Guild Wars 2

If the sylvari and the Pale Tree’s purpose was to rejuvenate the world after the destruction wrought by the other dragons – laying the seeds, so to speak, of new life which could grow to feed the dragons when they next woke up – why would the sylvari be awake now?

Sylvari are out in Tyria, living in the cities and among the people supposedly to be destroyed by the Elder Dragons. They may be incorruptible, but they can still die, and do. The dragons have barely got started yet; how many sylvari do you think will be left when they’re done? Would the Tree survive the fires of Primordus if he swept through Maguuma?

No, I don’t think your theory is very likely. If it was the case the Pale Tree should still be in hibernation, ready to sprout in the ashes of the world. I suppose it’s possible that that was the seed’s original purpose, but I doubt it. I just can’t see a benevolent Elder Dragon, even if it’s sort of an enabler for the others – they don’t work like that.

Problem is, if the Elder Dragons were doing it all themselves then they would have to be nerfed. We would have to stand a chance with Elder Dragons rampaging across the land, actively trying to destroy us…yet somehow not managing it until we had researched them, gathered an army, made some new tools and decided to go after them.

I like to think of it as working on the time scale of gods. I don’t think the Elder Dragons are lurking in the back so much as they just haven’t got around to destroying us yet. They work on cycles of thousands of years; waking up and bending your will to something takes a while. It might be decades for us, but that’s probably not long in Elder Dragon years.

It’s such a can of worms I’ve been avoiding making the comparison for most of this thread. We should perhaps try not to get into that debate here – it can become heated, and if nothing else it’s off topic :P

Wow, a charr Six is a fascinating prospect. Can we get some fan artists on this please?

I can see them becoming Immortal Imperators – maybe even a transition to a new six legions, in time. The attitude they held to them would be interesting though. Most charr already seem to have a great deal of respect for their imperators, and certainly they will obey them (that’s how a chain of command works). So if the power of a charr pantheon was accepted like that, would the charr honour them as powerful, wise leaders? Or would they resent the gap in power between their leaders and the rest of them?

Of course, it’s also possible they would consider it a corruption, claim that these new gods would inevitably try and rule/enslave the charr people, and promptly turn against them. But what then – if they kill them, the power still has to go somewhere again right?

draxynnic.3719:

Would it really be fair or justified if the Maoiris or Native Americans were to nuke every city in New Zealand or the US in order to take back their land, or for the Greeks to to the same to Turkey to retake Anatolia?

Ok, I’ve been avoiding this because it could lead to a whole discussion I don’t really want to have on these forums (so please try and leave it be!) but I’m just going to say it: I think the most apt comparison for the charr/human situation currently is actually Israel/Palestine. Both peoples have really good reasons to claim that land, both peoples have a long history of association with it, and both peoples are passing down a strong hatred for the other because it’s an emotional issue. However, both peoples are so far removed from the origin of the conflict that it’s now self-perpetuating and every act of revenge spawns a call for revenge, in a cycle which is extremely difficult to resolve equitably for both sides.

If contemporary charr and contemporary humans can heal over the rift their ancestors caused (and aggravated) and agree that both sides made mistakes but we can do better now, Tyria will be a better and more harmonious place. The question is, how to do that without de-valuing the sacrifices of those ancestors?

This stuff is hard :/ haha.

@Gostistyx: I like the opposition of nurturing/dominance! They work well as being means to the same end (teaching about life, the world and one’s place in it) yet being totally different attitudes. I can see that working well.

If the Maguuma Wastes are caused by the influence of the Sixth, that would be a nice surprise for when they choose to introduce it. That does still leave the question of where Primordus is hanging out though – I feel like if he had migrated to the Ring of Fire, we’d have heard about it.

Of course, for an Elder Dragon to be dead, we must assume the Old Alliance was powerful enough to kill a dragon, which, given what we know of the events of that era, seems unlikely. However, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that the five races mustered enough strength to kill at least one Elder Dragon

- or, it’s possible (although it would make any current connections unlikely) that a sixth Elder Dragon was killed in an even earlier cycle, one we have no trace of. We have no idea how long this has been going on (we don’t know how old Tyria is or how it came to be).

