R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Technically speaking, Kralkatorrik did take minions with it – but they traveled slower than Kralkatorrik, and were being created mid-flight.
That’s actually what I was thinking when I said that creating basic minions doesn’t seem tough enough to be worth the effort of waiting for them. At the speed he was flying, he effectively was alone- the Branded that actually took part in the battle seem to be what he corrupted nearby. Apply a similar behavior to Primordus, and he’d outrun his regular minions, leaving them to trail along behind as best they can, while making new green destroyers along the way. Once he settles in under the volcanoes, it’d only be new ones that surface first, and for a fair while after- and that’s where we come in at Rising Flames.
Jormag, I’ll cede- I’d missed that bit of lore in the legendary collections- but on the other hand, as you yourself pointed out, that was at a point where he’d been warring with the norn for years, and we’ve also been told that he directly took on hundreds of norn at a time at some point- presumably, if Frostfang’s purpose was going out in front like you seem to suggest, that means there was a point in those years where it wasn’t on hand to do so. Your interpretation may vary, but that sounds to me like Jormag was at the forefront in the beginning, and Frostfang only caught up, or possibly was created, later.
Given recent events, we’ve not seen what the Priory has been doing… so for all we know, they have been. Or they’ve been more preoccupied with their all-time low number of members thanks to the deaths at Zhaitan’s and Mordremoth’s forces, combined with the problems of magic going crazy and are a bit more worried at studying the ley line overflows so as to solve that potentially world-destroying problem.
And if that’s not enough, a throwaway line in the last episode said that there’s strife between the orders now, with the Priory in particular being called out as busy with it. And then there’s their new-found rivalry with the Consortium over this ley line business, as well as the Inquest’s involvement… our favorite scholars seem to have a lot on their collective plate right now.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
According to the mursaat’s own account, they left to wait for the dragons to return to sleep and for the other races to be destroyed. Granted, they and the Forgotten had previously tried to take on Zhaitan, but the dwarves, Seers, and jotun stayed out of it. The mursaat would say they were betrayed first.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Wait, didn’t the elder dragons absorb the magic and then create their minions which now have those other areas of dragon influence? Icebrood are way south of Jormag, yet there’s only one instance of icebrood having any sort of additional dragon corruption beyond frost (conveniently, this lone icebrood was closer to Jormag, providing evidence of such).
Sorry for the nitpick.
No order is specified, but it seems HIGHLY unlikely that Primordus wouldn’t take any of his minions with him when traveling to the Ring of Fire, and if he did and the old minions didn’t change from the new magic then we’d see some old destroyers mixed in with the new death/plant destroyers.
Since we see no such destroyers, that means Primordus moved solo (seems weird af given that Elder Dragons never do that), or Primordus altered his pre-existing minions.
I’m less than sure about that. The only time a dragon’s movements have been described to us in enough detail to know whether it was accompanied by minions- Kralkatorrik in Edge of Destiny- the dragon was traveling solo. That’s a sample size of one, but still…
On the other hand, if Primordus did have minions that it considered important enough to take with it- maybe whatever is filling the Great Destroyer’s shoes these days- wouldn’t it make more sense for the dragon to keep them near it, beneath the surface? Wouldn’t the minions we see up top, expanding the borders of the domain, be new ones created on the spot? Creating mook-level minions certainly doesn’t seem trying enough to justify bringing a whole army of pre-existing ones all the way across the continent, not when your destination is a spot practically overflowing with the material, both physical and magical, to create them there.
There’s no evidence that the Blighting Trees have any sentience of their own.
On the other hand, if they were like the Pale Tree, I wouldn’t expect them to show their sapience. She needs to manifest an avatar to talk to anyone except her children, and it’s hard to see what a Blighting Tree would gain from doing so. It’s not like it’s going to be able to convince us not to blow it up once we’ve already fought through the army surrounding it.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
No worries, and I think I agree with all of your points so far. I’d certainly benefit from a scaling system, which I didn’t make clear enough before. I’m just arguing the other side of things so that any third party that comes along doesn’t get the impression that there’s a convenient one-fix-fits-all solution. There’s more things that ArenaNet can be doing to make raids more accessible, but they’re never going to make them fun for everyone, and I feel it’s important to know at what point you’re willing to concede they’ve done enough. It sounds like you do, and I can respect that.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
And don’t you dare suggest the world of warcraft “only the best raiders should get the true dungeon ending” thing because that’s total horse manure and ONLY causes problems. (by you i mean general you, not you specifically Aaron)
I definitely agree on this point. Never played WoW, but the way the Thaumanova Fractal had dialogue that was only accessible in high levels… well, if they take the difficulty level route, I hope they’ll aim for better.
On the general idea of tweaking numbers- I’m… skeptical. It will probably broaden the appeal of raids, but it wouldn’t even come close to addressing all of the concerns. There are people who oppose needing a squad of ten. There are people who oppose the mechanics of the fight due to slower computers, or living in a part of the world from the servers, or having physical reasons they can’t react in time- the only way to accommodate them without reworking the mechanics would be to lower the damage to the point that the other players can just ignore them. Even just limiting ourselves to those who need the boss to apply less pressure through DPS or spikes, or for the boss to have less toughness or health… you cited Fractals, but the efforts to scale it through stats resulted in outright unfun encounters at both the easy and hard extremes, and it took years of adjustments before they got to where it is today (which is still not universally popular).
And that’s without getting the rewards balance right, so then min-maxers don’t abuse the system, or considering whether a party of ten increases the likelihood of having a wide skill range and what that might do to everyone’s fun, or trying to anticipate how it will the PUG community will respond and adjusting accordingly… it’s a very tricky, particular QoL adjustment in a game with innumerable potential QoL adjustments, and a company that’s tended to be rather slow in making said adjustments.
I would certainly like to see it, but I can’t blame the devs for not tripping over themselves to volunteer.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
(besides the four paths of Arah, but reading through the transcripts it seems like the only bits of relevant lore were things that we kinda knew about, it was just nice to see it expressed within gw2 lore)
I do commend you for taking a balanced, objective approach even though you have strong feelings on the matter. We need more people like that in this forum. This point, though, does bear a little nitpicking- what we learned in Arah explorable, especially the Forgotten and Seer paths, were major revelations that we didn’t see coming and that shook up how we viewed some of the most basic elements of the setting. Gating that behind (at the time) the hardest content in the game did quite a bit to slow that information’s spread through the community, and relying on hearsay from individuals too caught up in the punishing fights to give the dialogue close attention also resulted in a bit of misinformation… but it also meant that for the loresters who did go out and take on the content, there was something rewarding beyond a handful of blues and greens I didn’t spare a second glance and a fraction of the tokens put towards some of the most garish armor skins in the game. It gave us an incentive to play- without that story element, and such seemingly* important ones, I would never have considered trying Arah explorable. The trade off is that accessibility- even though I want to, the Seer path is still the only base game dungeon I haven’t gotten through.
