That seems a bit of a jump. The Master is supposedly trying to hatch the egg, which inclines we to think we want to help for what a dragon can do, not because the egg might have a passive corruption-cleanse buff.
It’s surely going to help us fight Mord in someway. So it’s accurate to say using Kralkatorrik’s power to fight Mord.
That depends on whether the baby has any power from Kralkatorrik. At the moment, we don’t even know how much of Glint’s power was Kralky’s- the predilection for crystals in her dwelling and guards certainly suggests his corruption repurposed, but her oracle abilities are spoken of as entirely unique to her, and the ability to soak up and exude magic is said to be something inherent to dragons in general. Only if we employ the first of those would we be using Kralk’s power, and I don’t see what good that’d do us- we already have asuran golems, and we don’t know how complicated or lengthy building crystal fortresses might be.
We’ve had a few big reveals on these topics this patch- that the Forgotten did indeed come from the Mists, that the gods not only knew of the Elder Dragons but that writings they left behind are the greatest source on the topic that the Priory has access to, that one of Glint’s eggs survived the destruction of her lair… but, to my mind the most odd tidbit is buried in what Ogden, who, as the last member of the Brotherhood of the Dragon is the closest we have to an expert on Glint, says at the end. He claims that her mental communication allowed her to learn language, which in turn led her to view the races as allies, and thereafter hid them until the Elder Dragons entered their hibernation. A slightly more detailed account of what is by now a familiar story… but he claims that that crucial second step, the language that allowed her to understand the races, she learned not from the Forgotten, or even from the dwarves, but from humans. Humans which, by the conventional timeline as we’ve previously known it, were believed not to have arrived on Tyria until long after the dragons last fell into slumber.
What are we to make of that?
Also where did it say such thing? I finished the new LS but couldn’t remember.
It;s an ambient conversation when you first enter the Priory instance. The teacher is telling her students it in the main classroom.
To expand, she’s citing a partially damaged text supposedly laid down by the human gods.
I’m not sure I feel comfortable speculating… I would never have guessed that “shadow” was one of the two prime spheres of Zhaitan.
@Zaklex I can confirm that those two are the only required foes. A hard right to the stairs and across the southern wall and the others never even knew I was there. Makes replaying not so onerous, although the cutscene still has to be sat through.
That seems a bit of a jump. The Master is supposedly trying to hatch the egg, which inclines we to think we want to help for what a dragon can do, not because the egg might have a passive corruption-cleanse buff.
I haven’t played those storylines myself, but isn’t Faren a mesmer too?
As for the upper-class twist, that’s something that’s always hung around the mesmer. It makes sense- mesmerism is about seeming and appearances, which could easily be carried over into a taste for fine (or made to appear fine?) clothes, and it is, compared to most of the other magical professions, a relatively refined and complex field, which would have made it more easily available to the historically better educated nobility. It’s also particularly useful for the nobility as we see in GW2, with their political games of plots and lies and bluffs and deceptions- all of which a mesmer is better suited to handling than the more brute professions.
To go back to the initial question, I don’t believe mesmers hold any particular social class or prestige, but that the profession is inherently more useful, and perhaps even a tradition to, the nobility.
Actually, the Glint as potential Elder Dragon came from Ogden, who stated it as a belief of the dwarvern Brotherhood of the Dragon.
Given that we don’t see minions (until now, at least), my first instinct isn’t to point to any dragon’s particular corruption but rather to guess that the bloodstone in the region ran dry, with or without dragon meddling (especially now, when we have a book that implicitly attributes the Maguuma’s magic waters to a bloodstone- a theory formed long before I joined the community, but to my knowledge never before touched on by the canon).
Huh… looking at that map, and now back at the OoW one… the northern and southern edges line up, but the western and eastern ones actually don’t. Maybe someone’s beaten me to this- there was a thread a while back about what the map implies about the shape of the world, which I don’t believe I followed to its conclusion- but wouldn’t that suggest that Tyria has poles at the west and east? (That is assuming, naturally, that the map is both accurate and depicting a sphere on a square image.)
