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Modern Tyrian Warfare


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This is intended fully in the spirit of friendly competitive speculation

@draxynnic.3719 said:

@"Psientist.6437" said:Guns are vented bombs. Make the gun itself stronger and it can use more powerful or simply more propellant. A .44 magnum is bigger than a .22 for this very reason. The material of the projectile is important, but the strength of the gun is more important. The strongest projectile possible becomes even stronger with a bigger explosion behind it.

Presumably, whatever magic defenses we could give to melee, ranged can use as well. It is very hard for range not to have the advantage. The Tyrian magic system is too hand wavy to make strong predictions, but I think only the strongest users of melee magic would be relevant in Tyrian large scale warfare. It looks as though magic users channel their magical ability through their gear. I don't see why magic users couldn't learn to do the same with a tank.

Yeah, I did note that the strength of the barrel can certainly help, through the mechanism of allowing for a larger charge behind the projectile. However, in the race between armour and firepower, better materials usually benefit armour more.

Stronger materials have more impact on the chamber where the explosion happens. Projectile strength has always led armor strength. Armor can sometimes catch up but historically, has always fallen behind. Projectiles don't have to be harder than armor and projectiles can use materials armor can not. Modern anti-tank projectiles are constructed of a depleted uranium casing with a copper core that melts and then burns through the armor. I am not sure what you are basing your logic on.

When it comes to the effect of magic - however handwavy you think it is, there are certain tendencies we can observe. For instance, almost every profession has some sort of projectile destruction or, worse, reflection field - guardian has several, mesmer has a couple, elementalist has Swirling Winds, necromancer has Corrosive Poison Cloud, scrapper has Defence Field, holosmith has Photon Wall, spellbreaker has Winds of Disenchantment, revenants have Protective Solace, and thieves have their various smoke effects (which technically only make those within impossible to target rather than actually stopping the bullets)... and Seal Area. Abilities that specifically act to keep melee enemies at bay are less common, usually on professions that
already
have access to some form of projectile hate, and can generally be more easily countered (using Stability, teleports, or some other means of getting past the magical line). So the end result seems to be that magic, on the whole, is
more
effective at countering ranged projectiles than other attacks, including melee.

Another thing that needs to be considered is that from the Tyrian perspective, guns are more of an equaliser than a revolutionary technology. The most advanced non-magical guns we're seeing are early gatling guns - to someone capable of tossing fireballs, lightning bolts,
, or more exotic magical attacks, this isn't actually all that impressive. Most fantasy settings present magic-users as being fairly rare in an effort to
not
have them revolutionise how wars are fought, but if you look at most human armies that you fight* in Guild Wars... traditional medieval period soldiers such as warriors and archers are certainly the most
common,
but you're often still looking at about half their number being spellcasters, and I'd consider most
Guild Wars
spellcasters to be scarier than any gun-armed infantryman before the arrival of true automatic small arms (which... we don't see in GW2). So if melee troops are still viable in the period of Guild Wars 1, I don't see the invention of firearms being something that really changes that. The reason why the three legions adopted technology was that, having outcast the Flame Legion, most of their enemies overmatched them in magic and they needed to close the gap - and the Pact then found ways to combine magic with charr technology.

*I specify 'that you fight' because ArenaNet tends to be economical with forces that you're generally not expecting to fight. The best example is comparing Ascalonian forces in most of GW1 (where you pretty much only see warriors and rangers, apart from the Flaming Sceptre) to what you see from the ghost army in GW2 or the Ascalon Army in the Annihilator mission.

The magiphysics behind class skills is purposefully hand-wavy. I don't have the source but the studio has said they keep the distinction between martial and magic skills unclear so players like yourself can make up your own distinctions. We have to be careful when using class skills as a genuine description of Tyrian magi-physics. Classes are also designed for balance.

So what happens when Tyrians develop new gun magic? Look what they have done with martial weapons. You seem to be relying on scenarios pitting magic enriched melee and magic poor ranged. We can use a very simple approach to our question; magic as a multiplier for a weapons platform, magic power (weapon + armor + trinkets) = total PEW or THONK. We know Tyrian magic skills change. Using the correct definition of Darwinian fitness, we should also expect magic skills to evolve. Tyrians should get more fit at using magic guns. Perhaps the potential impact of guns depends just on the difference between the bow and gun as magic poor weapon platforms. The impact of magic(guns) would eventually be huge.

edit: The impact of magic(exposives) would eventually be huge as well.

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@"Hypnowulf.7403" said:I the Rule of Wonder applies here, and it all comes down to how well it's implemented.

I'm not sure if that rule actually exists, mind you! I surmise that it does. There are rules of Cool and Fun. If it does not, use TVTropes or a similar analogue and fashion your own supposition as to how a Rule of Wonder would work.

The point is? Wonder is the dominating force.

This is an extremely vertical tank with a lion face. How does it stay upright? Dunno! It doesn't matter, really, as the rules of another reality need not match our own. So long as internal consistency is on point, anything can and will be possible because that's just more compelling to the kinds of people who enjoy these settings. In fact, at one point there was no "Fantasy" genre, there was only "Science-Fiction." The Tolkienesque perspective of separation came later.

I know Tolkien isn't to blame for this directly as he didn't create this separation; He did, however, popularise it. Earlier settings would play around with the concepts of Fantasy and Science, often blurring the line. A truly fantastic example of this is Anne McAffrey's Dragonriders of Pern, where whether the setting is perceived as Fantasy or Science-Fiction would be down to which era you were reading about.

Such as—caveat lector but five decades is long enough to not have to worry about spoilers, I'd think—before or after they discovered that there are spaceships and that dragons are genetically engineered creatures.

In more recent years we've seen the lines blur again as I feel most have become tired with the... stark separation between the two, desiring a merging of the realms if you will. (No one's going to get that reference, even were I to belabour it to say it's been a journey getting here.) Hm. There have been clumsier applications of this creative amalgamation, popularising the combination of the two as though it were an original idea, and they've paved the way for stronger examples of how the genre used to be. Loathe as I am to admit it, World of Warcraft likely played a large role by... Well, ripping off Warhammer wholesale. Blizzard's always been better at marketing the stolen works of others than their original creators ever were.

So, what does this gun do? Does it make sense? Rule of Wonder. There's probably some in-Universe explanation that doesn't have to have anything to do with ours. How did that norn leap five miles across a gorge, at such a bizarre trajectory, only to land gracefully on their feet without breaking their legs? I mean, I don't know if that's actually happened in Guild Wars as it's hyperbole, but knowing the norn it probably has.

How does this spell work? How do you summon food out of the aether? How does this gun work? Rule of Wonder.

Guild Wars 2 has played with some interesting perspectives of this as well as there's th dark side of the Rule of Wonder. If you're playing with things you truly don't understand, it might just blow up in your face. It might just blow up into a very ornery, upset, and murderous flame elemental. I think the asura might know a thing or two about that. I'd say lately they've gotten better about their scientific practises when dealing with dangerous and poorly understood forces.

There is a dark side to wonder indeed. I think this is represented by the torment and the tumultuous nature of magicks and magical creatures within the realm of Tyria. I mean, I would trust the norn Spirits of the Wild as far as I could throw them. Skeevy doesn't even begin to encapsulate tehir manipulative, narcissistic, and sadistic mores.

This tumult has lead to questioning whom can be trusted where magicks are involved. I know that we all have our opinions about that! That's how it is, though, with so little understood it always invites an air of mystery and you will have to suspend your disbelief with what's possible because with warped physics and magicks in the mix there's no essentially valid comparison to be made between our reality and theirs.

If you can shield yourself in magic and leap great distances, there's no reason not to throw yourself at a tank. If you can get a lanky tank to stand upright so that it can fit through all but the tightest of alleyways then you might as well do that too. If you can have a metallic car with giant, equally metal wheels do wheelies then why the heck not? All bets are off.

