R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The wolves don’t seem to be clones- everything that comes out of the blighting pods are planty, but the wolves have skulls and fur. Either they’re the result of more standard dragon corruption, or the blighting trees made parasitic plants which afterwards infested wolves.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
@Arkengel Supposedly, what blew was an Inquest lab under the ruins we see in Metrica. I think that lab is what the Fractal is supposed to be- it’s open at the top, but that might be explained away as one of the errors in the copying.
@trub No cinematic to be had, except for the one that ends the fractal, which is just the screen shaking wildly followed by a flash of white light.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Personally, I don’t mind which charr we get as a legend, as long as we get one eventually. I do think Bonfaaz Burntfur would be a better pick than Burntsoul, though- he called down the Searing, for titans’ sake, and went on to sack Rin before his death. Burntsoul’s legacy seems to be mainly failing to kill a troublesome bunch of humans when he had the chance, briefly and disastrously flirting with ‘gods’ that actively sought to kill their followers, and becoming the first high-profile victory of Pyre’s rebellion. I figure less likely a legend than a recipient of the same treatment as the Imperator who ran headlong into the Foefire.
But on the broader idea of revenant legends from GW1, that’s something I hope they move away from, and fast. I get that they’re good for nostalgia value, and make a ready supply of powerful characters that don’t need to be fleshed out for the playerbase, but it’s going to get really weird really fast if only figures active in an arbitrary ten-year span of history can be channeled, and they’ve already had to stretch to avoid a human-centric cast (looking at you, Ventari).
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
@Jaken This is the only real source we have on King Reza. “Reza, son of Zoran, was king of Orr during the Guild Wars. As king, Reza tried to shield his people from the wars, and encouraged a greater focus on spiritualism, magic and the arts. He was a genuine devotee of the Six Gods, with a faith that was true and earnest. He tried to play peacemaker during the Guild Wars, and stop the ravages of war throughout Tyria. Sadly, his efforts were unsuccessful. Not only did he fail to stop the wars tearing Kryta and Ascalon apart, but the attempt to use Orrian troops to stop fighting elsewhere left his own country open for an invasion of its own—by the charr. In an effort to save Orr from falling to the charr, Reza’s advisor, Vizier Khilbron, invoked a dark incantation from the Lost Scrolls. The uncontrolled magic of the Lost Scrolls caused to the Cataclysm, sending the entire kingdom of Orr to the bottom of the sea. How tragic that, as its last ruler, Reza the peacemaker bears the horrible burden of its fall… " All in all, not the kind of guy I’d associate with a greatsword. Maybe a focus elite spec.
@Burtnik Really? I’ve always found the opposite to be true. Kalla gets mentioned all over the place in Guild Wars 2, and every in-game rendition of the rebellion against the shamans focuses on her. Pyre, on the other hand, only gets a statue in a corner of Ashford, and maybe a few off-hand mentions in NPC banter.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The only trouble with pinning the rez spell failure on Dhuum or Grenth is that the spells aren’t around for the non-humans either. Unless the human gods are far more influential in the Mists then those races are willing to admit, that means something else went on, or is still going on.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
^That, although, at the risk of starting an argument that can’t be won, it’s unclear how much info a dragon actually gleans from the brains of its minions, and as far as we’ve seen, they do not facilitate a transfer of that information from one minion to another. Individual minions may retain the techniques, if they’ve been given enough intelligence to handle them, but they aren’t passed around the entire risen/icebrood/whathaveyou horde.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Officially, the art of resurrection has been ‘lost’ somewhere in the couple hundred years between the games. The devs were never very clear on why (not from a lore perspective), but they were pretty adamant that it’s just not something that’s done anymore.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
They’d already gotten them- that camp had about as many Seraph, Peacemakers, Wolfborn, and so on as it did members of the Pact proper. The races had already sent what they could be convinced to spare, they’d developed a plan that they believed would put them beyond the reach of their enemy, and that enemy was growing stronger by the day. Regardless of whether they were ready then, they knew they’d be less ready later. Mordremoth would just be more powerful the next day, or season, or year, or decade. If anything, I believe they waited too long.