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The relevant quote (in response to Trahearne asking after the Tree’s health): “I believe she’s still in danger. Her mind… was damaged.” To which Trahearne replies “Mordremoth. The Elder Dragon that spreads mental corruption. Our poor mother.”
After that, the conversation veers into a discussion of revenge and careful judgement, and nothing else of relevance is said.
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Zhaitan and shadows wasn’t very common at all, illusions were far more common for Zhaitan’s forces.
…
I think Zhaitan’s sphere of “shadow” refers more to the Risen Wraiths – they appeared to be made of shadow, and could hide themselves from mortal view at times.
I’m not entirely sure if this applies to the GW universe, but in several other fantasy settings “Shadow” is highly related to “Illusions”. In D&D for example, Shadow is a subschool of the Illusion school of magic.
Not so much GW. The term shadow is usually used in association with the magic of assassins/thieves, particularly their ability to teleport, something we only see two kinds of risen do.
On a more general note, as I don’t think it’s been mentioned here, the generic collection achievement for this area has us hunting for White Mantle badges scattered about, which seem to be in remarkably pristine condition.
Also, on the topic of Mordremoth’s mental corruption and the susceptibility of sylvari- I don’t know if this comes up for other races, but in my sylvari’s talk with Trahearne, I told him something to the effect that the Pale Tree’s mind had been damaged by the attack. I have no idea where my character pulled that from, but if that’s true, it would seem to suggest that either the Dream isn’t foolproof protection (which would fit with Ogden’s later line that such notions are too simplistic) or else at least that that protection isn’t extended to the Tree herself.
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As the architecture goes, I’ve noticed eagle busts and stepped ziggurat patterns, both of which were commonplace in the Tarnished Coast/Central Transfer Chamber in GW1… but curiously, they only occur in a couple places, and in all other aspects the architecture is quite different.
EDIT: I made a mistake. The GW2 ruins have ziggurat patterns, whereas GW1 had the actual structures. In light of that, perhaps the Waste culture was attempting to depict/emulate the Coast culture?
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As I’ve heard it, Crucible of Eternity was an early concept for the third in the run that was scrapped in favor of Sea of Sorrows. Take that with a grain of salt, as it is just hearsay.
He was obviously bad when we encountered him, yes. The question is rather he was always that way of just pushed into it. There’s too many unknowns about… well, just about every portion of his story for us to say. As Konig mentions, we have conflicting reports as to the nature of the conflict between him and the other gods, let alone whose fault it was. We don’t know conclusively rather the Realm of Torment was originally Abaddon’s realm or just the place he was imprisoned (the former is implied in the gw.dat, but that’s not considered canon, and to my knowledge it isn’t brought up elsewhere). We don’t know if Abaddon twisted the Realm, or if the Realm twisted him, or if they fed off each other. We don’t know how much of what his agents did was actually his bidding and how much was misguided zeal (both in the year of the Exodus and in the events leading up to and encompassing Nightfall).
Most importantly, in my opinion, we don’t have any confirmed canon knowledge of just why he was invested in the gift of magic. (According to the most recent word we’ve had on the topic, a forum post by Angel McCoy, the gift was made by all the gods, not just Abaddon. Whether the earlier lore of him adding a unique touch to what different races had access to, I don’t know/remember.) The theory that he knew about the Elder Dragons and was acting to oppose their rising is, at the moment, unsupported conjecture, and one with a serious hole in it: Why would releasing the dragon’s food source, to our knowledge the only cause of their awakening, be considered a way to oppose them?
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Is it just me, or does the thing that breaks the hourglass/comes out of the broken hourglass look like one of the Toment rifts from Guild Wars: Nightfall?
- The Crucible of Eternity takes place in 1325 AE, not in 1327 AE. Having Mordrem in there now wouldn’t make much sense, as it’s stuck in time (unlike the open world which is a “stuck in time until updated” scenario).