The point is is that anything we could draw from our reality probably isn't directly applicable to theirs due to the massive number of different and new variables in play. If the charr managed to figure out quantum computing due to quirks in their reality that enabled them to do it quicker than we have in ours, it can't really be questioned because—to say it again—such comparisons aren't useful.

It's like being irate that the charr have evolved so quickly in technological fields without taking into account the differences in physics, physical reality, and magicks that's come over silly to me in the past. We can't expect things to just work the way they do in our reality. The part I find especially fun is how the Rule of Wonder applies to technology as well as magicks, much as it has in some of my favourite settings, which is always worth taking into consideration.

How can you throw a fireball? Rule of Wonder. How can that fireball be withstood by a tank? Rule of Wonder. There's probably some material that has anti-magic properties. This is, in fact, true. Materials in Guild Wars have been shown to have either magical or anti-magical properties—ghosts cannot pass through black iron, which is precisely why the Black Citadel is made from the stuff.

So warfare systems in our world might not be applicable. If you were to have trenches, it'd be a simple matter for an Elementalist to flood them with lava—or water! Plain old water is good too. But then you have to consider that the charr could also probably drive one of their super-lanky all-terrain tanks down into enemy trenches as well, since it'd fit. It's just a funny mental image, it makes me giggle, you wouldn't want to be in trenches with one of those. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the Black Citadel can transform into the bloody Technodrome.

I think that this is why the most applicable warfare types just seem to involve a mix of guerilla tactics and everyone just scampering off everywhere in a mad free for all because it's just chaos. That's just how it is. It's more fun that way, I think.

A world where anything can happen is the only rule eventually flies up its own kitten. Suspension of disbelief isn't indestructible. It is very easy for writers to use the Rule of Wonder as an excuse for staying superficial or making the story about their own motivations. The studio has wagered a lot of suspension of disbelief with our truce with Jormag. All works build rules. I get that a fantasy mmo is an atypical genre. The Commander perspective makes atypical audience demands. The studio has built interesting great big rules. The works that push the premise that anything can happen too far stand out because audiences react poorly. It would be easy for Tyria to become too unreal.

More on topic, I think the depiction of combat is realistic because it fits within implied Tyrian magiphysics. Magic, not gear, make the fighter with magic as a psycho-reactive substance. A powerful enough Guardian could take a city. Conflict above a certain threshold would likely include magic users, martial or otherwise, and their strength would decide the outcome. The most powerful magic users will decide the shape of the immediate field of combat.

Not taking into account magic; guns, tanks, and helicopters make trench warfare obsolete. With them, we get our real world version of the ancient strategy of using forward forts and rearward support to project force with regular patrols and rapid response tactics. Guns, tanks and helicopters would make it much easier for powerful Tyrians to control, protect or threaten civilian populations. Tyria adds teleportation, wormholes, dragon mounts, etc into the bag. If we take the premise of group buffing seriously, large scale Tyrian combat would likely look similar to WvW but with real death. The winner would then overwhelm the civilians and magic poor.

Tyria could be a dark place for the magic poor. We have seen that narrative told. I would love to see more. Magic poor would describe someone who could use magic but can't afford training or gear. We have comments from the studio implying that everyone may be able to use magic. The story told by community material drives for NPCs could be so much richer.

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My point about trench warfare is not meant to be hard evidence for its viability (although such in-game evidence does exist). It is simply meant as a background for why such warfare would be cool to see at some point in the future, a method of carrying the suspension of disbelief via a 'reasonable enough' plot development in hopefully the minds of most people. The way actual warfare would be executed is not something that can be calculated outside of whatever anet decides will be the theme of the season. There is already large dichotomy in what happens between large player fights, large NPC fights and cutscenes. the world on screen is a synecdoche of the world in canon. My simple reasoning is that battlefields like those seen in verdun and passchendaele make for exciting, cinematic gameplay areas that, going by what I have outlined in the OP, would fit reasonably well.

@Psientist.6437 said:Not taking into account magic; guns, tanks, and helicopters make trench warfare obsolete. With them, we get our real world version of the ancient strategy of using forward forts and rearward support to project force with regular patrols and rapid response tactics. Guns, tanks and helicopters would make it much easier for powerful Tyrians to control, protect or threaten civilian populations. Tyria adds teleportation, wormholes, dragon mounts, etc into the bag. If we take the premise of group buffing seriously, large scale Tyrian combat would likely look similar to WvW but with real death. The winner would then overwhelm the civilians and magic poor.

besides the point, but I'd like to point out that trenches are still used in real-world modern warfare.

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@Psientist.6437 said:This is intended fully in the spirit of friendly competitive speculation

@Psientist.6437 said:Guns are vented bombs. Make the gun itself stronger and it can use more powerful or simply more propellant. A .44 magnum is bigger than a .22 for this very reason. The material of the projectile is important, but the strength of the gun is more important. The strongest projectile possible becomes even stronger with a bigger explosion behind it.

Presumably, whatever magic defenses we could give to melee, ranged can use as well. It is very hard for range not to have the advantage. The Tyrian magic system is too hand wavy to make strong predictions, but I think only the strongest users of melee magic would be relevant in Tyrian large scale warfare. It looks as though magic users channel their magical ability through their gear. I don't see why magic users couldn't learn to do the same with a tank.

Yeah, I did note that the strength of the barrel can certainly help, through the mechanism of allowing for a larger charge behind the projectile. However, in the race between armour and firepower, better materials usually benefit armour more.

Stronger materials have more impact on the chamber where the explosion happens. Projectile strength has always led armor strength. Armor can sometimes catch up but historically, has always fallen behind. Projectiles don't have to be harder than armor and projectiles can use materials armor can not. Modern anti-tank projectiles are constructed of a depleted uranium casing with a copper core that melts and then burns through the armor. I am not sure what you are basing your logic on.

That's... really not true. Know where the term 'bullet proof' comes from? High-quality armour was tested by firing bullets at them. The dent was the proof that the armour could stand up to the bullet - it was "bullet proofed". People have an exaggerated idea of the effect of longbows, crossbows, and even early firearms against armour, and yes, it did get to a point where the guns got powerful enough that it became increasingly impractical to wear armour that could protect against it due to the weight it would require. So armour got reduced from full suits to breastplates and helmets, and then removed altogether - but this wasn't because people COULDN'T make armour that could stop bullets (just look at Ned Kelly), just that it was so heavy it wasn't practical for battlefield use.

Armour has always been a compromise between protection and weight/practicality. Once armoured vehicles were invented, the main thing limiting how much armour could be layered on was how much weight the engine could push along.

In both cases, the availability of a material that's both lighter and stronger than steel is going to make a big difference. In the real world, we didn't get anything better for than high-quality steel until the invention of composite armour after World War 2, a time when advanced armour piercing shells were already flying around. In Tyria... we have mithril being presented as a material which is as much of a step up from steel as steel is from bronze, while in the meantime, we have no evidence that projectile technology is any more advanced than WW1 at the latest. So you've got some explosive projectiles, incendiaries, gas and the like, but armour piercing is probably still solid slugs.

Improving the metal of the chamber would help since it allows more propellant to be used per shot without risking breaking the weapon, but you're still looking at century-old propellant and projectile designs, and when it comes to armour, the quality of the material is pretty much the determining factor of how tough it is once you get past design considerations. Considering that the Kelly gang's armour worked and that was pretty crude (albeit thick and heavy), then armour made out of a material that's lighter and stronger than steel would go a long way.

When it comes to the effect of magic - however handwavy you think it is, there are certain tendencies we can observe. For instance, almost every profession has some sort of projectile destruction or, worse, reflection field - guardian has several, mesmer has a couple, elementalist has Swirling Winds, necromancer has Corrosive Poison Cloud, scrapper has Defence Field, holosmith has Photon Wall, spellbreaker has Winds of Disenchantment, revenants have Protective Solace, and thieves have their various smoke effects (which technically only make those within impossible to target rather than actually stopping the bullets)... and Seal Area. Abilities that specifically act to keep melee enemies at bay are less common, usually on professions that
already
have access to some form of projectile hate, and can generally be more easily countered (using Stability, teleports, or some other means of getting past the magical line). So the end result seems to be that magic, on the whole, is
more
effective at countering ranged projectiles than other attacks, including melee.

