Randin.5701

If we get a new race with EoD, then tengu seem like the most likely candidate (I'd personally say that the largos are the next most likely). But that is a big 'if'. They've talked before about how much work a hypothetical new race would be, but it's conceivable that they've decided the work would be worth it, or that they've managed to streamline some things that would make it easier. But I wouldn't pin all your hopes on it.

It's certainly possible, and it's one of the more conspicuous features that the game doesn't have yet, but at this point the only things we know conclusively about EoD are 'Cantha', and 'Concluding the dragon storyline'. Everything else is guesswork/wishlisting.

Also, just to address one of my pet peeves, I'd really like to see new zones that physically bridge the gap between the core game world and the more geographically isolated zones that have been added to the game. Basically, I want it to ultimately be possible to actually walk to every zone in the game, rather than needing to use waypoints to get to a bunch of them.

(While we're at it, can we also put in some zone lines between places like Verdant Brink and Bloodstone Fen, Straits of Devastation and Siren's Landing, and Grothmar Valley and Bjora Marches?)

At some point, I'd like to see some more of the non-Iron Legion charr lands. Grothmar Valley was a nice taste, but it'd be nice to see more of what the Blood and Ash Legion territories look like.

The way I see it, there are three major obstacles to making a new race: making armors fit, voice acting for the story, and new zones to go along with the race. So let's look at where the tengu stand in regards to them:

**Armor** Well, the more a new race's rigging corresponds to an existing race, the easier it should be to get armor models to fit on that race. Since the tengu already use the same rigging as the charr, making the armor models fit them should be easier than if they were working on a race that was completely different. Not to say that there wouldn't be any extra work needed to get armor pieces to fit right, but it should actually be fairly analogous to taking an armor piece initially designed around humans, and applying it to sylvari, as an example.

**Voices** The other potential really big issue for a new race, as the story has a lot of voice acting to it. There's two ways you could potentially work around this: First, as some people here have said, you could essentially have it that the tengu start at the current stage of the story, and don't experience any of the story prior to EoD. The other option, which I've brought up elsewhere, is to not actually have a new voice actor for the tengu, but rather use the existing recordings for one of the current races with some post-processing effects to alter the pitch and make it sound a bit distinct from the original. With that, you would have 95% of the voice lines you need for a new race without having to do any new recording (of course, you'd still need to get new recordings for that remaining 5%, but that should be fairly manageable). This wouldn't work for a new race with a distinct accent (like the largos) or an unusual speech pattern (like the quaggans), but for a race like the tengu, it should work fine. And frankly if having two races sound similar is the price to be paid to see a new race happen, I'd be fine with it.

**New Zones** I figure that a new race would require the addition of two or three new zones (not counting the level 80 content making up the rest of the expansion): a new city, a new tier one zone (the equivalent of Queensdale or Ashford), and potentially a new tier two zone (like Kessex or Brisban) to serve as the newbie experience of the race, after which they could reasonably be folded in to the existing zones for the rest of the leveling experience. And of course, people would still expect a full batch of level 80 content out of an expansion pack, meaning that EoD would need to be larger than either of the previous expansions. I have to admit, the fact that the Icebrood content is going to be so thin for the next several months actually has me a bit optimistic on this front, as I could see them doing something like putting the Living World team on making the tengu content, while the main expansion team is working on the Cantha zones.

Just my thoughts on it.

The various Shadow dyes (Shadow Green, Shadow Blue, etc) will have some depth to them on some pieces of armor. On certain color slots on certain armor (I'm inclined to say armors that have etching and similar designs on them), they'll essentially dye part of the section black, and part of it whatever the other color is.

> @"Tseison.4659" said:

> Too OP, next.

It's good that you bumped a two-year-old thread to inform us.

Aside from just 'for fun', I find running the story and completing maps to be a more compelling way to gain exp for masteries than just farming events over and over with my main.

