Guild Wars 2

Daniel Handler.4816:

@konig we know dragons corrupt using unique dragon energy. To stop corruption you have to stop energy either from binding or from flowing.

I’m not quite sure what your argument here is. We know that preventing dragon corruption is fully possible – Exalted and the Forgotten’s magic do exactly this.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Regardless do you believe Mordremoth can attach minions to the Dream?

If so why is the SotD the only one we see?
If not why can’t he?

I’d say it’s more likely that he cannot, given that by all indication no mordrem is. The reason I would argue is that the Dream is, simply put, not part of his sphere of influence. It’s not within the realm of mind.

By all indication, the Dream is a place, perhaps a sapient location even, and metaphysical at that. The Dream in whole is not too dissimilar in description and function from the Mists, that it wouldn’t surprise me if the Dream is a piece of the Mists, or of similar makeup.

The question is more: why is the Shadow of the Dragon from the Dream? The answer, in my opinion, could be one of two things. Either the Shadow of the Dragon met in the Dream is not the same as the one met in Tyria – that Mordremoth saw the Dream shadow and thought it would be a good psychological attack to use it on sylvari – or that it originally was not a mordrem and Mordremoth corrupted it somehow.

The first seems more likely, especially given how different the Shadow of the Dragon looks from your standard mordrem… Or any mordrem. It looks closer to sylvari and the Pale Tree than to mordrem.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Necromancers most definitely can have elemental minions.
Palawa Joko has undead elementals. https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Carven_Effigy
And the Djinn powered Iron Forgeman are bound by necromancers
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Rage_Binder

In the former case, as drax brings up there’s the case of mechanics that could interfere with lore. Looking at the effigies, they look like sarcophagi and are very clearly constructed, which may be where they come as elementals (there was no “Construct” mechanical race in GW1).

In the case of the Iron Forgeman being bound by necromancers, I wouldn’t say that they controlled the djinn at all. It seemed more like they were, well, binding the djinn to the Iron Forgeman. Which is an entirely different spectrum.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Also active communication is not a required part of the definition for group mind. Only that the consciousness came from a single entity. And Modremoth’s mind is a hive mind and a metaphysical location, so I don’t see your point.

Except that Mordremoth’s mind isn’t really a metaphyiscal location. We fight him in the Dream – that’s the location, not Mordremoth’s mind – which is somehow connected to Mordremoth. His mind in the Dream is that giant shadow, the avatar, and the big brain we fight atop of. It’s just within the Dream, but isn’t the Dream.

Mordremoth does have a hive mind, but this is different from the Dream.

Daniel Handler.4816:

However I have edited the OP so to take out the contentious aspect of #2. Do you have any opinion on mysticism becoming public once atheist guardians became a thing. And do you agree the soul is made of dust?

Thing is that “Atheist guardians” and monks was always a thing – see the charr.

And souls being made of dust is a purely mechanical thing. In GW1, piles of glittering dust is the “default salvage item” because (nearly) everything could be ground down to it (I am paraphrasing Joe Kimmes, who told me this in one-on-one conversation one day back in GW1). They likely continued this trend in GW2 – if it doesn’t make sense for it to drop blood, bone, claw, fang, totems, then it drops dust.

Ectoplasm salvaging into dust was done for purely economical reasons – Crystalline Dust was too expensive, and Ectoplasm too cheap.

In the Guild Wars context, I’ve generally thought of the various forms of ‘dust’ as being essentially crystallised magic. It’s typically used to make magic materials and items, and often comes from magical sources.

Since ghosts are made of magic, then, dispersing the form of a ghost is likely to result in some of the released magic ending up in dust. Similarly, since ectoplasm is fairly clearly a magical material, it makes sense that you can extract dust from ectoplasm.

However, I don’t think it’s necessarily true to say that souls are made out of dust. More that dust can be a result of breaking down a ghost’s form.

In Shadow’s Deed there are bloodstone weapons moving and attacking – are those minions? Belongs to who or they have their program like asura golem and do their duties.

Weapons that move and attack on their own are fairly common, actually – you see them in EOTN and in Orr. I’d forgotten about them, but they probably classify as magical constructs where the animating force is unknown.

When they revealed ele prof. for gw2 and i read about conjured weapons my first thoughs were about conjures as minions or weapon enchantment that sometimes like in case of ritualist changed look of weapon.
We see conjures as weapon to use, we could see both as weapon to grab and fight or to animate as minion. Probably the reason why we don’t do both is lack of some kind of trick, but yet we can summon elementals – maybe becouse knowledge about them is more spread and its easier to take and use pattern existing in the world. On the other hand weapons are things that gained mean of weapon if used by someone/something, so its secrets are know to their blacksmiths and wait to be spread. Now we are eggbearer/dragonsitter so I would revisit forgotten ruins where we fought with shadow cuz there were many chaos weapons. Just as reminder Seis introduced elemetal sprite that works as npc, we can communicate and make minor interations.

@Drax I agree that Necromancers probably cannot control elementals directly. I agree with you categories, although I don’t know if ranger spirits are undead.

@Drax&Konig
Are Death Shroud, Celestial Avatar, and the Transform skills, convergent evolution to Dervish forms?

Would Dervishes have been perturbed if they met a Charr monk https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Charr_Prophet using Dwayna’s kiss?

@Mem: The elementalist conjure weapons seems more like an evolution to the Conjure Fire, Conjure Ice, etc. of GW1 skills which were enchantments that boosted fire/ice/etc. damage when using a weapon that dealt said damage.

@Daniel: Nature spirits are not undead – they are, after all, just spirits. And spirits are not undead.

No. Death shroud utilizes life force, and transformations in general are older than dervishes (which were only a few hundred years old by GW1’s time, and we have transformations happening in the scriptures of melandru, in the druids, and elsewhere). And speaking of druids – if the ranger Druid specialization does derive from the culture, then the Celestial Avatar likely derives more from their magic than dervishes, and there were no dervishes in Tyria until post-Nightfall, over a century after the druids disappeared.

As for charr using Dwayna’s Kiss – this is purely mechanical. They’d be using magic that mirrors that spell, not a spell that they know named as Dwayna’s Kiss. They’d be perturbed by any charr using a spell named after their enemies.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

As for charr using Dwayna’s Kiss – this is purely mechanical. They’d be using magic that mirrors that spell, not a spell that they know named as Dwayna’s Kiss. They’d be perturbed by any charr using a spell named after their enemies.

I think it depends on whether they were aware at the time that monk magic wasn’t solely from the gods, which in turn boils down to an individual’s interpretation of monks and dervishes using ‘prayers’ instead of magic. If they had a sound grasp on the fact that the praying is just their specific way of tapping into the magic and not necessarily the only way to do so, it’d be as you say.

But it’s equally valid to say that if they did believe that Dwayna’s Kiss was literally the goddess intervening to heal the target, and they saw charr magic doing the exact same thing, they’d be upset and confused. Either they’d believe their own goddess was aiding the enemy, which undermines their faith in being the gods’ chosen race, or that the charr’s deities were providing magic on par with their own, which could undermine their faith in the pantheon.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

The question is more: why is the Shadow of the Dragon from the Dream? The answer, in my opinion, could be one of two things. Either the Shadow of the Dragon met in the Dream is not the same as the one met in Tyria – that Mordremoth saw the Dream shadow and thought it would be a good psychological attack to use it on sylvari – or that it originally was not a mordrem and Mordremoth corrupted it somehow.

Or, third option, that the Shadow of the Dragon was another echo of the future that the Dream captures and merely acted as the manifestation of the infection.

I’d completely forgotten ranger spirits – brain slip!

I think they’re in a category of their own, being spirits that were never a living thing (in the conventional sense) and thus aren’t undead. Norn and kodan legends indicate that it’s possible for spirits of natural locations and forces to arise spontaneously (there’s a line in GW1 about “spirits of mountains, seasons, fire and darkness”, for instance) – I suspect that’s what the ranger spirits are. Rangers have always had an element of communing with nature to them, so I think the spirits they summon are spirits of nature, not spirits of the dead.

It’s worth noting that some of the GW1 ranger spirits, and all of the GW2 ranger spirits, are elemental in nature, which may indicate a connection between them and elementals. It’s possible that there’s a hierarchy between them based on the amount of magic. There’s nothing to indicate that ranger spirits are sapient, so it’s possible that there’s a level of magic in which an elemental spirit forms but it doesn’t have a body, a higher level of magic where the spirit is able to form a body out of its associated element, and a final, higher degree of magic which creates a sapient djinn. Rangers might be calling on an existing spirit, or may have a magic ritual that allows them to effectively create the kind of spirit they want on the spot. Similarly, elementalists might be taking an existing elemental spirit and providing it with a body, creating an elemental on the spot out of whole cloth, or summoning one to their location.

Regarding dervish avatars…

I think the closest analogue to them in GW2 are revenant legends – keeping in mind that in the final iteration of GW1, avatar skills could be maintained permanently. Embrace the Darkness is an even better analogue, since that actually involves a physical transformation. Either way, I think those are the only examples in Guild Wars 2 of drawing power from a specific entity as the dervish avatars do (it’s worth noting that, while GW1 gave nearly everything a player profession whether it truly made sense or not, they were careful to only give avatars to humans and other creatures where it makes sense that they’d channel the power of a god).

The shroud and celestial avatar mechanics, on the other hand, seem to essentially be cases of the character stepping partially into the spirit world. Druids in celestial avatar form are probably emulating the spirit form of the original Maguuma druids. Necromancers using shroud (and Lich Form) are essentially becoming avatars of the generic concept of death rather than of one of the gods of death. The reaper shroud form is suggestive, but I don’t think a necromancer using Reaper Shroud is specifically channeling Dhuum or Grenth. It could be a case of where Dhuum, by choosing to manifest as a reaper, has essentially created the image of death as a reaper in the Mists, and it’s this concept-construct that necromancers are channeling – not directly channeling Dhuum or Grenth but a kind of echo of their image. On the other hand, it’s also possible that the concept of death as a reaper is older than the gods of death we know, and they choose to adopt that image because it was one that was already recognisable.