EDIT: I’m still holding out for a revelation, maybe a one-off event, where a whole section of the landscape lifts up to reveal the awakening of an Elder Dragon whose body we’ve been building on for hundred of years!

Things flagged as ‘group’ are generally ones that definitely need a few players; that doesn’t mean that everything that’s not marked as such is soloable.

With those kind of events it can be especially hard if you’re not there right when the event starts – those NPCs might have survived if you’d been there to shore them up, but when it’s just you alone against a force already in there, it gets a lot harder. Not your fault at all, just another variable. At any rate, that sucks for you guys.

I also support DEKeyz’s answer! Especially the part about “choose whatever you think looks cool”. Some professions are harder to learn or to use effectively than others, but I think for the most part that if you pick one and stick to it, you should learn it as you go. I definitely found that I was still finding news ways to use my elementalist around level 50!

Choose your race based on what you think looks cool at character creation, and/or what kind of story/theme you like since it will dominate the beginning of you personal story. But mostly, anything you pick will be fine. Hope you enjoy the game! What server are you on?

That comparison actually hold up pretty well azureai… so Ashford is Manchuria or something?

I agree that I would like to see the Elder Dragons be scarier in future. There’s no particular impact in hearing lich-lord after lich-lord say “ALL GLORY TO ZHAITAN!” – especially when these speaking minions’ motivations are far from clear. I’ve long said that the Elder Dragons are very similar to the Reapers in Mass Effect, and the devs have the same problem: you build your story around these unstoppable, massive, inconceivable enemies that threaten to destroy everything, but then how do you show that in game? How do you justify fighting one of them?

The most powerful scenes with the Reapers in Mass Effect 3 weren’t the ones were we talked to them, or when we saw them en masse. They were the ones where you’re out on a mission and in the distance, a Reaper looms massive on the horizon, destroying everything, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That sense of helplessness before a foe way out of your league – something that seems impossible to stop – is excellent game storytelling. I’d love to see something similar.

What I don’t agree with is seeing Elder Dragons fight each other – this would frustrate me because if two of them really fought, everything in the area would be destroyed, surely. Just being near an actual Elder Dragon should risk being flattened. I would be keen to see, say, a champion of one dragon obliterating a group of another’s minions. Some interaction, but let’s leave the Elders as territorial.

The dragons in the sky around Orr that Narcemus mentions are some of the coolest examples in the game right now. They help to remind us that we’re not the only heroes fighting this battle, we’re in a war. But in future I hope that the Elder Dragon fights can have a more desperate atmosphere.

Oh yeah, just like in the old pre-Searing catacombs training mission… good times…

Trahearne could be referring to something like the animating spirit that brings (temporary) life to the minions is drawn from the Mists? I don’t know; it makes just as much sense for them to be animated by the necromancer’s will through magic.

I think I recall reading somewhere pre-release that necro minions were supposed to be composed of dead matter, but from what’s buried deep underground rather than from a fresh corpse… but I don’t recall the source or whether it was official or speculation.

I don’t know about that, the Romans had a history of tolerance when it came to absorbing the cultures they conquered … Historically, not much about the Charr reflects that, they certainly held some xenophobic attitudes in their past.

Yeah, that’s true. To be honest I think it’s because they’re not that big on empire in the incorporation sense. It suited the Romans to let the locals do what had been working for them before – less admin work for the new Roman rulers. But the charr are more likely to exterminate people in lands they take; it’s not like non-charr get incorporated into the Legions! And there’s not really a role for non-charr citizens in (current) charr society.

I also agree that charr religion and such isn’t very Roman – but then, the Romans seem to have been pretty secular in a lot of ways. Their best myths were more like legendary histories, and a lot of religious rituals were observed out of a vague sense of obligation. Still, you are correct in that the wider cosmopolitan culture of the Romans doesn’t really have a charr equivalent.

Actually now that I think about it, I don’t know if you read the old blog post I linked to before but maybe it’s more accurate to say that the charr bear similarities to the Roman Republic, rather than the imperial period? I do think it makes sense to view the charr as in a transitional period right now. Who knows, if a hundred years from now the charr aren’t actively at war any more, their culture could develop in a variety of interesting directions.

