Rhansem.4865

All the runes will remain but not all 6th tier bonuses will be there at launch. There is an old FAQ forum post.

They announced this multiple months ago. People have had plenty of time to finish out a full 28-day log in cycle before the change. New Rewards in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure – GuildWars2.com

I had the same problem, it's a bug. The map reset after I scanned the last haze spot and I didn't get the next story step before being forced to reload the map. I restarted the chapter and it worked fine without being interrupted by the map reset. You should be getting a new step to the story immediately after the dialogue. If you can't wait for a patch just restart the story.

Not like the participation thing. I mean that players drop loot bags but those loot bags can only be obtained every x minutes and the time gate is on the player doing the killing. So it doesn't matter if you keep killing the same person or many different people you can only get a loot drop after your cooldown has expired. Essentially an effort to bring the minimum and maximum loot for killing players to the same value independent of the size of the conflict, instead reward regular frequency of conflict.

A system much like the current scavenger bags could work. Time gate the drops and improve them to compensate for the reduction in frequency. A good roamer will get individual kills as often as a zerg will kill another zerg putting the rate of getting rewards the same. A support will also tag a couple people in a zerg fight too solving the issue of not getting the same rewards.

They got turned off at almost end of work day for their studio. Give the devs some time to live their lives between updates. We were warned that they were live testing the system so expect this. Also, the way it was operating was encouraging match manipulation, people were jumping on alt accounts to treb smc so their main account could farm defence rewards. Should mean just upping the requirements to qualify for a defence, but they could be taking a moment to see other areas they didn't realize would be abused so hard and fix those before having it go live again. They want this to encourage fun player behaviour, not bannable player behaviour.

Li's slash needs to be dodged so getting practice just standing out there and dodging it will help you survive the encounter. There are two ways to time your dodge, either when your circle is half full or when the visual indicator on the ground for the slash goes away. Many times I run into people bringing their damage circle into the safe zone so getting used to just dodging the slash every time lets you avoid that damage when faced with needing to run out to the slash zone. Also, the green circle will always be on a player. This green circle will follow them around. That is why it was out in the slash zone, a player brought it there. It is another reason why the green circle should be focused because if ignored it will just down the player it is on. I will often see the person with the green circle quite far from the group so I will leave the safe zone even though I don't have a circle, dodge the slash, and then be close enough to help with the green circle. The encounter always has the same sequence of slash -> circles explode -> green circle explodes.