Guild Wars 2

I don’t know if anyone else finds this odd, but since the Pact was established in 1325ae, and it defeated Zhaitan in the very same year, then where did all the equipment come from.?

It states in game that the Pact equipment is an amalgamation of Charr, Asuran, and Human.
So in less than the space of a year, all these parties got together and ramped up a war machine that integrated all their technologies without any issues and then proceeded to mass produce them and put them into service with a variety of races. I am not just talking about the heavy gear, but rifles,etc.

The fact that they had super powerful airships and helicopters leads me to believe that this technology existed already.
If so, it would make sense that it belonged to the Charr,or at least the bulk of it as they seem like the only logical race that already have a pre established military apparatus and industrial scale capacity to front so much firepower.

This leads to another question! If the Charr already had that technology, why didn’t they use it to defeat the humans once and for all.

Finally, with the Pact using such advanced equipment like the turrets we find on the perimeter of Camp Resolve, why are they still using catapults and trebuchets in combat? Thats like having tanks but throwing stones?

Currently the war in the Silverwastes and the constant moving battlefield is great. I think they done a good job of getting the feeling across that we are involved in something big, but on the other hand, constantly including ancient technology on a battlefield that has airships acting like ’"C130 Specters", just pulls you out of the immersion. Just my opinion.

The more I think about it, the more of a glaring hole of nonsense it all becomes. Its just a mess to figure out what role technology plays.
Any takers care to fill in the gaps and offer some explanations?

Sifting through this a bit, a few thoughts: first, rifles were widespread before the Pact formed. We know they’d gotten to the point of being issued to the Seraph at least a year before the game actually started.

As for the vehicles, you’re right…ish. The charr had a functioning prototype submarine developed over “many years”. They also drafted the idea for helicopters, but we help in the first test flight (which spins out of control and promptly crashes into a cliff), so that’s less than a year old. The airships were completely a Pact innovation, although they may have been based on human hot air balloons. (We do not know whether the airships or hot air balloons came first, however.)

For the turrets, the simple fact that we never see them in the field suggests to me they’re by nature immobile, probably due to the nature of their power sources- they appear to run on the same energy as the walls do. If that amount of power can’t be packed into something smaller than an airship, there’s still plenty of room for more conventional weaponry that doesn’t run on overcharged batteries.

But the timeframe, though… yeah, I’ve got no excuses there. ArenaNet has always had a bit of a problem with times and distances. That all of this happened in a year is no more hard to believe than that the dwarvern civilization never progressed beyond swords and bows in 10,000 years.

EDIT: Added more accurate information on the vessels.

I have the most issue with the helicopters. They appear to be powered by a fire in the main chamber, which would be dangerous and leave no space for troops to ride. They are also very “vertical”. Is there like a hatch on the bottom and a ladder for someone to climb up into it? How does it move forward (or any direction)? There is only one set of blades on the top!

In real life, technology progresses based on past inventions, but if this is true, how did helicopter technology progress from the current Pact Helicopters to the KT-29 Moahawk that the Ebon Vanguard uses at some point in the future? They are very different.

narwhalsbend.7059:

In real life, technology progresses based on past inventions, but if this is true, how did helicopter technology progress from the current Pact Helicopters to the KT-29 Moahawk that the Ebon Vanguard uses at some point in the future? They are very different.

Maybe the charr eventually revisit their original design? It was quite a bit more conventional. Or perhaps the Moahawk is from an alternate future that we won’t end up at.

The Pact didn’t really invent. They innovated.

Rifles, as said, were around for quite some time. We see pistols even in Sea of Sorrows novel – 100 years before the game. Handheld guns were invented first by charr, though became widespread relatively fast, and a lot of groups had cannons well before.

The charr were already working on submarine and helicopter prototypes in the very beginning of the game, but weren’t ready for field use. Humans already had hot air balloons and asura already had blimps amd both had flying magical devices of their own designs – they just weren’t really combat worthy; that’s where the Pact came in.

As for why still use catapults and trebuchets …. well, the turrets appear to be harder to move about, but they do use them further in the field. And they actually very rarely use catapults and trebuchetes. In fact, I can’t think of a single case of either being used – mortars, yes, those are used at all the Silverwastes forts, and burning oil, but not catapults and trebuchet.

TL;DR Most Pact technology stems from the charr, but most of it was charr prototypes – they couldn’t get things to work properly yet. Humans and asura (perhaps norn and sylvari) butting in and giving opinions pushed them along faster.

narwhalsbend.7059:

In real life, technology progresses based on past inventions, but if this is true, how did helicopter technology progress from the current Pact Helicopters to the KT-29 Moahawk that the Ebon Vanguard uses at some point in the future? They are very different.

GW1’s april fool’s jokes are, unlike SAB, not canon lore as far as all indications go.

And even if they were, nothing says that they are of the future we experience, rather than say, a fractal or ‘potential future’ like the infinity ball storyline.

I think a lot of what goes into the game is just because it looks cool, than because it makes any sense.