I don’t see that as a problem, per se, but as a balancing act- just like any mechanical reward, the difficulty in acquiring something imparts a degree of value and a sense of achievement in getting it, and that goes for dungeons and raids. It makes what would otherwise be a simple handout served up to you on a plate much more meaningful. I suspect that’s part of the reason people are so dissatisfied with the current approach of serving up lore by exploring cleared raid instances. We don’t just want the low hanging fruit, we also want to be able to take part in the sense of accomplishment at earning it, at emerging victorious from the content it’s gated behind… but we also want that accomplishment to not be beyond our level of ability, and we want to be able to get it without going radically outside of our comfort, whether that means having to play a build we find actively unfun, needing to trudge through practice runs with impatient and insulting teachers, or just general distaste for needing to coordinate with strangers on the internet at all. Those are all valid points, and I think the biggest problem for raiding is that there’s no happy medium or magic sweet spot that balances all of those things for all of the players all of the time. Any conceivable solution is going to leave some part of the community dissatisfied, and in that sense the current raiding formula isn’t any worse than the alternatives. Honestly, I think the only real solution is for the players to come to terms with the fact that in a game as large and diverse as an MMO, some of the rewards they want are going to come from content they don’t want… or for developers to put in the effort to make those rewards accessible in a variety of equally challenging ways that doesn’t cause the efficiency chasers to just drag the whole playerbase down a single path that they’ve identified as objectively ‘best’. Either of those options is a daunting challenge.
*Key word being seemingly. As it’s turned out, none of those revelations has been directly involved in or otherwise important to the main story arc, which goes back to what you were saying about harshly gated material needing to be side story. I think the Arah paths came close to a good balance, as did Bastion of the Penitent- the revelations felt major and rewarding for those who valued them for their own sake without leaving the people in the game for the main content feeling like they missed out. Forsaken Thicket had a harder time with this, but that was due more to a combination of how it was marketed, how quickly and thoroughly the content spread throughout the community, and how much time was spaced between the raid wings and the resumption of story content for the rest of us. The design itself, taken in isolation, was probably fine, but the presentation ended up making it seem more important than it was.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Konig, I’d love to here your thoughts on my earlier comment (as seen below)
But before the attack on the Stronghold of the Faithful, Modremoth dieing kicked off something big for the White Mantle/Bandits in the area right?
Also, the death of Modremoth poured more magic into the Bloodstone right? And was that around the time when the White Mantle managed to crack it to take pieces? of it or was that earlier? I’m uninformed about how the timelines line up.
But if my suspicions are correct then there is more plausibility that an aspect of Modremoth is in Mr Mursaat.
I think they were able to crack it before, but there was a pulse of energy associated with Mordremoth’s death which was partially responsible for Gorseval and entirely responsible for Slothasor.
This. The timeline is a bit… unclear… but between the raid and the journals, we can ascertain that:
*The Mantle drilled into the bloodstone and began harvesting shards before Zhaitan’s death. At this point bloodstone crystals also began to grow in the surrounding clearing. When Zhaitan died, ‘hundreds of new crystals’ popped up, the rate of the Stone’s growth increased, and it’s implied that the magic within grew more volatile.
*Mordremoth’s death seems to have unleashed something described as a ‘windstorm’. The blast shocked loose many of the spirits bound in the bloodstone, who seemed to largely drift east, where they formed Gorseval. It also spiked ambient magic levels, and accelerated the spread of the crack in the bloodstone, which coupled with increased mining by the Mantle’s slaves eventually led to leaks powerful enough to change the weather and cause bloodstone madness. Either the ambient magic, or the leaking bloodstone, or both, mutated Slothasor during this time.
*Wings 2 and 3- Salvation Pass and Stronghold of the Faithful- occur, seemingly in short order and just before Head of the Snake kicks off.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
As said, Foefire and Bloodstone ghosts are the minority when it comes to ghosts… even in GW2 (and not a single ghost in GW1 – of which there are very many indeed).
I wouldn’t say minority… the Foefire in particular accounts for a huge chunk. Add that with the sudden flood from the bloodstone and I wouldn’t be surprised if the two together accounted for two-thirds of the ghosts we see in GW2.
That said, the principle point here is that ghosts can quite easily form without these disasters. It’s just that the sheer scope of them skews the data.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Sex and reproduction aren’t synonymous. Social organisms tend to have diverse orientations, selected for on the benefit of complementary roles. Ant and bee colonies are for the largest part composed of asexual units that assist a heterosexual queen in the communal system of reproduction. None such thing would come about without reproduction. Because humans reproduce on a smaller scale and came thereby to operate on a different plane of intelligence, we obtained romance as a force beneficial for reproduction.
I get the feeling we’re using the same word to talk about fundamentally different relationships at this point, but let me try one more time: The benefits, and thus, the reasons to pursue, romance extend beyond reproduction. See my last post.
If sylvari manifest our social propensities, without natalist injunctions and inhibitions, they should still have our natural preference for unrelated partners.
This isn’t a binary choice between importing something wholesale or having none of it. When things manifest independently, it stands to reason that it’ll manifest similarly in some places to reflect fundamental similarities and differently in others to reflect fundamental differences. The sylvari, with the fundamental difference of infertility and the fundamental similarity of a psychology mirroring humans, would naturally manifest the social aspects of romance while not manifesting the sexual ones- including the taboo on incest.
When things are instead adopted, which I expect is largely what happened with sylvari and romance, you’re closer to the mark: things will be imported wholesale except where there’s specific reason to make a change. In this case, the sylvari have specific reason to drop the incest taboo- it doesn’t make sense within their society, and if it was left in place, they’d have no eligible partners within their own kind.