I think, on the whole, their plan made perfect sense. The only moves that I don’t think were sensible were bringing Trahearne along personally (although, besides Laranthir, at least none of the other major officers accompanied him), and artless firing into the jungle the way they seemed to do in the cutscene (although, being a cutscene, and thus not very big on elaboration, it’s possible they’d attained an actual target- perhaps one of the Blighting Trees, with an understanding that it wasn’t a natural growth, or perhaps a concentration of Mordremoth’s vines. I’d like to think that’s the case.)
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
And another thing- they didn’t have the option of waiting for intel. It’s easy to forget now that the meta’s been stable for a year+, but their staging ground in the Silverwastes was becoming more and more tenuous. That last attack before they leave- the one we’re just barely able to turn the tide in? That was a ‘go now or don’t go at all’ moment.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Two reasons, I think. He seemed to be exhausted or somehow magically depleted after the cleansing ritual, and it’s just bad form to throw your leader into the middle of a meat grinder confrontation, which is what the aerial battle boiled down to. He wouldn’t have been able to do any good, and putting him needlessly at risk could’ve done a lot of harm to the cause.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Right, Aliyana. I’d forgotten about her. Good catch.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
You only need one death for a single haunting soul to be around in Tyria.
In theory, yes, but in practice it seems very, very rare for a spirit to linger. Ruling out whatever outlier calamities end up trapping whole crews of pirates at a time, and Bria’s shenanigans that cause souls to be removed from living bodies, I can only think of a handful of human ghosts, and no asura, charr, or norn ones, who possibly died within current living memory- a period of time more than twice as long as sylvari have existed.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
How do you Roleplay your guardian/Dragon hunter?
As a dim-white knight. While she might not be particularly compassionate, or kind, or inspiring, she does throw herself wholeheartedly into making the world a better place, and she takes pains to be honest and fair.
What motivates them IE. what is there belief/faith that drives them?
While she has a strong faith in, and fear of, the gods, her real driving passion is her conviction that Heroes aren’t just stories, that they do exist and do keep the monsters at bay- and that, if she works at it hard enough, one day she just might be one of them. Call it a mix of desperate idealism and a devotion to self-improvement.
What are the Limits to their abilities?
Extensive. Her guardian mojo manifested spontaneously, and she’s never had, or sought out, formal training. The result is a pretty good grasp on healing, both of herself and others, but only a handful of other abilities scattered sporadically across the guardian’s talents. As for what she does know, it’s powerful enough to keep her alive, and usually to pound what she’s fighting into paste, but it’s not going to set any records. She’s careful not to get in over her head.
Is normal to just specialize in one form of guardian type magic or does your character pull out all the stops to achieve their goal?
See above. She’s got a little bit of most things, but she’s not a specialist, nor is she able to ‘pull out all the stops’.
What are there reactions to other classes such as necros, mesmers, revanants, etc?
She’s more about what people do with their abilities than what label gets slapped on them, but she can’t abide sneaky and underhanded sorts (so most thieves.) She also disapproves of throwing one’s life away without gain, especially when justified as ‘for a cause’ (so some warriors, and less-able guardians, although see doesn’t spare any of the less martial types who try it either), and she keeps a suspicious eye on anyone who claims to consort with the villains of history (revenants). She’s also got a bit of a grudge against rangers, although that’s more due to one in particular than any trait of the profession as a whole. On the other side of the coin, she admires anyone else who chases ideals or holds themselves to a standard, and she also appreciates inventiveness and learning (engineers and any of the scholar professions, especially elementalists.)
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Now, all of that should just be taken as an example of how one person does things, not of ‘the right way’ to do it. As vague as our sources on most professions are, the canon lore only amounts to a loose framework. I know that can be frustrating, but in practice, what it means is that you’re free to make your own answers as you go, and as long as you don’t go over the top, most roleplayers will take it in stride. Just try to keep the overall power somewhat short of superhero, and respect what lore is around (which you seem to have already done), and you’ll do just fine.
