Should have been written “[…] withdrew to the area now called the Crystal Desert […]”, then.
So now you’re criticising the writings of a long-dead mursaat? Way to kick a guy when he’s down.
And… what’s so wrong with that? If they’re inconsistent, they are. Furthermore, you know I’m criticizing the works of the Writing Team, and the performance of the Continuity Team (There must be one!).
The New Krytan stuff (Which I hadn’t noticed) is also unforgivable… literally unplayable
Should have been written “[…] withdrew to the area now called the Crystal Desert […]”, then.
I think they made a similar lore mistake (And later fix) in a past episode, in Season 2. Or was it on S3E1? Can’t remember.
Dwarves and Mursaat were aligned at some point. Perhaps that’s why?
I also noticed the Destroyers being friendly to my Mursaat disguise. I thought of darker implications but soon chalked it up to faulty mechanics.
Mind you, I have not completed the episode, but while exploring the Mursaat Fortress, I came across one of the Mursaat Lore Tablets, and it read the following:
V. After our failed attack on Zhaitan, our Forgotten allies withdrew to the Crystal Desert. We soothed ourselves with the knowledge that upon the other races’ annihilation, the world would be ours.
(Emphasis mine)
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but by the time of the last ED cycle, when Mursaat, Forgotten, Jotun, Dwarves and Seers fought them, the Crystal Desert DID NOT EXIST. It was called then, the Crystal Sea, and it was only when Abaddon smote the Forgotten ships, aiding Jadoth the Margonite, that it was created. And Abaddon came while the ED were sleeping already.
Right?
I remember on my 3rd day, finally going past Queensdale into Kessex and doing Draithor’s event with a lot of people. We died a lot.
I also was taken with the look of Garrenhoff and the Wizard’s Tower (Even as I was a GW1 Veteran); I even based a D&D campaign on that little town. Lovely <3.
While Arthur C Clarke defined that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, I would also be extremely disappointed if through some asuran contraption, they could just shrug off the magical aspects of Ascension.
I would argue that we know little of the Vision Crystal. We don’t know if its magic was inherent, or imbued. If it was the latter… we could stretch the definition and label it magitech.
Edit: Correcting a stupid mistake where I wrote “contraception” instead of “contraption”, geez…
(edited by Rhaegar.1203)
Granted, I made a lot of assumptions writing that, and what you say makes total sense. I guess it derives from a problem I’ve seen in the story; we, and the Pact have, not put to rest or sleep, but killed TWO Elder Dragons. That’s something that has never been done in recorded history. So the PC should be very famous.
The problem I allude to is that the treatment we get does not reflect that. However, I understand it, since mechanically, each player IS the Pact Commander.
But still, having absorbed a bloodstones worth of power, considering they’re practically godmode control panels, does he actually need the WM anymore? Or does he just want them as an extra pair of hands to labor.
Well, we don’t actually know what he thinks the WM has to concentrate on. Maybe he has far more noble goals than we give him credit for, but given his history, I doubt it. OK, so now he’s sort of a god, which proven by other thread, is sort of really undefined in the Tyrian context. Maybe he’s not all-powerful? While the original Mursaat were certainly not gods, they were considered very powerful spellcasters, and yet, they needed the WM to sacrifice the Chosen and power the Mursaat’s Soul Batteries (Door of Komalie business and all that).
He doesn’t consider us anything at all. > doesnt that define inconsequentiality?
Maybe I worded it… wrong. I was trying to say that he knows nothing about the Pact Commander. Lore-wise, the raid always speaks of “mercenaries” and “adventurers”, and supposedly, Xera was just buying time for Lazarus to be moved before those adventurers could stop him from being reborn. So, they were not the PC. Lazarus never addressed Dragon’s Watch, just his followers. Maybeit was because he encountered something he hadn’t seen before, and needed time to consider, see how we fit in his design.