I'm hoping for a pet-focused elite spec--a ghost summoner or something similar would be fitting. Mostly because I want the necromancer--a class typically associated with raising the undead to fight for them--to have a single good looking minion, something that I'd actually want to have following me around. Wanting an elite spec solely on the basis of the potential aesthetics is weird, sure, but that's where I'm at right now.

I'd be equally on board with tengu, largos, and kodan, although kodan seem decidedly unlikely for a Cantha expansion. Tengu have narrative ties to Cantha, which makes them seem the most likely if we were to get a new race, but we will likely be passing through (or more likely, sailing over) largos territory on the way to Cantha, so they'd also make decent sense.

Honestly, if we were to see the norn's design change, the males are the ones I'd leave untouched--they at least look like a separate race. The female norn just being the human female model scaled up is the major visual weakness of the race.

If we wanted to go further than that, then maybe incorporate some of their shapeshifting into their base designs, as customization options. Allowing norn to have animal features--claws, patches of fur or feathers, pointed ears, wolf or cat eyes, etc.--without making them a full charr-style beast race, and ideally while also dodging them becoming a catgirl race.

If I were to narrow it down to the thematically best few classes for each race:

Human: you can make just about all the classes work, but Guardian and Mesmer are the most culturally human classes.

Sylvari: Ranger if you want to play up their nature side, Guardian or Warrior if you want to play up their love of chivalry.

Charr: Warrior, Engineer, and Thief for Blood, Iron, and Ash legions, respectively.

Norn: Warrior and Ranger are both natural fits; Revenant is actually also a really good fit for norn spirituality.

Asura: they're all about magitek; Elementalist, Necromancer, or Mesmer if you want to emphasize the 'magi-', and Engineer if you want to focus on the '-tek'.

It would be nice if we could get a single necro pet that wasn't so goofy looking. Hell, I've been hoping that we would get a pet-focused elite spec with EoD just in the hopes that the associated pet would look nice. But the golem being redesigned to look more like that GW1 version would work too.

Because Kralkatorik got used in a human-centric story arc, so they needed to find somewhere else to give charr their time in the sun.

Naturally, going off that, asura will take the lead in Cantha, while the norn will do so when fighting Primordus.

More seriously, there has been norn stuff in Icebrood, and I imagine will see more once we get to the next zone.

> @"Thunderbolt.3542" said:

> It's been 18 months since the Shiverpeak Mount Pack was on the Gemstore. My Norn must have it someday!

I'll second this one.

For that matter, mount sets themed around the other races would also be great. I'd particularly like a Charr-themed warclaw skin.

Go hit up those minigames in each of the zones. Getting silver in each of those games will net you another dozen or so (possibly more?) mastery points with relatively little difficulty. Bonus if you can swing a gold in a few of them.

Probably ask again in a couple months. I could potentially see it going in alongside the next LW episode

I did a rundown on the Charr a little ways back in this thread, and since I'm currently playing through on a Norn alt, I thought I'd run through the classes with them:

Norn are a race of burly giants that want to gain renown and glory in battle; **Warrior** is obviously a very good fit for them.

The hunt's a central part of their culture, so likewise **Rangers** are also going to be very common.

With the veneration of legendary ancestors being such a big part of their religion, the Norn actually feel by far like the most natural fit for the **Revenant** of all the playable races.

Amongst the Raven-focused Norn, I imagine you'd find a reasonable number of **Necromancers** and **Elementalists**; not enough to actually call them "common" in Norn culture, but there nonetheless.

I feel like **Guardian** doesn't really have anything in its favor of showing up amongst the Norn, but also nothing really working against it, so toss it also into the category of "not common, but also not rare."

**Thief** is a class built around stealth and extreme agility, neither of which really screams "Norn", so I'm inclined to call it rare.

The Norn are also one of the less techy races, so I'm going to say that **Engineers** are rare as well.

And **Mesmer** just doesn't feel very "Norn" to me either, so they also go in the "rare" pile.

