Well the only issue is that how much value can Trahearne bring to the table in regards to Mordy? He was chosen to lead the pack for 2 reasons: 1 ) he was neutral but well respected by the factions, 2 ) he’s knowledge of Orr and Zhaitan. Since Mordy is a new enemy Trahearne would have no useful insights. Maybe since he proved himself against Zhaitan, he’ll stay but I don’t know.
On the other hand, who else should lead the Pact?
Tyria seems to lack competent leadership.
Just to be different, I actually like Traherne better than any of the LS story cast. I just can’t take any of them seriously.
And I’m not a huge fan of Traherne either, but at least he didn’t come off like a comic sidekick.
Some Cultural Tier backpieces is a great idea! I support this.
I like this idea. Racially themed back pieces for all races would be quite cool.
You could interpret it that because you’ve leveled up and subsequently gotten proficient enough in combat to wear it that you have rightfully gained the capacity to be more proficient offensively, and that the stat bonuses are representations of character attribute gains.
That might make sense if armour didn’t have six tiers with ascending being far superior to plain white.
Let’s face it, GW2 (and any MMO I’ve played) isn’t even trying to be realistic. The weapons aren’t realistic, the armour isn’t realistic, the food and drink aren’t realistic. Even the fact that you can run endlessly without getting tired aren’t realistic.
Is food fair? Not really, but then neither are guard stacks, or boosters.
Ever heard of DLC? Don’t buy it if you think it’s not worth it. Some DLC is just a rip.
Let’s take it a step back and look at the fundamentals. As it is, food is a buff. Does it make sense to be? Not really (not that this matters too much in a fantasy setting). Maintenance oils/sharpening stones/tuning crystals are a buff and they make sense to be.
Why do maintenance oils\sharpening stones\tuning crystals make sense as a buff but not food? Whats the logic behind? (Narrative, concept, mechanics, etc?)
Concept wise in a fantasy world, food being a buff makes sense perfectly, even more so than things like sharpening stone and maintenance oils.
For example, why in the world would a sharpening stone convert 5% of my toughness into power? Do I use a sharpening stone to…what…sharpen the horns on my helmet so that I can use it to impale somebody?
In fact, the only thing that makes sense about food is that they should only augment stats, and not things like experience gain, magic find and gold from monsters, because food is by concept an organic consumable that affects the character’s body.
Like why the F would eating an Omnomberry Bar gives me 40% more gold from monsters? Do I suddenly gain the Midas Touch upon eating some magical food?
But gaining power, toughness and vitality after eating food makes sense, no?
Food making you stronger makes much more sense than armour making you stronger. Sharpening your weapons giving a damage bonus makes a lot more sense than armour giving you a damage bonus.
I say get rid of stat boosts on armour.
Dragon minions may exhibit remnants of intelligence and express that under limited autonomy. That doesn’t mean the dragon itself feels the same way, or that the dragons feel much of anything, except hunger.
They seek to conquer, but only in the same way that a swarm of insects does, by smothering all other life. I doubt they care at all about dominating the faces of Tyria, when they could simply wipe them out.
This idea kind of sounds like EVE… it’s interesting but I don’t know if it’s the tone ArenaNet is aiming for with GW2. I wonder whether I’d like it… or whether I wouldn’t… I guess it depends on a lot of things.
All that happens in EVE is that big corporations camp on resources (and 99% of the profit goes to the top 1% of players running the corporation). There are “stories”, but it’s mostly drama.
And I fail to see how spirits – which are not material – can be the same as a material body (even if made out of plants).
Spirits don’t have to be immaterial. The separation of the spirit and the physical world is a dualistic idea that comes from Abrahamic religions. Elves, Dryads, Valkyries and more are all examples of physical spirits.
Celtic myth in particular was fairly big on the idea of a spirit world (the sidhe) and the material world overlapping, and of beings that could walk in both worlds, and of places that existed in both worlds at once.
Though I loathe to say this: Actually, there is one example of a corrupted individual who doesn’t know he’s corrupted…
Kellach.
Kellach knew he was corrupted. His mistake was thinking he could be cured. Oddly, He does seem to have some free will in that he could actually seek out a cure, but perhaps Zhaitain allowed him that, so that he would be more convincing. In any case, it made for a good story.
Maybe the dragons might sometimes allow some minions the illusion of free will, but I think it’s unlikely that the whole nightmare court is so delusional.