One, Lazarus doesn’t consider us, the PC, as inconsequential. If anything, he doesn’t consider us anything at all.
Way I see it, he needed to take control of his army of followers. Cadeucus was about to wrestle that control from him, to divert their resources to vie for the Krytan throne. See, the White Mantle had always been a theocracy; a religious-political coalition, governing Kryta. So, most of its components are both zealots, and politicians/government officials,. There are also the ones that are only religious fanatics, and on the other side of the spectrum, the ones with political ambitions. Cadeucus falls into that last category: he just wants the White Mantle political party to secure the throne for himself. He cares not about the resurrection of their god.
Since Cadeucus is their leader, it doesn’t matter if most of the WM is trying to revive Lazarus. The moment the Minister decides to invade, the WM will have to mobilize. This is made evident through Justiciar Bauer’s journal, where he has to work his superiors ambition into research on the Bloodstone; Bauer hopes for the magical research to allow him and his faction to bring Lazarus back, so he convinces Cadeucus to funnel resources into that, by pointing out the potential military applications of the Bloodstone weapons.
So, finally, why did he show himself?
Because Cadeucus was about to rally the WM into attacking Kryta (He was, after all, being shown the military capabilities of the Jade Constructs). Lazarus knew the majority of the WM would drop that and follow their god, if the “Unseen One” now showed himself. It would effectively make about 90% of their militants follow him, instead of their leader. And given that he believes the WM needs to be focused on something… other than the Kryta politics, he needed to assert that control.
Have in mind that Lazarus showing himself like that is akin to the Second Coming to these people.
The first Anomaly we encountered was a coalescence of energies present at the Thaumanova Reactor fractal. Fractals are islands of reality pulled from The Mists, a kind of proto-matter that constitutes all. Including magic.
That’s where I think it comes from.
The only part of this new phenomenon that I don’t agree with is that all the characters on my account are seeing the “ghosts”. That just doesn’t make sense from a RPG perspective. It is actually very immersion-breaking for those characters who have not yet gone to Bloodstone Fen.
They may be “Mist-beings”, and the Mists reach out to all places, at all times. So, even if you’re starting out, these apparitions could appear retroactively.
I said it a long time ago! I even got a shoutout in the now defunct Points of Interest by host Kate Welch.
Ever since we used Omadd’s machine, and we witnessed the Eternal Alchemy, our character has not been right in the head.
That last screenshot gives me the creeps. They look so lonely… somehow reminds me of Silent Hill and Stranger Things.
The Anomalies work best for this. The one with Eir is just… too well defined.
It seems to be intentional, and a forecast of the shape of things to come: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4xbu7c/random_anomaly_sightings/
While you probably won’t be able to run GW at ultra performance without it taking a hard hit on performance (decreasing FPS) on that gig, it is decent.
You should be able to run the game with nice shaders and post-processing active; however, you should look into a cooling option. Central Tyria will be OK, but the newer maps put the graph card to the test with the nicer effects they have, elevating its temp. High temperature for a prolonged time can and will crash the computer (As I understand, this is by design, to prevent damage to the components).
I play on a laptop with an AMD A10 processor 1.6 GHz, 12 GB RAM and a AMD Radeon R6 graphics card, and it gives me decent FPS (Except on Lions Arch or zerg rushes, where the performance drops, fast). Yours has a better proessor, and a better graphics card.
I gotta wonder, though. Why 256GB on a Solid State Disk? Seems kinda low. (It will give you faster access to the disk, which can speed up the game, although it won’t be THAT noticeable).
A few objects WITH a few conditions, I can understand. But all conditions, on all objects?
We have enough Earth elementals bleeding, as it stands.
Says who?
There’s no evidence pointing out to non-gods being able to usurp a god’s domain.
But there’s also no evidence pointing the other way!
So, how can you conclude so?Because there is evidence pointing to that. They’re called a god’s domain for a reason, for starters, and in GW1:
“I have studied the beings you humans call gods. Your stories speak of extremely powerful, almost omnipotent beings who each specialize in one area of superiority.”
