Sajuuk Khar.1509

> @Jokubas.4265 said:

> Well, you'd think Kormir would have a connection at least as strong as Lyssa, actually having been a human herself, but that's actually a good point.

>

> Something I found interesting about Balthazar this expansion is that he wasn't "evil" in the sense that his actions were out of malice or some desire to destroy the world. It turns out that, as the God of War, he simply couldn't resist a war on a godly level. He couldn't resist fighting the Elder Dragons because that's simply his _nature_.

>

> On that note, it's possible that Lyssa's hesitation in leaving was similar. For whatever reason, it's in _her_ nature to have a connection to the mortals. It's possible she helped Balthazar on purpose because she hoped that him fighting the Elder Dragons would help the mortals. Further, I think it's possible, then, that she might have stayed behind as well, because of her nature. Of course, the other gods thought she left with them, but there are several ways she could have pulled that off. As goddess of illusions, perhaps she simply faked it. On the other hand, perhaps they pulled a twin trick, and only Ilya _or_ Lyss _actually_ left in order for the other to assist the mortals.

Kormir did, which is why she was the least to leave. Something Lyssa apparently mocked her for. She also mentions that she and her librarians can do no less then keep all the knowledge they have in order, despite the trouble of doing so, because it is a record of everything that was. Which suggests she might have seen her vast library as a means of saving at least the memory of the world, even if she couldn't save the world itself.

As for Lyssa, the Orrian History Scrolls say that Lyssa brought with her the hope and beauty of humanity, and that it was Lyssa who gave humans joy so that they could forget their past. In a rather funny bit of irony, it was the memory of being human, and having hope, that kept Kormir around so long. Perhaps Lyssa being the bringer of hope herself that caused her to have such sympathies. Lyssa's mocking for Komir either being a cover up to hide her true sympathies by towing the party line, or some form of coping mechanism.

> @Thalador.4218 said:

> Also, Balthaddon was _very_ sure of himself that Kralkatorrik's death wouldn't end the world, and it was heavily implied numerous times that he intended to continue his campaign until all Elder Dragons were slain and he claimed their power. At which point everything on Tyria would've become expendable for him, true, but until then he would have needed a strong army with good leadership to fight against all the other races and empires standing between him and the dragons.

The death of the Elder Dragons causing the end of the world doesn't mean that the moment another elder Dragon dies, everyone would just drop dead. All it means is that, with them removed, the cycle of magic would be destroyed, which would eventually cause everything to end. Nothing about what Balthazar did indicated he believed the world wouldn't end, only that it would just end automatically(which nothing ever suggested it would)

Also, he really wouldn't have had to fight through anyone, besides dragon minions, to reach the other Elder Dragons. The only other Elder Dragons alive besides Kralky are Jormag, and Primdordus, and he already knows where Primordus is(in the Ring of Fire where no real opposition exists), and going by Season 3, Jormag isn't too much further north then Bitterfrost, placing him easily within reach, and in area with no real opposition besides Icebrood. And given that the only army that could stand up to him, aka the Pact, is still in shambles after what Modremoth did to their fleet, and with his ability to built portals to the Mists to transport his troops, he would have had no real opposition from anyone but the dragon's minions. He could easily bypass all other nations in his quest. The only real question mark in his plan is bubbles, who we know nothing about really, but none of the races from the deep oceans have any sort of large military that we have seen.

With the power he got from Kralk, on top of the Bloodstone power he already had, he could have very likely just steam rolled the two sleeping elder dragons, and then taken out bubbles in short order, long before the world died. That is if the world dying would even effect him or his army at that point given that they aren't really alive in the normal sense.

For the sake of brevity, I cut them all down.

> @Thalador.4218 said:

>Observations and implications deducted purely from established lore and facts presented by the course of events, you mean.

So assumptions, which are entirely meaningless. The only lore we have on Balthazar is from human made scriptures and depictions of him, which makes them automatically wrong because of religious bias, and the human enforced cult that is "The Five" or "The Six" Also, your proposed hypothetical alternate plan ignores the events of Nightfall, and why the gods left back then as well.

>Simply untrue. They were not in the Mists and definitely not in their realms; a view that was supported by most of the faithful of the gods.

Second hand sources from people who literally have no idea about the true nature of the gods, and will even admit to it. Also, the books in her library don't mention the other gods being around in their realms, in fact, they outright mention Lyssa mocking Kormir for staying so long, which shows the others HAD left their realms a long time ago.

>When the Last of the Forgotten says he's the last on this world

As he knows, which doesn't make it true. Another example, Robert House in Fallout New Vegas believed cats were extinct, they were shown not to be in Fallout 4, that makes him wrong, but not a liar, as he isn't all knowing. Lying implies a willing intent to deceive, which there is no indication of in this case.

