Guild Wars 2

so…aren’t we doing the wrong thing by killing them?

are we sentencing ourselves to magic-overload blowing up Tyria in the distant future, in our quest for Phat Loots and Heroic Tales?

shouldn’t we, instead, just be trying to put them back to sleep?

Charr says “We don’t need no stinking dragons! We kill our dragons and if magic’s gonna be a problem then we’ll fix that too.”

If the Elder Dragons are some plot of Mother Nature to preserve magical balance, then Mother Nature can go to hell.

We prefer to stay alive thank you very much.

There’s a difference between it being what they do, and what their purpose is. Angel McCoy merely said that’s their “natural role” – but that doesn’t mean that it’s their purpose nor what they do nor what they’re intending to do.

What they intend to do, by all indications, is rule the world and destroy anything they cannot corrupt.

We honestly don’t know what happens if we kill an Elder Dragon. Though being said that their “natural role” is to balance magic, this may be their “natural role” in so much as it is a bee’s natural role to pollinate flowers. In that creatures adapted to function that way, but it’s not downright necessary (bees are needed for a lot of things in the ecosystem, but only because the ecosystem and bees evolved to be part of each other; and if they can survive being separated, then they’ll evolve again, and bees can be replaced by something else even if). But unlike with bees, killing off the Elder Dragons without a substitute may have no negative consequences. Magic might not be needing balancing. And if it does, what prevents a substitute from being put in place?

Even in the worst case scenario, the Priory has access to bloodstone shards after Arah, and if neccesary I’m sure they have the locations of at least the three we know about recorded as well. If they could recreate it, or failing that recover the pieces (and possibly modify them), then any role the dragons play could be effectively rendered defunct. Like Konig said, though, we don’t actually know what will happen if magic isn’t balanced- it could just as easily be a good thing as a bad one.

But do we know that having too much magic is a bad thing?

If magic is finite, but cannot get destroyed like some Asura think, then all magic that concentrates on one is not available for all others. In a further thought it becomes a heavy balancing problem over time. Nobody who gathered magic will release it by his own choice.

Horst Hortensie.5420:

If magic is finite, but cannot get destroyed like some Asura think, then all magic that concentrates on one is not available for all others. In a further thought it becomes a heavy balancing problem over time. Nobody who gathered magic will release it by his own choice.

That sounds exactly like what the Elder Dragons are doing.