Oh, and one more thing- I don’t play a guardian. Not in my mind, anyway. I play a person, and she just happens to be a guardian. Don’t let what your character does define who they are or how they act. It contributes, sure, but if you’re playing a two-dimensional profession instead of a character you’re selling your own concept short.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
She, actually, was not a direct descendant to King Doric. She was only the closest relation to the Doric line still living.
Yes… she was. " The royal lineage of Kryta, as with all royalty, descends from King Doric." She was the daughter of King Jadon, the monarch at the time of the charr invasion, via one of his ‘indiscretions’ and thus still directly part of the dynasty. The reason the Shining Blade are committed specifically to the Salmaics isn’t because they’re a seperate line of descent- Salma is just where the Shining Blade became invested in the royal family. Or, if you want to put it in more nationalistic terms, you could say that since Salma was at one point the last known royal in Kryta, loyalty to her descendants keeps the throne in Krytan hands. Opening it up to all of Doric’s descendants could theoretically result in the Shining Blade trying to place an Ascalonian on the throne, or some other foreigner descended from Jadon, if he lived long enough to sire any more children.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Yeah, Konig, I know about Keiran, that’s why I specifically mentioned in Guild Wars 2, not Guild Wars 1.
There are some examples in GW2 as well. They just aren’t broadcasted as clearly.
For a Kieran-esque shift, there is, of course, Rytlock. Shouldn’t need to expound on that.
For proper secondary professions, it’s around with the NPCs, you just have to look harder without the skill names popping up for us anymore. For the example that always jumps out to me, roughly half of the Ash Legion’s NPCs mix necromancer and thief skills, and there’re likely other examples to be found by anyone able to take the obnoxious amount of time required to look into the skillsets.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
More specifically, there’s nothing saying that the legends we invoke have to be dead.
On Jalis- a better indication of his status than his inclusion in revenant would be this book, although both thrust at the same conclusion: presumed dead, with no way of telling whether that’s actually correct.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I just kinda though they havent been on tyria long enuff for us to run into any sylvari spirits
(like 25+ years max)
While it would make a kind of sense for sylvari to be soulless, I lean towards that explanation, myself. Consider how few charr, or asura, or even norn ghosts we see. There’s just been too little time, and too few sylvari deaths, to say that the fact they haven’t haunted means they can’t haunt.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I’d also add that we have a modern example of human’s continuing interest- the Upper City of Divinity’s Reach is shaded by a massive orrery, after all. The problem would be that astrophysics, as such, is exceedingly unlikely to exist in human culture- first, because the tools and scientific sophistication are unlikely to exist at Kryta’s current state, but moreover because the field very well might not apply to Tyria. Between the Mists, constellations being able to embody themselves as avatars in the world, and the fact that the stars are able to predict and deliver warnings about the future, astronomy in Tyria would turn much more towards the lines of astrology than astrophysics.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Would’ve liked more, given how long it’s been since we had a lore Q&A, but there’s a couple of nice things in there. That was a surprisingly dense amount of new information on the tengu for such a short paragraph.
More interesting to me, though, is the phrasing of the Tequatl answer. There’s been plenty of theories bouncing around, but most of them shared the common thread of Tequatl in particularly growing to fill Zhaitan’s role- succeeding to the throne, if you will. The wording here, though, sounds more like that throne is breaking up into a lot of individual pieces, with each of Zhaitan’s ‘creations’ having the possibility of developing individually going forward. It makes me wonder, assuming that Tequatl was on track to becoming an ED, if other of Zhaitan’s champions could do so at the same time. If each dragon has two spheres, could they be replaced by seperate entities for each? Does there necessarily need to be only one dragon per given sphere, or could we conceivably have multiple, simultaneous Elder Undead Dragons in the future?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I’ll point out that the asura are already doing genetics too- there’s an exchange that’s stuck with me about bacon-scented flowers.