CHIPS.6018:

I think the Separatists are going the path of Nazis. They just need more speeches on Charr hate, Ascalonian superiority and extermination of all races that aren’t pure Ascalonian. They are already fighting against everyone so it isn’t that far off.

Yeah, in the hate-speech area the Separatists may be more our typical image of Nazis, but the fact of the matter is that Hitler didn’t originally get elected by a nation of fanatical racial purists. He got elected by a people who believed, at least for a time, that he could help the country get back on its feet an be a world power again. He sold the idea well – where it ended up is hardly what he advertised.

There may not be any evidence as to what the common people of Kryta think, but there’s not much sign that there care too much about war with the charr. It’s not part of their life. In Ebonhawke it’s a totally different story, and I agree that the people there are not keen on a truce with the charr. The whole city’s stories are themed around that resentment – especially the resentment of a queen who doesn’t have to live with the realities of Ebonhawke making the decision on behalf of the people who do.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Poison inflicts long lasting pain until death (if death comes as not all poisons kill), and can metaphorically be said to choke life itself. This is what I think Mordremoth wants – e.g. he’s the personification of sadism.

I think the poison idea fits well – or ‘blight’ meaning basically a poison or disease of plants – or potentially a ‘choking vine’ kind of thing? Like a plant that kills other plants for advantage? Maybe that’s just another nice metaphor. At any rate, if we consider it corruption of/through plants it works.

Primordus, to me, is rock, specifically – as opposed to soil or, I suppose, crystal. Rock in the hard sense is quite different to soil in the loose, growing sense. Failing which, the rock associations of Primordus might just come from a volcanic element: black rock, fire, lava, all things which we see when something forces itself up from under the earth’s crust. Obsidian is also volcanic in origin. This all leaves room for topsoil, loam, fertile earth or dirt to come under Mordremoth’s domain.

Excellent and well thought-out as always Konig

Personally I still favour the idea that the Nightmare was a part, or at least a potential part, of the Dream from the start. Rather than see it as a corruption, I see it as a part of sylvari that they don’t acknowledge – that darkness in every thinking being which individuals occasionally succumb to. Sylvari, being young, wouldn’t have come to terms with the complexity of their sentience yet. But that said, dragon corruption does also make perfect sense (I guess I just prefer the idea that we all have the potential for darkness in us).

‘Mordremoth’ as a blight dragon who corrupts plants and plant-like beings makes sense, and fills a niche that I don’t think any other dragon occupies. ‘Blight’ as a word makes me think of ‘corrupted’ plant life automatically. The Nightmare Court make it interesting because without a greater understanding of the Sixth it would be hard for us to tell what’s Nightmare and what’s dragon at this stage. If the Nightmare Court fills a niche similar to the Sons of Svanir as you suggest, connected to the dragon and its corruption but also serving a political ideological purpose among the sylvari – which I think makes sense – the physical and irreversible nature of the Nightmare could be Mordramoth’s influence. It did always seem much more than a worldview.

At any rate, I will look forward to seeing what’s done with this and I really enjoy the hint-dropping in the content we have. Good work analysing Konig!

Yeah, Jennah does a good job of letting people forget her powers, in my opinion. She’s more calculating then she seems.

I agree that Ebonhawke is really the only place still holding on to a powerful animosity for the charr. I don’t blame them – I mean we, as players, hold the grudge because it wasn’t that long ago for us. No intervening generations, just a couple of years waiting for GW2 lol. In Ebonhawke their whole identity is built around being the last bastion against the charr. They’ve been consciously keeping that hatred alive through the generations, and the charr siege makes that fairly easy to sell.

By contrast, most humans in Krytan would consider themselves Krytans, just as, say, a fifth generation Chinese American would almost certainly identify chiefly as an American. Queen Jennah wants this truce because it makes sense, and because she doesn’t have any reason to hate the charr that much. They aren’t attacking her kingdom in anything but the technical sense that Ebonhawke is part of her kingdom. It’s not surprising that there’s bad feeling toward Jennah in Ebonhawke – she’s asking them to “get over it already”, basically, because the rest of humanity has.

marnick is correct in saying that levels are a convention deeply lodged in the RPG genre (whatever the medium). The short answer to the OP is that there is no lore reason, our characters’ level-ups are not supposed to reflect anything significantly changing them in lore. Dustfinger’s point about down-levelling is a good one though – it does help to avoid the sense that your character has somehow become inhumanly strong when you return to lowbie areas.

