Guild Wars 2

ok I am noob when it comes to GW lore so i was wondering if anyone had a lore answer to this question.

Why when I die I can magically come back to life but certain NPC when they die it is game over?

Other people may well know more about it than I do but I don’t think it’s ever been properly explained.

They did say that when Grenth became the god of death he took over from Dhumm who was extremely strict and wouldn’t allow ressurections of any kind or raising the undead, but I don’t think they ever explained why it only seems to apply to players.

In GW2, you don’t die. You’re just defeated/knocked unconscious. If you notice, your character is still breathing. Same case for NPCs you can revive. It’s not actual revival but rather waking unconscious folks up. Though it seems there’s some magic behind it since there’s a few events in which NPCs mention “someone who knows how to revive” being needed, implying it’s more than just tapping someone on the side of their head until they wake up.

In regards to resurrection – which doesn’t seem to exist in GW2 for some unknown reason except in very special and rare cases (read: Citadel of Flame explorable holds the sole case I know of for a claim of resurrecting the dead in non-undead fashion) – as Danikat said, it was allowed by Grenth when he became the god of death. Dhuum, the previous god of death, did not allow resurrections or any kind of means to cheat death (supposedly even those who survived would-be fatal experiences were hunted down). But this seems to have changed in the past 250 years (from GW1 to GW2) since, as I said, resurrection is exceedingly rare nowadays.

The conditions for resurrection was never really clear, either way.

I’d attribute the lack of resurrection in modern times to be tied to why there’s shades and aatxes invading from the Underworld – I suspect that Dhuum finally broke free (in GW1, he was breaking free due to adventurers going to the Underworld too often, which also happens to be why Temple of the Ages is overrun with portals in GW2 – in short, UWSC screwed everyone over).

Amen to that Brother!

This also explain the markers in PvP.

You are not “finished” with blood and guts spilling all over the place and all that fun stuff. Instead, you are ‘marked’, ‘tagged’ as defeated.

It’s a bit of a shame that they didn’t write the old GW1 respawn mechanics into human lore. It would have made the human race take a level in awesome if their fallen champions could literally kick open the gates of hell and return to take vengeance. In the end Grenth always collects, but if a human dies valorous and faithful then another god vouches for them and they get let back into the world of the living.

As for the PvP, I always thought getting impaled by a flag means your dead, but since your already in the mists your soul is already where it wants to be so you just rematerialise at the entrance. An endless cycle of death and glory similar to the ghosts blessed by Balthazar in the Brisban wild lands.

I kept tapping a mangled centaur victim of a trebuchet shot on the head.

He wouldn’t wake up.

So, I then inspected him. Two of his legs were missing, he was pale and covered in his own blood, and most of the bones were broken in his chest.

I think Konig’s theory has some validity to it, but only to certain bipedal races, because the great devs in the sky don’t like different people.

hmmm it seems to me that my characters are full on dead, seeing as how you cant be unconscious with your eyes open x.x

Sure you can, RedSpectrum – just as some people can sleep with their eyes open.

I would rather they are unconscious, as my character would be put across as very weak, especially due to the amount of times he had died, and how he had died. (Falling off of a cliff is not a very heroic death).

Yeah, instead you fell down a cliff, snapped your neck, broke your legs, and just sit there waiting for someone to bring you back from being unconscious :P

I mean, i would rather my characters to be unconcious too. Have you seen the humans? theyre too young to dieD:, and dont get me started on my Sylvari. But anyways, I guess thats why the game says youre “defeated”.
And Konig you are right, you can be knocked out with your eyes open :P creepy

Konig Des Todes.2086:

But this seems to have changed in the past 250 years (from GW1 to GW2) since, as I said, resurrection is exceedingly rare nowadays.

Maybe because of the Silence of the Gods? Grenth used to allow resurrection, but since he (and the other gods) aren’t talking anymore, it’s becoming harder and harder to pull off?

Though I wonder what Raven’s outlook on the whole thing is. He’s basically the Nornic equivalent of a guide to the afterlife, and teaches Norn necromancers how to raise corpses, so I assume he’d have some sort of influence on it.

I always found the tutorial section in Factions regarding resurrection (the one where Togo apparently activates everyone’s kill-switches and then resurrects them) amusing because it addresses some of the questions regarding resurrection all while slightly breaking the fourth wall. I think it was the monk henchman that commented something to the effect of, “If we can always be resurrected at these shrines upon death, then we’re practically unstoppable!” to which Togo responds with something… lame, I guess, since I can’t remember what it was. o_o

Well, first, it wasn’t Togo, but Instructor Ng, and the response was about death penalty. Anyways, those tutorials (the one in Factions and the one in Nightfall) are breaking the fourth wall every other line and cannot be taken as lore (outside that there was some basic training happening with those individuals).

Konig Des Todes.2086:

If you notice, your character is still breathing.

Really? My characters seem pretty still when they are defeated. I saw no sign of their breathing: neither vapor streaming from their mouth in cold zones, nor slight movement of their chest.

