinity’s Reach Fanciest Cat competition" it's going to take you a couple of months. Still, why buy a cat when you can be a cat? Top of the shop is the Endless Mystery Cat Tonic, yours for just 100 Laurels.

It's a lot to take in. For now I'm going to keep my Laurels in my pocket. I'd like to see what this Exotic armor looks like, for one thing, not to mention what stats it has. And then there's the "level 78-80" thing. Who wants level 78 Exotic armor, other than a level 78? Then, too, this is just Phase One of the Achievement revamp. There may be other ways to earn Laurels in future.

It's no time to be blowing them on Arrow Carts, that's for sure.