R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
And if Jennah ever did go cray cray, it would probably be the blade that went to find a replacement heir. Supposedly there’s a hint that there’s another heir. One would hope anyways. Jennah’s getting to her late thirties and has no known heir…
We don’t know how old Jennah is and I’m not inclined to think that she’s in her late thirties. Remember that she took the throne at an early (if unspecified) age due to the death of her father. Konig or Drax could confirm or deny this but I seem to recall that a big part of the problem she’s had with the ministry is because they increased their power and influence during the early years of her reign, as she (again, as I recall) wasn’t quite old enough to rule on her own. But I could be wrong.
You’re right. And we’re told it was a headache for her to wrestle control back from Caudecus later.
That said, there was a line in the Grove at launch (1325) that said that that Jennah was ‘almost thirty.’ That puts her in her early-to-mid thirties now.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It’s pushed the karka and the krait straight into us. I wouldn’t call that safe. Add in the way Elder Dragons like to move large distances without warning, or paying much attention to what’s in their way, and I’d say Selbbub is still a threat. Just not an immediate one.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I agree that splitting the story is unworkable, but I don’t think that’s what anyone is actually advocating. The common complaint seems to be that the story shouldn’t have been written to require taking the Oath, regardless of race.
We already knew the Eye was following aspects, and that Balthazar had an aspect. Livia knew that just having all the aspects in one room would’ve been enough to resurrect Lazarus, no laying them out on pedestals required, and that we were deadset on following the Eye. There was nothing stopping her from saying ‘yeah, go ahead and hang on to that for now if you don’t trust me.’ She would’ve still gotten her way, and we would have been able to skip the entire instance.
Personally, I did find the Headquarters and all the books inside interesting, but it didn’t feel like the instance fit the story, and the Oath was an ordeal. Even the NPCs didn’t seem like they were taking it seriously, with the melodramatic voice acting. Things would’ve flowed smoother without it.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
There is a book, in the Shining Blade headquarters, with a list of members who died breaking the Oath.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It does come up- touched on in the main story, and given more attention in one of the Current Events.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
He did have an aspect- the book we find laying there. Konig had a chat with one of the devs, and they said that Balthazar left it there to ensure the actual Lazarus was never resurrected. I believe it was also stated during the story that he was recovering artifacts that the gods had left behind (and given how barren the vaults were, I suspect that he took more than just his own).
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Are you sure it wasn’t this one?
Citizen: The belladonna plant, on the other hand, wishes us nothing but ill.
Citizen (2): It’s jealousy. She’s beautiful and deadly to her enemies, but not as much as we are.
Citizen: Sometimes beautiful and deadly have their uses.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Ulgoth summoned a couple pretty large elementals, but Baelfire went well past that point. Godhood aside, being able to manifest a massive elemental form that tosses out meteors and fireballs like candy is something we’ve not seen any other elementalist even get close to.
Still, you make a good point about resources, but I don’t think that’s something we can correct for. Would we think of Scarlet as at all impressive if she hadn’t been able to pull materials out of pure plot? Would Xera have made our lists without the bloodstones, or Livia without the Scepter? And are we sure that Jennah or Isgarren or Taimi don’t have unfair resources of their own?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Rytlock was ordered by Smodur to end the ghosts however, when he returned from the mists he didn’t immediately report what he found in the mist, instead he went on the dragon hunt with the commander. Even though Smodur agreed to help that doesn’t mean every Charr was ordered to fight the dragon, Rytlock’s was in the mist and his order to end the ghost remains unchanged. This is why he wasn’t just called by the citadel he was forcefully taken back to the citadel and stripped of his rank, because he stepped out of his current mission when he was chasing the dragon with the commander and as a result he failed to report in time.
From what we’re told, it has less to do with what Rytlock was doing and more with how long he took doing it. HoT canonically took place in early 1328. Rytlock was arrested in 1329, after utterly disregarding two or three messages from the Black Citadel. He’s not in trouble for going after Mordremoth; he’s being court-martialed for remaining AWOL for about a year afterwards. Essentially, desertion.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Quite possibly, but the thread’s title stipulates we stick to NPCs.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
While Anise mentions not acting against Kryta, the oath itself seems to be limited to not telling specific secrets… If my understanding is correct, than that means the only real effect on the PC is that they can’t tell the specific secret they swore the oath in order to be told.
I’m not so sure. The rationale behind the oath, or so we’re told, is to make sure nothing like the Henge of Denravi could ever happen again. Developing magic that narrow doesn’t meet that aim- essentially, the Blade would have to go through and exhaustively designate every single little thing that might have catastrophic implications for their order as taboo- and given that Livia was freely able to show an uninitiated individual their secret headquarters, that clearly isn’t the case. It would seem much more reliable to have a magic that responds to intent, something that wouldn’t be entirely outside the known purview of mesmer capabilities.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
But here we are in what appears to be a religious hub, probably visited constantly up until the cataclysm,
I’m not so sure about that. Unlike the rest of Orr, which was heavily urban, I don’t think I saw any residential structures on this map, and it’d stand to reason that the gods, and later kings, would tightly restrict who had access to the reliquaries. It’s possible that the statues weren’t any harm because no one would be allowed to come close enough to see them.
EDIT: Went back to look around, and there is a town on the beach, but that seems to be it. I’d forgotten about the little Abaddon statues, however, and one’s pretty close by.
It’s possible that the inhabitants were among the privileged few allowed to know about Abaddon. We knew there were such people, even in Nightfall- most of what we were told about him and the Margonites in-game came from the priesthood of Lyssa in Vabbi.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Canach’s conversation was along the lines of what Anise might be hiding under an illusion. It might be an age thing, like he guessed, but it also might be some nasty scarring, or blonde hair, or a humiliating tattoo from when she got drunk on the town as a teenager. I always thought that people were reading more into that exchange than it supported.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
IIRC, the notes about Livia’s death and age were from White Mantle spies initially.
I… definitely missed that, if it was there. The book was a history of the Masters Exemplar of the Shining Blade. I’m not sure the White Mantle were even mentioned.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
This isn’t actually new at all. In War in Kryta, we could obtain a weapon called Bartholos’ Shining Blade which used the Gothic Sword model.
The Exemplar’s Edge – aka Tier 1 Precursor for The Shining Blade – has an appearance very similar to said Gothic Sword model, and Bartholos’ Shining Blade (slightly different texture but same shape for hilt and blade).
I felt this was a nice call back to GW1 here.
Ah, I missed that. Teach me to pay more attention to loot, I guess.
I only ever saw one continuity error and that was Queen Salma being mentioned at Divinity’s Reach’s opening. Though there do seem to be a handful of date errors around Bartholos’ retirement (literally typing 8 instead of 7 for the decades digit), which is more of a typo than continuity error.
I caught three- the Salma one, the Bartholos one (once might be a typo, but twice is more likely a mistake), and working back from the date and age of her alleged death puts Livia at 14 years old in EotN, and 8 during the Prophecies epilogue when a Shining Blade member considered her a candidate to take over for Evennia (and commented that she’s “easier to look at.”)
And while it isn’t a continuity error per se, the personal copy of the speech on Anise’s desk, the one announcing the formal trade agreement with Lion’s Arch, had part of Livia’s speech after the Foefire tossed on at the end.
I don’t know if this is brought up in-game but I was talking with Linsey Murdock about it.
Regarding the room’s pedestals, she replied that there “wasn’t really a lore reason for it” so I guess that’s chalked up to “it looks cool”.
But regarding the aspect: Balthazar took it to Abaddon’s Reliquary for the specific purpose of locking it away. He figured that the last place anyone would look for it is in the locked vault of a dead god. Basically, he didn’t want Lazarus returning and thought that place was safe enough – and honestly, if it weren’t for the Eye of Janthir, it would have been.
That is good to know, but it’s frustrating that it’s something you had to follow up with a dev separately.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I used to believe that Livia was the strongest necromancer.. but I thought her kind of underwhelming.. she hardly even appears to be a necromancer at all.. more like a warrior/mesmer………..
She doesn’t actually hit anything with that sword. It looked like she was using it as a scepter; in any event, though, all of her attacks had the necro special effects.
Still, I cast my vote for Joko. We kill Khilbron, without much difficulty, and it’s never been clear how much of his army was his own doing, and how much was the Scepter.
For mesmer I would say Jennah, or possibly Kitah.
Elementalist probably goes to Gaheron. No other has gotten close enough to seriously consider claims of godhood.
Engineer, grudgingly, goes to Scarlet. It’d be hard to beat a polymath who’s mastered the techniques of a half-dozen advanced races and has access to a seemingly unlimited resource base.
Ranger… either Zojun or the druids. Problem is, we never see rangers doing anything terribly impressive.
If we include assassin under thief, then either Vizu or Shiro (depending on how much of Shiro’s power you want to attribute to his assassin training, and how much goes to his Enjoy status and the undefined dark powers he researched). If not… it’d have to be Caithe. We don’t have many powerful thief NPCs in game.
Guardian- Logan.
Warrior runs into the ranger issue, but my vote would go to Turai Ossa.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
How many people actually got Crystal Desert from the teaser at the end? I certainly didn’t and I’ve seen the expansion spoilers.
I got “crystalline dragon, barren wasteland, and pyramid,” with the only pyramid(ish) structures we saw in GW1 being in the Tarnished Coast or Desolation. It was enough for me to consider it a logical leap.
And I agree with you 100% on the Caithe and Livia things. Actually, to echo your thought that the story flows better without irrelevant NPCs, I think we had too much of Livia. A lot of the communicator conversations felt like comic relief just to fill a silence, and while I did chuckle once or twice, they were pretty conspicuously out of place.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
On the whole, I wasn’t terribly impressed by this one (although I haven’t done much in the open world yet). It gets kudos for tying off loose ends, but the implementation of those story elements is some of the worst this season.
- Really unimpressed with the portrayal of Balthazar’s worshipers in the first instance. Last patch left me feeling like Balthazar’s role could very well be nuanced and interesting, but the crass flanderization at play here drained a lot of my confidence; doubly so, as it seemed to serve no greater purpose than to rub our faces in the fact that Balthazar’s a villain now. ’Let’s fight on the cobblestones, they hurt more’? Chicken noises from a priest? He’s the god of war, not anarchy and masochism.
- I enjoyed the White Mantle hideout, for what it’s worth, but it felt like building the world around gameplay and not the other way around (more on that later). Tacking it on to Brisban Wildlands felt more like a design equivalent of a shrug, and the entire thing was much larger than its story role called for. Good fights, though, and well designed achievements.
- The Shining Blade HQ… I’m glad we’ve confirmed that the place exists, but everything about it- entering through a sepulchre, the out-of-place house in the sewers, the trials- gave a heavy “super-secret-clubhouse” feeling. By the end I was half tempted to look for a ‘No Girls Allowed’ sign. (This also had the most technical problems for me- the lighting effects on my settings made it very hard to see the house, which combined poorly with the abundance of interactable objects that weren’t labeled, and the meander around movement script the Exemplars were following ended with all five piled on the exact same spot, which made it difficult to access the dialogue. And is it just me, or did the trial section feel like a slapped together montage of moments you were originally supposed to play through? Not that I minded, but it added to the feeling that this instance could’ve used another polish pass.)
- And then there’s the Shining Blade itself. Season 3 has had a trend of magical artifacts popping up everywhere without warning. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not to my tastes, and it’s not something the franchise has done in the past. I found it a bit jarring that there was suddenly a literal blade, and the idea of Seers and mursaat killing each other with swords doesn’t sit quite right either. Minor nitpick; I only bring it up to note that there’s been a trend.
- And then the books. I’m always a fan of these reading collections, but this time the abundance of continuity errors, the repeats of previous text, and the general difficulty I had accessing them brought me down drastically.
- On to the new map. Same cookie-cutter front-and-back loaded story with a guided tour in the middle that makes the new map feel poorly integrated with the reason we’re actually there. (More on that in a minute too.) For all that, I do like what I’ve seen of the new map quite a bit, and I look forward to spending more time in it. I noticed that we’re being forced to complete the hearts again, but they felt quicker to get through than some previous maps. I’d say they’ve struck a good balance. Also, we finally find out what happened to Dagonet!
- The final instance was… odd. This one felt the gameyist of the bunch. The god of fire hindered our progress with predictable, perfectly square patches of flame that toggle in a pattern that gives us safe passage? (Side note: if I hear ‘god magic’ again, I might just gag.) Not that the story side fit together either. We were in the sealed reliquary of the god of secrets, but aside from the decor nothing would’ve changed if they’d set it back in Draconis Mons. Why was the innermost chamber set up perfectly for bringing Lazarus back? Why did Balthazar carry an aspect of Lazarus all that way, just to leave it conveniently behind? Maybe the Eye catching up to him had something to do with it, but if so, it wasn’t communicated to us at all.
- The Livia reveal was… anticlimactic. They milked it for too long, laid down the hints too heavily. Anyone who knew who Livia was already had ample time to figure it out, only for the sham to keep dragging out to the point I was relieved to have it over. Anyone who didn’t recognize her has one more complaint to add to the cries that things are becoming needlessly convoluted. And I did not get the chance to ask her nearly enough there at the end. It was nice to see her again, but they fumbled hard on the delivery.
- Killing Lazarus off felt like a good, satisfying conclusion to this season’s B-plot. It did not feel like finale fair. With the weirdness around Livia factored in, I wonder if they hadn’t originally planned for all of this to be more important. It seems to me like the Balthazar plot took over before they were ready, and they were left with the choice between leaving the existing threads hanging or hastily chopping them off to get them out of the way. If that was the case, I do appreciate that they chose to offer us closure this time. It wasn’t what they’d built it up to be, but leaving everything in narrative limbo is no more appealing.
- We’re heading into the next expansion with exactly none of our guild issues resolved. For as big a deal as Dragon’s Watch has been, that has me curious what they intend to do. Braham, Rytlock, and Rox, at the very least, aren’t in a place to be at our side, and Marjory and Kasmeer’s drama is still a powder keg awaiting a spark. I don’t mind them playing the long game on this, but it does leave an open question of what role they’ll play this time ’round.
In summary, I applaud the vision but bemoan the execution. This isn’t how I was hoping to leave off before the expansion, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed, but on the whole I did enjoy enough of it that I don’t begrudge the time spent.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
While I agree that alignments are hobbling, I’m not so sure I’d call GW2 an example of gray morality. Sure, every group has motivations, and that’s a step up from chaotic evil murder-and-pillage, but ANet’s still taken pains to give them very clear black hat characteristics, sometimes in direct opposition to their stated aims.
The Sons of Svanir are rabidly misogynistic, regardless of how strong a given female may be. The Flame Legion are zealots who burn sacrifices alive, and are even more monstrous to their females than the Sons. The bandits sell their own people into slavery, and Caudecus and his Mantle sold out everyone outside the city walls to be slaughter by centaurs. The Nightmare Court converts others to their philosophy of freedom by torture and brainwashing. The Inquest, at least, can’t be accused of moral hypocrisy when they don’t believe in morals, but they take secretive research practices and overbearing control to heights unimagined by mainstream asura. And the Elder Dragons are well on track to kill us all if left alone.
If they had wanted to take the gray route, ANet could have. Imagine, for example, a Nightmare Court that only recruited through public speeches and rational argument, and who directed their ire towards the Pale Tree and the mentors who were ‘enslaving’ their siblings from the time they awakened. They could still be hostile, still be able to attack us and our allies, but their position of freeing their race would have a lot more credence. Instead, we have the brainwashing, and I believe that was deliberate. ANet wanted antagonists with realistic motivations, but they still wrote them to be ‘bad guys’. They didn’t seem to want gray, and they didn’t make it.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The ‘generic krytan female voice’ is Anise. I’m betting that first line (I can’t tell if it’s Braham or the male norn PC) is directed towards her.
With the glimpse at the oakheart, and the ghostly voice talking about a flow of energy, my first guess was that it’s a druid. With as little as we have to go off of, though, it’s hard to say.
One other big bomb in here- the text at the start says “The human gods have left Tyria, but one stayed behind.” That implies that Balthazar never joined the Exodus, and if true, it completely upends all the theories we’ve had about what happened to him.
EDIT: Another thought, regarding the blue wraith, and the line about making “uncommon allies”- the Pact in Orr has had access to a site that can mentally free dragon minions for about five years now. Perhaps they’ve been making use of it?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Publicly? Probably. But if it’s personal RP, or with a small group who gets behind it, there’s no harm in embracing the game’s storyline.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Well, it’s simpler to think Ventari also had no idea the sylvari were coming. There’s no evidence for it- he left behind his teachings, yes, but this was a person who tried twice in his life to found settlements of humans and centaurs on earlier forms of those beliefs. Wanting that dream (heh) to live on after his death is reason enough to carve the tablet. And by the same token, you’d have to explain how he might know. Short of Glint levels of precognition, or the Pale Tree speaking to him (recall that she didn’t form the Avatar we speak to until well after the Secordborn came along, and that we don’t know if she knew she’d be a mother in when Ventari died in 1180) and the whole thing quickly becomes a convoluted mess.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
We do have this to go off of- specifically “If all ministers came from the upper class, we’d only be serving a fraction of our populace. Those elected are usually key figures in their communities, and that often has little to do with gold.” On the other hand, we know from first hand observation that most of the ministers we interact with are clearly rich and well-connected, to the point that this describes the Ministry Guard as “protectors of the nobility of Kryta, most of whom are heavily involved in the ministry.”
Reading between the lines a bit, I’d say it’s clear that many more nobles than commoners make it into the Ministry, although the commoners apparently still have a chance. That doesn’t automatically make the system unfair, however. The elections might be stacked, but it’s also possible that the local nobles do traditionally fulfill leadership roles in their communities, and that a sufficient number of them take it seriously that they’re the natural choice to represent their communities.
Regardless, I agree with Cyninja and drax. Kryta wasn’t set up to be a democracy, and no one in the Krytan government is trying to be a democracy; of course it doesn’t make a very good one. And while it’s often lost on people today, it’s entirely possible for an authoritarian government to be benevolent. The reason they fell out of favor is because of what happens when they aren’t benevolent, but that doesn’t mean every autocrat is automatically a marauding tyrant. There are still some questions marks surrounding the extent of Jennah’s mesmer abilities, sure, and I wouldn’t mind ANet clarifying those, but she hasn’t displayed any behavior that rubs me the wrong way.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
There’s a few different theories. The one that’s generally considered the most likely now is that the Pale Tree used the dead from Ronan’s village as a template for the sylvari, Blighting Tree style.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I don’t think it’s not that they don’t admire and respect him. There are sylvari who talk about him with some degree of reverence, and areas of the Grove named after him. But there are two reasons for treating Ventari differently.
The biggest trouble is that Ronan didn’t leave much behind to remember him by (aside from the Pale Tree.) No code on a tablet, no teachings to live by… depending on when he died and how quickly the Pale Tree matured, even she might not remember him. He’d be just a name to them.
And there might be a reason for that. Ronan brought the seed back to be a gift to his daughter, and planted it to be a memorial to his family. As far as we know, that’s all it ever was to him- a tribute to his dead. Even as early as Eye of the North, it’s Ventari that’s caring for the sapling, and who appreciates how remarkable it is. Add in how much longer Ventari lived than Ronan, and even if the Pale Tree was old enough to understand what was going on around her, it’s quite possible her planter didn’t leave much of an impression.
And for all that? The sylvari still claim that he “represents the goodness in all beings.” That’s pretty close to a patron saint for a race that doesn’t have patron saints.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
They really leave it up to player interpretation. There was no point where you formally leave- NPCs of your faction refer to you as a member of your order as late kitten (although Makkay seems to call you a Scholar- perhaps an off-screen demotion due to your inactivity?), and dialogue during the party after Zhaitan’s defeat displays that the heads of your order certainly still considered you a member… but on the other hand, you haven’t done any work for your order since Flame and Frost at the start of S1, and the next time you see Almorra in S3 it certainly doesn’t sound like you’re treating her as a superior.
(Regarding Kudu, that’s also unclear. I don’t think he was the leader, but given that that ‘branch facility’ was the Inquest’s largest known base by a vast margin, the possibility still exists.)
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Charr do change their last names when they change warbands. Rox is actually an example of this- her’s was originally Pickheart, but she switched to Whetstone while she was trying to join Rytlock’s warband.
It’s not (as far as I know) mandatory, but it can be a matter of life and death. It’s vitally important that a charr fits into their new warband, that they learn to trust their new comrades-in-arms and that the trust goes both ways, and that they all learn to fight as a unit. Clinging to the old warband’s name gets in the way of that. It could come across as not being ready to move on and give the new warband their best, or it could be seen as feeling like the new warband isn’t as good as the old one. Neither one endears you to a new family.
I’ve only got the one charr myself. Cinder is part of the Wood warband, so named because they started out as loggers, then shifted gears to smelting. Cinder disgraced the previous legionnaire sufficiently to have leadership unceremoniously plopped into her lap, and she’s since steered the warband towards her own strengths in diplomacy, but they’re still a relatively dysfunctional and quarrelsome bunch, and desertions a few years back have left them thin on the ground.
The other members of the warband are all background NPCs. Cinder doesn’t see a lot of playtime, between being my second-least-favorite profession and not fitting in with my current RP guild, so there’s been no need/opportunity to entangle her with other players’ characters.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Yes and no. Unless losing his godhood completely replaced his personality, the things he does and does not care about are at least possibly the same as when he was a god, and his current blatant disregard for human lives runs counter to the explanation we’ve been given in the past for the gods’ withdrawal (granted, there are sound theories that reconcile the contradiction, but this isn’t the thread for them).
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The second book I linked: “King Doric constructed Stormcaller on Horn Hill north of Rin, his capital city, in the year 0 AE.” But as you point out, that’s not the main point.
The definition of ‘establish’ is to found, institute, build, or bring into being on a firm or stable basis. I would find it very bizarre if “Kryta established as a colony of Elona” was meant to read as ‘Kryta was a pre-existing kingdom, but became a colony of Elona’. Wouldn’t some variation on ‘Kryta becomes a colony of Elona’ be what you’d expect to see?
Personally, my attempt to solve the discrepancy would be this: Doric’s palace existed on the site of Lion’s Arch before the city was built. It was only three hundred years later, when Orr was at war with the Elonan colony, that the city named Lion’s Arch was founded (lions being a creature native only, as far as we know, to Elona.) The prince of Orr, Mazdak, then goes on to conquer Kryta, before going rogue and breaking off to be his own kingdom.
This still runs into trouble with the claim that Mazdak named Kryta, but it at least concentrates the errors into a single quest that we already know had been less-than-extensively thought out, and it results in the fewest oddities across the board.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That’s still relying on two points- the description of Lion’s Arch in GW1, and Macha in Sea of Sorrows- plus Bloodline of Kryta if you’re feeling generous, against the timelines, the Orrian History Scrolls (Mazdak’s boast was also that he named Kryta, so there would be no need for ‘now known’ if Mazdak had done so while Doric was alive), and the sources that claim Doric’s capital was in Rin (most recently these books in the Durmand Priory, but also parts of GW1).
Now, I obviously can’t say which of us has the right side of this discrepancy, but there is a discrepancy. It’s not as cut-and-dry as you’re painting it.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The only instance I can find of Doric being described that way is Bloodline of Kryta, which clumsily compacts the entire royal lineage into three lines. The Orrian History Scrolls referenced above say “His kingdom encompassed the lands we now know as Orr, Ascalon and Kryta.” The Quiz Terminal explicitly says “King Doric’s kingdom encompassed land that would later become what nations?” The Prophecies Manuscripts call him “leader of the united human tribes.”
The argument that Mazdak was Doric’s son, as I recall, was pieced together based on that line about the age of the sylvari. If that’s been thrown out, there’s nothing preventing us from moving him to 358 A.E., the date that every timeline ANet’s ever published gives for Kryta becoming an independent nation.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Never said she did. She left during Nightfall, which was before she supplanted Abaddon. :P
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
She wasn’t a god at the time of the Exodus- but she did leave the world during Nightfall, and as far as we know she never came back. If anything, we’ve reason to believe she’s been less active than the other gods. Those five used to communicate with Tyria through avatars, but that all stopped around the time Kormir became a god.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The bloodstone is a little different, because of the timescale involved. There was one dev post a long time back that put a bit of a question mark on things, but most sources place the bloodstones becoming a problem and the gods doing something about it as about a year apart. Sure, from the human perspective, it might seem like Doric’s trek to Arah inspired action, but it could just as easily be that the gods needed a few months to draw their own conclusions. Fifteen hundred years, though, is a bit of a separate beast.
I’m not sure I’m convinced by the justice thing, either. On several occasions in the past you’ve argued that the sins of the past don’t justify atrocities in the present, and I tend to agree. What happened with the Foefire is pretty clearly the fault of Adelbern, the charr, the titans, and Abaddon, in about that order. Orr starts with Khilbron or the charr, depending on whether Khilbron knew what he was doing, and again winds up with Abaddon. To hold that against Balthazar would require a reasonable expectation that he could have foreseen the outcome, and I don’t think that’s a very just thing to expect.
If there does wind up being a story about Rytlock’s arrival prompting the gods to kick Balthazar out of the club, I imagine it’ll be rooted pretty firmly in the present. Something along the lines of Rytlock asking/demanding help, doing a good job of convincing the other five that it’s in everyone’s best interest, but Balthazar pitching a fit, either because of some pro-human bigotry or simply because his ego and Rytlock’s struck sparks. Making it some twist where Balthazar is held responsible for basically all of the conflict on Tyria between the humans’ arrival and the dragons waking up seems quite convoluted when a simpler explanation would do.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I’m more or less in the same boat as Temihal. I have deep suspicions that Rytlock got tangled up in this god plot, but for his arrival to prompt the other gods to turn against Balthazar would require him to tell them something they don’t already know. The idea that Balthazar kicked off the war against the charr, and that everything that came of it can be laid at his feet, was pieced together from human mythology. Either the gods would already know that, or they would know better. For Rytlock to provide anything new in that regard would take either an eerily accurate charr myth documenting an interaction with Balthazar that the other gods weren’t informed of and that we players have just happened to never here, or else Rytlock happening to stumble upon some of Balthazar’s dirty laundry while in the Mists, that he had, again, managed to hide from the other gods for fifteen hundred years or so.
Alternatively, it might have been that the gods already knew, and were just waiting for a charr to get over their antitheism and bring the problem to ‘trial’, but that paints the gods as petty and reactive, not taking action until prompted to by some puny mortal. I’m not keen on that idea.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
This character has the most to say about it. As she touches on, we also see the priesthood acting as scribes during judicial proceedings, and running the orphanage in Salma District.
Other than that? Nothing I can think of. The priesthoods of the Six are not something Guild Wars 2 tells us much about, even though they still play a large role in human society.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Many in the Tarnished Coast, anyway. There were only a handful in the charr lands.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
“Dump here,” actually.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Moonyeti and Amaimon are both correct- we currently believe that an Elder Dragon will wake up with or without a catalyst- but it is worth pointing out that at least three of the other dragons tried using a minion to jumpstart them into awakening. This is just speculation, but it’s possible that a risen servant left over from the last rising, if sufficiently powerful, served a similar role as the Great Destroyer, Drakkar, and Scarlet.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
A quick browse of the Vigil category on the wiki shows only one captain who’s not clearly linked to the Pact- and he’s still in the context of Vigil coordination with another order.