But I digress. To build off what Konig said, it’s not just that they’re more inclined towards ‘plant magic’, but that those capabilities fill the same basic niches that technology does. Housing, furniture, clothing, armor, weapons, containers, jewelry, art, even carts; they can, and do, grow it all, and by all indications can do so much quicker, with much less required in the way of materials, than the equivalent methods of other races. They don’t have much impetus to develop a scientific tradition when they aren’t faced with any problem they can’t surmount without it.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Just a personal hunch, but I don’t think the Mantle made the soul batteries themselves. We see a boat full of them, like a shipment, in Abaddon’s Mouth in GW1, and while we never learned whether they were arriving or departing, I suspect that the mursaat made them. The modern White Mantle, who seem to be operating without the mursaat present (there’s a mention in Spirit Vale that He, commonly assumed to be Lazarus, hasn’t arrived yet), might not be able to imprison entire souls. If bloodstone is just a medium through which souls can be channeled but not contained, those shards might be charged by the sacrifices before jettisoning the spirit out to linger in the woods.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Only thing that occurs to me is that they’re attached to the hips of the Whispers medium armor, with what look like knives tucked into them.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
They mentioned the reasoning behind the name in one of the TowerTalk interviews- it’s been a while, but the way I remember it, they struggled to find one that’d apply equally well across all five races and settled on thief. They made a point of adding that the practitioners don’t all call themselves that, but the profession as a whole ended up getting named by its detractors.
EDIT: Found it. Link here, but this is the relevant part.
Jeff Grubb: When we originally created the thief profession, we had a big debate in-house about what the best name for it was. Because thief carries a lot of negative baggage, and yes there are the thieves who are going to be the bandits and who are going to be the brigands, but there are also the thieves who are going to be the agents (Ree: Robin Hood!), the spies, the Robin Hoods, basically, you know, the heroic type characters. So the thief has now turned more or less into, you know, a profession, there are good warriors, there are bad warriors, there are good thieves, there are bad thieves.
al’Ellisande: So you think it’s normal to come up as a character and say, well, you know, I’m a thief.
Ree Soesbee: Depends on what race. (Jeff:And depends on the situation.) An asura might be proud to be a thief. ‘I take things from you. You can’t stop me.’ (Jeff: We prefer ‘acquisition agent’, thank you. We’ve got a department over on the other side of HR.) By the same token, a charr would be proud to say he’s a spy. I mean, that was one of those- and the argument we had was very much each race would kind of have their own name for it, and the only name that we really thought was applicable across the board was thief, and, sure, that kind of means the class was named by people not of the class, like, a charr will say ’I’m a spy’ and the Blood Legion charr will go ‘Pff. You’re a thief!‘, and so that’s sort of what stuck.
Jeff: And from a profession standpoint, from a gamplay standpoint, we want a unified name across the board. So, basically, you will have a thief trainer, who would basically, you know, downplay the negative nature of that.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
So abandoning those who should be her allies to potential death is not an oddity?
Given she knows how good her allies are, and that the mordrem’s ultimate goal is the egg, taking out the valuable and vulnerable artifact that cannot fight back instead of assisting the rough and tough Elder Dragon slayer and his/her friends is, indeed, not an oddity.
I’d like to add to that that the player character- in the scene with the Faolaintooth, which you mentioned above- later does the exact same thing Caithe did. As the happened, the fearsome foe that time gave chase instead of sticking with the distraction, but nonetheless we’re just as guilty for leaving our allies in the lurch with scarcely any hesitation.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
If we had more villains that were burning all things with fire coming out of their fingertips, I’m sure elementalists would be harder to trust.
The charr are arguably even an example of this- none of the allied legions have generic NPCs using elemental magic, but there are plenty of Ash Legion that are necromancers.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Gotcha, although that wall doesn’t protect Krytans any more than Ascalonians- from my understanding, it only shields Mantle remnants, and perhaps Lazzy.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Can’t think of any wall associated with the White Mantle, but I’m going to chime in against the pro-human idea. Between the sacrifices of the Chosen, the civil war to hold onto power, and the fact we never heard about them putting any focus into the non-human raiders in the countryside, I’d be willing to wager that they killed a fair bit more humans than charr, or anything else. Add in that their puppetmasters aren’t human, and it’d be easier to characterize the cult as anti-human. The only ones they showed much regard for were their own or potential converts.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It’d also play into the narrative their (possibly unknowing) allies in the Ministry have been pushing- the monarchy was too weak to claim back the heart of Kryta, letting themselves be shown up by the mongrel pirates of all things, but now that the Mantle are back, the blessings of the Unseen Ones will change things…
That said, I think they’ve missed their window for that attack. Now that Lion’s Arch has been rebuilt with defense in mind, and the indication that they only have a single mursaat left to bring to bear, I don’t think they and their followers would be able to take the city. If they made that ploy, I’d expect they’d be more likely to bring some sort of bloodstone-fueled magic to level the place.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I’m not sure they’d do that storyline since it was already done in GW1. The War in Kryta was a civil war, we fought to overthrow the White Mantle and place Salma on the throne. It would feel kind of ridiculously if we got the same storyline reversed. Which isn’t to say it couldn’t happen.
But would the citizens of Kryta know this history? I am no lore buff but is there any indication that Krytans know about the White Mantle and Mursaat and this war?
It seems spotty, but, yes, it is semi-common knowledge. Apparently more a bogeyman story to keep children in check than a part of history taught in schools, but it’s at least widely known that “White Mantle=very, very bad”.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Big reply. Gonna break this up piece by piece.
So if it showed Jennah before she was Queen, is it supposed to have changed as soon as she became Queen?
That seems to me to be the idea. Really weird concept for a magic item, but there you have it.
Did it become blank? Did it show her unborn child? Did it show her first cousin?
Us not knowing that is the whole point, but I think we can make some assumptions. Unless the Priory keepers have seriously never opened it, which I find as hard to believe as you, it’s at least not blank, or they would’ve mentioned it. I don’t believe Jennah’s pregnant, so that would rule that out- since Tyria seems to operate on splitting possible futures, being able to tell before conception should be impossible. I hope we can rule out first cousin, too- in the human personal story, it’s established that as far as common knowledge goes, there is no one else in the royal line, so unless Jennah’s father had a secret sibling, or a public sibling who had a secret child, that’d rule that out.
The heir doesn’t matter as long as the Queen is around to rule. Unless they kill her or disgrace her, it doesn’t matter if Caudecus himself is the heir – she’s the queen.
That’s the point- the locket’s only important if Jennah exits the picture, so treating it as a Chekov’s Gun only works in the context of a threat to her. It’s what theoretically would happen after she’s gone that make the locket interesting.
If the locket is in any way important to royal succession why would the Priory have it instead of the Shining Blade?
This is the juicy bit- and the short answer is, I think you’re right, with a couple major buts:
-First, I don’t think the locket would be important to the line of succession. We admittedly don’t have a huge body of information to work with, but what we have seen is Adelbern getting the crown over Barradin with a minimum of fuss, and more importantly, all four of King Baede’s children being treated as valid possibilities to succeed, with the one deemed least likely getting it. By all accounts, the only thing that matters is that the monarch is descended from Doric- within that range, the free choice of the monarch being succeeded, and apparently even the will of the citizens of the kingdom, count for more than primogeniture. If that’s what the locket shows, that’d mean it’d be largely irrelevant. If, on the other hand, it does express, say, which child is the king’s favorite, it’s redundant- the king would very likely have already made that known. The only situation in which the locket could be useful in the succession is when there are no known heirs to choose from, or maybe when they are all distant relatives and the monarch left behind no clear preference. In other words, the locket’s only important now because of very specific circumstances that may have only come up sporadically in Kryta’s past.