That’s not entirely true. TA already established precedent; the start of the exp dungeon now talks about events that canonically took place a year apart as if they were happening concurrently. Either ANet’s already decided the dungeon timeline doesn’t really matter, or the exp dungeons don’t have a fixed date. (Unlike the story modes, I don’t believe we have anything that places the explorable modes anywhere more specific than “sometime after the story mode”).
All that said, I really don’t think changing CoE for the reason given is a good idea. There’s still the problem of the dragon minions being left over from Kudu’s work, which unquestionably ended two years before we first encountered Mordrem.
Yep. I’d quote it, but it’s kinda lengthy and I’m not sure how much ANet considers to be too much.
. Attempts to relate Kralkatorrik to Lyssa are based more on color and the fact that mesmers tried to enter his mind and he shut them out, but that’s beyond iffy when Jormag (and now Mordremoth) enter peoples’ minds.
Mesmers tried to enter his mind?
please ellaborate,
I know nothing about this and i love mesmers
When he passed over Ebonhawke, Jennah and Anise took a peek into his head, with the implied intent of repulsing whatever it was that was in the storm (they didn’t know going in that they were dealing with an Elder Dragon). Really, the passage read to me less like he shut them out and more like they recoiled from what they found.
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Can’t help with most of these, but there is at least some small precedent for the last bit- in GW1 times (and maybe even today, for all we know, just to peeve Palawa) he went to Kamadan in Elona as well as LA. He isn’t limited to any particular place in Tyria, he just (disclaimer: my impression) goes to the places where he can make the most of his very brief window of time. Well, brief in years past, anyway.
I think there is an NPC somewhere who talks about the taste of quaggans, but I don’t recall who, where, or what he said about how they taste. Have a vague feeling it’s a male charr, though, which narrows it down… a little. :o.
Can’t get on right now to double-check, but I think it was the charr pirate sub-boss on Jetsam Isle.
- From ~1310 AE: It is during this phase the Ministry starts to grow corrupt.
We don’t know that for sure, and in fact I rather doubt it. If I remember the relevant dialogue correctly (why they buried something so important in a single personal story branch, I couldn’t begin to say) the centaur were becoming a progressively worse problem and the Ministry was working to replace the Seraph within the city during the reign of Jennah’s father, which suggests that the corruption had already taken root at that early date, and was entrenched enough to start actively working to usurp control.
We can guess at the theme of the current laws getting considered, but that only goes back as far as however long the Ministry’s been corrupt. It probably didn’t start that way, and in any case it’s implied to be younger than Divinity’s Reach, so any law going back more than a hundred years would come from an age where the monarch had seemingly absolute power- and we know monarchs ran the gamut from truly caring about the common folk (Salma) to killing them for fun (Thorn).
I think they were trying to evenly balance how many story events you do at each 10-level interval. Why they didn’t leave it in, and have 9 arcs instead of 8, I can’t quite grok. They could have either kept the story starting at Lv2 as before, or nudged the interval to 9 levels instead of 10.
It can’t be that- even with the shuffling, chapter 8 has ten quests to chapter 5’s three.
We don’t know any specific laws, to my knowledge, just that the Ministry usually writes them and the Queen signs them into law. Everyone gets at least a hearing- foreigners get a hearing before the local Seraph, most citizens get an audience with a magistrate at the Ministry, and the nobility receives a full trial. Nobles also have the right to invoke trial by combat, although in modern Kryta it is an obscure right that is hardly ever invoked.
EDIT: Here’s the link . I don’t have time to listen through the whole thing, but they talk about the nature of the nobility towards the end. Not sure if laws or legal issues are mentioned specifically.
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Kralkatorrik seems to be the only one that’s showing no signs of trying to expand, and that could be chalked up to Kralkatorrik having realised how close it came to being speared by its own spine and is now lying low.
