Guild Wars 2

Okay, I might weigh in a little here. Now, I’m not saying that there isn’t a valid point here – guardians absolutely should have a viable support option. But I do think some of this has been exaggerated…

RabbitUp.8294:

They destroyed the class with HoT, removed the core identity, gave support to other classes while removing it from guardian, ignored the base class completely, turned them into a blue warrior.

The professions have generally been more about playstyles then roles. Playing guardian still feels different to warrior for me. Playing DH definitely feels different to berserker. Support-wise, I think guardian still has the edge… except for might stacking through the phalanx trait.

And what did Guardian get with HoT? Unwanted in pve, as welcomed as ebola in fractals. They eventually became the dps they were supposed to be after buffs 1 year into HoT, and of course, they require the DH spec to do it.

From what I’ve seen, they’ve always been viable. Generally not the top choice, and you’ll always get people who’ll spreadsheet out the absolute optimal party/squad setup and refuse everything else, but that excludes a lot of professions, especially in fractals where you only have five and therefore at least four professions will obviously get dropped.

Meanwhile, base Ranger are top dps and Druid is everything Guardian should be support-wise.

Personally, I neither enjoy the druid playstyle, nor so I like druids being so dominant on healing. Having one profession that’s the required healer goes against everything that ArenaNet said about roles in GW2’s development. There absolutely should be other viable options.

Tempest got a healing/support and a dps spec at the same time.

Not any more. Tempest has had quite a few nerfs along the way – you can’t be a solid healer in Berserker stats any more (in fact, from what I’m seeing, even in full healing stats you can’t compete with a druid) and even in full berserker they’ve been nerfed.

Berserker was once the best condi dps and base Warrior is still a must-have offensive support.

Referenced above. I’m not as familiar with Warrior as with some other professions, so I’m not going to comment further.

revenant took their boon spam.

Revenants have largely fallen out of favour in PvE modes from what I’ve been seeing.

I think I see where Hot Boy is coming from – a lot of champions, particularly if they don’t have adds and/or area effect damage, can be soloed by a mesmer purely because it’s reasonably simple to get them aggroed on illusions and to replace them as they get destroyed. You also have access to stealth, which can help for some channel points. So in terms of running around open world doing map completion and soloing the odd champion along the way, they are one of the better choices in the game.

Doesn’t mean anything in high-end group content, but there it is.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Sykper.6583:

Thinking on it more, why would the six not take action against the Elders way sooner? Certainly the Gods knew the Dragons existed even prior to leaving. There’s probably some natural force at work that we, as player characters, are unraveling by killing them off, contrary to the six gods who saw that killing the Elder Dragons would be to their disadvantage.

Here’s a question: Why should the Six take any action against the Elder Dragons?

Maybe they knew the consequences of killing the Elder Dragons without proper replacements, and such things did not exist? Maybe they had overestimated the amount of time the Elder Dragons would be asleep, intending to take action against them before they woke but they woke much sooner than expected? Maybe they just didn’t care, after all they left the world over a thousand years before the Elder Dragons began to wake up.

Up until the current episode, too, I’d have added ‘maybe it’s a test’ to that. The gods might be ready to pull humanity’s fat out of the fire if the alternative is extinction (or they might already have other colonies founded on other worlds to ensure that what happens on Tyria doesn’t lead to the extinction of humanity), but they’re looking to see if humans are able to figure out a solution on their own, potentially including cooperating with other races. Back in the day we had a few dev interviews talking about how the gods regarded humanity as ‘coming of age’ and being ready to stand on their own without the help of the gods.

Even with the latest episode, that might be the case. Balthazar could have gone renegade, for instance. It’s also worth noting that Balthazar said that “your home is a trivial concern” – it’s possible that Balthazar doesn’t consider the humans of Tyria inconsequential as a group, and would have initiated an evacuation if things HAD lead to Tyria’s destruction. Depending, of course, on how much time there was.

It can be useful if you don’t like using waypoints and Fields of Ruin is more convenient to get to than the map you’re going to.

Broadly speaking, though, I think ArenaNet should make it so that spontaneous rifts still occur around the pond… or make it so that there’s some way for a player to trigger one (talking to Weirdbringer, for instance). It’d also be nice if they made the thing account-bound rather than soulbound.

Tearthy Flame.1463:

Well you should watch this recorded video during the recent live stream. ArenaNet has said it in the past they want Trench Coats to be the silhouette of Medium Professions. As for the design of Medium Legendary Armor, that’s a different issue…

The problem with that is that you can get around it by wearing outfits in PvP and WvW. There are outfits with the silhouettes of all three armour types, so you can even try to fake people out if you’re so inclined.

Engineers are the builders of capital, not the owners of it. Sometimes the two coincide, but not necessarily.

As an observation…

We’re picking on ‘generic human’ here, but it isn’t even that – humans should have their own special responses from time to time too. For instance, Chadramar’s example about the “why can’t they be friends” speech in the Vigil arc would be just as bad coming out of a human’s mouth as a charr’s. Sure, the human is most likely Krytan and therefore at a bit of a remove from the conflict, but it’s still been Kryta that’s been at war with the charr for centuries – a human should at least know enough to know it’s not that simple.

It’s more that in many of those storylines, the PC is a generic blob that has no history before the storyline in question. They’re not even a generic human because one thing that ArenaNet’s background lore team has done well has been to make it so that their humans aren’t generic (even if sometimes they do feel a bit like redheaded stepchildren… possibly largely because human lore is mostly GW1 lore, and let’s face it, most of the GW1 lore writers have left).

