Guild Wars 2

What do we know about the bloodstones?

So far we know that there are five of them, four of them provide different magic spheres.

Denial.
Aggression.
Destruction.
Preservation.

But do we know how they work?

For instance, why is it that an elementalist can provide healing effects? Why can a mesmer dish out damage? Why can a necromancer deny enemies positive boons?

Each profession doesn’t necessarily correlate to a specific bloodstone. The point to the bloodstones was just that no one individual could use all 4 of those specific styles of magic at once, this also toned down the scale of the magic that any one individual can use. Now things seem to have changed somewhat in GW2, and I’m beginning to think that perhaps the bloodstones are loosing their effects. I only say this because it seems that certain individuals have the power (without dragon magic) to do some pretty devastating things (see human beginner area and earth elemental)

There are a few other cases in GW2 that have those devestating magical effects, but they still fit in one category of bloodstone magic (the earth elemental, destruction). It also seems completely counter productive to allow magic users to use the different types of bloodstone magics over a period of time, seeing as the magic itself was supposed to be limiting in the first place.

I think the idea behind it was to force individuals to rely upon each other for the magic that they could not perform themselves. AKA you guys need a monk to heal!

I agree with Narcemus about the point of the Bloodstones. Perhaps the backstory of them was just the way the writers chose to describe the limits of magic in relation to the separation of the professions. It’s nice they considered this in the lore and didn’t just say something like “because that’s the way it is” or something similar. The elimination of the monk class for the new “anti-trinity” style of gameplay must have been a challenge for them considering the lore. I haven’t seen much in-depth explanations for this besides a few lines of text, has anyone else?

There’s an interview that says that the guardian grew out of a blending between monk and paragon traditions, so guardians are now using the bloodstone (Preservation) that monks used to.

A point of significance here is that the lines between the schools of magic aren’t well defined except in the sense that specific skills belong in specific professions. For instance, imagine dividing a colour wheel into four chunks (say yellow, green, blue and red) – the dividing line between blue and red, say, is going to be somewhere in the purple region, and likely there’s going to be some red character on the blue side and blue on the red side. Now, imagine that instead of a wheel you have a tetrahedron where each school borders the others roughly equally* – that’s essentially what the schools of magic are. They have focuses, but overlap with one another so that they aren’t one-dimensional in their focus., and over time magic-users have grown better at taking maximum advantage of that overlap.

*I say ‘roughly equally’ because looking at the four magical professions, there are some schools of magic that appear more similar or less similar to others. However, if you compare to GW1, which professions appear closest to one another appear to have changed somewhat, so this may simply be a function of what practitioners have concentrated on rather then the actual degree of overlap.

Remember that not all magic-like effects are bloodstone magic. Some of it is spirit energy, some of it is divine intervention, and some of it is good old fashioned technology and elbow grease.

For example, a norn becoming Bear isn’t necessarily magical in the bloodstone sense. The bloodstones limit only the magic gifted to the mortal races by Abaddon.

And the ability for ritualists to summon spirits was a skill that they had long before the gods even gave magic to the world, if I remember reading right.

Narcemus.1348:

And the ability for ritualists to summon spirits was a skill that they had long before the gods even gave magic to the world, if I remember reading right.

You remember correctly but the way they did it was different from how “modern ritualists” do it. The ritualists that we know rely on the same magic as everyone else because this method was easier. Knowledge of the old ways of doing things are supposedly lost but given what ritualists do I assume they can summon the spirit of some ancient ritualist and ask. It should be noted that in one of the personal story mission a priestess of grenth is also able summon the spirit of a dead person.

Do Arah 4. Together with some bits of info on bloodstones found in GW2, it will change your way of thinking about those objects. But… just do Arah 4 first.
I have summarised the lore found in Arah in my thread in this very forum, but it would be better if everyone interested done it on their own – we could compare our interpretations and fill some holes we might got.

Narcemus.1348:

Each profession doesn’t necessarily correlate to a specific bloodstone.

Actually, that is the case.

We were outright told on the Elementalist page on guildwars2.com, before it got rehashed, that Elementalists utilize Destruction magic. Logically speaking, a profession cannot have more than 1 school used – thus cannot be tied to more than 1 bloodstone – due to dual professions in GW1.

Given that dual professions is gone, and that all professions have stronger healing now, one can argue that all professions go into Preservation as well, at the cost of dual professions. (Guardians, who most likely use Preservation as its base like monks, seem to use elemental abilities too thus would be, like the Elementalist, a Destruction/Preservation combo – just more in Preservation than Destruction, as opposed to the Elementalist).