Regarding Dwayna’s Kiss: Depends on how knowledgeable the dervish is, I’d guess. It’s been pretty much confirmed that, apart from the aforementioned dervish avatar forms, names of skills and spells that reference the gods are simply names that have been given to those skills and spells by humans, and do not actually represent that the god in question has any direct connection to that skill. So Dwayna’s Kiss is likely no more connected to Dwayna than Orison of Healing is.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

I think it depends on whether they were aware at the time that monk magic wasn’t solely from the gods, which in turn boils down to an individual’s interpretation of monks and dervishes using ‘prayers’ instead of magic. If they had a sound grasp on the fact that the praying is just their specific way of tapping into the magic and not necessarily the only way to do so, it’d be as you say.

People of the time could believe that monks’ power came directly from the gods, and solely, while still accepting that other races have healing magic that doesn’t.

There’s never any mention about non-humans healing folks praying to the gods they hate (be it Stone Summit, charr, or other). So I’d argue that if it isn’t brought up, there’s no common case of folks getting all riled up over charr who hate the gods using the gods’ magic. Or thinking them ignorant and stupid about it.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Aaron Ansari.1604:

I think it depends on whether they were aware at the time that monk magic wasn’t solely from the gods, which in turn boils down to an individual’s interpretation of monks and dervishes using ‘prayers’ instead of magic. If they had a sound grasp on the fact that the praying is just their specific way of tapping into the magic and not necessarily the only way to do so, it’d be as you say.

People of the time could believe that monks’ power came directly from the gods, and solely, while still accepting that other races have healing magic that doesn’t.

There’s never any mention about non-humans healing folks praying to the gods they hate (be it Stone Summit, charr, or other). So I’d argue that if it isn’t brought up, there’s no common case of folks getting all riled up over charr who hate the gods using the gods’ magic. Or thinking them ignorant and stupid about it.

How much of the racial skills can we attribute to lore?
Based on the elite skills the dervish ability of transformations has become very well known.
Also if ritualists were brought into the aggression school (but can access all schools through their spirits), what did dervish join?

Even if the dervish weren’t incorporated into necro and druid, I think it always was part of Destruction.

There are the wind and earth prayers.

And as far as metamagic the instant casting of flash enchantments resembles the principles of the glyph of essence more than fast casting.

The effects of FC revolved around mechanics that would become alacrity, quickness, and slow.

While Elementalist kept with the FE route, developing cantrips and instant attuneing.

Even in keeping with that tradition there is 1 second delay between shifting attunements, the same delay on using flash enchantments.

As I said before transformation magic existed long before dervishes even existed.

I would argue that ritualists are preservation + mists magic, personally, as the spells that don’t seem to relate to spirits and rifts are healing magic. They were also, alongside paragons and monks, merged into guardians in lore – would make sense all three were of the same school of magic.

I agree dervishes are Destruction; I’d argue rangers went into that school too, if any.

I would argue flash enchantments being restricted to dervishes is a mechanical limitation, not a lore one of their school – same with conjuring weapons (after all we see guardians do such) or transformations. I would not attribute shifting attunements to flash enchantments at all.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

As I said before transformation magic existed long before dervishes even existed.

I would argue that ritualists are preservation + mists magic, personally, as the spells that don’t seem to relate to spirits and rifts are healing magic. They were also, alongside paragons and monks, merged into guardians in lore – would make sense all three were of the same school of magic.

I agree dervishes are Destruction; I’d argue rangers went into that school too, if any.

I would argue flash enchantments being restricted to dervishes is a mechanical limitation, not a lore one of their school – same with conjuring weapons (after all we see guardians do such) or transformations. I would not attribute shifting attunements to flash enchantments at all.

Ritualist’s are clearly aggression. Even the restoration skills you mention largely feature life stealing. Remember they had blood sacrifice as a consequence of not being in range of a spirit when using a spell. And they harnessed ashes to boost their connection.

Rangers/ritualists/necromancer all share common traits.

1. Communing with the spirit world.
2. Binding the will of others

• binding rituals which are forceful
• nature rituals which create an open bond
• death magic, which is forceful
  3. Accessing multiple schools by channeling
• necros have spellcaster minions and can use ice magic
• ritualists can access lightning magic and healing prayers
• rangers can access stealth and gravity and water.

To me the empathic bond rangers can have with pets is just a more friendly form of minion

Ritualists are complicated by the fact that they predate the unlocking of the original bloodstone and, therefore, at least some of their practices fall outside the realm of bloodstone magic entirely (the same source that tells us that they predate the unlocking of the bloodstone also tells us that they added bloodstone magic to their repertoire afterwards). While the source indicates that original ritualism has combined with whichever branch of magic they adopted so that it’s hard to tell where one starts and the other ends, communing with the spirit world and binding spirits is firmly in the realm of Spirit.

The lightning effects of Channeling may mechanically be lightning, but when you look at the theme of how they operate, they are very different to Air Magic skills. Channeling skills aren’t generating lightning from the physical environment of Tyria – they’re drawing energy through from the Mists, which manifests as an electrical discharge. Spirit Rift is a good example. This gives channeling spells a clear distinction from Air Magic that suggests that it’s coming from ritualist practices, not from the school of Destruction.

This leaves Restoration Magic spells which, while improved by the presence of spirits in various forms, do largely seem to behave like monk healing spells – which is part of the reason why ritualists are generally considered to be attuned to Preservation.

Now, because Spirit was never tied to the bloodstone in the first place, there’s also nothing preventing the combination of Spirit with any of the four schools. So, in Guild Wars 1, you had the ritualist (Spirit/Preservation) and the ranger (Spirit/Destruction… or pure Spirit but with a preference for elemental spirits). In the time in between, the ritualist tradition was lost as a coherent practice with the destruction of Lion’s Arch, but pieces of it seem to have merged into other professions – guardian (Preservation/Spirit), necromancer (Aggression/Spirit) and arguably even elementalists are using some Spirit in order to conjure elementals, while revenants appear to be using pure Spirit or something very close to it to receive the power of the legends.

Bottom line is, we know that Spirit doesn’t fall into Aggression. It falls within its own branch, which is separate from the bloodstone schools and therefore compatible with all of them.

(Incidentally, regarding the life sacrifice nature of some skills – it’s been established for a long time that you don’t need to be a necromancer to burn out your own life force to power a spell – necromancers were just able to do so in a more controlled fashion. Since ritualist traditions started in an extremely low-magic environment, it’s entirely likely that they also developed techniques to tap a portion of their life force without killing themselves in the process.)

The issue is the prevalence of lifesteal magic in restoration magic which is unheard of in preservation. Moreover necromancers can indirectly access the four schools through their minions. Joko could control air magic through undead elementalists, it’s unclear how this is different from a Ritualist or Ranger using their spirits to perform an action. Also when Anet explained explained preservation was faith based rather than a conduit to the gods it’s made aggression the only school that actually channeled otherworldly energies.

The Restoration Magic skills that involve lifesteal are spirit weapon skills, which are thematically channeling a spirit into the weapon (like Belinda inhabiting her sword, albeit on a more temporary basis). They come from the Spirit “school”, not from any of the bloodstone schools.

I’m talking about the direct heals, not the special skill types that were available to ritualists alone.

Check out the section of An Empire Divided that relates to ritualists. None of the bloodstone schools are about channeling otherworldly energies – channeling otherworldly energies was a branch of magic that existed before the gods tinkered with the bloodstone and made the other forms of magic available. The bloodstone schools are different flavours of Tyrian magics; Spirit is literally otherworldly, being able to access and draw from the Mists. (It’s likely that Spirit still requires some Tyrian magic to access the Mists in the first place, but you can get more powerful effects with a smaller amount of Tyrian magic because most of the energy is coming from the Mists.)

Aggression, as demonstrated in the GW1 necromancer, doesn’t actually conclusively have any channeling of otherworldly entities. Spiteful Spirit maybe, but we don’t know what was actually going on with that skill… it might just be a name for the hex. Broadly speaking, Aggression allowed necromancers to channel the powers of death within Tyria, but granted no access to the afterlife: that was the domain of ritualists and Spirit. GW2 necromancers do (Shadow Fiend), but as I’ve previously stated, this probably involved necromancers picking up some ritualist knowledge between GW1 and GW2.

Regarding Joko: We actually don’t know what goes into making sapient corporeal undead, except that everyone who’s done it is a necromancer. I suspect it requires a mixture of Aggression and Spirit: Aggression to animate the corpse, Spirit to bind a soul within the corpse. Assuming it can be done through pure Aggression, though… you’re right, this does mean that sufficiently powerful necromancers can indirectly control the four schools through their minions. Which is similar to users of Spirit being able to generate effects that look like they might belong to a bloodstone school by binding the appropriate spirit. Or a good leader having followers with other magic types. Indirectly controlling a magic type through a servitor is not saying anything about what you could do without such a servitor.

draxynnic.3719:

The Restoration Magic skills that involve lifesteal are spirit weapon skills, which are thematically channeling a spirit into the weapon (like Belinda inhabiting her sword, albeit on a more temporary basis). They come from the Spirit “school”, not from any of the bloodstone schools.

I’m talking about the direct heals, not the special skill types that were available to ritualists alone.

Check out the section of An Empire Divided that relates to ritualists. None of the bloodstone schools are about channeling otherworldly energies – channeling otherworldly energies was a branch of magic that existed before the gods tinkered with the bloodstone and made the other forms of magic available. The bloodstone schools are different flavours of Tyrian magics; Spirit is literally otherworldly, being able to access and draw from the Mists. (It’s likely that Spirit still requires some Tyrian magic to access the Mists in the first place, but you can get more powerful effects with a smaller amount of Tyrian magic because most of the energy is coming from the Mists.)

Aggression, as demonstrated in the GW1 necromancer, doesn’t actually conclusively have any channeling of otherworldly entities. Spiteful Spirit maybe, but we don’t know what was actually going on with that skill… it might just be a name for the hex. Broadly speaking, Aggression allowed necromancers to channel the powers of death within Tyria, but granted no access to the afterlife: that was the domain of ritualists and Spirit. GW2 necromancers do (Shadow Fiend), but as I’ve previously stated, this probably involved necromancers picking up some ritualist knowledge between GW1 and GW2.

