R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
But only traumatic memories will get through to the Dream. That’s what causes the Court to go after sylvari in the first place- if it was as simple as “do bad things, and you can call it a day”, they could just sit around taking turns torturing each other. It also means they have no motivation to go after other races.
Yes, some of the windbourne offshoots ended up in sylvari territories, but the bulk of the Court was around the tower, where they completely ignored the sylvari settlement that was probably literally sitting in their shadow, and instead opted to harass random bandits, caravans, and hylek. Unless the Toxic Alliance was where the Court sent all of their fresh recruits, which feels like a patently ludicrous idea, their actions were only furthering the cause of Nightmare as we understand it by pure accident, if a player they killed happened to be a sylvari. And saying that the Nightmare Court just likes to be bad is a misunderstanding of their goals, and cheapens them as a faction in the process.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Is was written to deliberately avoid the Personal Story like it was the plague, but that was for the sake of casuals and newbies, not to obscure its placement on the timeline.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
We have had some things out of the game. There was a post on here not too long ago, making clear that normal krait view the toxic krait as being inferior/polluted/something like that, and so it should be a “kill on sight” situation. The Nightmare Court were totally chill with the toxic offshoot, from what we’ve heard- we’re told it’s because the Court is all “for the evulz”, but I really hope that’s just a thin pretext to cover something deeper going on with Mordremoth, because that explanation is 1.) lame, and 2.) not what the Court is about at all.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I’m not sure I see any particular age in the GW1 style Grenth- between the robe and the skull, I can’t put any age to him at all. From my perspective, the difference was just a change in his garment and face, which is what the Balthazar change was.
As far as my point on the randomness, perhaps a better phrasing would have been “which are in the new style and which are in the old”. The GW2 style seems to be primarily in Orr and modern Krytan settlements, but when you remove those two areas from the pool, you get a confusing jumble of GW1 (most of the places we’d previously saw them, plus a scattering of new ones) and GW2 (Reaper’s Gate and the Ascalonian Catacombs in particular) with no easily discernible criteria, in lore or design terms, for the choices.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
M.O.X. would have direct knowledge of our Guild Wars 1 character, and that’s a tangle ANet may well be better off avoiding.
You probably read Sea of Sorrows, if not then don’t open the spoiler tag.
Livia is still alive, she may appear in game any time
But she hasn’t, and unlike M.O.X., her character even has a role in the story beyond their relation to our GW1 avatars.
That said, I see no reason why he couldn’t return, being a G.O.L.E.M. and all. I think you touched on the problem, though: M.O.X. would have direct knowledge of our Guild Wars 1 character, and that’s a tangle ANet may well be better off avoiding.
Ogden Stonehealer, and he appears in the Priory and Arah. (Granted, I do wish he could play a more important role…)
Ogden is actually why I think we won’t see M.O.X. . I think ANet did the best they could with him, but even so, he came out entirely unsatisfactory- he has so little to say, two-thirds of his dialogue is locked away in a single norn PS quest. At that point, the question becomes “is it worth it?” We as fans love seeing references to GW1, but a returning ally with no clear role in the current story could only be a sharp, and unpleasant, reminder of the limitations that prevent any explicit mention of our characters. Is there any point in fan service that leaves said fans with a bad taste in their mouths?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I believe the M.O.X. and Zinn quests were before Guild Wars Beyond- same sort of content, but not built with Guild Wars 2 in mind. Just some fun quests and an easily accessible hero in Prophecies and Factions.
That said, I see no reason why he couldn’t return, being a G.O.L.E.M. and all. I think you touched on the problem, though: M.O.X. would have direct knowledge of our Guild Wars 1 character, and that’s a tangle ANet may well be better off avoiding.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That’s also just a concept, though, and in no way canon. It only means that at some point, ANet considered the idea that the sea remained petrified- we can draw no conclusions as to whether they stuck with it, changed their minds, or still haven’t decided yet.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Everyone’s talking about Malchor being the father of Grenth, but as far as I know we still don’t have any actual evidence… ?
A lot of theory is based on that, while afaik, we just don’t know if it’s true or not.
We don’t have any direct evidence, but we do know that his father was a sculptor, we do know that Malchor is the only sculptor ever associated with Dwayna, we do know that the gods only went to Malchor because they tried not to spend time among the general populace, and we do know that the only evidence against the theory was deliberately removed by ANet and replaced with something else. That makes a very strong case, as far as the theories around here usually go.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I think you’re pretty spot on with the timeline, although I can’t think of any particular reason Malchor couldn’t have known Grenth was his son.
As far as the statues go, all of them got changed dramatically (and inconsistently, I might add: it seems to have been totally random, which statues were changed to the new style and which were left in the old). The difference between new Grenth and old Grenth really is no greater than between new Balthazar and old Balthazar.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The only place I truly remember that happening is in one section of the wall, which involved the ghosts actively trying to repair and rebuild the wall and ruins.
