Why did Mordremoth wake up?

I mean the EDs wake up when they're deprived of magic, right? But Mordy was fed a ley line in his sleep, therefore it should've taken longer for him to wake up. Or the ley lines aren't magic?

Well, we don't fully understand the mechanism around Elder Dragons falling into slumber and awakening, but one good guess is that their awakening is related to the levels of local ambient magic. So after enough years of radiating out magic, the magic levels are high enough in the area for them to wake up and start devouring until they are sated. Awakening Mordremoth with a hard kick of ley energy is consistent with that.

What I'm not clear on is how draining Primordus and Jormag reduced their energy signatures to pre-awakening levels.

I'm not sure that dragons sleep when they're full. I think they sleep when there's no more magic to consume, and then they go to sleep. Which means when it became aware of magic, it woke up.

Think about being asleep and hungry and someone starts baking bread in the kitchen. I know I'd wake up pretty fast.

Zhaitan probably woke up because of the abundance of magic in Orr. After Zhiatan died thats when Mordomoth started to be active. You start to understand why Scarlett Brair did all of that during LS1. She heard Mordomoth call and started to work for him. The scene at the end of LS1 showed that Scarlett gave Mordomoth even more magic by tapping into the leyline energy in LA, so during LS2 mordomoth became very active., then we had HoT. With LS3 we started to understand how the other dragons absorbed Zhaitan and Mordomoths magical energy.

Scarlett, an antagonist from Living Story Season 1, was the cause of Mordremoth becoming fully conscious. The running theory (IIRC) is that sometime during those events, Mordremoth started to mind control/influence her to tap ley energy and send it streaming his way to get more power. Magic deprivation is one thing, but large boosts of magic also seem to jump start the Elder Dragons as evidenced by Jormag and Primordus becoming active (briefly) during Path of Fire. Anything that alters the status quo really, since Zhaitan's death before LS Season 1 caused his pent up magic to be dispersed along the ley lines anyway.

@Tamias.7059 said:Well, we don't fully understand the mechanism around Elder Dragons falling into slumber and awakening, but one good guess is that their awakening is related to the levels of local ambient magic. So after enough years of radiating out magic, the magic levels are high enough in the area for them to wake up and start devouring until they are sated. Awakening Mordremoth with a hard kick of ley energy is consistent with that.

What I'm not clear on is how draining Primordus and Jormag reduced their energy signatures to pre-awakening levels.

Well draining them through the machine is obviously what reduced their magic levels. It sucked out Primordus' magic and shot it at Jormag and vice versa. As for causing them to seemingly go back to sleep, it seems that a Dragon has to have a certain amount of magic to be able to awaken. Seeing as champions are seen attempting to build up their ED's magic to awaken them, through the Great Destroyer, Svanir, etc. This is just theoretical, though, but if this is the case, it is possible that if we kept all of the Mouths of Zhaitan dead, we could possibly have put Zhaitan back to sleep.

Because Scarlet had drown a great amount of magic from the depths of Lion's Arch. Why she attacked the Lion's Arch? Perhaps not because there is the greatest amount of magic, but the ways of ley lines are crossing Lion's Arch, so Lion's Arch was (I don't know it still is) one of the greatest source of magic in Tyria.

Also most likely Scarlet's machine drew out Zhaitan's magic, so this is why Mordremoth could even create a large amount of pods to create the minions (Zojja and Logan were imprisoned there).

We didn't see that the magic spread out after Zhaitan's death- somebody can say: that's because of bad design, I think not, because the writers know the story, and I heard that the core, veterant writers like Ree Soesbee or Jeff Grubb wrote the story even for Path of Fire years before it was even released.

i think that the magic of Zhaitan didn't spread out like Mordremoth's magic, and I think that Zhaitan's magic was absorbed by the ground- I mean it united with the whole ley line system.

This is why we didn't see any anomalies then, but after Mordremoth's death, because the ley line system couldn't stand two powerful magics, so this system began to transfer the magic from the ground to the outside.

The real question is, with all the crap going down, how long will primordus and jormag stay asleep? I can't imagine more than another year, if that

It's simple really

Anet needed a protagonist for the xpac and a huge jungle dragon was the best idea they had. So they ran with it

@"Anna.7845" said:I mean the EDs wake up when they're deprived of magic, right?

No. They wake up when there's a lot of magic in the world.

People think that "they go to sleep when there's little magic" means "they go to sleep when they're full"; similarly people think "they wake up when there's a lot of magic" means "they wake up when they're deprived of magic" but that's not the same. However, they tend to result in similar effects (no magic in dragons tend to mean a lot of magic in world and vise versa).