Regarding Joko: We actually don’t know what goes into making sapient corporeal undead, except that everyone who’s done it is a necromancer. I suspect it requires a mixture of Aggression and Spirit: Aggression to animate the corpse, Spirit to bind a soul within the corpse. Assuming it can be done through pure Aggression, though… you’re right, this does mean that sufficiently powerful necromancers can indirectly control the four schools through their minions. Which is similar to users of Spirit being able to generate effects that look like they might belong to a bloodstone school by binding the appropriate spirit. Or a good leader having followers with other magic types. Indirectly controlling a magic type through a servitor is not saying anything about what you could do without such a servitor.

Which is exactly what ritualists are doing. Controlling the magic of the four schools through a servitor. There is no “spirit magic”. We are told it resembled, but was not Tyrian magic. Rituals allowed rangers and ritualists to invoke the power of entities outside of the world (aka access mist magic they wasn’t bound in the bloodstone) without using tyrian magic to empower the connection. Later they started using ley energy like everyone else, but kept their connections to “spirits.” The powers of celestial spirits, spirits of the wild, ghosts, etc are too variant to treat them as one unified magic. Rather they are entities that can perform several acts of magic.

Look at the Dragons. Several can access the mist without relying on ritual.

• Zhaitan creates sapient undead, corrupts several ghosts, and a reaper of grenth. They are not a ritualist.
• Mordremoth accesses the dream. They are not a ritualist.
• Jormag forces a havroun into allowing him access the mist. There are not a ritualist.

Accessing otherwordly energies/spirits has nothing to do with a fifth school. Its just that all interact with said entities, as well as energies in general, in different ways.

As for ranger/ritualist/necro
The game itself allowed the spawning power of ritualists to apply to ranger spirits and necro minions, but not to conjure spells of ele/mesmer. Necro summon animals like locusts, shrimp, and snaff pioneered telepathic control. Rangers summon animals like birds, piranha, and they have pioneered empathic connections.

Also you are incorrect. https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Bloodsong was not a spirit weapon. And we are directly told “Necromancers, calling on the spirits of the dead, and even death itself, to overpower enemies and assist allies.” Arbitrary defining death as solely within Tyria (and not telling us this in the manuscripts), while simultaneously introducing the concept of an underworld is too confusing to have been part of the writing process. Similarly monks resurrected from the afterlife, otherwise Grenth would not have had to overturn Dhuum’s ban on it. It just happens that the underworld is one of several places the dead go before the hall of heroes.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Which is exactly what ritualists are doing. Controlling the magic of the four schools through a servitor.

That’s pretty much my point, actually. Summoning of spirits is a separate form of magic to the schools of magic formed from the bloodstones – but because it’s separate, it’s compatible with all of them. In GW2, every magic-using profession has effects that could arguably be considered Spirit… noting that I’m using the term “Spirit” because that’s what it’s called in the document I’m referencing, not because it exclusively deals with them.

I consider it highly likely that use of Spirit still requires a small amount of Tyrian magic in order to catch a spirit’s attention and/or to open a gateway into the Mists: however, this quantity is small enough that it was within the bounds of what was possible in the low-magic state of Tyria while the original bloodstone was still locked.

As for ranger/ritualist/necro
The game itself allowed the spawning power of ritualists to apply to ranger spirits and necro minions, but not to conjure spells of ele/mesmer. Necro summon animals like locusts, shrimp, and snaff pioneered telepathic control. Rangers summon animals like birds, piranha, and they have pioneered empathic connections.

The game also allowed rangers to use touch skills of any profession at a discount, mesmers to fast-cast any spell, and so on. It’s entirely believable that ritualists could use their skills to bolster ranger spirits and necrominions with mists energy. In fact, this might be a lesser form of how sapient undead are created in the first place for all we know!

As I recall, it’s been specified that things like Deathly Swarm are actually swarms of undead invertebrates. I think it might have been during the original necromancer announcement while GW2 was in development. So while superficially similar to what rangers do with some skills, there is a fundamental difference.

Snaff’s profession, if any, has never been determined. The usual guess is mesmer, since his technologies were mind-related (defending against mental attack, mentally remote-controlling a golem, mentally remote-controlling an Elder Dragon…), but he was pretty much a noncombatant when not driving a golem.

Also you are incorrect. https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Bloodsong was not a spirit weapon.

Bloodsong is both clearly a spirit and not a Restoration Magic skill. I didn’t think raising it was necessary or relevant, since the whole basis of thinking that ritualists use Preservation is based out of taking away all the things that are clearly being provided by spirits and seeing what’s left.

What’s left is basically healing/condition removal – a Preservation trait – and lightning (normally an Air Magic trait, but as noted previously, this appears to be Mists energy manifesting as electrical phenomena rather than traditional lightning).

And we are directly told “Necromancers, calling on the spirits of the dead, and even death itself, to overpower enemies and assist allies.” Arbitrary defining death as solely within Tyria (and not telling us this in the manuscripts), while simultaneously introducing the concept of an underworld is too confusing to have been part of the writing process.

I wouldn’t necessarily hold too much stock in that… those descriptions were written even before the rest of the Prophecies Manuscripts, and may not represent the actual final lore. The Prophecies Manuscripts also say of monks that they have a “direct conduit to the gods” (demonstrably false when you see how many monks there are that don’t worship the gods).

Certainly, controlling the spirits of the dead is not mentioned in either the Factions or Nightfall descriptions (the Factions manuscript does talk about “the fury of the netherworld”, but that’s not very specific and could be intended to be evocative rather than literal). Or, like monks believing their powers came from the gods, some necromancers might have believed they were controlling the spirits of the dead when they really weren’t.

There aren’t many necromancer skills in GW1 that even hint at spirits, and those that do are a) mostly in Prophecies, and b) may just be names as the effects themselves aren’t spirit-related (kind of like all the Dwayna’s-this and Melandru’s-that skills in the monk and ranger lineups: just because the skill has a particular name doesn’t mean it’s actually invoking that entity). It seems that at some point they made a clear distinction: Necromancers influence death within Tyria, but at the very least, once a spirit has departed from Tyria it’s outside of the reach of (most) necromancers.

GW2 changes this with Shadow Fiend and shroud, but as previously noted, things have changed and it’s likely that none of the professions are entirely limited to a bloodstone school any more.

Similarly monks resurrected from the afterlife, otherwise Grenth would not have had to overturn Dhuum’s ban on it. It just happens that the underworld is one of several places the dead go before the hall of heroes.

If resurrection calls spirits back from the afterlife, doesn’t that go against your assertion that only Aggression had ‘otherworldly’ magic?

Exactly what resurrection magic involved has never been spelled out. That said, spirits don’t go to the Mists immediately – they typically linger for a while. It does seem that there’s a limit to how much time can pass before a resurrection can occur even in GW1 (the typical response to finding even a relatively recent death scene is usually “what a tragedy”, not “get resurrecting, monks!”) – so it may be that resurrection only works if the spirit is still present. This seems at odds with the threat posed by Dhuum, but it’s possible that Dhuum wasn’t just going to passively wait until souls arrived in the afterlife, but that he would also go about eradicating ghosts and other undead on Tyria as well.

Of course, it’s also possible that resurrection could bring spirits back from the Mists. The lore is fuzzy, after all. Another possible explanation for why resurrection has become impossible, after all, is that Grenth bolted the proverbial door after Zhaitan stole the spirits of a bunch of dead Orrians.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Which is exactly what ritualists are doing. Controlling the magic of the four schools through a servitor. There is no “spirit magic”.

Just so that it’s clear: what drax is calling “spirit magic” is “controlling […] a servitor”.

“Spirit magic” is the manipulation of the Mists that includes using a spirit’s own abilities of magic, which in turn allows ritualists to effectively bypass the “one school per individual” limitation (or two schools, as it had become by GW1’s time).

Daniel Handler.4816:

The powers of celestial spirits, spirits of the wild, ghosts, etc are too variant to treat them as one unified magic. Rather they are entities that can perform several acts of magic.

No one said that Spirits of the Wild were included, but honestly, they’re not too variant at all. They’re all souls. And if ritualists and revenants’ magic is, fundamentally, the “manipulation of the Mists” that includes “the control of, and borrowing the power of, spirits” then whether the spirits are Celestial, normal, or Of The Wild, they’re still spirits and it’s still the control and borrowing power of spirits.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Look at the Dragons. Several can access the mist without relying on ritual.

• Zhaitan creates sapient undead, corrupts several ghosts, and a reaper of grenth. They are not a ritualist.
• Mordremoth accesses the dream. They are not a ritualist.
• Jormag forces a havroun into allowing him access the mist. There are not a ritualist.

Zhaitan doesn’t corrupt a reaper of grenth. He did steal souls from the Underworld, but we’re not sure how. And havrouns by definition would be using “spirit magic” whether or not they’re ritualists.

You seem stuck in the mindset that “ritualist magic is unique unto them” and that “ritualist magic can only take form in what ritualists do” when neither of those are true.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Accessing otherwordly energies/spirits has nothing to do with a fifth school. Its just that all interact with said entities, as well as energies in general, in different ways.

None of the four schools – which are not the whole of magic, I will add, as no school deals with plant magic like Mordremoth – interact with accessing otherworldly energies or spirits.

Ergo, the ability to do so comes outside the schools.

Whether they take the form of ritualists or revenants or what Dessi does is another matter entirely.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Also you are incorrect. https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Bloodsong was not a spirit weapon.

Take out all things related to spirits or the Mists in general, and all that remains are healing spells for ritualists.

You’re constantly going back to spirits and their magic.

Okay.
First I don’t know where I picked up snaff was a necromancer. Perhaps in the association of Oola. Idk. I may be wrong.

So have we seen mesmers mind control on the level of minion magic? It seems like will suppression was always an aggression thing.

Now rather than saying there is no spirit magic (which uses the biased language of Prophecies) I will specify.

There is
* ley magic,
* dragon Magic (corrupted ley),
* mist magic (which includes non spirit entities)

We see this with: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cosmic_Power
* Energy of the Mists
* Magic of the Elder Dragons
* Power of the Ley Lines

"Taking out all the things related to spirits" is impossible.
Every spell in restoration magic relates to spirits, item/weapon spells. Performing healing prayers by converting spirit matter to life does not make you any closer to a monk than to a necro, especially when several require skills require blood sacrifice. Moreover we are told their skills don’t resemble their original forms.