On the claim that incest is undesirable because of favoritism, again, we seem to have fundamentally different views in play. Where I grew up, it was taken as granted that a partner would take precedence over a sibling when all else is equal, and in my own family unit I made no secret of the fact that I was closer to some of my siblings than others. They didn’t, either. That didn’t negatively impact our trust- we understood that’s how things stood, adjusted our expectations accordingly, and carried on with no more than the occasional youthful tantrum that it wasn’t fair that Sibling X gave Sibling Y more of his cookies than Sibling Z. If you count that as profound disillusionment that undermined the foundation of kinship… well, you grew up very differently than me, and I congratulate you on your charmed life.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Ceara’s initial motivations were actually laid out pretty clearly when we were introduced to her backstory. “She wanted to construct systems as complex as the ones she saw in nature, to build machines as sublime as the living things she saw each and every day. Her greatest joy as a student came from testing those established systems to expose their flaws in aid of strengthening her own designs.” It wasn’t just learning for learning’s sake, but learning so that she could one-up the natural world- in asura terms, the Eternal Alchemy- itself. That fits what we saw, too: her biggest accomplishment before she switched to Scarlet were the steam creatures, the designing and building of an artificial and self-replicating form of life.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
All ghosts are:
- Foefire
- killed by bloodstone ritual
- having a destiny or duty of higher level, having something that bound them to stay (very few examples, but look at Turai Ossa)
I can’t think of, or remember any other source of ghostsThere are the ghosts around Hidden Lake in Brisban Wildlands, there are pirate ghosts in a mini-dungeon in Gendarren Fields and I think there’s another pirate ghost group in Sparkfly Fen. More recently, there’s a ghost around Ember Bay and there’s the bandit ghosts robbing the lumber camp or the ones near Noran’s Cabin in Lake Doric. I think these ghosts only had unfinished business as motive to stick around, rather than dramatic forces.
On top of that, there’s another pirate ghost group in Harathi, another ghost in Harathi who pops up just to chat about her friend who visits her tomb, another group of ghosts in Harathi who haunt Saul’s false tomb, dolyak ghosts in Harathi who terrorize bandits who disrupt their graveyard… and that’s one zone. Restless souls are everywhere in Tyria.
That said? Not a single one of those ghosts has displayed the ability to possess a new body. The very closest we’ve come are Bria’s shadow fiends, which are more properly nightmares, not ghosts- the relationship between nightmares and ghosts is unclear, but even if a ghost can become a nightmare there seems to be a fundamental difference between the two. If Glint was still around, absent some serious mesmer shenanigans, she’d be a spectral dragon speaking with an echoing version of the same voice she used in life.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Some hardcore oppose, saying that an easier mode would make Raids less exclusive.
That’s not a fair summary. There are other concerns- the dev resources needed to make it still be interesting and fun (acknowledging that tuning down numbers to directly lower difficulty typically just leaves bosses boring and unengaging), questions of how much would be lost in the tone and mechanical storytelling, and arguments over whether this story mode would still require ten players- and, again, how to adjust things if it doesn’t. It seems to me to be something that a lot of people want but have very different ideas over, and whatever form it takes, many will be left unhappy.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
From a race that doesn’t do any kind of breeding, none kind of romantic relationships follows.
But romance isn’t just a sex thing: see asexuals. It’s about emotional intimacy, it’s about building tight-knit social units, it’s about companionship, and while these are traditionally tied up in who we sleep with, removing the sexual aspect doesn’t cause all the rest to lose its value.
Also, I wouldn’t compare the lack of taboo on incest with homoromanticism, which is a minority orientation and not an exception.
I… didn’t, I don’t think. Are you referring to my reference to the dev quote?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Also, since we know no sylvari can reproduce no matter how much they try, does it matter that they’re all technically siblings?
It should matter, if it’s human bonding they’ve inherited. Aren’t sibling pairs humanly aberrant, regardless of whether they are reproductive?
I don’t recall anyone saying they ‘inherited’ human notions of romance. That quote above lays out that they take a pretty different tack, and more generally speaking, it’s so common for non-human races to have human-like psychology, love included, in both fantasy and sci-fi, that it’s not something anyone feels a need to justify anymore. The things that set them apart are almost always built around specific exceptions, and this is just one of them- it’s accepted these days that the taboo against sibling relationships is rooted in the dangers on in-breeding. With a race that doesn’t have that danger, it follows that they wouldn’t have that taboo.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Dev answers. In particular: “Raids are the only place where we can tackle darker themes or tie up loose threads that don’t fit in the main narrative. In this case we decided to provide some closure to a historical character who was sometimes referenced in lore, but almost never shown. . . Raids are essentially side stories, and while they may sometimes share themes with other content they are not part of the core Guild Wars 2 narrative. Because of that, we can tackle darker or more mature topics that don’t fit elsewhere in the game: failure, guilt, betrayal, and struggles for redemption.”
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Considering the chains are magical, not physical- they fade out throughout the fight and we have to reforge them by killing monoliths- I don’t see any reason they couldn’t have been binding Abaddon’s essence. No body required.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Nope. Dwayna is air. Water goes to Lyssa, and before her to Abaddon.
What ritualists and rangers do are very different- I’d be inclined to say that they’re entirely separate, if it weren’t for a line of profession lore in the GW1 days- but neither is represented by the dragons. Zhaitan can be linked to necromancers, but almost all of what he does would fall under death magic or curses- there’s precious little there dealing with spirits. Mordremoth, likewise, seems to have specifically dealt in ‘plant magic’, not exhibiting any of the spiritual aspects or harmony with fauna that is also included in nature magic. Instead of saying nature magic was within his sphere, it’d be more accurate to say that nature magic and his sphere partially overlapped.
Mordremoth was linked to Mind by the gods and the Priory, and he came close enough that I’d give him the mesmer’s domination magic, but there was no signs of chaos and not so much as a single illusion. Like Zhaitan, he might get partial credit, but there are extensive parts of the mesmer profession that were beyond his purview.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
@Xenon Like Konig said, none of the dragons is associated with ‘healing/light/protection magic’ that guardians use. There’s also ‘spirit magic’ (different kinds used by ritualists and rangers), ‘Mists magic’ (revenants and possibly ritualists), ‘astral/celestial magic’ (druids and a select few Canthans), blood magic (necromancers), illusion magic (mesmers), and possibly chaos magic (also mesmers) and air magic (elementalists), depending on how you feel about some of what the Branded and Kralkatorrik do. That’s just the kinds available to playable professions past and present- the Forgotten had a whole kind of magic that was explicitly dragon-proof, for instance. In the big picture, it seems like the major attributes of the Elder Dragons represents a pretty small slice of mostly elemental magic.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
1. Yes. There’ve been a few places, Omadd’s machine being the most prominent, where we’ve been given the number six.
2. … kind of? ‘Spheres of influence/magic’ have only been presented to us in the context of attributes of a dragon, so there’s not really any meaning to the phrase in other contexts right now. It’s a little like asking if all the faces of dragons are attached to dragons.
If you mean kinds of magic more generally, the answer is probably no. There are ways of dividing magic that don’t correspond well to the dragons- the four bloodstone schools, for instance, or the seven or so spellcasting professions.
3. Unknown, but the common assumption is it’s because of the bloodstone. At the end of their last cycle, all of the remaining magic- that is, dragon food- was gathered up and locked away in an object that is believed to have been on the Tyrian continent, so it stands to reason that they’d head that way to look for it.
4. Not clearly known, but a lot of the language used suggests so- the various sources that say the dragons ‘wipe out all life/civilization/magic’. It’s unclear whether there’s specific evidence pointing to that or if it’s just the assumption of Priory scholars extrapolating from what they see in the Tyrian continent.