It’s also perfectly possible that he is expanding,but like the DSD not into areas the five player races have settled, and I believe we have evidence- several sources link the ogres coming out of the Blazeridge Mountains specifically with Kralkatorrik’s rise, and they also state that the ogres are seeking new lands. Given how otherwise strange it is that they would seek to move into a narrow strip of land next to a growing patch of dragon corruption, I suspect that they’re under pressure from the east, and given the timing, Kralkatorrik would be the likeliest cause.
Oddly, only those who died in the Cataclysm and from the effects of Nightfall seem to have been sent to the Realm of Torment.
The simplest answer, I suppose, would be that those two events share a quality that the others don’t. Perhaps Abaddon took a personal hand in the creation of the Lost Scrolls? While we don’t know whether the Cataclysm was their intended function or something going horribly wrong, there’s a certain degree of similarity between hidden magical scrolls that caused a land to sink beneath the ocean and the domains of the god of secrets and the deeps.
Just to answer part of the question, demons were/are formed directly from the Mists. The assumption is that they’re simply deposited into the realm of whomever they serve.
Or formed from the realm of their master.
What about the other species? If I remember correctly there was A charr in the Realm of Torment.
Not sure if this is good evidence of “what normally happens”, since at the time we saw the Realm of Torment, Abaddon (and Dhuum) were diverting a lot of souls into the Realm of Torment that did not belong there. Kormir and Dunkoro’s son were also bound to the Realm of Torment, and they were paragons (not just their class, but the meaning of the word).
It wasn’t so much Abaddon’s doing, but rather that the human gods arranged for anyone who came into contact with Abaddon’s power to be sent to the Realm of Torment so that his influence wouldn’t spread. At the very least, that demonstrates that the gods are able to exert influence, probably even control, over where the souls of non-humans end up within the Mists. Whether they regularly exert that control remains an open question.
This is something that’s come up several times in the past, but the short version of those discussions has been that maybe you’re right and there are more elsewhere, or maybe they’re all clumped around Tyria because of the bloodstone (at the end of the last rise, all of their remaining food was concentrated into a single point, presumably somewhere on Tyria).
I found the NPCs back in GW1 who were mesmers tended to be the more charming ones. (Gwen may not have been the most pleasant, but Kieran wore her down.) Norgu was an actor and was very affable, if not necessarily the most attractive. I’m sure there’s something alluring about the mesmer arts, and that naturally draws others to them, whether it be romantic or otherwise.
In GW1 the professions (well, core professions) were also heavily slanted towards the human deities- for mesmers, that meant Lyssa, the goddess of beauty and, apparently, love. I wouldn’t be surprised if mesmer culture developed in a way that reflected that connection- socialization might make mesmers more amorous as a whole than members of other professions.
*In the quaggan racial storyline, we learn that the waters as far south as Dredgehaunt Cliffs have become too cold for arctic quaggans due to Jormag’s influence pushing south. No doubt that also had an influence towards the west a bit as well, due to wind and water currents.
I’d attribute that to local icebrood activity, since the arctic quaggans in Frostgorge say the water is nearly too warm to survive in.
An interesting observation, even if you are bending Anise to fit your trend.
Cadeyrn’s the only semi-important mesmer I can think of that you missed.
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Personally, I think the damage is due to Jormag’s rise and the subsequent flooding. You gotta figure an earthquake bad enough to shatter a mountain range will do some damage to a structure in said mountains.
As for the ghosts, they seem to just be members of the Vanguard who died a natural death and stayed on to watch over the HoM and our GW1 stuff. Definitely not Foefire- they’re far out of range and non-hostile.
Personally, I feel happy with the team as it is. It’d be all too easy for it to be done in a way that makes it feel like the sylvari was only being added for some token inclusiveness, and more importantly, I’m still rooting for the Biconics to be wrapped up and retired or demoted to the sidelines at the end of this season. I’d like to see things moving towards closure with them, not additional of elements that would perpetuate their story.
