It’s been awhile since I’ve had enough time to run through the lands of Tyria, mapping them. I figured I could spend half an hour or so today running a mission and then write it up without too much effort. Little did I know that fate would conspire against that plan.
The mission was the Nolani Academy mission. The area for this mission, like many missions, is fairly straightforward. This means that when I did the area originally I already uncovered most of the map. The idea was to do a quick run through the place to make sure I got everything. It wasn’t long before I saw this:
My usual running strategy is to equip Illusion of Haste, which allows me to be permanently hasted so long as I recast the spell every time it wears off. However, in this mission I ran into a group of Shatter Gargoyles which use Imagined Burden to slow down their targets. Shatter Gargoyles don’t pose a real threat to me but instead of attacking them I merely tried to run past. Unfortunately that didn’t work.
I tried again. This time I was eliminating the gargoyles before they could wear me down. I was just about to move from the first part of the mission to the second… When my computer crashed. Very frustrating. Killing the Charr had taken me a decent amount of time since my character was using skills designed to run, not to fight. I didn’t want to do it all again myself so I decided I would need to actually join a party to complete my task here.
After joining a group we ventured into the mission area again. Some of the fogged areas I had been missing were located on the west side of the area, north of the bonus mission area. Running to the end of this precipice gained me .1%.
Here’s another area just north of that precipice.
Running up the slope and overlooking the horizon also gained me .1%.
We then continued the mission by clearing out the Charr that were laying siege to the academy. Here’s an effigy they made to scare the defenders.
After wiping out the sieging Charr, we continued south beyond the fragment of wall that separates the first half of this mission from the second. I could see clearly on my minimap that there was a significant portion of covered map area on the western side of the southern approach to the wall-fragment. Rather than immediately heading south to Rin, my goal was to try and make my way as far west as possible and see if there was a way to get to that unexplored area of the map.
Fortunately, there was a way. Immediately after you trigger the cutscene and rain begins to fall on the Charr encampment, heading down the slope and going west will lead you to a large camp of Charr.
Unfortunately I was mobbed by Charr and slain, but one of my party members resurrected me. There are two things to note here. One is that this large group of Charr, led by two Charr heroes, is on a piece of land that juts out towards the northwest in a way that it looks like will lead to the low-plain that leads to the wall-fragment. Unfortunately, though this piece of land looks like it will lead to the low-plain, it ends in an abrupt cliff. It might be worth running around that region just to make sure that all land there has been uncovered, but the real place you need to find is this:
This slope leads down into the low-plain that approaches the wall-fragment. Here’s a picture taken at the end of this piece of land.
In total I uncovered about three or four patches of fog by running along the edge of this valley. My total visible gain was .1%, but I suspect it was closer to .166%. After exploring that area we continued on into Rin. Most of this area had already been explored when I did the mission previously. However, there’s one small section on my map, the southernmost point on the map, that looked somewhat blurry.
There is a point just before the mission boss (Bonfaaz Burntfur) when Rurik will stop. Use this opportunity to circle around the buildings in that area to the south. I managed to find this plaza south of the boss.
Continuing to circle around you can make it all the way around Burntfur to this location. Although I don’t think circling around like this uncovered any area for me it’s possible that some people may gain .1% from heading around behind the boss.
Total gain for this mission was between .3% and .4%. Not bad. I’d be more enthusiastic about this gain if it hadn’t involved three different attempts, one of them prompted by a computer crash, to get the same thing done.