-Second, I think the locket wouldn’t matter too much to the Shining Blade. They’ve been the constant bodyguards of the royal family since Salma, and their calling is to protect ‘the Salmaic dynasty’. That means that if the ‘secret heir’ is descended from Salma, they’re practically guaranteed to already know about them, and their only interest in the locket would be in keeping the heir secret. If the heir isn’t, but is some descendant of Doric (e.g. Wade Samuelsson), they simply don’t care. They’d be hellbent on keeping Jennah alive long enough to continue the line instead. Since the locket is in Priory hands, and it’s hard to see how the Shining Blade would benefit from keeping a secret heir anyway, that’s the answer I’m leaning towards.
Unless Kryta has some of the worst record keeping in Tyria or the royal family is decimated in some way so that only obscure distant relatives survive wouldn’t most people interested enough know who the next heir is without needing a locket? Family trees aren’t that complicated.
In this case, I think they are. First off, any records on royal lineage would’ve most likely been kept in Lion’s Arch, the only real city Kryta seems to have had at the time of the tsunami, at which point they’d have either been destroyed or moved to the Durmand Priory, which has already shown it treats this whole heir business as secretive (more on that in a minute). Secondly, if the real issue is that we’re looking at someone descended from Doric but not Salma, we’re talking about a family tree that goes back a minimum of 1,329 years, to a time when human civilization on the continent is said to have just progressed beyond tribes. It’s likely that any of the older branches of that family wouldn’t have been well documented, and that the records that did exist would’ve been in either Ascalon or Orr, where they’d likely be just as destroyed as anything in Lion’s Arch.
As far as decimating the royal line goes, it’s possible they did it to themselves. It’s not something Tyria’s touched on yet, but in our own history, having too many descendants in the royal family hasn’t always been a good thing- disagreements are a bit too quick to lead to war at that level. It’s possible the royal line of Kryta tried not to have many children, or that extra children were encouraged not to marry, or that children of extra children ended up outside the succession and eventually forgotten. There’s a possible precedent for that last one in Ascalon, since Adelbern was at once a descendant of Doric and born a commoner, and like Jennah, his line of succession seemed suspiciously scarce.
The more I think about it, the more I think the locket was just a red herring for the “world leader” who would die plot.
Possible.
Another alternative is if the Shining Blade decides the White Mantle corruption in the Ministry and Divinity’s Reach is so deep (could it be related to the man Marjory chases in her short story?), the only way to cleanse it is to fake Jennah’s death, let the White Mantle execute their plan and take the throne, once the Mantle and their supporters move out of the shadows the Shining Blade and Jennah finally know who they are dealing with.
I actually wouldn’t mind seeing that, and S1’s abrupt distrust between Anise and Logan would tie nicely into it as well.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It’s been a while- but didn’t the devs say that the raid stories weren’t going to be part of the Living World, or at least not necessary for understanding what’s going on?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I see people excited about the story but so far we have confirmation of what we speculated about in Brisban, honed in on in Dry Top and soft confirmed in Silverwastes. Here’s hoping the bread crumb story in wing three brings in the Shining Blade and the epic return of Livia. Bonus points if it leaves the Maguuma entirely and hooks back into the Krytan locket plot (although it would be super lame if they redid what they did with Scarlet and Jennah survives another assassination).
Why do people assume that the locket doesn’t have Jennah’s picture in it?
It’s supposed to show the heir- that is, not the current reigning monarch but the next in their line of succession. The importance has nothing to do with Jennah’s legitimacy, but that if something were to happen to her, given that there’s apparently no public knowledge of any other descendants of Doric, the locket would be a primary deciding factor in determining who got the throne.
Assuming that Caudecus wasn’t in a position to seize it for himself at that point.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Keep in mind that the elder races lacked two things the modern races have in abundance:
2) Technology. The only technological race of the elder races were the dwarves, and their technology goes as far as blackpowder and trebuchets in GW1.
You forgot about the Jotan. Even if its not double confirmed the Jotan have stories of their civilization and had technologies such as telescopes, which in my opinion is much more advanced than trebuchets.