I wanted to fight one of them for myself before I commented. Now that I have…

The Destroyers have always had a bit of an insect theme to them – this is directly commented on in the magazine that PCGamer put out which was a combination Utopia concent art, EOTN guide, and GW2 teaser in 2007. So an insectoid look on a Destroyer is probably just part of the Destroyer theme.

Personally, I found that they had a strong Great Destroyer vibe, apart from being bipedal instead of having multiple insectile legs like the Great Destroyer had. Instead, the insectoid aspect of Ignis and Aestus comes more from having an arthropod-like head, where the Great Destroyers was more draconic.

Slowpokeking.8720:

Risen Priestess of Lyssa: Zhaitan will devour you, just as he devoured our gods.
Risen Priestess of Lyssa: My goddess was mere prey for the dragon. Despair!

Farnax, High Priestess of Lyssa: Zhaitan eats gods!

Remember this?

ArenaNet uses the unreliable narrator, the Risen aren’t exactly unbiased, mesmers are known for mind games and deception, and NPCs in-game directly laid doubt on those lines. I don’t think they have any credibility.

Making the skills simple AoEs probably would help. You generally can’t expect a player who’s under heavy pressure to look for pickups, particularly a non-engineer player who isn’t familiar with engineer pickups. There’s an argument for Throw Bandages, since a) just throwing bandages at people isn’t going to be particularly effective and b) the duration/recharge ratio is such that you can realistically expect to be able to set up a small stockpile, but for the others… might as well make them like thrown elixirs. Heck, treating them as elixirs for traits would probably be a significant buff in itself.

Maybe I’m being a grognard, but I’m inclined to say that someone who came in after GW2 released IS a newbie. Plus, we’ve seen people with the Game Designer title making slips before. I wouldn’t read more into that, in isolation (I haven’t seen the GuildChat yet, when live it’s at an awkward time for me and the VOD takes a little bit to come up) than what we already know – the power of the dragons is such that a god taking one on directly has a good chance of losing, and possibly being eaten.

That does suggest that either they don’t have anything on the horizon planned that might be threatening the gods, or that if they do, they’re keeping it under wraps. Which is a bit disappointing, because without some bigger threat which might explain Balthazar’s behaviour, it makes it more likely that they’ve just thrown Balthazar under the bus just because they wanted a twist.

I actually like what they tried to do with the medkit.

But the numbers… by the Khan-Ur, the numbers! While Bandage Self is actually a decent self-heal on a profession that has other healing, Med Blaster does less healing than Regeneration, which is ridiculous for something that requires a character’s full focus, particularly when some professions hand out Regeneration like candy for doing almost nothing. Like miriforst says, the skills, even the auto, need to be worth their cast time. Currently, they… just… aren’t.

Ashantara.8731:

Leo G.4501:

For those circumstances where it won’t work for a character, the simplest solution is to rewrite what is said and done to close fit with the decisions of your character but within the limits of the story.

Well… would it have been such a problem for the devs to alter text with the same content in ways that made it sound race-conform? You can say something that leads to the same result in a million ways, and a Charr would say them in a rough, warrior-minded manner rather than sounding like an empathic psychologist, no?

That’s been pretty much my thinking. The different races all have different voice acting anyway, so it doesn’t seem like it should be too difficult to give them subtly different lines when appropriate. We saw this in the exploration phase of Out of the Shadows, for instance.

Obviously, it wouldn’t be feasible for different races to go down entirely different story paths, and the NPCs are still only voice acted once, but they can work in variations that still fit with the voiced responses. This was particularly noticeable in the first instance of the most recent release – there should have been one race that was more hesitant and one that was more gung-ho about it, even if both have to come to the same conclusion before the next NPC response.

Personally, I’d be disappointed myself if the new set doesn’t bring viable alternatives to druid. Partially because the game isn’t supposed to rely heavily on one healing profession, and partially because, entirely subjectively, I don’t like druid but would like the opportunity to be a healer.

On the other hand, a guardian elite spec wouldn’t need to be as healing-focused as druid is to become a similarly effective healer. Druid was taking a profession that had fairly little party healing and making it a primary healer. Guardian, on the other hand, has a moderate amount baseline, albeit not to the levels introduced in HoT – it’s just that dragonhunter is a relatively selfish specialisation. A guardian specialisation probably wouldn’t need to be as healing-focused as the druid to be something that can compete with the druid when added to core guardian.

Kenshi Maru.5489:

HEY GUYS, I noticed one inconsistency with the leaked Elites.
As far as traits go we usually get 1 major, 3 minors, 1 major, 3 minors, 1 major 3 minors on elites.
Here we’re getting 1 major, 1 minor 3 times then twice 3 minors.

Maybe they are just making it so you can get all the majors first so you don’t waste your Hero points on stuff you won’t use and get get right into playing the elite, but still it’s worth noting this change over the first elites. Maybe they will change them all?
Honestly this makes me believe more that the leaks are real, as I don’t think people would think of this when making fake stuff, they would just copy-paste the original unlock ordering.

Sounds like they might have taken (or independently come to) my suggestion of changing the unlock order from a year ago. The old unlock process had the serious flaw that it wasn’t practical to start playing the elite specialisation until you had at least one grandmaster major, which required you to be most of the way in. A different unlock order would make it more practical to play the specialisation earlier in the unlock process.