The Kellach story is a good one, a classic tragedy of misguided actions (although the dialog does belabour the point a bit). The nightmare court as secret dragon minions just doesn’t work for me. It seems forced, and a waste of the potential of the court in the storyline. The nightmare court as the rebellious and misguided winter court is a much better tale, with potential to stand on its own.
As Marge Simpson once said, just because something is overly complicated, doesn’t make it a good story. And being obsessed with plot twists in TV shows is not exactly healthy. Ahem.
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Having Scarlet cut-off before she could say what her plans were wasn’t clumsiness, it was deliberate. It would have been easy for Scarlet to say “Mordremoth” or “a dragon” instead of “a new master”.
The writers were being intentionally vague. And possibly they were leaving themselves an out, in case they changed their mind.
We do see some risen with souls, though, sovereign eye/Reza the most prominent example.
Arguably King Reza’s soul was not in his body. The eye says that the players mentor is “beneath the dragons wings”, which could mean that Zhaitan is holding the souls somewhere or somehow. Or Perhaps Zhaitain only binds the souls of the most powerful of its minions, while the common minions are the soulless shells they act like.
Either way, when the body dies, the soul is free and uncorrupted. Zhaitan seems to corrupt only the body and not the soul. If Sylvari spirits are their body, this wouldn’t work, since corrupting their body would be corrupting their spirit.
And because Mord can only influence plants
What? That seems unlikely. It’s only called the Jungle Dragon because of its location.
It’s like saying the Orrian dragon can only corrupt Orrians.
I think most people are underestimating the immunity. Even a plant dragon wouldn’t be able to corrupt Sylvari, which I think is caused by the birth of Sylvari. They are born from the mists into a plant hull and that is probably their immunity. Before they can get corrupted, the plant body has to be corrupted and releases the soul before corruption can take hold (just a theory I am working with). If this is true, then nobody can corrupt them actively until they are changed/manifested like the Toxic Sylvari. This doesn’t exclude that she might have communicated with Mordremoth (a possible terrible picture entity), but it denies the corruption.
I think the immunity “stems” from the fact that the Sylvari have no souls. There are mentions in the game of dragon minions having their souls removed so that their bodies can be possessed. For instance there is a ghost in Mount Maelstrom that laments the fate of its body. And there is a Kodan in Frostgorge sound that states that Jormag only corrupts the bodies of Kodan.
If Sylvari, being creatures that came from the dream, are basically spirits, spirits that are inseparable from their bodies it could explain why they die when corrupted.
I share your opinion that the elder dragons whole force of nature and not really understanding their actions makes for a weak story.
I do offer you that there’s conflicting information regarding whether they have emotions. For example, kralkatorik tracked down glint once he woke and killed her because she betrayed him. The fact that he can feel betrayal goes against many the arguement a that they are just a force of nature.
Glint was an obvious threat, and the dragons act intelligently when it comes to fighting threats. We don’t know whether it was acting from emotion, or simply acting strategically.
So I’ve been wonderin’. About the world and the story, it all seems good. I want to keep this brief and all, for the sake of argument. I just like to point out that the Elder Dragons don’t feel very evil. In other words, don’t feel like they should be antagonists.
Yes, perhaps they are forces of nature, and it feels very messed up by tampering with nature’s cycles. But there should be an antagonist that’s at least relatable, someone that gives their side of the story and someone I can understand. Who’s going to understand the animistic motives of a freaking dragon? Okay, maybe a few (which, I won’t know how that’ll be done), but doesn’t make my point any less clear.
I feel the devs sacrifice the story just to have the feel-good and epic moments. I say the feels are tripled with a good story. I know they can write good, just look at Tybalt!
That’s why we have dragon champions – they provide the personality (and dialog) that is missing from the dragons themselves.
From a gameplay perspective, having endless armies of irredeemably evil minions to mow down isn’t a bad thing either. It beats slaughtering boars.
But you haven’t explained how market speculation affects price!
Remove an entire crafting discipline, and 1/3 of the nodes, and all the tools (including the gem store tools). That’s a big change.
The condition duration/reduction foods are over-rated. 40% duration only helps if it isn’t cleansed, and realistically how many conditions run their full duration?
Skritt dragon minions. I’m calling it.
A centaur and a human being gay for eachother… shudder
The thing is, in a game, pretty much everything is from the player perspective, except for cut scenes. Usually you don’t encounter the end boss until the end.
We have already seen Mordremoth (I assume) in a cut scene, but the characters won’t see him in person for a while.