And that particular stretch was being cleared for a highway, not on account of the ghosts.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
When it comes to the ruins of Ascalon:
The Iron Legion believes, rightly or wrongly, that the Foefire ghosts are strengthened by the ruins, and that eradicating them entirely will stop them from manifesting or at least substantially weaken them. Whether this belief is correct or not, there is an orchestrated campaign to destroy the ruins of Ascalon, but this is done out of a principle of making the land safe® rather than being motivated by the destruction of human culture and history… or at least that’s what they claim.
Wasn’t that only limited to specific parts of/things in the ruins? I remember the statues in the Ascalon City meta, but for the most part charr seem to have no problem existing alongside human structures.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
More important is that we were told in EotN that Echovald was changing (though it did specify that the growth was new), and that the Jade Sea probably wasn’t. If they were the same, shouldn’t they revert at more or less the same rate? And if they were different, why would Echovald changing mean that the Sea would also change?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
They’d also have less motivation to do so, though. In Abaddon’s case, such a cover-up was an act of necessity, since it seems simple knowledge of his existence could give him a foothold in Tyria. In Dhuum’s case, without that necessity… would they really go to such an effort? A massive undertaking to deceive, simply to hide the fact that gods can be replaced? The reapers certainly didn’t seem to care if you knew.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I believe that’s south-east Cursed Shore.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I agree. A being as powerful as the God of Death could not help but attract followers; I guess the question is really just whether the following was part of the mainstream of worship or a more fringe/underground deal, like Abaddon’s cult after his fall.
Edit: As to the circumstances of Dhuum’s defeat, I just had a thought. Assuming, as seems reasonable at this point, that Malchor is Grenth’s father, the timeline would suggest that he died well Dhuum was still the lord of the Underworld. Yet he was attached enough to Tyria to become a ghost. I freely admit that we know little enough of Grenth to make this a rather shaky supposition, but perhaps the conflict between Dhuum and Grenth at least had its roots in that fact? It would at least account for the otherwise strange coincidence that Dhuum was defeated by Malchor’s son very near to the place where Malchor took his own life.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Gonna add my voice in support to the idea that Grenth was sculpted by someone else.
On the topic of a Dhuum statue, maybe Dhuum was never worshiped at all? Unlike any of the others, even Abaddon, he’s never really mentioned interacting with the gods or with humanity, beyond his ban on resurrections and the undead, and there’s no mention of the other gods having any issue with Grenth usurping him. Considering that, and that all the other gods contributed something to humanity in their early days, acting as their patrons and generally interacting positively with the populace until the Exodus, I wonder if Dhuum had always been seperate from the pantheon.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That place looks like one of the mossy portions of a dungeon to me… has anyone tried to hunt that location down? I remember hearing once that ANet only used locations visible to the players in GW1 cutscenes.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
So that might be what’s actually going on. Zhaitan only raises relatively intact corpses,
But we have to remember, that a great many if not most of the risen on Orr are Orrians who died when the continent sank.. ~250 years ago. I find it highly unlikely, if not impossible for those corpse to have stayed intact for that long an amount of time.. Now some might say, well the ocean is cold, But I don’t think that it would be cold enough to prevent decay given that Orr is very close to the Ring of Fire Islands, and is next to a desert (Probably very near Tyria’s Equator)..
“They say the water there is black as night, like ink’s been poured into the waves. It never gets lighter, and the sun never warms it. Sailors have used Orrian water to freeze things even in the Maguuma Jungle’s heat. Just one drop turns meat into jerky. A canteen could ice over even the fires of Sorrow’s Furnace!” Sea of Sorrows, pages 45 and 46.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Well, keep in mind that thaw comes from GW1. There were no asura in Factions, and asura were very new to the surface in EotN and had no reason to be interested in Cantha. Why would they have developed a term for it at that point?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I agree with all of your points, Tipper, but I think it’ll mostly come down to rather ANet has finally gotten over their continuity headache with the personal story.
This just in….
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/introducing-the-story-journal/
FINALLY! And while we’re touching the topic, I’m thrilled that they at least touched upon making the Personal Story replayable, even if it was just they’re typical “not off the table” wording.
