Does Mordremoth absorb Zhaitan's magic?
The first is that Mordremoth creates copies of a dead body long before Zhaitan dies. The sylvari are supposedly shaped after the physiology of Rhonin’s family.
Emphasis here on supposedly. Not irrate at you specifically, but this has come up several times recently.
Before launch we were given a couple possible explanations for why sylvari look like humans, and using Ronan’s village as a template was only one of them. Yes, after HoT launched, we saw the blighting trees and decided they were proof for that particular theory, but now the game is telling us that they’re not. There’s no sense in us hanging on to this ‘fact’ when the support for it has been removed.
The second is the Destiny’s Edge clones in the second to last story mission from HoT. We fight clones of Zojja that were created by the blighting pods, but Zojja is clearly not dead, yet Mordremoth was able to create clones of her. If this is the case, how exactly is absorbing Zhaitan’s magic supposed to change Mordremoth’s powers? I thought the cloning process was supposed to somehow represent Mordremoth’s mind power (is that still a thing – are we going to see Primordus use plant, death, shadow and mind powers now?). If the other dragons absorb the mind magic of Mordremoth, can’t we just replicate the same methods to kill them?
If Mordremoth can clone dead bodies, why does he keep Eir, Faolain, Logan, Zojja and Trahearne alive (keeping them alive inside the pods would actually require some effort seeing as they would need nutrition etc)? Why not simply kill them and pump out a bunch of Mordrem Champions with their skills and abilities?
This is more speculative, but I think there are a couple possibilities here. Maybe he kept them alive to serve as bait- part of the reason we ended up in the heart of Mordremoth’s domain was pursuing reports that our friends were still alive. On a similar note, maybe it’s part of Mordremoth’s thing for psychological warfare, spreading false hope among the rest of the Pact that their friends might be rescued or horror at the imagined consequences of being taken alive.
Or, possibly, it ties into a different tidbit we’ve had from the devs, that different magical domains can conflict- maybe Mordremoth’s traditional corruption clashes with death-based corruption. Maybe using a corpse can only result in a ‘colonized’ minion, and it takes a live one to make multiple copies. Maybe keeping, or copying, a mind requires a living subject (remember that Faolain was conveniently tossed offscreen and not confirmed dead).
Point is, we just don’t know enough to say it doesn’t make sense.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
As far as Logan and Zojja are concerned, I think those clones far more closely resembled their host than the minions created by the blighting trees. Those duplicates were exactly copies, short of being made of flesh, while I don’t think any of the corpses from the blighting trees were recognisable after the transformation. Plus, it’s possible that Logan and Zojja had only recently been put in the pods, or at least not as long as we believed. The sylvari, he instantly corrupted when he could (that one Nightmare Courtier being an exception, probably so that we realize Nightmare Court did not mean Mordrem servants), and the rest? Maybe they needed to be starved in preparation or some such.
Emphasis here on supposedly. Not irrate at you specifically, but this has come up several times recently.
Before launch we were given a couple possible explanations for why sylvari look like humans, and using Ronan’s village as a template was only one of them. Yes, after HoT launched, we saw the blighting trees and decided they were proof for that particular theory, but now the game is telling us that they’re not. There’s no sense in us hanging on to this ‘fact’ when the support for it has been removed.
Actually, we were explicitly told that was the case, after we got told a couple in-universe theories about the reason for the situation.
But that was in an interview with Ree Soesbee, so it seems like many of her other interviews they’ve retconned it.
Doesn’t change the fact, however, that we see no decay in the mordrem (how Zhaitan’s death corruption manifested – not the corruption of corpses), and even before Zhaitan’s death Jormag was already corrupting corpses.
It would seem far more likely to me that Taimi in this case was simply wrong and Mordremoth had taken only the domain of shadow, thus explaining the Shadow of the Dragon appearing from the Dream (originally described as being Zhaitan’s depiction within the Dream, Zhaitan’s shadow if you will) and its summoned Shadow Tendrils and Smothering Shadows.
Though the lack of further shadow evidence should be called into question there…
remember that Faolain was conveniently tossed offscreen and not confirmed dead).
A dev – I think Matthew Medina? – confirmed she wasn’t dead when corrupted into a pseudo-Vinetooth.
Those duplicates were exactly copies, short of being made of flesh, while I don’t think any of the corpses from the blighting trees were recognisable after the transformation.
Mordrem saurians. Mordrem hylek.
They’re as much of an exact copy as Mordrem Zojja/Logan were, the hylek ones oddly talking even. They were taken as both corpse and living.
Plus, it’s possible that Logan and Zojja had only recently been put in the pods, or at least not as long as we believed. -snip- Maybe they needed to be starved in preparation or some such.
According to Taimi, the Blighting Pod fluids have “great preservative properties” – so one would think that the pods were designed to keep victims alive, or from decaying if already dead.
Dear ANet writers,
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
Actually, we were explicitly told that was the case, after we got told a couple in-universe theories about the reason for the situation.
But that was in an interview with Ree Soesbee, so it seems like many of her other interviews they’ve retconned it.
Do you mean the TalkTyria interview you linked in the other thread? Just gave it a look through, but what it says is “because the race tightly relates to the essence of human due to the Pale Tree’s influences from Ronan, the overall form has a human silhouette… They are a collection of abstract notions the Pale Tree had about what made up the human, as she really only saw the surface. They are a tree’s interpretation of humans.” Nothing there about using corpses as a template, and arguably it’s evidence of the opposite, with the bits about ‘abstract notions’ and ‘only saw the surface’.