Narcemus.1348:

Now things seem to have changed somewhat in GW2, and I’m beginning to think that perhaps the bloodstones are loosing their effects. I only say this because it seems that certain individuals have the power (without dragon magic) to do some pretty devastating things (see human beginner area and earth elemental)

The point of the bloodstones was to prevent the merging of schools of magic, not to keep things limited in of themselves. So you can do amazing feats while limited to a single school of magic.

It’s hard to say that the Bloodstones have ever really done their job though, when you really look at it. I mean here in GW2 every profession can help in the area of preservation as well as 1 other area of magic, and in Guild Wars 1 each profession had secondary profession abilities which allowed them to mix their way into multiple areas of magic.

I mean the only way that anyone can say that the Bloodstones have done their job is that no 1 specific spell can bring forth effects from multiple stones. Otherwise each profession seems to have abilities in each sphere of magical influence, even though certain professions are usually much stronger at it than others.

Well, ele’s staff water skill 1 tends to disagree, healing and damaging at the same time.

Like I said, the boundaries between the schools aren’t rigidly defined. Denial, destruction, and aggression can all heal, for instance – they just did it in their own ways that, in GW1 at least, weren’t as efficient as Preservation could do it.

The effect of the bloodstones is to prevent anyone from using all four, and that seems to have happened – however, drawing from multiple bloodstones does seem to be possible. Just not all four.

Another instance of game mechanics mucking up game lore.

In a perfect world people could only rain fire from the sky, or cast healing spells, or whatever denial and aggression are, but to make the game work they have to blend the lines to make the gameplay viable for everyone.

If we consider Denial as ‘not letting my target do things’, Preservation as ‘doing nice things to my folks’, Destruction as ‘doing bad things to my target’ and Aggression as ‘doing things to my folks that will make them do bad things to my target’ (although the boundary between Destruction and Aggression seems a little blurry), then skills like Chaos Storm have potential to do all within one spell (daze / aegis / damage / retaliation).

If we go as far as saying that ‘destruction can heal’, then the original division crumbles, imho, and makes much less sense. If 3-4 schools can do multiple things, how can you pinpoint out the differences between them and how, in the first place, can we know that those differences and schools exist in the first place?

I understand the difference between the lore and the in-game mechanics, but i also understand the relationship between them and how, more or less, they work together.
I do not think we can totally scrap the in-game mechanics and in-game stuff saying ‘oh meh, that’s just mechanics, it’s not lore, it’s irrelevant’.

I understand the fact that the devs might have changed a lot of lore since GW1, be it in retcons or by retelling the history, by finally telling the truth, by filling the gaps, and so on – of course they didn’t have all the Dragons plot and the GW2 setting all fleshed out in the old days of Prophecies, when they introduced the first bloodstones. Most likely they named the Maguuman stone ‘bloodstone’ because it was used to sacrifice people there – and that’s it.
They built new lore around it as they wanted to expand the storytelling and setting-making potential of an element that was already there, providing more data about it in the process. This is something understandable, but it caused severe alternations and loopholes in the setting, especially if you compare the lore of GW1 and GW2. Heck, even if you compare what some devs said in interviews – their words either denied some older interviews or in-game knowledge.

That’s why i believe we should keep the old theories and knowledge from GW1, but take them with a solid grain of salt right now. Especially that not only knowledge from Arah clearly states something different than GW1, but also because of the new in-game mechanics.
Chaos Storm is an example of one side. The other is that we can’t go dual profession anymore. We may say ‘meh, it’s just mechanics’ – or we may embrace those bits as well and accept that what we’ve known so far is either incomplete or a total lie and lots of things are yet to be discovered (possibly even written by devs).

It’s only reimbursed by lack of proper info and loads of assumptions and theories around the bloodstones, not to mention the ‘changes’ in lore as who created the bloodstone. It may also turn out that the whole ‘school division’ is a moot theory, either because the devs decided to change how things work or because it was wrong all along, even with some scraps of actual info, yet pretty old now.

Gonna take screenshots of all conversations and all NPC quotes from Arah 4 the next time i’m there.

The distinction seems to be that the labels are what each school is most suited for…

…or, to put things in perspective, what each school was viewed as most suited for at the time the document that identified them was written. The magical schools have been developed since, and people have found ways of doing things with them that were not seen as possible during the time of Guild Wars 1… and by extension, it’s likely that magic-users in Guild Wars 1 have discovered ways of using the schools that were not known (to humans, anyway) at the time the Bloodstone lore was written.

