Narcemus.1348

> @"Raknar.4735" said:

> > @"Sajuuk Khar.1509" said:

> > > @"Fueki.4753" said:

> > > There may be a reason for that, but it's also established fact that Lyssa left Tyria with the others.

> > > Therefore she no longer has anything to do with us, who were left behind.

> > > Said reason can be as little as Lyssa disagreeing with the others and refusing to take away his godhood.

> > >

> > > Unless Arenanet retcons the fact that Lyssa left, or we chase the gods into the Mists, there is no way for Lyssa to become part of the plot.

> > There is no established "fact" that Lyssa left.

> >

> > Kormir claims she left, but Kormir isn't all knowing, and Lyssa is the goddess of illusions, and a twin goddess. Lyssa could have magiced her way into making it look like she left, or maybe one of the twins left, and the other didn't.

> >

> > You should never take anything an NPC says as literal truth. Developers write NPC dialog from the perspective of that NPC, a flawed being with limited understanding of the situation.

>

> Kormir isn‘t a normal „unreliable narrator“ NPC. She‘s the goddess of Truth. If her truth isn‘t an established fact, then everything she stands for as a goddess has no meaning. That would also mean, that the titles of the other gods have no meaning. Therefore Lyssa‘s title as goddess of illusion would just be a title, and not a truth.

To my understanding, Kormir is actually the Goddess of Knowledge. Her title, being Goddess of Truth, has more to do with how she treats the knowledge. She inherited her power from Abaddon who was the God of Secrets, because he took all of the knowledge and hoarded it for himself. Kormir is called the Goddess of Truth because she is more open and sharing of the knowledge that she has, and as a Sunspear stood for justice, which means she prefers to expose knowledge under the light of Truth. This does not mean that she automatically knows everything or automatically knows the truth of every situation. The gods of Guild Wars are not omni-anything, but they do stand quite a few pegs above the power of humans.

> @"Fipmip.7219" said:

> > @"Vyrulisse.1246" said:

> > It's getting kinda old how Anet seems obsessed with making villains relatable or trying to make us feel bad for them. Sometimes it's okay to have bad guys be bad.

>

> what you mean like caudecus and joko and balthazar and bangar?

I feel like in those 4 cases, while they gave those villians motivation, they did not make them relatable. In the end, they were all villains that needed put down.

It would have been interesting if they had a hybrid system where players could learn a set of skills and traits from home city trainers and then go out into the world and learn more from fighting beasts with similar spell techniques or new trainers on new continents. It could be similar to a collection system, but that's neither here nor there.

Edit: One additional thought would have been starting with one set of skills and traits based on your character's race, then you could meet with class trainers of other races to learn more about your class and how that race feels about it.

Thank you for building something that has meant so much to me over these years! I look forward to your next big thing!

Test Response

> @"witcher.3197" said:

> Most of the people who were alienated by the narrative of GW2 are probably not going to be around to discuss things on the lore forum 7 years in, let's be honest. The "many of us" is a sample size of what, half a dozen? Irrelevant. All Charr fans too I assume, of course you like the narrative because it caters to you endlessly.

>

Yes, and many of the people who are not bothered either way on the subject find the idea of reading such lengthy discussions dull and don't bother commenting. We cannot assume anything based on those who do not say anything. And you seem to assume that I am a "All Charr, all the time" player which isn't true. I play charr probably 1/4 of the time at best. I have 5 characters one for each race, my main is a Sylvari (who I see as a reincarnation of my main from prophecies) and my next closest to main is my Human Ascalonian Guardian (descendant of my main also). I spent years playing Guild Wars before Guild wars 2 came out during which time I played through all of the games in chronological order, my main was my first pre-searing character, I also have and love my perma-pre and have a third ascalonian character that I used to help bring another player up through the game. I've hated the charr with every fiber of my being, and have grown to respect what Arenanet has done to grow them as a race.

In my time outside of the game, I have spent many hours on these forums discussing the good nature of humans and the balanced nature of the good and evil on both sides to those who view things in a "only charr" sort of way, and have been hated against by some for that reason (hated may be a strong word, perhaps belligerently argued against me?). To add to that, I have never once heard from any of my guildies (from Guild Wars 1) anything along the lines of what you are discussing. I have one guildie that refused to play a charr character in memory of GW1, but he never complained about any unfairness. I do know at least one that would claim that the Asura did more to destroy the feel of Guild Wars than any other race. But we'll just have to agree to disagree. I find the idea of having to shoehorn a lot of human centric perspective into a land where the charr rule and their perspective should be prevalent to be a bad one. The only proper places for human centric perspective in Ascalon anymore should be from human Ghosts, Ebonhawke, and roaming priory members. This is the last I will add to this subject, though. I don't feel the need to hit my head against a brick wall when my OPINION is out there now.

