Guild Wars 2

In woodenpotatoes latest video he discussed that. It’s a confessor you kill in one of the human personal stories.

DarcShriek.5829:

draxynnic.3719:

The issue there is that normally, you’d expect people to write their true feelings in their own journal… unless, that is, Bauer was expecting that someone would read his journal.

Also, who was the confessor when Bauer wrote this. He refers to someone that is faithful to the unseen ones, which would be the previous confessor. Bauer knew of Caudecus’ intentions when Caudecus was just a justiciar.

The note was written on 75 Zephyr, which is early in the year. Caudecus was not the Confessor yet. Bauer is not a traitor to Caudecus, he is a traitor to the former Confessor.

The artifact switch was made.

We don’t have the date of Esthel’s death. We do, however, have a letter in Caudecus’ Correspondences (letter 13) indicating that it was under Caudecus that the focus was on researching means of weaponising the bloodstones. My conclusion was that Esthel’s death happened prior to 75 Zephyr, and the ‘Confessor’ in Bauer’s journal was Caudecus in every case.

Meanwhile, later entries indicate that Bauer is still looking to achieve Lazarus’ rebirth: 75 Scion 1325 and 31 Zephyr 1328 being the clearest.

Bauer was probably doing what typically happens in such situations – brown-nosing everybody who could potentially be a leader so that he’ll remain in a good place to pursue his own agenda regardless of who wins.

draxynnic.3719:

We don’t have the date of Esthel’s death. We do, however, have a letter in Caudecus’ Correspondences (letter 13) indicating that it was under Caudecus that the focus was on researching means of weaponising the bloodstones. My conclusion was that Esthel’s death happened prior to 75 Zephyr, and the ‘Confessor’ in Bauer’s journal was Caudecus in every case.

We might not know the exact day, but we do know that orphaned humans killed her during their rise to power, so that’s as close to a timeframe as we can get. I don’t think we can say it coordinated with the release date of the game, but some time around there. Interestingly enough, the bookshelves contained some information about bloodstones, which I suppose was more foreshadowing of events like those in Bloodstone Fen.

draxynnic.3719:

DarcShriek.5829:

draxynnic.3719:

The issue there is that normally, you’d expect people to write their true feelings in their own journal… unless, that is, Bauer was expecting that someone would read his journal.

Also, who was the confessor when Bauer wrote this. He refers to someone that is faithful to the unseen ones, which would be the previous confessor. Bauer knew of Caudecus’ intentions when Caudecus was just a justiciar.

The note was written on 75 Zephyr, which is early in the year. Caudecus was not the Confessor yet. Bauer is not a traitor to Caudecus, he is a traitor to the former Confessor.

The artifact switch was made.

We don’t have the date of Esthel’s death. We do, however, have a letter in Caudecus’ Correspondences (letter 13) indicating that it was under Caudecus that the focus was on researching means of weaponising the bloodstones. My conclusion was that Esthel’s death happened prior to 75 Zephyr, and the ‘Confessor’ in Bauer’s journal was Caudecus in every case.

Meanwhile, later entries indicate that Bauer is still looking to achieve Lazarus’ rebirth: 75 Scion 1325 and 31 Zephyr 1328 being the clearest.

Bauer was probably doing what typically happens in such situations – brown-nosing everybody who could potentially be a leader so that he’ll remain in a good place to pursue his own agenda regardless of who wins.

In the first letter of caudecus, he was still a justiciar. At this point Bauer offered the support of his forces to Caudecus. Bauer indicates that he’s not fond of Esthel’s new found piousness.

We don’t have dates for the letters to Caudecus. I checked. Some of the earlier letters could be 1324 or even earlier for all we know.

In fact, the Missing Sister arc suggests that the PC’s sister has been missing, presumed dead, for some time, and the letters in Caudecus’ Correspondence seem to be in chronological order. The one where Bauer initially makes contact is the very first, before Caudecus framed the Ebon Falcons, let alone when the Ebon Falcons went missing. So however long the PC’s sister had been missing at the start of that… Bauer’s first letter to Caudecus probably came before that.

Rognik.2579:

We might not know the exact day, but we do know that orphaned humans killed her during their rise to power, so that’s as close to a timeframe as we can get. I don’t think we can say it coordinated with the release date of the game, but some time around there. Interestingly enough, the bookshelves contained some information about bloodstones, which I suppose was more foreshadowing of events like those in Bloodstone Fen.

I don’t think we can say it’s even close, actually.