The truth is that the schools are really defined as elementalism, mesmerism, necromancy, and, since naming has been complicated by the change since GW1, preservation. While there may be boundary regions where their magics look similar, the fact remains that a guardian cannot cast a mesmer spell, a mesmer cannot use elementalist magic (except through using mesmer magic to hijack someone else’s spell), and so on. The limitations set by the bloodstones still hold - it’s just that the spellcasters of Tyria have widened the range of things they can do while remaining within those limits.

I’ve always looked at the schools not so much as what their name means or what they do, but what the practicing professions do.

Denial was always mental based magic – and when thinking on meaning of denial – to deny – then even that can be used in a beneficial way. To deny pain, damage, or harm. Similarly, it can mean denying beneficial things – from causing damage, to receiving healing, to movement. I’d argue that denial magic is the school used in regards to making things float (denying the object from falling/denying gravity).

And when looking at the elementalist, though they have protective skills, snares, and healing, they’re still destroying something to cause those spells – they destroy the surrounding earth to obtain the rocks that become shields or that they hurl just as much as they use fire and air to damage their enemies directly.

Necromancy in GW1 almost always focused on taking advantage of actions – either past or current actions. In GW2, this is changed a bit but still exists to a degree. Thus Aggression would be, arguably, tied to the act of utilizing movement.

Even monks did more than merely heal – remember smiting prayers? This means that Preservation is more than just keeping things together. It can be harmful too, if used in a certain way. I’ve always viewed smiting prayers more as highly concentrated doses of preservation – not dissimilar to the Jade Wind, which was corrupted magic granted by Dwayna the patron of monks. Preservation – to keep in condition – can do more than restoring or preventing damage to, in the context of living beings. Petrification is the act of preserving one’s movements, for instance. (I kind of like to think that smiting prayer skills are miniscule little Jade Wind effects – each skill that damages a foe is temporarily petrifying them).

So I really don’t see an issue with all schools being able to heal, truth be told. It’s not so much in what the schools do, but rather how its done.

So all schools can heal, defend, damage, and buff with the same effects. That’s how I view it, at least.

That’s definitely a very interesting perspective, and one I don’t know that I’ve ever heard before. It also makes a lot of sense.

Personally, I think the Jade Wind is more Destruction or, possibly under current rules of magic, Denial – that’s where we seem to be seeing transformation effects the most in GW2, and the effect was basically to petrify everything.

However, the general principle applies that smiting magic is likely a case of ‘too much of a good thing’. A little bit of sun or warmth aids in maintaining someone’s health, for instance, but too much of either will burn you. Likewise, a little bit of preservation magic is beneficial, but a wave of concentrated preservation magic will overload the system of someone unprotected from it and cause harm.

The other side of Preservation is conjuring barriers to protect – in GW1, this was mostly on a single person, in GW2, it usually protects an area. However, it’s a small step away from a field of solid force that protects… and a field of solid force that you use to beat someone over the head with. Most offensive guardian magic seems to fit into one of these categories – hitting someone with blue fire or light which when used in a more controlled manner is beneficial (consider that symbols and some other guardian offensive spells also provide some beneficial effect to allies) or smacking someone with a force field of some kind.

When if you were to preserve a living being in a means that would harm them, wouldn’t it be petrification?

Your line of “too much of a good thing” is more or less what I meant with how I view both smiting prayers and the Jade Wind (and now, guardian magic)- the latter being a huge amount that brought such a devastating negative impact.

And yet we have a dungeon dedicated to bloodstones and the Seer in GW2, and there’s no mention of any schools, either by any of their name or even the division being mentioned.

I might be taking it a tad too simply, but if there are nearly no differences between the bloodstones other than ‘profession x is based on bloodstone in y’ – which probably is a retcon/Gods’ lie in the first place now – then why stick to the division?

It boils down to what it means that z is an ‘elementalist spell’ or a ‘monk spell’, i guess, other than pure design – but from the in-game point of view.
We also know that there are spells that can’t be tied up to any known professions, like the monsters’ tricks. Perceiving bloodstones as sources of ‘x profession’s magic’ creates a conundrum if you don’t limit yourself to the player toon professions being the only spellcasters.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

When if you were to preserve a living being in a means that would harm them, wouldn’t it be petrification?

