Guild Wars 2

After years of playing the original Guild Wars, and months of Guild Wars 2, I’d like to think that I know quite a bit of lore. But some topics remain ever unexplained or eternally vaguely referenced at best.

One such a topic: magic.
I found the entirety of the history of Tyria’s magic on the old and new Wiki pages.
But then I stumble across a lot of questions as I go along.
Reference: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic

It is presented as a supernatural power that can be controlled by certain individuals, and is split up into four “schools”: Preservation, Destruction, Aggression, and Denial.

So all the known magic falls under this.
Preservation sounds like Healing.
Destruction sounds like it refers to damaging spells.
Aggression sounds like… spells that affect others, without causing direct destruction?
Denial sounds like interrupt spells, and particularly Mesmer comes to mind.

It’s not really clear what profession’s attributes fit where. And no official, neat table has been composed yet.

And to add to the confusion, there is this one:

It is not clear which known types of magic fit into which school, except for elementalists who utilize Destruction magic.

Great, so Fire, Air, Earth, Water and Arcane magic, are all of Destructive nature.
But hang on. Water can heal – isn’t that Preservation? Earth can snare and shield a person – isn’t that Denial? Air can daze and stun and speed things up – Aggression? Denial?

Or is this not how it works? How does it work? What do these things even mean?
And if you set up a scheme where magic is supposedly governed by these four types of it, why

I want to find out what goes where.

Isn’t there any writer on Arena Net’s team who could just sort out the table, for all of us curious fellows? And for the roleplayers, too. Nothing is more annoying than roleplayers who claim they can master all, and then say, “but there’s no source saying i can’t”. Childish, indeed. But it happens. And often.

And anyone who has any idea, naturally… share!

It’s generally accepted that Destruction is elementalists, Denial is mesmers, Aggression is necromancers, and Preservation is monks/paragons/guardians. Destruction is the only one that’s been specifically stated, but Denial and Preservation were both pretty clear in context in GW1.

One thing to keep in mind is that the schools do have a fair degree of overlap in what they can do, and between GW1 and GW2, spellcasters have learned to do things that hadn’t previously been thought possible with their school of magic.

With elemental magic specifically, the explanation a lot of people use is that even defensive elemental spells involve destroying something else – for instance, while the game engine can’t handle it, an earth spell that pulls a shield out of the earth is smashing the ground apart for raw materials, a healing geyser will require breaking the ground open to allow the water to gush forth, and so on. A simpler answer, though, is that the schools received those names within a few years of the bloodstones being formed and most (human) practitioners had only developed the most obvious spells from their school – so elementalists might have been primarily using destructive fire and lightning spells, for instance.

I see. That’s interesting food for thought.
It just frustrates me endlessly that there aren’t very clear tables that point out which profession can do what, and which of their seperate attributes have that sort of “overlap” going for them. But this is a nice thing to keep in the back of my head, at least.

Very clearly explained. Thank you.
Curious what others might still add to all this. I do hope to see more of the lore developed in-depth as the game expands. The concepts are so nice!

I would like to add that it is also believed that Thieves use Denial as well (because their ability to go invisible and shadow step are along the lines of illusion) and Rangers are thought to dabble in Destruction because of their Nature Rituals. Then Engineers and Warriors just don’t use magic. I have to agree with what Drax mentioned though, I think the naming of the schools of magic have more to do with the mindset of how you accomplish tasks with the magic, than the result. We also know that before the bloodstone was split that magic was able to do much more massive things than it does today. The scriptures of Abaddon say that Lord Jadoth asked for the ability to smite his enemies, then a large whirlpool appeared and swallowed a whole forgotten navy.

What Drax said is pretty much what I’d say – that the school naming is about how you do something not what you do. However, I’d like to add a word of warning: that GW2W article has a lot of misnomers in it – there’s wrong information (although presented in-game) put up as fact, and speculation and even contradictory information put up. Those two quotes are accurate, but the rest is rather iffy.

@Narcemus: that large whirlpool was made by Abaddon, however, so that’s not a good example. A better example may be the Cataclysm, as it was fueled by magic from before the Bloodsones were split.

I’m aware the wiki page consists partially of rabble, which is why I opened this thread to begin with. It wasn’t clear enough, and the endless debates on the roleplaying community’s own site really got my panties in a knot, so to speak.

It’s incredibly hard to come by clear information on Tyria’s magic, and when caught in roleplay it can be quite grating to see players just go, “nobody says I can’t” when they cough up the most ridiculous spells and effects without consequence to their characters. Since there isn’t a cohesive guide or nice table with a simplistic explanation out there, there’s no way to tell this flavour of roleplayers to take it a notch down.
My character, as a guardian, can do a grand total of two “tricks” as he so refers to the spells he can cast, otherwise relying on his swordsmanship. Then in comes a person who pretends to be a Warcraft Paladin in the wrong setting.