Also much less useful for, y’know, just about anything to do with surviving an endless horde of monsters. Konig was speaking in context of the things they had to handle the Elder Dragons, and so far as we know the jotun didn’t bring anything to the table in that regard except enchanted swords, magic, and some loose understanding that the EDs had a bigger role at play in the cosmos.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
We actually did get an answer to that one… sort of. For fellas who can’t be bothered to click on links, there were exactly no details, but Leah Hoyer did come in to say that they want to “be sure to emphasize key beats and wrap up threads moving forward, rather than create loose ends.”
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Nitpicking, but I do want to point out that the Ascalon and Nolani Academies weren’t the same thing.
Anyway, I don’t think there’s any explicit statement, but I get the sense they’re leftovers from the building of the Black Citadel.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It looks to me like it’s the second, longer video, but I don’t have time to be sure.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
“…Cobiah could see it more clearly- and it was not entirely as he remembered. The monster was as dead as the ships of Orr, its black flesh rotted and fouled by disease. Barnacles clung to the creatures fins…” Sea of Sorrows, page 425. It goes on like that for a bit.
And looking back, Konig, the damage wasn’t all that bad. One cannonball hit it in the cheek, but the way it’s described later on as a “long, pale scar”, it sounds like even that was just a graze.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
It wasn’t visibly undead in the first encounter- and since it was in the second, just thirty-seven years later, I think that rules out the possibility that it’d been a risen for thousands of years.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
@Thermaltron Mordremoth didn’t plant the Pale Tree. She was pulled out of a cave of seeds guarded by plant monsters, and then planted, by a human. And if Mordremoth had intended them to be falsely pleasant sleeper agents, as you suggest, that leaves a question of why the only tree to acheive contact with the races that stood as a threat got planted by accident.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
While scaling in game is always a fickle and inconstant beast, for the depth to make up the difference we’d essentially be talking about the breadth of an entire zone, straight down. Extrapolating off of Ghosts of Ascalon, that might put it on the scale of dozens of miles. Not technically impossible, I suppose, but…
The distance from corruption is an interesting angle, though. I won’t derail the thread further, but I think those sorts of more nuanced possibilities will hold more water in the future- if this is ever touched upon again at all.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
As shown in the story instance Buried Insight, Mordremoth’s mental influence is distance based – this is no longer suspected like Diovid said but pretty much confirmed; Mordremoth’s voice is silent to Canach and the Mordrem Guard who wandered there passes back and forth between his old self and his new self to the point of voice wavering (it’s very hard to tell this from just reading the dialogue – the voice acting is critical here).
I’m completely with you on the rest, but I’m thinking that what happened there wasn’t anything so simple as ‘distance’. If you consider that spot near Rata Novus to be roughly the extent of Mordremoth’s reach, that’d leave the northern half of Auric Basin, both guild halls, and the entirety of Verdant Brink beyond it, which clearly isn’t the case.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Or Logan didn’t know what he was talking about. Even at their closest, Rytlock was still standoffish about his past- there’s no reason to believe that he didn’t stonewall Logan like he has every other character.
Or, alternatively, a mythical human sword belonging to a great Ascalonian hero in the hands of one of Ascalon’s greatest foes could well be said to be “looted from Ascalon” wherever Rytlock may have picked it up- it’d just take meaning Ascalon the nation, not Ascalon the location. Doubling up on that, the words were said in a moment of emotional heat, intended as a barb to draw blood- not exactly circumstances under which people are known to speak with great precision.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Playing Guild Wars 1 would be your best bet- they were still a thriving, vital culture back in that game, and you might pick things up wondering around their areas or hanging out with Ogden. Here are the best wiki pages from that game, although as is always the case with cultural questions you won’t get nearly as much from the wiki as you would from the game.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Better if it had been the Foefire. As far as we know, the only way the Searing, or any other large rock falling from the sky, has sent people to the Mists is by smashing them to a pulp. Great way to get in, really, but getting out isn’t as fun when you don’t have a body anymore.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Disclaimer here: different roleplayers have very different ideas about how closely they need to cleave to lore. I fall on the stringent end, and that’s the perspective everything below is written from, but this guy sounds like he plays pretty loose. By all means take our suggestions to them, but the important thing is whether you enjoy playing with the character. I wouldn’t let impossible backstories get in the way of that.