Your line of “too much of a good thing” is more or less what I meant with how I view both smiting prayers and the Jade Wind (and now, guardian magic)- the latter being a huge amount that brought such a devastating negative impact.

Not necessarily. What we see in beneficial use of preservation magic is fields of force that defend things and energy that assists the recipient in healing and recovering from afflictions. In harmful use, we see fire, glowing energy, and (in GW2) fields of force employed as weapons. None of that is connected to petrification.

Meanwhile, we do see some petrification… in elementalist (Destruction) magic. Defensively, in that case, in the form of Obsidian Flesh, but the precedent is there – if there’s anything which if turned offensively becomes petrification of a foe, it’s based off skills like Obsidian Flesh and Earth Armour, not anything in the Preservation lines in either game (unless Dervishes employ Preservation, and I’m personally inclined to think that they’re a mix of what is now human racial skills, and Destruction). I think you’re getting stuck on the idea of turning something to stone being petrification, and missing the fact that nothing in the Preservation line involves stone, or turning things into stone, in any way.

@drkn: Lorewise, the purpose of the division is to explain why there are clear divisions between the magical professions. Those divisions still exist, therefor the lore still matches with the mechanics. Furthermore, the effect of the division is pretty deeply bound into the game’s lore – it’s apparently the reason Doric died before his time, it’s the reason Abaddon cracked the kittens and declared war on the other gods, and it’s been referred to in lore interviews (there’s one where Grubb mentions that the effect of the “gift of magic” followed by the breaking of the bloodstones has been recorded in an independent historical record (namely that of the asura).

The division probably didn’t get mentioned in the Arah explorable path in question because the division of the bloodstones and the splitting of the magical schools that resulted in that is old news, while the original purpose of the proto-bloodstones and the involvement of the seers in making it is new. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any creature who employs magic that can’t be assigned to one of the schools if you think about it (even dragon minions, although they don’t count since they draw their power from their master’s, not from the Bloodstones). Still, if there was, it could be explained as the critter having some other source of power – we know now that there are still sources of magic in the world that aren’t connected to teh dragons or the bloodstones, it’s just that the bloodstones are the source of magic that’s most conveniently available to PC spellcasters.

What about GW1’s ritualist’s binding rituals?
Not Dragons, i guess not bloodstones, probably somehow the Mists themselves – how? If the magic commonly used by our toons is a ‘gift of Abaddon’, to put it simply, and is channeled through bloodstones, how are the binding rituals channeled? Or even the guardian’s spirit weapons – what school is it, what’s the ‘lore mechanic’?
If our toons can and do draw magic from the Mists – or any other source than old-interviews-confirmed bloodstones – saying that the bloodstones and schools of magic are behind the magic used by our toons is a long stretch. I’m trashing the old knowledge and theories of the bloodstones and magic to keep a fresh perspective, not tied by old info in fear of plotholes and retcons.

Well, ritualists were originally told to gain their powers through meditating on their ancestors, so it is more than likely that their power originally came from the mists.

draxynnic.3719:

Meanwhile, we do see some petrification… in elementalist (Destruction) magic. Defensively, in that case, in the form of Obsidian Flesh, but the precedent is there

I wouldn’t call that petrification. The animation for that, iirc, is earth from the ground being wrapped around the body.

Unlike, say, the Basilisk gaze attack (which uses mesmer animation).

@drkn: Spirits have always been presented as a form of energy. And there’s quite a lot of implications – particularly around the mursaat – implying that they can be channeled for magic. It is how rangers in GW1 got anything that could be considered a magical attack, and for ritualists the spiritual/ancestoral themed skills are what gave the most divergence for the profession’s abilities. Effectively, ritualists “bypassed” the four schools system by using spirits.

Ritualist magic is also clearly stated to be something that existed before the “gift of magic” was granted (although it was augmented by adding bloodstone magic afterwards – which is unclear, although Preservation is a popular theory due to some similarities between ritualist and guardian stuff).

To my eye, drkn, you’re appearing far too eager to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. We now know that there are sources of magic apart from the bloodstones – the dragons, for a start, a number of skill challenge sites are presented as sources of power, and the original artifact made by the Seers was essentially a storage device for energy that, presumably, came from elsewhere. However, we still have distinct magical professions rather than super-wizards that can employ the full spectrum of magic, therefor the division of the form of magic most easily accessed by mortal spellcasters still remains. The “old theories”, as you call them, are still valid, they’re just not all there is to know.