Also, while the Forgotten had anti-corruption magic, you would have to be pretty daft to believe they all knew it. Stop assuming that all races one one giant ball of SAME ENTITY WHO KNOW EVERYTHING! They are not.

>Even if he meant "one of his spikes" that is still a world apart from being made of his blood.

The above quote also doesn't say that its because it's from his spine that his spine part is the reason why it can pierce Kralkatroik. His spine is part of his body, which has his blood in it, which we learned from PoF that is what harms him. That isn't a retcon, only a clarification.

>It has no mystery, no intrigue, no feeling of awe.

1. Literally who cares. Stories that attempt twists for the sake of twists are just M Night Shyamalan tier. I could go into Occam's Razor and all that, but the answer with the least assumptions is usually the right one BECAUSE its the most likely one.

2. I also like how you choose to speak for everyone in being disappointing in the depictions of the Elder Dragons. I, and many others I know, find them quite well.

3. And, according to Kormir, they are still "the six" implying they found a new host for Balthazar's power. Which is as per Nightfall lore.

4. The idea that Abbadon's demons could have overpowered the gods had they tried anything is pretty silly.

5. Except, again, Kormir herself mentions they are still "The Six" even with Balthazar depowered, so yes, the game DOES imply they found someone new to hold his power.

>you don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to see that a god's power packs more punch in terms of quantifiable teratons of destruction than the death of a dragon which causes a slight windstorm and a magical imbalance that can actually be fixed.

That really only shows that the gods have less control over their power then the Elder Dragons do, not that they have more of it. It's also indicative of the Six having their powers transferred to them, essentially being a small bottle(human) being forced to contain an ocean, rather then having said power naturally like the Elder Dragons do.

>Or that a few days of battle between these entities could generate enough heat to boil away billions of tons of seawater, turning that sea into a desert,

You mean like how Zhaitan rose an entire nation from underwater in a day? or Kralkatorik branded a hundreds, possibly thousands, of miles long scar across the world simply by flying above it? Lets not get into the BS Mordremoth caused in the little time he was up.

>Also, it is simply bad when you have to treat everything you hear, see, or read as utterances of an unreliable narrator in a game.

No, that simply makes it realistic, because the real world's history very rarely works on hard facts.

To give an example of another game franchise. Bethesda Game Studios, the creators of The Elder Scrolls, a series often cited as having some of the most complex lore of any game series not based on a preexisting series, have freely, and outright, admitted that when writing lore for their games, they knowingly, and intentionally, write several different versions of major events of the past, and put them all in the game, without having any real idea or desire of making any of them true. Even when it comes to things like the Nine Divines, they knowingly places multiple, contradictory, interpretations of them into the game, with no intentions of any of them being true. The whole point is that everything you are told is shaded by political, religious, cultural, or racial, bias, that makes it inherently untrustworthy, just like anything you could be told IRL.

>Dragon Age there were times when the narrative got turned upside down because of a major revelation, but that revelation made sense, it fit the previously known story from a certain point of view

Dragon Age is also a pretty poorly written game, that takes little chances, and barely has lore of its own. Its hard to "mess up" something that's so vapid in the first place. But Bioware did prove they could what with DA2 and DAI being to terrible.

>She says that as not being part of their clique - which was the Six - anymore, not as that he's been ousted but they found a cooler dude to join them in their mile-high club. Stripped

That is your interpretation, one which is not supported by the in-game facts, and, as far as I can see, only really exists to give credence to the idea that Anet messed up somewhere.

> @Thalador.4218 said:

>Balthazar in his entirety (personality, character, principles)

Getting **** on by a bunch of people you considered your closest friends changes people? Who knew! Also, we never met Balthazar in Guild Wars 1, so we have no idea what his personality was outside of second or third hand accounts by his devoted followers... who are OFC inherently biased in favor of their god.

>The fact that the gods were not in the Mists yet Kormir was all of a sudden found in the Mists for the plot's sake

The gods were only "not in the Mists" as per the areas of the Mists humanity knew about, and have explored. Also, she IS the god of knowledge, and already knew everything Kas was going to say before she said it. She would have known we were coming, and thus, been there because she needed to be.

>Forgotten having left Tyria before Kralkatorrik's rise and Glint's death getting retconned into: the Forgotten were all over the Crystal Desert still and even fought alongside Glint before they all got branded

In the words of Michael Kirkbride

"Gypsy Moth dustmemore insert - it should be noted here that it is always foolish to think of whole races sharing like minds. "Ayleid" is as much a metaphysical designation as it is a cultural one. Just like the earliest Chimer who orphaned themselves from the Velothi Exodites, but remain Chimer today, large numbers of Ayleids showed more interest in the immediate earthly needs of agriculture rather than the magical needs of concept-farming. This distinction becomes important later, when "Ayleid" begins to designate other, and ofttimes foreign, agencies."