"Ritualist magic" is servitor work. I only associated it with Aggression because servitor work was already in that school and the game told us rits filed under Grenth.

You say things like:

You seem stuck in the mindset that “ritualist magic is unique unto them” and that “ritualist magic can only take form in what ritualists do” when neither of those are true.

Which makes no sense.

I didn’t create a list of dragons to imply dragons were using ritualist magic. I meant that it’s ridiculous to assume that the dragons use the same type of magic. And to treat it as some monolithic field.

From wizards mutating seeds, to necro plant minions, there is no evidence to treat Mordremoth plant magic as something special. It’s a combination of several schools.

You deny every skill that mentions soul/spirit/demon/god/death/rebirth in prophecies.

As well as necros using cold from the underworld. Monks using heat from fissure of woe. And turn them into bizarre elementalists.

Daniel Handler.4816:

So have we seen mesmers mind control on the level of minion magic? It seems like will suppression was always an aggression thing.

Was it, though?

PC necromancers only ever used necrominions, which don’t have any will of their own to suppress, just a basic programming. Joko’s undead clearly did have a will to suppress, but while Joko is at least part necromancer, we don’t know what else he might have at his disposal… including simply the old-fashioned ‘serve me or be destroyed’ approach (which is what he uses, broadly speaking, to regain control in GW1…)

Meanwhile, elementalist NPCs, primarily the Stone Summit, are able to create ice golems.

Mind-to-mind communication is something we’ve seen mesmers do – in Edge of Destiny, for instance. I don’t recall of any confirmed examples where a mesmer overrides someone else’s will. A lot of the GW1 spells have names evocative of instilling an emotion in the target, but again, they may be just names: is Empathy actually making the target feel empathy, or is it simply ‘empathy’ in the sense of ‘it hurts when I attack’?

The only confirmed case of overriding will available to PCs in GW1 was ritualists. This was one of the lore distinctions between ritualists and rangers: “while rangers are at one with the spirit world, ritualists can and will be its master”. Spirits called by rangers come and serve willingly. That may be the case for some ritualist spirits as well, but they can also bind them.

Now rather than saying there is no spirit magic (which uses the biased language of Prophecies) I will specify.

There is

• ley magic,
• dragon Magic (corrupted ley),
• mist magic (which includes non spirit entities)

We see this with: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cosmic_Power

• Energy of the Mists
• Magic of the Elder Dragons
• Power of the Ley Lines

I’d divide it into two broad categories: Mists magic and Tyrian magic.

Mists magic is basically what we’ve been calling Spirit: magic that draws from the Mists as an energy source.

Tyrian magic I subdivide into three categories:

Ambient magic is magic in its ‘natural’ state. The magic that flows through ley lines is ambient magic. Ambient magic is a unified whole, although it also has the ‘spectrum’ of different types of magic within it. Currently, the spectrum is probably overbalanced in the fields of death, shadow, plant and mind due to the deaths of Zhaitan and Mordremoth.

Dragon magic is the magic corrupted by the dragons. It seems to be composed of whatever parts of the ambient magic spectrum the dragon has claimed for it, the primary distinction being that dragon magic corrupts those who come into contact with too much of it into dragon minions.

Bloodstone magic is the magic flowing from the Bloodstones. It appears distinguished from ambient magic in that it is divided into four distinct “schools” which cannot be fully combined with one another. It does appear, however, that they can be combined with other types of magic such as ambient and Mists magic. There also appear to be ‘gaps’ in the schools of bloodstone magic: regions of the full ambient spectrum that weren’t reflected in the four schools (plant magic, for instance: yes, there are examples of elemental magic changing plants, but this seems to be a case of excess magical energy that happens to cause them to mutate rather than anything approaching what Mordremoth, sylvari, and GW2 rangers can do).

In the years just after the Exodus, bloodstone magic was the dominant form of Tyrian magic, and those who wanted to escape the limits of bloodstone magic either had to cooperate or turn to Mists magic. Nowadays, ambient magic appears to be dominant, but the influence of the former dominance of bloodstone magic is seen in the four primary spellcasting professions each being primarily based on one of the four schools.

Now, this does raise an interesting question of why “Tyrian” magic works outside of Tyria. My guess is that any stable region of the Mists also has a ‘local magic’ associated with it, which is similar enough to Tyrian magic that the forms of magic used by Tyrians transfer.

“Taking out all the things related to spirits” is impossible.
Every spell in restoration magic relates to spirits, item/weapon spells. Performing healing prayers by converting spirit matter to life does not make you any closer to a monk than to a necro, especially when several require skills require blood sacrifice. Moreover we are told their skills don’t resemble their original forms.

Because they’ve integrated the spells together. The healing spells you’re talking about can be used without a spirit present… having one present, however, allows energy to be drawn from the spirit to make the spell stronger, or to make it cheaper with the same effect.

If we weren’t told that they’d incorporated Tyrian magic (which basically translated to ‘bloodstone magic’ at the time), I’d be happy with just saying it’s all Spirit. After all, a spell that looks like it’s directly cast by a Ritualist might actually be opening a portal to the Mists and having a spirit cast a spell through the portal. Since we’ve been told that that they do incorporate bloodstone magic, though, it’s worth going through their capabilities and figuring out what it could be.

By process of elimination:

Ritualists use very little that can be called Denial, and what there is clearly comes from a spirit (the spirit that interrupts when it attacks, say). So it’s not that.

There’s a lot of stuff that looks like Aggression in the ritualist… but those effects are coming from spirits, whether those spirits are manifested as creatures or infused into an item. So it doesn’t appear to be that.

The various lightning-damage effects are comparable to air magic… but the graphics shown are different enough to indicate that it’s not lightning as elementalists summon it, but something different that manifests as electrical discharges. So it doesn’t appear to be Destruction.

That leaves the healing, which apart from having synergetic properties with the presence of spirits and being less efficient when spirits aren’t present, looks a lot like monk healing.

Is it a perfect argument? No. But it’s the best supposition we have. It’s reinforced by guardians absorbing ritualist magic, as stated in Sea of Sorrows, which would be easier if ritualists already used Preservation… although I’ll note that it could be just that guardians grabbed the Spirit/Mists side of it because they could. (Which, as I’ve said, I think GW2 necromancers have done as well.)

You deny every skill that mentions soul/spirit/demon/god/death/rebirth in prophecies.

Names are just labels, applied in-game by people who may not know what the skill is actually doing, or may be naming it by allegory. To give one example, we see Dwayna’s Kiss being used by spellcasters that actively hate Dwayna. It’s highly unlikely that Dwayna was actually indiscriminately smooching charr that were killing her worshippers at the behest of charr shamans. Perhaps the spell was named in a period where humans fervently believed the magic was coming directly from Dwayna. Or perhaps it was named by allegory – “that spell felt like I was just kissed by Dwayna!” We don’t know, and that’s why names are unreliable.

Similar questions can be raised regarding other spells. Did Spiteful Spirit actually summon a spiteful spirit that slaps them every time they cast a spell? Or was it just that the effect felt like that to the victim? We don’t know, but in GW1 (which is the benchmark I use for the schools, given it’s questionable how much they actually matter in GW2) there’s nothing in the necromancer lineup that we can point at and say “That’s explicitly influencing a spirit”. Even mesmers had that – the original forms of Unnatural Signet and Spiritual Pain were essentially anti-spirit skills, although over time they were rebalanced into something more broadly applicable.

In Guild Wars 1, ArenaNet was careful to only give dervish avatars to enemies where it makes sense that they might have a connection to that deity. So we can reasonably say that avatars do involve a connection to the gods. All else is open to interpretation at best.

As well as necros using cold from the underworld. Monks using heat from fissure of woe. And turn them into bizarre elementalists.

There’s more than one way to set something on fire. You can carry a brand or coal over from an existing fire. You can concentrate light on it. You can run an electrical current through it. You can use friction. You could drop white phosphorous or some other pyrophoric substance on it. You could put it in a furnace and raise the temperature until it bursts into flame. Same end results, but the pathways are very different and the things you would need to do and the equipment you would use is different. Just because you can set things on fire by putting them in a furnace, does not mean that the other methods are some sort of “bizarre furnace”.

Similarly, preservation fire does not need to come from an otherworldly source to be different to elementalist fire.

It’s harder to give physical examples of other ways to freeze something apart from bringing it into contact with something cold, but in a magical world, it’s entirely possible. Necromancers do not need to draw power from otherworldly sources or to be some kind of ‘bizarre elementalist’ in order to freeze things – they can do so through a different route. As I said previously, elementalists freeze things by conjuring something cold which strikes the target. Necromancers, broadly speaking, seem to do so more through simply sucking the heat out of the target.

You have created enough reasonable doubt for Ranger, Ritualist, and Revenant to be in none of the ley schools.

There are no healing skills that don’t interact with spirits in some way. So yes you are correct they are using preservation magic, as druids use destruction magic, and the revenants use denial magic. But they using their spirits to do it, not themselves.

My comment on aggression was based on the game telling us they aligned with Grenth. The skills don’t describe their old abilities or anything other than servitor magic of the underworld, nature, and reflections in the mist.

Also the concept of ambient magic is meaningless. Unless you are referring to Mursat magic the Seers bound all main in the bloodstone. We are told using multiple schools is hard but not impossible. Plant magic is most likely a combination several schools.

Moreover if plant magic wasn’t in the undivided bloodstone then Mordremoth had no reason to sleep.

Edit: Moreover whether it’s ambient or bloodstone or dragon, tyrian magic allows Mordremoth to access Mists.

Yeah, I thought initially (going way back now) that ritualists and necromancers were related due to the common focus on death – but they’ve made it fairly clear that ritualism was something different. The interests of the gods don’t line up nicely with the schools – Grenth blesses necromancers and ritualists because both are related to death, for instance, but that doesn’t mean they’re otherwise connected. Elementalists needed to go to a separate deity for each blessing, after all.

I’ve already addressed the thing with the healing skills – they can boost those skills by having a spirit nearby, but they don’t have to. Spirit Light still works without a spirit nearby, it just requires some of the caster’s life force as a substitute (noting, again, that magic doesn’t need to be Aggression to potentially involve sacrifice). Mend Body and Soul still heals, it just won’t remove conditions without any spirits nearby. Etc, etc, etc. They still work, just not as well.