When it comes to spirit weapons – there are a lot of theories floating about as to what they could be. Mine is that the name only comes about because of a resemblance, and they’re fields of force, same as generated in skills like Shelter and Zealot’s Defence, shaped into recognisable weapons and mentally directed by the caster. Another is that they truly are binding spirits in weapon form, but this is simply harkening back to the possible connection between guardians and ritualists – we know that ritualistic spirit-wrangling predated Abaddon’s gift of magic to mortals. (It’s also interesting to note here that of the primary magical professions, all but the necromancer have some means of conjuring weapons in some form, but they each have their own twist on it.)

@Konig: The visual effect for Obsidian Flesh in GW2 is pretty much the same as for petrification, except that the character can still move around in that form. Since GW2 elementalists can transform themselves into mist, lightning, and even full-on storms for short periods, it stands to reason that they could transform themselves into stone while retaining their movement.

I had the feeling you’d bring up basilisks, to which I have a handful of responses. First is to comment that it seems a simple beam attack animation – often associated with mesmerlike enemies to be sure, but it may just be reuse of resources.

Second, though, is that it is entirely possible that petrification is a mesmeric effect (although probably close the the boundary where elementalist and mesmer magic meets). After all, in GW2 it’s mesmers that have the means of transforming others (Moa Morph) – elementalists can’t turn others into mist or lightning, after all (at least not directly…) – petrification might be along similar lines. However, if it is a mesmeric effect, that means it’s Denial and definitely not Preservation. :P

Third, as noted above, it’s possible that the power behind a basilisk’s gaze comes from some other source than the bloodstones.

I think you yourself showed how Elementalists don’t petrify.

They transform. They transform in wind, water, and earth. This isn’t petrification.

Denial would certainly petrify – denial of movement, after all – though turning to stone is the question. Surely elementalists would be able to petrify, but who’s to say others can’t?

That’s something I’m not understanding from your stance. What prevents the same outcome to be achieved via multiple schools?

I land at the Jade Wind being from Preservation because of its source of power, and the original purpose for that power. Shiro twisted magic granted from Dwayna that was meant to be used to aid the people of the land. Besides the fact that Dwayna’s the patron goddess of monks and thus the patron of Preservation, you can’t easily aid the people with Destruction or Denial magic. Preservation is the most direct choice.

In their normal uses, Preservation and Aggression are the two that are most beneficial – it’s only in the non-standard uses that Denial and Destruction are helpful (just as, vice versa, Denial and Destruction are most harmful directly, while Preservation and Aggression become harmful in non-standard methods of use).

Turning something to stone is literally the definition of petrification. We’re used to the term also meaning immobolisation because stone isn’t normally self-mobile, but that’s what’s impressive about elementalists doing it – they can turn themselves to stone and still move.

Myself, I don’t think it’s so obvious that the blessing had to be (purely) Preservation. Partly because I suspect the gods don’t follow the same rules as mortals, and partly because when she’s not being the god of life and healing, Dwayna is the goddess of air, warmth, and the sky. When it comes to a blessing to guarantee a good harvest, the second might actually be the [i]more[/]i important of the two – blowing in rain when rain is needed, keeping the climate right for optimum growing conditions, and so on. Thus, even without considering what mortal mages can do with healing rains now, the blessing logically could have been primarily elemental (namely, “Destruction”) in nature. It’s just that for mortals just grasping the principles of elemental magic, it’s easier to toss fireballs than to manage a complex weather system to your favour.

Furthermore, while it no longer occurs in GW2, in GW1 smiting magic was known to be particularly useful against undead. There’s no reason why petrification should be more effective against undead – in fact, arguably a skeletal undead could be completely petrified with no loss of function. Meanwhile, Resurrect Heals Zombie is a named fantasy trope – turning magic normally used to heal against undead has a tendency to cause harm instead. Now, GW1 had no way to represent directly turning a heal spell against undead, but it could make the offensive damage type most associated with healing magic do extra.

I know you like the theory, but you’re drawing a pretty long bow from that single data point that can be explained in other ways (another simply being that Abaddon granted Shiro access to some forbidden magic that converted the power). Otherwise, there is nothing to link smiting or guardian magic to your concept of temporary petrification. None of the skill names reference it, and skill graphics show light, flame (normally blue), blue energy, and arguably electricity. In fact, given that GW2 varies death animations according to what inflicted the killing blow, if offensive Preservation magic leading to petrification was a thing, they would have had the opportunity to represent it through a special death animation.