It’s possible he could make an appearance, and then fly off, leaving you to deal with his minions, but that’s kind of cheesy.
That’s…not what I was referring to. Rather, Scarlet Briar’s Journal indicates pretty clearly that nightmare is a vector for said “entity”, whatever it may be.
You seem to be confusing nightmares with The Nightmare.
Having one of the playable races and a large fraction of the player base as secret dragon minions is a completely fruitcake idea. It’s totally unworkable from any sane gameplay perspective. Only the most hardcore Role Player could concoct such contortions of cannon.
Having the nightmare court as dragon minions makes slightly more sense. But only about as much sense as the inquest, or the ministry, or the flame legion also secretly being dragon minions. But there is simply no evidence to support the idea. (If anything, the inquest are the ones with dragon connections).
Just because the nightmare court is evil, doesn’t make them dragon minions. There are plenty of evil races, like the Krait, that are not dragon minions.
That the nightmare court are unwitting dragon minions is somewhat more plausible. But Dragons are not subtle. Having a secret minion army is not their style. There are no examples in the game of dragon minions being unaware of their corruption, or their master, or of whole secret minions armies. Secret dragon minion armies. Say it out loud. Sounds a little far fetched? If it’s true, it’s cringe-makingly bad writing. It’s the stuff that fanboys come up with in their extended universes, or a plot device from “despicable me”.
It’s possible that toxic courtiers could be dragon minions. The toxin could be related to, or derived from dragon corruption, or dragon magic. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Mordremoths minions look more like the various toxic creatures.
That Scarlet alone was a (possibly unwitting) servant of Mordremoth is probably the most plausible of these theories, especially given her inquest connections, but we’ll have to wait and see.
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Ventari was a pacifist.
Actually he is right about the sons of Svannir, they do in fact worship Jormag. And the inquest don’t worship the dragons, but they do pursue the study of them and their power.
Not all Sons of Svannir are Dragon minions either.
This one? yeah it’s been there since the beginning, something to do with the source of corruption in that area or something.
It’s caused by the reactor exploding. It’s mentioned in one of the DE or Hearts in the area (I forget which).
The WvW Season 2 has been going on for 2 months, and because you don’t figure out that you have no clue how to do the rewards until a couple days before the end the rest of us get screwed? GG
the sense of entitlement in this thread is pretty effing astounding. you are not going to lose your house or life by having to wait a few days for your WvW rewards, chill out people.
Hardcore WvWers have no need of houses, or lives…
The eye of Zhaitan isn’t humanoid at all. And the mouth of Zhaitan is bipedal, but it doesn’t look like it was ever human either.
I wasn’t aware of the pirate captains being dragon champions, but on the other hand it’s not like any of them could walk into a bar unnoticed. Maybe a really dimly lit one, that already smelt bad.
Scarlet could pass as normal (from her appearance). She could wander around a city without attracting attention. That is highly unusual for a dragon champion. Dragon champions tend to stand out. Scarlet seems way too normal.
Ranger buffs!
I kid.
For NCSoft to save money on server costs.
^this
The line about it getting the zones populated was the cover story.
Lol, it’s not like they would have had a separate physical server for each instance. MMO ‘servers’ haven’t been actual separate physical machines for years. Everything is virtual these days.
I would like to suffer from your problem. It isn’t a issue with my pearl dagger.
But, with the higher level veterans, your thief is a glass cannon and could be one hit by them (also the agro circle in Orr is massive).
Slight nit pick, but a dagger/pistol glass-cannon thief can pretty much face roll anything in Orr. Using smoke field plus auto attack will ensure than you hardly ever get hit, and even vets melt in a few seconds. The only mobs that are tricky are the vets that deal AOE condition damage, like risen giants.
It’s possible that if they implemented the trader and people who mistakenly got the wrong number of tickets had already spent them, they’d have to sort out a real mess of refunding/revoking purchases as well as correcting the rewards.
I remember when they did a patch in WoW that screwed up the prices of PvP armor and they had to roll back thousands of transactions. That was not pretty.
Dear devs, if you gonna re-use contents by just changing the achievements then at least check if you are counting the achievements correctly. It seems like rewarding the players in GW2 is such a complex issue that even the devs can’t figure it out.
But on the positive side, I think you guys are making the right decision to cause frustration for 100% of players instead of 50% of us. GG
The achievements are working. Got the achievement and the title. It’s whatever triggers the chest that isn’t working. No idea why, since I’ve been on my server since before the start of season one.
