• Fixed a bug that could prevent Magister Tassi from offering players her Stopped Clock Tower miniquest if they had previously completed a Daily Fractal during Halloween. To ensure stuck players can talk to Tassi, miniquest progress will be reset for all players, but achievement progress will be preserved.
• Fixed a client crash in the Ascent to Madness dungeon when shader quality was set to Low.

I often wonder how many players wouldn't play GW2, if it didn't have such an amazing wiki.

World vs. World

• Fixed an issue that could cause incorrect map queue numbers to be displayed.

I wonder whether this also fixes the two-based array issue in PvE, i. e. when your position is n+1 in a queue of length n.

I probably go Reaper like I used to before EoD. But I still have fond memories from last year, where I was going ham in the labyrinth on my GS-Vindicator. Good times!

PS: Shortbow thief works great in the lab.

Unstoppable Flamethrower/Juggernaut (with a Sigil and Relic of Speed) works, too.

That's not quite the issue I'm having. Of course "not playing the game" solves all issues. The weird and imho disturbing property of the new Open World Legendary Armor is that so far almost all required currencies (Essences from rifts and map/meta currencies form SotO maps only) come from a very, very small fraction of available Open World PvE content as opposed to the other legendary armors, where you pretty much just play the respective game mode (Raiding, WvW, sPvP).

Which means that even when I enjoy playing Open World PvE content, most of the things I do, e. g. other maps, metas or events do not grant any progress towards the armor. I really hope that ArenaNet changes this and greatly increases the variety of contributing Open World activities.

Imagine you would make progress towards the armor regardless of what map or events you do in Open World, maybe even include story instances, strikes and DRMs, but have (weekly/monthly) diminishing returns or limits per map/event/activity so people need to spread out for max efficiency. Pretty much the opposite of what we have now.

exactly one type of content

One very, very, very specific type of content in this case. Also, it's not so much the act of grinding itself which I oppose. I have done my fair share of grinding in MMOs and I can see why this is something one might even enjoy. What I strongly dislike is the you have to do exactly this today/this week, if you don't want to miss out on rewards.

I still would not suggest to hunt outside of the Weekly Rift Hunting Achievements, i. e. 5 x 5 hunts a week, since you are not getting any higher level essences from Tier 1 without it. It looks like TP prices for those motivations are already going down. I still haven't completed my 15 Tier 3 hunts from the special Vault task list and I'm wondering what will happen to Tier 3 Hunts, if more people either complete it or decide to skip it.

They name major game updates different now and changed their size. A mini-expansion like SotO is in fact about the size of 2 Living World episodes. I assume that SotO's (quarterly) major updates will roughly have the size of a 1 Living World episode, but who knows ...

Fixed

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/138197-game-update-notes-september-26-2023/#comment-2002377

• Fixed an issue that allowed players to repeatedly commune with certain places of power across Tyria while holding uncharged quartz crystals.

I found this review of a review (a low effort rant which does not even link to the source) much more painful to watch than the source itself, but maybe "it is very incorrect to think this", too.

In fact I found Peon's video quite interesting and enjoyable to watch. He has a different perspective than me (as a long term player) and I actually agree with a lot of his points or I can at least understand where he's coming from. I don't think he said anything I strongly disagree with which wasn't clearly posed as (just) his opinion which he is of course entitled to have like everybody else.

Isn't the Searing Cauldron Hero Point exactly the one that was bugged for weeks, i. e. didn't work at all? Which would mean their fix was bugged and introduced a possible exploit?

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/137516-broken-hero-challenge-searing-cauldron-iron-marches-merged/#comment-1990719

Broken Hero Challenge - Searing Cauldron (Iron Marches) [Merged]

Players cannot commune with the Searing Cauldron Hero Challenge located in the southern part of Iron Marches.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/138197-game-update-notes-september-26-2023/#comment-2001483

• Fixed an issue that prevented players from communing with the Searing Cauldron hero challenge in Iron Marches.

🍝 Spaghetti! 🍝

1. All Necromancer Specs: Reaper, Scourge, Harbinger
2. Most Guardian Sepcs: Dragonhunter, Firebrand
3. Soulbeast
4. Most Engineer Specs: Scrapper, Mechanist
5. Most Revenant Specs: Renegade, Vindicator
6. Most other Specs

But I'm not quite done, making up my mind, after the Weaponmaster Changes, since how a spec plays/feels often depends a lot on which weapons it uses and hence which stat sets are valid.

E. g. I like Greatsword and Longbow on Guardian which more or less determines the stat set (power damage) and a general play style (offesnsive, bursty, high risk+reward). I'm currently running this as Dragonhunter, but maybe it works even better or is even more fun as Willbender.

Other professions, e. g. Necromancer, are mostly defined via their class mechanic which changes dramatically with the chosen Elite, i. e. the weapons don't matter much when you spend most of your time in Shroud anyway.