I’m honestly angry with how HoT’s story turned out and hopefully, if Arenanet goes with this theory that I found (credit goes to Leallax.1482/salad-commander on Tumblr for figuring out most of the theory while I added in a few more speculations), it can make up for it.
Major spoilers obviously. Tread carefully.
So here goes:
Mordremoth is not dead.
And here are some reasons why:
1. It felt too easy and too fast.
At multiple times, the game says that Mordremoth is easily more powerful than Zhaitan.Yet with Zhaitan, it took a huge army along with foiling Risen spies, gaining artifacts that repelled dragon corruption, destroying it’s food and minion supply and lots of planning that felt like months to finally finish him off. With Mordremoth, we just had to leave our destroyed army behind, saw two people die, brought Glint’s egg to Tarir, discovered that apparently all the elder dragons have a weakness and took a small group of adventurers across the jungle to somehow waltz into the dream and poke Mordremoth’s mind AKA a big tubby lizard to death with our weapons. That’s just it. And it felt like just 3 days that this all happened with no effort.
2.So many unanswered questions.
Leah Hoyer herself hinted that the ideals between the Mordrem Guard and the Nightmare Court would be explored in the HoT storyline (as said in the Mordrem Guard Point of Interest) yet it never was. They didn’t even explain the differences between the Dream, the Nightmare and Mordremoth. Why?
Also, what happened to Malyck and his tree? What happened to Taimi in Rata Novus? What happened with all those politicial problems involving Queen Jennah in Divinity’s Reach? What happened to the Pale Tree? What happened to Logan, Zojja, Kasmeer and Rox? Did they get out ok? Hell, we didn’t even get an ending cinematic of everyone celebrating. All we got at the "end’’ was the egg absorbing the released magic and a few strips of dialogue.
3.Too much foreshadowing.
All through the story, NPCs kept saying ‘’What if this is bait?" “Is this a trap?” "Does Mordremoth know we’re coming?" And guess what happens? Zero. No traps. No ambushes. Not one event happened where I felt like Mordy was actively and aggressively wanting to murder us. And to quote Canach(he says this if you’re sylvari in Prisoners of the Dragon): Mordremoth loves surprises.
It’s obvious that he’s planning something big.
4. No changes happened with the jungle.
Mordremoth is said to be the whole jungle. Yet when we finished attacking his mind, the jungle doesn’t decay into some swamp-like land or whatever. It remains exactly the same and full of life.
Not to mention the Mordrem still walk around the jungle and attack Verdant Brink at night like they usually do on a daily basis.
5. Mordremoth can take over any sylvari’s thoughts.
As told by the devs and Canach, Mordremoth has the ability to plant thoughts in sylvari’s heads. After you dealt with his mind, he could’ve just put the idea that he was dead into Canach’s brain.(And yours too, if you were sylvari.)
6. Mordremoth is supposed to be the elder dragon of the mind.
Not to mention he, along with the other elder dragons, is said to be 10000000000+ years old. Surely he has alot of tricks up his sleeve.
“Oh, but we fought Mordremoth’s physical form in Dragon’s Stand!”
No, we didn’t. The Mouth of Mordremoth is supposed to be an EXTENSION of the jungle dragon rather than the dragon himself. And Laranthir even yells “Commander!” during the fight. So it’s said to be that the PC participated in the fight along with dozens of other players. (Which brings up another question: Does the Pact have multiple commanders?)
“But if he isn’t dead, why did all that magic release?”
Because Trahearne was literally plugged into Mordremoth. So when we destroyed the Marshal, all the magic that was stored around and even inside him was opened and released.
(And here’s something interesting: the devs pointed out that minions of Mordremoth can be cloned. We even saw what looked like Trahearne getting multiplied in the City of Hope cinematic. What if maybe, just maybe….the Trahearne we brought down wasn’t the actual Trahearne but rather a clone of him? …..Let’s save that theory for another time.)
“Mordremoth just underestimated us!”
Wrong. Mordremoth knows that we were strong enough to kill Zhaitan. If he had underestimated us, then he wouldn’t have brought down the Pact fleet.
“But Arenanet never mentioned Mordremoth being alive in The Road to 2015!”
I’m guessing because they don’t want to give away spoilers.
TL;DR We haven’t heard the last of Mordremoth and he will be back. He just wanted the Pact to think that he was dead so they would leave him alone and not get in the way of his plans. And the end of Hearts and Minds, Mordy managed to trick us into thinking we killed him, but it costed him some of the magic he consumed.
If you have any opinions on this theory, please reply.