Another thing that needs to be considered is that from the Tyrian perspective, guns are more of an equaliser than a revolutionary technology. The most advanced non-magical guns we're seeing are early gatling guns - to someone capable of tossing fireballs, lightning bolts,
, or more exotic magical attacks, this isn't actually all that impressive. Most fantasy settings present magic-users as being fairly rare in an effort to
not
have them revolutionise how wars are fought, but if you look at most human armies that you fight* in Guild Wars... traditional medieval period soldiers such as warriors and archers are certainly the most
common,
but you're often still looking at about half their number being spellcasters, and I'd consider most
Guild Wars
spellcasters to be scarier than any gun-armed infantryman before the arrival of true automatic small arms (which... we don't see in GW2). So if melee troops are still viable in the period of Guild Wars 1, I don't see the invention of firearms being something that really changes that. The reason why the three legions adopted technology was that, having outcast the Flame Legion, most of their enemies overmatched them in magic and they needed to close the gap - and the Pact then found ways to combine magic with charr technology.

*I specify 'that you fight' because ArenaNet tends to be economical with forces that you're generally not expecting to fight. The best example is comparing Ascalonian forces in most of GW1 (where you pretty much only see warriors and rangers, apart from the Flaming Sceptre) to what you see from the ghost army in GW2 or the Ascalon Army in the Annihilator mission.

The magiphysics behind class skills is purposefully hand-wavy. I don't have the source but the studio has said they keep the distinction between martial and magic skills unclear so players like yourself can make up your own distinctions. We have to be careful when using class skills as a genuine description of Tyrian magi-physics. Classes are also designed for balance.

So what happens when Tyrians develop new gun magic? Look what they have done with martial weapons. You seem to be relying on scenarios pitting magic enriched melee and magic poor ranged. We can use a very simple approach to our question; magic as a multiplier for a weapons platform, magic power (weapon + armor + trinkets) = total PEW or THONK. We know Tyrian magic skills change. Using the correct definition of Darwinian fitness, we should also expect magic skills to evolve. Tyrians should get more fit at using magic guns. Perhaps the potential impact of guns depends just on the difference between the bow and gun as magic poor weapon platforms. The impact of magic(guns) would eventually be huge.

edit: The impact of magic(exposives) would eventually be huge as well.

We see some examples of 'gun magic', I think. Unclear distinction or not, the graphics for deadeye attacks look like magic projectiles to me. The end result... is not clearly more powerful than the spells that spellcasters can throw normally, unless you're talking about stuff that is essentially field artillery rather than small arms. It's certainly true that ranged weapons can likely be enhanced just as melee weapons and armour can (which is probably how bows manage to remain relevant), but if improved metallurgy has brought armour and melee weapons up to the point where it remains relevant in the face of firearms (and direct spellcasting, which has been around for centuries), then the effect of adding magic is just going to boost them all up equally, assuming there isn't some factor that makes some things more enchantable than others (for instance, if enchanting a striking surface is important, it might be easier to enchant a single melee weapon than to enchant every bullet or arrow you're planning to shoot).

But you've ignored one of the important points I raised:

When it comes to the effect of magic - however handwavy you think it is, there are certain tendencies we can observe. For instance, almost every profession has some sort of projectile destruction or, worse, reflection field - guardian has several, mesmer has a couple, elementalist has Swirling Winds, necromancer has Corrosive Poison Cloud, scrapper has Defence Field, holosmith has Photon Wall, spellbreaker has Winds of Disenchantment, revenants have Protective Solace, and thieves have their various smoke effects (which technically only make those within impossible to target rather than actually stopping the bullets)... and Seal Area. Abilities that specifically act to keep melee enemies at bay are less common, usually on professions that already have access to some form of projectile hate, and can generally be more easily countered (using Stability, teleports, or some other means of getting past the magical line). So the end result seems to be that magic, on the whole, is more effective at countering ranged projectiles than other attacks, including melee.

We can point to existing spell effects and show that the effect of magic disproportionately protects against ranged projectiles. Consider if you had a squad of Guardians armed with sword and shield. With half a dozen of them, they can chain Shield of Absorption while advancing, making them (and anyone else within or behind the dome) basically immune to projectiles... and then when they're within range, they teleport in. It's worth keeping in mind that melee DID happen in WW1 once one side got into the enemy's trenches - the hard part was getting there in the first place.

Now, Guardians seem to be fairly uncommon... but on the other hand, NPC guardians such as Braham and Logan seem to be able to maintain SoA-like effects for longer than the player can. And that's just one weaponset on one profession. Imagine a battlefield where Walls of Reflection, Feedback bubbles, and the like are popping up all over the place (and that's just considering the actual force fields, since if we applied real life physics things like smoke screens, Corrosive Poison Cloud, and Swirling Winds would probably just make it harder to hit with bullets rather than completely stopping them), and someone can teleport right next to you from a distance comparable to your weapon's range. Suddenly, bringing a sword to a gun (and magic) fight doesn't look like such a terrible idea.

That's probably the most impactful difference between warfare in Tyria and warfare in the real world about a century ago. In the real world, there's no equivalent to all those anti-projectile fields. The fact that Tyrians also have access to improved metallurgy and magical materials which at least offers the chance of providing personal armour that is still relevant against available small arms just adds to this.

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@draxynnic.3719 said:

@Psientist.6437 said:This is intended fully in the spirit of friendly competitive speculation

@Psientist.6437 said:Guns are vented bombs. Make the gun itself stronger and it can use more powerful or simply more propellant. A .44 magnum is bigger than a .22 for this very reason. The material of the projectile is important, but the strength of the gun is more important. The strongest projectile possible becomes even stronger with a bigger explosion behind it.

Presumably, whatever magic defenses we could give to melee, ranged can use as well. It is very hard for range not to have the advantage. The Tyrian magic system is too hand wavy to make strong predictions, but I think only the strongest users of melee magic would be relevant in Tyrian large scale warfare. It looks as though magic users channel their magical ability through their gear. I don't see why magic users couldn't learn to do the same with a tank.

Yeah, I did note that the strength of the barrel can certainly help, through the mechanism of allowing for a larger charge behind the projectile. However, in the race between armour and firepower, better materials usually benefit armour more.

Stronger materials have more impact on the chamber where the explosion happens. Projectile strength has always led armor strength. Armor can sometimes catch up but historically, has always fallen behind. Projectiles don't have to be harder than armor and projectiles can use materials armor can not. Modern anti-tank projectiles are constructed of a depleted uranium casing with a copper core that melts and then burns through the armor. I am not sure what you are basing your logic on.

That's... really not true. Know where the term 'bullet proof' comes from? High-quality armour was tested by firing bullets at them. The dent was the proof that the armour could stand up to the bullet - it was "bullet proofed". People have an exaggerated idea of the effect of longbows, crossbows, and even early firearms against armour, and yes, it did get to a point where the guns got powerful enough that it became increasingly impractical to wear armour that could protect against it due to the weight it would require. So armour got reduced from full suits to breastplates and helmets, and then removed altogether - but this wasn't because people COULDN'T make armour that could stop bullets (just look at Ned Kelly), just that it was so heavy it wasn't practical for battlefield use.

Armour has always been a compromise between protection and weight/practicality. Once armoured vehicles were invented, the main thing limiting how much armour could be layered on was how much weight the engine could push along.

In both cases, the availability of a material that's both lighter and stronger than steel is going to make a
big
difference. In the real world, we didn't get anything better for than high-quality steel until the invention of composite armour after World War 2, a time when advanced armour piercing shells were already flying around. In Tyria... we have mithril being presented as a material which is as much of a step up from steel as steel is from bronze, while in the meantime, we have
no
evidence that projectile technology is any more advanced than WW1 at the latest. So you've got some explosive projectiles, incendiaries, gas and the like, but armour piercing is probably still solid slugs.

