Guild Wars 2

Is it just me, or does the architecture of Arah slightly resemble the natural architecture of the Ley Line hub in Dry Top? Or maybe this has been discussed before? I always thought the architecture in Arah was interesting, with all the circles everywhere, anyone think this has any significance? Or do you think this is just coincidence?

I would say it is just coincidence.
Circles are not exactly uncommon in architecture.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Circles are not exactly uncommon in architecture.

That being said, I don’t think it’s unlikely that there is a leyline under orr. The gods made their home there. The orrians were magically gifted humans. And then there is the source (the wiki forgets to mention that the Artesian Waters are also a highly magical place, not just the source of Orr’s water).

And here I wanted to create my new thread dedicated to the very observation Webtoehobbit had made here…. curse my laziness for not doing it two days earlier.

No, it’s not just you, but I’d also include the entirety of Orr and not just the city of Arah when comparing it to the “natural” formations inside a ley line hub.

Those Orrian ring structures have been driving me mad since the early days of my first exploration of Orr. I mean, even if you just open the map and drag it to the Artesian Waters in Cursed Shore, you’ll find dozens of those tiny circles staring at you, mocking you with their mysteries.

The only reference — outside the visual one with their excessive use all over the land — comes from a skill challenge in Cursed Shore:

It’s unknown what purpose these giant rings once served, but they fell with such a force that they’re now half buried in the Orrian soil.

— http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Strange_Ring_Structures

And even this little tidbit is almost worth a middle finger from the rings themselves.

However, as I explored the hub and found a paper detailing that magical rays shooting through stone circles are actually a natural phenomenon for ley lines, I couldn’t help but think of the resemblance to Orr. Then after a quick glance at the aforementioned cluster of rings around the Artesian Waters — beneath which there ought to be a gigantic hub, too — I was most certain that the similarity is not coincidence.

I theorize that first the gods, then after Exodus the Orrians as well, built an artificial, above-the-ground ley line hub system that encompasses most of the peninsula/island. The ring structures with their varying sizes could’ve been conduits, capacitors, and enhancers of magic, effectively connecting the enormous quantities of magic radiating from the Source of Orr into every corner of the kingdom, imbuing everyone and everything with the Source’s power. Of course, after the Cataclysm most of the rings were damaged or fell into the soil, thus disrupting the network through which the magic traveled above ground.

Yet still, in localized sections it might’ve still remained intact. Konig pointed this out to me, and I think it may further serve as proof for the theory: the rings holding those brass-and-glass globes in the jotun path of Arah contain something called ‘green light’ that created the crystalline entities we are forced to defeat to advance. Greenish, tealish light is also the color of raw magical energies as we now know. (Although this light contained within those globes is most likely corrupted, since as we stand in the path of the rays cast on the ground, we gain a buff/debuff that allows us to damage the entities but also ticks our health more and more rapidly with each stack of green light accumulated.)

Tl;dr: The ring structures are parts in an enormous artificial magic-conducting system encompassing all of Orr in order to provide the Source’s magic to all corners of the land. It was originally initiated by the Six, then the Orrians continued building it after the gods had left. I think it would be a very interesting discovery if proven correct; the gods’ level of magitechnology being so advanced as to allow the construction of an artificial ley line system.

@ Thalador. Oddly, I had a very similar theory to this and it got me thinking about a lot of other things that initially seemed insignificant. I wonder, will part of the LS mean going back to Orr, and turning the stone structures into a giant cannon aimed at Mordremoth for us to spam 1 on and whoop his scaly kitten

" I think it would be a very interesting discovery if proven correct; the gods’ level of magitechnology being so advanced as to allow the construction of an artificial ley line system."

They could always have been so advanced that they had no need for any ley line system and could enable magic without one.

portals and teleportation could be a great use

just think mass transit system with no congestion

Seriously, just google for images of holey stones (or witch stones, or hag stones) if you want to see where the inspiration for the rock formations in the ley line hub (and the ley line weapons) came from.

It’s an old gaelic tradition that you could see through witch stones into the other world, or that they provided protection from evil spirits, or brought luck, etc.

They only look Orian because in real life holey stones come from the sea.

Wanderer.3248:

Seriously, just google for images of holey stones (or witch stones, or hag stones) if you want to see where the inspiration for the rock formations in the ley line hub (and the ley line weapons) came from.