In theory, if you removed most magic from the world while the Elder Dragons are sleeping (such as via a stronger Bloodstone), then it's possible the Elder Dragons would never wake up because there's never enough magic to trigger their awakening (in this situation, it's probable the gods screwed the pooch here with tampering with the Bloodstone - both in Abaddon's giant gift of magic, and the gods splintering it since S3E1 stated fracturing a bloodstone causes it to begin to leak and we were told around release and during S1 that the Bloodstones have been weakening).

Some NPCs are partially to blame saying the Elder Dragons "sleep when they are sated" but the Elder Dragons are never sated. Otherwise Kralkatorrik would be going night night right now, and Primordus and Jormag would be waking up once more.

Primordus, Jormag, and Mordremoth - if not the others too - all had "herald" champions (The Great Destroyer, Drakkar, Scarlet Briar - Scarlet was an improvised herald) who had jobs to feed the Elder Dragons magic to hasten their awakening. The death of The Great Destroyer (and Glint's betrayal) put Primordus (and Kralkatorrik) off by 50 years as they had to gather magic alone. It's probable that the Giganticus Lupicus fought in Arah (confirmed to be a minion from the previous dragonrise) was acting as Zhaitan's herald.

So in this sense, had it not been for Scarlet, Mordremoth would have taken another ~50 years to wake up.

@"Tamias.7059" said:What I'm not clear on is how draining Primordus and Jormag reduced their energy signatures to pre-awakening levels.

Well that much is pretty simple. If they had Power Level 9,000 when waking up, and had eaten a lot of magic to become Power Level 50,000 by the time of Season 3, but were drained of 45,000 Power Levels worth of magic, then they'd be less than their awakening levels (now 5,000 rather than initial 9,000).

Less simple is "why did they go into hibernation?"

My guess is that since exposure to their weakness had paralyzed them (did the same to Kralkatorrik, to a degree), and they had just enough exposure to "knock them out" rather than to "kill them". Kind of like a strangling someone. They're going to pass out from lack of oxygen before they die from lack of oxygen.

Or alternatively it's as @Narcemus.1348 said, and the Elder Dragons need a certain amount of magic to be awake in the first place. I'm not entirely convinced of that, however, if it's a case where creatures become Elder Dragons as Glint's Legacy is all about (which implies that once upon a time, our current six Elder Dragons might not have been Elder Dragons themselves, so they had to have lower magic levels back then).

@Arden.7480 said:Also most likely Scarlet's machine drew out Zhaitan's magic, so this is why Mordremoth could even create a large amount of pods to create the minions (Zojja and Logan were imprisoned there).

Blighting Trees never really showed to utilize death magic. They never touched the corpses directly, just did exactly what was done to Zojja and Logan who were always alive. Copy them.

Hell, that's what destroyers do. Mimic living things. Mordrem were just more accurate.

@Arden.7480 said:We didn't see that the magic spread out after Zhaitan's death- somebody can say: that's because of bad design, I think not, because the writers know the story, and I heard that the core, veterant writers like Ree Soesbee or Jeff Grubb wrote the story even for Path of Fire years before it was even released.

It was stated that Path of Fires was not written until the end development of Heart of Thorns. They "knew they'd bring back the gods" at some point since they began GW2, but they didn't know how or when (which includes not knowing they'd use Balthazar as a villain then).

@Arden.7480 said:i think that the magic of Zhaitan didn't spread out like Mordremoth's magic, and I think that Zhaitan's magic was absorbed by the ground- I mean it united with the whole ley line system.

That's how Mordremoth's magic spread - the ley lines.

@Fenom.9457 said:The real question is, with all the crap going down, how long will primordus and jormag stay asleep? I can't imagine more than another year, if that

As long as the writers deem fit, really.

But in theoretical lore: they could wake up at any moment given the amount of magic in the world, and the amount of destroyers and icebrood still active. Those minions, even the small grunts, would be gathering magic for their Elder Dragon to bring about their awakening sooner.

@"Konig Des Todes.2086" said:

Less simple is "why did they go into hibernation?"

My guess is that since exposure to their weakness had paralyzed them (did the same to Kralkatorrik, to a degree), and they had just enough exposure to "knock them out" rather than to "kill them". Kind of like a strangling someone. They're going to pass out from lack of oxygen before they die from lack of oxygen.

But in theoretical lore: they could wake up at any moment given the amount of magic in the world, and the amount of destroyers and icebrood still active. Those minions, even the small grunts, would be gathering magic for their Elder Dragon to bring about their awakening sooner.

It's also possible that the hibernation was intentional on the part of Primordus and Jormag, for this very reason. As Braham's been angsting at us for half a year now, they retreated to a place where they're nigh-untouchable, but we now know for sure, thanks to PoF, that their minions are still active in the world, and theoretically any of them can feed energy back to their masters. If Primordus and Jormag realized that they'd suddenly been rendered vulnerable- and there's a very good chance of that; remember that the greatest issue Tyrians keep running into is that they don't respect that the dragons are very intelligent beings- then a retreat to recuperate and regroup would be exactly what you'd expect them to do.

