Guild Wars 2

In dimensions alien to the physical world, sentient entities scheme of ways to enter the realm of flesh, dreaming of the havoc they can wreak. Just as ghosts can defy death by returning to the land of the living, demons find ways into our world, where they feast on suffering, despair, and the vital energy of intelligent creatures.

Quote from the GW1 Wiki. Has there been any sightings of demons or even mentions of them in GW2 so far? I haven’t recalled at all, but I know not all demons were related to Abaddon in someway from GW1, so even with him gone there should still be some demons left in the world.

I wouldn’t say there should be some left in the world. Of the three types classified as demons in GW1 (more on that further down), two only entered Tyria as part of Abaddon’s escape, and the third were confined to Cantha.

That said, whether we see any really depends on your definition. Imps are called demons at several points, and one of the hearts mentions they bounce back and forth from the Mists, so they’d probably be your closest bet. If you see the term used by an NPC, they’ll almost always be talking about imps. Fleshreavers (what ‘demon’ currently redirects to on the wiki) are called by the sigil of demon summoning, and we often see them emerge from underworld portals, so I suppose they could also count if you stretch the definition far enough (although it’d either be a retcon or a major unmentioned extension to the GW1 lore we had on them). Shades, aatxes, and the shadow behemoth I’d count as possible demons- they seem to be GW2’s nightmares, which in GW1 were at best described as dark spirits. It’s a question of origin- if they’re generated by the Mists, they meet the definition. If they aren’t, if they’re psychotic or corrupted ghosts of some sort, or some kind of corrupted nature spirits, or something most closely related to the djinn, or whatever other possibility could be raised, it… probably depends again on how you stretch the definition. Similarly, a stretched definition might count all of the enemies produced by the Fractals as demons, being spontaneously generated Mist creatures with a hostile bent.

As for the things that were directly classified as demons in GW1? Oni, Margonites, torment creatures? We haven’t seen any of those. Oni were a Canthan problem, and their source was believed to be slain in GW1. Margonites were exclusively servants of Abaddon, and any who survived Nightfall will probably have now found themselves in Kormir’s realm (fingers crossed for some rogue holdouts in Elona, though). Torment creatures are the best bet for a return- we saw some serving Dhuum, and there’s no shortage of speculation that he’s behind the turmoil that seems to have taken the Underworld.

There are, it would seem, multiple types of demons out there. Torment demons were the most common in GW1, and are often what GW veterans think of when talking about GW-styled demons. But Nightmares, Imps, Oni, Titans, and Margonites all count as demons too, and its hinted that Fleshreavers are as well – of these, we see Nightmares, Imps, and Fleshreavers in GW2.

A note on Nightmares: While they’re referred to as demons occasionally and they live primarily in the Mists, there are indications in GW1 that they are malevolent spirits. It’s likely that unlike torment demons that formed in the Mists, they’re closer related to Margonites who were originally humans and transformed into demons by Abaddon – in that they were original normal souls but were transformed into demons through as-of-yet unexplained actions.

An odd thing I only recently noticed, is that the Sigil of Demon Slaying (or some such) gives a bonus against elementals. No idea if that impacts the lore regarding either any.

I think it’s also possible for spirits to form semi-spontaneously from the Mists without needing to be a living being first: consider the animal spirits, for instance (they grow weaker when the population of the related animal is reduced, so they don’t seem to be taking the spirits of dead animals into themselves, or at least, the benefit that they gain from doing so is less than the benefit from the animals still being alive). The distinctive feature of demons seems to be malevolence, so it’s possible that both corporeal and incorporeal demons qualify.

Regarding fleshreavers: The Stygian Veil implies that torment demons start as partially-formed skeletons that grow from there, which is similar to the EOTN description of fleshreavers harvesting flesh. Fleshreavers could be a strain of demons that the Mists created with the ability to reproduce and to enhance their otherwise weak bodies by harvesting flesh and organs from other species – however, their genes (or equivalent therof) still program towards the original near-decrepit form, thus requiring the fleshreaving to be repeated with each generation.