Guild Wars 2

so are we sure he’s dead. never in the scene did i see a corpse. i just saw him falling.

all we really did was corrupt the magic he feeds off of, but he’s survived thousands of years without magic by sleeping. are we sure we didn’t just corrupt him and turn him into some mutant monstrosity?

having the power over the dead makes him dying like this very hard to believe. specially without a corpse.

the world of tyria is set in stone , we are only pawns in the eyes of Abbadon who knows if korimir got possesed by abbadons spirit playing us like loki and laughing at our Squander as we try to slay dragons.

i believe he is not dead but mortaly wounded for a dragon that could take hundreds of years to finally die , hence why his minions have stopped spreading though i think that isn’t the last we have heard of him, since all the dragons are connected with each other and are all fighting over for territory for magic, Zhaitan a ancient dragon is smart he may have help from a different dragon to regain power through magic or tapping into the laylines since they are not all discovered yet.

who knows if scarlet used the kriat for subjects to test a poison that the source was created from zhaitans blood to grow a corrupt tree to try to use against Mordramoth since his got a thing for trees and the magic this kind of tree gives off.

she could be connected to zhaitan , though its all speclative like anything not set in motion yet, if he returns and we see a dragon vs dragon fight that would be amazing to watch from a airship.

There apparently was a body. In the Living Story your player character asks if an item in the Special Collections archive of the Durmand Priory is Zhaitan’s tail, and the warden confirms that it is.

We just never saw it, just as we personally never killed Zhaitan. We just pressed #2.

GuzziHero.5104:

There apparently was a body. In the Living Story your player character asks if an item in the Special Collections archive of the Durmand Priory is Zhaitan’s tail, and the warden confirms that it is.

We just never saw it, just as we personally never killed Zhaitan. We just pressed #2.

crap..that makes me believe zhaitan is alive even more.

we SHOT his tail off. of coarse it would be left….the only thing that would confirm it is his head…

The conversation is between the PC and Archivist Ernswort.

PC: I really have to ask. Is that Zhaitan’s tail?
AE: As a matter of fact, it is. We brought it here after Zhaitan’s death. We had to construct special rigging to get it in here. It took months.
PC: And they’re experimenting on it?
AE: They’re studying it, yes. It may one day reveal all the secrets of the Elder Dragons.

well, zaitan is a zombie dragon. and we all know zombie dont’ die.

GuzziHero.5104:

The conversation is between the PC and Archivist Ernswort.

PC: I really have to ask. Is that Zhaitan’s tail?
AE: As a matter of fact, it is. We brought it here after Zhaitan’s death. We had to construct special rigging to get it in here. It took months.
PC: And they’re experimenting on it?
AE: They’re studying it, yes. It may one day reveal all the secrets of the Elder Dragons.

see? if they had to choose any part to experiment on it would be the chest as thats the strongest and most vital(other than head which is hard to hit)

the tail can be discarded like zaitan did. and so studying it for a weakspot is useless.

unless thats all that could be found and they are just assuming he died.

my guess is he’s slunk off to recover underground where we cant find him. maybe primordis will get mad for the intrusion and we will get a dragon brawl

Zhaitan corrupted himself and now he’s his own minion.

Tequatl is slowly claiming Zhaitan’s throne.

I do hope for the Priory’s sake that Zhaitan is really dead. I can see it now.

Zhaitan wakes from unconsciousness
“Ah just great. A great winged zombie like me shouldn’t be falling, or feeling pain. Schooldragon errors. It’s as if I’m some weakling Shatterer, nevermind an Elder Dragon. I tell you, if it wasn’t for those pesky kids, I’d have killed everybo-…….WHAT THE UNDERWORLD!!?? WHERE’S MY KITTENING TAIL?? Oh, the Priory has it?? Well, we’ll just see about that!”

Wolfheart.1879:

I do hope for the Priory’s sake that Zhaitan is really dead. I can see it now.

