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Luminiferous" achievement?


acapela.8215

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I am trying to do this achievement.

I enter one of the jumping puzzles, start the beam pulsing, proceed to incrementally arrange the mirrors, then someone enters behind me and either disables the pulsing beam or disarranges one or more of the mirrors, seemingly just out of curiosity (and in ignorance that someone may be trying to do something with the relevant mechanisms). I have to start all over again. Part way through, the process repeats with someone new. Then I have to start all over again. This is even when I am doing this on a map that is in the process of closing. There are still enough people on the map to destroy my runs, repeatedly.

Hours into this circus, it has become a kind of water torture, or sleep deprivation.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Or am I just doomed to rinse/repeat this until I somehow "get lucky" and complete each one (there are 11 jumping puzzles for the achievement) before someone yanks it out from under me?

Any help appreciated.

Update: on top of that, I finally finished "Lighting the Hidden Tower", collected all 3 of the small chests, received credit for each of them... and then the main/large chest needed for the "Luminiferous" achievement did not spawn. So, I will have to wait for server reset, and try the "Hidden Tower" again.

Final update: first full run of "Hidden Tower" was bugged. Changed maps, let the server reset, did it all again (much more quickly, I had done each segment before), picked up each of the small chests, and the final big chest spawned.

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Perhaps I am mistaken then. But even when I did not fall from the jumping puzzle, the light pulse would stop, I would turn around and see another player standing next to the last mirror, which was disarranged. Awfully suspicious.

I will watch more carefully to see what happens when I fall from the jumping puzzle, and how far away from the seegment of the jumping puzzle I am working on I have to go to get back onto the track.

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Attempting "Lighting the Way" (one of the stages of the Luminiferous" achievement), which takes you all around Bjora Marches West, through the tunnel to Aberrant Forest, and then around Bjora Marches East... the light pulses simply ceased a significant way through (I was well into Bjora Marches East when they ceased).

(However, the fact is, in attempting these achievements I have observed the light pulses to cease almost immediately, for instance between the emitter and the first mirror, or between the first and second mirrors, etc, which suggests either the environment can interfere with emitter/mirrors, the game is sensitive to the player's route from mirror to mirror, there are defects in this emitter/mirror mechanism, or any combination.)

I see no timer on my condition bar, nor any other indication of a time limit. On "Lighting the Way" I was indeed going slowly, pausing regularly to refer to video guide on YouTube. Perhaps it is expected that the player repeat the process as many times as necessary to learn the route and mirror settings by rote, so the player can proceed from one mirror to another without pausing (such as to view a guide)?

Given the length of some of these routes, how long it takes simply to traverse the routes mirror to mirror, plus the aggregate time it takes simply to turn mirrors, much less the apparent requirement to know route/mirror orientation in advance, putting the player on a time limit (or allowing anything to fiddle with the emitter or the mirrors while the player is en-route), just generally, and especially without any sort of timer display... all I can say is: "bleah!"

So, I am going to abandon Shadow in the Ice specifically, and Guild Wars 2 generally, for a while. "Luminiferous", combined with the "Party Guardian" achievement (in which targets would spawn and be killed before the majority of the players on the map could even arrive, or for which often no spawn notification was ever provided), all of which I have tried to rush in just a couple of play sessions, and all of which are IMO evidence of less than stellar game design, has resulted in a very high frustration level. Avoiding the whole game for a week or so sounds like a GREAT idea.

(When I resume "Luminiferous", I am going to follow whatever route is indicated "intuitively" by the path of the light pulses, and I am going to assume only one orientation of each mirror is relevant and that all other orientations "swallow"/fail to propagate the light pulse... this should allow me to skip referring to a guide, at least on outdoor puzzles with long sight-lines like "Lighting the Way", and should hopefully speed things up.)

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Lights and mirrors do have a timer. If you take too long, the light stops pulsing and/or mirrors reset. It's been that way from the release of the first episode. I've had to redo several light puzzles both during the first episode and of the new ones released because I lost too much time trying to figure out where the next mirror is.

Fortunately if you redo it immediately you're likely to remember where you went wrong last time and can save enough time to get through. At least I haven't been stuck badly enough to even think of needing a guide for this, the light pulses and the sounds the mirrors make (the right orientation has a different sound for each reflected pulse than the wrong orientations have for each blocked light pulse) are easily followed in my experience.

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The raven gates and portals are serverwide. The light activation and mirrors are client side. However, I have suffered from bizarre desynch issues with this release. I have completed the raven puzzle, got the chests, but the final chest wouldn't open. Its been causing interesting issues like letting me open the chests even though I shouldn't be done. Relogging the character fixed it but had to start over.

I don't think its entirely the fault of players on this one.

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I have attempted 2 of the light puzzles in the new part of Bjora Marches and both times I opened the final chest, but neither time did it give me credit under the luminiferous achievement list. The first time I thought I didn't get credit because I fell off a plank and died and had to run back, but the chest was still there when I got back and I was able to open it. The second time I didn't die and opened the chest again - in a different light puzzle - but still didn't get credit. I did all the ones in the original part of Bjora Marches OK and got credit for them all, and it did transfer them across to the luminiferous achievement, but I can't seem to get credit for any of the ones in the new part of the map, or at least the ones I have tried, anyway. Do you have to open all the norn chests as well as the final chest to get credit, because I might have missed one or two of those? I thought the main thing was to open the final chest, so I didn't worry too much about the norn chests.

