Guild Wars 2

There is no name that I know of, either from GW1 or from GW2, I’m sorry.

For the most part the Krait with wings evolved from the Krait Nimross that shed their skin. So my first assumption would be that they have grown powerful since then and have lost the need to change their skin, which eventually lead to them losing the ability whatsoever. More than likely though it came from ArenaNet wishing to give the Krait a single defining look as opposed to multiple slightly differing looks.

Well I can tell you that this isn’t the first time that the Orrians have risen from the Dead. In GW1 there was a Lich Lord that took over the bodies of the numerous dead orrians (after the cataclysm destroyed the entire peninsula) and forced them to invade Kryta. It was originally believed that the first risen dead that Zhaitan produced were from these undead, but that is extremely unlikely seeing as they had been dead for over 250 years and there is likely very little left of them to reanimate.

Well, you are a little off on the Nightfall one, because Joko has already ravaged and rampaged across Elona. And has a special army made up just of those that wronged him and those that helped him.

Okay, you are talking about Shiro Tagachi in two different forms.

When Shiro petrified the Echovald Forest and the Jade Sea it wasn’t himself doing it, you see, the Emperor had received a gift from the Goddess Dwayna in order to give bounty to the years crops and merely to bless the realm in general. When Shiro killed the Emperor he took this blessing onto himself and used it to give him strength and power. When he was finally slain by the champions Visu, Archemorus, and Victor this blessing, which Shiro had corrupted was released throughout the area in a flood and it corrupted the landscape surrounding. So technically this power was not his own, but instead was the corrupted power of Dwayna a goddess.

At this point Shiro was not living in any fleshy form, but was instead an envoy. He had found a way to quit the duties that he was supposed to do, which was escorting the dead to the afterlife, and was instead able to take their souls and trap them within armor bound to his will. In this aspect he may have been able to hold his own against Zhaitan, having no visible form of his own, and armies of afflicted and Shiro’ken at his beck and call. I only say this because Joko has proven that it is possible for lesser creatures to hold the dragons at bay. But this being said, it was never his will to stay that way. The entirety of the story was him creating a spell that would allow him a mortal form once more. In this fleshy form there is no way he could ever have the power to overthrow an Elder Dragon in an all out war.

Alright, I know that the topic has moved away from this a little bit, but I wanted to put out there what my original thought had been about the Elder Dragons. I mean the ED’s are all about corruption, changing beings and nature from their normal form to meet the needs of the Dragon. So I decided to look at it a little differently, in as what the Elder Dragons choose to corrupt.

This is the listing of how I had imagined the Elder Dragons being based off of what I know about them:

Jormag – Corruption of the Mind
Kralkatorrik – Corruption of the Body
Zhaitan – Corruption of the Soul
Primordius – Corruption of the Earth
DSD – Corrpution of the Sea
Six – Corruption of Nature

Now let me explain what I mean. Primordius, DSD, and Six are relatively simple from what we know about them. These dragons do not corrupt the living sentient beings and turn them into their minions (from what we know) but instead change the very fabric of the world around them and make it theirs. For example Primordius takes the rock and stone around them and molds it into his mindless minions, same from what we have had explained about the DSD, he takes the water and forms it into tentacled beasts. Now at this point in time adding Six to this is merely a guess at best. We know very little about him as a dragon except that he has some connection to nature in general.

Now the later 3 are a little more difficult to explain, so I will start with Jormag from the book Edge of Destiny. Now it is well known and understandable that when creatures come into Jormag’s service that their body becomes corrupted and eventually becomes ice. Similarly when creatures are transformed by Kralkatorrik their wills become that of the dragon. So how do I draw the line as to which dragon corrupts the body and which corrupts the soul? Well in Edge of Destiny when the group goes to fight the champion of Jormag much of the fight has to do with protecting the mind. You see creatures that come to Jormag do so by having their mind taken over first, then slowly their body changes to reflect the mind that controls them. In the opposing way the battle against Kralkatorrik very little had to do with protecting their minds against the elder dragon, and when Kralkatorrik corrupts its foes it does so in a sudden blast changing their form then and there. And in fact Kralkatorrik’s mind is shown to be actually rather weak, compared to the mind of Jormag, because I highly doubt that any sentient being would attempt to intrude into the mind of Jormag, out of all the Elder Dragons.

Lastly, but also relatively simply is Jormag who I see as the corruption of the soul. Now, I recently went into Mount Maelstrom last night and saw a vigil crusader’s soul that explains that her body is out there somewhere fighting against her fellow comrades, so this has recently conflicted with my original thought that Zhaitan would take the souls of the dead and force them into their original bodies and force them to his will. This seems like an extremely difficult way to create minions, but it also makes some sense as to why the undead seem to be grateful in many instances after they die, saying things like “at last” or “finally.” My only thought on things there is that perhaps Zhaitan only traps a part of the soul within the body, the amount necessary to power the undead without requiring constant magical energies from himself, but not enough to give them a free will.