Zhaitan wakes from unconsciousness
“Ah just great. A great winged zombie like me shouldn’t be falling, or feeling pain. Schooldragon errors. It’s as if I’m some weakling Shatterer, nevermind an Elder Dragon. I tell you, if it wasn’t for those pesky kids, I’d have killed everybo-…….WHAT THE UNDERWORLD!!?? WHERE’S MY KITTENING TAIL?? Oh, the Priory has it?? Well, we’ll just see about that!”

priory scholar answers the banging at the door
Zhaitan “i’ve come for my tail puny mortal!”
Priory Scholar (without looking up or paying attention) “please take a ticket and get in line, current waiting time for access to the tail is 3 months”
Zhaitan “3 MONTHS?! ITS MY TAIL. WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO IT”
Priory Scholar “experiments, bragging, and disection. as i said sir please take a ticket”
Zhaitan “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM”
Priory Scholar “a very loud very annoying asura?”
Priory Scholar looks up to see who he’s been talking to this entire time
Priory Scholar(shaking a bit) “…oh….uhhh….” faints

Zhaitan “kitten…so this is why Primordus hasn’t bothered coming to the surface…”

arenta.2953:

Wolfheart.1879:

I do hope for the Priory’s sake that Zhaitan is really dead. I can see it now.

Zhaitan wakes from unconsciousness
“Ah just great. A great winged zombie like me shouldn’t be falling, or feeling pain. Schooldragon errors. It’s as if I’m some weakling Shatterer, nevermind an Elder Dragon. I tell you, if it wasn’t for those pesky kids, I’d have killed everybo-…….WHAT THE UNDERWORLD!!?? WHERE’S MY KITTENING TAIL?? Oh, the Priory has it?? Well, we’ll just see about that!”

priory scholar answers the banging at the door
Zhaitan “i’ve come for my tail puny mortal!”
Priory Scholar (without looking up or paying attention) “please take a ticket and get in line, current waiting time for access to the tail is 3 months”
Zhaitan “3 MONTHS?! ITS MY TAIL. WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO IT”
Priory Scholar “experiments, bragging, and disection. as i said sir please take a ticket”
Zhaitan “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM”
Priory Scholar “a very loud very annoying asura?”
Priory Scholar looks up to see who he’s been talking to this entire time
Priory Scholar(shaking a bit) “…oh….uhhh….” faints

Zhaitan “kitten…so this is why Primordus hasn’t bothered coming to the surface…”

+1 lols

arenta.2953:

Zhaitan “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM”
Priory Scholar “You’ll need a tray…”

If you jump off the airship at the end of the Arah story dungeon (and have a revive orb) you actually can see the body.

I hope they say that the “thing” we killed wasn’t Zhaitan. I really hope they come out and say that thing was a surrogate body Zhaitan was creating for himself and we killed it before it was complete. That would explain why it looked so ugly and also why the concept art of Zhaitan looked different from what we saw in-game

Makes for interesting theories. We know from the story that dragons consume magic. We do not know for sure if it is only the Elder dragons that consume magic or all dragons. We also know, from the story, that there are more dragons then just the Elders as we fought three of his champions and there were more flying around in the sky during the fight.

Given all that if it is only the Elder dragons that consume magic we should expect the level of magic in Tyria to go up with one less Elder dragon. If it is all dragons then we should expect a civil war among the dragon followers of Zhatain as they fight over those magical reserves and the level of magic will bounce up and down. I doubt if Zhatain or any of the Elders would share magic reserves with the underlings as it is a finite resource as was established in the story. If he is still alive then the rate of magic consumption would remain stable as Zhatain goes into an extended sleep using the magic to heal his body.