Improving the metal of the chamber would help since it allows more propellant to be used per shot without risking breaking the weapon, but you're still looking at century-old propellant and projectile designs, and when it comes to armour, the quality of the material is pretty much
the
determining factor of how tough it is once you get past design considerations. Considering that the Kelly gang's armour worked and that was pretty crude (albeit thick and heavy), then armour made out of a material that's lighter and stronger than steel would go a long way.

When it comes to the effect of magic - however handwavy you think it is, there are certain tendencies we can observe. For instance, almost every profession has some sort of projectile destruction or, worse, reflection field - guardian has several, mesmer has a couple, elementalist has Swirling Winds, necromancer has Corrosive Poison Cloud, scrapper has Defence Field, holosmith has Photon Wall, spellbreaker has Winds of Disenchantment, revenants have Protective Solace, and thieves have their various smoke effects (which technically only make those within impossible to target rather than actually stopping the bullets)... and Seal Area. Abilities that specifically act to keep melee enemies at bay are less common, usually on professions that
already
have access to some form of projectile hate, and can generally be more easily countered (using Stability, teleports, or some other means of getting past the magical line). So the end result seems to be that magic, on the whole, is
more
effective at countering ranged projectiles than other attacks, including melee.

Another thing that needs to be considered is that from the Tyrian perspective, guns are more of an equaliser than a revolutionary technology. The most advanced non-magical guns we're seeing are early gatling guns - to someone capable of tossing fireballs, lightning bolts,
, or more exotic magical attacks, this isn't actually all that impressive. Most fantasy settings present magic-users as being fairly rare in an effort to
not
have them revolutionise how wars are fought, but if you look at most human armies that you fight* in Guild Wars... traditional medieval period soldiers such as warriors and archers are certainly the most
common,
but you're often still looking at about half their number being spellcasters, and I'd consider most
Guild Wars
spellcasters to be scarier than any gun-armed infantryman before the arrival of true automatic small arms (which... we don't see in GW2). So if melee troops are still viable in the period of Guild Wars 1, I don't see the invention of firearms being something that really changes that. The reason why the three legions adopted technology was that, having outcast the Flame Legion, most of their enemies overmatched them in magic and they needed to close the gap - and the Pact then found ways to combine magic with charr technology.

*I specify 'that you fight' because ArenaNet tends to be economical with forces that you're generally not expecting to fight. The best example is comparing Ascalonian forces in most of GW1 (where you pretty much only see warriors and rangers, apart from the Flaming Sceptre) to what you see from the ghost army in GW2 or the Ascalon Army in the Annihilator mission.

The magiphysics behind class skills is purposefully hand-wavy. I don't have the source but the studio has said they keep the distinction between martial and magic skills unclear so players like yourself can make up your own distinctions. We have to be careful when using class skills as a genuine description of Tyrian magi-physics. Classes are also designed for balance.

So what happens when Tyrians develop new gun magic? Look what they have done with martial weapons. You seem to be relying on scenarios pitting magic enriched melee and magic poor ranged. We can use a very simple approach to our question; magic as a multiplier for a weapons platform, magic power (weapon + armor + trinkets) = total PEW or THONK. We know Tyrian magic skills change. Using the correct definition of Darwinian fitness, we should also expect magic skills to evolve. Tyrians should get more fit at using magic guns. Perhaps the potential impact of guns depends just on the difference between the bow and gun as magic poor weapon platforms. The impact of magic(guns) would eventually be huge.

edit: The impact of magic(exposives) would eventually be huge as well.

We see some examples of 'gun magic', I think. Unclear distinction or not, the graphics for deadeye attacks look like magic projectiles to me. The end result... is not clearly more powerful than the spells that spellcasters can throw normally, unless you're talking about stuff that is essentially field artillery rather than small arms. It's certainly true that ranged weapons can likely be enhanced just as melee weapons and armour can (which is probably how
bows
manage to remain relevant), but if improved metallurgy has brought armour and melee weapons up to the point where it remains relevant in the face of firearms (and direct spellcasting, which has been around for centuries), then the effect of adding magic is just going to boost them all up equally, assuming there isn't some factor that makes some things more enchantable than others (for instance, if enchanting a striking surface is important, it might be easier to enchant a single melee weapon than to enchant every bullet or arrow you're planning to shoot).

But you've ignored one of the important points I raised:

When it comes to the effect of magic - however handwavy you think it is, there are certain tendencies we can observe. For instance, almost every profession has some sort of projectile destruction or, worse, reflection field - guardian has several, mesmer has a couple, elementalist has Swirling Winds, necromancer has Corrosive Poison Cloud, scrapper has Defence Field, holosmith has Photon Wall, spellbreaker has Winds of Disenchantment, revenants have Protective Solace, and thieves have their various smoke effects (which technically only make those within impossible to target rather than actually stopping the bullets)... and Seal Area. Abilities that specifically act to keep melee enemies at bay are less common, usually on professions that
already
have access to some form of projectile hate, and can generally be more easily countered (using Stability, teleports, or some other means of getting past the magical line). So the end result seems to be that magic, on the whole, is
more
effective at countering ranged projectiles than other attacks, including melee.

We can point to existing spell effects and show that the effect of magic disproportionately protects against ranged projectiles. Consider if you had a squad of Guardians armed with sword and shield. With half a dozen of them, they can chain Shield of Absorption while advancing, making them (and anyone else within or behind the dome) basically immune to projectiles... and then when they're within range, they teleport in. It's worth keeping in mind that melee DID happen in WW1 once one side got into the enemy's trenches - the hard part was getting there in the first place.

Now, Guardians seem to be fairly uncommon... but on the other hand, NPC guardians such as Braham and Logan seem to be able to maintain SoA-like effects for longer than the player can. And that's just one weaponset on one profession. Imagine a battlefield where Walls of Reflection, Feedback bubbles, and the like are popping up all over the place (and that's just considering the actual force fields, since if we applied real life physics things like smoke screens, Corrosive Poison Cloud, and Swirling Winds would probably just make it harder to hit with bullets rather than completely stopping them), and someone can teleport right next to you from a distance comparable to your weapon's range. Suddenly, bringing a sword to a gun (and magic) fight doesn't look like such a terrible idea.

That's probably the most impactful difference between warfare in Tyria and warfare in the real world about a century ago. In the real world, there's no equivalent to all those anti-projectile fields. The fact that Tyrians also have access to improved metallurgy and magical materials which at least offers the
chance
of providing personal armour that is still relevant against available small arms just adds to this.

Nothing is bullet-proof. At best, we can achieve bullet resistant. If you can't wear sufficiently strong armor on the battlefield then sufficiently strong armor doesn't exist on the battlefield. Your first response makes no sense. Everywhere in the real world, throughout history, projectile strength and distance always, eventually, surpasses armor. Perhaps your focus on material strength is keeping you from seeing reality. With projectiles, speed and mass are more important than hardness. Get a marshmallow going fast enough and it could destroy the Moon. Tyrian explosive technology may be in its infancy but we shouldn't expect that to last. Your assumptions about what bullets are made of are just assumptions and your focus on material is inaccurate. Why wouldn't there be mithril bullets?

The last section about magical protection from projectiles is important and I didn't ignore it. I'm also not making the case that melee would be obsolete. A projectile shield is another form of armor. As projectiles become more advanced and magical, shields would have to get stronger and require more power. We are just trading power requirements for weight. We would need a lot of arbitrary rules that limit the evolution of projectile weapons and magic but somehow didn't effect melee weapons. One of the core narrative premises is that Tyrian weapon systems are becoming more powerful and combat is changing. I trust the narrative to tell me more about combat narrative then game mechanics.

We've been focusing on combat between institutions and heroes. Perhaps guns would have a bigger impact on the lives of the magic poor.