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@Xarfax.7192 said:I have attempted 2 of the light puzzles in the new part of Bjora Marches and both times I opened the final chest, but neither time did it give me credit under the luminiferous achievement list.Several of the new light puzzles (specifically the ones inside caves/buildings/ruins) consist of two shrines/light sources (and in the case of the tower even three). They don't count as completed unless you have lighted both/all three shrines. You will notice you have finished the whole package when a text notification appears on screen and a large (I think) essence chest pops up in addition to the small shrine chests.

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Thanks to everyone for their comments.

So, I finally finished this on one of my two accounts (I expect the second account to go much more quickly). The basic strategy of ignoring whatever guide you are using for reference, and just following the light pulses and positioning mirrors empirically until they reflect the pulses was generally sound. However, with most of the indoor puzzles simply following the pulses is not feasible. The route through the indoor environments is generally discontinuous (Raven Gates, jumping/climbing/falling, backtracking... in general pathing through a "labyrinth"), so for the complete neophyte, referring to a guide is probably advisable.

At this point, I do agree that the basic premise of my original post was incorrect, and the other posters are correct: other players cannot interfere with light puzzles in progress. Each player is given a private "state" throughout for these light puzzles, and can proceed through them without interference.

However, the puzzles do indeed time out. As well, I have noticed the occasional mirror (always in the middle of the puzzle, including the mirror I most recently positioned... this appeared to be random) resetting before the rest of the puzzle times out (I assume this is an intermittent bug of some sort). As well, at least one of the outdoor puzzles passes through a Raven Barrier, which timed out relatively rapidly (much more rapidly than the mirrors do), reactivated, and blocked the passage of the light pulses; this required me to backtrack and re-open the Barrier; fortunately this was close to the finish of the puzzle, and I was well within the global timeout for that puzzle as a whole, so I did not have to re-start the whole thing. You only need one pulse to strike the little shrine at the end of the puzzle.

Consistent with other players' experience, I also experienced problems with chests. For instance, in the Tower puzzle (3-part, indoors), I completed each of the sub-puzzles and collected their individual chests, presumably within the timeout for each sub-puzzle. But the final large chest did not spawn. I assume this is another form of timeout (each of the 3 sub-puzzles had their own timeouts, which I did not violate, but I took too long to complete all 3 sub-puzzles within some sort of timeout for the Tower as a whole, and so did not receive the final/global reward, which includes achievement credit as well as the large chest). I re-did the Tower (all 3 sub-puzzles, which were still pretty fresh in memory) from the beginning, and the final large chest did ultimately spawn.

Finally, part of "Luminiferous" consists of the puzzles in Bjora Marches East originally contained in "Luminary", plus the "Luminary" meta-achievement itself (though some of these puzzles are named differently in "Luminiferous" versus "Luminary", which could be confusing if you are extremely literal-minded, like I am). In working the Bjora Marches East puzzles comprising "Luminary" (which I had not yet done), I received credit for each of them under both "Luminiferous" and "Luminary" simultaneously, but upon overall completion, and after receiving credit for "Luminary" in itself, I did not receive credit under "Luminiferous" for completing "Luminary". After a moment of panic (and a bit of outrage... what, ANOTHER bug!?!), I decided to try relogging, and this did the trick. Everything completed, I was awarded that pesky mastery point, and went away happy.

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I'm glad you got it done, hurray! Question, were you working on all this without a skyscale? I know it's doable without one. But with one, it really is as simple as following the light and turning the mirrors. There's never any puzzle aspect, you don't have to suss out which angle to use or pick the correct path out of a few choices. The light either screeches to a halt or bounces off to the next mirror. (Or bugs out and crashes midair right after the mirror bounce, which is the only issue I've run into with these). Things timed out once or twice but it felt more like a bug than an actual puzzle timer.

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@acapela.8215 said:Consistent with other players' experience, I also experienced problems with chests. For instance, in the Tower puzzle (3-part, indoors), I completed each of the sub-puzzles and collected their individual chests, presumably within the timeout for each sub-puzzle. But the final large chest did not spawn. I assume this is another form of timeout (each of the 3 sub-puzzles had their own timeouts, which I did not violate, but I took too long to complete all 3 sub-puzzles within some sort of timeout for the Tower as a whole, and so did not receive the final/global reward, which includes achievement credit as well as the large chest). I re-did the Tower (all 3 sub-puzzles, which were still pretty fresh in memory) from the beginning, and the final large chest did ultimately spawn.

I noticed the same. I think it was the tower one, not 100% sure.

Also in one of the new puzzles you can mount which makes it trivial while in others you can't mount. It seemed like a bug to me.

Anyway I like the new puzzles. Like short, simple and more forgiving jumping puzzles. Better than the last ones where you just rushed through the map in a straight line which was quite tedious. Would like more of these and some with a bit more puzzle elements and not to strict on the timers.

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