So yeah, as much as I love the concept of the Bloodstones and their “types” and further influences, it would’ve been nice to see a more detailed explanation from Arena Net. Same for the Guardians. Their inspiration is taken from Paragons and Monks. For humans that’s almost a no-brainer. The monks and paragons of old took up arms and fought more intensively throughout the wars, reshaping their skills of old into new abilities better suit for the combat of all those years.
For the other races, especially the Charr, I wonder what they based their Guardian prowess upon. A sudden “oh look, I got mad and I conjured divine fire, lol oops” seems like a lacklustre explanation – thank my buddy for forever instilling that mental image in my brain.

But that’s me, I love to think there’s a good story behind everything in a grand fantasy world like this. It’d make it feel more alive if more stories were written about the founding of the in-lore valid professions. I’m a sucker for background stories of characters like Mhenlo, Gwen, Cynn, and even Trahearne has me mightily curious. The “I-can-do-it-all-no-problem” super scholar Sylvari ought to have his backstory explained more thoroughly; I’d love to get a better insight on what he can do as a Necromancer, without his super salad sword.

I guess I’ll just wait for future novels and in-game story development. Twiddling thumbs.

Do the Asuran colleges also fall into such categories?

Auruan.2837:

It’s incredibly hard to come by clear information on Tyria’s magic, and when caught in roleplay it can be quite grating to see players just go, “nobody says I can’t” when they cough up the most ridiculous spells and effects without consequence to their characters.

To quote an NPC in Beetletun: “With magic, anything is possible” (this being said in reference to capturing the persona given off by Caudecus – something I doubt actually is possible). I really wouldn’t limit abilities so long as it’s just not too powerful without drawback. There’s a limit to everything, but not necessarily in what can be done (just how much and without consequence).

Auruan.2837:

For the other races, especially the Charr, I wonder what they based their Guardian prowess upon. A sudden “oh look, I got mad and I conjured divine fire, lol oops” seems like a lacklustre explanation – thank my buddy for forever instilling that mental image in my brain.

It’s not divine fire. The guardian magic is powered by faith in beliefs – this includes in one’s warband or legion, for charr. Even faith in the Nightmare works, as seen by a certain Nightmare Court guardian.

The asuran colleges are somewhat separate – they use the same magic everyone else does, but they have different attitudes. Synergetics are essentially theoretical scientists and philosophers, Dynamics are experimental scientists and military engineers, Statics are historians and civil engineers. While there are probably some forms of magic that are favoured in one college and disfavoured by another, the asuran colleges are not directly related to the schools of magic.

@Auruan: Guardian magic is described as being empowered through the faith of the wielder. This is superficially similar to divine magic, which is probably why it’s been considered to be divine magic so often, but the catch is that it doesn’t matter what the guardian has faith in – the power doesn’t come from the object of faith, but from the Bloodstone and channeled through the faith of the wielder. A Grawl who places his faith in a shiny pebble could be a guardian if his faith is strong enough. The typical example given of a charr guardian is one that has placed his faith in his warband and his legion.

When it comes to ‘coughing up ridiculous spells and effects’, as you put it… well. The most basic rule of thumb is that if you do something that is clearly ripped from some other profession, you’re doing something wrong – unless you’re a mesmer and you just stole it. To go into a little more detail, here’s what I think of with each of the professions (note that some of the GW1 professions – Dervishes especially – likely also had favours from the gods, possibly allowing them to break the rules a little):

(next post)

Aggression (Necromancers, arguably Assassins, arguably Ritualists): Animating the dead, large (minions) or small (undead insects and similar small creatures as a direct attack). Wells (which in GW1 required a corpse – fluffwise, both of these would require corpses). Marks. Teleporting – to dead bodies. Draining life force for health or magical power. Instilling fear. Instilling increased aggression in allies (GW1). Afflicting a foe with debilitating or outright harmful curses, poisons and diseases. Removal of beneficial effects from enemies, transfer of harmful effects from friends to enemies. Passing into the spirit realm and calling entities from there. Darkness and cold, including using shadow energies as an attack form.

Denial (Mesmer, arguably Thief/Assassin): Direct manipulation of magical energies to attack or defend (usually with the precise results being unpredictable, but can also be mad emore precise at the cost of being more pedestrian). In Guild Wars 1, this included the ability to finely manipulate an enemy’s energy reserves, draining them to top up their own, consuming them to restore their health, or burning it to deal damage. Copying another magic user’s spells… temporarily. Interrupts. Illusions, both physical and existing only in the foe’s mind. Teleporting without restriction. Limited telekinesis. Messing with space and time. Invisibility. Ability to remove harmful effects from friends or beneficial effects from foes equally. Limited mental control – at about the level of instilling or amplifying emotions, or simply overloading a target’s mind to harm or stun them. Ability to transform foes into another shape… or at least make everyone BELIEVE they have been so transformed.

Destruction (Elementalists, arguably Rangers, arguably Dervishes): Shaping and controlling the elements in a variety of ways. Transforming their body to elemental form for short periods. Conjuring elemental spirits. Crude manipulation of elemental energies to attack, defend, or replenish their magical reserves. Pretty much, as long as it involves wielding an element, an elementalist can probably do it. Unlike most forms of magic, elementalist magic rarely seems to be able to provide a benefit to allies and a harmful effect to foes simultaneously – it must be one or the other. Fluffwise, many elementalist spells probably can’t distinguish friend from foe – a fireball would burn all in the area while a healing geyser would heal everyone – but mechanically anti-griefing measures prevent this in game.

Preservation (Monk, Guardian, Paragon, arguably Ritualist, arguably Dervish): Limited fire magic, with distinctive blue flames. Light that can heal or harm, sometimes simultaneously. Very limited electricity. Limited teleportation (pretty much always to living creatures). Creation of magical fields as barriers, snares and/or weapons – the latter of which may be infused with spirits allied to the caster.. Removal of harmful effects from allies, and fortifying the strength of allies. Symbols.

Those are the things that come to mind regarding each magic type, although it may not be an exhaustive list. Mesmers are probably the hardest to pin down – between being able to steal someone else’s magic or generate an illusion that looks convincingly like another school’s spell, they could conceivably pull out just about anything. At the bottom line, though, if someone insists on godmoding, there’s probably not much you can do short of having a GM who can say “well, actually, I don’t think you can do that with the magic type you’re using.”

Konig Des Todes.2086:

To quote an NPC in Beetletun: “With magic, anything is possible” (this being said in reference to capturing the persona given off by Caudecus – something I doubt actually is possible). I really wouldn’t limit abilities so long as it’s just not too powerful without drawback. There’s a limit to everything, but not necessarily in what can be done (just how much and without consequence).
[. . .]
It’s not divine fire. The guardian magic is powered by faith in beliefs – this includes in one’s warband or legion, for charr. Even faith in the Nightmare works, as seen by a certain Nightmare Court guardian.

My personal take on that quote is: With magic, a lot is possible.
And by a lot I do mean an awful lot.

Onto the second bit: I am aware it’s not actual “divine” fire. But the explanation that sheer belief conjures the effects is a little lacking to me. Humans have a history wherein the Monks and Paragons of old passed on their teachings, where the recent generations worked hard to establish the Guardian form of such spellweaving. Then the majority of other races get little past, “They believe, they have faith!” from the lore writers. I’m still eagerly awaiting the wicked story of how the first Guardians of other races stepped up. I suppose the multi-race efforts of what eventually became the Pact had quite some influence in the long run.
Alternatively, there was this lovely mental image that my friend conjured into my head, wherein an Asura ran off with a massive scroll containing all magic information one would ever need. Skritt not far behind, screaming about shinies.

And then there’s you, draxynnic.3719. Let’s face it, your explanations are a treat.
I had my suspicions of where each thing went, but this makes it a lot easier for me to set it in place inside that thick skull of mine. Very much appreciated.

And as you yourself already stated, there’s a number of professions and attributes that aren’t always too clear on where they belong.

draxynnic.3719

Fluffwise, many elementalist spells probably can’t distinguish friend from foe – a fireball would burn all in the area while a healing geyser would heal everyone – but mechanically anti-griefing measures prevent this in game.

In the Guild Wars Prophecies manuscript booklet it’s referenced that magic indeed has no friendly fire settings of any kind. Devona is at one point somewhat disgruntled that Cynn has a tendency to not care for aiming practice.

draxynnic.3719

The most basic rule of thumb is that if you do something that is clearly ripped from some other profession, you’re doing something wrong – unless you’re a mesmer and you just stole it.

Sadly, this happens more often in roleplay than I’d like to admit having witnessed.
Once upon a time, I met a person who could heal and damage and conjure and distract and also tapped into the mental affinities of the Mesmer profession despite not being one. This person went on to point at Guild Wars 1 and its cross-profession system, but we made very clear to them that in-lore, no such characters actually exist.

All the lore characters I can think of always belonged to only one profession. My friends did some brainstorming, too, and we found none that had the cross-professions going on. Granted you exclude Varesh Ossa, who swapped from Dervish to a heavily malfunct Paragon… and swapped her hair for extra eyes and the whole load you get for making pacts with exiled death gods. 8D

(Note: not going to count Trahearne as Necromancer/Guardian, as his guardian-style sword skills are supposedly the sword’s doing, and his entire character is wibbly-wobbly in terms of storytelling as it is now anyway.)

Thanks for the compliment!

The sword skills are indeed powered by the sword itself – Sylvari get to use it in a personal story step.

When it comes to dual-professioning – I think there are some lore characters who have multiple professions or at least appear to be dabbing in using skills from multiple professions. Shiro, for instance, uses both Assassin-like and Ritualist-like skills, although the Ritualist-like skills might actually be PvE skills he received from the Envoy track. :P

Possibly more importantly for roleplaying, though, is that even if you allow dual professions at all (it seems to be a practise that has fallen out of favour lately, possibly because spellcasters discovered they could achieve more power focusing in one school than dabbling in two), lorewise changing secondary profession was at least as difficult as changing your attribute lineup. In GW2 terms this would mean visiting a trainer – in fact, for the first year or so of GW1’s life you needed to visit a profession change NPC to change secondary profession when you didn’t need to to change your attributes, and arguably that change may simply be a convenience thing. This means that, practically speaking, changing secondary profession should be something that’s at least as difficult as changing attributes – at the very least it would probably require a few hours to reattune to a different bloodstone. It’s not something you can do in the field.

In terms of guardians having faith – technically speaking, it’s not a case of being powered by faith, it’s that having faith in something means you can channel the power. The Warhammer Fantasy fluff for magic makes for an interesting analogy, I think – that has eight basic flavours of magic (there are others, but they’re generally combinations or aspects of the basic eight), and each is attracted to people with a compatible personality and mindset. I suspect something similar may be in play with the schools of magic in Guild Wars – guardians/monks/paragons and their faith being the most obvious case, but if you think about it the other spellcasters also seem to have certain personality traits associated with them in NPCs. Now, whether this is because they were suited to the magic because they had the right personality or because the chose the magic because it fit their personality is a bit of a chicken/egg question…

Anyway, I’ve digressed a little there – what might help is thinking of faith as a conducting element. The power is still coming from an external source (the Preservation bloodstone) – however, you need to have faith in order to be able to gather, channel, and direct it.

In terms of how the guardian spread – it seems that once humans developed the profession they started spreading it to their friends, and/or that once other races knew it was possible, they started developing it for themselves. Basically, knowledge is something that tends to spread unless deliberately kept under wraps, and since other races did have monks and paragons in GW1, there’d be nothing stopping them from replicating the results even if they didn’t have the human pioneers of the profession giving them pointers.

@Drax I think I would add “arguably Ritualist” to Destruction magic. they got many lightning based completly offensive/direct damage spells on the Channeling Magic atribute. They even had the ability to summon a binded kamikaze spirit called “destruction” (being a spirit just the name wouldn’t be a good example, but all those lightning spells would be).

I see your point, but I don’t regard having one damage type in common as a good marker – necromancers get a few cold effects, after all, and professions that we know to be bound to the monk/guardian bloodstone (which I’m just going to call Preservation for simplicity, even though that hasn’t been absolutely confirmed) have shown evidence of using dishing out electricity damage.

More significantly, while we’re not given a lot on the fluff for spells, a lot of the names for ritualist lightning damage spells suggest that it’s actually channeling energy from the Mists that manifests as electrical discharges, not generating magically induced and directed but otherwise normal lightning like elementalists do. Spirit Rift is particularly unsubtle in that respect, and that’s one of the signature spells for channeling nukers. Meanwhile, the ritualist lacks anything elemental-oriented apart from lightning, while a signature feature of Destruction seems to be having access to all four – other professions listed under Destruction, even as possibilities, have at least one skill each that fits under each of the four elements (air, earth, fire, water). For ritualist… well, I’d admit you can cover the other three, but it’s reaching more than I’m comfortable with (it requires using a snowball skill for Water, for instance), and for an air specialist all of the air is actually lightning and no actual wind.

There are greater analogies with Preservation and Aggression. Restoration magic healing effects behave similarly to monk healing, including sharing the ‘light’ keyword in some direct heals and having access to hard resurrects in GW1. In the analogy with Aggression, it has in common lifestealing and the theme of gaining power from the dead in general.

One of the complications of the ritualist is that they’re known to have had magic independently of the bloodstones – they’ve added bloodstone magic from an unknown school to their repertoire, but they were able to call on the spirits of the dead without it, which means they essentially seem to have two types of magic at their disposal – whichever school they’ve taken from the bloodstones, and spirit summoning. Their spirit-wrangling means that, basically, they can get around any of the bloodstone limits through the means of invoking the spirit of a mage that used a particular magic type (and who knows how many of their ‘direct’ spells are actually opening a portal to the spirit world and having the spirit cast the spell through the portal rather than physically manifesting in Tyria?).