While I’m keenly aware of the difficulty of proving a negative, I’m pretty certain that if your theory was correct, by now we’d have seen more to support it than the supposition that the Jade Wind is the result of excessive preservation magic (which is itself based on the assumption that the blessing was purely preservation magic to begin with).

From my viewpoint, if the Jade Wind had been purely Preservation, then the form I’d expect it to take is a wave of intensely luminous blue flame that simply vaporises everything exposed to it. It’s the light and energy that is required for life dialed up to an intensity that life cannot survive.

: Turning something to stone is literally the definition of petrification. We’re used to the term also meaning immobolisation because stone isn’t normally self-mobile, but that’s what’s impressive about elementalists doing it – they can turn themselves to stone and still move.

But that’s a different situation all together, not close to the kind of petrification we’re talking about. Elementalists, effectively, turn themselves into living golems (the original kind, not GW kind); this is the cease of life petrification. It’s not something I’d attribute to the Elementalists’ skill at all.

: There’s no reason why petrification should be more effective against undead

Nor is there any real reason given outside “it’s divine” for why undead are more effected by Smiting Prayers. Should one consider Smiting Prayers to be Preservation, then naturally what would be the harmful form would typically be less – if at all – effective against undead compared to the living.

Unless one were to consider that the same skills in mechanics are functioned differently based on the target of the spell.

And I’d like to point out that I never said – or at the least intended to mean – that all forms of negative Preservation is in the form of petrification. An alternative, which I view would be most effective against undead, would be rather the excess of benefit on a cellular level. For instance, healing a cell to the point where it may explode from overworking. To a living, this is harmful, but the cells can be replaced – undead cannot replace cells, being unable to recover naturally, thus would be more harmed by this.

Not all smiting prayer skills do more damage against undead, so it’d be silly to believe all smiting prayer magic must use the same methodology.

: From my viewpoint, if the Jade Wind had been purely Preservation, then the form I’d expect it to take is a wave of intensely luminous blue flame that simply vaporises everything exposed to it. It’s the light and energy that is required for life dialed up to an intensity that life cannot survive.

In other words, how you view highly concentrated and widespread Preservation magic to be, based on GW2, would be the Cataclysm. In the Arah storymode dungeon, we see an artistic cinematic of the Cataclysm (and Orr’s rise), which included a light blue light (rather Guardian-esque in color). And in GW1, most undead from Orr were rather skeletal – even the zombies had a lot of flesh missing. Which would account for the “vaporizing” bit.

Overhealing something until it explodes is certainly one thing I could see as possible (in fact, it’s a concept I’ve come across before). My main point is that we’ve been seeing progressively more preservation effects since the ‘mini jade wind’ theory first arose, both offensive and defensive, and unlike GW1, in GW2 we can be fairly confident that what we see when a skill is used is actually what an in-world witness to that skill would see.

Since nothing we’ve seen in Preservation indicates petrification either in the dictionary sense or in the common gaming term sense you seem to be using, while there are effects from (or appearing to be from) other schools of magic that do cause petrification in either the dictionary sense or the common gaming sense, my conclusion is that petrification is not something that Preservation does.

(On that matter, with regards to the elementalist skill, wouldn’t it be in-principle easier to simply turn something into unmoving stone than to turn something into stone that still moves like a living thing? I’d posit that the reason we don’t see elementalists petrifying their enemies is that living things have a resistance to being directly transformed by elemental magic – certain circumstances can bypass this resistance, such as an elementalist self-transforming, but an elementalist is blocked from transforming someone else.

On this matter, thinking on it, I also have a suspicion that mesmer transformations, possibly even from basilisks, don’t actually involve physical transformations – instead, they create an illusion of transformation convincing enough that victim and observers alike believe it.)

Just because it’s not used in modern times doesn’t mean it wasn’t 450 years ago, or isn’t possible to be done.

That method of using the school may be frowned upon if not completely banned – just as murdering for the sake of experimenting on corpses is in GW1 Ascalon.

This isn’t a case like resurrection, which even in lore is a rather rare and “that’s possible?!” aspect in GW2 (with the only known attempted case being Gaheron).

Regarding the elementalist skill, it depends on how its done. Can the Elementalist turn others into stone? And is it actual stone or just appearance/a growth?

And I would agree with any mesmers “petrifying” individuals – that is what Queen Jennah did, after all. Created the allusion that those people became branded while petrifying them (to a degree).