It’s an old gaelic tradition that you could see through witch stones into the other world, or that they provided protection from evil spirits, or brought luck, etc.

They only look Orian because in real life holey stones come from the sea.

Well now that u mention it they do remind me of of those stone you talk about.

However there is no reason to think that they still couldnt do all these things, they take ideas from the real world, and ideas can be changed and twisted to suit your story needs.

the people that first found the stones in the real world used them to try and see into another world and protect them from evil.

remember this itself is a story that was just aplied to a mundane circle with a hole in it.

not saying you are wrong, just saying you cant really discount much because of real world similarity’s.

we simply dont have enough information

On the colour of magic:

I think magic actually has something of a ‘spectrum’ to it. If you look at the magical professions, they have colours associated with them – necromancers are green, ritualists were teal, guardians and monks blue, mesmers purple. Elementalists are a little harder to define because their magic conjures physical effects that have their own colours, but one could presume that the colour of arcane effects (usually yellow with a greenish tinge) represents the ‘natural’ colour of elemental magic before it’s been used to conjure fire, lightning, and so on. (Of course, there is some colour overlap – mesmer effects often have some blue in them, guardian effects can have some teal and violet, and so on, but they seem to be solid as general themes.)

On this basis, the teal colour of the magical streams in the ley line hub is roughly what I’d expect to see for a mix of the whole spectrum of magical energies, from yellow (elementalists) to purple (mesmers). With no red or orange magic, a bright teal is close to the colour I would predict for the mix of magic – it’s not that the colour of raw magic is teal per se, it’s that there’s greenish yellow, green, blue, and purple in there, and this gets averaged out to teal when perceived by the eye. (Kind of like how the Sun appears yellow despite actually broadcasting all visible wavelengths – because there’s more yellow than other colours).

The ‘green light’ in Orr is probably an Aggression-heavy mix of magic – which both makes sense for Zhaitan’s domain, and explains the DoT effect.

Thalador.4218:

snip

I agree that the rings appear to be part of a large machine. I think the machine in question was used to “liberate” the magic of Tyria that the seers & co. sealed away during the last dragonrise. More importantly, the same machine was probably used to seal said magic back into the bloodstone once Doric asked for intervention from the gods.

Obviously, the next question is who built it (even if neither of those were its purpose), and more than likely the answer is that it was Abaddon. He’s the guy in charge of magic and knowledge and all that jazz, so any such machine being built at the time/place would not be possible without him having a hand in it. But why go through all this trouble to spread magic all over the place?

Let’s take a small detour to the teachings of Abaddon: “act with magic, act within reason, act without mercy.” He’s the newly-appointed head magic honcho, obviously, so what does he do? The reasonable thing would be to gift magic to the races of the world. After all, we have mention of the Ascalonians being amazed at a single Orrian citizen easily performing nigh-impossible feats of backbreaking labour through magic. As for acting without mercy, that’s pretty self-explanatory: With their newfound power, the races of Tyria promptly began slaughtering each other, more effectively than ever. Sure, many would die, but when all is said and done whoever is left standing would have a much easier life through ample use of magic. If you disregard the sticky morality of the situation and stick to cold, hard logic it’s a pretty solid decision.

That sticky morality part is where the division between the gods comes in. For Abaddon things are pretty clear-cut – being able to do literally anything through magic kind of trumps fighting tooth and nail for your very survival. Once you can get past that little bit of mass-genocide that separates the two, anyway. Obviously the other gods weren’t quite as enthusiastic about subjecting the races of Tyria to a brutal all-out war that leaves the few survivors living in a peaceful (if somewhat decimated) utopia. We all know (somewhat) what happened at that point.

I checked the ley line globe in the Chantry of Secrets. There’s clearly no ley line through Arah, Kryta, nor Maguuma. And since it’s in game, its cannon. Taimi is clearly mistaken about the caves in dry top being a ley line hub.

: P

@SpeedFiend: There seems to have been a divide between the gods in general. Melandru and Dwayna wanted peace, Abaddon and Balthazar pushed for conquest, the attitudes of Lyssa, Dhuum and Grenth are unknown. Doric managed to persuade Balthazar to change tack (probably partially because mass destruction through magic is not the kind of warfare Balthazar actually wants) and this shifted the balance.