Regarding ambient magic: The Seers bound all magic they could get at the time in the bloodstone. It is very clear, however, that there is a lot of magic in Tyria at the moment that is neither in the bloodstone, nor corrupted by the dragons. This is ambient magic – which you could also refer to as leyline magic and other terms. It also seems to be the only form of Tyrian magic that is currently available in a continuous spectrum: bloodstone magic (however relevant it may be) was broken into the four schools, and the dragon energy of each Elder Dragon is primarily focused on that dragon’s domains.

Regarding Mordremoth having no reason to sleep if plant magic wasn’t in the undivided bloodstone…

First, the dragons appear to go into hibernation when there’s no magic to be had. It’s entirely possible that Mordremoth could have got practically all the plant magic by the time the bloodstone was formed.

Second, and possibly more importantly: We don’t know that the magic of the four schools actually represents all of the magic that was in the original bloodstone.

Consider… there are four schools, but there are five pieces. As far as we know, there is no magic form based on the Keystone. It’s entirely possible that some of the magical spectrum ended up locked away in the Keystone and not made available. Or it could have been in a part that shattered altogether, and ended up locked up in shards (possibly including the shard held by the corrupted priest of Melandru in Arah) rather than being in a piece large enough to form the basis of a school of magic.

The issue is if spirits can boost them then I have no reason to believe they aren’t spirit to begin with. From the urn spells, and the binding rituals, we know spirts can heal/ressurect. As they said in an empire divided "These human Ritualists adapted to true magic when the gods introduced it, but still rely on the Spirits of the dead to put these skills into practice."

There are no untainted skills in ritualist. Whatever you see is just as easily them converting their own spirit rather than other spirits. Monks have only one skill that made them lose health to heal. And the direct implications was you were transferring health from your body to an ally. They didn’t sacrifice health to ressurect or use spirits for it. Restoration has far to much health loss for such an easy comparison.

If ritualist lightning isn’t true lightning, monk fire isn’t true fire, necromancer ice isn’t true ice, shadowsteps aren’t true teleports, then treating restoration magic as true preservation is just as off. It resembles it, but it got there by using spirits.

The reason is that we are told they did adopt “true” (Bloodstone) magic. This raises the question of which school they’re using. And Preservation is the most likely school for the reasons described above.

An Empire Divided itself says that the “true magic” and Spirit (Mists magic, if you prefer) are mixed in their skills. This accounts for the things like Restoration Magic skills being more powerful when a spirit is present – the Spirit side of the spell grants the spell a boost when a spirit is present.

However, in evaluating which form of bloodstone magic that ritualists used, the most logical approach seems to be to look at what powers they still have when no spirits are present. This boils down to Restoration Magic healing and channeling… and of the two, the Restoration Magic healing seems closer to Healing Prayers than Channeling seems to Air Magic. (Including the use of a reusable res that doesn’t require a spirit, which in GW1 seems to have been limited to Preservation with the possible exception of Eternal Aura).

Now, another thing to keep in mind is that it’s highly likely that ritualist use of Preservation is cruder than that of monks. Monks were specialists in Preservation; ritualists were specialists in Spirit, and thus it’s likely that they spent less time refining their use of bloodstone magic on the basis that they’d make up the difference with the assistance of the spirits. So it would make sense that, where monks had largely done away with spells that drew from the life force of the user, the cruder form used by ritualists did have that price… unless assisted by a spirit.

And even then, there isn’t that much. There’s Spirit Light, and Flesh Of My Flesh… and FOMF is basically an Infuse Health that works on dead people. You could view Spirit Light as a crude Infuse Health with the potential to draw energy from a spirit in lieu of the caster’s life force.

One could bring up Generous Was Tsungrai, but a) that involves a spirit, and b) when you look at numbers, that usually results in a net health gain.

(Incidentally, I’m inclined to think that shadowsteps are true teleports, akin to mesmer teleports. I generally think of the magic used by thieves – which they clearly do use – as being a specialised form of the same general type of magic that mesmers use. Others may disagree, though. Regarding monk fire and necromancer ice: Both can ultimately result in something that is genuine fire and ice. They just get there through a different route than fire and water magic, respectively. There’s more than one way to light a fire – just because the end result is similar does not mean that the route is the same.

Yes, I’m aware that a similar argument could be made regarding ritualists and Preservation… but as I said, we know ritualists incorporated bloodstone magic of some variety into their skills, which makes it a question of “which school is it”. And for reasons previously discussed, I think Preservation is the most likely.)

draxynnic.3719:

…
(Incidentally, I’m inclined to think that shadowsteps are true teleports, akin to mesmer teleports. I generally think of the magic used by thieves – which they clearly do use – as being a specialised form of the same general type of magic that mesmers use. Others may disagree, though. Regarding monk fire and necromancer ice: Both can ultimately result in something that is genuine fire and ice. They just get there through a different route than fire and water magic, respectively. There’s more than one way to light a fire – just because the end result is similar does not mean that the route is the same.

Yes, I’m aware that a similar argument could be made regarding ritualists and Preservation… but as I said, we know ritualists incorporated bloodstone magic of some variety into their skills, which makes it a question of “which school is it”. And for reasons previously discussed, I think Preservation is the most likely.)

Reread the text.

These human Ritualists adapted to true magic when the gods introduced it, but still rely on the Spirits of the dead to put these skills into practice.
Unfortunately for scholars such as myself, the skills of the true Ritualist are no longer to be seen; but those that evolved from the merging of magic and Spirit certainly are widespread. Master Togo of Shing Jea Monastery, to name just one example, is a Ritualist of uncanny ability.

The reality of merging means they recognize these abilities are not of the four schools. Which they justify based on observations that Ritualists still rely on their spirits. There is no caveat to what rely on means. It could be all, but if restoration magic was such a huge exception I assume that would be noted.

Regardless this is a problematic source.

When a person says true magic, and then refuses to call it spirit magic, this is an issue. Not only because they say true magic instead of referring to which school, but also because they begin to lack credibility. We know bloodstone magic is not the true magic.

And when this person says they know there was a merge, but not what the original skills were, I don’t believe them. They have no idea whether or not the schools completely resemble the original Ritualist magic. In our travels we have met a spirit for each school. The author doesn’t consider that possibility, in their mind only monks can be expansive healers. Resurrection comes from Dwayna. The gods did not give these abilities beforehand, therefore to have them expressed through spirit means a merge took place.

There is no lore reason for any healing ability to be related to preservation, unless expressly stated.

The chill effect can be produced by nature magic, chaos magic, dark magic, water magic, and light magic. Why not healing?

The well of blood, the healing spring, swirling aura were ways to heal others in gw1. Somehow everyone decided that mixing magic is easier than advancing the healing abilities inherent to one’s profession. And this defies what we know about mixing magic. It is explosive and dangerous.

There was no mixing. There is just a scholar who can’t accept that such abilities could match or exceed true magic.

Ranger/ritualist/revenant are tainted. They each appeal to different powers, we have no reason to believe that any of their abilities are their own and not that of the entities they channel.

The Revenant is not Denial just because Shiro was an Assassin. Nor is the Druid Denial because they can summon black holes. Nor is the ritualist Denial because they can teleport their Spirits to them.

They can be everything, so they are nothing.

I did read the whole thing, particularly the parts you’ve bolded. The part about “the merging of magic and Spirit” is exactly what I’m pointing to with the Restoration Magic skills: they draw from Preservation, but the nature of the spells is that they’re also augmented by Spirit.

Thus, they still rely on the spirits of the dead to employ their skills with maximum efficiency.

The ‘unreliable narrator’ question is a valid one. I think the term ‘true magic’ is simply to distinguish from bloodstone magic… which is certainly not the whole truth, but at the time the document was written, the only magics they knew of was bloodstone magic and Mists magic. So, it’s a label. The label may be inaccurate, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the label is wrong.

The bigger question is… where did the writer get his sources? If he’s just been observing ritualist magic, then maybe what you say is correct. However, it’s entirely likely that there are primary resources we haven’t seen from the point of view of the ritualists that specify that they did work the “new” magic into their abilities after it was made available.

That said, if you invoke the unreliable narrator question, then it is entirely valid to consider that ritualists were actually pure Spirit all along – and similar for rangers (albeit preferring spirits of nature over the spirits of the dead). It is going against a lore source, but the unreliable narrator question does apply.

Regarding healing in general: There were other sources of healing outside of Preservation. However, there are different ‘flavours’ between them. Destruction healing, for instance, can operate through converting energy into life force or through healing water, but the former is always ‘selfish’. Preservation was the type that could provide powerful heals to other entities than the caster through a healing “light” – which is closest to what we observe with Restoration Magic healing.

Revenants, incidentally, are clearly pure Mists magic. Almost all of their abilities come directly from one legend or another, and those that don’t are generally generic manipulations of the Mists.

Ritualists, rangers, and dervishes are, in your terms, “tainted”. They draw some power from other entities, so how do we know that they’re doing anything for themselves through direct use of Tyrian magic? We don’t. Not for certain, anyway. We can, however, make some pretty solid deductions on what schools they would be using if they do.

I am a hypocrite.
I willingly said dervish were destruction because of the wind/earth. But I know better now.

Energies are manipulated by the classes. But that does not mean their effects are of said schools.

That is the message of the engineer. Toss elixir R mimics symbol of judgment. Toss elixir U mimics Wall of Reflection. Super elixir is a light field that heals and remove a condition.

When an engineer is turning people into a moa they aren’t casting magic. Nor do we try to align them with the Denial school. To an older observer they have merged denial with alchemy. But the reality is alchemy can replicate the effects of “true” magic.

Similarly, the solar beam resembles guardian light in color and effect; simultaneous healing to allies and damage to enemies. The celestial avatar’s Cosmic Ray even recycled the animation for the guardian tome of courage auto. The seed of life took its name from monks, and uses light. To an older observer druids have merged spirit with preservation. But the reality is they are an avatar of celestial power, and a star spirit can probably control light better than a mortal.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Light_field
Faith magic, chaos magic, nature magic, black magic, centaur magic all use light to heal in gw2. Just because faith magic is particularly adept at it means little.