And more on topic: what I found really sad was that we found no trace of the old resurrection shrines (the half-circular pedestal with a giant orb of light floating above it) in Guild Wars 2, despite there being plenty across all areas back in GW1.

No I’m pretty sure your character is for sure dead, not unconscious. If you type /deaths in-game, it will tell you how many times your character has DIED, not how many times they’ve been defeated. I think the whole revive/respawn at a waypoint thing is just a gameplay mechanic that we’re supposed to overlook, though I could be wrong. But the game itself says we are dead, not unconscious.

Technically it says we’re “defeated”, that command is the only place it quotes us as dead that I’ve seen (and I wouldn’t take a chat command as strict lore canon anyway). Like others have said, the lore is that we’re being knocked out/incapacitated, but not killed. It’s stated down in this link: http://www.arena.net/blog/jon-peters-answers-your-first-batch-of-healing-and-death-questions

“Q: Let me get this straight: you really can’t die in Guild Wars 2?

Jon: That is correct; you can only be defeated. When we made the decision to allow everyone to revive a fallen comrade, we didn’t want to explain why everyone suddenly had the magical ability to bring people back from the dead. Instead, we thought it would be cooler to say that people were defeated instead of dead, so that we could justify them being brought out of it by any ally who happened to be passing by. This also helps us lorewise in that we can now kill off NPCs and don’t need to deal with the question of why someone didn’t just rez them. From a game-mechanics standpoint, there is no real difference between dead and defeated. Either way, you’ve just lost and incurred whatever penalty is associated with losing."

Essentially, the ‘downed’ state is you struggling to stay conscious on your last legs, while the ‘defeated’ state is you, unconscious.

You’ll notice that some NPCs can be ‘revived’ because they are in a defeated state, while others are quite clearly corpses who can’t be revived at all.

Hmm, I guess I’m wrong then. They should really change the /deaths count then, it clearly says died, very misleading.

something I find really odd here is the turm “resurrection” is still applied to ranger pets when they return to action…so apparently they die…they just never fall over and walk around uselessly till they resurrect.

Donut.6914:

Hmm, I guess I’m wrong then. They should really change the /deaths count then, it clearly says died, very misleading.

I’ve suggested something similar in the past, and people got very aggressive about it.

As for me personally, one of the reasons I often play a caster is the ‘death mechanic’. Magic saves my character. She may be unconsious, but she cannot die due to combat. So yeah, when she’s lying on the floor…my character at least, is still alive. If she teleports back to a waypoint, a spell saved her.

The reason to avoid going down however is pretty similar to what Instructor Ng stated in GW1. You may not die, but youcertainly didn’t make it any easier to actually win the fight. And you gotta walk back…

Rehashed Jibe Tube.7102:

something I find really odd here is the turm “resurrection” is still applied to ranger pets when they return to action…so apparently they die…they just never fall over and walk around uselessly till they resurrect.

Well pets used to fall over and go into a downed state. DUnno why they changed that.

Well, if you’re a sylvari, that might be true.

Yes I think they could use a bit more in the “death” lore. One issue is if you are knocked out then how to you just randomly appear at a WP?

It’s like Pokemon. You ‘whited out’ and came to a distance away, having crawled while unconscious.

Or, if we’re considering that these are Asura Waypoints with teleporting capability, when you fell unconscious you activated the emergency teleport.

The real answer to this question is that it’s what the storytellers want. I’d love for there to be a nice easy to understand lore there, I just haven’t found it.

The question was obviously not a literal one about the game mechanics, its a lore question. Unfortunately, like every game with resurrection, there are inevitable plot holes . In the original Guild Wars for example, the monks performed resurrections but they can only rez the players. There is no lore what so ever explaining why other people completely die. You can only assume its because their spirit went to the Mists and did not want to return to the body. Or perhaps its because we are supposed to pretend that if the body takes too much damage that it can’t be resurrected.

There is no good way to have resurrection in a game and an explanation as to why each and every random npc in history may not have been resurrected. Perhaps its because they died of old age.

This was especially annoying in the original Guild Wars, when resurrection existed in the lore yet there were no attempts to explain why you couldn’t simply rez the NPC you were trying to guide through the mission. In fact, a necromancer could turn a dead player into an undead minion and then after that the player could be still be resurrected; it was like a constant retcon.

I expect that’s why they got rid of it for GW2, and now we only fall unconscious and such.

RedSpectrum.1975:

hmmm it seems to me that my characters are full on dead, seeing as how you cant be unconscious with your eyes open x.x

In fact you can. I know people that sleep with their eyes opens at times, and there are cathatonic or comatose (not sure about that one) that have their eyes opened and zero conscience. Probably someone unconscious could have their eyes opened but his brain would be sleeping so it wouldn’t matter much.

so does this concept still apply in the mists too and wvw? because you can finish off people yet they can still be revived.

I think the Mists and PvP are considered something different, because of the fact that the Mists are where souls go upon death. Because of this it could be that you actually do die there and are then revived, but we really do not know this to be true.

It’s more that PvP and WvW often ignore lore for the sake of player competition – they only receive the basics of lore behind them.