Now these are just thoughts that have been rumbling around in my mind for a while so I thought I would throw them out there. Feel free to correct any of my mistakes.

Amen to that Brother!

That’s the beauty of this game. I played Guild Wars for 4 years before starting Guild Wars 2, and I am personally loving getting this new lore and comparing it to the old lore and seeing how these things expand upon each other, and even how they differ in places.

Droknar’s Forge itself is underwater. But if you are talking about the change in climate for the Southern Shiverpeaks then yes, it is now a lush forest. This is explained to be a result of the eruption of Mount Maelstrom, the volcano within the territory of the same name. Now my first thought was how does a volcano change the climate so drastically without loads of ash being spewed, etc.. but then I remembered, somewhere within that area (between the Bloodstone Caves dungeon entrance from GW1 and the area that was once the Ice Caves of Sorrow mission) there is a bloodstone underground. And no one knows what a power like that could do to the landscape.

My personal interest lies in how you will be able to return to Cantha in the first place, and the changes that the area have gone through. I mean with the push to remove all races from Cantha, I doubt their policy would change at all over 250 years. This being said there is an interesting dynamic where if you wish to enter the continent, you more than likely are forced to fight against the military of the empire. Even more interesting then would be how a human would be forced to recognize that they must fight against their own kind, and with humanity’s current home in Kryta always being so overrun with strife, finding another human territory that has survived and then having to fight against it would be a major struggle for the character.

Well for one the mursaat had given Saul D’Alessio control of their magic to help him drive out the charr, they could not obviously let him teach anyone else their magic, so to remove this threat they removed him as well. And in doing this instead of setting Saul up as the leader of the White Mantle they made it certain that those who survived knew for a fact that the mursaat were their leaders, in the end.

It’s possible that the scrying pool still works, the problem is that your character doesn’t have the True Sight or have gotten Closer to the Stars perhaps…

I totally agree about Cantha, and honestly the game seems set up to have Cantha be the next expansion, or at least a expansion, with the Tengu being nearby, but hidden behind their wall, plus with Zhaitan dead the undead navy would be gone making travel there possible again. The only issues with what you said are the fact that with Winds of Change the chance of afflicted beign around are slim to none. We did a very good job of removing them permanently. And the Luxons and Kurzicks have been quelled for the most part, but random groups still holding of seem possible. Also, the jade sea will have turned back to ocean by now and the echovald should have grown back in some sense.

My point, which no one seems to be getting, is that I thought that the dungeons, in their story mode, were supposed to be fun. They were supposed to tell the story, get a few poultry chest rewards in there and viola, it’s done. Then if you wanted to really go all out and play things as extremely difficult then you play the explorable mode. But no it seems the only way to play the story is to have the perfect team, have someone who’s done it before, and waste all your money on repairs. Then if you really feel like you want to punish yourself more you try explorable mode. This was not the way that ArenaNet lead me to believe that the dungeons were meant to be.

A few days ago me and some good friends tried, for the first time, to play the Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon. Now we’ve waited this long because few of us have been online at the same time, but we wanted to do this together as friends. So, the 5 of us were finally together, a necromancer, warrior, and 3 rangers. We went into the dungeon as a lvl 60, 49, 45, 38, and 32. And all of us except 1 have been playing Guild Wars 2 since the first beta weekend events, so we are all relatively used to our characters, and the style of play of Guild Wars 2. This being said, right as we entered the dungeon, we got our butts handed to us. We got through the first rooms with multiple instances of being downed, and in some instances defeated. Most ghosts hit with 1-2 hit k/o’s and the health on these ghosts was literally somewhere between that of a veteran creature and a champion, based on the amount of damage I was able to deal through my elite lich form. In the end we had to quit, in the amount of time it took to even get through the first part of finding Eir I had a full suit of damaged armor and 1 broken piece, and most of my friends were in the same situation.

Now I would be fine if this was the explorable mode of the dungeon which is for quest rewards such as unique armors and weapons, but this was story mode. Now I know I’ve read many people commenting on complaints saying it’s just people wanting free giveaways, but I promise you that this is not the case. I am a lorehound, and I always have been. I want nothing more than to play through the story to understand how everything runs it’s course. And it was my understanding from the Wiki that the story mode of dungeons was meant to be something that any random pick up group could run though relatively easily without large amounts of strategizing, but this, at the current time, is not the case. Now I’m not saying that ArenaNet should make the dungeon into a piece of cake walk through. I want a challenge, but challenge isn’t the same as being blown away the instant you walk into a room.