The fact of the matter is that when you try to remove or even de-emphasise levelling, a substantial number of players will whinge about the lack of progression and how they want to see measurable progress for their efforts. People are playing with the system, though (it’s been a long time since people just transplanted D&D rules into a computer). One of my pet peeves in MMOs is the trend toward quantifying everything, though – levels, gear scores, min-maxed stats.

Obsidian.1328:

GW2 likes to paint them a picture that separates them from mainline Charr, but that’s not how they were presented in the original. The GW1 Charr wanted to dominate and kill every race, not just the humans.

To be fair, in GW1 we know almost nothing of charr discourses around this stuff – the above is how the humans see it, but they would, wouldn’t they? I won’t deny the charr had a racial superiority thing going (one has to wonder if they had that before they were driven out, or if it was a defensive thing afterwards) but I don’t know if they were driven to rule the world necessarily.

Of course from our perspective it’s pretty clear the charr went from simple bad guys to a race with a more complex and sympathetic history because it suited the writers, but in lore as it stands the Flame Legion shamans are a lot like Hitler. They offered a chance at power to a people who had been beaten and shamed, and the people took that chance to return to grandeur – but atrocities ended up being committed because of it, probably beyond what most people ever intended (yes, Godwin’s Law, I plead guilty).

And from my roleplay perspective, my female charr take no responsibility for what the shaman kittens did :P

On a semi-related note, given the similarity of the Searing crystals to Kralkatorrik and his Branded, anyone else think that the Cauldron of Cataclysm was an artifact of Kralkatorrik’s?

It may be coincidental (what fantasy writer doesn’t love crystals?), but it would also fit well with the vibe I’m getting that our Kralkatorrik arc will also deal with the Ebonhawke situation (given where the gate to the Crystal Desert is).

Server location etc. doesn’t matter, just pick your general region (Europe/America) and somewhere that has space and sounds good to you. As Garambola said, you can still transfer for free at the moment, with limits.

While ‘forget everything you know from WoW’ might be a bit of an exaggeration, I certainly think you’ll get more out of GW2 if you don’t assume things work like they do elsewhere. Learn as you go, there’s a lot to pick up but a decent learning curve, and people in map chat are usually pretty helpful

I find myself tempted to actually type ‘kitten’ for effect these days, when I’m uncertain about how to phrase something without bad words or when I want to emphasise something :P

I agree with Narcemus – “a truly omnipotent being…that was invulnerable to everything the Charr could throw it” might as well be an Elder Dragon, and that’s barely phased the charr. They’re used to living hard lives in a hard land, I think.

The charr back in the day hated and resented the humans and their gods because they beat them – using powers the charr couldn’t match. Whether or not the charr actively hate the Six now, they despise the idea of a god in general. They don’t want to bow down before anything, or serve a will beyond their own. Nothing makes a charr grovel! And they conquer on their own strength, with technology made by their own hands, not by the help of outside forces they cannot control.

Tybalt T_T (Though I always got the vibe he might be a Lion’s Arch charr, not one from the legions strictly speaking!)

Holding a bit of resentment for the charr because of GW1 is totally understandable! And really, they aren’t the easiest people to get along with, let’s be honest. Still, I think just as in the real world, these conflicts only get more and more painful if children keep trying to avenge their ancestors and keep their grudges alive. Neither the charr nor the humans who are alive now lived through the Searing, and Tyria is a very different place. So I agree, it’s time to move on!

As for sentiments (fan and NPC), I agree that belittling the Searing is insensitive (I role-played with friends in GW1 and have witnessed some pretty heartfelt stories about it!), but I also think it’s kind of realistic in-game. Not that many contemporary Krytans have connections to Ascalon, and it has been 250 years. It’s ancient history now (much further into the past than, say, the American Civil War is for us), and I imagine people mostly just don’t talk or think about it anymore. Besides, even back then the Krytans were pretty unconcerned as long as the charr didn’t attack them, heh.