Not presently, but I have been seriously considering it. I’ve been stepping away from traps over time, there are viable alternatives to longbow for ranged, and the instant-activation core virtues do have their advantages. At the moment, I think the extra damage from having one trap on your bar, the stronger healing from Wings of Resolve, and the block from Shield of Courage is still worth it, but I could see myself going back if…

…wow, I didn’t realise Virtue of Courage had been buffed to a 45s recharge. That really IS tempting if you back it with the appropriate traits.

The game does, however, display a single damage number for skills rather than a range. I think what it does is show the damage from the middle of the range.

When you’re looking at skills from the hero screen, though, I think it assumes that each weapon will have the same damage range as the weapon you currently have equipped. Or, possibly more likely, it uses a common value rather than the value of any specific weapon (I’ve noticed, for instance, that the values from the hero screen tend to be less than from the skillbar).

The takeaway, though, is that it does seem to be a straight case of multiplying by power (as opposed to healing skills, which typically have a base value which is added to a multiple of healing power). At least for the skills I looked at. I think the damage from phantasm skills might have different rules, though.

Eh, nothing wrong with pairing a sword with a dagger or focus in my mind. Thieves and rangers already do sword/dagger, and guardians and mesmers already do sword/focus. Both offhands would pair well with a melee weapon (assuming sword is melee in at least some attunements).

Personally, I like tempest… but it is unfortunate in the extreme that it’s essentially rendered the old attunement-dancing playstyle obsolete. There probably really should have been an elite specialisation that left that intact before Tempest. (Yes, I know you can choose not to overload, but half of the specialisation is based around overloads.)

Gotta say, what I’m hearing about the new one is… disappointing. Still, it’s a leak, and I guess the final implementation might be better than we think.

Fashion Mage.3712:

I suspect that those utility skills can hold up two charges rather than functioning like mantras; ie. the first cooldown completes and it keeps ticking, and then after the next cooldown it holds a second cast of that skill.

Which is similar to a system Diablo 3 uses on some skills – they have ‘charges’, each of which recharges individually. So you can only use the skill so many times in a given timeframe, but you can choose whether to use it multiple times in quick succession or to spread it out.

Technically speaking, leather is useful in cloth and metal armour. Metal armour often has leather for various straps, connecting parts, and padding, while many forms of clothing were reinforced with leather in medieval times.

That said, reducing the leather requirements for armour crafting may well be warranted. I think the spike in leather prices had more to do with additional leather sinks that were introduced (I remember when leather was generally the cheapest of the three armourcrafting materials), but I think the effect on armour crafting was entirely unintended.

To lay it out straight…

I probably wouldn’t transfer to an Oceanic server unless I could freely transfer back to NA. The people I know are on NA, and while some are Oceanic, they’re not all. The EU/NA split fractured the playerbase enough as it was. (If I could freely transfer back and forth, now, that would be very tempting, so I could get a good ping when running solo or with other Oceanic players.)

Even putting that aside, though, the Oceanic region probably just isn’t a big enough market for them to justify having a server out here. While I don’t know the exact economics involved, it’s likely that the first server is going to be by far the most expensive – you need to have space to put it, staff on-site to deal with any problems, backups, and so on so forth, the cost from which probably isn’t going to scale up much from additional servers. A couple of servers, or even half a dozen, just might not be cost-efficient… especially if half of the players from that region are going to choose to continue playing in NA or EU anyway because they know people there.

Okay. Let’s talk swords.

First, as some people have mentioned, swords are not necessarily melee weapons. Secondly, as other people have mentioned, elementalist does not currently have a melee weapon.

These two factors might not seem to be compatible, but with the elementalist, they can be – you can have some attunements where the weapon is a genuine melee weapon (with enough defensive skills to balance against the naturally low armour and base health of elementalists – although in practise, well-played elementalists tend to be hard to kill due to a combination of defensive skills and self-healing as it is) and some where they have some standoff capability. Granted, other professions can do the combination of melee and magic, but no profession combines genuine melee with the constant attunement-swapping of elementalists. Engineers can come close with kits, but engineers and elementalists do have distinct feels and, for lack of a better term, a different flow.

Third, we have various precedents for a melee elementalist-type in the setting. The GW1 dervish was essentially a melee elementalist with a more limited list of elements – while the current reaper is pretty close to a Grenth dervish (as translated into GW2 mechanics), a sword or greatsword elementalist could fit well as the more modern analogue to a dervish using multiple elements. We also have the Aspect Arena, using Zephyrite skills, which includes a melee setup with the Lightning Aspect. And this is without going into things like the GW1 secondary profession mechanic (although, arguably, the berserker is a bit of a W/E in that respect).

More broadly speaking, combining a light or relatively light melee fighter with elemental magic is a common enough theme for people to have encountered it elsewhere and have a hankering to play it in GW2. Geralt from The Witcher is possibly the prime example, but not the only one.

Pistols, well… I can’t help but feel that while there’s no doubt that you could come up with some cool skills for elementalist pistols, when push comes to shove they’d just be another midrange option. A genuine melee weapon (on some attunements, at least), on the other hand, inherently allows for the possibility of a playstyle that just doesn’t exist in the game at present.

Version 1 is basically ‘you have the power of a god but you don’t get to do anything with it’. Which is about as pointless as being the marshal of a military organisation without having the ability to decide where the troops go (because that would be a strategy game, rather than an MMO). Cough. Cough.