As far as Trahearne goes, my thoughts have previously been along the same lines as Shiren’s in regards to his future role. However, now that Mordremoth is on the table… IF they opt to have a real connection between Mordremoth and the sylvari, and IF they choose to start exploring that connection somewhat early on, instead of something they cram into a big reveal at the end of the road, then I think it could be fitting to use the eldest of the Firstborn, the very first sylvari, to do that exploration. And if it ends up killing him… as others have pointed out, ANet might see that as a two birds, one stone situation.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
For my part, Peneloopee’s voice creeped me out way, WAY too much to care about what they were saying or why they were in the story. If they’ve swum away to their happily ever after, I’ll be glad to wave them off and hope they never come back.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I really hope they don’t toss him on the biconics just because they don’t have a sylvari yet. Cookie cutter models have their time and place, but I don’t think the composition of the main cast should be one of them.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I think you’re trying too hard to pigeonhole the Elder Dragons into patterns that you’re used to seeing in other games. When it comes right down to it, Kralkatorrik is very different from your traditional elemental earth (Primordus comes closer to that particular style), and none of them have anything to do with air beyond being able to fly (with the exception of the brandstorm, but that’s a byproduct, not a theme).
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I agree with all of your points, Tipper, but I think it’ll mostly come down to rather ANet has finally gotten over their continuity headache with the personal story.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I would like to reiterate that there is nothing definitively saying that the Jade Sea ever began to thaw. In Factions, and even Winds of Change, it was only hearsay and speculation. There was no evidence to it, just wishful thinking that things might return to normal.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I’m pretty much with you there. The only remaining ruin they claim to care about is the Great Northern Wall, and that’s for the stated purpose of building a highway to better conduct troops and machinery from southern to northern Ascalon. I think that Rin being (relatively) intact despite having sat next to the Black Citadel for the last two hundred years is also pretty telling.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I think most people are underestimating the immunity. Even a plant dragon wouldn’t be able to corrupt Sylvari, which I think is caused by the birth of Sylvari. They are born from the mists into a plant hull and that is probably their immunity. Before they can get corrupted, the plant body has to be corrupted and releases the soul before corruption can take hold (just a theory I am working with). If this is true, then nobody can corrupt them actively until they are changed/manifested like the Toxic Sylvari. This doesn’t exclude that she might have communicated with Mordremoth (a possible terrible picture entity), but it denies the corruption.
I think the immunity “stems” from the fact that the Sylvari have no souls. There are mentions in the game of dragon minions having their souls removed so that their bodies can be possessed. For instance there is a ghost in Mount Maelstrom that laments the fate of its body. And there is a Kodan in Frostgorge sound that states that Jormag only corrupts the bodies of Kodan.
If Sylvari, being creatures that came from the dream, are basically spirits, spirits that are inseparable from their bodies it could explain why they die when corrupted.
We do see some risen with souls, though, sovereign eye/Reza the most prominent example.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Maybe it doesn’t matter, since this is an older thread, but might we keep things on topic? We’ve already had plenty of threads rehashing the same old ground on how people feel about Logan’s decision; hell, one of those is still on the front page. CHIPS was making an example for one of the shortcomings of GW2’s story, and besides was making a statement of opinion. There’s no point in trying to change it: the only thing we have to match their opinion with is someone else’s opinion, and besides, CHIPS has been around for a while. I’d wager all the arguments for both sides seem old hat by now.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
First thing that came to my mind: how the hell does jade thaw?!
Same way water petrifies? Just in reverse.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The jade from the quarry is water turned into jade.
As for what it means, I’d guess that the Jade Sea didn’t thaw. Unlike the Echovald Forest, the reported changes in the Sea were “unsubstantiated rumor at best.” It could easily turn out that the belief that the jade would thaw was just wishful thinking.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I meant more that Scarlet was trying to assert herself against the entity- unless we want to add to her long line of ridiculousness that she could go toe-to-toe with an Elder Dragon in force of will, it would mean that even if Mordremoth was affecting her he probably wasn’t putting enough into it to put her on champion level.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I do agree that it seems rather unlikely that Scarlet was a conventional dragon champion. I’m still not decided as to whether or not the entity is related to Mordremoth, and if it is, Scarlet is either directly or indirectly an agent, but champion entails A.) the largest degree of the dragon’s will, and B.) full control over the dragon’s minions. Scarlet was convinced she was still working for herself, so it seems unlikely she was a champion in that regard, and she had to go to quite a degree of effort to build an army, which wouldn’t be necessary for a champion. (For those who might point out that maybe Mordremoth doesn’t have an army yet, I would counter that corruption can be spread even when the dragon in question is sleeping, and even without a pre-existing pool, it would’ve made more sense for Scarlet to build up her army that way if the option was available.)
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
A champion level minion is not the same thing as a Dragon Champion. They’re just minions with defiant and a bigger hit point pool.
I didn’t say they were. I’m not worried about what fancy border their portrait has; I’m talking about how the story treats them.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The only other human(oid) dragon champion was Svanir, who got transformed into the nornbear. No dragon champion looks even vaguely human.
If scarlet was a dragon champion, she was uniquely unaffected by the transformation.
And for someone who was notoriously voluble, she was strangely reticent about having any association with an elder dragon at all.