At any rate, there’s no reason we know of that they wouldn’t have spread out, and even now one or two (Bubbles, maybe Kralkatorrik) are outside the boundaries of the in-game map.
5. They were definitely made by the Seers. Currently, the lore is that the version from GW1 was a human myth that proved false, kind of like how they believed their gods created Tyria. That said, while we don’t know how the Seers created the bloodstone, the Forgotten say it required ‘divine resources’, meaning there may still be room for the human gods to have played a role.
Needless to say, this is one of the more hotly disputed topics on this forum.
6. It leaks out of sleeping dragons, who then eat it when they wake up. We don’t know where it came from originally. More recently, the levels of ley magic have surged because killing dragons (and exploding bloodstones) seems to release their contents all at once.
7. Into the dragon, from where the dragon can use it (most notably in the creation of minions) or hold onto it until they fall asleep, after which it slowly leaks back out.
8. Unknown. We do have examples of it happening outside of dragons- imps, for instance, and it seems that any dragon minion can do it regardless of what they were in life. As far as we can tell, though, it’s just a different kind of resource that some Tyrian creatures are able to take advantage of. It’s a bit like asking why humans can’t digest cellulose.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
We know she encountered it in Orr, but that doesn’t mean it was native. Combine that with the fact that thorn wolves look just as lush as regular hounds, just with darker coloration, I’m not sold on it being death magic.
If I had to guess… we know that Faolain and Caithe were the first sylvari to travel abroad, we know that the Dream is able to create copies of what sylvari send back to it, and if Caithe’s explanation of the White Stag is to be believed, it’s even capable of creating manifestations of sylvari emotion. Put all that together, and Caithe and Faolain’s trip to Orr is probably the first time the sylvari race, and possibly the Dream (depending on its exact nature), were exposed to the full extent of dragon corruption, and what the world would look like if they get their way. My bet would be that the Nightmare is either the Dream reflecting the sylvari’s emotional response, the bleakness and darkness of a dragon-dominated world (possibly responding more to Zhaitan’s shadow aspect than the death one), or reacting against it, lashing out violently against something it’s proven to have an antipathy for, or a bit of both- the same way being sick is often as much about the body’s overzealous reaction to an infection as it is about the damage from the bacteria/virus/parasite itself. After that, it might be as much about associations as anything else- when Cadeyrn’s Court, which advocated a philosophy of embracing the darker side of the sylvari nature, also embraced this force, linking the two in their own heads might’ve also linked them in the Dream.
(That said? I suspect I’m wrong. My track record with guessing ANet’s story direction has been very spotty. They’re more often interested in a twist they’ve deliberately kept secret or in something that makes thematic sense than they are in what logically follows from the evidence that we currently have access to.)
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Soundless sylvari were a thing looong before S2. But.
By all indications, the Nightmare is indeed a metaphysical something or other. The thing to remember about sylvari is that they’re not just leafy humans. That goes for their biology, that goes for their outlook, and that goes double for their nature and minds. This is a race that is shaped by enigmatic, poorly understood mystical forces that have direct access to and interaction with their heads. Nightmare isn’t just an ideology, it’s a force, a corrupting one. You’ll hear sylvari talking about how they’re able to sense it, feel it, and those who embrace it are warped and changed in mentality. That’s the point of the Court’s torture- not to brainwash, not to engage some human psychological phenomena, but to break their will so they give in to the power of a Thing that we know precious little about at this point. That doesn’t mean that they’re especially vulnerable to all outside influence, but anything that involves the Dream/Nightmare goes beyond just knowledge and opinions and ideology.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(but then why did the gods call it bloodstone before Doric’s passing)
As far as we know, they didn’t. The PC/Priory refers to the pre-Six rock as the Bloodstone, but that’s just because it’s the same rock as later got the name. No different to the way we call mountain ranges the Rockies or Himalayas even when talking about the period before there were any humans around to name them.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It’s funny how Asura do age the fastest though. I don’t know the exact numbers, but at least within two years after birth an Asura is at school, like a pre-college.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they age faster, just that they trust their young to handle advanced notions earlier. Charr actually get sent off to the fahrar younger than asura do. Also, I’ve never seen that two years figure… do you have a source?
For your list, I’m not sure what you’re trying to say… if you mean how long they live, you’ve got it almost backwards. It goes norn with the longest lives (although they don’t tend to make it all of the way), then asura, then humans. We don’t know where charr fit in, but I’d expect they’d be about as long as humans, or perhaps a little shorter. If you mean how fast they age, we don’t have any data to rank them by, except that iirc charr can walk from an earlier age than humans.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I don’t think this is plausible. While there is that one event in Wayfarer Foothills that has a norn set up a new statue for the grawl to worship, no one ever tells the grawl “This is your new god! Worship it!” It has to be a grawl shaman to persuade his followers to worship a god – which is far from a difficult task. But a single bloodstone shard wouldn’t be enough to get grawl to worship it. It either needs to be a statue of some sort, or some other impressive display. If the other bloodstones are anything like the one we saw back in the Maguuma Jungle in GW1, it’s not that impressive and the grawl wouldn’t worship it.
If a Son of Svanir really wanted to turn grawl to the power of Jormag, they either keep making dragon statues (which a few tribes do worship), or just turn them all to Icebrood. They wouldn’t need a bloodstone, and really don’t need an elaborate plot to convince them.
I’m not not talking about a shard, I’m talking about a full on bloodstone
A 50 meter radius giant disc with red glowing patterns and giant spires of bloodstone crystal. A grawl’s gotta be enticed by it.
I was considering it because something similar happened in GW1, where a group of Ettin.. well, I wouldn’t say worship, but really like a bloodstone, hidden deep in the Sparkfly Fen. (I think it was there, at least)I was just thinking that a bloodstone would be much more up Jormag’s lane than a bunch of statues, as the bloodstone already contains and regulates so much magic.
Maybe, but they’d be better off convincing the grawl to worship Jormag, or one of Jormag’s lieutenants, and then have the shaman order them to commit sacrifices. Or the shaman could make the sacrifices himself. There’s no need for grawl middlemen, and as minions go, they leave much to be desired.