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Cipher_of_Melandru
Basically, human legends state that the Six Gods are absolutely powerful in their specific domains. Even if that holds false, the fact that they have power of these domains is part of what makes them a god.
So it goes to logical deduction that if you have power over a god’s domain, you are a god.
So Menzies is a god. He is able to corrupt the Forge and make tainted weapons for his Shadow Army; He corrupts the domain itself that way, meaning he has power over it.
Just following your logic.
I would take the title to mean that he serves as Menzies’ priest. That he serves Menzies, but worships something else that Menzies hopes to use for his forces.
The main reason I think this is the entire quest behind him – we take “Unholy Texts” to discover what boon Menzies’ forces had gained from the Priests’ meddling and remove it, but if Menzies was the boon-giver, why would he need a priest to boon his personal army?
Really? Intuitively, I’d say “priest of X” means “priest who worships X” when X is known to be a quasi-divine figure. I guess you could say that a “priest of Queen Jennah” would mean Jennah’s personal spiritual adviser since obviously Jennah isn’t worshipped (or is she?).
This. I took it just as nit-picking to support Konig’s stance on the matter. Since it isn’t explicitly stated that this Priest worships Menzies, if leaves room to his interpretation.
Right click on any of their portraits and select “Join them in world” (Or something, can’t quite remember exact text)
I loved them. Even Dry Top and Silverwastes had peaceful sections. Stuff like that needs to come back.
In other words: A non-god cannot take over a god’s domain. One needs to be a god to do such.
Says who?
There’s no evidence pointing out to non-gods being able to usurp a god’s domain.
But there’s also no evidence pointing the other way!
So, how can you conclude so?
“Take his place” doesn’t mean “acquire godhood”. You can do the first while already being a god. Sort of like Lyssa now claiming domain over Water after Abaddon’s fall.
Lyssa was a god in the first place, however, so that comparison wouldn’t
And I say she was right in the same quote you brought up. Read again.
And then there’s Gaheron Baelfire, who sort of achieves a form of godhood (Apparently inspired by Kormir’s deeds).
He doesn’t obtain anything close to godhood, and nothing really says he was inspired by Kormir – rather, he was going for godhood because the Flame Legion were still set in the “charr need gods to rule because humans had gods when they ruled” mentality, but after the events of GW1 it the Flame Legion got this mentality of “adopting gods is willingly following a weak(er) being, we must make our own god to be truly strong and rule”.
Fair enough, the only one that mentions Kormir is Logan, who says Gaheron is probably trying to do the same as she did all those years ago. But nothing in lore supports it, or even that Gaheron attained godhood.
Where do you get this “trying to ascend to godhood”? The reason for the war he’s waging on his half-brother has never been stated.
Since he is trying to usurp Balthazar, it’s relatively safe to assume that he’d want to completely take his place. Doesn’t mean that this is his primary objective, but certainly a part of what he’s doing.
“Take his place” doesn’t mean “acquire godhood”. You can do the first while already being a god. Sort of like Lyssa now claiming domain over Water after Abaddon’s fall.
For years we thought about the gods as The Five. It was only when Nightfall was released that we counted one more among them. Who’s to say there aren’t more (many more) that just have not revealed themselves?
Highly unlikely within this pantheon. As we found out, they were actually always The Six, we just didn’t know. So I doubt ArenaNet would pull that same plot off once again. Aside from that, the gods represent certain ascepts of life & magic, and there’s not too much left to fill in.
Fair enough. I was mostly responding to your statement that to be a god, you have to be one of the Six. Seems to me a logical fallacy: Kormir was not one of the Six, because there were already Six; she had to take one of the Six’s power to become a god. She was NOT part of the Six. She joined them.
And then there’s Gaheron Baelfire, who sort of achieves a form of godhood (Apparently inspired by Kormir’s deeds).
