R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Given that your argument on the main question was predicated on the idea that dragons can only corrupt certain things, I feel my response was relevant. We are agreed, though, that more data is needed to provide a definitive answer.
You did raise an interesting point I missed on my first read through, so another question to the list: can elder dragons feed on magic corrupted by other dragons?
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@mushroomz couple flaw with your analysis. First, we do very much have sylvari battling Mordrem right now, and mordrem attacked, potentially fatally, the Pale Tree. Second, we know, for instance, that Jormag can also corrupt corpses, and from an out-of-game source that Primordus can corrupt the living (it was presented in relation to what we see in the Volcanic Fractal). As for the CoE subjects, we know they were physically altered by the energies to become identical to dragon minions, and we know nothing of their mental state. (As I recall, we never actually saw them getting along with the Inquest as they were supposed to- and even if they did, we saw in Arah mursaat path that Inquest had figured out how to control Zhaitan-created risen, so it wouldn’t be telling if they did). If it looks like a dragon minion, and is omni-directionally hostile like a dragon minion, why would you think it isn’t a dragon minion?
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My point, though, is that even if it’s just a bunch of tents in harpy-infested wilderness, it might still be safer than a centaur-besieged town.
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@Danikat That would have interesting implications of its own- it would mean, for instance, that Primordus, after 207 years of refilling from his natural lowest, is not sufficiently more powerful than Mordremoth, who has had less than a year (although, arguably, he may have not hit his usual lowest due to Scarlet’s interference, although that also… bah. Getting sidetracked.) For two centuries to mean so proportionately little, each dragon must awake while still possessing massive reservoirs of unexuded magic, or else that the dragons consume magic at a very slow rate. It would also mean opportunism could tip the scales at this point- with Zhaitan’s death, whoever gets the bulk of his power (especially if the reservoir hypothesis is true) may well be able to outclass the others enough to dominate them, and that possibility would only grow the more dragons we slay. All, of course, contingent on it coming down to a brute comparison of power levels-perhaps the nature of dragon ‘spheres’ is such that no dragon can control more than one (or two, however you want to interpret the data)? Or perhaps draining such a quantity of magic would take a prolonged period of time, more than they’re likely to have? That could explain how Orr wasn’t tapped out, even after more than a century at the heart of Zhaitan’s territory…
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“New Ascalon” would not be any safer than where they live now, if anything it would be more of a risk.
That depends on whether the centaur war improves by the time this hypothetical land grant happens. If the choice is between unoccupied frontier riddled with monsters and monstrous races, or living under constant threat of siege by a hostile monstrous race and needing to rely on a resented force for protection, I think “New Ascalon” would be very attractive. The ancestor thing swings both ways- they only came to Kryta because they had to choose between leaving Ascalon and constant war, after all. If the situation is reversed, why wouldn’t they do as their ancestors did, and reclaim a measure of their ancestral land in the process?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Actually, we have seen plants corrupted by Zhaitan- all over Orr, and also in Sparkfly Fen.
Nitpicking aside, now, we have seen a creature corrupted by multiple dragons in artificial conditions- the end bosses of CoE, both story and explorable, are such. Whether it could happen in the wild, and what the state of mind of such a creature would be (i.e. which dragon it would serve)… those are much more interesting questions, which we have no answer to. An even more interesting related question (which may risk hijacking your thread; I profusely apologize if that occurs): knowing that corruption is no sure protection against other corruption, does that mean one Elder Dragon could corrupt another?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Jehovasson, I should think.
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I can’t claim my interpretation has any more of a basis than any other here, but… in the Prophecies manual (and maybe somewhere else, but that was the first I found double checking) they described Doric in 1-0 B.E. as “leader of the united human tribes”. Working on the basis of the fact that in the real world and Tyria neighboring tribes frequently war with each other, and that presumably we’d have heard of it if any leader united the humans before Doric, and on the basis of the Scripture of Dwayna… I think the most likely explanation is that the humans of the time probably were in conflict with each other, and that the scripture might be showing us the start of Doric’s efforts to unify them into the entity that would be known as Ascalon.