It depends what kind of story you want to tell. Do you want to stick to the plot of the game? – in which case your work is mostly done! Alternatively you can work around the edges and in the gaps, as I like to. Associate yourself heavily with one of the Orders, or remove yourself entirely from them and be more of a freelancer who doesn’t like the factionalism. Invent a place for yourself in the Pact (if you’re up to that – not sure how through the game you are). Since you’re human, you can think about where you stand on politics: pro-monarchy? Pro-ministry? Pro-truce, anti-truce? I find that a human’s views on the charr and the truce are a good place to start.

To give you some examples, my warrior is supposed to be a mercenary – she’s pretty selfish and doesn’t really care about high ideals, she fights to protect only when people pay her! (This is a consequence of having a loyal, protective, friendly warrior in GW1 and wanting a contrast, haha). A friend of mine has a human engineer who’s a sniper and an auxiliary in Ebonhawke, called in for special jobs. Another friend has a human guardian who was born and bred in Ebonhawke and hates Queen Jennah because she holds the queen responsible for her father’s death. To be fair, none of those characters are particularly brave and bold hero types, but my point is you can use a lot of different factions as a basis.

Um, if I may, does no one see the irony of claiming that the charr don’t deserve Ascalon because of the incredible damage that they caused with the Searing, in light of the Foefire? People of all races will do terrible things when they feel they are pushed to the brink (humans have a history of it – Vizier Khilbron, anyone? – but maybe that’s just because we know a lot more of human history). The charr held a pretty big grudge over being forced out by the humans, and like all such grudges I imagine it grew more bitter with time. Then the shamans got hold of new power, so they used it. That power happened to be magical fire and scorched earth tactics, but it’s not like they had a choice of options; they used it because it was their most powerful option. Think of it like a nuclear bomb.

The charr took Ascalon from the humans. Before that, the humans took Ascalon from the charr. Before that, someone else may well have lived there; we don’t know. We do know that the charr have made some pretty brutal conquests, but we also know that humans spread widely across Tyria (and the other continents), claiming basically everywhere and then defending against others, like the centaurs, who also have a right to a homeland. The whole thing’s a twisted mess of blame and grudges, like some real world places I could mention.

Anyway, the point is that the Elder Dragons will take everything from everyone. So can’t we all just get alone?

Melchior, I think you’re extrapolating too far from what we know of the other races’ beliefs. I’m with you on the charr, but I think that it would only be one more idiosyncrasy in an idiosyncratic race for an asura to take up the worship of the Six. The norn aren’t likely to because the human gods don’t fill the same purpose as the Spirits of the Wild in my opinion. I can see sylvari at least investigating the Six, or worshipping them to learn about them, which is actually pretty compatible with how I imagine dervishes.

So, other races are perhaps not that strongly opposed to the idea – however, I still think it wouldn’t work in the game. I think it would be reasonable to have a non-human role-play character who worshipped the human gods for their own reasons, but to put it in the game implies that it’s fairly commonplace among their race. Charr guardians have been stated to be quite unusual, for instance, but there’s no reason for anyone to be too surprised by them in Ashford. They’re familiar enough. A charr who worshipped the Six would cause shock, though, and as Melchior implies they may well be lynched!

If they were going to add dervishes, I think they would have to remove the gods from the template and use something else, more generally magical. I can’t see it happening though – I don’t think it adds enough to the game to justify it. What’s more likely is that at some point down the line some professions might get scythe as a possible weapon, and you can re-live at least a little of the glory.

The problem is this goes against the stated goal of allowing players to make their character any race without it affecting their gameplay potential. Plus, it could cause some balance difficulties, especially since most of these ideas are pretty close to existing professions.

The possibility remains for a dervish – if you used the same kind of fighting style but linked it to something other than the gods – but I don’t think there’s much room for it mechanics-wise, with the guardian and other existing professions, so I wouldn’t hold your breath.

I agree with Konig, new races are easier to fit in, and new weapon sets for existing professions is do-able, but new professions would start to get weird fast. And I don’t know that chronomancer would work in an MMO that well, no matter how cool the concept is in theory. It’s good in a role-playing game where the players can be creative and the GM can accommodate things.

