Guild Wars 2

Now that the big topics are dying down, it seems an opportune time to get into the little ones (although this might reignite a big one).

For those who don’t know, on a table in a cave in the back of the mercenary camp in the new map, there’s a collection of unlabeled objects you can interact with, including this letter. (Here’s a thank you to Konig for already having it up on the wiki.)

So… Balthazar used to have a dagger, apparently a very good one, and the devs decided it’s worth sneaking in a mention of it. This is odd for two reasons. First, at face value, it just doesn’t seem important. Maybe it’s an artifact infused with god magic or some such, but in the past Balthazar has been associated almost exclusively with greatswords, making a dagger an odd choice for a Chekov’s Gun. The phrasing doesn’t help- the mercs look to be treating it as an opportunity to kiss up, but there’s no mention of the missing dagger being magic or particularly important beyond being well made, and Balthazar himself certainly seems to have bigger things on his mind.

The other reason- the last patch, Head of the Snake, introduced a well-made, suspiciously out of place dagger, with no clear connection to the other things going on around it and with no obvious reason for us to interact with it… and it was in the raid. It particularly stands out because the raid had a lot of item-based mysteries that you slowly unravel by interacting with all manner of random objects, but A.) the dagger was the next-to-only object that didn’t tie into anything else, besides possibly a murder, and B.) your character comments on it being out of place but doesn’t find any evidence of where it came from.

Are the devs suggesting that Balthazar was in the Bastion of the Penitent? If so, why? The dagger may have been used to kill a prisoner during the escape attempt, and if so it doesn’t seem likely that Balthazar happened along after the fact. That would put him there during the prison’s operation. Was he a prisoner there? Holding a god seems like quite a stretch, even for the mursaat, and the timeline is strange with the prison being abandoned during GW1… but it would open up more depth for the Lazarus thing. If the mursaat, or someone connected to them, are the enemies Balthazar was referring to, then using Lazarus as his cover could be more than just a narrative excuse to cash in on fan nostalgia and tie up the Mantle plot thread.

Obligatory link to the dagger made by mercenaries

And I hadn’t known about that dagger in the raid (unsurprising since I haven’t had many chances to explore it). What’s most curious is that both daggers have the same appearance.

On an aside, the food platter isn’t really out of place since Saul’s recap of his imprisonment began with the mursaat offering things to get Saul’s cooperation, including (as shown in the art), lots of food.

It’d be interesting if the dagger does tie Balthazar to the Bastion of the Penitent; people already tie Deimos to Menzies, so perhaps that is where the connection furthers on?

Obligatory Link to Balthazar’s Dagger

That’s part of an entire weapon set. For that matter, pacifist Dwayna has one too. I don’t think the Black Lion skins mean much beyond Evon being willing to exploit human religion.

But These Daggers existed well before Evon was conceived

(Conceived as in born, since Gw1 takes place a few centuries before Gw2, Daggers were recent additions)

All the same, that set’s dagger is completely different from the one seen on the workbench next to the letter (I provided a link).

The GW1 set were forged by the Zaishen in honor of Balthazar, and not made to represent Balthazar’s personal kitten nal.

If I remember right the prison is also conected to the mists.
Then there is also some space/time displacement there.

• We can enter and leave it now, so the forces that hold people there are weakened?

The Mursaat were never real god-tier and thus wouldn’t have been able to hold of Balthazar if he went there. The Eye of Janthir is a different matter maybe?

So the question is not only how did the dagger end up there, but also when. In addition the question of it’s significants.

• Balthazar was/is the god of war and I presume he would grant wishes to his followers. While offering might and courage on the battlefield, I can easily see him ending the suffering of his loyal subsjects. Appearing in front of them to welcome them into his army personaly, but got suprised by something powerful? (eye of janthir mystery)

• He gifted the dagger someone. Unfortunatly we weren’t introduced so far.

• The dagger in the prison is a replica.

• The Mursaat found the dagger, after Balthazar lost it.

Either way, he lost the dagger and it ended up in the bastion somehow.

This is a great catch! If the knives are actually connected there’s a chance Balthazar might have been in the Bastion of the Penitent–unfortunately the motives would be obscure.

Before I go on, it’s important for me to pose the following question: how did Balthazar even know about Lazarus in the first place? Try to keep this in mind.

I doubt the former God of War and Fire was being held captive by the mursaat.
It’s likely that Balthazar was already in possession of Lyssa’s mirror at the time, hence disguising himself as a mursaat, moving undisturbed amongst the Unseen Ones–there might even be a remote chance (very remote) that Lazarus was Balthazar in disguise all this time along, since GW1 times, and was a focal point in driving the mursaat as a whole in contrasting Abaddon’s return (tricking and using the mursaat in the process of course).
The actual reasons for him to be in the Bastion though are hard to tell… would you let me continue with the “Lazarus has always been Balthazar” theory I could argue that he was there–posing as Lazarus of course–when Saul d’Alessio was taken away and he might have obliged himself to never let Saul free and risk the dismantle of what he contributed to create (the final scope being contrasting Abaddon and coincidentally his brother Menzies). This would render Deimos as a creation of Balthazar, and there might be evidence for this, even if coming from outside of the game.

Some of the inspirations for Balthazar could have easily come from Ares and Hephaestus, the Greek gods of, respectively and generally, war and fire. Similarly to Hephaestus, Balthazar is also an incredible blacksmith but more important here are some features shared with Ares (and the direct encounter with Balthazar gave us insights about his true nature): the embodiment of the most violent aspects of war, often bloodthirsty; Ares’s value as a war god is placed in doubt at least once and he often faces humiliation and defeat; the affiliation with dogs.
This brings me to Deimos–what a peculiar name to choose for this situation. In Greek mythology Deimos is a personification and/or an abstraction of the sheer terror that is brought by war, definition which by itself ties well with Saul’s character, but Deimos is also often depicted as being the son of Ares, the god of war–what a wierd coincidence, isn’t it?

In an interesting and not so unrelated note, in the Kabbalah Balthazar is the name of a demon who controls Shadows (not implying anything here, just an interesting remark).


Regardless of all of this, will the Eye of Janthir play a bigger role in the future? I think its GW2 visual representation makes it assume a sort of cosmic relevance–I always had the weird impression the Eye was helping us navigate the Bastion, an impression validated by the fact that it curses us with the Gift of True Sight without which opening the warden’s door would be close to impossible (unless a thief happens to be in the vicinity of course).

What if Balthazar was in the Bastion in his search for power?

Disguised as a Mursaat he went in, investigating the place but was stopped by the Eye of Janthir.
Maybe he lost the dagger in the process, trying to conserve his own power.

The major problem with your suppositions, Sock, is that during GW1 people had contact with Balthazar still and he was still treated as hating deception and preferring honorable combat and the “glory of war”. Whatever led him to realize “there is no honor in war” and become a conniving, uncaring god had happened after GW1. So during the creation of the White Mantle etc, Balthazar would have been opposed to such deception that you suggest he had pulled.

Flashpoint wasn’t a “revelation of Balthazar’s true nature” but rather a “show of Balthazar’s character development”.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

The major problem with your suppositions, Sock, is that during GW1 people had contact with Balthazar still

We had contact with his servants, but not Balthazar himself. If he became a conniving, uncaring deity that far back, there’s no reason to believe that he’d have brought his followers up to speed.

I’m not sure I have a specific theory at this point. The timeline weirdness gets in the way.

If the dagger was used to kill a prisoner, that puts Balthazar there before the riot and following massacre. The fact that the prison’s (relatively) intact indicates that it wasn’t attacked by a god. That really leaves three options: A.), he arrived after the mursaat were gone, bypassing Cairn and the statues without bothering Deimos; B.) he arrived before the mursaat were gone, either dealing with them cordially or infiltrating without ending up in a battle; or C.) he arrived before the mursaat were gone as a prisoner. Either B or C would likely mean that he was already weakened back in GW1. It’s hard to see how he’d be captured, or stoop to dealing with or otherwise sparing beings whose followers were actively trying to stomp out his own, if he had the power to avoid it. Either A or B begs the question of why he’d go there to begin with- that’s not to say that there aren’t any number of possible explanations, just that I don’t see anything in what we currently know that would suggest an answer.