The idea of a 1:1 correlation between real-world time and in-game time was dodgy at the best of times, but the entire Personal Story clearly isn’t intended to have taken place on the day of release. I’m pretty sure that canonically King Thorn’s return (Halloween 2012) postdated Zhaitan’s death – the Lost Shores release certainly did according to interviews at the time*

So, it appears that Zhaitan’s death occurs sometime around or before Scion 1325, with the rest of the personal story stretching backwards from there. If we assumed that the whole Personal Story spanned six months or so – which seems reasonable – then 75 Zephyr could easily be after Confessor Esthel’s death.

Bottom line is we can’t conclude anything from the date of the 75 Zephyr entry without knowing the date of Confessor Esthel’s death. However, there is no indication in the journal of a change in the Confessor’s identity – not only is it a curious thing to miss out on general principles, everything in the journal suggests a consistent policy from the Confessor throughout the time period spanned by the journals.

*The… questionable… idea that the Living Story and the person story canonically happened in whatever order you played them in with that character didn’t crop up until after Lost Shores – during Lost Shores, it was mentioned that part of the reason the karka moved in on Southsun was due to the Risen threat being diminished through Zhaitan’s death. My understanding is that when they rightfully ditched that idea, the entirety of the Living Story went back to occurring after Zhaitan’s death.

Because we don’t know the date of Esthel’s death. We cannot assume bauer’s first journal refers to Caudecus as confessor.

We can’t assume it doesn’t, either.

However… I did a little more digging into the other journals, and from them, we can set a ‘latest possible date’. Valis the Learned calls the Confessor a ‘he’ in the 86 Zephyr entry – which can’t be Esthel. Furthermore, a comparison of Bauer’s entries suggest a continuity between 75 Zephyr and 86 Zephyr: in 75 Zephyr Bauer sent a message to the confessor, and in 86 Zephyr it appears that he received a response from the same confessor (which Valis’ entry indicates is Caudecus).

From the Caudecus Correspondence letters, we see that Esthel was an enthusiastic supporter of Lazarus’ rebirth (although she may not always have been, given Bauer’s reference to ‘newfound piety’ in the first letter). So if we were to claim that the 75 Zephyr journal entry referred to Esthel, then we would need to draw the following conclusions:

1. Esthel went from being more interested in weapons to being more interested in resurrecting Lazarus and then died, all within a ten-day period.
2. Bauer either didn’t think to mention this transition in his journals, or we didn’t find the pages where he did. (It’s also curious that Valis doesn’t describe the confessor as ‘the new confessor’ if there was such a small gap between the new confessor taking the reins and Valis getting his approval.)
3. Either Caudecus’ correspondences are not in chronological order as they appear to be, or every letter from 1 to 13 dated from this 10-day period: including all of the 1-20 human personal story and the disappearance of Falcon Company (meaning that Falcon Company was missing for less than a fortnight).

Each of these conclusions can be reconciled, but it would e a stretch to do so. I consider it much more believable that Caudecus was already the Confessor as of 75 Zephyr.

We also have indications that Bauer was pursuing Operation Rebirth himself – 75 Scion 1325, 31 Zephyr 1328 in particular. As noted, the Caudecus Correspondences indicated that Bauer was firmly in Caudecus’ camp with regards to the question of religion over practicality. This gives two possibilities:

1) Bauer was playing Caudecus, pretending to be in Caudecus’ camp while actually working to resurrect Lazarus. Caudecus probably got a fake aspect.

2) Bauer was genuinely in Caudecus’ camp, but was paranoid about someone from Xera’s camp reading his journal, so he wrote his journal entries as if he was supporting Operation Rebirth. The aspect got swapped.

Furthermore, Valis’ final entry is clearly a reference to the ritual that exploded the bloodstone and empowered Lazarus. Now, it’s possible that it was intended to achieve some other goal… however, there is circumstantial evidence that it was intended to be the final stage of the resurrection, with whatever Xera did either having failed to resurrect Lazarus or having been intended all along only as a first step of a process to be completed at the bloodstone itself.

Putting all these items together, I think the most likely explanation is that Bauer was still supporting Operation Rebirth behind Caudecus’ back. It’s possible that he was also sabotaging Xera – he may, for instance, have given both Xera and Caudecus fake aspects while keeping the real one for himself. The motivation would be a bid to seize the rank of confessor for himself: he could claim that he was the one who achieved Lazarus’ resurrection after Xera failed and despite Caudecus’ attempts to prevent it, and thus could reasonably expect to be the one that is promoted after Lazarus wipes Caudecus off the map for heresy.

The alternative is that the ritual at the bloodstone was intended for an entirely different purpose, but Lazarus or whatever being is impersonating Lazarus was ready to step in when the bloodstone exploded. If this is the case, it seems unlikely that he would have taken the product of Xera’s efforts to the ritual site (that would be asking for trouble) so if Lazarus is an imposter, then the assembly of four parts Lazarus and one part fake might still be hidden away somewhere.