Not seeing the ‘massive population’ or ‘lots of resources’, and to be honest, the humans can’t afford to be bloodthirsty at this point. Kryta is in a precarious situation. Personal strength is irrelevant if the resulting policies accelerate human deaths, or worse, turn a portion of their society openly against another. It would probably lead to the collapse of the Krytan kingdom… although, going the extra mile and reducing them to a race of refugee exiles could be interesting if done correctly.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s definitely issues with the way humans are presented. I’ve found them in GW2 to be bland and forgettable. All the same, and this applies to quite a few of the ideas in this thread, introducing a random new element to shoehorn in an arbitrary new plot direction would be recreating everything (well, everything intrinsic to the concept and not the execution) this forum hated about the S1 story.
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They did:
We are discussing your thoughts internally and continuing to work on the story steps. Once I have some more new I will update the thread.
Source thread. That was posted eight days ago, and since there hasn’t been any further word since, it is not unreasonable to assume that they’re still internally hashing out what to do. (Although, given ANet’s irritatingly self-defeating policy regarding communication, we aren’t likely to hear anything more until the changes they decide on go live.)
EDIT: Actually, there are a couple more recent ones from three days ago here, both from Chris- “For those asking we are still discussing the story steps and will have an update soon.” and “I or Leah will update as soon as we can and we intend to at the minimum to get things back in order.”
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Several reasons spring to mind. If they are indeed re-writing dialogue and possibly re-doing voiceovers to support their new model, that could take a while. If they haven’t decided internally whether to support the new model or revert to the old, they won’t have even started yet. If they think other parts of the game, or even other aspects of the new personal story (buggy quests, examining and fine-tuning the new rewards, etc.) take priority, again, that’ll slow things down.
It’s also, for all that I know, fully possible that they did fix it already- ANet doesn’t always mention what they change in the patch notes.
Also, note that GW1 maps were just built different. Due to their strict pathing and other features, side areas could be designed to look thick and impassable. GW2 Kryta is almost entirely traversable, hence a sparser “foresty” feel as opposed to a dense jungle vibe.
Not that Kryta had a thick jungle vibe. The zone boundaries in Prophecies were all either abrupt hills or valleys. It wasn’t until Istan (or perhaps Echovald?) that we saw vegetation used to define the limits of playable zones.
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The reference it got was to establish that it has no role to play in ending the Foefire. To me, that sounds like it’s being written out of the story.
Wasn`t it that it does not matter which of the swords would be there?
So they do not have to use it, since they have one of them.Doesn`t sound like it is written out of the story, just not needed for that task.
They communicated the ideas that Magdaer caused the curse, that Sohothin can end it, and that Magdaer is not part of the ritual to end it. The natural extension of that is that, unless there’s going to be a second Forfire, or we players have to stop someone from causing a second Foefire (both terrible ideas, as far as I’m concerned), Magdaer no longer has any role in the plot.
@Stooperdale The way it was mentioned- just a brief snippet, which when examined only reduces Magdaer’s importance- feels to me like tying up a dangling loose end as a form of closure. It’s not like E or Scarlet’s connection to Caithe or even Scarlet before her reveal, which have all been mentioned in ways that raise new questions or revisit the old ones.
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The reference it got was to establish that it has no role to play in ending the Foefire. To me, that sounds like it’s being written out of the story.
Full conversation.
Norn: Someone told me that sylvari aren’t born, they’re hatched. Is that true?
Sylvari: We’re born, but in our own way. We’re the fruit of our mother, the Pale Tree.
N: For us, birth is a matter of blood and pain. It’s the infant’s first great battle. Many don’t make it.
S: And for us, birth is like falling from a great height, all the way down to the hard ground. Not all survive the fall.
N: No parents? Who cares for you when you’re small and weak?
S: We’re not born small like you. We emerge full-sized from our cocoons and immediately enter school.
N: Born full-sized? Maybe your race is stronger than I thought.
I really don’t want to take a size in this again, but do consider that the sylvari uses “like”, which in that context can only denote figurative language, and that Serimon explicitly tells sylvari characters that the Pale Tree lowered their fruit when they awoke.
