Oh yeah, who's bad?!

The Great Destroyer explodes into a gazillion pieces

Who's bad? We're bad!

Eat hot lava and dirt, Great Destroyer!

Thankfully, the quest for pain inverter wasn't -too- tedious. I had the map waypoints already, so it was just a matter of blinking all over creation and looking for an easy to kill spawn per quest.

Then it was the quest for finding skills that could save me from burning. Frigid armor was out, my elementalist was fire magic spec, and I hadn't unlocked Nightfall on the ranger yet. Ward against elements? Not a clue where it could be got. Fortunately, Extinguish was sold in Kaineng Center, and I had a map point there, and Ogden was healing prayers and prot specced, so that fit in nicely. Breath of the Great Dwarf was my other goto skill, except I needed 3 Destroyer cores to get it. I had one.

I wasn't about to delve into a massive dungeon complex in order to farm Destroyer cores, so I latched onto the G.O.L.E.M. mission. After failing twice, I sat back and scratched my head wondering why the heck I couldn't seem to melt these Destroyers at all. Eventually, after staring at the wiki, it finally hit me on reading the words - Destroyers are immune to burning. This makes skills like searing flames useless against them.

...

My elementalist was a searing flames spec, reliant on creating burning, and then toasting things. I had Cynn, the fire elementalist in my party as well. NO WONDER none of them were doing any significant damage to the Destroyers. Bah.

Most luckily, I was a ranger, and a ranger has a wonderfully useless 85% of the time skill called Winter. That changes all elemental damage into cold. Which not so coincidentally, Destroyers are weak to.

Now armed with one spirit, the same mission suddenly proved much easier. Pain inverter helped too. I lol'ed at one poor Destroyer who managed to position himself to AoE Executioner strike my henchies, and hit himself for 80x5 damage. He didn't last long after. Repeat mission x 4 until 2 Destroyer cores finally dropped.

Ran back to High Priest Alkar full of glee, and got Breath of the Great Dwarf in return. This time I was ready, two nullify Burning skills, Winter to make Destroyers vulnerable to my fire elementalists, and Pain Inverter for kicks.

It was still pretty touch and go, especially since the Great Destroyer didn't pull very well. But I managed to find semisolid ground at one spot and flagged the henches there, spammed the extinguish heal, and kept Pain Inverter on at all times. Was as well that I did, because one of my heroes or henches liked to interrupt. As I got blasted for damage, so did Mr GD himself. A few scary blasts later, praying that my monks could catch up, down he went.

YAY!

The Epilogue rocked. It was full of GW2 hints, which is amazing when you think about how far back the planning went. (Big hint in the screenshots, there's a big ol' dragon in the background!)

I have officially completed the four primary quest storylines of GW... albeit on different characters. If only I could now decide which one I want to focus on, and what I should be aiming toward next.