That said, it takes a bit more than a boulder to get into the Mists, with your body intact anyway. He’d have to put more effort into the backstory for me to swallow it- with the new precedent of Rytlock and Sohothin opening a portal, I could possibly buy that this elite guard was close enough to Adelbern that some kind of similar fluctuation nabbed him. It’s still a long shot, though, and I’d personally want a very good reason why this guardian had to be from the past. Rule of cool doesn’t cut it for bending lore.
As for living out the 200 years? That’s solidly beyond my belief. As far as we can tell, bodily processes don’t cease; you still move, and breathe, and talk, and fight, and die in the Mists, so you should still age. However, the Mists, and specifically the Rift, is supposed to touch on all times, so perhaps he only lived out a few years or so then found himself spat out in the future.
Oh, and one other thing- guardians weren’t around at the fall of Ascalon. Hell, they were still pretty rare more than a century later. If he wants his character to be a guardian it’d have to be a skillset he picked up from someone modern.
So, is the concept possible? For a super-special, one-in-a-billion case, accepting the alterations laid out above, yes, technically. If you can’t tell yet, I still don’t like the time traveler idea, or in general having to bend the lore that far to make a character work, but the Mists is a vague enough place that it can be abused into making this work. And maybe your friend pulls it off well enough to forgive that. That’s going to be your call.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I think the fact that they do it is sufficient evidence that they need it- laying on your back, dead to the world, is hard to justify spending several hours a day on if you aren’t getting something out of it.
And as a note, it definitely doesn’t come down to ‘low photosynthesis environments’. While they are able to process sunlight to the extent that being out in the sun feels invigorating, the amount of energy they derive from it is at best a small supplement. The bulk of their activity is fueled by an essentially human-like digestive system. Even if they could run themselves on sunlight, it still wouldn’t remove the need for sleep- I can’t stay awake forever by eating a lot, after all.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It should be stressed that there’s a difference between ghosts and spirits that have gone to whichever afterlife. Since you specifically cited Crow and summoning, I get the sense that you’re dealing with the latter.
The thing about ghosts is that they’ve got some reason for hanging around, and for the ones that don’t seem altogether sane, that’s the thing that’s warped their psyche. Every example we’ve seen of spirits that moved on in GW1 or 2, barring those subjected to a very particular torment, have been essentially ordinary people minus bodies. No crazier, or less knowledgeable, or less helpful than they were in life. Maybe confused, or struggling to cope with their new situation, but you shouldn’t treat him as a fundamentally different person just because he happens to live in the Underworld now.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Word of Dev is that sylvari aren’t inherently any more flammable than a human- and when you think about it, it makes sense. Have you ever tried to start a fire with hale, green plant matter? It’s quite the vexing exercise.
Now, as to how humans are able to walk around with a burning chunk of white-hot rock pressed into their back- your guess is as good as mine. Charr are even worse. Their fur would be more flammable than any sylvari.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I remember somewhere that there are priory teams in the desert? I don’t know if that is true though.
Iowerth mentions that the ritual used to see Riannoc’s final moments during Secrets in the Earth were discovered in the Crystal Desert while tomb-raiding. Who’s tombs unknown – there were multiple groups in the desert (Ascalonian, Seekers, Forgotten, Margonites, Primeval Kings’ era Elonians, and Turai’s era Elonians) – and it is unknown when it happened as well (could have been before Kralkatorrik/Zhaitan rose/threatened the region).
Which makes one wonder why the ‘memory seeds’ were 1) needed in S2, 2) not brought up with Riannoc’s death.
There’s also Stinn, who’s at least been to the desert at some point in his life- the phrasing is vague, but like with Iowerth, it sounds to me like it was a relatively recent trip. Granted, that doesn’t mean the ‘dark events’ are recent- there’s no reason the Priory would have to go through the desert gate, and events in one part of the desert may be no threat to grave robbers in another.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.