If a 3rd Brand appears on the map I'm done

When GW2 started the Brand was already created by kralkatorrik - not a fan, but it made sense. Then with this expansion we get a 2nd Brand, now much, much bigger...

And at the end of the story, Kralky got even stronger and looks to be the main bad guy. If he starts branding the rest of Elona I'm so fucking done. We have all these beatiful lore rich maps and if one of these bland, boring, onedimensional, uninteresting, oversized drakes turns half of them into these generic purple zones I won't even want to play this game anymore.

I hope we focus on the rebuilding of the Sunspears, but deepd down I know it's just going to be the 6th year of boring dragon hunting..

I think Kralkatorric absorbing the magic from Balthazaar gives the devs a wonderful opportunity to add new and interesting assets to the Brand biome. I'm fine with more branded area, just make sure it has a nice twist that makes it different from the rest of the brand.

Completely agree.Branded is by far the most boring dragon minions on this game. i hope the crystal dragon will be done in the next LS season. if they do a ex-machine to kill it on first LS4 chapter i will make a party to celebrate.

In fact, a niche of crystallized creatures seems to excuse the lazy designer to make almost two-dimensional drawings with a 2-color palette. If it's all crystal, what do I need besides draw giant polygons?

Joe Satriani at least get good inspiration from Crystal stuff.

Other than the original maps, which generally had a bunch of maps with the same 'theme' next to each other, ANet have been relatively good since HoT to deliver us varied maps with multiple biomes/locations or at least maps that don't feel really similar one after the other.

I think Kralk WILL brand further, because the end cutscene proves as much, but I don't think that means we'll ONLY see brand in the Living World maps they release. Season 3 chucked us all over Tyria - we went from Volcanoes, to Kryta, to the Shiverpeaks and more. I can see that continuing with Season 4.

Also as Malthurius pointed out, absorbing the Lion's share of the magic Balth released gives us the opportunity to see new types of Branded and new types of corruption.

Kralk has absorbed, if we take into account what happened to Balthazar, dragon energies from 3 dragons: Mordremoth, Jormag and Primordus (the bloodstone, if I recall correctly, contained magic not corrupted by the dragons, as per the Seer lore). The first thing we can draw from this is that like Jormag and Primordus are opposite, probably so are Kralktatorrik and either Steve or Zaithan. I vote Steve but due to c'mon Anet at least show us the kitten whole story of dragons Zaithan certainly not being opposite to Primordus, Jormag or Mordremoth (they used "death.good." magic according to Taimi and the story during HoT and LS3), it leaves us with the uncertainty of whether or not Steve or Zaithan's corruptions can't be put into the branded (we don't see branded that are anything but branded in themselves so far).

With that in mind, we might hope that Kralkatorrik actually puts the corruption he inherited to some use, it would be nice for example to have a zone (did anybody say a META zone???) where the whole Pact takes on Kralk and there's a Matthias-like phase shift on the climate of the whole map due to Jormag/Primordus magic running rampant. But that's probably just a dream and we'll get a zone with 2/3rds of that sweet grape juice.

I'm fine with it, really, nothing can be as boring as Jormag whose all snow and ice. I mean, we have a big Shiverpeaks, but every corner just kinda looks the same, only the south has some variety with less snow.The brand has a lot more life to it, since it's any complex unique terrain covered in Crystal, so its much more variable than snow and ice

The Branded have honestly been my favorite dragon minion enemies, due to the over abundance of fire, ice, and death themes in fantasy. Mordrem were a welcome respite, but sapient plants are not often far behind the other three. Crystalline monstrocities while not unheard of, is less common. Same with lightning, though those are more common than plant creatures.

As mentioned, Kralkatorrik now effectively has absorbed magic from four of the other five Elder Dragons - Primordus and Jormag via Balthazar, Mordremoth and Zhaitan via their deaths - so we could very well start seeing Subject Alpha-esque foes in Season 4 and Expac3 (depending on how far we go before killing Kralkatorrik).