So we have to get the Asurans to build a magic level meter (gas gauge) so we can determine Zhatain’s state.

yes, he is quite dead. For some players. For others, not so much. That is not a matter of reasonable speculation, but a fluke of changing content strategy midway. The game offered traditional static content at launch. When they switched to Living Story, it would have been consistent to remove the whole of Zhaitan story. Unfortunately, that would have left the game with barely any content at all. Maybe they will revisit a dun-dun-dun moment of Zhaitan reemerging during some later Living Story arc, but at the moment, Zhaitan is dead according to GW2 history.

replayed the mission

is he dead? and not just wounded. the undead dragons he brought back are all still moving.

and they said he’s dead just by assumption.

asura have been wrong before(often in very disastrous ways)

Obviously, things could change, because story writing, because magic, but I think it’s safe to say Zhaitan is dead.

In-world, it would make very little sense for us to go to war on the scale that we do, take Zhaitan down, and then remove his tail without being as certain as we can be that it’s quite dead. Even if noxious fumes keep individual soldiers from carving off their own personal trophies / avenging their every lost loved one on the corpse, I’d be surprised if we didn’t carpet bomb the body or blast it from above with lasers. It would just be silly for us to shoot Zhaitan down, see that he doesn’t get back up right away, and then fly back to Fort Trinity to celebrate.

It’s possible Zhaitan could live on in some fragment, like transferring some of its essence into a servant’s body or something, because ~magic~, but it only makes sense for the body to be dead. We know Zhaitan is a powerful necro, so I’d expect the Priory at least to disassemble the body as much as possible, or to keep an eye on it in case it starts moving again.

From an outside-the-game, narrative standpoint, I sure hope Zhaitan is dead, because we’re more than two years into the game and we’re only just approaching our second dragon, out of six. I don’t know if we’ll ever actually slay all of the Elder Dragons, and we don’t have to necessarily slay them one-at-a-time, but it seems awkward to start doubling back instead of moving forward.

the priory took his tail
. . . one of his tails

Suckas. . .

I woulda taken his head.

. . . all of his heads.

wait. . . who has zhaitan’s head?

……..dinkleberg….

i don’t recall we are addressed as the one who “slayed” zhaitan, is there ? “defeated” zhaitan perhaps, but “slayed”, i can’t remember…

so zhaitan could well be still alive….

What difference does it make anyway?

Randulf.7614:

arenta.2953:

Zhaitan “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM”
Priory Scholar “You’ll need a tray…”

I love you, Jeff Vader. Glad I’m not the only one who thought that xD

Some fun facts:
The Arah storymode is bad designed, the devs themselves said that.
Tequatl got updated with the reason that he got stronger, which suggests that Zhaitan is still alive. This would give the devs the opportunity storywise to revamp the Arah storymode in the future.

arenta.2953:

that makes me believe zhaitan is alive even more.

we SHOT his tail off. of coarse it would be left….the only thing that would confirm it is his head…

Wow, that’s an excellent point! I have always suspected/hoped Zhaitan was still “alive” somehow, trying to recover. The tail they acquired and are storing at the Priory disappointed me, but I forgot that Zhaitan’s tail wouldn’t have even been attached to him anymore. Basically, it may still be the only piece of the remains anyone has yet located.

Never trust a “death” scene where the villain gets knocked into a hazy, dark abyss. It’s too vague. No one really finds a body. It is a common trope used in movies and video games as an excuse to bring a “dead” villain back for a sequel.

And this is the dragon of death we are talking about, here. Can he even be killed? His “body” seems to be cobbled together out of parts of other dead dragons. He uses countless undead minions as his senses and sources of energy. His true essence doesn’t even seem to be tied to any one organism — a physical “body” seems like more of a luxury for him, rather than a biological necessity.

We blasted him directly with those lasers a bajillion times. We tore parts of him off, and he still kept on kicking. Oh, but because he finally let go and fell into the ocean, we assume he’s dead? Sure, a multitude of blasts from heavy artillery weren’t enough to do him in, but a bit of a fall into some salt water are what finally did him in. Uh huh. Sure.

Are we even sure the tail is Zhaitan’s? He had all kinds of other dragon champions flying around up there. Maybe the tail is one of theirs. Or, heck, they’re all ancient, long-dead creatures anyway. Maybe the scavengers found a random tail from a creature that died centuries ago. How would they even know? Do they have Zhaitan’s DNA on file?