Or, in short, believing that everyone in an race all did something, or all followed the same creed, is always wrong.

>The dragon-slaying spear was made out of Kralkatorrik's spine (Edge of Destiny), not his blood

I do believe it was made from blood from his spine. At the end of EoD Caithe goes around picking up crystallized fragments of Kralkatorik's blood(seemingly as a backup plan in case they needed to make another spear) Which I suspect will be brought up when we need to kill Kralkatorik.

>The gods getting retconned from wise but distant caretakers who disappeared all of a sudden due to some greater conflict in the Mists (for example, the reason why they were forced to evacuate from the human homeworld catching up to them, Dhuum, Menzies, demons, etc.) into uncaring, incompetent fools

We never knew why the gods left, and the gods were shown as far back as GW1 to be generally uncaring entities, whose sole approach to humanity was "you can do it!" and "You already have the gifts!". They were never wise, the whole Abbadon situation proved that. If anything, the Gods got smarter since then by actually finding someone, or something, to dump Baltahzar's power into, instead of leaving his chained up at full power like they did Abbadon. Balthazar getting freed by a mist wandering Rytlok, using a god-made magic sword, isn't exactly a situation most would account for.

>The gods now being weaker or on par with the Elder Dragons whose power is beyond them - it was the opposite all the way up until PoF

Was it really though? Almost all talk of gods vs Elder Dragons has been pure speculation. No one in any position to actually confirm such a thing has said the gods were stronger then Elder Dragons.

All this demonstrates is a long running problem in fandoms when it comes to lore. People take whatever they read as being truthful if its propagated enough times in the game, when, in reality, you should NEVER EVER trust a single thing any NPC, or in-game text, says, because in the frame of in-universe, it's all skewed by bias and the NPC's personal interpretations.

>I'm genuinely interested; where does she say that there are still Six Gods and not only five?

When talking to Kormir, Kas makes some comment about one of the six betraying humanity, and Kormir mentions that Balthazar had his power stripped, and is no longer one of the six. She makes no comment or suggest on about how, with Balthazar gone, it would be only five now. Kormir herself just mentions "The Six" as if there are still 6 of them, even with Balthazar depowered, and not counting because of it.

-We know Kormir was human, and Grenth is supposedly at least half human(his mother being Dwayna, and his father being a mortal sculptor)

-We also know the gods we have now are not the first. Dhuum came before Grenth, and Abbadon came before Kormir, and we know someone came before Abbadon as well.

Given how we learned from Nightfall that god power can't be destroyed, even tough the god holding it can be, it's very possible all the gods we have now are simply people who took the mantels from some previous, possibly non-human, entity, much like Kormir did.

How THOSE beings got that power, they were either born with it, like the Elder Dragons, or amassed tons of magical power throughout their lifetimes to achieve it.

It really wouldn't surprise me if there was some level of discontent among the 6(besides Balthazar going off the deep end) about the decision to leave Tyria to its fate.

Lyssa always had a stronger tie to mortals then the others, and ancient texts say she lived among humans until Arah was completed, and that the other gods basically told her she had too leave them to live in Arah, despite not really wanting too.

It really wouldn't surprise me if she did something to help Baltahzar, even if she may not have known just what he was going to do.

> @"Konig Des Todes.2086" said:

> Which is coincidentally also unneeded with the plot going the way it is. With the Pact's decimation at the beginning of HoT, Mordremoth could have been "just as tough" as Zhaitan and we'd have issue, and with the Pact being unable to scrounge up the forces to face another dragon so soon, neither do the next.

>

> Though IIRC, the reason why they made Primordus so huge was said to be because they thought Zhaitan and Mordremoth were "too small" to be true world-shattering threats. Hence the irony that they made Zhaitan's model smaller because the original was too huge to have a reasonable fight against.

Ehh, the supposed destruction of the Pact by Mordremoth always seemed more like a loss of materials rather then a loss of forces. We see a huge number of Pact survivors access the HoT maps, as well as a rather large sum of recoverable materials, and a number of events based around recovering said materials.

Though, I find it funny they thoughts Zhatan was too small when, based on what the wiki says at least, ti was nearly wice as long as the original USS Enterprise from Star Trek TOS. IT was literally nearly twice as long as a starship.

> @Vyko.6953 said:

> here you are, all dragons! and one icing on the cake - that tiny stain above Primordus is Vlast.

> 

Ahh yes, the good old power scaling issues caused by having to make each new threat bigger and badder then the last in order to try to justify why its a challenge to kill compared to the last one.