Shouldn’t be that hard to identify the group of players that has the achievement but no tickets. I doubt that anyone has thrown them away.
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I voted #5, but what I really want to vote for is “No gendered armor at all, each outfit should be the same for both genders”.
Funny of “attractive in different ways” tends to mean guys don’t get sexualized overtly and instead get ‘strong’.
Guess what? a lot of girls would like that “forced equality”. If we have deal with your kitten you should deal with ours.Bullseye! Thank you.
No, (straight) dudes, a heavily muscled guy who maybe has his shirt off is NOT sexualized in the same manner as a scrawny slip of a girl with inflated boobs, heels and frilly underwear.
Uh yeah. There’s a reason ArenaNet doesn’t have armor like that in this game. That looks kittening ridiculous.
So a half-naked man (un)dressed to look “sexy” is ridiculous, while half-naked women (un)dressed to look “sexy” are par on course. That is exactly the problem. We’re pretty much brainwashed from birth to not only accept but demand ridiculous, objectifying and even degrading images from women.
If you don’t like seeing a dude made up like that, it should be a wake-up call of how the hetero male gaze that we’re supposed to think of as the natural default treats women. What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. If it isn’t, something’s messed up.
By all means, people should be able to have and enjoy their skimpy “armor” — for both genders. An outfit that looks like flamboyantly decorated lingerie on the girls should be a flamboyantly decorated banana hammock on the boys.
There’s a difference between sexy and ridiculous. Shirtless is one thing, a guy with a leather bra is another.
Any of these theories are probably as good as any other because I doubt that even the GW2 writers have come up with origins for all these things yet.
There’s plenty of as-yet-uncontradicted lore from GW1. I think that it’s pretty unhelpful to assume that everything is in a basically permanent state of limbo; we ought to assume that whatever was stated in GW1 or the core game of GW2 and hasn’t been changed or negated yet is canon.
Take the speculation on whether Scarlet is or isn’t a servant of Mordremoth. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if the LS writers haven’t actually decided that for themselves.
It’s virutally incontrovertible that she WAS a servant of Mordremoth. Between the dragon glyph in her hideout, the fact that she’s a sylvari who was being taken over by a hostile entity, and the cinematic after she was killed, I don’t see any way she couldn’t be a dragon minion.
This seems to me to be the same issue as when people speculated that Kasmeer was going to die because of one tiny prick on her finger that wasn’t even really called out as significant in the Living Story. GW2’s writers are trying to be subtle, but only very rarely do they create justifiable controversy. It’s just that we’re grasping at straws, assuming that the story is more complex than it actually is (out of desperation maybe). In reality, I don’t think we have much of a reason to doubt that what’s being shown to us is true and that there aren’t three or four extra hidden layers of depth to the story.
Except they haven’t shown Scarlet to be a servant of Mordremoth. There have been plenty of opportunities for her to say so, but the writers have deliberately not revealed who her master was, or even that she was working for a dragon. The writers clearly do want things to be ambiguous.
We only know that waking the remaining dragon(s) was her goal, which was implied by the dragon mural, and then pretty much explicitly stated after the end of the LS.
A player can’t be marshal of the Pact. You’d be stuck at a desk drawing up plans, organising logistics, and actually leading.
Not out adventuring, risking your life, taking no responsibility.
A champion level minion is not the same thing as a Dragon Champion. They’re just minions with defiant and a bigger hit point pool.
Thread derailed almost instantly lol… Theres no real reason why an elder dragon would wake itself in such a way, theres obviously something out there pulling the strings of the elder dragons
She was pretty clearly insane. A best she was a loose cannon, at worst a total maverick, and completely out of control. If she was a dragon minion, she probably wasn’t sticking to the plan.
Possibly like Glint, she rebelled, and was out to kill Mordremoth. That doesn’t make her a good girl, because she had no concern for the collateral damage.
Or, she woke him early, before he gathered enought strengh, so we could kill him because she saw our defeat in the future,
This theory would work if she didn’t give it a huge magical meal to wake it up. If she wanted to just wake it up, she could have possibly just taken her giant flying drill and then proceed to drill directly above him. It would have either woken it up, or it would have exposed it in its slumbering state.
She didn’t know where it was. She knew that it was on a ley line, and she poked the ley lines with a big stick. She didn’t create or alter the ley lines. If it was sitting on a key line, it was already feeding.
The evidence that she “fed” it is laughably thin. We saw it open it’s mouth. Dragons are know to do that for a variety or reasons. We all heard it roar.
