Review: Adventures In Guild Wars 2′s Thaumanova Reactor

I am actually one of the people who voted for Ellen Kiel instead of Gnashblade and most of my reasoning had to do with the Thaumanova Reactor. I had always been curious about what had happened there and wanted to find out what the Inquest was testing. Additionally while the Fall of Abaddon sounding interesting and seemed like it would be neat to see something epic that happened in history, it was also distant history. The explosion at Thaumanova is something that had happened recently and it seemed to me like it might actually have implications into the Living Story. Granted this was back before the reveal of Scarlet so I might not have voted this way if I had known it would just mean more of her.

The Thaumanova Reactor is a story instance in the Fractals of the Mists which sadly can only be accessed once per account unless you find someone who hasn’t gone yet and tag along with them. Additionally the instance is designed for five players and due to the mechanics of some of the rooms it’s not actually possible to solo the story instance. This is a nice departure from some of the past story instances.

When my group first loaded into the instance the first thing we noticed was that we were transformed into Asurans. In general I dislike being turned into the other races because I am pretty particular about how my characters look, but I do have to admit that running around as a pack of Asurans was entertaining. I play a Norn normally so an Asuran is literally the opposite side of the spectrum. On the upside, I am sure getting around the cannon room as a bulky Norn would have been even more gw2 gold .

By the time players arrive at the reactor there are already a quite a few dead Asurans laying around and Scarlet’s minions are popping in through portals. The concept of the instance is pretty simple. Players have to shut down two of three colliders in separate rooms around the reactor. After doing that we see Scarlet and she, once again, ports away right before the explosion leaving us to fight the Thaumanova Anomaly which is some sort of energy being thing. The fight is pretty fun with parts of the floor being destroyed and coming back. It’s mostly a fight requiring awareness. Overall the whole instance is interesting and players who pay attention to the dialogue will learn some cool tidbits.

Leading up to this event, all anyone really knew about what happened at the reactor was the Inquest was studying “chaos energy” and we had no idea what that meant. However, now the situation appears to be a bit different. Here’s a few really important lines.

Scarlet Briar: I told the Inquest chaos energy was a misnomer. Mind you, dragon energy is tricky, so I can see how they flubbed it.
Scarlet Briar: At least they helped identify the network of magical channels that crisscross the globe. That was a breakthrough.
Scarlet Briar: Now we know how NOT to do this kind of research right on an intersection of those channels. Live and learn, right?
Scarlet Briar: That’s progress. Hooray for progress! Ooh, but it’s getting a bit too deadly in here for me. ‘Bye now!
So now we know that chaos energy is dragon energy… which much like chaos energy is a “what the heck is that” sort of thing. My theory is pretty simple. We all know the dragons sort of “eat” magic. I don’t think they destroy magic exactly but consume it and turn it into something else maybe a different form of magic. Maybe the “dragon energy” is whatever the byproduct of this process is. So basically they were testing magical dragon poop…

Then there is the whole business of “magical channels that crisscross the globe” which explains how Scarlet was able to teleport everywhere. But clearly those channels weren’t put there by Scarlet, they already existed and probably serve some purpose. I am beginning to wonder if maybe all of this relates back to Abaddon and magic being split into the different schools through the bloodstones. There’s a lot of potential here for them to take things in a lot of directions and tie in a bunch of lore from Guild Wars back into things which are currently going on.

Since they were using “dragon energy” the Elder Dragons will probably fit back in with all of this Somehow. Before magic was given to the sentient races by Abaddon the only time magic was really around and used aside from by the gods was when the Elder Dragons were awake and at that point it was wild and chaotic. I wonder if part of the reason the gods so tightly controlled magic had less to do with knowing the races would use it to destroy each other and more to do with knowing the Elder Dragons would sense the amount of magic being used and magical artifacts being created increase and once again awake to devour everything. In that sense the Elder Dragons would actually be trying to maintain a certain amount of magical balance in the world… and that would leave us with the Gods fleeing out of self preservation more than trying to protect the world.

There’s so many potential possibilities here and these are really just my first thoughts about it all. What do you guys think about the reveal about the magically channels and the use of dragon energy?