R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
@Foxx I’m with you on the grawl. I miss the glory days of the guttural “WE RA RA!” Now, most of them sound as if they’re terrified of their own shadows.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
To be honest, I never understood quaggan hate. I get that their voices and speech habits might be irritating to some, but aside from their pacifism there’s nothing that marks them as any more out of place than, say, the skritt- and said pacifism is on the decline anyway, as we see individuals and communities embracing proactive defense and their rage forms.
I think that their culture is entering a period of forced change, but I do not believe that they are a doomed race, barring unforeseeable circumstances such as a krait campaign of genocide or a karka population explosion.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I’d also add that even in the case of conventional undead, such as the armies of Khilbron or Joko, necromancers have never (that I’m aware) displayed any greater capabilities to combat or otherwise affect them (with the sole exception of ghosts, possibly as a result of hybridization with ritualist magic/methods). I suspect that necromancy as a school of magic in Tyria covers only minions, not what we traditionally think of as undead.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Would Jennah and the Shining Blade even know who the heir is? Assuming the locket is the only way to discover their identity (if it isn’t, the object’s importance as a plot device drops precipitously, which is inconsistent with the narrative emphasis placed on it), I can’t imagine that the Blade would have gotten their hands on the locket and then returned it to the Priory afterwards. They are a much more secure organization, and much less likely to misuse or be careless with the information.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
It doesn’t exist in-game (it would be hard to miss, since it was marked by a waterfall with a pool at the bottom), and the sewers are not accessible.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I mean the PC mostly beats things up for others he does not do a lot of planning or makes a lot of tactics he just beats.
Unfortunately, that’s pretty much exactly the case. The story has been written in such a way that we players react, not act. The NPCs are the thinkers and planners- and also the brash knuckleheads- who drive the plot.
It makes the writing team’s job easier, but this approach has the downside of making it hard to feel like our characters ever accomplish or change anything.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Nah, they aren’t GL. They’re these- leviathans, like the Maw from SoS, a type of aquatic creature whose living form was ultimately cut from the game.
Irritatingly, they’re also the fourth separate thing to go by that name in the Guild Wars universe.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Gaile says here that the team is working to address “Plot holes and story inconsistencies that may have been introduced with story realignment”. Ambiguous wording, but my interpretation is that means they’re sticking to the reshuffling of the chapter 8 stuff and will be making changes to make the new model viable rather than reverting to the original order. Where that leaves the greatest fear storyline, I couldn’t even begin to guess.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
^What about the Elder Dragon that has minions that are made of crystal? Is a complex and long name that I do not know why he was named like that but from what I understand he was also made of rock when he slept.
Opinions may vary, but I never thought he looked much like rock.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The asura, as far as we know, never touched Primordus, just siphoned off the magic he was radiating in his sleep. I don’t think Elder Dragons turn to rock when they sleep, but that Primordus in particular has a rocky appearance.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Why did the former five great races did not kill the dragons while they slept even if the dragons were made of rock you could just mine them until they are nothing:)
Why bother? Sleeping dragons are Someone Else’s Problem.
Why risk your hide when it will only benefit some remote descendant?
When said “remote descendant” is the future of your race and culture? I can think of several reasons.
Personally, I suspect it wasn’t for a want of motive or intel that they didn’t try, but a want of means. From what we’ve been told the sum total of dwarf, forgotten, seer, and possibly (though I have my suspicions) jotun civilization had by that point been reduced to a level that Glint could hide all of them, and while we don’t know the upper limit of her abilities, it seems to me implausible to extrapolate that she could hide an area or population as large as, say, modern Kryta. That would leave us with the surviving races making up less than what a single current race does. Even setting aside manpower, though, we don’t know if the elder races, even at the height of their power, could have harmed one of the dragons. We managed to pull it off, because asura magitech is OP, but with the exception of dwarvern blackpowder we haven’t seen any evidence that the jotun or dwarves had any more offensive capabilities than the humans had in GW1 times. Forgotten and seers are harder to pin down, because we know so little about them, but again, there is no evidence that they had a dragon-slaying weapon up their sleeves… and the simple fact that they didn’t attack the dragons in their slumber indicates that either they didn’t have such a weapon or were at least sufficiently uncertain of its success that they weren’t willing to risk it. (I’d file Glint’s spear into that later category.)