But on Balthazar being Lazarus all along… wouldn’t it be better for him to drop the disguise when the titans came after the mursaat than to split his essence, and then go through all the trouble that followed, including two hundred years of being incapacitated? Sure, Balthazar might’ve already been weakened by then, but at that point you have the same difficulties as the prisoner theory (why would he be weakened so long ago?) in addition to all new difficulties (why would Balthazar be instrumental in founding a competing faith? More importantly, why would he then act to preserve that faith after it had served its purpose, assuming that Lazarus was probably the ‘He’ who ordered the Mantle to hide in the jungle? Why would Balthazar trust the knowledge to bring him back to the followers he’d deceived, who would destroy him in an instant if they knew the truth, instead of to the powerful worshipers who truly did have faith and saw it as their sacred duty to help their god combat supernatural threats?)

Do we have exact text of him hating Deception? Honor is not the same as Honesty. Honor means Pride so if there are text of him ever having Honor he wouldn’t back down from a challenge.

I’m also wanting the samples of text referring to him having honor aside from the player’s words to him while fighting him(didn’t see any ingame text from GW1 despite checking both the Fissure of Woe quests’ text, the story of Kaolai, the Priest of Balthazar’s words + the Champion of Balthazar’s words & skills and haven’t been able to access the manuals). It’s quite vital.

I don’t recall a single time after the Exodus where godly Balthazar–or any other human god for that matter (Abaddon and Kormir excluded)–directly interacted with mortals like he recently did in GW2, at least that we know of.

Also, the way he delivers that particular line [“I’ve learned there is no honor in war.”] is not surrounded and defined by anger and remorse as the previous one [“They abated me; dimmed my light… But they will see me now.”] is, which to me indicates that this realization is not necessarily correlated to his fall. In addition, this is the first time we actually encounter him as a character, we have had no real previous encounter for any development to actually take place; the closest we have are scrolls and scriptures.

To conclude on this, not every human has the same perception of Balthazar. Similarly to how greeks regarded Ares, tyrians regard Balthazar from two perspectives: on one hand he embodies the physical valor and strength necessary for success in war, on the other he was overwhelming, insatiable in battle, destructive, and man-slaughtering.
However, even amongst his followers, it’s believed that glory (honor) does not come with war alone, it will be a recognition for proving valor and bravery, to not hesitate nor stumble against difficulties (as written in his scriptures), hence assuming a broader meaning amongst tyrians, not just linked to military war.


@Aaron Ansari As you say, it’s really hard to try to guess how and/or why the dagger is there with the few informations we have as of now. However, if Balthazar is directly involved with how the knife ended there, the only reason I see (as of now) for him to even be in the Bastion to begin with would concur with the crazy “Lazarus was Balthazar’s alter ego” theory–this idea is obviously holed.

Two of my main focal points were: the similarities with the greek god Ares, which are even deeper now that Balthazar was defeated (and to quote an orrian scroll, this might be a repeating pattern: “It would not be the only time that the Master of War was wrong.”); that question I posed at the start: how (or even why) did Balthazar know about Lazarus in the first place?

I failed to indicate a couple of my thoughts: as you suggest, I pictured him already weakened when posing as Lazarus (and I think the infamous “Abaddon Fractal” would definitely answer something in this regard), though not as much as in GW2 times priorly to his “rebirth”. I also failed to indicate that I don’t think it was a one-man mission, meaning that Balthazar was sent on Tyria following an agreement with the other four gods (who are theoretically an harmonious group); perhaps he had a selfish intent to regain some power in the process. Perhaps, following the disruption of the Door of Komalie, he was abandoned on Tyria.

About him being instrumental in founding a competing faith… humans won wars only thanks to Balthazar’s intervention, either direct (as in him personally fighting) or indirect (as imbuing others with his magic), hence his loss of power would not ensure a success amongst his human followers, and the Zaishen have slowly drifted apart from solely honoring Balthazar; had he the intention to survive he would need to have a better plan (view the Maguuma Bloodstone and the White Mantle).
Also, following the Exodus the human gods vowed to stop caring about Tyria in general, not just humans, and Abaddon’s defeat saw their final link with this world broken in their minds.

The risk of being unmasked was minimum for Balthazar when posing as a mursaat, as blind fanaticism gets in the way: not even the mursaat’s total annihilation was enough for White Mantle zealots to realize the Unseen Ones were no gods, and as far as we know Caudecus was the first leader who was cautiously trying to depart from honoring the mursaat.


