Guild Wars 2

Okay, a few quick facts first, someone feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Dead in the LA attack: 45000
Number of years the sylvari have been appearing: 25

Okay, keeping this limited to Pale Tree Sylvari (PTS), because we don’t know enough about any other trees.

Let’s say that the Pale Tree has made 1000 sylvari a year. Seems like an awful lot, but we’ll go with it. That would give us 25000 PTS.

While the Grove is obviously the biggest gathering place of PTS, Lion’s Arch had plenty too. It was likely one of the biggest gatherings outside of the Pale Tree and the area right around it. Let’s say that 1 in 10 people in LA that died was a PTS. Sounds reasonable to me. (Don’t forget, some of them were Nightmare Court, and died as part of the Toxics.)

Out of less than 25000 PTS (some have died due to other things), 4500 died in LA within the span of a few days. That would be about 1 in 6 PTS dead from Scarlet’s attack. These numbers are all guesses, naturally, but I’m trying to guess high for the PTS population, and low for the number dead. It could easily be 1 in 5, or maybe even closer to 1 in 4.

So, how many sylvari are really left, and what percentage actually died in LA? And, more to the point, can the race survive the shock of losing that many in such a short time span? Most of them are still somewhat connected through the Dream, will there be a backlash from this many deaths? Will more of them fall to Nightmare because of this, or maybe go completely insane?

1000 Sylvari a year is probably way too LOW.

A real tree in the real world develops many more seeds than that each year to make up for the fact that most are destroyed before they have a chance to fall from the parent, find a safe spot of their own, and begin to grow. An intelligent tree with hoards of intelligent offspring to play caretaker has far more potential for successful reproduction.

PLUS, there are hints that the Pale Tree may not be one-of-a-kind.

The Sylvari will not disappear anytime soon, although the Asura are working desperately on the Tyrian version of Agent Orange.

Weren’t all (or most) Nightmare Court Sylvari born from the Pale Tree and were then turned to Nightmare at some point? Do they not also count when figuring the number borne from the Pale Tree each year? I wouldn’t be surprised to see that all of the Nightmare Court killed during Scarlet’s assaults over the course of the LS Season 1 reaches into the hundreds of thousands (and there still seems to be many more apart of Nightmare to re-supply their forces).

I think 25.000 is way too low, just ask a few WvW players how many supply camps they´ve captured…

Your suggestion of 1000 a year is quite a bit off, when it seems to give birth to dozens every hour or so.

On the other hand, though the firstborn awakened about 25 years ago, it was somewhat later that the second generation arrived, then the third. So the rate of awakening is not constant.

But the main point remains the same: There have been great suffering in Lions Arch, and no matter what and no matter the actual number of deaths, its going to effect the Dream, possibly greatly.

I don’t think what happened in Lion’s Arch compares to the general mayhem of the dragons. Sylvari have been dieing to dragon corruption or other threats for a long time now.

I don’t think you need to worry about the sylvari population, my understanding is that the rate at which sylvari are born increases as time goes on. It was six or sever years between the Firstborn and the Secondborn, it’s far less between the birth cycles today. Sylvari are entering Tyria today at a rate faster than they ever have before.

Lots of data pulled from thin air to create an issue where there isn’t one. I’d say just a few 100 died in total, and of those most were human. Were the attacks were actually more deadly then you’d not have all the council and other notable npc’s of LA surviving, heck, you’d bombard them first. So for specifically the pale tree sylvari a couple of dozen perhaps died. negligible impact on the population of ‘good’ sylvari.

Actually I believe ANet is the source of the “45K dead” figure, the city of LA being a lot vaster in lore than in game mechanic reality. This is true of any MMO territory, it can’t be as vast as it really would be both due to data limitations and to the needs of game play.

The Pale Tree must be reeling from losing so many of Her children so fast. And the Dream as well. The Court tries to inflict pain and suffering on sylvari in order to feed that into the Dream. Well, they got it in spades with LA’s fall (might be one reason the Toxic Alliance worked, the Court was hopping with glee at the chance to do this).