On the spelling issue, it’s not really pretension, there is actually a difference. ‘Eutopia’ means ‘good place’, like a paradise or perfect society – which is part of the reason people often misspell it that way. ‘Utopia’ (which is the name of the original book) means ‘no place’, as in a place that doesn’t or cannot exist – it was meant to be sort of ironic, as it is a perfect society, but there isn’t any such thing in reality.

Before release, my boyfriend toyed with concocting rules for a table-top battle game (a la Warhammer and that sort of thing) based on Guild Wars 2. If there was any interest in that I’d happily suggest he take another look at the idea

A GW RPG could be great fun, because there’s lots of potential for player characters to have their own stories play out in the background of the games’ stories (heck, that’s what the game’s stories ARE half the time – we tag along!). As an occasional role-player in the game I always like fitting my own stories in the gaps.

Given what marnick said, what would the mechanics of a GW RPG emphasise? I feel like there should be lots to support the ideals of group co-operation and role flexibility.

Well, to be fair, when the charr started playing with explosives I can only imagine that Ascalonian ruins would be a favourite target. “Oh, the city planners wanted to clear this all to build something eventually anyway. What’s that, you need target practise? Go right ahead!”

That scroll excerpt about Lyssa is fascinating. I really will have to finish my personal story and spend more time in Orr hunting these things down! Wren fits with the old ‘Scriptures of Lyssa’ stuff from the GW1 statues; I may have to go and read over the other old scripture excerpts for clues too, heh.

I find “brought with her the hope and beauty of humanity” to be a very interesting choice of phrase. We know the Six are supposed to represent parts of human nature, writ large as it were, an it has been said that all humans have a little of all the gods in them. That phrase almost makes it sound as if the gods came out of humanity and not vice versa, though! Could just be ambiguous phrasing, I don’t know.

All of it also means that the Tyrian magic does not come from Gods at all, but possibly from Dragons which then eat it back when they awake.

Well, there IS plenty of precedent in Guild Wars history for what appears to be the bad guys actually taking back what’s rightfully theirs. The charr and Ascalon being the obvious example, the Shining Blade in GW1…

@Konig – I had never considered how the largos might fit into the human gods’ lore, but oh boy, that could be awesome! It makes a lot of sense. I’m not familiar with lore around the Artesian Waters, but if the only major source of non-Dragon magic around Orr and Arah is a marine one… well, that holds strong potential for largos connections. I can think of a number of ways that might work, the choice of Arabic names for largos suddenly has extra connotations… good thought

As a side note regarding Abbadon, I’ve written about it before, but my simplified view has always been this: either he handed power to a humanity that wasn’t ready for it and didn’t take responsibility for its use, thus dooming the humans of the time without the other gods intervening (the orthodoxy); OR he handed power to humanity knowing that they would struggle and war with it, but knowing that was needed for humanity to grow on their own and develop independently of their divine patrons. I like to think that Abbadon wanted to see humanity learn from their troubles, but the other gods decided to just take away that power instead, and Abbadon (as god of magic and secret knowledge) resented that lost opportunity.

I’m surprised, I was under the impression you could just add someone by their character name – perhaps they have to be online at the time or something? Or I’m just mistaken.

At any rate, yes you can use in-game mail to contact them by their character names, and mail is for the most part account-wide so whichever character they next log in with, they should see your mail.

Agreeing with Dahkeus, it’s often a good idea to have a ranged weapon and a melee weapon. If you don’t like weapon swapping mid-fight, then use a ranged weapon for a while and then switch to melee, dive in and stay there until the fight’s over. I do that on my warrior, although I also switch back and forth mid-fight.

In general, weapon swapping is beneficial for almost any character, even if in my experience I didn’t learn to make good use of it until I’d played for a little while. But if you want to avoid it, that’s your choice, hopefully you can find a good build that allows you to limit the situations in which you would swap. Personally, my main is an elementalist, so I’m biased the other way – by level 80 I was used to swapping constantly!