If the human kingdom came to exist solely at the behest of the leader of the gods to her servant, it would certainly explain why Doric’s bloodline is held in such high regard even fifteen centuries later- it would go one step further than believing the monarch was blessed by the gods (a tenuous proposition giving their current silence) to instead claim that the institution of monarchy, the very principle by which the Tyrian humans govern, was an act of a goddess through her servant.
Nothing keeps peace better than uniting against a common enemy.
But yet, wasn’t it when, and arguably because, the charr were faced with a common enemy that they fractured as a people, fell to fighting with one another, and lost Ascalon to the humans as a result?
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What about the orders? Which order do you guys think would best suit a detective-like system?
I’m guessing the Whispers would be the best undercover one, but what do you guys think?
Definitely Whispers. Digging up secrets and cultivating contacts, after all, seems to be the primary work of the organization. The average Vigil crusader doesn’t have the patience for that kind of work, and the average Priory scholar wouldn’t care about anything that you wouldn’t expect to see taught in a college class- unless the crime had profound repercussions throughout the nation or continent, it’d probably be considered too trite to be cared about.
That said, these are just stereotypes, and individuals would frequently deviate from the norms- our only NPC detective is with the Priory, after all.
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And even if they manage to reclaim Ascalon… For what? Having to fight Ascalon’s Ghosts, Flame Legion, Branded, Ogres, Renegades, and the local fauna additionnaly to Centaurs and bandits?
Actually I’m pretty sure the Renegades would be on their side if humans retook Ascalon, seeing as how they want to retake Ascalon for the humans. .
You’re thinking Separatists. Renegades are the charr wanting to wipe the humans from existence.
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Hm… oddly enough, the follower of Dwayna breaks the pattern a bit. Still has the blue flames, but with blue-tinted normal eyes, not solid white orbs.
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The Godlost are the blue kind- spectral flames, solid orbs of white, and all. Then again, I also suspect they’re just re-purposed Ascalonian peasant models.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
As to WHY Jormag doesn’t just corrupt all the Sons of Svanir at once, who knows? Maybe the Elder Dragon thinks it’s better to slowly corrupt the Norn via a “see? Corruption isn’t so bad. It’s your CHOICE to join Jormag and gain his power” approach. Or maybe Jormag enjoys the slow slide into evil by free-willed beings. It might even be a sign of “scruples” on the part of the Elder Dragon, a particular quirk in his choosiness about minions.
I’d guess it’s because the Sons have better luck recruiting from norn homesteads, and thus spreading corruption, than a faceless form of ice would.
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I’m pretty much with Zaxares. If memory serves, the ghosts at Demetra and the Eye and visually and mechanically identical to the Foefire spirits, just with a different name slapped on. Perhaps there was originally meant to be a distinction, but the choice to reuse assets in such a manner muddled the issue, and now years later the Living World teams have forgotten about it?
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Unless we’re summoning him from the Hall of Heroes, which will include a defend-the-necromancer/ritualist scenario has it has the past three times it was done.
But of course. How else will they work in the mandatory reminder of how to click on red before the boss fight?
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Not sure what you mean by she… the female sylvari clinging to Caithe is Wynne, from last patch. The male sylvari standing before Caithe a scene or two later is the same as the one next to Marjory in front of the wurm, so I’m going to say PC stand-in, which means we will indeed catch up next patch.
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Hm… I think in the bread case, a distinction would be drawn between justice and the law. Is it just, after all, to expect a child to starve to death? The distinction in that case (disclaimer:personal opinion) would be that a follower of Dwayna might wish for the merchant to forgive the theft as an act of charity, while a follower of Kormir would be more inclined to pay for the value of the bread herself.
@Zax I think laws would almost have to distinguish between race. After all, a human child is much more helpless than a charr cub, and very different things are expected from a norn child than asura progeny. Sylvari run such a wide gamut on matters of relative innocence and maturity, with nothing to tell them apart visually, that the sort of development related generalizations and milestones applied to other races cannot be meaningful. As to harshness versus leniency… well, we already know that non-humans don’t have the same legal rights in Kryta as Krytans (“outsiders are given a hearing before the local Seraph authority”), so instead of being something codified I expect it would come down to the individual judgement calls (and prejudices) of the particular Seraph.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
We don’t have any actual measure on comparative strengths between races. The norn-versus-warband thing you cite is more accurately a question of combat capability, of which strength is only a part.
Norn and kodan are pretty much of a height- my norn is as close to the middle of the height slider as possible, and is eye level with kodan, so I’d put them at nine feet, maybe nine-and-a-half given they have a bit of a hump. Jotun are roughly half again as tall as a norn, so that’d put them at thirteen to fourteen feet, probably give or take a couple. Giants I’ve previously eyeballed to be around 18-21 feet, but given the limitations of the in-game camera I don’t have much faith in that figure. Lupi I’m not even going to try to guess, beyond that it’s taller than a giant. As for lieutenants and such, a member of the community constructed this excellent comparison from data pulled from the game’s files (far right was a version of Zhaitan that was later scrapped). If you can find the original thread, or if someone else can point you to it, I believe he posted the dimensions of the models as well.
Smallest, I think, would be the skritt. Dwarves are a good contender for having non-proportional strength, since they are no longer limited by organic muscle.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Ah, the good old days, where almost every non-human group’s lore was just a handful of red names!
Rose colored glasses aside, there certainly is a place for less serious questions like this one- and that place is now here, like it or not, since they shut the race sub-forums down.
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…Fair enough. For the sake of argument, though, I’d like to refine my question specifically to a human child, from a human perspective, unless that wasn’t at all what saventis meant. Most kids in Tyria aren’t raised to be zealous child soldiers, after all.
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When would justice ever dictate a child’s death?
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R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
On jotun: they aren’t as important because what we have now are just inbred, uneducated savages living in the ruins of their ancestors. Any understanding of magic or technology they once had is long lost- at this point, in terms of both sophistication and aggression, they are on par with the grawl. The norn, by comparison, are thriving (even spread thinner than the other major races, that still puts them at an immense numbers advantage over the jotun) and have proven themselves capable of keeping up in modern magic and technology, even if they admittedly don’t seem to contribute to driving those fields forward.
On giants: honestly, we don’t know nearly enough about them to make that call. I believe there are, in total, seven in the game, and while the ones who bother to speak to us do seem to be fairly well-spoken, we never see them using tools or magic, I don’t believe we see any structures associated with them besides crude lash-ups, and we never see them interact with each other or provide insight into their people. Giants as they currently exist in GW2 are simply a handful of cave hermits- the question of whether that’s all that’s left of their people, or simply exiles from a community existent in regions yet unseen, is currently unanswerable.
The Lupicus we’ve gotten conflicting information on- and it doesn’t help that we know from out-of-game that the term actually refers to several different species, who might have been at massively different points of development. The undead lupi seen in Arah seems to have received magitech augmentation, but the scant records from the Priory in Hidden Arcana seem to indicate their civilization wasn’t technologically advanced. The data available could fit anything from the Lupis being essentially large animals to them being somethings like the seers or mursaat-advanced, but not much caring for weapons (perhaps due to the fact that their comparative size and claws made things like swords redundant).
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Didn’t we strip them of their ability to corrupt in WoC?
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Obviously, this is subjective, but the definitions I apply are:
Race: sapient species (able to self-perpetuate) capable of communication with others.
‘Major’ race: One of the five sophisticated races bound by semi-alliance, granting them notable legs up in being able to benefit from the advances of any of the others and being able to establish a presence in the territory of the others. These two advantages gives them a reach and power the other Tyrian races cannot match.
‘Lesser’ race: As used in the personal story, seems to apply to comparatively unsophisticated races. Only common factor appears to be that they in large hold tribal loyalties above racial ones (quaggans a possible exception), with all the drawbacks that come with that. For that reason I prefer to classify them as tribal races.
I have a few other classifications for the other GW2 races, but as that is beyond the scope of your questions, I’ll focus on those instead: no, I would not consider spiders or drakes races, as they are unable to communicate, and therefore cannot be proved to be truly sapient through the information available. As the alliance I refer to above did not exist in GW1, a seperate definition of ‘major’ race would be necessary for that game, but my gut says we don’t have enough information on the norn and asura at the time to decide whether they were truly on par with the humans. I would put dwarves into that camp, though. The snakes you recall could either be the forgotten, naga, or krait. Other than that, there are the seers, giants, wardens, several spiritual and demonic entities that may or may not meet my self-perpetuation criteria, and arguably others, although the fact that enemy factions very rarely spoke in that game makes it hard at times to distinguish between races and simple monsters. All have pages on the Guild Wars 1 wiki.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
@Akbaroth This?
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Jormag is quite aggressive in the north, but Kralkatorrik is still recovering from its wound.
What wound?
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Personally, I understand why they’ve avoided an Afrocentric race. The problem with trying to work in representation by culture is that it by definition imports facets associated with those peoples- in other words, stereotypes. Given a community predisposed to be sensitive about that sort of thing, and a country that doesn’t have much in the way of common understanding of African cultures, that could turn very ugly, very fast.
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1. We don’t know.
2. We mostly don’t know. We know she was still alive and with the Shining Blade (although, most agree, not likely leading them) 71 years ago, and many think that if she could live to be at least 200 years old, 270 isn’t too much of a stretch. We don’t know what she did with the Scepter, although many assume it’s the source of her longevity. The idea that she’s Anise is pure off-the-wall speculation, albeit somewhat popular- nothing supports it, but nothing outright rules it impossible either.
3. No word about them past GW1. It’s popularly assumed that it’s up to us to determine how each of our own characters died, without any single more-valid canon answer getting in the way.
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I think a device would be more likely than a spell. Asura magic tends to have more in common with sci-fi tech than your typical wizardry. However, whenever an NPC uses a waypoint, they run up to it first, so my hunch is that lore-wise you do have to be in the near vicinity of one to use the network. Obviously, though, it’s one of the fuzziest places to try to figure out where the lore stops and the gameplay mechanics begin.
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Then again, ingesting Mordrem-infested produce might not be the best call in any case… especially considering there seems to be a precedent for parasitic plants/fungi taking over animal hosts.
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I wouldn’t say they’re exactly the same. At the end of the Scripture Dwayna charges Doric to go out and do things, while the historical monuments suggest the act of sealing the bloodstone caused Doric’s death. It wouldn’t make sense for Dwayna to say those things if her solution to the war killed him before he could start her tasks.
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Cavernhold Camp in the north is a Tamini place, and they do patrol a fairly large stretch around it, including being the force that assaults the quarry. Still, they’re relatively minor- on par with the Tamini presence in the Hinterlands, more or less.
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Honestly, I expect any new race would be locked out of the PS as it exists today. I don’t know whether to expect something unique for them, a PS Season 2, or just having the PS completely replaced with something new (or going the way of personality…), but I fully expect an overhaul in conjunction with a new race.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
What was said in Nightfall was that Khilbron was tricked into using the scrolls by the demon Razekiel (sp?), though this isn’t directly true as what the demon seemed to do was convert Khilbron’s faith, and that he was a follower of Abaddon.
There’s no reason it couldn’t be had both ways, of course. Khilbron could’ve been a follower of Abaddon without being so fanatic that he’d willingly cast a spell that kills himself, thus leading Razakel to opt for trickery.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Lore-wise, of the races we’ve seen in GW2, I think that the only ones with any real chance of becoming playable are tengu, largos, and kodan. Of the other races, only the krait, dredge, and maybe centaurs are advanced enough to be player characters, and all three are enemy factions very heavily integrated into various zone overstories. (Although, if they ever return to the dredge rebellion storyline…)
Of the three, tengu probably have the best shot- mechanics aside, they’re the player races’ closest neighbor. The isolation is the only obstacle, and the easy answer is to have dragon minions flush them out.
Kodan already have that motive, but they’re also scattered as a people, not to mention toting a superiority complex worse than the asura’s. Largos we know the least about, but I’d expect there to be a significant barrier over their cultural quirk of hunting sentient beings, particularly those they admire.