Ultimately the timeline got really weird, as you also said, and this is just a fun idea that arose from connecting dots, perhaps wrongly.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

We had contact with his servants, but not Balthazar himself.

People keep saying that as if it’s an irrefutable fact, as if we’ve never had individuals directly confront the five gods since the Exodus. This simply isn’t true. Both Dwayna and Grenth had shown themselves, directly, to mortals – and Grenth during GW1’s time period. We’re even told that Lyssa had communicated directly with a mortal.

Is there any reason to believe that Balthazar had not done similar? IIRC, some of the Zaishen do mention having seen visions of/from Balthazar.

We players only ever met the avatars. But that wouldn’t stop others from meeting the gods post-Exodus.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

If he became a conniving, uncaring deity that far back, there’s no reason to believe that he’d have brought his followers up to speed.

So his personal avatars wouldn’t know the state of their god as they fight for him teeth and nail against his treacherous half-brother, their alliance being in part due to honor versus treachery?

All the while, other gods are directly communicating with mortals and their vessels without bringing up some change in Balthazar’s personality?

That feels as hard to swallow as Jennah being Lyssa.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

If the dagger was used to kill a prisoner, that puts Balthazar there before the riot and following massacre.

Not necessarily. We don’t have a specific timeline for each prisoner’s death and we know some were kept alive (as we fight them). Heck, Balthazar’s presence could have started the riot – I don’t think we get an exact reason for the riot beginning.

Mickey Frogeater.1470:

Do we have exact text of him hating Deception? Honor is not the same as Honesty. Honor means Pride so if there are text of him ever having Honor he wouldn’t back down from a challenge.

I’m also wanting the samples of text referring to him having honor aside from the player’s words to him while fighting him(didn’t see any ingame text from GW1 despite checking both the Fissure of Woe quests’ text, the story of Kaolai, the Priest of Balthazar’s words + the Champion of Balthazar’s words & skills and haven’t been able to access the manuals). It’s quite vital.

You can pretty much read any of the Zaishen or Fissure of Woe NPC dialogues to get either. They may not mention Balthazar directly, but they all talk about honorable combat and the like, while also talking about following “Balthazar’s teachings”. There’s also dialogue such as Alsacien talking about honorable combat in Balthazar’s name, etc.

You said you looked into the Fissure of Woe’s quests’ text but apparently missed things such as Khobay and the Wailing Lord’s betrayals and how Balthazar’s followers – who reflect Balthazar’s teachings – handled both (speaking of justice for Khobay, and “lessons” for the Wailing Lord’s broken neutrality). Grenth isn’t the only god attributed to justice – Balthazar is as well, just less so.

Balthazar even have the titles such as “Scourge of the Prideful”.

Hell, Balthazar’s own words: I’ve learned there is no honor in war.

I have learned, meaning once he did believe in honor in war.

This isn’t to say Balthazar is a perfectly good god, but he had certainly was not as he is now.

Sock.2785:

I don’t recall a single time after the Exodus where godly Balthazar–or any other human god for that matter (Abaddon and Kormir excluded)–directly interacted with mortals like he recently did in GW2, at least that we know of.

Dwayna appeared before Karei about 300 years after the Exodus. Grenth appeared before Olias between Prophecies and Nightfall. I want to say there was a case of Balthazar and Lyssa appearing before mortals post-Exodus too, but cannot recall where I saw such.

Sock.2785:

To conclude on this, not every human has the same perception of Balthazar. Similarly to how greeks regarded Ares, tyrians regard Balthazar from two perspectives: on one hand he embodies the physical valor and strength necessary for success in war, on the other he was overwhelming, insatiable in battle, destructive, and man-slaughtering.

I’ve not seen a single human source considering him the latter. The closest I’ve ever seen is the High Priest Zhang adding “Paragon of Bloodshed” and “Bringer of War” among his many (much more bright) titles like “He That Shows Us the Final Truth,” “Revealer of Strength”, and “Finder of Wisdom.” But those two titles are less “insatiable, man-slaughtering battle” and more neutral, like Balthazar himself had shown given scrolls and scriptures.