As for the possibility of just chipping away at a dragon until it’s gone, we saw in the Zhaitan fight that it had a pain response, or at least an equivalent reaction to damage. That being the case, anything that could hurt it should also be capable of awakening it.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
If I were them, I’d have been terrified of possibly waking them up again early. It’d be like following a lion that mauled you back to its den and poking at it with a stick. If the Tome of Rubicon is any indication, the other races didn’t want to rush that confrontation- they were content to hope that their descendants would be strong enough to handle them next time they awoke.
Well from what we know, newly awakened EDs are at there weakest (or at least at lowest magic levels).
Even at their weakest, though, they’d likely still be able to corrupt everything in the vicinity. Kralkatorrik created the Dragonbrand after he’d been leaking magic for ten thousand years- how much worse would that have been if they had woken him when he was still pretty much full up?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
If I were them, I’d have been terrified of possibly waking them up again early. It’d be like following a lion that mauled you back to its den and poking at it with a stick. If the Tome of Rubicon is any indication, the other races didn’t want to rush that confrontation- they were content to hope that their descendants would be strong enough to handle them next time they awoke.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I went back to GW1 shortly before Dragon’s Reach pt. 2. With this news, I’ll probably be sticking there for a while… maybe finally get a few more HoM points.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Knowing ANet, there would probably be a week or two you could pick it up for free, and then yeah, gem store purchase after that.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Not yet. ArenaNet has semi-plans to make it playable again in the future, but there’s no telling how long that might take.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Are you referring to the book? If so, no. The book is a prequel to the game, placed between GW1 and GW2.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Also consider that the Hinterlands are not the actual hinterlands of the centaur race. Just as we didnt see the full extent of charr in GW1, not their young ones, farmlands, agriculture or just general culture, we dont see much of the centaur either, other than their war- and slave camps.
Actually, it’s implied that we do, or rather that the war and slave camps are all that they have. Technically we don’t see any fields or forges there, but the camps in Cloven Hoof Camp are supposed to be the heart of their food and weapons production, for instance. The mine to the south of it is where they get much of their ores and lumber. Add to that that we’ve been told the centaurs have nowhere else to go, and I’m willing to bet that the Hinterlands are home to the majority of the Harathi and Modniir tribes. (The Tamini, as befits their role as scouts and skirmishers, seem to have the bulk of their numbers near the front lines in Queensdale and Gendarren.)
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Technically, it’s never said that the five surviving sapient races (more on that in a bit) formed an alliance.
There is a bit at the end of the mursaat path- “the races gathered together to fight the dragons, each contributing something”- that certainly sounds like an alliance, and in context would almost have to be the five races explicitly addressed as being around back then.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
As far as why they’re continuing to fight, we’re told it’s not so much about reclaiming ancestral territory as it is about finding new territory at all. The Modniir lands are now icebrood territory, the Maguuma Wastes presumably cannot sustain the Harathi’s numbers (they’re the largest group and the main bulk of centaur numbers), and something apparently prevents the Woodland Cascades from being a viable option. Kryta is the only place they have to go, and if they can get revenge while they’re at it, so much the better.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Well its strange how Anet defines the elder dragons they said it like their not sentient and intelligent but 2 years ago in game time Zaitan was killed now for a example if a wolf and puma 2 apex predator shared some of territory if not most and one of them is killed by horde of deers the other one will not care but I bet that the Elder Dragons care since one of their apex predator brothers could be killed so they must think that they could be also since they are clearly sentient and intelligent.