X profession can control X force using X magic.
Guardians can control light using faith magic is a logical statement.
X profession can control X magic using X force.
Saying Guardians can control faith magic using light is illogical. Light itself is not magic.

A Ritualist controls healing/resurrection/vampirism/mist energy using spirit magic.
They adapted magic to their school as much as an Engineer adapted magic for Elixir U or Asura gates, by replicating what they could.

Well, that’s the thing – even if we discard the ritualist as ‘unreliable narrator’, there’s nothing to say that Mists magic and other forms of magic are unmixable. The four schools couldn’t be combined in GW1’s time because of the splitting of the bloodstones (in GW2’s time, it seems that this limitation is much less important, which is why I generally refer to GW1 in analysing what any particular school does) – because Mists magic was never regulated by a bloodstone, however, it likely can be mixed.

Furthermore, even in GW1’s time it was possible to wield the powers of multiple schools using th secondary profession mechanic, and I’m inclined to believe that at least some elite specialisations in GW2 are essentially the GW2 equivalent of taking a secondary profession.

It is also worth noting that a being calling on the aid of a spirit or other entity may find that their new patron is limited to a particular school. For instance, ranger spirits are mostly Destruction-oriented (and in GW2, they all are), while if we assume that Celestial Avatar is calling on a spirit (it may be, it may not be) that spirit appears to be mainly focused on Preservation.

So dervishes may be calling on the gods for some things, while relying on their own magic for others.

On the observation of the engineer: We’ve been told that the engineer is the one profession that doesn’t use magic directly at all. However, their inventions, particularly their alchemical concoctions, can have magic due to the use of magical ingredients and materials in their construction. So clearly, they’re not aligned with a school. It’s probably reasonable to presume that elixirs gained their properties from ley magic, but given how unpredictable their effects tend to be, it’s probably not in a well structured form.

I agree that spirits can be limited. But that is irrelevant.

Esprits d’Orr : For gameplay considerations, each class can cast only a specific type of magic. However, in terms of roleplay, would it be possible for wizards to have a wider magical knowledge or potential, and therefore be able to cast spells from a variety of branches (such as an elementalist fireball coupled with a mesmer illusion) ?

Angel McCoy: I love that idea, as do many people living in Tyria. The reality, however, is that only the most powerful have the time and energy to do this. It’s like getting two doctorate degrees, one in medicine and one in engineering. Few have the time to do this, and usually, an individual doesn’t want to turn her back on everything she’s already learned to start a new magical discipline. She’d much rather continue advancing her knowledge in the discipline she’s invested decades in. Some, however, may dabble and experiment with specific spells. If a master elementalist can find a mesmer to teach her to produce an illusion, then she may explore ways to combine them. Most professions keep their secrets close to their chests though. And, the danger of a conflict between magical energies and thus, an explosion, is very real."

It is impractical to assume a significant portion of Ritualist is done by direct merging and not simply servitor work.Yes the spirits the Ritualist use may be confined to restorative pursuits, but that means little.

A spirit is not limited to a school. That idea treats spirits as if they only appeared after the Bloodstone’s creation. Rather, spirits are of a certain part of the spectrum of magic, and that sometimes aligns with how schools are divided.However sometimes not.

For instance, ranger spirits were using plant magic in gw1. Faction celestial skills can create suitable effects for all professions (including magical abilities for warrior and assassins that do not resemble any of their skills).

A school is just a collection of magical techniques that grant use of a particular bloodstone.

When we say water magic we most likely refer to the magic within the school of destruction that focuses on attuning to water etc. Why? Because naming things operated under a first come first serve policy back in gw1 days. People couldn’t simultaneously access two schools at once without great difficulty. So any watery effect was automatically linked to the school.

However we now know the truth. We know spirits and gods can use magic regardless of bloodstone or ley magic.

When I said Engineers adapted magic I meant literally. As you said, they have magical ingredient which they can combine to mimic the effect of certain spells. When alchemy can seemingly produce spells, its time for us to take a look at these categories we have placed on spirits. We need to accept they don’t have to be part of a school, or use its magic, to produce similar effects.

Never is this clearer than with combo fields. Look at the different flavors. If a warrior can shoot projectile finishers through an engi light field, I hardly think light is special .

Daniel Handler.4816:

It is impractical to assume a significant portion of Ritualist is done by direct merging and not simply servitor work.Yes the spirits the Ritualist use may be confined to restorative pursuits, but that means little.

I don’t think it’s impractical. My whole point previously was that ritualist use of Preservation is cruder (without spiritual assistance) because they’ve focused on Spirit with a little bit of Preservation, as opposed to monk spells which are the result of more focused honing of Preservation. Using Angel’s analogy, the monk has a doctorate in Preservation Magic, while the ritualist has their doctorate in Spirit but did a minor in Preservation while an undergraduate and uses that to augment their primary focus.

Angel’s whole point is that, in GW2’s time at least, such merging is entirely possible. Potentially dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, but magical experimentation is like that.

A spirit is not limited to a school. That idea treats spirits as if they only appeared after the Bloodstone’s creation. Rather, spirits are of a certain part of the spectrum of magic, and that sometimes aligns with how schools are divided.However sometimes not.

They might have been, actually. A spirit coming from the Mists into Tyria likely brings its own magic with it, but to collect more magic it’s likely limited to similar rules to mortals. Spirits of nature may well have been limited to choosing a single bloodstone to attune to according to their nature (although plant spirits will have a natural affinity for the ‘plant’ part of the spectrum that allows them to use it even if it’s outside of a school, possibly because they were more able to collect what little ambient magic in the plant part of the spectrum there was in GW1’s time). Spirits of the dead, as summoned by ritualists, may be spirits that had a particular profession when they were alive: healing spirits, for instance, may well be ritualists calling upon the spirits of dead monks. Calling spirits allowed the strictures of the bloodstones to be evaded because you could call upon spirits that drew from different schools, but in GW1’s time, it’s entirely likely that most spirits were also restricted to using bloodstone magic for most of their energy, and thus largely had to put up with the same restrictions.

On the other hand, while Mists magic is largely related to calling on spirits and similar entities, there do appear to be other things it can be used for directly.

It’s worth reiterating that the rules of magic have changed between the splitting of the Bloodstones and the present day of GW2, such that the importance of the schools has greatly diminished – largely, it appears, because the levels of magic that come from sources independent of the bloodstones (“ambient” or “ley line” magic) has substantially increased. It seems unlikely that the rate of release of “ambient” magic has suddenly jumped in the years between GW2 (if anything, you’d expect it to slow down as the dragons woke up). What I’d guess is that between the Exodus and GW1, the ambient magic was mostly being absorbed by inherently magical creatures (spirits, animals with natural supernatural abilities such as drakes, sapient beings) so that the amount of “free” ambient magic remained low, the Bloodstones were the main source of magic that could be used for spells, and the dragons remained asleep because there wasn’t enough ambient magic left over to start filling up the ley lines. Sometime around or shortly before GW1, though, it seems that Tyria’s capacity to absorb magical energy into the environment was exceeded, and free ambient magic started to build up, starting the process of waking the dragons and weakening the influence of the bloodstones.

Which is why, when discussing the four schools, I usually stick to GW1 examples. In GW2, it really does seem as if the schools are no longer really relevant and the reason we have four distinct professions that approximately line up to the bloodstone schools is purely because of inertia in teaching and study practices. There may be nothing in the rules of magic in GW2’s time that prevents someone from pioneering a new magical technique that involves, say, combining elementalist fire and air magic with the magical constructs and healing effects of guardians to create a new profession that has some of the features of both but does not contain all of the features of either.

There is the chance of error, yes, but that could be because the existing professions have been refined over centuries while going out of those professions is moving into something more experimental.

@drax
Sorry for the late reply.

This discussion can’t truly progress until we have more info.

1. the amount of ambient magic available between the exodus and gw2
2. whether spirits that manifest from the mist still use it as a power source

But I will say there is no evidence that any of the ritualist’s spells without or without spirits are cruder than preservation. In fact for their energy cost they frequently heal more and have stronger effects.

I see healing as an effect that can be replicated by several schools. It just so happened faith magic was bound into the preservation bloodstone, and developing healing techniques with faith magic was considerably easier. Even back in gw1 elementalists and necromancers could heal others, they just weren’t considerably talented at it.

No worries, sometimes one just has more important things.

Yes, those two points do make it hard to pin things down. The impression I get for the first, though, is that the answer is that there was barely any before the bloodstones were unlocked, and now there is enough to make the bloodstones irrelevant.

For the second, we do see a lot of cases where spirits are using effects that could be from Tyrian magic… but we also know that Tyrian magic works in the Mists, so they could well be using energy that they brought with them, and any behaviour from a spirit that looks like it’s restricted to a school could just be that it has an affinity for that part of the magical spectrum.

When it comes to ritualists being less sophisticated than monks: when it comes to their direct healing spells when there aren’t spirits around, they are less efficient. Keep in mind that primary Monks will typically be getting around 35 extra healing from Divine Favor – this makes the humble Orison of Healing competitive with Ghostmirror and Mend Body and Soul when a spirit is not present… and experienced monks tended to take a “lolorison?” approach to it. Spirit Light, meanwhile, is basically a Heal Other that trades 5 energy for a sacrifice component.

Now, when taken as a secondary profession, ritualist healing is usually more efficient, especially when there are at least some spirits around.

Regarding healing as something that can be done by several schools…

First, being able to quickly heal allies for a large chunk of health is rare. Being able to do so in a sustained manner is GW1-only.

Second, other casters use different methods. Elementalists do so by washing the target with healing water… and I’ll also note that the healing in Ward against Harm and Swirling Aura didn’t get buffed in until 2012, when they were probably explicitly looking to put in some foreshadowing towards water having more of a healing role in GW2. Necromancers, as previously discussed, typically heal allies by stealing life energy from somewhere else. Monks, guardians and ritualists do so through light effects.

(In interests of disclosure, I’m not sure how precisely some of the mesmer healing of allies in GW2 works, but that’s in GW2.)

draxynnic.3719:

[snip]…
Second, other casters use different methods. Elementalists do so by washing the target with healing water… and I’ll also note that the healing in Ward against Harm and Swirling Aura didn’t get buffed in until 2012, when they were probably explicitly looking to put in some foreshadowing towards water having more of a healing role in GW2. Necromancers, as previously discussed, typically heal allies by stealing life energy from somewhere else. Monks, guardians and ritualists do so through light effects.

(In interests of disclosure, I’m not sure how precisely some of the mesmer healing of allies in GW2 works, but that’s in GW2.)

Light effects is a non sequitur.

1. The Deep Freeze from frost bow is visually identical to “chilled the bone.” Same animation does not mean same school.
2. Spectral Wall and Null Field are both ethereal fields. Same composition does not mean same school.

Just as you can imagine a way for Necromancers to suck warmth rather than imbue cold, I can imagine a Ritualist that manipulates spirit/mist energy. Not only do the ghostly weapons in game produce blue light, but the Ritualist is known for using lightning.

Light-ning

Otherwise we have to treat the foefire as preservation magic because of the blue fire similarities. We have to consider all combo field usage as magical.

Now we’re going in circles.

As I’ve said before, I thought, before becoming aware of the previously discussed document, that ritualist was pure Spirit too.

It’s a reasonable argument to make that said document is ‘unreliable narrator’ and thus may not be accurate. However, I consider that there’s at least a good chance that it’s using sources that we haven’t seen directly that are accurate. So, if we’re not to discard that piece of evidence entirely, the question is raised… which school of magic was it that they adapted into their original tradition?

For the reasons discussed above, I think Preservation is the best fit.

I don’t think I was being cyclical. I think we disagree on what merging entails.

In short, ritualist:monk as biomemetics:biology. The techniques are there, the composition is not.

In long, neither of us know the exact process by which magic merges, but here is my theory.

I believe they adapted all schools into their original tradition, not just preservation. Remember, the author never mentions a single discipline. Instead, he uses the collective term “true magic.” This was a scholarly source. The name “preservation” would not be omitted if ritualists had merged with it more than others. My opinion is that channeling from an influx of dead spellcasters would required adaptation. And learning preservation alone would not cut it.

Ritualists are the only servitor users in the game that suppress will and intelligence while still accessing ability.

• Type1 servitors have consent to channel/become avatars. They include Rangers/Dervish/Havroun.
• Type 2 servitors do not have consent. They are unable to use advanced abilities without freeing the intelligence of the entity they control. They include Revenants and Necromancers.
• Ritualists are Type 3. They use advanced powers without intelligent undead/souls/spirits/echos.

And ritualists are the only servitor users with inaccurate colors. Color picker software easily establishes what our eyes may have difficulty seeing. All ritualist abilities, and the spirits they produce, are turquoise. They are not the blue-white of divine forces/monks. In fact they are not the color of any school. Instead they are all the color of ghostly flesh.

One could say thats just for
pvp reasons. But I disagree. Mesmers in Gw1 and engineers in gw2 use the exact same color/texture when they copy monk/guardian skills. And even the crudest preservation magic is the right color scheme, including that done by paragons.

For example compare Reversal of Fortunate-https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Reversal_of_Fortune
https://youtu.be/2I2npnDOcCA?t=1m21s
and
“Incoming”-https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/%22Incoming!%22
https://youtu.be/OoiYmoT5ui0?t=17s
to
Mend Body and Soul-https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Mend_Body_and_Soul
https://youtu.be/5ZB6KSJBDfk?t=2m43s

Not only could they have made ritualist skills blue-white, they could also have made them yellow/orange. But they didn’t. Why? Because nothing by ritualist is pure usage of a school or even complete access through a servitor. That would have the correct colors. Revenant shows us that.

Go back to the interview with Angel.

only the most powerful have the time and energy to do this. It’s like getting two doctorate degrees, one in medicine and one in engineering.

You assume that it was easier for guardians to use ritualist abilities because restoration magic is already an interdisciplinary fusion of preservation magic and spirit. That makes no sense. They are doctoral disciplines. Find me a smart guardian in the game. Biologists can use biochemistry easily because chemistry has been applied to biology. Complex+complex does not easily reduce to simple and portable for the casual soldier. People don’t learn biochemistry before learning biology and chemistry.

This is why I brought up biomemetics and why I keep mentioning light-effects. Structural techniques are much simpler to mimic. Air planes and velcro were based on birds and burrs before DNA was discovered.

That is what the guardian does. They shape light like ritualists shaped spirit. Like artists sculp clay flowers.

But spirit is even more versatile than light or plastic or clay.

Spirit is not a basic element like water etc. Though elements can coalesce into spirit like Djinn, mortals are compounds, mixtures of the known elements and perhaps more.

Therefore a mortal soul is likely several elements, perhaps:

• healing: light or water
• stealing health: dark
• cleansing conditions: light or fire
• burning: fire
• redirecting damage: light
• reducing damage: ice
• lightning: air or ice (most of the lightning on our planet is produced from friction between ice crystals in clouds).

Tldr; Ritualists are half-hearted revenants that can take on the knowledge but not the power of their spirits.

• Their spells are limited to what spirit can do as a substance.
• Adaptation and merging was finding ways to replicate true magic (light effects etc) with spirit.

First, Angel’s statement applies to how things are in GW2. Does it apply to GW1 where, I must point out, secondary professions were common?

While some knowledge has been lost (at least in central Tyria), broadly speaking knowledge has deepened between the games, which likely increases the time that’s required to master a profession. Consider the progress of scholarly pursuits in the real world. Five hundred years ago, it was possible for one person, in their lifetime, to become an expert in every field of human knowledge at the time. Now, that’s basically impossible. Even if you had someone who lived forever, new developments occur at a rate that one person just can’t keep up with them all: by the time they’ve assimilated one discovery, there have been several more.

Second, you admit yourself that in real-world doctoral degrees, different fields apply to one another. The person who has a doctorate in biology will have done some chemistry because it’s useful to the discipline (and in most universities, I believe a certain amount of chemistry is a prerequisite for biology). The person who has a doctorate in engineering will have done some physics for the same reason. Physics doctors will probably have some basic chemistry. Etc, etc, etc.

The ritualist has a doctorate (assuming it’s appropriate to use the doctorate analogy in GW1 when it might be more accurately a Masters, an Honours, or even a base bachelor’s…) in Spirit with a minor in Preservation. The guardian flips this, having a major in Preservation, a minor in Spirit, and the extra time spent not getting a doctorate in combat training. Note that we have been explicitly told that guardians absorbed some ritualist teachings, in Sea of Sorrows, so the fact that combination of Preservation and Spirit can and has happened has been established unless you want to argue that Macha was also an unreliable narrator on that, and while unreliable narrator is a thing, you can only invoke it so many times before it starts becoming “so, why should we believe you over every NPC source that’s stated an opinion on the subject?” Generally, while knowing that unreliable narrator exists, we assume that what we’re told is correct unless we have conflicting sources, because if we don’t make use of the sources we have we’re just guessing.

Third, on the colour approach to analysis… I noticed that your video didn’t show the effect of Mend Body and Soul on the recipient, so I went into game and tried it out. The effect you show for “Incoming!” – the blue-white bubbles – also appears on the recipient of ritualist heals. At that point, I thought ‘hang on, wasn’t there a generic you-just-got-healed animation?‘, and checked a few other examples like Lion’s Comfort on warriors and Aura of Restoration on elementalists. Sure enough, the exact same series of blue-white lights.

So as much as I’d like to go “Ahah! Preservation colour!”, it’s actually just a generic healing indication.

So, on the colour thing, I have a few observations:

First, ritualist teal is close to Preservation. It’s close enough that you could have some Preservation mixed in and the end result would still be ‘teal’. (And, for the record, vice versa: a guardian could have a bit of Spirit mixed in and the end result is still close enough to ‘blue-white’ that it’s not worth putting in another colour for.)

Second, colour theory in relation to GW1 is a little dodgy, since the idea of magic as a spectrum almost certainly didn’t come until later and back then the colours were mostly for profession recognition. A lot of the colours have changed between the games. Warriors used to have an orange aura on basically everything, now they have more realistic effects for a largely non-magical profession. Elementalist ‘pure magic’ effects used to have blue effects, now arcane skills are mostly closer to yellow. Assassins used to have predominantly pink effects, now thieves are closer to indigo. Possibly most importantly of all to this discussion, ritualist effects were teal, while revenant effects that don’t relate to a specific legend tend to be red or a misty grey-white.

Now, there are multiple ways this could be explained, but between those two observations, I don’t think the ritualist healing effects having a teal colour (the generic healing animation notwithstanding) rules out the possibility of Preservation being mixed in.

Finally, you claim that they adapted all schools in. The whole point of the bloodstones was that this was impossible at the time. We’re left with picking one, and the best fit, for reasons that have been discussed, is Preservation.

@Drax please define what you think merging meant.

I read the angel quote. She explicitly refers to the danger of merging. This risk had to do with the mixing of energies not the difficulty of a master elementalist learning how to make illusions. She does not refer to the abilities as separately dangerous.

You claim they adapted one because of a loophole but four is impossible. Why?

They said spirit + true magic not spirit + preservation. Interdisciplinary fields are not homogeneous, even in our reality. Parts can relate to one field but not to others.

For instance
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochemistry#/media/File%3ASchematic_relationship_between_biochemistry%2C_genetics_and_molecular_biology.svg

If you think the turquoise is close enough to be a mix then you need to address why a pure usage is done through a mix. There is no turquoise in monk/paragon skills but those professions both have orange/yellow bursts. Both pink and indigo are within the palette of mesmers and ether. Moreover thieves came from assassins so the focus on dark/smoke/shadow may have changed their colors. Ritualists use the underworld, whether revenants draw from the same location is unknown. Crude should still be the right color.

Now I keep getting ahead of myself so let me clarify rather than theorize.

Form determines function.
Consider Razah vs Sylvari.

• they are direct adaptations
• both use the wrong material to mimic flesh
• both have most of the functions of humans (like choosing professions).
• ether, plants, and flesh are close enough to shape to the same function.

Now consider guardian vs ritualist

• they are direct adaptations
• both use the wrong material to mimic each other.
• both have most of the functions of each other.
• spirit and light are close enough to shape to the same function.