Alternatively, going through and making some of the harder-to-obtain mastery points a little easier to get would be nice. HoT and PoF mastery points are honestly plentiful enough that I don't think anything needs to be changed with them (hell, I got enough PoF mastery points without even actively trying, just from naturally playing through the game), but for Central Tyria, doing things like making the Silverwastes legendaries spawn a little more frequently (what if you made it so they were a guaranteed spawn once the relevant fort hit max defensive level?), and taking the LW S2 masteries off of the capstone achievements, and just put them on one of the regular achievements for the episode (ideally not the ones that functionally require a group to complete), would do a lot to make the process more manageable.

> @"SlitheSlivier.1908" said:

> What about Ryland? Think he will die? That's the real question!

If I was a gambling man, I'd bet on Icebrood ending with Rytlock becoming the new Blood Imperator, and thus having to settle down behind a desk, and Ryland deciding to join up with us as penance for everything he did under Bangar, and taking Rytlock's place in the adventuring party.

Definitely agree with making the story modes soloable, and possibly even integrating them into the personal story more directly. I'm running through the full story with an alt currently, and I had forgotten just how little Destiny's Edge are actually in the story if you don't run the dungeons, which makes their appearance in Arah and the post-launch story feel really weird.

And even back closer to launch, I could never find anyone interested in running Crucible of Eternity's story. I'd like to be able to cross that one off the list someday.

A simple thing they could do for pretty much all of central Tyria to improve the look is simply remove that low-hanging cloud cover that every zone has. Having enough of the sky visible that you can actually tell if it's day or night wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

**Charr** are the race I'm most familiar with, so let's run through the classes, and see how well they fit with them:

* **Warrior**, **Engineer**, and **Thief** are the signature classes for the Blood, Iron, and Ash Legions, respectively, so they're obviously in.

* **Rangers** would likely be fairly common as warband scouts, although with their lack of anything techy, I imagine that they'd be less common in Iron than in Blood and Ash.

* **Necromancers** actually seem to show up fairly often as Ash Legion NPCs, and with Ascalon dealing with a persistent ghost problem, it makes sense that the Charr would train undead specialists.

* **Elementalists** are in a weird spot, as they're the signature class for the Flame Legion. Flame used to be accepted in Charr society, and I'd imagine that there has been enough cultural exchange between legions that it would lead to Elementalists existing in the other legions, but they might be a little distrusted for being too Flamey.

* **Revenants** are also odd. Rytlock was the first Revenant, so you'd expect that to cause them to be more common amongst the Charr, but at the same time, the Revenant's brand of Mist magic seems like it's a better match for cultures that go in for things like gods and the veneration of ancestors, and which just generally care about the things in the Mists, which very much isn't the Charr. So I'm inclined to call them less common.

* **Guardians**, if I remember correctly, are supposed to have arisen from GW1 classes that are tied to specifically Human cultural practices. Since GW2 opens with the Humans and Charr having just barely started to make peace with each other, Guardian is something that might be seen as being "too Human" to be something that the Charr are interested in.

* **Mesmers** also seem to show up as being more of a Human thing, so I could see the Charr generally dismissing it for the same reason as the Guardian.

Cultural/racial mount skins for all mounts

Elder Dragon themed skins for skyscales

I've found myself establishing a head-canon of certain mounts being the 'signature mount' for each race. And so except for pulling out the flyers when appropriate (or the skimmer when going over water), I tend to stick with using that mount when playing a character of the appropriate race.

Charr use the warclaw, because, aesthetically, that's just too perfect a fit. Battle-cats riding battle-cats.

Norn use the springer, because it fits well for a race of mountain-dwellers.

Humans use the jackal, since the jackal is apparently made out of fragments of one of the human gods.

Sylvari use the raptor; a jungle mount for the jungle race.

Asura use the roller beetle, since acquiring the beetle is all tied up in asura research projects.