On the bigger question of Jormag worshipers using a bloodstone at all- first they need to find one. One’s buried under the Steamspurs, well south of anywhere we’ve seen the Sons operating. Another, last we saw it, was in the Ring of Fire, which means it’s right on top of Primordus now. The other two we have no leads on, but if the dispersal pattern holds, they’re at the bottom of the Unending Ocean somewhere, even farther away. And that’s without considering the fan theory that there’s something about the bloodstones that prevents them from being eaten by dragons. They were originally built to keep magic safe from the dragons, after all, and we’ve seen that Zhaitan didn’t consume the bloodstone shards he obtained. Mordremoth also ignored the one in the Fen, even though it was well within his reach… although that, perhaps, is because he didn’t want to take on the Mantle before he’d subdued the opposition from the Itzel and Nuhoch. On the other hand, that didn’t stop him from provoking every major nation on Tyria by attacking their leaders…
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Then we get to the reason that all magic isn’t entirely Dragon magic. I mean we have many cycles of this happening, so what happens that makes it so the magic in the world doesn’t corrupt individuals that use it. In this situation we are told that certain Dragon magic opposes other Dragon magic. My theory is that it isn’t a situation of magic cancelling out magic, but more a situation of the corruption cancelling out the corruption. But it is specific, it has to be the corruption of ice magic that gets negated when mingled with the corruption of fire magic. The magic itself is unharmed, it is merely whatever is done to the magic that causes it to become corrupted that gets removed. I would say that this is why Primordus moved to collect Zhaitan’s magic, this is possibly the only way that he can imbue his minions with that extra boost. I am somewhat confused, then, by why Mordremoth would use Death Magic, like Taimi speculated, but it could be possible that they could channel the magic in such a way through their minions so that it doesn’t interact with the opposing magic. No matter what, though, this is something that ArenaNet needs to explain.
It’s an interesting way of looking at things, but how do you account for magic being drawn directly from the sleeping dragon? We know there’s been at least two instances of it happening, but the old asura gate network didn’t seem to be compromised by Primordus’ influence, and someone certainly would have noticed if the bloodstones had the risen taint… unless one of the purposes of the keystone nobody taps into is to contain that corruption. But why use Zhaitan to strengthen the stone if they had to lock away all the power they got from him?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Wouldn’t Blaine being undead break lore? I can’t think of any naturally occurring undead beings in GW2.
It doesn’t mean it can’t happen in the setting. There seemed to be a few in GW1.
(Although this theory seems like a very long shot indeed.)
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Ghosts of Ascalon was my personal favorite. It has the best characters (nothing exceptional, but still better than the other two) and is chock-full of lore. I know some people don’t like the graceless exposition dumps, but if you think of it as much as a crash course in the GW2 setting as a novel, it holds up alright.
Edge of Destiny… honestly, it felt poorly written to me, and by an author who had a different idea of what Tyria was like than the other official sources. There’s a whole host of little things that seem inconsistent with the setting, and that trips me up even worse than the characters who don’t seem to have any clear motivations or nuances beyond the way they argue with each other. That said, those characters are very important. It’s the only novel that gets into the backstories of major NPCs, and I’ve heard some people say it’s almost required reading for the dungeon story modes.
Sea of Sorrows has the best ‘lore’, in my opinion the best writing style, and it feels the most like a story set seamlessly in Tyria, but on the other hand the main character didn’t interest me much and didn’t undergo any important character growth, and the plot itself seemed weird at points, especially towards the end. It was also less of a direct prologue to the game like the other two were, and more a ‘slice of history’ experience. I enjoyed it, but mostly because I’m already deeply invested in the lore. Your mileage may vary.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
More generally… I don’t buy the idea that either the content is in a raid or it wouldn’t exist at all.
That’s fair. Maybe I was being too emphatic with my response last night.
My concern is that, whatever form we get additional story content in, ANet’s policy for the last two-and-a-half years has been that it won’t be the main narrative. The Story Journal model has been kept far too tightly scoped, including no more than three or so plot threads at a time and only including peripheral elements where they can directly drive one of those threads along. (Even there, the core biconics cast monopolized those roles until S3.)
If there had been space in their schedule, resources to spare, and a priority placed on incorporating Saul, I think Saul would’ve been incorporated. The fact that he wasn’t indicates that at least one of those factors was absent. With dungeons ditched, and Fractals only now receiving ‘new’ content… well, in Stein’s words, “Raids are the only place where [they] can… tie up loose threads that don’t fit in the main narrative” for the foreseeable future.
You’re right, it didn’t have to be that way, but now that it is I think it’s more realistic to ask for the existing model to be tweaked until it’s accessible (the discussion between you and Sykper). Belial’s insistence that the loose threads we care about need to be in the main story would just push off their resolution indefinitely. Perhaps there would’ve been a point years down the line when they could include Saul… or perhaps not. it’s not a gamble I’d like to take.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
My point is they’re not cutting anything out of the main plot. This is stuff that just wasn’t going to show up in the Living World anyway, because there’s no room for it without derailing an episode. If we hadn’t got raiding, nobody would’ve met Xera or heard about the White Mantle trying to resurrect Lazarus until Out of the Shadows. Nobody would’ve found out what happened to Saul, and that’s what irks me about that argument. It’s not a choice between some of the players or all of the players having access to the story. It’s a choice between some of the players or none of the players. If I have to choose between getting Livia in a raid, or just not seeing her in GW2, I’ll take the raid, any day.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Saul is not a side story. He is the reason the White Mantle are a thing. His fate could have been used in a great way. He could have been used to undermine everything the White Mantle stand for. But nope. Just lock it away in a raid.
But how much of that is relevant? The Inquest and the Flame Legion and the Sons of Svanir are also all things, but we have no idea who founded them. That doesn’t mean we’re missing out; it means that characters who (were believed to have) died before our PCs were even born aren’t part of the current conflicts. Likewise, undermining the White Mantle would be beating a dead horse at this point. They failed their big attack, and their leader is dead- they haven’t been wiped out completely, but in ANet’s style of storytelling, that still amounts to a billboard saying “We’re Setting Them Aside And Moving On!” The only faction of the group left in play is supposedly on our side.
There wasn’t room in the story to linger on the Mantle and try to undermine their theological support, not when they’re only roughly one-third of the plot ANet has to get through this season. If Saul hadn’t been relegated to the raid, he’d just have gone the same way as Malyck, gathering dust on the shelf where they put loose threads with bleak prospects.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
To interject a bit of fresh, if still anecdotal, perspective: my guild isn’t just complaining about needing ten people, they’re complaining about needing ten people with complimentary gear sets and builds, the coordination groundwork to communicate clearly and concisely, the free time to read up on mechanics and the skill to execute their roles, the patience to fail repeatedly over stupidly small mistakes until they got it right, the schedules to allow the full team to be on together long enough to stop failing, AND the hardware and geographical locations to make lag and disconnects an infrequent vexation. Despite those barriers, they still managed to get a raiding team for a while, but the never got to the point of reliably beating Vale Guardian, and they never got close to taking Gorseval. They burned out. Now, I hear the new wings ease you in better… but we also had substantial turnover during the content drought after HoT (the changes non-raiders got amounted to polishing content we’d already been repeating over and over for months), and most of our original team has stopped playing. It’d take an announcement of a more accessible mode to spur us to risk trying again, whether you call it Easy or Story is semantics… but we would go for it, and other members of the guild would flock to it as well. The raiding population in the microcosm of my guild would increase exponentially.
