Guild Wars 2

So, I’m really into the nature/spiritual races in games (for example I was a Tauren in WoW). And I was wondering who you guys think would be the most nature/spiritually aligned race in Tyria?

PS: I’m talking both player character AND overall.

Well the Norn are huntsmen. They revere the spirits of the wild, having a much more one on one relationship with these spirits unlike the more distant relationship between the humans and their gods.

Profession-wise, if you want to go nature I would obviously say ranger, and there is a spiritual side to that as well, but the stronger profession spiritually would be a necromancer just because of their close ties to death.

I suspect you are talking bout races…
In my country there is a huige debate between two nature loving factions. One is very against the way animals (in this case chickens) are being treathed in what they call chicken factory’s (plop-chickens). They are saying that every chicken that has to be eaten had to have had a healthy life. The other factions is stating that this is very nice, but those healthy chickens with a good life are producing 5 times more gasses that disrupt the ozon layer, and are therefore worse the planet as a whole.

The reason im saying this is that in Tyria there are two races that fill your description. On one hand there are the Norn. They believe in the spirits of the wild and honour the beasts they hunt as gods. Onm the other hand there are silvary, who honour all that grows and see the land itself as an entitiy and a godlike creature.

This is picking between two totally different points of view and approaches.i so lets return the question: Are you an animal protector or against polution??
And wich one more??

Oh I was going as a whole, and was thinking about Grawl and Ogres as well, but me personally would be for both animals and pollution (natural gas emission isn’t an issue the plants and natural reactions in the wild can’t handle), but this thread is more aimed at the races of Tyria as a whole than my opinions on this topic xD.

I wouldn’t consider the grawl, harpies, ettins, ogres, centaurs, charr, humans, dredge, or asura as natural at all. These all seem to move into an area and clear cut, reform to their needs, and leave their filth everywhere (the last one aimed at the ettins). Skritt maybe though (they do love to recycle :P)

Well Grawl vary drastically depending on what they are worshiping as a god, so I feel like they could be up there, Asura are debatable, their architecture always has stuff growing on it so its not super intrusive, and there are hippy asura (as Shown in Infinity Ball quest line), but as a race I agree they’re probably not too nature friendly.

PS: According to the Asura line the Vigil is pretty focused on Nature and learning to keep damage to Tyria at a minimum.

I’d say Norn would be the tauren of GW2

I’m surprised no one even said Sylvari. O_O

Valentine.6529:

I’m surprised no one even said Sylvari. O_O

Someone mentioned Sylvari in a previous post (spelt wrong granted), but even then Sylvari don’t feel too Nature attuned to me and feel more like plant based Humans, which is what I think ANET was going for granted…

Nature: Sylvari

Spiritual: Human

Nature and Spiritual: Norn

There ya go.

Durzlla.6295:

Someone mentioned Sylvari in a previous post (spelt wrong granted), but even then Sylvari don’t feel too Nature attuned to me and feel more like plant based Humans, which is what I think ANET was going for granted…

They don’t feel like humans at all to me. At least not Tyrian (world mind you) ones.

But no, they didn’t want to make them too humanoid – they wanted to make them as *in*human while still humanoid.

Agreed. sylvari, to me, whne compared to actual humans feel like they’ve reversed roles. Sylvari are the youngest and most naive race while humans have more experience. they are the plale trees interpretation of humanity but they are far from an acurate copy. as a-net said, “She only saw the outside”.

I think it is a tie between norn and sylvari.
Norn do indeed revere the spirits and seems to have a certain respect for the land. They are hunters but seem to have respect for their prey for the most part.

But sylvari create everything from plants, they live in plants , they ARE plants. If they revere anything it is The Mother Tree, the world itself and all life. All things have a right to grow.

Thinking of it I actually think sylvari is a tad more nature aligned than norn and thus I disagree with what the others been saying.