There’s nothing there saying they don’t. The question was about what the dragons think of each other, not what the dragons think of us. For all we know new found caution may be the reason why we haven’t heard anything from any of the other dragons in the last two years.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I think the question on Glint, specifically, comes down to one thing- in GW1 the baby had the same fleshy (well, scaly) bits as her, but in GW2 Glint is talked about (and depicted in concept art) and if she had nothing organic left of her form at all. If there are organic parts to the baby, it would follow that Glint would have needed to have undergone some biological process. If ANet has decided to retconn it to sat Glint, and by extension the baby, is all crystal, the simplest answer would probably be that she generated the eggs, likely in similar fashion to all the crystal elementals she had in her lair.
The wording in Arah explorable certainly suggests Glint was a corrputed creature- you can’t “return” free will to something that has never had it. As for why Kralkatorrik picked her? We have no idea.
Fun fact though- all those dragons flying about in Orr are Teq’s size. You have to break out of the map to see it, but the three you shoot down measure up to the same scale.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Nothing concrete in-game, but my own impression is that they’re not really large enough to need that. I’m sure each recruit ends up in a particular warmaster’s command and tends to stay there, but keep in mind that the reason modern militaries have so many divisions and sub-divisions is that they’re expected to defend against each and every plausible threat that might be directed against their country, as well as being forced to divide themselves to cover the breadth of their country. The Vigil doesn’t have those concerns. At this point in their existence they’re looking towards one foe, and one foe only- the minions of the dragons. They don’t need separate groups trained to fight centaurs, or to utilize urban warfare tactics, or what have you- they focus on where dragon minions are today, not where they might be tomorrow or what other things might try to attack them. They’ll need to, on individual or perhaps squad levels, split up their training so they can serve different roles on the battlefield, but I suspect that’s about it.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
This is the most recent statement on it . Basically, their cycle apparently has them spread thin enough that they never have to come into direct competition, and so they don’t interact at all. I think that idea has some holes in it, but if that’s the official stance, then that’s the way it is.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I think most of them are pretty self-explanatory- warriors are the bread-and-butter axe-and-sword tank kind of profession, thieves are your rogue type, elementalists are your mage type. Guardians would be the white knight/paladin hybridized a bit with a cleric, rangers are your typical rugged wilderness rogue with aspirations of warriordom, hybridized a bit with a druid, and necros are the edgy dark/blood mage type (especially in GW1). Mesmers and engineers are the only ones without clear parallels, I feel. None of them entirely fit the mold either- thieves have magic, elementalists are flexible but not as versatile as your standard RPG mage, and so on.
That’s the thing about archetypes- I’ve always felt they’re an attempt to force square pegs into round holes.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Just to put my two coppers in on the first topic, it’s been my observation that only egg laying creatures are seen to reproduce after corruption. Considering that, I would say that suggests risen are capable of asexual reproduction (as drax pointed out, there just seems to be too many cases where egg laying creatures lay corrupted eggs for them all to have been fertilized just before corruption) but incapable of pregnancy. (At a guess, I would attribute this to eggs being developed to be largely self-sufficient, whereas development in the uterus requires a sustained reliance on the workings of the mother’s body- workings that may no longer be functioning post-corruption). As we also see, as Konig point out, minions apparently being generated by undead fish or icebrood crystals, I’ve also tended to think that those two, at least, are capable of replication without biological reproduction, replicating a template apparently out of raw materials. (The crystals might be waved away as actually being a form of icebrood troop transport, but risen fish spewing out streams of risen humans/other creatures? When they’re occasionally explicitly referred to as replicators? Not so much.) I’d tentatively add the branded to that list, due to an event that ominously alludes to them always coming back no matter how many are destroyed, but there again, an alternative explanation is possible: that branded regenerate rather than replicate. Of course, destroyers are primarily (perhaps exclusively; we know Primordus can corrupt, but not if he actually does ) produced through this generation method.