I know the wiki is for players, by players. Don’t worry.
Where do you get this “trying to ascend to godhood”? The reason for the war he’s waging on his half-brother has never been stated.
For years we thought about the gods as The Five. It was only when Nightfall was released that we counted one more among them. Who’s to say there aren’t more (many more) that just have not revealed themselves?
I meant Glint dragon went to Artesian Waters to purefied herself from Elder Dragon… http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Forgotten
it was accidentally to that spot ? So Ley Lines have connections to everything…
Glint was NOT purified at the Artesian Waters; she underwent a Forgotten ritual at The Altar of Glaust
Konig:Menzies is never said to be a god. Dhuum is a fallen god, he had the same place as Grenth. Same situation as Abaddon and Kormir and Abaddon’s unnamed predecessor.
While Menzies is not directly regarded as a “God”, he is referred by the GW1 Wiki as a “Deity”; coupled with the facts that he is Balth’s half-brother, has armies, priests, and made an alliance with two other Gods, heavily weigh on his godhood.
That’s a brazier. That’s not a Seer, that’s a Lyssa statue.
pikkunana.7495Wiki said she went to The Artesian Waters where first god step to Purified herself from Elder Dragon curroptions.
The Artesian Waters is where the First God in Tyria set foot, which was Dwayna. She did not come to be purified of anything. That’s where she happened to “land” in Tyria; and it was probably because the Artesian Waters follow the Ley Lines, and thus, the Bloodstone magic, and thus, why the Six first felt drawn from the Mist (Where apparently they were wandering with the Humans)
And then you have other Gods, without a correspondece to Elder Dragons. Menzies, Dhuum…?
OK, maybe Dhuum was not part of the original pantheon, but Menzies was Balthazar’s half-brother.
The statement that he is making is simply that the humans themselves know about the regular average creature that is termed a Dragon by running into them in multiple locations. Sadly, while the Charr have myths about the Elder Dragons, there is no evidence that the Charr have had any contact with the dragons that humanity knew about, because they are so far separated.
This. What my line meant, Aaron, was from the Charr perspective.
I just don’t see it. They knew about Elder Dragons, but not “regular” dragons?
This may be nit-picking, but if we come to that, not only Charr knew about dragons, but Humans as well: there was a named area in GW called “Dragon’s Gullet”, and it contains Human ruins.
I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound like they were around the time the GL existed. It sounds, much as you state in your last line, that they had stories about the GL.
- Add the option for some materials that can only be bought (such as Thermocatalytic Reagent), to be added to the crafting menu. Having to close the craft window, to go the vendor, and go back again (with the tabs expanded!) is aggravating…
I got a question (If anybody knows, even if not from Anet, please let me know):
Back in GW1, in the The Wilds mission, there was a runic stone showing some carvings (dragon related, apparently): https://wiki.guildwars.com/images/2/20/Runic_stones_in_the_Wilds.jpg
I, for some time, thought these were the ones shown on the Mystery Cave Seal, until I realized these are Ascension runes: http://storage9.static.itmages.com/i/14/1204/h_1417668212_9865493_0776d4069c.png
Are the carvings Druidic? Will they be addressed at some point? Or just random interesting stuff the map developer threw in there for flavor?
Because in GW1 time they seemed random, but now… in retrospect… I mean, the triangle could be interpreted as the Bloodstone regulating the flow of magic, via wavy lines in an out (leylines?), there’s the dragon, and then the square divided in 4 sub-squares (Four schools of magic?).
I’m not saying fixing that wouldn’t cause other problems. All I am stating is that joining a squad does not guarantee you will get back to that instance.
Doesn’t it feel unfair that, while you worked on the events and helped your lane to progress, a random disconnect, not only prevents you from participating, but also allows another player access to a map that has progressed and may very well be a meta success?