Admittedly, it would explain why the PC somehow never dies regardless of what happens to them, but having an NPC have the power and actually be able to use it gives the story more places to go (and remember, when Nightfall was made, they were intending to go to Campaign 4, not to switch tracks and start working towards GW2).

Version 2 is still not making the PC a god, it’s just, well, distributing the power so thinly it’s almost meaningless rather than concentrating it into one personality.

There are some things which, in an MMO, it’s genuinely better to hand it to the NPCs.

Doam.8305:

Elites kinda lock their weapons to themselves so if we got the axe you could only pair it with either a torch, focus, or pistol and all of those just sound weird. An axe + shield mesmer would look really nice but you loose your shield the second you turn your elite off. Its for that reason I never thought about making a legendary shield and won’t make any legendary that’s locked behind an elite.

Don’t forget that mesmers also get a sword offhand, although it might not combo well with axe if axe is condi-based. Furthermore, axe/torch is already possible on rangers and berserkers, and if the leaks are correct, will become possible for guardians and necromancers as well as mesmers.

apharma.3741:

draxynnic.3719:

You can do it for power, by giving something a low base coefficient and a high scaling for power. However, that just encourages people to run builds with both power and condition damage (and expertise if they can squeeze it in).

No you can’t, the damage calculation is weapon strength*power*coefficient of the skill including auto attacks/armour.

Skills do not have a basic damage number that factors into it, it is entirely a derived value.

My experimentation seems to suggest otherwise.

If what you say is true, then dividing the damage of an attack by its power coefficient should consistently result in the same value.

Working through some mesmer auroattacks, using damage values from the hero panel (to avoid changes in power from switching weapons) and coefficients from the wiki:
Mind Slash: 346/0.7 = 494.`285714` (using ` marks to indicate repeating decimals)
Spatial Surge, minimum range: 267/0.54 = 494.`4`
Ether Bolt: 247/0.5 = 494
Winds of Chaos: 163/0.3 = 543.`3`

Sword, greatsword, and scepter are all within error of one another. Winds of Chaos, however, is noticeably different. Either the coefficient on the wiki is wrong (a coefficient of 0.33 would give the same figure as the other weapons) or there’s something else going on. Note that this seems to be an issue with the staff in general – all of the sword, greatsword, and scepter skills I tested this way came out the same, but with staff, the same test for the direct damage for Chaos Storm gives about 543 just like Winds of Chaos (which would require a coefficient of about 0.36 to bring into line with the other weapons).

Now, we know that healing skills have a level-dependent base value which is then added to by the power coefficient. This could be the same for damage skills. Of course, it’s entirely possible that for some skills, the base value is simply a flat 0, in which case for those skills it will be purely power coefficient.

Or the wiki could just have the wrong coefficients for staff. shrug

Hang on. If it’s a case of the wrong coefficient… then the figures should come out the same if I change my power by removing equipment.

With all my character’s equipment (apart from weapons – I didn’t have the inventory space to go that far) removed:
Winds of Chaos: 108/0.3 = 360
Chaos Storm: 118/0.33 = 357.`57`
Mind Slash: 229/0.7 = 327.`142857`
Spatial Surge: 177/0.54 = 327.`7’
Ether Bolt: 163/0.5 = 326

The error margin seems to be higher at the lower Power value, but the non-staff weapons seem to be getting 326-327, while the staff is getting around 360. Now, let’s try with the proposed corrected coefficients from previously:

Winds of Chaos: 108/0.33 = 327.`27`
Chaos Storm: 118/0.36 = 327.`7`

That looks like you’re probably correct after all – it is just the coefficient that matters, but the coefficients for Winds of Chaos and Chaos Storm on the wiki are wrong – they should each be 0.03 higher.

Well, ArenaNet doesn’t seem to like the idea that sylvari can’t be engineers either. We’ve seen quite a few in the game – Scarlet, Aerin, arguably Canach, and probably more that I’ve forgotten.

It is an uncommon path, though. Most sylvari prefer professions that are closer to nature and/or magic (there are some dialogues that suggest that straight warriors are also rare, at least outside the Nightmare Court – it’s worth noting that the generic Wardens are rangers and elementalists). However, it’s entirely reasonable that some sylvari will have a fascination with machinery and how it all works that leads them to become engineers, or with how the various substances in the forest can be mixed and put to use leading to learning alchemy, including the making of explosives. In fact, I recall an interview where one of the devs suggested that a sylvari engineer might use a kind of biofuel in their flamethrowers, rather than the more conventional mineral oil based fuel likely used by the charr.

So, there’s nothing stopping a sylvari from becoming an engineer. However, their culture and values are such that those that do are typically oddballs, and that is reflected in sylvari NPCs – sylvari NPC engineers are rarer than most other professions.

Acnologia.6934:

The gift of the khan-ur’s claw to the charr is not really a gift to the race itself anymore. It has become a gift to the iron legion imperator that has the custody of the claw, an imperator that proclaimed that his wish was to destroy it to free the charr race from an antiquate tradition.

If you go deeper into charr politics, this is actually exactly what you’d expect.

The charr aren’t a single united nation so much as three separate nations that support each other militarily. Ascalon is Smodur’s territory, and therefore it is up to Smodur whether the war continues. Ergo, it was Smodur that Queen Jennah needed to persuade, and therefore it was Smodur who received the Claw. As long as Smodur maintains the peace, neither Malice nor Smodur have any direct say in what happens in Ascalon, short of declaring war on the Iron Legion as well – they can express their wishes but they can’t openly continue fighting in Iron Legion territory against an opponent that the Iron Legion has declared off limits. (I do have a suspicion that Bangar has been supporting the Renegades, but that’s under the proverbial table.)