Why would mordy control scarlet to wake her up early? Dragons sleep for a certain amount of time kinda like hibernation why would a bear try to wake itself up in the middle of its hibernation… Mordy eats poops sleeps, theres very little mordy would gain from scarlet waking her up and cant a dragon simply just wake itself up? Whats the point of going through all that trouble to wake yourself up…. I honestly dont see how people are coming up with the idea that mordy got inside scarlets head to wake itself up (very angrily with a huge roar i might add) it makes ZERO sense who really led scarlet to mordy ???
It doesn’t make sense to me either.
That said, as far as plot holes go, it wouldn’t be the biggest in history, so I’m not ruling out the possibility that it was Mordremoth.
- There are some cases – such as the Daithor the Drill event chain in NE Kessex Hills – that imply that they still are made from flesh and bones. I’ve also seen players comment about Trahearne saying he summoned his minions from the Mists? Though I don’t recall this so take it with very loosely. Magic has overall become far more powerful than in GW1, so I wouldn’t expect it to be the same. But typically I view it as summoning the bodies deep in the ground. However, I’d say this is pure mechanic – one of the biggest downsides of playing a minion master in GW1 was that you couldn’t get your little fleshy army up until the battle was more or less done, and they often died of degeneration before the next battle.
I think what everyone refers to in regards to Trahearne and his undead is the line from the personal story mission ‘Reconnaissance’ where Trahearne states that his minions are unable to be corrupted by Zhaitan because they were never alive to begin with which begs the question of where they’re coming from. I suppose you could argue there’s something to be had in the minions (at least for the skill Bone Minions) popping up out of a black well-like circle.
At the least I don’t think it’s implausible for necromancy to have advanced to the point where the flesh and bone needed for a minion can be created from magic itself when there is no corpse available.
Necromancer minions aren’t corpses – they are parts of corpses. So arguably a minion was never alive (although bits of it were). Trahearne might have meant that Zhatain required whole human corpses to reanimate.
The only other human(oid) dragon champion was Svanir, who got transformed into the nornbear. No dragon champion looks even vaguely human.
If scarlet was a dragon champion, she was uniquely unaffected by the transformation.
And for someone who was notoriously voluble, she was strangely reticent about having any association with an elder dragon at all.
It’s simple.
Most sylvari-related karma items sold in Caledon Forest and Brisban Wilds should have been Tier1 cultural in appearance (not stats). Also some sylvari PS rewards could have been also Tier 1 cultural (I believe at least one is?) (Kitten! One of the quest is to help a smith!). Finally, some chest loot tables could have had more Tier 1 cultural too.
Backgrounds skins could also have been made culture-dependant (mesmer and necromancer are to some extent, and not warrior, engineer and guardian).
Otherwise, like Electro, I found “normal” gear adapted to my characters.
There are a few tier 1 weapons given out as personal story rewards, including a greatsword, shortbow and staff (possibly others). I haven’t ever seen any racial armor as a personal story reward.
I think the OP was asking if summoned elementals have sentience.
I’m not sure if there’s any evidence one way or another.
So I need some thoughts on the Lore behind Necromancy and the Sylvari.. I have taken on trying to Roleplay a Sylvari Necromancer for the Nigthmare court, ? …
I’ve never seen a Nightmare court necromancer. Has anyone?
Obviously Sylvari have Necromancers, since Trahearne is one. But Sylvari Necromancers animate dead animals, not plants.
I don’t see why Sylvari corpses, and other plants, couldn’t be reanimated. Undead are not synonymous with Dragon minions. However, being able to animate dead plants, if possible, is probably an entirely different profession to a necromancer.
wvw is designed so casuals and bad players can feel like pros
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/541/920/9d8.jpg
example of how this order warfare could work in the mists
Because of scarlet’s intrusion into the mists, the very fabric of it’s construct has become unstable, the mists war front has been moved 1000 years into the past before all the orders of tyria were united against the dragons.
Please never undertake a career as a writer.
Please help voice your concerns in this poll
http://www.gw2wvw.net/content/anet-planning-having-season-3-your-thoughts
No, thanks. This thread on an official forum with Dev is perfectly fine. Why do you keep promoting this site?
Its a poll.
And about promotion? Its our officially sanctioned community site for WvW matchups with nearly 3000 hardcore WvW/GvG members
Yeah and about 2990 of them are trolls.
It’s an awful, awful forum. A perfect example of John Gabriel’s GIFT: