Guild Wars 2

I have a few questions I’d like discussed. First of all, if the bloodstones all contain one particular school of magic, what would that mean for that school if its containment stone was destroyed?
In the situation we’re faced with, the power released from the bloodstone was absorbed by Lazarus, so I suspect to us, nothing is changed. The related school of magic is just inside a Mursaat now instead of a stone, so nothing is different for us. But when/if we kill Lazarus? What happens then? And is Lazarus now REALLY good at one particular school of magic? (Whichever one governs setting people on fire)

As a followup question, destroying a bloodstone nearly destroyed Kryra. If we kill Lazarus, wouldn’t we have to worry about that? Will we need to create a replacement for the stone that was destroyed?

OH!!! Or will the Glint baby be the new house for the magic!! (Wild speculation)

I don’t think I ever saw anything except dialogue that indicates these schools exist. Therefor I tend to think these schools are just a human told story. The effect the spliting of schools is said to have, namely not being able to use all schools at once and therefor the need to specialize (professions), can be explained by assuming the general amount of magic that a person is able to wield after the Gods resealed the bloodstones is too limited to be efficient in many different ways at once (in gw1 in a smaller way also shown by the attribute system, in gw2 by the trait line system).

Following this theory, Lazarus will just have generally become stronger and the magic he is now wielding could possibly be absorbed by the other bloodstones, should we defeat him on top of one of them.

“The first four segments rule over its respective school of magic: Preservation, Aggression, Denial, and Destruction. The fifth fragment, the keystone, is required if one were ever to make the bloodstones one. "

From the wiki https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bloodstone

I’m not dismissing the idea that the school thing is just human flourish on the story. Just that the wiki also mentions the schools being a thing.

The schools are one of the weirdest places where GW1 lore was changed for GW2, but the essence is this: the schools were very much a thing in the past, and not ‘just a human flourish’, but, as time went on and the dragons released more magic back into the world, it opened up options that weren’t as limited. This is over-simplifying things, and not exactly right, but for argument’s sake let’s say there’s two completely separate sources of magic to draw from- the bloodstones, which constrain you to only using one school, and the leaked magic from the dragons, which doesn’t. Back in GW1, there wasn’t as much leaked magic around, so to be a powerful spellcaster you had to use the bloodstone magic and accept their limitations. In GW2’s time, though, it’s reversed- the leaked magic is strong enough that anyone still tapping into the stones couldn’t keep up, and it doesn’t lock you into a school, so everyone’s using it now.

What all this means is… more or less what you guessed in the post. I don’t think the magic can be tapped into while it’s inside Lazarus, but since it wasn’t important anymore anyway it shouldn’t be a problem for us. I think you’re right about what it means for Lazarus, too- that it’d make him really strong in whatever field that stone was- although whether the devs decide that’s worth going into remains to be seen.

If a stone is destroyed, or if Lazarus is killed without something to take the power… theoretically, it wouldn’t do anything more than give a boost into the pool of leaked magic. However, since we’re starting to see that having too much magic in the system is bad, that’d likely cause unforeseen complications. For that reason, even if there wasn’t an explosion, I’m sure we’d need a replacement of some kind, be it a stone or a baby dragon.

@Inc whether killing Lazarus on another bloodstone would work really depends on if they have a maximum capacity or not. They’re already probably holding more magic than they were ever meant to. If there is an upper limit, trying to make one stone do the work of two overburdened stones would probably be a very bad idea.

Alternatively, if there isn’t and they just keep growing to compensate, you might just get a nice, safe mountain. Hard to guess right now.

The wiki page also mentions (on the discussion page) that the only source for this info is an article writen by an Orrian historian. Although this comment predates the release of GW2, I can’t recall anywhere in GW2 where the schools are mentioned (including Arah explorable dungeons) so the article still seems to be the only (unreliable) source.

Like you said, the discussion page is outdated. There are a few places it’s talked about, but this interview with a couple lore devs covers most of the basics- and it’s delivered as third-person omniscient Word of Dev, so there’s no need to worry about an outdated, specifically human bias mucking things up.

EDIT: In-game content has never covered all the lore, so you’re not going to see much about the schools there, but if you want a place they’re at least mentioned this book from Season 2 is a fine place to start.

The schools are why we have four primary Tyrian magic professions (mesmer, necromancer, elementalist, and guardian replacing monk). Presently, there are some who think the schools are obsolete, and thy might well be right (due to the amount of magic that is now available from other sources – nowadays, the restrictions have been described as being more about lack of time to learn other disciplines rather than an inherent restriction in the way magic works), but at one point the schools were restrictive. They persist because of tradition, and maybe because the remaining influence of the bloodstones meant that it was still easier to learn the magic of a school rather than, say, trying to develop your own discipline that straddles the boundaries between two.

The usual theory is that the Maguuma bloodstone was Preservation. Partly because of the healing effect of Maguuma waters (it’ll be interesting to see if that changes after current events) and partially because it was theorised that the defoliation of the Maguuma Wastes and the loss of Monk-style powerful healing and resurrection magic was linked to something happening with that bloodstone.

If that’s the case, Lazarus would probably have been made into a super-Guardian by consuming the Bloodstone. It’s worth noting that he has been both a Necromancer and an Elementalist in GW1, though, so he’s likely to have a wide range of skills (mursaat are much longer lived than any of the playable races, so they likely do have time to master multiple disciplines.)