I would be interested in being pointed at this dialogue, though. I can’t remember any place outside of the personal story where pregnancy is brought up. I know that the chicken event in Malchor’s is mentioned to be pre-existing, artificially corrupted eggs, but it never says there that the chickens can’t reproduce. I’d have to check in on the drake one, and those are the only two egg events I know of.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
^Did those decades of stopping Primordius helped the rest of the races? And were they not more useful as normal race that fight against the elder dragons like the humans, charr, azura, norn and sylvari?
We can’t say for sure, since we don’t know how the situation stands below ground, but since we see destroyer pockets in asura, human, tengu, and norn territories it’s safe to say that those three races would probably be in a very bad way if the dwarves hadn’t checked destroyer numbers. It’s not easy to counter an enemy that can pop up anywhere in your country at any time.
And if your question was where were the norn living at the time, it was in the far northern mountains, which were not at that time flooded. They were driven south 85 years after GW1
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
For the grawl, we have this . Ogres, I think, are just inherently aggressive- they consider pets family, but essentially beat them into compliance, and that doesn’t say good things about how they treat anyone else. All the tribes that are friendly to us are either pushed to the point where they’re struggling to survive, usually due to branded, or, in one case, because the chief owed us for reestablishing his rule. In other words, it only happens in extraordinary circumstances. (Same thing goes with the grawl, but at least there you’ve also got a possibility of a ‘god’ making them play nice.)
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Yes. We kill Dagnar later in the same campaign.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
^In that situation you will be criticised no matter what if you did not you were called a coward and that is a dishonorable thing if you did well its seem that you are wiped out from existence with your army you just can not win. But truth be told Adelbern is at fault those poor souls they can not get peace.
That Adelbern is the ancestor of the current Duke of Ebonheart?
Relative, but not ancestor. Adelbern only had one child, Rurik, and he died (as far as we know) childless. The Duke of Ebonheart is most likely descended from one of Adelbern’s own ancestors.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The rebellion was against the shamans, not the Flame Legion- the two are just conflated because by the end, the flame legion was acting as the shamans’ army. I think it might actually be said somewhere that the shamans from the other legions even gave up the fight and renounced their gods. It’s the shamans who are hated, because they were only granted that power by the other charr for the promise of being invincible, they abused that power, and then it turned out that they weren’t holding up their end of the bargain, and then they cracked down hard in an attempt to keep power. By the end they were just cruel tyrants. The hatred for the Flame Legion just derives from that grudge, because the Flame Legion has voluntarily stuck with the shamans all this time.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Do the modern chars know that the reason they are a great power now is because of their former gods? And I said if the human gods were responsible because of them they made Abbadon mad by imprisoning him in a place of torment and he did what he did.
They certainly don’t acknowledge it. Maybe somewhere in the back of their heads they know they’d never have defeated Ascalon if the Flame Legion hadn’t united them, but the three modern allied legions bury that under a stubborn insistence that they can manage just as well without magic and that having gods had, in fact, held the charr back from charting their own destiny.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Aren’t bigger at all, really. My necro is eye level with kodan, and he’s of middling height. I think a bear form norn is actually bigger, though I haven’t tested it.
Just goes to reinforce that concept art isn’t at all a reliable thing to base ideas on.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
^Does that mean that in the end the rest of the human gods are responsible for the char invasion and everything after probably even the guild wars?
Hm… not really. The charr were ultimately acting in retaliation against the gods, but I don’t think it’s fair to conclude that makes it the gods’ fault.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
So this Abbadon from what I understood was the one responsible for the event in GW 2 until the last expansion but why did he did that and is true that he was not one of the original human gods?
He was responsible for the events of the three GW1 campaigns, if that’s what you mean. He was one of the original gods, but his name was struck from the records after his fall. It’s a little complicated, but the gist of it is that he gave too much magic to the races, the other gods took it back, things escalated, and Abaddon and his followers ended up going to war. He was defeated and imprisoned in the Realm of Torment, which over the course of a thousand years drove him insane. He used his servants in GW1 as a way of getting revenge against the other gods and their followers, and in the final campaign he tried to free himself and subject the whole world to the Torment he had been trapped in.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Did the humans knew that existed other sentient society building races besides theirs? And if they did why they were so unprerpared.
They did, but humans in the time of GW1 treated most other races like monsters, with more or less the sole exception being the dwarves. Further, none of those races at the time posed a threat to the existence of the human kingdoms- they were simply raiders who would occasionally burn a village or butcher a caravan. The charr were in such a state because they were fighting each other as well as the humans, and remained that way until they united and acquired a magic artifact indirectly from a human god. However, by that point the third Guild War had started, so the humans didn’t notice the change until it was too late. As for why they were unprepared, all three kingdoms had by the charr invasion been at war for fifty-seven years, and their militaries and treasuries were both depleted.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Most concept art doesn’t reflect actual lore events. It’s just a tool to develop the appearance of creatures and environments. In this particular case that’s even more true, since iirc in the personal story Eir says she hasn’t had much experience with the kodan.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Well, keep in mind that the skritt attack us, not the other way around (the difference between red and yellow mobs). Personally, I always marked it down as any given scratch’s consensus over rather attacking strangers is justifiable for shiny loot, but a degree of territoriality probably also comes into play- they’re comparatively more vulnerable than other races, and I think it’s likely telling that the only region in which there are no friendly skritt is also the only region where the powers that be treat them as vermin.
Either way though, a degree of randomness is to be expected- they’re the only race without the ability to maintain overarching ethical norms, since those would have to be reestablished after every time the community breaks into units too small to comprehend them.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
It’s one thing to pick up a bit of useful magic and then heavily modify it to the point it’s almost unrecognizable. It’s quite another to adopt strange religious beliefs and funeral customs from what is by far the smallest ethnic group in your kingdom. I can certainly see those of Canthan descent carrying on that tradition, but the vast majority of Krytans would think of it as bizarre.
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As Dustfinger says, it would seem to fit the GW2 Necromancers best. Many of the GW1 professions evolved into the GW2 ones. Guardians, for example, appear to be a descendant of Paragons and Monks, while also picking up the Ritualist’s spirit weapons. It makes sense that the urn magic of Ritualists would be adopted by Necromancers, given their strong links with death and the underworld.
Culturally, though, not so much- Canthans may use funeral urns, but most races on Tyria go in for either burials or pyres.
Mechanically, it would be difficult to do at all with GW2’s system, since the majority of skills in combat are now tied directly into the weapon. You might counter that they could give the urn skills, and that’s true, but it’d limit how many variants you could have, and we already have two or three classes that do that, which would make it mechanically indistinct.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Are we ever given a reason why there are some events where we aid Skritt and help them, but most others, we are killing them and smashing their stuff?
The ones we are friendly with are generally from a large group of skritt while enemies are from smaller groups.
Skritt are kind of a hivemind. Basically they’re dumb in small-medium groups and unable to keep treaties and deals and such with the other races but in a city of skritt they will have enough there to rival Asura in intelligence and have no problem keeping deals with the greater races.
Not necessarily. Off the top of my head I can think of two very small friendly communities in Brisban, one rather large hostile group in Harathi, and a group in Timberline that is half hostile and half friendly. I’m not sure there’s even a correlation there to work with.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Ohh. Yeah, that is confusing. The game is named after the guild wars of Tyrian history but we don’t actually engage in the guild wars. we start the game as the guild wars end due to the charr invasion. So there was no multiple guild wars, there was only one big series of conflicts called the guild wars that ended with the start of the first game.
Well, they are numbered now, but I don’t think they were in the first game.