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@Fipmip.7219 said:My point about trench warfare is not meant to be hard evidence for its viability (although such in-game evidence does exist). It is simply meant as a background for why such warfare would be cool to see at some point in the future, a method of carrying the suspension of disbelief via a 'reasonable enough' plot development in hopefully the minds of most people. The way actual warfare would be executed is not something that can be calculated outside of whatever anet decides will be the theme of the season. There is already large dichotomy in what happens between large player fights, large NPC fights and cutscenes. the world on screen is a synecdoche of the world in canon. My simple reasoning is that battlefields like those seen in verdun and passchendaele make for exciting, cinematic gameplay areas that, going by what I have outlined in the OP, would fit reasonably well.

@Psientist.6437 said:Not taking into account magic; guns, tanks, and helicopters make trench warfare obsolete. With them, we get our real world version of the ancient strategy of using forward forts and rearward support to project force with regular patrols and rapid response tactics. Guns, tanks and helicopters would make it much easier for powerful Tyrians to control, protect or threaten civilian populations. Tyria adds teleportation, wormholes, dragon mounts, etc into the bag. If we take the premise of group buffing seriously, large scale Tyrian combat would likely look similar to WvW but with real death. The winner would then overwhelm the civilians and magic poor.

besides the point, but I'd like to point out that trenches are still used in real-world modern warfare.

Battlefields like that would be interesting and would be a great way to showcase the difference between soldiers with and without magic. Stalemates or hardened front lines form when opposing forces are evenly matched. Powerful heroes could show up and move the front line.

Edit: We don't see trench warfare when combatants are using mature tank, helicopter and plane technology. We only see trenches used when modern combatants are limited to small and medium arms and artillery.

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Nothing is bulletproof? Really? Tried firing a .50-caliber (about the largest that I'd say you were talking about 'bullets' rather than shells) at the belt armour of a battleship?

An extreme example, but it shows the folly of absolute statements. "Bullet proofed" historical armour wouldn't necessarily hold up to every bullet. And even if it did, non-penetrating hits could certainly be enough to knock you around. But no armour was expected to be perfect - just good enough that you're better off with it than without it. And having materials that are as far above steel as steel is above bronze is going to substantially delay the point at which guns outmatch armour to the point where armour stops being worth wearing. Perhaps indefinitely - the "firepower always outmatches armour in the end" mantra is a popular one, and it's true if you're thinking about armour rendering you invulnerable instead of simply less vulnerable than you'd be without it, but historically the period during which personal body armour beyond helmets was abandoned was pretty short, it's just exaggerated in people's minds because it was most of last century. It wasn't until WW1 that the cuirass was completely abandoned, and body armour has been undergoing a renaissance in recent decades - in part because you don't need as much armour to protect against shrapnel, but in part because, guess what? Advanced materials! And when you get down to it, kevlar isn't actually THAT big of a step up from steel in terms of the ratio of its protective qualities versus weight - it's just that steel had been the best we had until then. I don't think Tyrians will be abandoning their mithril, orichalcum, or deldrimor steel armour any time soon. Maybe people who can only afford steel armour would also ditch it like in real life, but mithril in Tyria seems to be pretty common for an exotic fantastical metal.

Melee weapons, meanwhile, benefit from advanced materials just as armour does. Lighter materials aren't as much as an advantage for weapons since with weapons it's important to have a certain degree of weight to the blow, but that can be compensated for by simply making the weapon bigger. Firearms, on the other hand, are more complicated - stronger breeches would certainly help, but it's not such a direct conversion of better materials = better weapons.

To address a couple of specific points:

@Psientist.6437 said:

With projectiles, speed and mass are more important than hardness. Get a marshmallow going fast enough and it could destroy the Moon. Tyrian explosive technology may be in its infancy but we shouldn't expect that to last. Your assumptions about what bullets are made of are just assumptions and your focus on material is inaccurate. Why wouldn't there be mithril bullets?

I've answered why there wouldn't be mithril bullets. In fact, you clearly haven't thought it through, but you've answered it. Speed and mass are what's important with projectiles (well... not directly, but I'll get to that in a moment), and while we don't have details on the properties of Tyria's fantastical metals, mithril in pretty much every other setting where it appears, going back to Tolkein, is described as being stronger and lighter than steel (let alone heavier metals that are often preferred for projectiles). It's basically fancy super-titanium.

Now, you might say that this means it goes faster with the same propellant, and that's true, but now it's that moment I referred to. Whatever charge you have firing the bullet is going to impart a certain amount of kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is proportional to mass times velocity squared. Momentum, on the other hand, is what broadly determines how hard a projectile is to stop, and that's just straight mass times velocity. If you fire a lighter bullet with the same kinetic energy, more of that kinetic energy equation is being taken up by velocity, which means that the momentum of the projectile is less. Density is also important both for resisting air resistance and for punching through armour, since if the bullet has a wider cross-section, it needs to displace that much more armour to punch through (and getting extra mass by making the bullet longer only goes so far before it starts creating other problems). So for armour, you want a material that's light but strong. For bullets, you want a material with a high density, since you want the frontal cross-section of the bullet to be as small as reasonably practical but to squeeze as much mass (and therefore momentum) into that cross-section as possible.

Again, we don't know the properties of Tyrian metals, but for darksteel and mithril, we can make educated guesses. Mithril is pretty consistently presented in fantasy where it appears as being lighter than steel, so it probably makes for an inferior projectile to steel (let alone copper, lead, and the like). Darksteel appears to be an alloy of platinum or some other metal found in platinum ores such as iridium, which would give a density similar to tungsten and lead. Orichalcum and Deldrimor steel we don't really have much to go on in terms of density - being even better for armour means it's probably at least not significantly heavier than mithril, though, and even if it was, both seem to be materials that are rare and expensive enough that you wouldn't want to be making every bullet out of it. Maybe you'd see the odd specialist armour-piercing round made out of it, similar to how APCR/HVAP was used in WW2 (namely, generally being issued in small amounts with orders to only use them when regular AP wouldn't cut it).

Regarding the marshmallow example: Technically true, but we're clearly not looking at cee-fractional projectiles in Tyria. Broadly speaking, they seem to be similar velocities to real-world projectiles of about a century ago, maybe even a little bit slower.

We've been focusing on combat between institutions and heroes. Perhaps guns would have a bigger impact on the lives of the magic poor.

Perhaps, but where's the magic poor? Human armies have generally been presented as having magic-users as a significant minority at the very least. The White Mantle I'd consider an outlier (they essentially have a two-tier system, with spellcasters being channeled into the White Mantle proper leaving bandit forces relatively magic-poor), but you can look at Ascalonian ghost armies or several human factions in GW1 to get a broad idea of how common spellcasters are among human armies. Technology is generally presented as being an equalising factor when a relatively magic-poor group (such as the legions after the overthrow of the Flame Legion) are having to go up against someone stronger in magic... and they still use melee troops because their enemies aren't magic-poor.

There is a degree to which engineers and guns in general appear to be more common among magic-poor factions, such as the non-Flame charr and outlaw groups such as bandits and Separatists (and the latter are probably motivated by stealing charr munitions). But if we're talking large-scale warfare... thus far, most known cases of large-scale warfare have had at least one magic-rich side, whether it's humans versus charr or the Pact versus dragon minions. Talking about magic-poor battles is like talking about real-world modern warfare without air power: sure, it can happen between really poor countries or between factions in a civil war, but if you're talking about major power conflict, it's going to be there.

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You seem intent on arguing . I agree that magic enriched melee wouldn't become completely obsolete. However your arguments against projectiles are inaccurate and arbitrary.

@"draxynnic.3719" said:Nothing is bulletproof? Really? Tried firing a .50-caliber (about the largest that I'd say you were talking about 'bullets' rather than shells) at the belt armour of a battleship?

So get a bigger bullet. Your logic relies on asymmetrical straw-men match ups. Heavily armored battleships were chased from the seas by lighter, faster missile boats that could maintain range.