Rejoining a map while on a squad is not ideal. Often, I’ve been disconnected from a map (GW2 since my internet is just fine), to be stuck in a different instance of the map. Trying to join my squad gives me the “World is full” error. You have to keep trying for a full 10 mins, and with luck, you may get back to them.
Sounds like Jennah has hell of a PR thing, because this “interview” [conducted by whom?] sounds like proactive damage control.
I’m a pro-Queen, but her words sound empty, and just reassuring. Trying to keep people from panicking.
On the other hand, it sounds like the Pact has made a choice in terms of leadership. Permanent, or temporary?
Bow damage in GW1 took altitude into the calculation; I dunno why that was removed, so I assume there was a design decision involved. Balance, maybe?
I mean that the information is generally scattered around. IN the previous wekes/months to HoT launch, the teaser images were posted on FB and IG, which I believe were linked, as well as Twitter. Not on the general website.
All the Scarlet and Marjorie story stubs was posted in the website, never in-game. Still can’t find it in the client.
Reddit is where Devs have started to post this stuff; MO comes here generally, but seems like the subReddit is their forum of preference.
But in my opinion, they’re listening to the wrong cries!
We all welcome narrative and stories. But for the love of Balthazar, do this in-game! Wy do I have to track website, forums, reddit, tumblr, twitter, facebook and instagram?
Same thing happened with the stories about Scarlet.
Do
This
IN-GAME
So… Rata Sumians are now seen in Rata Novus; does that mean that the TD map will be updated and we’ll see more Asurans in there?
Is no one going to address the “Exotic Dancer Pole” suggestion?
In there, conspicuously added in 3rd place?
Shiro is very nuanced! I like him… in paper. But his execution felt rather forced, eh?
Abaddon is also very believable. I like him. I may have worded my previous opnion in a wrong way.
We both agree on Scarlet and the other two. Even Gaheron.
Maybe he was positive and good at the beginning but became corrupted after consuming dark powers from the spider god Arachnia causing him to become greedy for power and fame.
I’m hesitant to consider data-mined info like Arachnia as canon…
At some point between GW:EN and GW2, I considered ANet could put a spin on the end of Nightfall and pull a plot-twist on Abaddon’s end goal at breaking from the Realm of Torment: since he was the God of Secrets, he could have found out about the Elder Dragons, and then distributed Magic among the races to prepare for the next cycle. He was misunderstood by the Gods and the races, and cast down. He was still trying to break free to warn the Gods and prepare humanity.
But no, he was made generic evil.
Konig, is the irony because Norn females don’t return from the North? Or because of the Sons of Svanir being misogynists?
No, Desert Borderlands =/= Crystal Desert.
Crystal Desert is a true desert to the southeast of Tyria, bordering with Elona, another continent. I’m actually unclear on this, but the Crystal Desert is mechanically part of Tyria, and lore-wise part of Elona. Something like that.
It has dunes, rocks, and long-abandoned desert towns. You’d like it. Can’t wait to visit it in GW2…
People keep bringing this up, but I don’t think it is bad writing at all. In this situation, the writer wasn’t counting on our connection to Belinda, but rather to Marjorie. We don’t necessarily mourn the loss of a secondary character, but we feel for our ally who just lost their sister – and we are forced to think about how her grieving impacts the group dynamic.
People are so desensitized by the GRRM method of dramatically killing people we care about that they often miss the more subtle (and better written, imo) tragedies in many narratives.
Maybe it is also because I don’t care about Marjorie either. I can’t relate to her. Nor Rox, Nor Braham, nor Canach, nor Ellen Kiel. I feel a lot more for Kasmeer.
I remember that I chose the one Asura that bombs some undead towers (Part of the Greatest Fear arch), and… someone dies? His wife? No, him, and then I have to tell the wife, right. That.
Goes to show how much I cared.
Those are White Mantle. White Mantle have always used capes, I don’t think they’re hinting at them being player-usable now.