Someone without the ability to use one can substitute to access its associated techniques.

I know what Macha said. And I agree. But I think they adapted techniques/hoo-ha, not literally combined magical energies.

Abilties refers to output, technique is the methods. Ability requires practice or flair, technique requires memorization. Know how something is done is different from doing it.

A volleyball player could easily apply the techniques of football to their sport. Although footballers don’t use their hands, both sports use the rest of body to knock the ball into the air. But given the chance to learn how a footballer juggles, I think an expert volleyball player would find it easier to do it with volleyball. They understand its weight and how to manipulate it.

Similarly, the amount of experience using light or spirit or any element is a factor in how one learns to use energies.

The dragons have merged with other magics, do you see any skills that are purely from a new domain? Even creatures of extreme power and intelligence require training. They, like ritualists and guardians, will replicate the way they are comfortable.

Moreover any of the abilities they have mixed are super obvious. There aren’t any plant/death/lava hybrids that can be confused for original destroyers. Yet all restoration skills only resemble ritualist animations.

Now I believe ranger is either mixing techniques or using normal plant abilities, but if you think they are mixing plant/school magics remember the plant/x skills are clearly different from pure plant. And ranger uses pure water and pure light. Were ritualist a mix we should see pure spirit, an obvious mix, and pure other.

Rather than saying abilities and techniques I could say skills and principles. But yeah. I agree that ritualist has merged. Just not the way you define merging.

Angel also states that mixing elementalist and mesmer magic to create an elemental-infused illusion is possible, so it’s obviously not the mere fact of mixing that causes an explosion (there may be some branches of the spectrum that are inherently immiscible, but at least some mixing is possible between magic types, and, I think, has already been seen in a number of places).

From my perspective… there are inherent dangers involved even with well-studied magic in Guild Wars 1’s time, even if you ignore sacrifice spells. Elementalist Azhuire’s experiments towards developing the Ward Against Harm spell had unintended consequences that are referenced in a few presearing quests. Koro Sagewind first blinded herself (whether just temporary, or whether it was permanent and she used magic to see afterwards, was never confirmed) and then outright killed herself crafting powerful illusions. The Ether Prodigy spell grants rapid Energy regeneration, at the price that if you ever lose the enchantment you’ll effectively Energy Blast yourself.

And these are in branches of magic that have been well studied for a thousand years, where spellcasters use certain spells knowing they have risks and accepting that the gains outweigh the risks. How many spellcasters burned themselves – possibly literally – a thousand years before Guild Wars 1 when even the basic principles of the schools were unknown to those who didn’t have the benefits of divine tutelage or a magical tradition going back to the last time the dragons were awake? There’s an ambient dialogue between Flame Legion enemies in a certain location of Iron Marches which could even be interpreted as a Flame Legion shaman trying something and ending up as a pile of ash instead.

Mixing magic between the professions is going back to breaking new ground. While the magic within the professions is fairly well known, when it comes to how the magics of the professions mix, people aren’t going to know the dangers or how to avoid them. The elementalist trying to create a fire-infused illusion might end up creating an explosion and killing themselves not because fire magic and illusion magic is incompatible, but simply because the two types of energy interacted in an unexpected way leading to an explosion. (Heck, for all we know, some of the effects we have now originally came from somebody blowing themselves up. Shatters, for instance, could have come from one mesmer losing control of their illusions in such a way that the illusions exploded in their face and killed them, and another mesmer observed this and figured out a way to do that in a deliberate manner as an offensive weapon.)

Bottom line is, I think the risk of an explosion or other unintended consequence is not because the different energies are all inherently immiscible with each other (they clearly aren’t, as the various new Destroyers show), but because such work would be experimental and people doing such experiments don’t even know where the potential pitfalls are yet, let alone how to avoid them.

Regarding the question of what I consider ‘merging’ to be:

I consider “merging” to be use of magic that draws from multiple types in a single skill. So, for example, a ritualist spell using Preservation magic with the potential for a boost from Spirit would be a case of merging.

This sort of thing (apart from mixing Spirit with a bloodstone school) was explicitly prevented by the Bloodstones – the whole point of the splitting of the Bloodstones was that a spellcaster drawing from the Bloodstones couldn’t draw from all four of them at once. However, since the core of Spirit was independent of the Bloodstones, there’s nothing to prevent Spirit from being merged with any one bloodstone school. It cannot, however, be merged with all four. So, when it comes to identifying which ‘true magic’ that ritualists used… they can’t be using all four, and were most likely limited to just one. The best fit for which one that happens to be is Preservation, as previously discussed.

In the present day, on the other hand, ambient magic has risen to a point where people can draw from the spectrum of ambient magic (which obviously can be mixed because it’s naturally mixed in a ley line) to bypass the Bloodstones as an alternative to Spirit. Most spellcasters stick to the four professions, however, since it’s safer to build on the foundations of well-trodden ground.

@drax
Why would they have to draw from all of them at once?
You expect a complete mixture of spirit and the other schools without precedent.

In terms of servitor magic:

• Primordius can make fire/death and fire/plant. Making fire/death/plant is irrelevant.
• in Gw1 all types of spellcaster could be undead and under the control of a single entity.

Simultaneously using servitors of all schools breaks no rules.

In terms of channeling/spells sometimes the combinations are obvious:

• https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Offering_of_Blood vs https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Offering_of_Spirit (clearly blood magic + spirit)

Sometimes not:

• https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Weapon_of_Quickening
  (could be spirt/denial or spirit/destruction)

But none are spirit + two other schools. So no rules are broken.

In terms of urn spells, what do you think they are doing? It could be servitor work, it could be channeling. All I know is that the drop effect differs greatly from on death procs in minion magic . And whatever they are doing it is much more invested into all schools than a necromancer is.

When you merge with true magic some skills use one school some skills use another. What doesn’t happen is all skills have to be of all schools, otherwise Guardian wouldn’t have so many unchanged skills from monk.

Interdisciplinary fields not homogenous in our world, and they aren’t homogenous in tyria either. That’s not how knowledge works.

How difficult would bio-engineering be if everything had to be physics/math/chem/biology/computer science at once.

And now we’re going around in circles again – by which, I mean we’re just parroting the same arguments at one another.

“Servitor work” – the summoning of spirits and the like – allows you to get around the restrictions, at least somewhat, because you’re not using the magic directly, you’re getting the servitor to use it on your behalf.

A lot of what ritualists do is servitor work in various forms. Binding rituals are obvious. Urns infuse the spirit into an urn (yes, I’m pretty sure we were explicitly told this at some point). Weapon spells infuse the spirit into a weapon.

However, there are spells that ritualists are able to cast directly. Broadly speaking, these draw energy from the Mists that manifest as electricity or heal, although there are a few that perform some other function.

The latter can be interpreted in three ways. Interpretation 1 is that that the raw power of the Mists, shaped and controlled correctly, can be used for both. Interpretation 2 is that the electricity was drawing from the Destruction bloodstone. Interpretation 3 is that the healing was drawing from the Preservation bloodstone.

Interpretation 2 is rejected for reasons that have already been discussed and will not be repeated again.

Interpretation 1 could be considered the most intuitive if not for out-of-game sources. However, out-of-game sources indicate that ritualists blended their original traditions with bloodstone magic. This goes beyond just having servitors that can use bloodstone magic – An Empire Divided talks of ‘merging’ and of original pre-gift-of-magic ritualist traditions having fallen into disuse. If the ritualists were just using the same energies they used before the bloodstone was unlocked in order to summon spirits that could use bloodstone magic, as you seem to be claiming, then we wouldn’t be talking about a “merging of Spirit and magic” – they’d still be using pure Spirit, just with a wider range of spirits.

So the ritualist skills were a combination of Spirit and some form of bloodstone magic (called ‘true’ magic at the time). According to the limitations of bloodstone magic, each profession taps into one school. So which school are they using?

For reasons previously discussed, Preservation is the most likely possibility.

It ate my response. But essentially you have created a false dilemma.

Not all ritualist magic is healing or lightning. And the stuff that isn’t is outside of your interpretations.For instance manipulating blood. Offering of spirit is closest to offering of blood, and is likely to be aggression/spirit.

The rules of the bloodstone say that two stones cannot be used simultaneously. Spirt is not a stone. And there are no ritualist skills that have unique attributes of two or more schools.

The discussion is cyclical because your concept of merging needs citation.

If I combine spirit with preservation to create a healing skill, that is a separate occurrence to a later combination of spirit and denial. Unless spirit magic is stuck in the preservation stone, I don’t see where this monopoly is coming from.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Not all ritualist magic is healing or lightning. And the stuff that isn’t is outside of your interpretations.For instance manipulating blood. Offering of spirit is closest to offering of blood, and is likely to be aggression/spirit.

The rules of the bloodstone say that two stones cannot be used simultaneously. Spirt is not a stone. And there are no ritualist skills that have unique attributes of two or more schools.

The rest is more clearly Spirit. Offering of Spirit is purely Spirit – and, more generally, means of generating more energy were common to several magic types in GW1.

The discussion is cyclical because your concept of merging needs citation.

This whole discussion is extrapolating from inconclusive citations. The last dozen or so posts can be summed up as “disagreeing over how to interpret the passage in An Empire Divided”. I conceded a while ago that your interpretation cannot be ruled out – we don’t have the citations to conclusively prove or disprove either interpretation. However, I think my interpretation is more likely, for the reasons that have been discussed. From my perspective, no substantial new arguments have been raised in the last half-dozen or so posts, on either side, so there’s really no point to continuing this until more information is available.

If I combine spirit with preservation to create a healing skill, that is a separate occurrence to a later combination of spirit and denial. Unless spirit magic is stuck in the preservation stone, I don’t see where this monopoly is coming from.

The “monopoly” is that the early ritualists appear to have chosen to use a combination of Preservation and Spirit, and the ritualist tradition we see in GW1 derives from that decision. There’s nothing to say that other magic types couldn’t be combined with Spirit, and there is in fact evidence that it is… in other professions.

@Drax. I agree, we need more information. By the end of the living story we should have more information on the combination of magic. This discussion is also not working because there is two of us. Things you see as clearly spirit are not so clear to me, and vice versa. The subjectivity of two is not very helpful. Until then, I agree the discussion is going nowhere.