And of course everyone in Tyria is talking as if Zhaitan is dead. Because that’s what they believe, and that’s what they hope for. And true, the undead threat has receeded. But this doesn’t necessarily indicate Zhaitan is no more — only that he is weakened, retracted, regathering his strength, or reconsidering his strategy.

The way I look at it, Zhaitan is basically the ultimate evil, and the most powerful dragon. He doesn’t live, so how can he be killed? Anything that dies, he potentially gets. To attack Zhaitan’s body is to attack a symptom, while the root of the problem remains a complete mystery.

What are the other dragons? A plant dragon? A rock dragon? A watery dragon? Pffft, okay. Certainly formidable to mortals, but their domains are not infinite. They can, I assume, be killed. And once we have defeated them, Zhaitan swoops in an snatches up their powers for himself, enslaving the most powerful lieutenants his army has ever had. The guy’s name is practically a sound-alike of “Satan.” This guy is The Big Bad. The Final Boss. At least, I have always thought so.

Danikat.8537:

If you jump off the airship at the end of the Arah story dungeon (and have a revive orb) you actually can see the body.

Yes, although I always considered this sort of a glitch, or at least unintended behaviour. No offense to ArenaNet’s amazing work, but the final battle of the Personal Story has always felt rather lackluster, rushed, and anticlimactic. The mechanics of the fight really felt like an afterthought. I would not be surprised if the coders just hastily tucked away his character model down into the ocean like that, as an easy way to dispose of it, never thinking anyone would find it.

And heck, even if that really is intended, and it’s really his body down there, so what? He could just be temporarily unconscious or incapacitated. Or playing possum. Or abandoned his previous body, slipping away in some other form, for all we know. He’s such a vaguely-defined and nebulous force, I have no doubts he could do that.

He is confirmed 100% dead by the developers. It is the whole reason the Dragon Bash festival was held exactly one year afterwards. But newer players would not know that because ArenaNet removed those festivals from the game.

Hannelore.8153:

He is confirmed 100% dead by the developers.

Source?

Regardless, that would be a very weird thing for them to say. Even if Zhaitan is intended to be totally dead and gone, and ANet has no plans to bring him back, what would be the point of releasing any kind of confirmation statement? They don’t need to do that. Let people wonder about it, what is the harm? In the meantime, they have clearly written their story in such a way that they have plenty of outs if they change their mind in the future.

Hannelore.8153:

It is the whole reason the Dragon Bash festival was held exactly one year afterwards. But newer players would not know that because ArenaNet removed those festivals from the game.

All the Dragon Bash festival indicates is that the NPCs of Tyria believe Zhaitan is destroyed. The fact remains, there is no hard proof Zhaitan is finally dead. And for an undead, magical lich-dragon thing who was always kind of “dead,” and whose powers are anything but fully defined, that is kind of a big deal.

Danikat.8537:

If you jump off the airship at the end of the Arah story dungeon (and have a revive orb) you actually can see the body.

RIGHT at the end? Like at the pillar? While fireworks are going off?

TO ARAH STORY! Ugh…

Zhaitan is dead. Arenanet has confirmed it in interviews and in the hidden arcana library in the Priory they have a tendrils (or it may have been his tail) off of his corpse hanging from the roof… He’s dead 100%

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Zhaitan is dead. Arenanet has confirmed it in interviews and in the hidden arcana library in the Priory they have a tendrils (or it may have been his tail) off of his corpse hanging from the roof… He’s dead 100%

Yeah, his tail.

Either way, dead or no, magic can retcon pretty much anything.

I do not see WHY he would not be dead though? GW2 has 5 other dragons to deal with, not like Zhaitan is The Mandarin or something.

Oh, I’m sure He died…..

…..From sheer embarrassment that he was being injured by leafy-head and basic cannon fire.

Novuake.2691:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Zhaitan is dead. Arenanet has confirmed it in interviews and in the hidden arcana library in the Priory they have a tendrils (or it may have been his tail) off of his corpse hanging from the roof… He’s dead 100%

Yeah, his tail.