On Mayday, while it’s not made clear whether she’s Pact or non-Pact Vigil, the fact that about half the Draconis team (although, admittedly, not Mayday herself) use Pact weapons, and that they’re supporting and deferring to our former Pact commander, seems suggestive to me. Add in that she’s sporting a rank we’ve never seen Vigil troops use outside the Pact…
I’m not really sold on the typo argument. Six or seven isn’t a huge sample size, true, but certain patterns (they’re all used by members of one order who are coordinating with another, and they mostly occur outside of the Pact’s main theaters of operation) suggest that there’s some deliberate thought being put into them. My guess is that we’re seeing the result of the Pact needing one order clearly in charge of some operations. If you have a Warmaster and a Magister at an outpost meant for military operations, you’re going to want the Warmaster in charge. And if your outpost is far enough away that it’s not reasonable for that additional authority to derive from Trahearne or one of his commanders, or if there’s been conflict among the ranks that prevents a ‘first among equals’ relationship from working out, giving that Warmaster the rank of Captain might be the best way to solve the issue.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The Exalted also have the advantage of being able to go into hibernation until needed. They only had to face the hazards of the jungle until the city was built, whereas a human colony would need to weather everything Castigator listed for another century.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
As far as we know, the other orders don’t know Riel’s identity. She was introduced as Doern’s assistant, and they might know her as the Order’s top agent in Lion’s Arch.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Castigator got most of it right, but a couple of corrections:
Wynnet was ‘just’ a Magister, although that’s still the second or third highest rank in the Priory’s hierarchy.
And Riel, as Master of Whispers (not Preceptor), is very much the official head of the Order.
The Pact does have captains and lieutenants, but curiously, they seem to be largely assigned to the Pact’s secondary and tertiary objectives (Frostgorge, the Cruicible of Eternity, the Citadel of Flame), well away from the main campaign. My guess is that these ranks exist to create a clear authority in places where reporting back to Trinity or Resolve isn’t practical.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That’s because, for the most part, the Pact doesn’t have ranks. There’s the Marshall, commanders, captains, and lieutenants, but past that they use the ranking systems of the three orders that make up the bulk of their troops.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Dougal Keane, in Ghosts of Ascalon: “When they run into someone still alive, they see that person as charr, or at best an ally of the charr. It doesn’t matter who or what the person really is. It could be Queen Jennah herself, or a sylvari. To them, every person who invades their space is charr.”
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Expanding on what drax said, ‘power level’ just doesn’t seem to be what defines a god. It’s not that they’re impossible to beat, it’s that they have control/influence/what-have-you over aspects of existence. Grenth divvying up souls between the afterlives, Dwayna granting prayers for healing, Abaddon rupturing reality through knowledge of his existence, and Balthazar lending out fire puppies doesn’t aid any of them in a face-to-face fight, but they do set those gods apart from the likes of Menzies, the Elder Dragons, and plucky bands of adventurers intent on deicide.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
While I see where you’re coming from, I got the impression that the relics were scattered and hidden. That’d require either A.) Lazarus sealing away one aspect of himself at a time, or B.) having agents to do the hiding for him. In the first case, if he was able to confine the corruption to a single aspect, it’d have been much simpler- ditch the corruption first, and then carry on in a diminished but healthy state. In the second, it doesn’t really matter if the minions were Mantle or not. If he had long enough to find them, explain what was happening, and instruct them on what to do, it’d seem odd to believe that he didn’t have the time to also instruct them on how to bring him back.
Personally, I suspect one of two things happened. Either he did leave instructions for the White Mantle, but they weren’t able to figure out how to manage them at the time- maybe he overestimated their ability to harness or manipulate bloodstones, given that shards were a component in the resurrection ritual and the Mantle didn’t start extracting them until the last few years; or, I believe more likely, he instructed them not to bring him back until certain conditions were met. Maybe he was aware they were struggling with the bloodstones and needed to give them time to figure things out, maybe an extended period of dormancy would’ve ameliorated the corruption somehow, or maybe he wanted to wait out the titans/Shining Blade/Elder Dragons. Regardless, I imagine that the Mantle leadership scattered the pieces for safekeeping, then proved too tight-lipped about what they’d done, and the secret eventually died with the last of them.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.