Warriors in heavy armour and swords vs automatic weapons should be a total no contest, but some players would have a fit if they couldn’t play their favourite archetype.

Tanks are 100% charr, and were used against Ebonhawke before the truce. Submarines started with the Iron Barracuda prototype, but it’s mentioned at one point that engineers of all races put effort into perfecting them. Choppers supposedly have a similar line about starting with the charr and being perfected in an Orrian event, but I’ve never seen it myself.

Airships are a bit more ambiguous. With Kryta getting a balloon-based courier service ‘after the fact’, I suspect it’ll turn out to be humans that came up with the idea of flight based on a lighter-than-air gas, while the charr and asura provided weapons and steering systems.

Now, the rapidity at which the new technologies were developed is surprising. The circumstances of the Pact are ones that I can see leading to rapid breakthroughs – you have people who have taken different technological paths coming together and collaborating which usually results in new stuff developing from combining those paths that would not otherwise have come from taking those paths individually, and the pressure of a war usually results in accelerated deployment of near-ready technologies (at the expense of the ‘blue sky’ research that they’re based on). It probably is a little fast, but when you look at the rate of development in WW1, possibly not excessively so.

Regarding the Moahawk: While I don’t think anything along the lines of the charrcopters ever flew, aircraft of a century ago looked a lot different to what we’re flying now, not to mention the 1920s ancestor of the helicopter. Other factors are a) we don’t know what date the A.R.E.N.A. commandos came from (the time travel technology is implied to be invented around GW2’s time, but that doesn’t mean the commandos can’t be another 50-100 years on) and b) when humans start building helicopters they might use a very different design, similar to how human “rifles” are very different to charr examples.

EDIT:

@Wanderer: Depends on the materials. Body armour is increasingly returning to the battlefield as a result of improved materials and the increased threat posed by things that body armour can protect against (such as shrapnel). Ordinary iron and steel may not go very far against firearms, but when magical alloys such as darksteel, mithril and orichalcum are available and spellcasters can throw low-intensity area effects with reckless abandon, that might alter the calculus somewhat in favour of armour.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

But the timeframe, though… yeah, I’ve got no excuses there. ArenaNet has always had a bit of a problem with times and distances. That all of this happened in a year is no more hard to believe than that the dwarvern civilization never progressed beyond swords and bows in 10,000 years.

I hate to invoke real life here, but humans in the real world also used spears, bows and arrows for 100,000 years – guns have only been around a few centuries. Aircraft 110 years. Internet, which we take for granted today, was a nerd’s fantasy 20 years ago. Smartphones are also only 5-6 years old. My point is that we’re in a period of exponential progress.

Tyria could work the same way. This war against the dragons may have been the best thing to ever happen to the world – it caused races to unite, and those races to develop more and more advanced tech/magitech in a short time.

Mental Paradox.3845:

Aaron Ansari.1604:

But the timeframe, though… yeah, I’ve got no excuses there. ArenaNet has always had a bit of a problem with times and distances. That all of this happened in a year is no more hard to believe than that the dwarvern civilization never progressed beyond swords and bows in 10,000 years.

I hate to invoke real life here, but humans in the real world also used spears, bows and arrows for 100,000 years – guns have only been around a few centuries.

Spears, yes, but the figure I’ve seen for bows is around 10,000 years- and I doubt the dwarves survived the Elder Dragons with stone tools. Possible, if the other races shouldered most of the burden, but that wouldn’t be my first guess.

Same dwarves who invented and perfected the deldrimor steel we used in Orr tho.
(Whether it was around by the time of the last ED rise is a different question)

Paradox has a good point. A motivator for discovery and innovation like the ED rise and the unification to combat them is unprecedented in Tyria’s history.
The old races waged war individually against them until Glint got them together.

A lot of events with dwarven artifacts link to demons and stuff like the sanguinary blade and eye of the dragons are made of remnants of jormag himself. It’s possible that at some point these became redundant or classified too dangerous and were abandoned.

So it may not have been much of a “they never progressed much” as much of a “they had to discard and hide their progress for reasons.”

Mental Paradox.3845:

Aaron Ansari.1604:

But the timeframe, though… yeah, I’ve got no excuses there. ArenaNet has always had a bit of a problem with times and distances. That all of this happened in a year is no more hard to believe than that the dwarvern civilization never progressed beyond swords and bows in 10,000 years.

I hate to invoke real life here, but humans in the real world also used spears, bows and arrows for 100,000 years – guns have only been around a few centuries. Aircraft 110 years. Internet, which we take for granted today, was a nerd’s fantasy 20 years ago. Smartphones are also only 5-6 years old. My point is that we’re in a period of exponential progress.

Tyria could work the same way. This war against the dragons may have been the best thing to ever happen to the world – it caused races to unite, and those races to develop more and more advanced tech/magitech in a short time.

