I finally got the griffon! Boy, that was an involved set of collections; it took me longer to get the Griffon than it did to complete the entire story of PoF. It also made me look for ways to produce gold that I hadn't ever before; I didn't really feel like grinding RIBA Silverwastes over and over, nor Auric Basin. I went gathering and salvaging, with help from GW2Efficiency, I filled up my material storage multiple times and sold off the >50s mats. This got me about 140g by the time i'd finished that. After that, I liquidated my gathered laurels into Medium Crafting Bags, and sold those, and I had more than enough. I've got about 165g left over.
For the griffon, you need 10 special items you collect from heart vendors at 25g apiece. This is a pretty hefty price tag. You also need "runes", which are gotten from doing various events, two of which are legendary bounties. Goddamn that Legendary Corrupted Facet was brutal. I came up with a new build for survival on my warrior as a result.
It's just a bulky sorta build with GS / axe-shield. bull's charge, signet of endurance, endure pain, rampage, healing signet. two hard CCs provide nice breakbar damage, plus rampage can fill in with the rest, with all but one of the rampage skills having breakbar damage as well as doubling my health for the duration, as well as also proccing Peak Performance. Between two interrupts, a channeled block skill, Adrenal Health, Healing Signet and Mango Pie, i'm rather hard to kill. Adrenal Health is kind of amazing in PvE, as long as I've recently used a Burst i have plenty of passive healing and a little bit of active healing. Peak Performance is used when I need to spike with damage a bit, because otherwise this build is mediocre damage wise. Peak Performance is +33% damage for a few seconds after using a Physical skill like Bull's Charge or things like that.
Then when you get into the story instance in Kormir's dying library, man that was something else. Some of the enemies are ABSOLUTELY BULLSHIT, some are pretty easy. They're all underworld sorta enemies, Abaddon related, so Shadow Imps, Aatxes, Fleshreavers, and Shades. There are also corrupted guards running around too. They have elite variants that you're required to kill, who each have a fairly unique ability that you must follow. A corrupted Guard would drop Persistently Blinded on you if you ignored his Stop and Go instructions, an Aatxe would drop high damage fire fields, the shade would knockdown with nearly every attack, etc. The single most bullshit one was the Shadow Imp, who has Phase Shift, where it shows a portion of the ground; if your damage comes from in that portion, it will take damage, otherwise it shows up as EVADED. As a melee build, that more or less forced me to sit still and do nothing for seconds at a time while it evaded 70-80% of damage.
But that's paid off, and I've now unlocked the Griffon for my entire account. Whew.