On the other hand, I personally would play it once or twice, and then not bother again unless someone else needed help running through. The story content is the chief draw for me, and once I’d consumed it, no shiny back piece or mini that wants me to make twenty more runs is going to draw me in. I’m not the kind of audience raids should be geared towards, because I’m not going to stick around. Some of my guildmates would wander off with me, and some would stick around, depending on the rewards, but they wouldn’t play for the challenge, and I don’t believe they’d make the jump up to the hard difficulty in any significant numbers.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
A lot of people already headcanon that when you’re raiding, you’re not actually playing the part of the Pact Commander, but some random Pact soldier or mercenary that just happens to be present. You could consider a ‘story mode’ for the raids to essentially be “no, really, this IS the Pact Commander and allies of comparable power, not a bunch of nobodies well outside their depth”.
To be fair, it’s not entirely headcanon. IIRC, at the start of Stronghold of the Faithful Glenna attributes the first two wings to a band of mercenaries who happened along.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
We know he was in on the plot to kill the Queen, but so was Caudecus. That doesn’t make them Separatists. From how quickly they killed Uzolan, actually, I was left with the impression that they didn’t consider him one of their own.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
When you do something like this right, all of the elements come together to deliver the story – and that includes the fights themselves. Take any piece of that away (entering a cleared instance is taking big chunks of it away) and the result is considerably different than it was likely intended.
Again, the medium dictates how the story is delivered to a degree, and in this case, the medium centers in large part around the encounters – how the bosses look, feel and interact with the player (leaving the player with a sense of being the hero), making them integral to the story.
I don’t raid, but I enjoyed the cleared instance, and I felt that I got all the important bits from it. I was also able to live with YouTube videos to experience Forsaken Thicket and I’d certainly play an easy mode raid if there was one. I don’t really have a horse in this race.
This line of thought interests me, though. If it’s true that every aspect of the raid adds to the atmosphere and story- and I believe it does- doesn’t that include the group play? The daunting difficulty? I admit I’ve not paid much attention, but my understanding is that the mechanics of the bosses usually require the team to divvy up tasks. For the systems that you can’t expect a single player to handle, regardless of difficulty, there’s really only one option: remove them, dumb the fight down. Wouldn’t it lose something then? Likewise, would a boss that a single player can beat leave the same feeling as one that took ten heroes to bring down? Would a boss that you can beat while playing poorly convey the same tone, even if you don’t think you can play any better?
I think you’re on to something when you say the encounters are an integral piece of the raid, but I wonder if reducing them might not have the same effect as not experiencing them at all.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
- so they gods dont answers the Prayers? i hinted on the example of this one Priestess of Grenth who can help you twice (dependent on witch decisions you make) by praying to Grenth to summon some spirits – either this is terrible planed and a horrible paradox, or one side is lying
I’m with you on this one. There does seem to be a bit of a contradiction between the devs saying the gods have been quiet for 250 years on one hand, and what Priestess Rhie and the racial elites can do on the other. There are possible explanations (maybe the gods only grant blessings now, instead of sending an avatar you could chat with like in GW1, or maybe they only aid the high priests and greatest heroes and ignore everyone else, or maybe what Rhie and our characters can do doesn’t come from the gods at all), but in the end it feels like us trying to fill in a gap that shouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t mind a more direct dev response on this.
- well and to grand grand … mother/father influence on our life .. i guess you didnt really understood the feudal-system: IT WORKS THAT WAY, i mean as INGAME examples: – you set Salma on the throne of Kyrtha because her ancestors were kings 250 years ago or something (so Queen Jenna bases her rule on a around 800-1000 years old bloodline)
Right. That’s how it works… for nobles. There’s nothing specifying that our characters were nobles, either before or after the events of the game.
so Thakery is still a noble and WHY shouldn´t Salma made our Characters nobles after their years as Adventures – for their deeds to all of Tyria (and makeing her Queen (in revolutions it often gone this way))
As Rognik already pointed out, Logan isn’t a noble, and Gwen wasn’t a noble. She says her father was a warrior and adventurer, and we actually meet her mother, Sarah; she’s the village healer for Ashford. I don’t know what you mean about the clothes- they seem colorful, but not particularly fancy- and I don’t remember any orders to help her… we just give her a hand and let her tag along with us because she’s a nice kid.
There’s no reason that our GW1 characters shouldn’t have been made a noble by Salma, and in fact I know that several people roleplay just that. ANet left it open, though, so we can decide for ourselves what happened, and I’m grateful for that. None of my Tyrian characters would’ve been happy as nobles. If yours would have been, who says their descendants aren’t important? Maybe the branch that the GW2 character comes from is only a ‘lesser’ noble in the Salma District, but 250 years is a long time for branching out. Maybe the main line of descent gave us Caudecus Beetlestone, second only to the Queen. Maybe one of their descendants even married into the royal line, and Jennah has a little bit of your GW1 hero’s blood. I just don’t see why they would mention it.
The bottom line of your complaint, though, seems to be that GW2 was made to be a different game than GW1- and that’s true. You also seem to like GW1 better, and there’s nothing wrong with that. GW1 had a darker atmosphere and, imo, more interesting background lore and cultures. It also, ironically, had a more personal story. GW2 is explicitly more lighthearted and optimistic, with a stronger together theme to the plot, allies who are valued more for their quirks than their capabilities, and a story that has us reacting to events we observe more often than pursuing our own goals. If that’s not your cup of tea, that’s fine… just remember that ANet was trying to do something different, not just do GW1 over again with fancier graphics, and many people do like what they’ve accomplished here.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The story mode of the original CM dungeon kinda hinted at the Separatist connection already- he complains about the Queen working with the charr, and NPCs mention that he’s been seen in Ebonhawke and with the Separatist captain who was the final boss.
It also tied up his fate- we catch him pounding on a false wall in the basement and asking his conspirator buddies to let him in, and we watch them kill him. Outlived his usefulness, I suppose.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
He does, although last I checked it hadn’t been well-documented on the wiki.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
We’ve had a hint, but nothing explicit one way or the other.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Ooh, estimates and math. This could be fun.
Going through the book again- there’s quite a bit of room for error, trying to derive an exact span of time from loose descriptions of day and night, but I loosely guesstimate that the trip from the Ebonhawke sewers to the Viewing Hill took about 35 hours of travel. (This is without trying to account for what summer at Ascalon’s latitude does to the length of a day, but since they traveled a good distance during day and night, it shouldn’t make a huge difference.) This includes travel through some patches of rough terrain, and travel after periods of combat and on little sleep… but most of the passages are about how the going was easy and they made good time, so assuming they made as straight a line as they could, I’m going to be very generous and give an upper estimate of 100 miles, and a lower estimate of around 70.