Any of those could be done, even the dredge… the question is whether they would be done well. None of them are without their obstacles. Returning a different race from GW1 is also a potential option, if harder to integrate with the GW2 story, but I don’t think bringing a new race in is a sound idea. Look at the amount of sylvari hate floating about, even with five years easing us into them, and attempts since launch to expand on them has only compounded the opposition.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
The cinematic just shows us Arah, then skips to Khilbron without really telling us anything we didn’t already know.
I also find the tower’s location extremely odd. It might be possible though that “the gates of Arah” is refering to another entrance we don’t know about at the city’s east side. After all, the Charr approached Arah by foot. If there was a quicker more direct route, they most surely would have taken it.
Maybe, but the presence of searing cauldrons around the Vizier’s Tower certainly suggests the charr were set up in that area one way or another.
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don’t forget that at least one ‘town’ of Orr survived sinking – in the realm of torment.
What are you talking about? From what I remember, everything in the RoT was Margonite structures, built in the once-sea east of Orr.
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Looks like the dialogue isn’t on the wiki, but that last link I have up there has the sylvari character and another sylvari calling it hair.
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With maybe one exception, they just call it hair.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
There’s contradictory information on that. EotN made the Great Destroyer out to be the ultimate evil, so at that point we didn’t know there was an Elder Dragon waiting in the wings. The Movement of the World (early pre-release lore primer) said, to paraphrase, that no one would have believed in Elder Dragons until some time after they started waking up. Vekk and Gadd’s books in the Hidden Arcana instance, however, both show not just awareness of the dragons, but quite a bit of understanding of their nature which was supposedly cutting edge in 1325… and Gadd died in EotN, 1078.
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Just out of curiosity, where in lore does it say he made them ( soldiers and civilians ) stay?
He basically banished anyone who decided to follow Rurik (who wanted to retreat and seek the aid of Kryta) and as such most people decided to not follow Rurik.
He did? As I remember it, he only banished Rurik. He certainly seems eager enough to have your character back in the epilogue instance and titan quests.
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Nothing says he found it in Plains of Ashford… in fact, I find that very, very unlikely. The fact that he refuses to talk about it suggests that there is very much a story behind him having it, rather than it simply being something he tripped over one day.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Personally, I preferred having fantasy dinosaurs to real life ones. It allowed them to not be weird in a game where 7 out of 10 professions cast some sort of spells, and it avoided looking laughably out of date when we inevitably overhaul our understanding of what they actually looked like five or ten years down the road. Since they went that way in the first game, it’d be a jarring disconnect for them to suddenly jump to realism now. Cool for cool’s sake doesn’t stand very well on its own. (See Living Season 1 and our response to it here.)
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I believe that it’s referenced by the Seraph around the area, but I don’t recall anything beyond ‘there was a settlement here’. I believe they even referred to it as Greyhoof Camp when talking about the village, although I can’t imagine that was its actual name.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
We’ve certainly never heard of elephants in lore, so if there are any they’re outside of human Tyria/Cantha/Elona. As for pebbly-skinned things with tusks, there are marmox in GW2 and ntouka in GW1, but both are more like rhinos. Nothing off the top of my head has anything approaching elephant-like ears.
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A misanthrope with cronies? Sweet! Best of both worlds, imo.
But more seriously, Mental, we aren’t going to get anywhere if we just both say that the other person is wrong. You claim the war seemed winnable, and you proved in the thread that apparently got me my new label that you can think these things through, so I admit to being honestly curious. How would you have gotten around the lack of arable land, or the apparent lack of fresh water sources? What edge did the Ascalonians hold that they might have won?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Personally, my investment is in material. Lion’s Arch looked much better in nautical-themed wood than the stone humans always like to build with.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Don’t think I’ve ever seen a hylek with a pet, but in addition to the moas mentioned above, there’s also an asura in Rata Sum who trains siamoths to serve as companions- much more typical ranger ground than carnival attractions. Other races that come to mind are skritt with murellow, and arguably harpies with griffons, though that looks more like cohabitation than training.
I think, in general, Danikat hit it on the head here. While there are exceptions- like drakes seeming to be rare pets regardless of location, or non-moa birds only showing up with norn and pirates- it seems to boil down to whatever’s in the near vicinity.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.