An extreme example, but it shows the folly of absolute statements. "Bullet proofed" historical armour wouldn't necessarily hold up to every bullet. And even if it did, non-penetrating hits could certainly be enough to knock you around. But no armour was expected to be perfect - just good enough that you're better off with it than without it. And having materials that are as far above steel as steel is above bronze is going to substantially delay the point at which guns outmatch armour to the point where armour stops being worth wearing. Perhaps indefinitely - the "firepower always outmatches armour in the end" mantra is a popular one, and it's true if you're thinking about armour rendering you invulnerable instead of simply less vulnerable than you'd be without it, but historically the period during which personal body armour beyond helmets was abandoned was pretty short, it's just exaggerated in people's minds because it was most of last century. It wasn't until WW1 that the cuirass was completely abandoned, and body armour has been undergoing a renaissance in recent decades - in part because you don't need as much armour to protect against shrapnel, but in part because, guess what? Advanced materials! And when you get down to it, kevlar isn't actually THAT big of a step up from steel in terms of the ratio of its protective qualities versus weight - it's just that steel had been the best we had until then. I don't think Tyrians will be abandoning their mithril, orichalcum, or deldrimor steel armour any time soon. Maybe people who can only afford steel armour would also ditch it like in real life, but mithril in Tyria seems to be pretty common for an exotic fantastical metal.

So, historically, as projectiles, guns and explosives evolved, armor offered less or niche protection. The change takes time.

Melee weapons, meanwhile, benefit from advanced materials just as armour does. Lighter materials aren't as much as an advantage for weapons since with weapons it's important to have a certain degree of weight to the blow, but that can be compensated for by simply making the weapon bigger. Firearms, on the other hand, are more complicated - stronger breeches would certainly help, but it's not such a direct conversion of better materials = better weapons.

Better materials directly translate to better gun weapon platforms just as easily as armor and melee weapons. We wouldn't have the historical evidence of firepower gradually and persistently out classing armor and melee if what you say is true.

To address a couple of specific points:

With projectiles, speed and mass are more important than hardness. Get a marshmallow going fast enough and it could destroy the Moon. Tyrian explosive technology may be in its infancy but we shouldn't expect that to last. Your assumptions about what bullets are made of are just assumptions and your focus on material is inaccurate. Why wouldn't there be mithril bullets?

I've answered why there wouldn't be mithril bullets. In fact, you clearly haven't thought it through, but
you've
answered it. Speed and mass are what's important with projectiles (well... not directly, but I'll get to that in a moment), and while we don't have details on the properties of Tyria's fantastical metals, mithril in pretty much every other setting where it appears, going back to Tolkein, is described as being stronger
and lighter
than steel (let alone heavier metals that are often preferred for projectiles). It's basically fancy super-titanium.

Now, you might say that this means it goes faster with the same propellant, and that's true, but now it's that moment I referred to. Whatever charge you have firing the bullet is going to impart a certain amount of kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is proportional to mass times velocity squared. Momentum, on the other hand, is what broadly determines how hard a projectile is to stop, and that's just straight mass times velocity.
If you fire a lighter bullet with the same kinetic energy, more of that kinetic energy equation is being taken up by velocity, which means that the momentum of the projectile is less.
Density is also important both for resisting air resistance and for punching through armour, since if the bullet has a wider cross-section, it needs to displace that much more armour to punch through (and getting extra mass by making the bullet longer only goes so far before it starts creating other problems). So for armour, you want a material that's light but strong. For bullets, you want a material with a high density, since you want the frontal cross-section of the bullet to be as small as reasonably practical but to squeeze as much mass (and therefore momentum) into that cross-section as possible.

Your argument here gets away from itself. If a massive projectile and a light projectile have the same momentum, the light one will have a lot more kinetic energy. If a light projectile and a heavy one have the same velocity, the heavy one has more kinetic energy. The bolded is a mess. You don't come anywhere close to making an argument against mithril bullets.

Again, we don't know the properties of Tyrian metals, but for darksteel and mithril, we can make educated guesses. Mithril is pretty consistently presented in fantasy where it appears as being lighter than steel, so it probably makes for an inferior projectile to steel (let alone copper, lead, and the like). Darksteel appears to be an alloy of platinum or some other metal found in platinum ores such as iridium, which would give a density similar to tungsten and lead. Orichalcum and Deldrimor steel we don't really have much to go on in terms of density - being even better for armour means it's probably at least not significantly heavier than mithril, though, and even if it was, both seem to be materials that are rare and expensive enough that you wouldn't want to be making every bullet out of it. Maybe you'd see the odd specialist armour-piercing round made out of it, similar to how APCR/HVAP was used in WW2 (namely, generally being issued in small amounts with orders to only use them when regular AP wouldn't cut it).

Regarding the marshmallow example: Technically true, but we're clearly not looking at cee-fractional projectiles in Tyria. Broadly speaking, they seem to be similar velocities to real-world projectiles of about a century ago, maybe even a little bit slower.

Do you mean c-fractional? I don't see why we couldn't see projectiles accelerated to relativistic speeds with magic. True we don't see it, but the reasons are arbitrary. If magic force fields can redirect or absorb kinetic energy then they should be able to add it as well.

We've been focusing on combat between institutions and heroes. Perhaps guns would have a bigger impact on the lives of the magic poor.

Perhaps, but where's the magic poor? Human armies have generally been presented as having magic-users as a significant minority
at the very least.
The White Mantle I'd consider an outlier (they essentially have a two-tier system, with spellcasters being channeled into the White Mantle proper leaving bandit forces relatively magic-poor), but you can look at Ascalonian ghost armies or several human factions in GW1 to get a broad idea of how common spellcasters are among human armies.
Technology is generally presented as being an equalising factor when a relatively magic-poor group (such as the legions after the overthrow of the Flame Legion) are having to go up against someone stronger in magic... and they still use melee troops because their
enemies
aren't magic-poor.

We see the bodies of the magic poor pile up everyday. Guns would eventually replace bows and melee weapons among the magic poor. To the bolded; your logic has magic poor melee attacking magic enriched melee and ranged?!?!? Because officer logic I guess.

There is a degree to which engineers and guns in general appear to be more common among magic-poor factions, such as the non-Flame charr and outlaw groups such as bandits and Separatists (and the latter are probably motivated by stealing charr munitions). But if we're talking large-scale warfare... thus far, most known cases of large-scale warfare have had at least one magic-rich side, whether it's humans versus charr or the Pact versus dragon minions. Talking about magic-poor battles is like talking about real-world modern warfare without air power: sure, it
can
happen between really poor countries or between factions in a civil war, but if you're talking about major power conflict,
it's going to be there.

Most of the magic poor aren't soldiers but still need weapons to defend themselves. Guns would change their lives. I imagine there would be two levels of combat for any battlefield, the magic poor and magic enriched tiers. The magic poor would use the most powerful ranged weapons they could. Why would they want to engage magic enriched melee in close combat? In general, I think you are confusing combat mechanics designed to limit the natural advantages of ranged weapon platforms and narrative designed to create and reinforce class distinctiveness for realistic Tyrian combat lore. Which isn't a big deal.

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Most of the people who lack magic talent tend to go into the Warrior and Engineer profession anyways from what we have seen since GW2 began.

These two require the least magical talent and more into Physical Strength and Intelligence of a person.

Some magic are used for these profession but they are on the lowest magical energy cost than the other professions.

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@EdwinLi.1284 said:Most of the people who lack magic talent tend to go into the Warrior and Engineer profession anyways from what we have seen since GW2 began.

These two require the least magical talent and more into Physical Strength and Intelligence of a person.

Some magic are used for these profession but they are on the lowest magical energy cost than the other professions.

Hi EdwinLi. I am going to pretend you didn't imply Engineers are less intelligent. Hitting things with a hammer to fix them is science. I am not attacking your perspective but the assumption that Warriors and Engineers don't use a lot of magic is an assumption. A lot of Warrior skills function well beyond the natural limits of the body.

With the magic poor we are closest to the real world use of weapon systems. A real world magic poor person doesn't choose a sword over a gun. This is a case where what we see in game emerges from motivations that have nothing to do with making Tyria realistic.