I think we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that Balthazar’s murderous side ever stood in contrast to honor being associated with him. Honor is always a matter of perspective. Balthazar has clearly been associated with rage and violent tendencies since way back in GW1, and is being praised by his followers nonetheless. They may present him and his teachings as honorable, but that doesn’t mean they are, from our point of view.

So while it is clear that Balthazar has changed, that aspect of him has been there before, albeit less extreme. Strictly speaking, he still doesn’t have any evil intentions. Balthazar is in no way comparable to, say, Dhuum or Abaddon, who enjoyed terrorizing people. Balthazar is willing to destroy Tyria to get what he wants, but it’s just collateral damage.

One could even argue that he’s still got a very bloodthirsty, twisted sense of honor.

“I’ve learned there is no honor in war. But if you crave the glory of the fray…”

Those are his words. Glory, honor, where should we draw the line? He’s clearly reacting to the Commander’s challenge here, unleashing Temar and Tegon, where it seems to me that he didn’t have to.

Random on the spot fun theories after reading this.

Balthazar was thrown in to the Bastion of the Penitent after he lost the battle in FoW and Menzies stipped him of his power. Deimos could have been bound to Balthazar at one point and then turned against him with Menzies took reign. The knife/dagger could have been a weapon he found/stole/used to escape the prison. The dagger/knife must have some significance to his escape if he’s trying to have a blacksmith recreate it.

Regarding the dagger model, we’ve seen such before in Scarlet’s Secret Lair. It may simply be a case of reusing an asset unless this is supposed to be some subtle nudge at Scarlet’s speculated involvement in the Abaddon fractal which we would’ve experienced had Evon won the election back in Season 1. What exactly would she have learned about studying Abaddon and the gods that would’ve aided her in her overarching plot?

Another interesting tidbit in the Bastion is the pile of clothes which the PC comments on having scales and speculating whether it belonged to a krait or something else. It could be foreshadowing of Samarog’s involvement given the comment about not fitting a bipedal individual, or maybe it could refer to a Forgotten. Either way, none of the corpses seen in the Bastion are scaly, so if the clothes didn’t belong to Samarog, their owner is conspicuously missing.

It’s not linearily related to the dagger itself, but since we’re discussing gods and mursaats;
Mursaat Token.
This token looks particularly interesting to me because it shows a creature. And it’s clearly not a mursaat. So I’m thinking, what if it depicts Janthir as an entity? It seems to have a somewhat humanoid shape with 4 tentacle legs and 6 tentacle arms.
What if the Mursaat worshipped this entity, after they found it in the mists to which they retreated around the previous dragon cycle. What if they found the creature Janthir, and were given its eye as a tool. Such a creature would unknowingly be stronger or weaker than Balthazar, but surely put Balthazar on edge, or not move without caution. In the last theory, Balthazar was faced with the eye of Janthir, and maybe he struggled with it and decided that it was not worth the risk of fight and fled, leaving the dagger behind.

Hrrrmn. I’m not sure about the ‘clearly not a mursaat’ part. It’s not a complete mursaat, granted, but a bust of a mursaat that shows the head, torso, and back tendrils, but not the arms and legs, may have a silhouette similar to that.

Interesting observation nonetheless, however.

draxynnic.3719:

Hrrrmn. I’m not sure about the ‘clearly not a mursaat’ part. It’s not a complete mursaat, granted, but a bust of a mursaat that shows the head, torso, and back tendrils, but not the arms and legs, may have a silhouette similar to that.

Interesting observation nonetheless, however.

So you’re saying the tokens depict a limbless mursaat with really long feathers?
interesting, I’m having a good laugh imagining a quadrupet mursaat floating around.
A Chosen! A Chosen!, My kingdom for a Chosen!

Busts are a fairly common form of sculpture, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the entity being represented as a bust actually lacks arms and legs, it just means that the sculptor hasn’t included them.

Whoever made the design for mursaat tokens may have been using a similar artistic license. Because there’s a limited amount of space to work with on the token, they chose not to include the arms and legs so they could devote more space to the parts they considered more important to represent.

Out of the Shadows….Shadow Army
North to Vabbi confirmed

certain “bathazar” friendly class will get dagger for expansion? :^)