That said, whatever treaty that Smodur has is not necessarily binding in Blood or Ash territory. Bangar is probably well within his rights to declare that any human in Blood Legion territory is open game. This might annoy the other Imperators, but what he says goes in Blood Legion territory, just as what Smodur says goes in Iron Legion territory.

You’re still assuming she maintained it alone. It could be being maintained by some sort of artifact, or she could have some sort of collective of mesmers maintaining it for her.

Possibly even reinforced by guardians, since blue patches can be seen in the dome when viewed from Lake Doric. Both mesmer and guardian seem to be professions that humans seem to be particularly strong in (they invented the latter, while every Mesmer Collective member we currently know of is human).

My viewpoint is that the orbs represent the magic, not the dragons. Killing the dragons leaves the magic in an uncontrolled state. This has consequences, but those consequences can be ameliorated by bringing the magic back under control quickly.

Taimi’s device, however, pit the magics directly against one another, in an effort to destroy both domains (taking their respective dragons with them) – an act that is much more disruptive to the balance than simply leaving the magic in an uncontrolled state.

As for connecting the gods to the dragons… that theory comes up so often that you could almost make a drinking game out of it, and there’s an in-game book that appears to debunk it. There are similarities, and some gods do line up to the dragons nicely, but you just can’t match them up one to one. (The big problem is that ice and death are separate domains in the All, while among the gods, Grenth has both.)

alain.1659:

Science-ish theme is not for me though. I think it is weird to have an old school knight or a magic user, and a dude armed with a grenade kit and a flame thrower together.

To me, magic actually serves to explain the anachronisms.

Magic users could already throw gouts of flame (or other effects) equivalent to a flamethrower, or cast explosive spells at range that are equivalent to grenades or a portable mortar. In fact, in the lore, the Iron Legion developed technology so they could compete with enemies who made more use of magic (humans and Flame Legion).

Regarding the old school knights – historically, they became obsolete because their armour could no longer stand up to the weapons that were being used. In a world where exotic metals exist that possibly outperform modern metallurgy, and those metals can then be enchanted for greater toughness and protection against heat and other effects, it’s possible that they would continue to be viable up until the point where technology reached the point where melee combat just largely doesn’t happen. (Note that in the real world, this happened less than a century ago.)

Personally, I have two problems with grenades:

The first is that I don’t really enjoy needing to manually aim the autoattacks. I understand that’s enjoyable to some people, but it just isn’t to me – and when that’s well known to be the most viable option, it’s a bit disappointing.

Second, and bomb kit suffers from this as well, they have the flaw of the skills mostly feeling the same. Grenade skills 2-5 are all throwing three grenades, but they have different power coefficients and inflict different conditions (and, in some cases, fields). Similar for the bomb skills. Granted, there are tactical situations which call for using a particular 2-5 skill, and it’s logical for them to be that way, but I find them less interesting than kits like flamethrower and elixir gun where the 2-5 skills have very distinct behaviours.

Which is unfortunate when these have been the best kits to use, for PvE DPS anyway, pretty much since launch. YMMV, but the dominance of grenades and bombs has generally turned me off considering my engineer to be one of my main characters.

insanemaniac.2456:

scrapper has a pretty strong electricity undertone and i would be disappointed if holosmith does as well

Core engineer does in general as well, though – Static Shot, Static Shield, Static Shock on the A.E.D., and the Static Discharge trait. If sword/shield proves to be the primary set for holosmiths, you’re naturally going to have at least one electric skill there. If the people who want Static Shot and Blowtorch swapped get their way*, you won’t be able to run sword without at least one electric skill (from your offhand).

Scrapper dialed it up a bit, but electrical effects seem to be a core engineer thing. I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least a little in other engineer elite specialisations. In particular for something like the holosmith which is going into sci-fi technology – engineer stuff is at least broadly based on real or theoretical technology, so holo-generators probably will be powered by electricity, meaning the holosmith will likely have a supply of it for other purposes.

However, it will probably be primarily holograms and lasers, although I do note that having a sword mainhand might mean that it actually becomes possible to play a build that behaves like Canach. (Namely, generally making use of engineer kits, explosives, and other devices and a shield that behaves more like an engineer shield than a warrior one, the main distinction is that Canach uses a sword.)

*That said, I’m not sure I’d agree with that. Offhand pistol as it currently stands seems to be set up so that it’s useful for melee as well – in fact, it’s arguably more melee-oriented than shield is. Currently, pistol/shield makes for a more standoff setup, while pistol/pistol is more for close-in skirmishing tactics. Switching blowtorch and static shot would mean that pistol engineers are always obligated to get in close. Additionally, blowtorch is a better fit for an offhand pistol used with a melee weapon – the holosmith, for instance, would probably be happier combining a sword with the current OH pistol with blowtorch rather than one with Static Shot.

You can do it for power, by giving something a low base coefficient and a high scaling for power. However, that just encourages people to run builds with both power and condition damage (and expertise if they can squeeze it in).

In fact, apart from Kormir and (probably) Grenth, we don’t know that any of them are. Balthazar and Lyssa appear human, but we know that there are other races that appear human. Dwayna, Melandru (in some depictions) and pre-fall Abaddon all have or had wings.

Raising a charr up to their ranks to replace the one who might have been the one who decided to go to war against the charr in the first place (the origins of the original charr-human conflict are… ambiguous) might well be the gods’ idea of a peace offering. It might also be a way to get the Flame Legion back into the fold – they’d have a genuine charr god of fire and war to follow.

Regarding Rytlock specifically… he’s had a journey to the Mists where he refuses to say what happened (possibly because he doesn’t expect his hierarchy to approve) and where he was, apparently, blinded (and we know at least one way that can happen). It’s possible that he’s caught the attention of the other gods and, if they are looking for a replacement for Balthazar, he might well be a candidate.

Not saying that I expect the plot to go that way, but… it wouldn’t be completely stupid, and it would certainly be less stupid than Balthazar being turned into a throw-away boss.

I’m planning to do exactly that with my Mesmer (and using chronoshift to boot) for the pure irony of it all.

Cristalyan.5728:

These small “issues” makes me wonder if the initial lore team (or lore writer) was replaced. Because, it is evident that nobody on the lore team took into consideration how hilarious is to threaten Balthazar with the fire he gave to us :-)

Jeff Grubb’s left the team, and I don’t think many people, if any, that worked on the original lore from Prophecies are left. Ree… I honestly don’t know if she’s still around. I haven’t seen anything to indicate she’s left, but I don’t think I’ve seen or heard anything of her since before HoT released.

They have, and I considered raising it, but it was early enough that they might have changed their minds before release. I also have a feeling it was Colin who said it, so he might simply have got the lore wrong.

lordhelmos.7623:

I personally believe that the human gods were not divine at first. They might have been kings and rulers of the original human travelers that came to Tyria. They discovered a place in Tyria where the leylines that control the flow of magic all intersected to create a huge magical wellspring. This wellspring was the Artesian Waters.

I think the human gods were mortals that “ascended” to godhood through the Tyrian Artesian waters. Because of this, their divinity is directly linked to the Eternal Alchemy.

There are six dragons and six gods. I believe this is relevant due to the human gods drawing power from the six major spokes of the Tyrian magic system.

While the gods may not have been divine forever (we know at least a couple ascended), I think there’s enough evidence to believe that their divinity predates their arrival on Tyria. For instance, Abaddon was one of the gods to arrive on Tyria, and we know Abaddon had a predecessor – said predecessor, then, must have been divine before the gods arrived on Tyria.

Furthermore, while some of the domains of the gods line up to the Tyrian domains, not all of them do. Zhaitan, Primordus, and Mordremoth can be lined up, with some issued, to Grenth, Balthazar, and Melandru respectively. However, every attempt to line them up has run into problems with lining up the remaining set, even with the DSD essentially being a wild card that can adopt whichever role is left… particularly since Jormag’s sphere appears to explicitly be cold-related, and cold is not one of the primary spheres of the Six Gods.

My viewpoint is that the Six Gods are likely the six, similar but different, spheres of some other world. Balthazar’s depowering may well be entirely unrelated to events on Tyria – Tyria may be our little part of the Guild Wars setting, but not everything has to be linked to events on Tyria.

And yet they’re still worshipping at a sunken shrine to Melandru. It’s pretty obvious that it’s a shrine to a humanoid god, so obviously there’s something leading them to consider there to be a connection.

Frankly, I’m not convinced by one line of dialogue. It could, for instance, be a “Mellaggan wouldn’t have abandoned us, so she must have been killed” thing. Another possibility is that Melandru had a representative who remained in Tyria (similar to the Seventh Reaper) who was “Mellaggan” to that group of quaggan, and that representative did get destroyed by the krait.

Danikat.8537:

Also I think even devout humans attitudes would be closer to ancient pagans than modern followers of the various Abrahamic religions. They don’t believe their gods are infallible, certainly not all-knowing or all-powerful so disagreeing with them wouldn’t be totally out of the question. Unusual and probably dangerous, especially in person, but not unthinkable.

This has generally been my attitude when people say that the Six aren’t gods because they don’t conform to the Abrahamic ideal of a god. They’re not supposed to. They’re modelled more on a “pagan” pantheon of gods.

That said, though, I would expect a human to at least have a moment of doubt, of thinking that perhaps the god is acting in such a way because the god knows something we don’t. Even at the point of allowing Tyria’s destruction – human legend has the gods caring about more than one world, so it’s possible that the ‘needs of the many’ principle is being applied on a grand scale. Would allowing Tyria to be destroyed – especially if it’s possible to evacuate it beforehand – be justified if the alternative is to allow many worlds to be destroyed, potentially including Tyria?

Acnologia.6934:

Rytlock new human god of war. A charr as a human god of war… i’ll laugh to death if this happen.

I was thinking this, if it happened, just for the reactions (both in-game and out-of-game)… and I can also think of reasons why it might not be as absurd as it first appears.

I don’t think ArenaNet is likely to do anything that might result on Rytlock being too powerful to be a major character, though. He’s pretty much the game’s mascot.

Natto.5819:

But, ever since Anet writers introduces the idea that a god had his powers reduced due to the Elder Dragons, you can’t deny that with the current lore, other gods could be weakened and be hiding among humans in disguise.

The possibility? Sure. In fact, there is precedent – both Lyssa and Dwayna have disguised themselves as mortals in the past.

However, the inability to disprove a thing does not prove the thing is true.

From what I can see, your argument has the following logic.
A) Balthazar is depowered and disguised
B) Therefore the other gods are depowered and disguised
C) Jennah uses magic outside mortal bounds
D) Jennah’s magic falls within Lyssa’s domain.
E) Therefore Jennah is Lyssa.

There are two flaws in your argument.

The first, lesser flaw is that B does not necessarily follow A. There’s nothing in E5 to indicate that Balthazar’s position is not unique among the gods, and in fact, a possible reading of the final instance dialogue is that it was actually the other gods that caused Balthazar’s fall. One could conclude from the presence of Lyssa’s mirror that she supported his endeavour, but that’s not necessarily the case – the mirror could have been stolen, given as a gift prior to his fall, or could even be a backhanded gift intended to rub salt into the wound that Balthazar took good advantage of. Even if Lyssa is supporting Balthazar, this actually goes against your argument – if all the gods are so weakened that they have to disguise themselves as mortals, and Lyssa is disguised as Jennah, then destroying Tyria could well finish Lyssa off.

The second, greater flaw is that there is good reason to believe C is false.

First, there is precedent for exceptional humans pulling off similar great feats of magic. Tahmu, the heroes of Tahnnakai Temple, Koro Sagewind, and so on. Now, many of them paid with their lives, but they lived at times when magic was a lot weaker than it is now. (And this is without considering the possibility that Doric’s line has greater than average magical potential)

Second, there is precedent for multiple spellcasters working together to create a more powerful effect. A particularly pertinent example is in Sea of Sorrows, where at one point a number of guardians cooperate to create – you guessed it – a protective shield. What’s impressive if you assume it’s one person might be quite pedestrian if Jennah had half the Mesmer Collective waiting for her signal.

Third, there is precedent for a magical artifact or device to be able to generate effects that the creator could not produce directly. The Searing Cauldron copies, God’s Vengeance at Fort Aspenwood, and many asura devices fall into this category. Jennah mentions having made preparations – this dome wasn’t something she’s pulled off on the fly – so it’s entirely possible that she had something enchanted so that if she starts creating a protective shield, the device will amplify and expand it into the city dome we saw. Heck, it’s possible that this particular artifact is an older part of the defences of Divinity’s Reach than Jennah’s reign, and it’s the real reason why the central section has a domed roof.

Fourth, none of the three possibilities above are mutually exclusive. It could be a combination of all three.

Therefore, there are plenty of reasons to believe that what Jennah has done is within the bounds of what a mortal, but royal, spellcaster might be able to achieve with the appropriate preparation and resources.

You really don’t need a Lake Doric scroll, since it’s just off Divinity’s Reach. But yeah, some form of combined scroll would, I think, be worthwhile, especially if the same system is used beyond the current season.

I think this is something that would have benefited from humans having special dialogue. The general plot could work out the same, but human characters might take the attitude that “we need to find out his motivations” rather than immediately jump to the “he’s a villain” conclusion, only deciding that he needs to be fought when he declares that he doesn’t care if he destroys Tyria (god or not, your world is your world).

(Personally, at this stage it feels like they just downgraded human lore once again by turning Balthazar into a villain for the sake of a cheap twist, even if Balthazar was probably the most morally questionable of the post-Abaddon pantheon. The followup for this had better be worth it.)

EdwinLi.1284:

Only ones that showed actual care for Humans was Dwyna, Melandru, Grenth, and Kormir.

Lyssa does as well, but she tended to do so on a smaller scale. That’s five of six, and I’d argue that there’s evidence that Balthazar cared for humanity as a whole, despite being pretty temperamental, even if that was only in the way that a general cares about his soldiers.

EdwinLi.1284:

Dakurus Sunfire.9157:

EdwinLi.1284:

It is actually not out of character as Balthazar is well known to be the most Cruel of the six gods with some Humans calling him the “God of Mass Murder”

I need a link or source.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Balthazar

Don’t mind the part where when he first appeared in tyria that he was carrying the decapitated head of his own father. :p

Check the original sources before relying on the wiki. It’s an asura who called him that, along with a number of other insults – Steward Gixx of the Priory, to be precise:

“Gixx: Sadly, no. The human god of mass murder is not a deity that likes to use the same tactic twice. The idol’s no longer enchanted.” https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Ghost_Rite

ArenaNet missed a lot of opportunities for race-specific dialogue there. Charr should be really raring for the kill, while humans really should be showing some angst towards fighting one of their gods, possibly only truly being resolved when Balthazar goes “I don’t care if I destroy your world in the process”. Even the asura, sylvari, and norn could have specific dialogues if you think about it. Instead, we have the same generic “oh, guess we’re fighting a god” regardless of race.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

perilisk.1874:

The human gods (including the fallen ones) all seem to be the same type of being, just like the Elder Dragons, despite their differences, inhabit a shared category. It isn’t clear if that’s true of the others you mention, or if they even exist as actual beings, rather than just sacralized concepts. Same for spirits of the wild, etc.

I would not consider the fallen gods of the Six pantheon to still be gods. They are demi-gods at best, mortals at worst.

perilisk.1874:

Also Mellaggan is a Quaggan nature goddess. I.e., Mel andru + Qu aggan . Even if the Quaggan insist otherwise, it’s most likely a (probably somewhat tongue-in-cheek) adoption by the Quaggan of a human deity, sort of like Badazar.

Except that there’s nothing to really support this beyond human scholar claims (and we have a long standing history of scholars – human, asuran, charr, or otherwise – making similar claims that are downright false, like “grawl are ancestoral cousins to humans” that charr scholars claim). Mellaggan and Melandru, while having similarities, are about as much of “the same” as Melandru and Mordremoth.