@Arden.7480 said:

We didn't see that the magic spread out after Zhaitan's death- somebody can say: that's because of bad design, I think not, because the writers know the story, and I heard that the core, veterant writers like Ree Soesbee or Jeff Grubb wrote the story even for Path of Fire years before it was even released.

But recall that we also didn't see any ley-lines at that point; in fact, the entire concept of ley lines was theoretical for everyone outside Scarlet and the Inquest. It seems that a certain concentration of magic is required to make magic visible to the naked eye. Zhaitan's death didn't hit that point, at least not in the smaller lines running above ground. Mordremoth's did.

On the bigger point of why dragons sleep/wake- I agree with Konig in that they clearly don't sleep when they're sated, not when all indications are that Kralkatorrik is currently running around with more power than a single dragon has ever had before. It seems likely that they'll keep going until there's not enough magic left to sustain their activity. I don't think the data suggests it's as simple as waking whenever ambient magic hits a certain threshold, however. If that were the case, we'd either see them all waking at once, which we know didn't happen, or waking by order of how magically charged their surrounding environment is, in which case it shouldn't be as regularly spaced as we've seen. As Konig noted, they awaken remarkably close to fifty year intervals, with the presence of a champion-level minion redirecting power possibly speeding things up by an increment that is again remarkably close to fifty years. And another issue; while we don't know all the relevant facts about the distribution of magic across the world, it would be reasonable to expect that Zhaitan, sleeping beneath what we've been lead to believe was the single greatest concentration of magic in the world, should've awoken before Jormag, who wasn't near any known magical hotspot. Likewise, the Maguuma jungle, especially the southern reaches that contained Mordremoth's core, were very magically active in GW1, but the Blood Legion homelands where Kralkatorrik was were mundane.

It's clear that something else is going on, something that artificially staggers the cycle. It's possible that the need of a certain threshold of magic to return to activity, coupled with the way Zhaitan was tapped and drained by the Five, contributed to why it wasn't the first to rise, but it does nothing to resolve the other oddities. A dev comment years ago said that the 'current understanding' of Tyrians suggested that the cycle is spaced out to keep the dragons from competing with each other, either by their design or as a naturally arising accord, but it was deliberately framed as potentially faulty/incomplete information. Maybe that spacing also extends to each dragon developing a different sensitivity, such that Mordremoth requires much more magic to stir than Primordus. Maybe the dragons are aware of the surrounding world while they sleep, and of how much power they've already been funneled by their minions, and on that basis time their own awakening; after all, Mordremoth was reaching out and tormenting Scarlet, showing clear signs of consciousness in the process, as early as 1322. Or maybe it's something else entirely we haven't gotten to yet.

TL;DR: It's more complicated than just the level of ambient magic in the world, and it's quite likely that we don't have enough pieces yet to figure out how it really works.

@Scott McGough.6897 said:

@Arden.7480 said:I heard that the core, veterant writers like Ree Soesbee or Jeff Grubb wrote the story even for Path of Fire years before it was even released.

looks like I had a bad source XD

btw: thanks for this answer.

Wait, what? Jeff Grubb, the genius that wrote the finest pieces of dragonlance and the fiendishly brilliant manual of the planes, thought that the story of GW2 was worthy of him contributing to it? It would be like if he wrote that Lunitari turned evil over night, killed Raistlin Majere to get access to kill Nuitari and was in turn killed by Camaron Majere with a dragonlance.

@Torolan.5816 said:Wait, what? Jeff Grubb, the genius that wrote the finest pieces of dragonlance and the fiendishly brilliant manual of the planes, thought that the story of GW2 was worthy of him contributing to it?

Yes, that's him. He's been contributing to the story since Nightfall in GW1

Then Zhaitan was probably indeed a little bit inspired by Takhisis, although Takhisis has no dominant head if I remember well. I would be severely saddened if he is the lead writer of anything after that, he has written too many briliant figures(Soth, Huma, Raistlin, Kitiara etc) to be responsible for: I am Lazarus, NO, I am Lazarus, NOPE, I am Lazarus. Of course he had more freedom in books than he has in a computer game, but the quality issue would be glaring.

@Anna.7845 said:I mean the EDs wake up when they're deprived of magic, right? But Mordy was fed a ley line in his sleep, therefore it should've taken longer for him to wake up. Or the ley lines aren't magic?

1- Imagine you are soundly sleeping for a looong time, and you begin to feel hungry. Eventually your tummy is actually making sounds and hurting, and you awoke, put on the slippers and go to the fridge.2- Imagine you are soundly sleeping for a looong time, and you begin to feel hungry. Then someone squashes a hot dog in your face.