Comparing that to the size of the in-game map, the part of Tyria we can see would be no more than 771 miles to a side. That works out to an upper estimate of 594,522 square miles (not quite the size of Mongolia, four times the size of Montana) and a lower estimate of 291,316 (about the size of Chile or Zambia, or two Montanas).
That is a massive range, and it’s based on plenty of assumptions… but even the upper end still leaves us with pretty small countries by modern standards. To compare to drax’s findings, that’d put the inhabited parts of Kryta that we see sitting between 19,118 square miles (smaller than West Virginia, a little larger than Slovakia, 1.62 Belgiums) and 9,368 (about the size of New Hampshire, smaller than Macedonia, .79 Belgiums).
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Those quotes aren’t him agreeing- not saying no is NOT the same as consent- but:
Maybe, just maybe, he’d be surprised because Saul believed that the followers who had converted to the White Mantle’s faith in defiance of more than a millennia of human religion, who were fighting in Kryta’s defense in its most desperate hour, who had joined in on a suicide mission in order to secure the futures of their families, their country, and their faith- maybe Saul believed these people were worthy?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
On ancestry- my great-great-great-great-add a few more greats grandmother was a president’s aunt. That fact has… just about zero significance to my life. It’s not even something I’d know about if my grand-uncle weren’t a genealogy buff. The status of an ancestor even a hundred years back, let along two hundred and fifty, very rarely carries down unless there’s a system in place to ensure it- say, the nobility, which our GW1 characters were never indicated to be part of.
Even Logan Thackery didn’t get any favors from his ancestry except the family name. Yes, the man the the foremost Captain of the Seraph now, but he was a mercenary and a gladiator before that, and he is very much not a noble. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right skillset, and Gwen had nothing to do with that.
I agree that ANet probably went too far in not recognizing our deeds from GW1, but it’s not exactly a plot hole. Humans were never statue-builders the way charr and norn are, and Ascalon had more important things on their mind than our deeds. The only thing we did that would get us a monument in Kryta is help win their civil war… but there are no monuments to the Krytan Civil War, not even for NPCs. They were given a private graveyard, and the leaders have things named after them, but we weren’t a leader and they can’t put our name on a tombstone.
On the monk- we had this explained to us in interviews before release. It’s been a long time, but from what I remember, the profession became unpopular for two reasons:
-The gods stopped answering prayers. Yes, their spells still worked, but this was a profession that defined itself by its relation to the gods, to the point where they called those spells prayers instead of magic. The power was still there, but the identity was broken.
-Other professions developed their own more potent means of healing, rendering monks less useful. Being able to heal others really well doesn’t count for much when the others don’t need healing.
That left monks without their religious identity, with their value in protective and smiting magic… in other words, guardians.
On the gods- we’re not likely to get an answer to that, because saying what the gods have been doing these last couple hundred years would be a major spoiler to any potential storylines that would bring them back into GW2, and lock them into an answer years before they need to be. That said, we have been given plenty of hints in interviews, and Narcemus summed them up nicely. The devs suggest that the gods were doing more harm than good, so they wanted humans to learn to get by without them.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Saul faithfully agreed. The Unseen Ones descended on the encampment, repelling wave after wave of invaders. The Charr invasion failed that day, and the surviving Charr fled back beyond the Shiverpeaks.
First: that’s Durmand’s flavor text referring to what we’d just seen with our own eyes. Where the two disagree, I know which one I’d believe.
Second: That passage says a price, not the death of his followers, and then goes on: “The Unseen Ones had made a promise, and they demanded their due. Kryta was safe, and Saul’s most devoted servants could continue to worship and serve their new gods. The rest of the witnesses would have to die, however, for they had seen the true power and glory of the Unseen Ones. As Saul watched his followers struck down, he realized his gods were neither good nor wise.” Regardless of whether you believe the mission or the book, it says the same thing: Saul’s reaction made it clear he didn’t understand what the mursaat meant until it was too late.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Saul never accepted it. Reading through the mission, the sequence of events went like this:
*Saul and his followers are stranded behind enemy lines, desperately outnumbered, with the fury of the entire charr army breathing down their necks.
*With no hope of winning on their own, they pray to their gods for deliverance.
*Miraculously, the gods appear- faith rewarded.
*The gods promise, in clear terms, to not only win the battle but end the invasion altogether.
*The gods make some ominous, unclear warning about a price to be paid, without specifying what they mean.
*The gods then call Saul specifically out, breaking whatever line of thought he may have begun.
*The gods draw Saul’s attention to a gift of great power.
*The charr descend upon them and the battle begins.
*After wave after wave, the enemy finally runs out of battle to send.
*The gods turn around and butcher Saul’s followers without another word.
Imagine the rollercoaster of emotions there, and then the fight afterwards, the mingled elation and exhaustion at the end. Imagine going from that to seeing your comrades-in-arms cut down by the very force you’d believed saved them.
There was no ‘deal’. There was no chance for Saul to agree, or object, or even process what they were talking about. The mursaat rushed him right on past that. They didn’t lay out the terms for him to consider, or even coerce him into agreeing the way drax has been saying. Optimus Caliph straight up fast-talked him past the point and then moved right back into dazzling him with a sign that divine deliverance was at hand.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Not so with Dorian, Hablion, and Thommis. In Prophecies we see that they’re fanatics who’d happily offer up Mantle lives to the Unseen Ones’ service.
They don’t know that. They take Saul and leave the others without either of them saying how they feel about the mursaat.
You make a huge assumption that the mursaat know something they don’t know – that Saul will reject them while Dorian, Hablion and Thommis will accept them and their brutality. Nowhere is it established before Saul is taken that the other three are more willing to co-operate than Saul would be.
As far as I know, and correct me if I’m wrong, draxynnic has completely fabricated a super power that the mursaat are not established to have anywhere in the lore – the ability to detect whether a person will kill an innocent in cold blood.
Your argument doesn’t hold water because it’s simply not established at the time (to either the audience or the mursaat) how Saul or anyone else will react to the mursaat.
You are, perhaps, correct that they couldn’t know those three would kill for them- but it’s not at all a stretch to believe that the mursaat knew they were the most devoted of the group with Saul. From just the snippets of conversation that we have in the Bonus Mission Pack, it’s clear that Hablion, Thommis, and Dorian are true believers, while Bryen and Gisinger believe but also have split loyalties to their families and loved ones, and Jaemes and Rebekah are pretty open about only being along to help their countrymen. Of those categories, which would you think is more likely to perform human sacrifice at their gods’ command? And unless you are fabricating a super power of the mursaat to hear prayers and teleport across vast distances to answer them, we know that Optimus and the rest were close at hand, and so easily could’ve overheard the same things we did.