I feel like your previous discussion is proof that they have done a good job of creating a grey story. Many of us long term Guild Wars 1 vets have disagreed with you on how the humans are "villianized". It is pretty obvious that there are two fairly large groups of player perspective for either side. You yourself claim this to be the goal of creating a grey story, and it exists.

By the time Guild Wars 2 had started, the game lore had 3 games worth of entirely and purely human perspective in all things and only 1 expansion that included a few other perspectives. ArenaNet had to do some work to flesh out their world in Guild Wars 2. I think part of the problem are seeing is that most of Ascalon is now charr territory, and because of the lack of humans, most of what we hear is entirely from the charr point of view. And much of it is obvious propaganda, and in many cases is obviously wrong. I believe this is intentional to show that the charr perspective is biased. And we seem to be forgetting that we have the entire city of ebonhawke to offer the opposing perspective.

> @"Pax.3548" said:

> Even though the charr practically destroyed 2 human kindgoms , they suffered massive losses in their invasion, as Kalavier said, the charr invasion force consisted in 2 armies, one went south towards ascalon and then, after the searing, contiued south directly towards Orr but was completely wiped out by the cataclysm, while the second army went west through the far north shiverpeaks, and then south towards Kryta, but the army was annhilated by Saul D'Alessio and the mursaat. Military speaking, humanity , as drained as it was because of the guildwars, sure made the charr suffer for their conquest

Very true, just to add a bit to that, what remained of the Orrian invasion returned to ascalon to find that what remained of the humans were still fighting to their dying breath. They had assumed that Ascalon was broken, and were very wrong to this day. They also had elite groups of humans behind enemy lines sabotaging their plans and killing their Flame Legion leaders. No one can say that humanity didn't give them a run for their money, and while the humans had the cataclysm and the Mursaat that helped push out the charr, the charr themselves couldn't have gotten in without the Titans.

> @"Knighthonor.4061" said:

> why was Lion Arch untouched?

To my understanding, the Charr invaded from the North, since they came through the Far Shiverpeaks. This means that they likely didn't end up sweeping far enough south before Saul D'Alessio countered them with the White Mantle. We know from the story that the last battle where the Charr were broken happened up north of the visited Krytan civilization near the city of Dementra.

When Zhaitan rose he brought the landmass of Orr back from under the sea. If you look at the Guild Wars 1 map, most of Orr was shards of land with sea in between. We do not know the borders between nations persay, aside from the Shiverpeaks separating Ascalon and Kryta. We know there are some ruins in sparkly swamp and blood tide, but I do not think we know if they are Krytan or Orrian. I would say that it is likely that the crystal desert and the Blazeridge Mountains separated Ascalon and Orr, as the Crystal Desert was far more tied to the Primeval Dynasty of Elona.

> @"Kalavier.1097" said:

> Also with humanity originally invading Ascalon and driving out the charr, it's seen by some (out of game at least) as a "Welp, they are even now." type deal.

To answer the OP question, before diverging, the basic explanation for "amends" that we are given is that the travesties of the charr (mostly the searing) were done at the hands of the Flame Legion who forced all other charr to do their bidding. The current chart now fight against those Flame Legion members so they are to a degree redeemable, though that doesn't mean that they regret conquering Ascalon or anything.

I agreed with your statements up until this point. Everyone who takes that mentality acts like the charr were some peaceful, loving natives to Ascalon and the brutal fierce humans came in and destroyed everything they had built. The charr were and still are a race of warmongers who fought and took everything that they wanted. They conquered the Blood Legion homelands and Ascalon from unknown owners (likely to have been the dwarves from the Catacombs of Kathandrax story). They were no more owners of Ascalon than the humans who owned and held that land for something like 1000 years. In the end the Charr were just angry that they had met a race that could stand against them and succeed.

Agreed. As much as I would like new information on them, this story should first and foremost do justice to the Norn, Charr, and Kodan.

What I would really like more of is just a good background of their society and cultural/religious beliefs. To my understanding, while we know they believe in a unique afterlife, we do not know anything about whether they worship their ancestors, or the gods, or the celestials, or anything else. There is so much mystery shrouded around them.

Sadly, we do have to remember that dev comments aren't canon and can be changed. I am not trying to debate over semantics, I'm just trying to find a way to explain this weird and somewhat undesirable situation (fury, seriously?) And have it make some sense.

It becomes difficult, though because they initially set up the secondary domains as magics that could be transferred between dragons, but these new ones feel more like motives or mindsets. Like Zhaitan' shadow domain had more to do with the way that he demoralized his enemies, and kralkatorrik's fury has to so with his anger, and perhaps configuration could have more to do with stirring up conflict, but it all falls apart once way or another...

Do we know that jormag uses Telepathy, though? We know that his minions do. We know that Drakkar and Dragonspawn had telepathic capabilities, but that doesn't mean that jormag does. It could very well be similar to Zhaitan's mesmeric minions, it doesn't mean that he has mind magic just because his minions do. I could be wrong, but I do not know that anyone has been talked to in their mind directly by jormag.

