The new expansion, Path of Fire, came out! Yay! Wahoo! Ahem...

The expansion starts out with an airship flight to the Crystal Desert. From there, it's a wild ride through five zones filled with beautiful sites, including this fancy floating city-thing:

A different floaty city thing (this time, a ghost floating city thing):

It has some pretty gorgeous vistas:

...and some awesome places to die:

It's also pretty geographically diverse, considering it's supposed to be a desert. There's snowy mountains to the north, grasslands, semi-jungle areas, and an evil sulfur sea. There's also the Bone Palace of Joko:

It also has some great new events including one fighting a giant piņata!

The new expansion also introduced mounts to the game. There's five of them, and they each have their own uses. The mounts are available everywhere, and they kind of break the game in a few places:

These mounts are pretty awesome, but they include some highly controversial things. They can be skinned, which isn't unusual or unexpected- gliders could be skinned before them. However, the skins currently cost real-world money and have some total bullshit RNG associated with them. The end result is that a great many people were insanely pissed. Some examples include here, here, here, in the official response thread, etc and so on. It's so bad, even Jim Sterling (son) weighed in. Personally, I wont be spending any money on the mount adoption system. If they release stand-alone skins in the future and they aren't hidden behind bullshit RNG and I want them, I may consider it. But for now, this is predacious and evil and, frankly, making me pretty unhappy in the game...

I posted a bit ago that I crafted Astralalalalalaria. Well, here's the first screenshot I took celebrating it:

The PoF expansion brought a ton of weird and funny new junk items. One is this, "Questionable Mine Claim". I love it because the icon is hilarious. So, I'm holding onto it and not selling it.

Also, as you can see in the above screenshot I'm finally taking my Guardian back into WvW. Firebrand, the new elite spec, makes Burn Guardian fun again. So, I'm using it!

One of the new things that PoF brought to the table was Bounty Hunts. These are pretty cool. You start by taking a bounty from a number of regional bounty boards. The bounties are tied to their region, but their spawn is timed so you aren't always guaranteed to get the bounty you want unless you're willing to wait and camp the board. Once you accept the bounty you gather a large group of people together and head to where the bounty takes place. The bounty can be in a number of different locations for each region. Once at the bounty, you have a time limit to kill the bounty before they escape. To make things more complicated, there will be a number of random boons, mechanics, and limitations which will be placed upon the bounty.

The battles can be pretty awesome and intense. Here we are fighting some Hydra bounty:

So, I've done some stupid shit in this game. For example, ever seen a God's upskirt? What about a zombies'? Ahem, anyway....

There was a pretty weird glitch I encountered. Made one of my characters look like they were constantly cheering or something. It was a bit weird...