Either way, dead or no, magic can retcon pretty much anything.

I do not see WHY he would not be dead though? GW2 has 5 other dragons to deal with, not like Zhaitan is The Mandarin or something.

simple. Zhaitan and cantha.

aka the affliction from gw1.
the 2 sync so well together it would make a great story

Zhaitan is really and truly dead. Where do you think all that Zhaitaffy comes from? Someday even that will be no more, and we will say “Zhaionara”.

Yup, Zhaitan is dead for good... now we only have to fight with the rest of the elder dragons during the remaining 10 years before GW3, lol.

Hamfast.8719:

Zhaitan is really and truly dead. Where do you think all that Zhaitaffy comes from? Someday even that will be no more, and we will say “Zhaionara”.

/groans

That was physically painful.

Yeah, he’s dead.

But he’s the Elder Dragon of undeath. Did we destroy him, or just make him stronger?

I do expect him to return in some way, shape, or form. And, eventually, to revive Scarlet. Odd how both died and didn’t leave a body, right?

yeh.. he ded. His tail even hangs in the durmand library as a trophy

Basaltface.2786:

yeh.. he ded. His tail even hangs in the durmand library as a trophy

we cut the tail off. he was still alive without it

I get the feeling, being primordial forces of magic and nature, no Elder Dragon can truly die. This is somewhat akin to saying the thunderstorm outside . . . died.

While it can be dissipated, maybe even delayed, eventually it will appear again. Even if it takes thousands and thousands of years.

After all, if Zhaitan is death . . . can death . . . die?

One for the philosophers to be sure. But, in comic book lore, you know what they say about not seeing a body. . . .

Be funny if the tail grew a new Zhaitan.

Don’t give the developers any ideas. On that note, if we’re talking proof, something is still keeping those corpses, around and near Orr, running about.

Just something to keep in mind.

Honestly sinse each dragon has two spheres of influence (zhaitans being death and shadow I believe?) I wouldnt be suprise if we have to kill them in both spheres of influence. maybe we killed his control over death and one day in the future he recovers and we all get stabbed by shadow spikes from our own shadows…Imagine that at hte moment of mordremoths death. Everyone is celebrating and BAMB. All the destiny’s edge members get a shadow spike throw the chest.

Just because he -is- dead doesnt mean:

a.) He has to stay dead

b.) Another entity cannot take his place.

There’s loopholes in confirming something is a certain way, at some point in time. Anet never said he would be out of the picture for good.

Villains coming back to life due to some karma houdini is not a rarely used plot device. And the priory has dragon bits in the library where all the magic items are. We also have a live dragon egg floating around, ripe for corrupting.

TL;DR

>Anticlimactic boss fight
“Lol I killed death, death died”
>Meanwhile Dhuum is alive

All the other dragons have champions right? Jormag, Shatterer, was it shadow of the dragon that attacked the Pale Tree? Anyway, we faced what four or more dragons before we got the one we call Zhaitan. How do we know he isn’t just another “champion dragon”. Sure he looked different from the other winged critters playing flappy bird over our heads, but can we really say with 100% certainty that was Zhaitan?

Just a thought, nothing more.

It seems in fact he may be both dead, and not dead. Like, umm, a charr in a box*.

*this was believed to be merely a thought experiment, but I understand the Asura have actually carried out some practicals.

Danikat.8537:

If you jump off the airship at the end of the Arah story dungeon (and have a revive orb) you actually can see the body.

Poke it with a stick to make sure it’s dead

How can you kill that which has no life?

niea.7504:

How can you kill that which has no life?

Are you saying I’m immortal?

Palador.2170:

niea.7504:

How can you kill that which has no life?

Are you saying I’m immortal?

No.

But honestly, who cares? I’d rather know what’s going on with Livia. Who’s with me?

Im not so sure about it. We basically gave him an epileptic seizure with those peashooters we fired on him and after all they arent deadly mostly.