Mellaggan is specifically the goddess of the “bounty of the sea”, which has a very specific meaning. Melandru is the goddess of nature and earth.

Basically, Mellaggan is a lot more specialized in her patronage, and is more specifikitteno Tyria (like Zintl and Ameyalli) rather than general concepts like the Six Gods

Well, there are other similarities, like having the same starting syllables in their name, and the tendency of some quaggan groups to worship Mellaggan at sunken shrines to Melandru. We know that the gods have influenced nonhuman races, it would make a lot of sense for the quaggans to have had some folk memory of Melandru that ultimately became Mellaggan (which is basically a portmanteau of ‘Melandru’ and ‘quaggan’, now that I think on it). The focus on sea life could well be the result of the quaggans being an aquatic race and therefore focused on what happens in the oceans – they see Mellaggan as a sea deity because what they saw was her influence on the seas, and whatever Melandru was doing on land was out of their sight and interest at the time. Therefore, the apparently different identities of Melandru and Mellaggan could purely be a result of the different viewpoints of humans and quaggans, while still being the same goddess being seen from different angles.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Natto.5819:

a – There more other giant races that had access to powerful magics. I think this was said in the Jotun storyline.

Thrulnn the Lost is lying on many accounts. The Six never favored them nor did they ever worship them, and the jotun did not fall from power due to confusion from losing magic but rather their loss of magic was caused by civil wars where they targeted their own scholars and sages.

To be fair to Thruln the Lost, while he’s not telling the truth*, he may not be lying. It’s possible the story was changed by one of his predecessors, and Thruln the Lost is faithfully repeating what he learned.

*The norn ‘defeat our ancient foes’ story arc involves meeting the ghost of a Thruln who saw the collapse of jotun civilisation unfold – hence how we know that Thruln the Lost’s story is wrong. While there may be some elements of truth to it, it was the fault of the jotuns that their society collapsed.

One other possibility, come to think on it, was that since the destroyers are made of Primordus’ magic, they have the same weakness to Jormag’s magic, but being considerably weaker than Primordus, it takes less to kill or incapacitate them. So them being knocked out may have had nothing directly to do with what was happening to Primordus, but simply that they were knocked out due to being too close to the first stream of Jormag magic pulled down by the device.

Another possible motivation could be denying Elona allies. Kryta was already in chaos, but killing Salma would have robbed the anti-Mantle factions of a legitimate alternative to White Mantle rule, but at least some of them would continue fighting nonetheless – thus prolonging the fighting in Kryta. And the potential for chaos in Cantha, or at least resuming Canthan isolation, from killing the emperor probably doesn’t need to be spelled out. Such conditions might prevent either from sending aid to Elona.

When it comes to possible world domination… it’s unclear. It’s possible Joko believes he has a legitimate claim to Elona and is just taking what’s rightfully his, and he’s content with that. It’s also possible he’s just a very patient opportunist and will take whatever he can get, with an eye towards eventual world domination.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

draxynnic.3719:

I think part of that was that the Order of Whispers didn’t believe the dragons could be killed, while the Priory thought the answer might be found in researching the dragons… essentially what Taimi was doing. Zhaitan’s and Mordremoth’s deaths were both essentially a combination of the Vigil and Priory approaches, and when they proved to work, the Whispers assumption that killing them was impossible was overturned.

I agree, but I feel that makes it worse, not better. They didn’t just put the Vigil approach on the pedestal, they discredited the other two- the Order of Whispers was wrong, and the Priory wasn’t going to pan out on time. (Personally, I didn’t see much Priory in either of the kills. It takes a lot of reading between the lines to figure out what happened with Zhaitan, but it seems to me to have been a result of the Inquest data Zojja liberated from CoE, maybe supplemented by her own study under Snaff, combined with Gorr’s research, which the Priory had no hand in until the later stages. Mordremoth came down to the Commander taking a lucky detour and then experiencing a plot-driven epiphany at the appointed moment. The Priory approach, on the other hand, always felt to me like a careful study of how the elder races survived, and not taking any stupid risks until they figured out what they were facing. The Glint’s legacy subplot seems like a natural continuation of that mindset, but the disaster with the Pact fleet was about as far from it as you can get.)

But yes, E5 feels like a shift in approach. I just hope it manifests into something longer term, and doesn’t end up as a blip in the plot.

Essentially, yes. In each case, you needed a bit of the Priory approach for the assault to work – namely, identifying a specific weakness of the dragon. However, in neither case was it the Priory who figured it out – in Zhaitan’s case it’s Professor Gorr, in Mordremoth’s case it’s the PC (which, okay, might be Priory, but is just as likely to be another order, so we can’t really credit the Priory with that).

And we nearly saw Primordus and Jormag taken out using research, to be aborted when additional research revealed it was a bad idea – except that all of that was Taimi, who is not a priory member (as far as we know)

So the Priory’s approach is part of the mix, it’s just that the Priory keeps getting sidelined as somebody else makes the breakthrough.

perilisk.1874:

Edit: Since the Charr’s WM equivalent are users of fire magic, it might also be another chance for Balthazar to seek to get powered up.

Now, that would make for a serious dollop of irony. I wonder if the Flame Legion are really that desperate, though – they also seem to have learned the lesson about worshiping non-Charr gods, they just seem to have taken it to mean they should create their own rather than going full atheism like the other legions.