I would agree, there is a difference between having a conversation with someone that has a really high charisma and having your mind manipulated with magic.

I was going to say something similar, you had overpopulation which allowed the affliction to run rampant turning people into afflicted which then turned around and started slaughtering survivors. After years of waiting, the afflicted were finally wiped out and then the gangs became a target, using the freedom of having the afflicted gone to war with each other. Their war was short, but bloody and many of them were also wiped out in the process. And then there was a bit of a civil war against the Ministry of Purity to kill Reiko. I feel like if all of that didn't bring down the Canthan population then any war waged against the tengu and the Kurzick and Luxons would have. Cantha may look very different today.

I understand all of that, my comment was geared towards the idea that since Guild Wars was a MMO, and all things revolved around combat, what other things do the other classes do that could explain the way they explore and interact. For example, I was working on Dervish and was realizing that the dervish, being a wandering mystic, might have similar exploration style to maybe a ranger or perhaps a druid. But as I started going through the spell list and seeing spells that protect from Fey and celestial and feinds and creating portals to the astral plane and such I realized that I would need to go through all of the spells and give them a once over to see how they work in guild wars.

Yeah, I had made 6 races for people to play as (Charr, Tengu, Human, Norn, Asura, and Golem) I kept to just these because our timeline was closer to GW 1 than GW2. But that's as far as I got. I was working on classes, but I couldn't find the right place to start. I had 14 classes I wanted to design between the 2 games and the spells within 5e didn't seem to necessarily fit the feel of Guild Wars. This, mixed with the struggle of figuring out the place of Guild Wars characters in the exploration and interaction pillars was difficult, because Guild Wars was pretty much entirely about combat. I think that I have decided to set that task to the side for now and just DM some regular 5e for my friends and maybe dabble in my spare time. I'll have to check into those sources whenever I get back into looking at homebrewing again.

> @"Kalavier.1097" said:

> > @"brenda.9723" said:

> > I think its is funny that a lot people seem to think that the norn would side with the humans XD. The norn dont like the queen and the rest of the human nobility. They dont like leaders who dont earn their position, but are born in a certain class. So I think it is unlikely that they will help Queen Jennah to stay in power.

>

> Untrue. They didn't care for her at first because they felt she should've just gotten rid of the dissenters in the Ministry who were working against her.

>

> Now they she caused every single traitor minister to publicly reveal themselves and be arrested or killed, and also helped raise the shield around DR against the siege bombardment I'd bet the general viewpoint of her among Norn is higher.

I think that the bigger thing is that the individuality of the norn would keep the norn as a whole from joining either side. You would see individuals on either side and many staying neutral.

> @"Konig Des Todes.2086" said:

> > @"Narcemus.1348" said:

> > To build on this, our information that the Six left to find a new world came from Kormir as well, both being told, and reading in the book. What if this is her way of hiding the fact that she has already done away with the other six, except perhaps Lyssa who has been able to hide from Kormir this whole time. This would seem to leave the uncharacteristic leaving of the souls of their followers to be play toys for demons more acceptable.

>

> It wouldn't feel right to me for the other gods to already be dead. Especially with what happens when a god dies. There would have been one hell of an aftershock if four or five gods had perished.

>

> That said, Kormir isn't the only source for the Six Gods having left. Humans had long tried to contact them without success as they realized they're no longer in their realms (Cathedral of Silence PS), we've been told such by the devs that they left the world too (though this could be a retcon since then, or just them hiding the truth), and the servants of Grenth seem fully convinced that he departed naturally and peacefully.

>

I guess my meaning could be misconstrued. I did not mean that they are all dead, but perhaps she convinced them individually to leave their realms and "balthazar'd" them. It would seem that having the Goddess of Truth on their side helped them find a way to remove Balthazar's divinity, but since the method is unknown, I'll leave it at that. And yes, we know that the Gods left their realms, but we got the reasoning (going to find a new, safe world for their followers) from a book written by a man who got a vision from Kormir, and from Kormir herself. I'll be honest, I was only attempting to add to tinfoil, I do not personally believe this.

To build on this, our information that the Six left to find a new world came from Kormir as well, both being told, and reading in the book. What if this is her way of hiding the fact that she has already done away with the other six, except perhaps Lyssa who has been able to hide from Kormir this whole time. This would seem to leave the uncharacteristic leaving of the souls of their followers to be play toys for demons more acceptable.

Alright, I guess go ahead and close this discussion. It doesn't appear that anyone knows or is interested.

I've always considered the possibility that it wasn't that Grenth couldn't kill Dhuum physically, but for whatever reason, as a God known for upholding Justice, he could not (for some reason) morally decide to kill Dhuum. It is possible, IMO...