Though, trying to take Mordremoth's size is a bit complicated by the fact he is his corruption, so his body is basically all of his vies which stretch all across central Tyria.

To be honest, this immense size doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, who remember the original Zhaitan model? The one whose head, neck, and one arm was larger then the Zhaitan we have in-game.

> @"Konig Des Todes.2086" said:

> Unfortunately we do not know the size of their territory - which gives Anet some wiggle room for determining such if/when we go there. We only know that they originated east of the Blazeridge, and under the first Khan-Ur marched north, west into the EotN Charr Homelands / GW2 "Blood Legion Homelands", and then south into now-called Ascalon. We don't know if - or when - they marched further west, or really what lies further east of [the new in-game world map](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/4/46/Tyria_map_%28clean%29.jpg) that was pulled from the dat file, beyond the general shape of the land from the [full world map](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Tyria_world_fan_map.jpg).

What I find odd about that new in-game map that was data-mined is that it is missing the giant inland sea shown on the other map.

I mean, Its obviously very low detailed an artsy, so the terrain isn't very clear, but they were usually pretty good about showing us when there was a giant puddle of water somewhere.

One thing that has always bothered me is that, we know the Blood and Ash Legions have their own territory on the other side of the mountains to the north and east of Ascalon, but just how large ARE those territories? Iron controls all of Ascalon, but do we know anything about how large the area they rule is? If its a similar size to that of Ascalon themselves? I couldn't imagine the other Legion not having similar territory sizes given how much they constantly try to stay on top of each other.

It has always seemed odd to me that the Charr's "empire" or w/e you want to call it could make them the worlds preeminent superpower, but its always just sort of ignored and they just sort of act as if Ascalon is all they have.

Its even odder when you think about how the Charr Homelands area we visited back in EoTN was treated like it was super backwoodsy, on the fringe of their territory.

> @"Konig Des Todes.2086" said:

> 3. Based on [Garden of the Gods](wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Garden_of_the_Gods) they're going to another world, a world without major problems like the Elder Dragons, to begin anew with humanity or possibly other races.

This would be the most hilarious kick in the balls if it turns out to be true. I mean, can you imagine it?

The gods brought humanity to Tyria, seemingly fleeing some cataclysm on the world they came from, and now, once it turns out this world also has a cataclysmic event going on, they just leave it, not even bothering to attempt to evacuate even the humans?

Its like "You guys are cursed, so we are just leaving you here to die, have fun!"

> @Harper.4173 said:

> So then let them hover as a presence - allow them to be a part of the story without giving them the chance to upside everything - like GW1 did.

Guild Wars 1 didn't though. The gods had no real part in Prophecies, Factions, or Eye of the North. The only time they did anything was in Nightfall, where they collectively told Kromir and the rest of the party that they couldn't do anything about Abbadon, and that it was up to mortals to suck it up and figure it out themselves.

> @Harper.4173 said:

> I'm not saying that we should have let him beat up the dragon and blow up Tyria - I'm saying WHY did they write the gods off and write him into such a cliche in the first place.

The gods are brokenly powerful and would make things too easy. Same reason they had to make up excuses back in Guild Wars 1 as to why the gods never did anything beyond tell people "y'all can do it!"

-The Asuran eternal alchemy is just a philosophical concept to describe nature, and how everything interact on a universal level.

-The Charr's military is limited by mortal means.

-The Norn's spirits are, in all honesty, pretty weak,and several of them got killed by Jormag.

-The Sylvari's dream is limited in what it gives based on what the Sylvari themselves know.

The human gods on the other hand are literal walking, talking, planet destroying, living atomic bombs. Them giving humans even a fraction of thier power allowed humans to dominate the known world for hundreds of years.

> @Thalador.4218 said:

> If they cared, they would've done one of the following:

>

> A.) Evacuate the Tyrian human population and everyone else who wanted to escape "certain" doom to another world that doesn't have eldritch abominations feasting on life and magic. Just like they saved humanity in the first place and brought them to Tyria from an unknown calamity that possibly destroyed their homeworld.

> B.) Understand that Glint and the Forgotten were working on multiple viable projects that could fix the extremes of the dragon cycles and prevent the destruction of life and the disappearance of magic in draconic bellies. They could've worked from their realms through proxies (avatars, champions, priests, priestesses, divine interventions, etc.) to further that plan and help Glint realize her designs to save Tyria.

To be perfectly honest, this is the same way gods, or ascendant beings, are portrayed in basically every medium. Stargate did the same with its "ancients", and Star Trek does the same with the Organians.

10 dollars says they know, or know of, some way to beat the Elder Dragons without screwing up the planet, they just wont tell us because "we are supposed to stand on our two feet and figure it out". Then, after its all over ,they will send some token avatar and be like "good job guys, we knew you could do it!"