While normally I’d agree, there are three issues:

1. The date given for the invention of stone, wood, and steel weaponry is 10,000 BE; the supposed date of the last dragonrise.
2. The world of Tyria, unlike Earth, has magic which alters the source of technological advancement (or logically should).
3. During the time of the said above date given for the invention of stone, wood, and steel weaponry there were at least two – if not four – magically advanced civilizations, namely the mursaat, Seers, and potentially Forgotten and jotun, not including the giganticus lupicus whom, while said to not use weapons of stone, wood, and steel, did have cybernetic augmentations based off of the risen G-Lupe seen in Arah (which is, indeed, a cyborg of some degree).

These three points combined call into question the notion of 10,000 years of lacking technological, magical, or magitechnological advancements.

My gut feeling is that while the dwarves survived, dwarven civilisation crashed and was rebuilt at least once between the last Rise and GW1: they’d forgotten a lot about their own history and origins until the Tome was rediscovered. Possibly their old society structure was too dependent on abundant magic and collapsed, maybe the Stone Summit war wasn’t the first time dwarves fought dwarves but, unlike to jotun, they were able to bootstrap themselves back up. Perhaps, as they enslaved the dredge, the dwarfs were subjugated by the jotun and it took the fall of the jotun for the dwarfs to rise – but they had to start from scratch.

Have people forgotten one thing? The Durmand Priory.

The Durmand Priory basically works as a laboratory and engineering hive mind for the pact. Not only did they build a pilotable golem on steroids, giant lasers, sonic cannons and god knows what else but they also create various innovations for the standard army. The design for the airship was likely done by members of the priory (other races) working together, as well as likely most of the pact technology and weapons.

The pact works on a similar concept to the Charr three high legions: Blood Legion (Vigil), Ash Legion (Order of Whispers), and Iron Legion (Durmand Priory). The vigil supplies the manpower and militia to directly confront any threat or obstacle the pact faces, the order of whispers works to subvert, infiltrate, and perform reconaissance, while the priory works in the background on technology and weapons for the pact to utilize. They are still three separate orders but are far stronger united than divided.

and as for why they use lower class technology it would be due to cost efficiency. take the forts in the silverwastes for example versus the camp in frostgorge sound near the CoJ: the camp in frostgorge has been held for a long period of time, long enough for pact engineers to move in and establish better defenses for the camp. The forts in the silverwastes on the other hand are prone to not only extremely high amounts of damage but often are overrun by mordrem, a waste of money and materials to establish more expensive defenses like the pact cannons each time rather than simple trebuchets and mortars. trebuchets and mortars are also far more mobile than the floating defense turrets the main camp utilizes. all in all the pact has a very good budget, but it’s not a limitless budget.

lastly about the charr and their technology: the charr invention for a helicopter came too late for the battle of ebonhawke, as cease-fire talks began before its full invention. another reason is that ebonhawke was literally the last human settlement in ascalon with a MASSIVE wall to protect it, with a good dozen feet of stone between the outside and inside. even with an army of tanks it would take at the very least a few hours to even dent the wall and by then trebuchets and catapults would be raining hell on them, thus the wall eventually became a testing ground for iron legion inventions rather than an actual assault area.

and of course all of the other humans were across the shiverpeaks, which is now norn territory. plus they weren’t bothering ascalon much, so they could be written off.

Well considering human and charr tech seems pretty similar with the charr’s just being better, and the asuran’s being all magical I assume they just took whatever human/Charr weapons they had and stuck magic asuran batteries in them rather then bullets, prolly streamlined em a bit in the process as well. Also the original pact gear (the stuff you get by completing the personal story) looks pretty okay for them only having a year to make it, where as the silverwastes pact soldiers I believe have had 2(?) more years to further stream line the hybrid tech.

Then there is the durmand priory which is essentially this game’s equivalent of jimmy neutron.

I think it is easy to exaggerate the distinction between magic, technology, and magitech if we apply real world physics to the Tyrian universe along with the assumption that new (technology) trumps old (magic). In the Tyrian universe, magic would be the equivalent of another elemental force like gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Magic would fundamentally effect how weaponry evolves.
I have always assumed that our weapons genuinely perform the skills listed. When a ranger wields a harpoon gun, they can fire a projectile that summons a swarm of piranhas. Tyrian martial weapons are far more powerful and versatile than their real world counterparts and weapons. The comparative power of a Tyrian tank versus a Tyrian warrior wielding a greatsword does not have to mirror the difference between an M1 Abrams and a Viking.

I agree that the Pact developed all the necessary magitech unrealisticly quickly. The Pride of Tyria played out as a combination of three card monte and deus ex machina.

I wonder if the Durmand Priory or the Pact has been busy reverse-engineering Scarlet’s technology too. My feelings about her Mary-Sueness not withstanding, her work on the Watchwork monsters, the Aetherblade/holographic technology and culminating in the Marionette and the Breachmaker and all indicate she’s made light-years of technological progress in a relatively short span of time. The Pact’s recent new weapons might even be largely due to discoveries made by examining Scarlet’s work.

Well we see some of the Aetherblade’s holo-dancers in the Durmand Priory basement, and we see Priory scholars at the wreckage of the Twisted Marionette, as well as a moved DP camp in LA near the wreckage of the Breachmaker.

So it would be likely that the Priory are studying Scarlet’s innovations.