Put it this way, it’s certainly risky to help someone who might injure you in the process, but if you agree that they need help I think it follows that it’s the right thing to do to help them. That still leaves the option of saying “it might be the right thing to do, but I’m not willing to put myself in danger to do it!”

Maybe it’s just that, in my hubris, I don’t see those skritt as really a threat, even if they are hostile :P They’re dangerous to everyone else in the area too, so I crack a few heads, make a point, and tell them to be more careful next time. Hero, away!

I think that one may be bugged, I decided that it was last time I was there on my server. Best to just move on if it’s not working for you (which, since this post was two hours ago, I’d guess you’ve already done!).

I don’t believe I have seen the skritt burgler, but I did have an encounter with Modus Sceleris (who out-numbered me many times and promptly ripped me apart). I think it might have been in Fireheart Rise.

Oh, oh I know, don’t get me wrong. Technically polygyny, specifically, has been the most desirable form of marriage in most societies around the world and throughout history. I’m an anthropology major, and after I posted I wondered if anyone would pull me up on that :P

What I really meant was that when it comes to a Western, English-speaking, and especially North American (or chiefly North American) audience, polygamy does not go down well. It’s one of those things that can get a pretty vehement reaction, and the subject is best avoided for marketing purposes unless you’re trying to provoke controversy.

As an aside, I wouldn’t be too hasty associating cheating and some kind of biological tendency toward multiple partners with polygamous marriage systems. There are a lot of very logical, practical reasons for polygamy of various specific forms in different cultures, not to mention plenty of reasons why other societies favour monogamy for equally logical and practical reasons

If I were a crazed asura genius living in these times, and I was going to build a doomsday robot, building it as an imitation mechanical Elder Dragon would certainly have style…

…I almost want to give it a Mars Attacks style weakness, where it can be destroyed/disabled with a kind of anti-climactic design flaw.

That does sound like the asura! And the asura home instance is a spacious lab complex where it seems you krewe probably live and work.

Asura family relations are complicated… I have the example from Eye of the North but I haven’t come across many examples to go off in GW2. At any rate, family is important, but children seem to go their separate ways from their parents and pursue their own projects at a reasonably young age (much like a norn seeking her own legend). I feel like many asura probably have a fondness for their parents, but also a burning drive to be better than them!

Be careful – what you’re saying is “people who destroy their lives through alcoholism don’t deserve help.” :P

Those skritt are a danger to themselves and others because they consume alcohol irresponsibly. The heart NPC, as Zeefa said, does not approve of this and wants help getting his people back under control. Sure, it’s a little unorthodox, but it does make sense when you get the whole picture.

draxynnic.3719:

When Kormir assumed Abaddon’s mantle, my suspicion is that she essentially consumed Abaddon’s spirit along with it – there is no Abaddon, only Kormir..

I agree with this. Abbadon held a certain power, Kormir now holds it. I believe that Abbadon is dead, but even if he wasn’t, it would be some remainder of his mind or spirit that still existed – it wouldn’t have any of his ‘divine’ powers. Which would make him not very interesting.

And you guys just had to go into the gods=dragons stuff, didn’t you? Poor Konig :P

If they were going to do anything with Abbadon, I’d rather see us fighting a group of human Abbadon cultists who believed that he could be revived and restored to power…but were wrong. Just deluded cultists worshipping a dead god with no power. I feel like that’d make a good story.

I wrote a thing about Abbadon and his motive here Mechos, just fan fiction of a sort but I have always found the whole situation pleasantly ambiguous!

Also on the wiki, which is a good first stop for anything like this!

What did you like to play in WoW? That might help some people offer recommendations.

Easiest classes to pick up, in my opinion, are warrior and ranger (and probably guardian). There’s always a learning curve though, and whatever class you pick, you will learn it if you keep playing it – so I recommend just picking something that interests you, and sticking with it. When you try stuff out, don’t neglect to check the skills above your main skill bar (F1 etc.) as these are that class’s special mechanic!

As for what makes a good ranged character… rangers can use shortbows or longbows and a lot of their other weapons are mid-ranged, but you will have a pet and a lot of the ranger mechanics/skills centre on the pet. I have a warrior who switches between axes and a rifle so that she can be melee or ranged as is convenient. Thief with pistols is good fun, engineers can use guns and various ground-targeted effects, and all of the caster classes can use sceptre and staff. It really depends what kind of stuff you want to be doing!