What’s more, in response to an earlier question, Soesbee said “I can’t tell you anything [the sylvari] don’t know!” She’s open about the fact that not everything they were telling us is the full, objective truth.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Going back to the idea that dragon minions can absorb the magic of another dragon after it dies and adopt as aspect of them, why don’t we see sylvari absorbing Zhaitan’s death magic or becoming more powerful like Teq after Mordremoth dies? We literally have an entire playable race of dragon minions, why can’t they absorb dead dragon magic like the other dragon minions? At the very least, the Pale Tree should be able to do it.
I don’t believe either of the points you bring up utilized Zhaitan’s magic.
Sylvari are humanoid, but they aren’t human. They’re made of bark and sap and not flesh and blood. They’re made to resemble humans, but don’t actually share their physiology, they just mimic it. No death magic involved there.
The clones of Destiny’s Edge… well, we don’t know that much about them, but they aren’t undead either. Zhaitan’s magic revives on a 1-to-1 ratio. You get one Risen from one corpse. Multiple copies wouldn’t be possible through his power. And as you said, they aren’t dead when the clones are made either. The cloning is something Mordremoth is capable of with its own powers, probably a combination of both its mind and “nature” powers.
I don’t think either of those are what Taimi is talking about either, though. Rather, what she’s referring to is something that honestly went kind of unexplored in HoT, particularly later on. The Mordrem were stated a couple of times to be collecting corpses. Its mentioned in a few story instances, namely the one involving protecting the Itzel village as well as the prison camp (there are corpses collected near the beginning). Its also brought up in the open world areas now and then, like during the Ordinance Corp chain in Verdant Brink. So presumably some of the Modrem you fight are reanimated dead, though there seems to be very little indication of which is which.
Particularly in the case of the Itzel Village mission, the Itzel themselves say that they burn their dead to prevent them from being corrupted (something also mentioned during Eir’s memorial as a major reason her body wasn’t brought back to Hoelbrak) and if you choose to go on the offensive against the Mordrem instead of just defending the village, you have to destroy those “blister pods” which are stated to be the way the Mordrem are corrupting corpses.
Also, I believe during the Ordinance Corps chain you find out that Diarmid was previously a Pact member who died in the crash. One of the lines one of the NPCs says is something like “That creature… it had Diarmid’s face!”. So that’s perhaps one of the few specific instances of Mordremoth corrupting a corpse.
That’s what Taimi is talking about, I think. She’s not saying ALL of Mordremoth’s corruption / clone techniques are from Zhaitan. The ability to corrupt living creatures is something inherent to most of the dragons, Mordremoth included. And the cloning thing seems to be his own ability as well. But presumably, Mordremoth can only corrupt / clone living creatures by his own power. Zhaitan’s power is what allows him to also corrupt the dead in addition to the living.
The problem with that conclusion, however, is that other Elder Dragons are fully capable of corrupting corpses. Jormag’s seen doing such once in Edge of Destiny, and IIRC, does so again during Enraged and Unashamed.
Further, we know that the Pale Tree was able to create a close approximation of humans just by witnessing them – if not because of the corpses among her roots (something that Primordus’ minions do actively – create close approximations of creatures they see).
It would seem weird that Mordremoth is incapable of the same, and it seems downright weird that he’d be able to clone living beings that are in stasis but unable to clone dead beings that are being preserved. Both situations result in the body being the same, more or less.
With every Elder Dragon, the first domain – plant, death, fire, ice, crystal – has always been resulting in how the corruption looks. This remains true when Primordus takes the first domain of Zhaitan and Mordremoth – his destroyers look like plant and fire mixed, or death and fire.
Yet with Mordremoth, the only mordrem that ever looked like it might have been a result of death mixing with plant was the mordrem wyvern. Mordrem Wolves and Mordrem Trolls were just corpses being turned into plants (and it seems to me that the end result for the trolls are Mordrem Grunts, which have veteran versions called Mordrem Trolls, or Mordrem Menders/Vinetenders which utilize the same general appearance as grunts but with minor alterations).
Dear ANet writers,
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
Really? Most of the Mordrem I’ve seen look withered and decayed compared to the Sylvari and Sylvan Hounds.
Another simplistic answer would be that while Mordy and Primordus did absorb portions of Zhaitan’s death magic, they didn’t inherent Zhaitan’s style of undead/zombie corruption, and both of them are simply using the death magic in different ways.
Mordy was (possibly) using it in minion production to help make better copies of the dead animals and fallen Pact members, and Primordus is simply imbuing some of his minions with it to strengthen them.
Didn’t Taimi conclude that chak could filter out death spectrum when digesting leyline? Thinking of how much chak there was so close to Mordremoth (I bet millions and millions, the way they swarm and because, if Gerents are the highest “tier” there were at least 4 around if not more spreading even more chak), would it be a long stretch to think that his big leyline eating tree trunk would simply not be getting enough death magic? So, even though he could have absorbed it and used against us, maybe he just didn’t have enough, because the chak were (still are) eating all of it on that side of Maguuma. Primordus on the other hand, went for the southernmost leyline and chunked on a completely clear leyline, thus getting a huge portion of death magic. Or something like that.
Mordremoth would have gotten access to that southern ley line running northwards too, however, and the chak filtering out death while eating ley line, to me, implies that death magic would be higher concentration in what ley line magic is left because they’re not consuming and converting it.
Dear ANet writers,
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.