This isn’t the right forum for this, but…
Between waypoints and zippy sigs and other speed boosts available to most classes, the only role for mounts would be vanity items, and given how much needs to go into building a mount system compared to other vanity objects (an armor set, for instance), I just can’t see it as being cost effective.
Plus, what would a charr even ride?
They do, but typically it’s usually just a darker version of the same color. The Eye is the only place I know that has a yawning black abyss fringed with aurorae.
Hey, good to see ya in these parts again!
It’s hard to disprove (or prove) theories on the Eye, simply due to how few hard facts we have to work with, but I gotta say I like this one for trying to pin down the role of the gods in the current story, instead of cynically dismissing them as being written out of the plot and forgotten. It checks out about as well as any theory I’ve heard regarding the Eye- the thing was clearly built by a great power, seemingly for a particular purpose, and it’s actually easier to believe that kind of accomplishment was the work of gods. (All the more so now that we’ve seen the scale of some of the surviving structures in Arah.)
As much as I like it, objectively, I don’t find the evidence to be compelling- though I stress again that I feel that way about all of the theories I’ve heard (or indeed developed myself). The main bit of evidence here is the skybox, and while it is noticeably distinct, none of the places confirmed to connect between Tyria and the Mists, including the two that connect to the Realm of Torment, feature anything remotely like it. The statue of Kormir also raises questions- if it is indeed old, why would the servants of Abaddon allow it to remain intact at the heart of his realm?
All in all, I like the idea, but cannot say it’s any more or less likely than the alternatives.
*kill interesting people.
It does seem strange that they would have in such a short time achieved a more or less equal proportion to the other races, especially considering that every member of their race literally has an inherently noble disposition. They just don’t get raised bad the way members of other races can be.
Personally, I think the pirate sylvari are supposed to represent the sylvari that didn’t know better and fell in with the wrong sorts after taking off for society outside the Grove. Lion’s Arch would be the natural first new city to visit, and once there pirates would be the natural element to lure the gullible into a life on the wrong side of the law.
We don’t see much story focus on quaggans, really- the problem is, I think, that the individuals we do focus on without fail seem out of place. Bloomaloo and Penelopee are recurring offenders, but we also have Kookoochoo and Drooburt, who were both placed in conspicuous locations, were the only quaggan on their given map, and were both absolutely absurd, without even an attempt to explain why a quaggan went out to the middle of an arid waste to beg, or why a juvenile quaggan was allowed to stage his own circus performance at the shadiest gathering of sellers and buyers outside of Lion’s Arch.
Now, I’ve got no problem with using them as mascots (instances along the lines of the Halloween trick-o-treaters), and any one of the above NPCs probably would have by themselves just been some lighthearted humor. But all of them together, with no serious or even truly quaggan-like quaggans to balance them out, plus the mascot thing, plus the fact that no other lesser race has gotten even half of the screentime these clowns have… I think the underlying issue being expressed in this thread is that the joke has been run into the ground, and it’s taken the community’s opinion of the quaggans with it. The preexisting quaggan haters, of course, have been waiting down there this whole time to welcome us with open arms.
There are consoles scattered throughout the place that tell its story. They were experimenting on undead minions when they got too greedy and corrupted something they couldn’t contain, so they evacuated the inner complex.
Actually, almost all the asuran labs have that script. I would imagine it says the same thing on all of them, but I’ve never actually checked.
Probably not directly, no. It does seem to be working on the same project as the Crucible of Eternity though.
Not quite. Map travel in Guild Wars 1 suggests you really do travel the whole way, but they don’t show it. Way points are explicitly recognized in universe as teleportation.
Not true: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Map-Travel_Inventor
Perhaps you do things differently, but I tend to consider any dialogue that explicitly mentions clicking or pressing keys as a gameplay element outside the lore.
The few times we see an NPC waypoint, they do clearly walk up to the things before disappearing, so I would think that our ability to use them anywhere is just a gameplay quirk.