As for how those three were judged more loyal than Saul- that’s simple. We see Saul react to the death of his men, and needless to say, he took it poorly. The mursaat were on hand and would’ve had to be blind to miss the kind of reactions we’re shown in the Bonus Mission Pack and the end of the raid. It didn’t have to be premeditated, when the signs were there to respond to on the fly. The other three? No such response. Sure, they seem surprised to see Saul taken… but they still don’t try to intervene, and while the actual killing was being done, they stood impassively in the background and watched.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Even if you do genuinely agree at first, seeing how it’s implemented can change your mind. In particular, seeing who a supposed god considers to be worthy or unworthy says a lot about the god’s true character: a god who deems a trio of sociopaths to be ‘worthy’ while condemning more altruistic individuals as ‘unworthy’ is not one that is likely to be benevolent or kind themselves. Saul could well have accepted that some of the group would be killed for the greater good, or if it was simply a ‘will not survive out full presence’ thing (gods using avatars that are less destructive to their followers is a thing, after all, so just because the mursaat ‘appeared’ doesn’t mean that they can limit the collateral damage of a full manifestation) but seeing which ones were killed made it clear that the greater good was not on their minds.
I think you’re overstating that point. While I agree that they proved to be overzealous after they took over (and Thommis was just a piece of work in general), that wouldn’t necessarily be evident before they had power to abuse. Before the attack, Saul specifically called those three out as his most trusted followers, and charged them with taking over the cause should anything happen to him.
That said? There’s a world of difference between deaths caused by inaction, deaths caused incidentally as the unavoidable consequence of an action with a different purpose, and deaths caused actively and intentionally- with a dose of sadism thrown in, since it looked like Saul’s men died in extreme pain. It’d derail the thread to get into the philosophical arguments, and it doesn’t have to make a difference to you, Slowpoke, but suffice to say that there is not a widely adhered-to ethical model in the world that claims you are justified in taking someone’s life so long as you saved it at an earlier point. Quite a few people believe that, and all it takes to make Saul’s reaction make sense is to suppose that he was one of them.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Can’t speak for Magdaer’s status, but the smith is most likely Beigarth, the norn’s most famous blacksmith, a friend of Eir’s, and experienced in working with unique materials. He’s most likely either back in Hoelbrak or working with the Pact as it rebuilds.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Rank and file White Mantle can be seen fighting alongside Mursaat in Prophecies. Why would they be ok with being seen by those low level troops?
Are they, though? We can see them, because that that point in the story we’ve Ascended, but can the Mantle grunts? As far as I know, there’s nothing that indicated that.
As for the mursaat’s reasoning, it might simply be a wish to foster the cult mentality. If only the most devoted ever see the Unseen Ones, that’s impetus for the rest of the flock to be devoted. If a random member who just happened to be in the right place in the right time, more devoted to their country and family than their gods, was given the same privilege, it erodes the mystique. It makes the gods more approachable, more personable, which runs counter to the image they wanted to project.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Could these clues point towards Livia? It’s the only plot left that makes sense for her to be in. She didn’t turn up during either raid and that’s all resolved, she didn’t turn up during the attack on DR nor to take down Caudecus and the White Mantle, so why else did they deliberately reveal her to be alive during Sea of Sorrows if not to participate in one of those plots?
While I would like to see Livia make an appearance in GW2, I’m not sold on this line of reasoning. The same could be applied to Evennia, or Malyck, and the answer for both of them could also apply to Livia- at the time ANet meant for the character to be involved in a future story, but when the time came it was outside the scope of what they had to work with. GW1 ended, HoT was very tightly scripted, and the White Mantle plot now seems concluded after a raid and two episodes, conceivably too little time for the devs to introduce what would be a completely new character to much of the player base. They’ve made their position very clear in the past: if they don’t feel they can give a plot the justice it deserves, they won’t do it.
There are too many links to Seraph, Shining Blade and Krytans, a strong interest in protecting Kryta and probably the Queen, an interest in Logan and a dislike of the White Mantle. The Order of Whispers mention is the odd one out, not the norm so I’m thinking E has contacts in the Order, not that he/she is a member. Livia fits most of the criteria and there are explanations for the criteria she doesn’t fit (mostly, magic).
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s nothing stopping E from being in a position of authority in the Seraph and a member of the Order of Whispers at the same time- that’s pretty much the Whisper MO. A different letter also addressed it’s bearer as Agent, so it’s possible that all the Seraph with letters are Whispers as well. (Or it might just be a common term that I’m reading too much into.) The only thing we can be confident of at this point is that he has ties in both organizations, and conceivably the Shining Blade as well.
I’m more interested in the “I’ll get there as soon as I can.” It might come to nothing, but I’ll be keeping an eye out in DR to see if any prominent NPC crops up soon. For that matter, Anise is absent at the start of the siege, and is displeased to see Demmi. We know E advised the Whispers not to involve her…
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
What I think might happen is that we’ll try to locate Lazarus’s final aspect, the one that was swapped and hidden by Caudecus (assuming Xera found the fifth and last aspect and that the reborn mursaat is 4/5 complete), to possibly blackmail him.
According to the dialogue, anyway, that aspect was in Caudecus’ desk, and we already have it and are sending it along to the Shining Blade to find out if it really is a bit of mursaat essence.
There are a couple of big questions here, and any meaningful speculation is going to require us to make some assumptions about them that may well prove false. First off, the ritual. Caudecus, the player character, and apparently even Xera believed that all the aspects would be required to revive Lazarus, but is that true? We saw him getting on just fine with only part of himself in GW1, but there were some pretty substantial differences there- now his aspects are imbued in objects, not people; it’s White Mantle who were performing the ritual, not Lazarus himself, and it might not even be the same process; and there’s no telling how the corruption would’ve played into things. For that matter, what would have happened if they’d succeeded? If Lazarus had to split into aspects to survive, why would a couple hundred years sealed inside a lamp change that? Did the Mantle even think that far ahead, or were they too fixated on having their god back? Did swallowing a bloodstone prove to be the pill needed to cure him? Whether or not we’re dealing with Lazarus, and if so, what state Lazarus is in depends quite a bit on those answers.
The other wild card is Bauer. Caudecus only had his word that the aspect was swapped, but according to Bauer’s personal journal, he was playing Caudecus false. I’d prefer not to think a man would lie in his journal- that introduces a level of uncertainty I’m uncomfortable with- but the alternative is that our cliffhanger is nothing but a red herring easily disproved after some careful thought, and I’d like to give ANet more credit than that. So which is it? Was Bauer playing Caudecus false? Xera? Both? Is the aspect we recovered from the manor genuine or not?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)