My general perspective is this:

Norn are close to nature, but in the same way as an intelligent apex predator would be (see also: many real-world preagricultural societies). They respect the spirits of the creatures they hunt and compete with, and seek to remain on good terms with them – for the spirit of a prey animal might go elsewhere if offended, and the spirit of another predator might seek to do the norn harm. They’ll intervene if they become aware of someone else despoiling their environment, but this is because they know it will harm them, not because they have a feeling of stewardship of the land.

Sylvari, though, do seem to have that feeling of stewardship. The sylvari have havens scattered through the Maguuma and southern Kryta regions – mostly looking to preserve some area from Zhaitan’s influence, but there are some that have been set up pretty much in direct protest to Inquest ecological irresponsibility. Now, this mixes with the sylvari feeling of their destiny being to fight the dragon, but there’s an element in that of protecting the land in general, with the dragons being one of the greatest threats to protect the land against.

Human followers of Melandru have a similar outlook to the sylvari, without being tied up in the overall mission to fight the dragons. We don’t see much of their activity in GW2, though. Overall, though, humans, norn and sylvari all have a degree of spirituality – norn and humans through animal spirits and gods respectively, and sylvari through Ventari’s tenets and the Dream.

Asura and charr, on the other hand, largely don’t care beyond their direct interests, although like any general rule there are exceptions.

Of the nonplayable races… on the whole, they’re largely on a similar level to the norn. Kodan are probably the most spiritual of all races, with that spirituality incorporating a concept of being in balance with nature (and other things). Quaggan worship a sea goddess of nature, and while they don’t militantly protect nature, they live in harmony with it. Hylek seem to mix sun worship with a reverence for certain animals that they see as incarnations of the sun’s power – consider the event chain in Caledon and the ritual in the personal story to prove one’s worth to become Champion of the Sun… the former of which involves taking the forms of various animals.

Centaurs in GW2 seem to have an earth-based religion. In Guild Wars 1, Elonian centaur religion was based around ‘ancestor trees’ and quests related to them involved cleansing nature of Nightfall’s corruption – it’s unclear, however, if there’s a connection between the religion of the Veldrunners and the northern tribes. With grawl, it really seems to depend on the individual tribe and what that tribe worships. Jotun and skritt don’t seem to really care, and neither has a religion really worth speaking of (although the skritt maxim of ‘Enjoy life!’ is a lot more attractive than jotun self-worship).

Profession-wise… when it comes to being spiritual and close to nature, it’s hard to go past ranger. Beyond that, elementalists can also have a close connection to nature, while on the other side the constant contact between necromancers and the world of the dead leads to a degree of spirituality… at least in the more savoury individuals. Guardians can also be quite spiritual – guardian magic is powered by faith, and while that faith can be in a secular concept, among the more spiritual races it often is in a more spiritual sense.

On guardian: Alot of the skills seems geared to be able to make that spiritual norn. Calling the owl/spirit weapons/ice worm. that’s my norn guardians theme. Native American look and his guardian class background is basically a warrior shaman.

draxynnic.3719:

The sylvari have havens scattered through the Maguuma and southern Kryta regions

The Lionguard have havens. Those havens aren’t sylvari. The Cears are though, but there’s only one in southern Kryta, which is for fighting Zhaitan’s influence.

Please give me some credit rather than jumping straight to the ‘Drax is a moron that missed something everyone knows’ interpretation, Konig.

I meant ‘haven’ in the general term, as in a safe place for something that might otherwise be endangered. There’s the one in southern Kessex, and there’s also the oasis in southern Bloodtide (with another sylvari outpost nearby), which is mechanically a Krytan region even though politically it hasn’t been Krytan since Zhaitan’s rise at the latest. As well as looking after the lands in the Caledon and its general vicinity, the sylvari also have a significant presence in southern Sparkfly, as well as a couple of outpost on the eastern side of the Mt Maelstrom region for the express purpose of fighting Inquest pollution.