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Right, those. Wasn’t there one with Cynn too?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Canonically, I’d say that the true “heroes” of GW1 were Ascalon’s Chosen (Devona, Aidan, Mhenlo, Cynn and Eve), helped by the other Heroes and henchmen. They were present throughout all three campaigns and Eye of the North, as well as playing pivotal roles during the War in Kryta and the rise of the Ministry of Purity. It’s just kept unobtrusive so that players can feel free to roleplay their own character’s achievements.
Hard to say, since I don’t think any of them are mentioned in GW2 either.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
1. Yes, s/he does, but most of their accomplishments have been forgotten. You’ll find a very rare reference in an ambient dialogue or two, but that’s all you’ll hear about the character directly.
2. Not entirely sure what you’re driving at there, but yes, the White Mantle was in charge when we went to Kryta in GW1. What we know of Kryta before the Mantle mostly comes from NPC dialogues in GW1 or a variety of GW2 sources.
3. You begin the day before it’s destroyed, actually. The prologue ends with the Searing, which burned the kingdom to the ground, and you’re then skipped forward two years and begin the game in earnest in the post-apocalyptic remnants.
4. Hm… that’s a difficult question. We saw more regions in the first game, but the maps were also smaller then. I think right now GW2 is bigger than GW1 was at launch, but not nearly so large as GW1 was by the time they finished with it.
5. No. They were presented as a single force of savages under the leadership of their shamans (and, later, we meet a handful of ‘good’ charr trying to overthrow the shamans). It wasn’t until the gap between GW1 and GW2 that we heard about the charr as separate legions.
6. Yes, but not too many. For the most part they were just a couple of important characters (Glint and Kuunavang, if you want to look them up), and as enemies in a single region of the second release. Elder Dragons weren’t established until near the end of the game, and even then we only got hints at them.
7. Yes, near the end.
8. We actually start just after the third Guild War. We never see them in-game, and they aren’t fleshed out beyond what the wiki shows.
9. We fought demons and a couple fallen gods, and Dwayna’s avatars have angelic appearance. There is no cosmic scale clash of good vs. evil going on, though.
10. Yes! We met all five of the elder races in guild wars 1, worked closely with the dwarves and forgotten, met a seer, and nearly wiped out the mursaat. The jotun are the only ones not developed at all, as they were just background mobs in GW1.
11. No. We fought destroyers and the first icebrood, but in lore Elder Dragons don’t seem to be known about until Primordus wakes up, 40 years after the end of the game. That said, we do see some of them sleeping, but we don’t recognize them as such. (We think Primordus is a statue, for instance).
12. Never played that game, but I doubt Guild Wars lore is at all tied into any other game.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
In all fairness, we’ve only ever seen Faolain talking to Caithe (or to Caithe’s current companions about Caithe, or as a Dream reflection of Caithe’s inner conflict regarding Faolain). So of course, if she has an agenda and is talking to the subject of that agenda, it’s going to revolve around that particular agenda. None of that means that it’s her only goal or interest, though, just the only one we’ve ever had an opportunity to learn about.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
“Corpse Caller”, actually. Just replayed the event, since none of the dialogue is on the wiki. I agree with your classification- some degree of intelligence but of questionable power- with the obvious addendum that in this particular case, it is clearly able to spread corruption.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Come to think of it, I wonder if the wraith in the cave is a champion. Turning the Valiant’s pet but leaving him alone shows a level of spite and independent initiative that is consistent with observed champions (Whiting in particular comes to mind, with his vendetta against Cobiah), and at the end of the event chain in nearby Sleive’s Inlet, it’s suggested that the abomination you kill wasn’t intelligent enough to be the force driving the risen in the region.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Converting a corpse into a new risen minion appears to require only a high concentration of Zhaitan’s corruption, provided by the presence of a champion, specific artifacts imbued with its power, or possibly just a whole heap of lesser risen together in one place. I would assume the ossuary/corpse arc system is used in the cases a champion/artifact isn’t at the scene- instead of having the artifact go to the corpses, they bring the corpses to the artifacts.
All that said, a whole lot of this is inference, and I really wish the game addressed the subject better.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.