Captain Whiting and Herboza the Wretched were both champions, and both were only pretty standard reanimated human and norn, respectively. I find it likely that a lot of the more autonomous, champion level risen in the Orr storylines are also champions, as they match all of the traits that make dragon champions what they are- the ability to lead in combat, the deference of lesser minions to them, a reaction from their dragon when they die…
EDIT: Forgot Morgus Lethe. Nice catch, Kalavier.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I have. They’re not the most common types, but there are a few generic ones around, especially in TA and the later level zones (that is, the Steamspurs).
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I dunno… he knows a lot more about it than the Shining Blade in the area.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That comes up a lot, just because the first words out of her mouth weren’t some variation of “I’m going to kill you!”, but Kasha really wasn’t being that nice. She told us point blank we don’t belong here, and there was nothing to indicate that she had any intention of letting us leave.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It’s assumed. Can’t stress that enough. Not even popularly assumed, and there are some very good arguments against it.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Personally, I’m in the camp that Livia learned it during Prophecies, but in Gadd’s defense he seems to have practically beelined for the nearest bloodstone. Assuming he didn’t just zero in on the nearest concentration of magical energy (unlikely, given that when we meet him he knows what he’s looking for), he already has a degree of knowledge on a magical artifact associated with the human gods and believed at the time to have originated in Orr. That in mind, it doesn’t seem such a big leap (though a small leap is nevertheless a leap) to say that he may have also known about the Scepter.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I’d attribute that more to the link between ghosts and the night- there are quite a few, often but not always hostile, that only show up when the sun is down.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
For number four (no idea for one through three), ghosts can communicate with anyone they like- Dougal, for instance, claimed familiarity with them in GoA, and he was a not particularly good thief. I think necromancers differ only in that they have some sway over the dead, be it in the form of calling them forth (see Priestess Rashenna) or controlling them (much rarer and more a ritualist thing, but it still happens, especially among necros who are dead themselves, like Murakai or Joko).
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Out of curiosity, since I wasn’t around back in the GW1 days: why do we think someone teleported the Scepter? I always assumed it was some sort of automatic safeguard. What would anyone have to gain by taking the Scepter just to put it back in Arah?
Glint’s vision (her head basically) appeared and warned the players to flee the volcano IIRC, and then after they run away the scepter is shown disappearing.
I forget where but I remember reading that glint ferried it to safety, but I can’t be sure if that was wiki or theory from these forums.
Didn’t Glint disappear before the Scepter? Been a while since I played that mission. (grumbles about Sparks of the Titans)
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Out of curiosity, since I wasn’t around back in the GW1 days: why do we think someone teleported the Scepter? I always assumed it was some sort of automatic safeguard. What would anyone have to gain by taking the Scepter just to put it back in Arah?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
My thoughts: Livia’s phrasing in SoS indicates that she still has the scepter, but it clearly is not used in a battle which threatened the life of the designated Krytan heir. Furthermore, she never said she used it, only that she studied it. I would tentatively guess, then, that she decided to play it safe with the Scepter and used it to expand her own knowledge of the magical arts, not as a weapon or tool or whathaveyou. Given the amount of power it is implied to have, while such a policy isn’t as flashy as the alternative, it certainly would seem the more prudent course.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I don’t think the Scepter of Orr would become a badge of office, just because it would risk becoming only that. An artifact of that power must require a heap of magical experience to use properly, and making that a required part of qualifications for Master Exemplar would cause more troubles than it might solve. What if the times demanded, or the best available candidate was, a warrior or similarly non-magical fellow? What if the Scepter’s true powers require a necromancer, or a specific subset of necromancy? Would you make your top position available only to highly trained members of the least popular caster profession? Would you let someone who couldn’t tap the artifact’s power squander its potential? Why do either of those things, when it just narrows your options?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
To be fair, one of the asuran krewes has the possibility of returning later on, as does the sister. It’s still bad odds- one in six for asura and one in three for the humans with dead sisters- but it’s still better than the complete zero chance for the charr warband.
It’s not really worse or better.
I feel it is. I’m less upset with the implementation preventing me from experiencing the whole story than I am with the feeling that the story was just forgotten about, and left, as you said, unfinished.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
To be fair, one of the asuran krewes has the possibility of returning later on, as does the sister. It’s still bad odds- one in six for asura and one in three for the humans with dead sisters- but it’s still better than the complete zero chance for the charr warband.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
the Inquest golem attack on the Sylvari camp in Maelstrom is motivated by the Inquest wanting to collect Sylvari to infuse their spirits into golems.
To try to infuse their spirits, anyway. They hadn’t managed to collect any test subjects at that point, so rather it would have worked is up in the air, given the potential unique circumstances of the sylvari race. But that’s a debate for another thread.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Gai is the living person, but it’s worth remembering that he talks down to everybody who happens not to be a ritualist.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.