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@Psientist.6437 said:

@EdwinLi.1284 said:Most of the people who lack magic talent tend to go into the Warrior and Engineer profession anyways from what we have seen since GW2 began.

These two require the least magical talent and more into Physical Strength and Intelligence of a person.

Some magic are used for these profession but they are on the lowest magical energy cost than the other professions.

Hi EdwinLi. I am going to pretend you didn't imply Engineers are less intelligent. Hitting things with a hammer to fix them is science. I am not attacking your perspective but the assumption that Warriors and Engineers don't use a lot of magic is an assumption. A lot of Warrior skills function well beyond the natural limits of the body.

With the magic poor we are closest to the real world use of weapon systems. A real world magic poor person doesn't choose a sword over a gun. This is a case where what we see in game emerges from motivations that have nothing to do with making Tyria realistic.

Why do you think I said Engineer require less Intelligence? I never said anything about Engineer requiring less Intelligence. Not to be rude but it is very clear you misread and misunderstood everything I said in my comment.

I said Warrior and Engineer requires more focus on Strength and a person's own Intelligence rather than ability to use magic. Intelligence of a individual is more than a person's ability to use magic and how powerful their magic is.

The Intelligence I speak about is not the RPG stats used to determine a character's magic power but the Intelligence of a person as a individual for creativity such as how they fight with their own weapons and ability to assess and act on the situation they are in to determine their actions or improvise for where they lacking.

Also, I said Warrior and Engineer do use Magic but they are in the lowest cost of magical energy required to perform so even those who are Magic Poor can use all the Engineer and Warrior's magic ability without worry they may or may not have the requirements to perform them. Basically a Warrior and Engineer depends more on their Strength and Intelligence to creatively use what little magic they can use in their attacks and tools while also using skills focus less on magic and more on using their strength to provide the weapon's impact and use their weapons properly such as handling gun recoil and and Intelligence to assess their situation, creating tools to replace dependency on magic use, and using what little magic they have with their weapons and tools due to being poor in magic.

For Warrior they can use the little amount of magic they have to enhance their strength or enhance their weapons. They will also use their Intelligence to be good leaders to plan strategies, how and where they should attack, what they will use their magic poor talent on for their attacks such as enhancing their weapons with magical fire or provide self strength or resistance enhancements using their magic due to their low cost, and what buffs will benefit the people fighting along side them with small amount of magic energy put into their Shouts so more of their allies can hear them and be motivated.

For Engineers they use their intelligence to create technology and creativity with other knowledge to cover their magic poor skills. Thus creating tools, weapons, and gadgets that can help enhance their magic ability to be at a higher level, use a alternate source of magical energy to perform stronger magic abilites they can't use themselves due to their poor magic, and even perform feats with pure technology alone that rivals magic such as exo-skeleton to enhance movement speed and resistance to crippling conditions or putting a rocket on their hammer to provide the impact of a magic user more talented in magic. Some Engineer NPCs have even resorted to create cybernetics using their own intelligence to enhance their ability to use magic as well or to provide enhance strength so they don't need to use magic to enhance it for them.

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@EdwinLi.1284 said:

@EdwinLi.1284 said:Most of the people who lack magic talent tend to go into the Warrior and Engineer profession anyways from what we have seen since GW2 began.

These two require the least magical talent and more into Physical Strength and Intelligence of a person.

Some magic are used for these profession but they are on the lowest magical energy cost than the other professions.

Hi EdwinLi. I am going to pretend you didn't imply Engineers are less intelligent. Hitting things with a hammer to fix them is science. I am not attacking your perspective but the assumption that Warriors and Engineers don't use a lot of magic is an assumption. A lot of Warrior skills function well beyond the natural limits of the body.

With the magic poor we are closest to the real world use of weapon systems. A real world magic poor person doesn't choose a sword over a gun. This is a case where what we see in game emerges from motivations that have nothing to do with making Thyria realistic.

Why do you think I said Engineer require less Intelligence? I never said anything about Engineer requiring less Intelligence. Not to be rude but it is very clear you misread and misunderstood everything I said in my comment.

I said Warrior and Engineer requires more focus on Strength and a person's own Intelligence rather than ability to use magic.

The Intelligence I speak about is not the RPG stats used to determine a character's magic power but the Intelligence of a person as a individual for creativity such as how they fight with their own weapons and ability to assess the situation they are in to determine their actions.

Also, I said Warrior and Engineer do use Magic but they are in the lowest cost of magical energy required to perform so even those who are Magic Poor can use all the Engineer and Warrior's magic ability without worry they may or may not have the requirements to perform them. You can say the skills of a Warrior and Engineer depends more on their Strength and Intelligence to creatively use what little magic they can use in their attacks and tools.

I only misread a small part. You are using a hard dichotomy between classes that is purposefully built as a soft dichotomy. Besides, every skill that may not need magic may be enriched by magic. Could the magic poor wield a magic enriched weapon? My point here is that the power difference between a magic poor armed with a magic poor sword and gun is the same on Thyria and Earth. The magic poor would always be armed with guns. By your own logic, when facing ranged foes any melee attackers would have to shield themselves and quickly close distance. This still eliminates a huge percentage of melee attackers. As gun technology evolves the threshold for shield power and gap closing speed increases. This is the equalizing force you described earlier. It doesn't really matter what weapon a magic poor is wielding when a melee fighter reaches them. That melee fighter just shrugged off the magic poor's most powerful shots. A sword and shield may be effective at close range but it is unlikely. Magic power is too big a part of 1v1 combat. The magic poor may not have any protection or healing skills. My point here is that the weaker opponent will always try to optimize ranged attacks first. Charrzookas are the first step in putting the magic poor on an equal footing with Elementalists. Perhaps we could even look at Engineers similarly.

More advanced weapon platforms would increase the power potential of the magic poor. However, without arbitrary rules, the magic enriched would learn to build magic enriched versions and magic skills to channel through the enriched weapon system. I know I have talked about hand wavy rules and I don't want to build artificial or personal rules. I think this assumption describes a real rule that can't interfere with an active PC protagonist. In the context of lore and not mechanics, we should expect to see more examples of magically enriched tanks driven by specialty professions. Thyria would be an extreme version of Earth. Thyrian's could easily destroy themselves. Thyrians could build a gun that could destroy their moon. Asuran's guns may already be using direct energy acceleration for projectiles. Scruffy 2.0 could have a rail gun powered by magic.

To be clear, I think the representation of combat is as realistic as it can be. Class distinction and balance must come first. Thyrian forces are extremely mobile and a small number of fighters dominate the outcome. We should expect to see the same blitzkrieg strategies used by modern nation states. Front lines would still form where ever foes were equally matched. The strategies we see in game where the Commander leads other .01% magic enriched on a mission that decides the outcome are realistic for Thyria

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@Psientist.6437 said:

@EdwinLi.1284 said:Most of the people who lack magic talent tend to go into the Warrior and Engineer profession anyways from what we have seen since GW2 began.

These two require the least magical talent and more into Physical Strength and Intelligence of a person.

Some magic are used for these profession but they are on the lowest magical energy cost than the other professions.

Hi EdwinLi. I am going to pretend you didn't imply Engineers are less intelligent. Hitting things with a hammer to fix them is science. I am not attacking your perspective but the assumption that Warriors and Engineers don't use a lot of magic is an assumption. A lot of Warrior skills function well beyond the natural limits of the body.

With the magic poor we are closest to the real world use of weapon systems. A real world magic poor person doesn't choose a sword over a gun. This is a case where what we see in game emerges from motivations that have nothing to do with making Thyria realistic.

Why do you think I said Engineer require less Intelligence? I never said anything about Engineer requiring less Intelligence. Not to be rude but it is very clear you misread and misunderstood everything I said in my comment.

I said Warrior and Engineer requires more focus on Strength and a person's own Intelligence rather than ability to use magic.