I have always been exceedingly fond of the Nightmare Court. They are just so wonderfully creepy in the way that their beliefs make it perfectly logical to do awful things (and not just being evil for evil’s sake – not that any of the GW2 racial enemies actually fall into that category!).

One of my favourite things about the Nightmare Court lore is that since their goal is to corrupt the Dream with dark experiences, they get the most out of it if they capture, torture and traumatise other sylvari rather than members of the other races. Sure, torturing a human victim will add nastiness to the Dream from you, but torturing a fellow sylvari adds nastiness from you and the victim. Double the value!

When Cadeyrn created the Nightmare Court, it is bcos he believes that Ventari’s teaching goes against what he think the Sylvari race is capable of and supposed to do, which I neither agree not disagree but at least it seems like a justifiable faction to me.

While all sylvari grapple with how “all things have a right to grow” should be enacted in practical terms, another thing I like about the Court is that Caderyn created it in large part for the Pale Tree’s sake. He doesn’t believe the sylvari should turn away from her, he believes they need to save her – by letting her see beyond the ‘brainwashing’ of the Ventari Tablet, an outside source. Really, all sylvari are still a lot like children: some are naive and follow what they’re told without question, and some are selfish and follow their first impulses without concern for others. The Nightmare Court are like bratty toddlers writ large; they don’t see why they should care about anyone else, especially non-sylvari.

The gods did not create Tyria, but that doesn’t mean they’re not gods. Maybe they’re not Gods with a capital G, but the difference between extremely powerful supernatural being and god (in a polytheistic fantasy setting) is a pretty vague one. Still, it is important to keep in mind that they’re not by any means the only extremely powerful supernatural beings out there, no matter what humanity might have assumed since they started worshipping the Six (then Five, then Six again).

Which begs the question, are there also Steam Asura and versions of the other races, or not? I would pay good money to see a mechanorn or something.

I personally doubt they’re planning a comeback, but you never know – I don’t know what their plans are for the human gods in general. It’s more likely, though, that the references to Abbadon are just there because they fit the history while giving a shout-out to GW1 players. When the gods dwelled in Arah, Abbadon was one of them, before his fall, so he’d have his place with the other Five – although it seems they did a shoddy job of removing traces of him from Tyria after all.

Another possibility is that the personal story uses sites dedicated to Abbadon a lot because he was the God of Secrets and patron of magic. Of all the Six Gods of the time, his temples etc. would be the most likely to contain powerful artefacts. If Arah was a centre of power because it was atop Zhaitan’s resting place (like the asura’s Central Transfer Chamber tapped into Primordus’s latent energy) then Abbadon would be the one who made the most use of that, I figure.

The first dungeon is Ascalon Catacombs which you can do at level 30. After that the next ones are at ten level intervals, so Caudecus’s Manor at 40, Twilight Arbor at 50, and so on (you should get notified about them as you level up, through mail).

There’s just chat for finding a group right now, well that and you can get your status as ‘LFG’ on your friends panel. Ask in map chat either in the zone of the dungeon (Plains of Ashford for Catacombs) or in Lion’s Arch, which is a general hub (but mostly full of Fractals of the Mists requests now).

As for weapon choice, I’m not sure, I can’t imagine there being complaints but you can always ask when you find a group if people want to request specific skills or if they have any problems with your weapon set-up.

Good luck!

Jairyn.6913:

I’ve tried to “friends, country men, brothers! A day may come when the courage of men fails, but it is not this day, let us retake the Temple of Balthazar!” in zone chat.

That’s excellent. I’m sorry to hear you didn’t have more luck, but I really think that’s the way to go about it – gather up a few brave souls, or a guild or two, and venture forth. If I saw a sweet message like that I’d be tempted

We could make some kind of asuran Risk where your goal is to conquer Tyria? :P

And yes, nothing confirmed, but my money is on the steam creatures being developed at some point in the future. They may or may not be related to that asura story (potential future) then, but some kind of alternate universe is certainly possible.