Guild Wars 2

They say the Sylvari are immune to Zhaitan’s corruption, as they can not be turned to risen, but what other plentiful races are absent from Zhaitan’s army?

Skritt, Jotun, Centaurs, Grawl, and Dredge. Surely if Zhaitan is willing to use Quaggans, he’d be willing to use any of those, so where are they?

Khyron.8735:

They say the Sylvari are immune to Zhaitan’s corruption, as they can not be turned to risen, but what other plentiful races are absent from Zhaitan’s army?

Skritt, Jotun, Centaurs, Grawl, and Dredge. Surely if Zhaitan is willing to use Quaggans, he’d be willing to use any of those, so where are they?

how many centaurs grawl jotun and dredge do you see south of lions arch?
jotun are in the shiverpeaks
dredge live underground
grawl are in the shiverpeaks and ascalon
and centaurs are north krytan

he doesn’t use them because they aren’t in his territory, simple as that

skritt are the only thing I don’t have an explanation for, but by the time any skritt are in danger of being turned into risen, the pact takes a stance on burning corpses or rendering them unusable to zhaitan.

the reason that people point at sylvari as uncorruptible is that they actively fight and die in orr… and because tegwen TOLD us that sylvari don’t get corruptted

They’re there, being attacked. That’s like the whole point of the Sparkfly Fen zone. IIRC his presence is also felt in Timberline Falls, but less so.

They may not be Risen but they’re definitely getting killed.

It would be interesting, though, if the Skritt “hivemind” effect interfered with Zhantain’s control over risen Skritt and that’s why he doesn’t use them.

Remember, Risen present in Orr are usually long-dead corpses shaped by Zhaitan. Outside of Orr you will see charr, asura, norn, humans, quaggan, krait, hylek . . .

I get the feeling you don’t see dredge, jotun, or skritt since they don’t have settlements near the Risen. So they’re not very available. Same for the centaurs, though I wonder about the southeast Kessex Hills sometimes.

Sylvari are unique in that they’re immune to ALL Elder Dragon corruptions – not just Zhaitan. Though there may be a possible exception to Mordremoth, should the nightmare that “corrupted” the Nightmare Court truly come from Mordremoth like implied.

Thus far, sylvari are the one and only race immune to any dragon’s corruption. The lack of any particular race as a dragon minion is likely due to one, or both, of two things:

1) Proximity to the dragons(’ minions).
2) ArenaNet not wanting to make so many models (my explanation for why we don’t see icebrood grawl/jotun/wurms or branded grawl/harpies/wurms, and the like).

Like Calcifire said, for your examples most of them aren’t near Zhaitan’s forces. The closest are dredge and skritt, but it’s only one colony each that are near, and as Calcifire said, the Vigil (or Pact) are proactively burning all corpses they find to prevent them from rising.

Calcifire.1864:

the reason that people point at sylvari as uncorruptible is that they actively fight and die in orr… and because tegwen TOLD us that sylvari don’t get corruptted

We knew sylvari couldn’t be corrupted since the redesign on sylvari was revealed – during “sylvari week” for the blog posts. In one of the interviews, we were told that instead of being corrupted, sylvari simply die. No minion is made.

Obviously, that’d mean that Zhaitan could have been an exception, since he corrupts corpses primarily (or solely when directly) – as something that’s dead cannot die, ergo the line couldn’t be referring to being immune solely to Zhaitan – but that got debunked in game.

Yeah, this is a developer resource issue more than a lore issue. It would take a crap-ton of work to cover all possible permutations of dragon minions.