The Intelligence I speak about is not the RPG stats used to determine a character's magic power but the Intelligence of a person as a individual for creativity such as how they fight with their own weapons and ability to assess the situation they are in to determine their actions.

Also, I said Warrior and Engineer do use Magic but they are in the lowest cost of magical energy required to perform so even those who are Magic Poor can use all the Engineer and Warrior's magic ability without worry they may or may not have the requirements to perform them. You can say the skills of a Warrior and Engineer depends more on their Strength and Intelligence to creatively use what little magic they can use in their attacks and tools.

I only misread a small part. You are using a hard dichotomy between classes that is purposefully built as a soft dichotomy. Besides, every skill that may not need magic may be enriched by magic. Could the magic poor wield a magic enriched weapon? My point here is that the power difference between a magic poor armed with a magic poor sword and gun is the same on Thyria and Earth. The magic poor would always be armed with guns. By your own logic, when facing ranged foes any melee attackers would have to shield themselves and quickly close distance. This still eliminates a huge percentage of melee attackers. As gun technology evolves the threshold for shield power and gap closing speed increases. This is the equalizing force you described earlier. It doesn't really matter what weapon a magic poor is wielding when a melee fighter reaches them. That melee fighter just shrugged off the magic poor's most powerful shots. A sword and shield may be effective at close range but it is unlikely. Magic power is too big a part of 1v1 combat. The magic poor may not have any protection or healing skills. My point here is that the weaker opponent will always try to optimize ranged attacks first. Charrzookas are the first step in putting the magic poor on an equal footing with Elementalists. Perhaps we could even look at Engineers similarly.

More advanced weapon platforms would increase the power potential of the magic poor. However, without arbitrary rules, the magic enriched would learn to build magic enriched versions and magic skills to channel through the enriched weapon system. I know I have talked about hand wavy rules and I don't want to build artificial or personal rules. I think this assumption describes a real rule that can't interfere with an active PC protagonist. In the context of lore and not mechanics, we should expect to see more examples of magically enriched tanks driven by specialty professions. Thyria would be an extreme version of Earth. Thyrian's could easily destroy themselves. Thyrians could build a gun that could destroy their moon. Asuran's guns may already be using direct energy acceleration for projectiles. Scruffy 2.0 could have a rail gun powered by magic.

To be clear, I think the representation of combat is as realistic as it can be. Class distinction and balance must come first. Thyrian forces are extremely mobile and a small number of fighters dominate the outcome. We should expect to see the same blitzkrieg strategies used by modern nation states. Front lines would still form where ever foes were equally matched. The strategies we see in game where the Commander leads other .01% magic enriched on a mission that decides the outcome are realistic for Thyria

I think you're too focused on the applications of weapon use.

I am talking about the application of Warrior and Engineer being more common profession for those who lack in magic ability. I am not speaking about weapon use but what are probably the two most common profession path for those who are low in magic ability.

If applications of weapon use for magic poor is applied then in a strange way these are also the two Professions that have Rifles as their core Main Weapon which some NPCs who are magic poor tend to be either a Warrior that use rifles or Engineer that use rifles or Engineer with the pistol/shield combo. Though among charr forces was have Charr Engineers that use Pistols and Shields. Thus those who depend more on guns and more advance guns that can rival magic in power are commonly a Warrior or Engineer.

If you want to mention, Deadeye then that is rather different matter since it rather new to GW2 due to being introduced in PoF more so Anet can start introducing Sniper Rifle NPCs.

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@Psientist.6437 said:You seem intent on arguing . I agree that magic enriched melee wouldn't become completely obsolete. However your arguments against projectiles are inaccurate and arbitrary.

Funny that you say that, since I'm just pointing out that the situation as it currently stands in-game makes sense. Could it change in Tyria's future? Possibly. In fact, if we consider the ANNIHILATOR quests to be canon, it WILL. But as things currently stand, the balance between melee weapons and projectiles is such that melee weapons are still a significant part of warfare.

@"draxynnic.3719" said:Nothing is bulletproof? Really? Tried firing a .50-caliber (about the largest that I'd say you were talking about 'bullets' rather than shells) at the belt armour of a battleship?

So get a bigger bullet. Your logic relies on asymmetrical straw-men match ups. Heavily armored battleships were chased from the seas by lighter, faster missile boats that could maintain range.

Actually, my logic was pointing out the folly of speaking in absolutes. In discussion of real-world ammunition types, however, the cutoff is about the point at which projectiles start being called "shells" rather than "bullets". The Germans had a 13mm heavy machine gun in WW2, which was slightly bigger than a half-inch. They also had a 15mm automatic cannon, although 20mm cannons were much more common. Certainly, if you get to 20mm, you're definitely in shell territory by modern ordnance terminology.

Also, with regard to battleships being chased from the seas by missile boats? No. No no no. Battleships were rendered obsolete by aircraft carriers. For the price of a WW2-era battleship, you could build a WW2-era carrier, and the carrier just offered more bang for longer range. If it was just a matter of missile boats, navies would have responded to them the same way they did to torpedo boats before them - have a slightly heavier class of ship that could chase them off (that's where the term 'destroyer' came from - it used to be short for "torpedo boat destroyer"), and an increasing series of bigger ships until you got to the ships of the line. If it was just about missiles, there'd still be room for big, heavily armoured floating missile batteries that would be the modern equivalent of battleships. We have aircraft carriers because, for the same resource investment, an aircraft carrier is far more capable.

An extreme example, but it shows the folly of absolute statements. "Bullet proofed" historical armour wouldn't necessarily hold up to every bullet. And even if it did, non-penetrating hits could certainly be enough to knock you around. But no armour was expected to be perfect - just good enough that you're better off with it than without it. And having materials that are as far above steel as steel is above bronze is going to
substantially
delay the point at which guns outmatch armour to the point where armour stops being worth wearing. Perhaps indefinitely - the "firepower always outmatches armour in the end" mantra is a popular one, and it's true if you're thinking about armour rendering you invulnerable instead of simply
less
vulnerable than you'd be without it, but historically the period during which personal body armour beyond helmets was abandoned was pretty short, it's just exaggerated in people's minds because it was most of last century. It wasn't until WW1 that the cuirass was completely abandoned, and body armour has been undergoing a renaissance in recent decades - in part because you don't need as much armour to protect against shrapnel, but in part because, guess what? Advanced materials! And when you get down to it, kevlar isn't actually THAT big of a step up from steel in terms of the ratio of its protective qualities versus weight - it's just that steel had been the best we had until then. I don't think Tyrians will be abandoning their mithril, orichalcum, or deldrimor steel armour any time soon. Maybe people who can only afford steel armour would also ditch it like in real life, but mithril in Tyria seems to be pretty common for an exotic fantastical metal.

So, historically, as projectiles, guns and explosives evolved, armor offered less or niche protection. The change takes time.

Because armour hit a hard block to its evolution around the 15th century. They'd pretty much hit the limit of what could be achieved with the materials they had at the time, within the weight that a soldier could bear and still be an effective fighter, while guns continued to evolve. With the advent of modern materials, personal body armour is starting to work its way back into a modern soldier's equipment, so the period where personal body armour was virtually nonexistent seems to be over, at least when it comes to armies of advanced nations. If medieval armoursmiths had a material that was as far in advance of steel as steel is from bronze, I'm pretty sure that armour would never have been dropped altogether.

Melee weapons, meanwhile, benefit from advanced materials just as armour does. Lighter materials aren't as much as an advantage for weapons since with weapons it's important to have a certain degree of weight to the blow, but that can be compensated for by simply making the weapon
bigger.
Firearms, on the other hand, are more complicated - stronger breeches would certainly
help,
but it's not such a direct conversion of better materials = better weapons.

Better materials directly translate to better gun weapon platforms just as easily as armor and melee weapons. We wouldn't have the historical evidence of firepower gradually and persistently out classing armor and melee if what you say is true.

Not really, because the period where that transition happened was a period where materials technology was pretty much stalled. There were metallurgical improvements during the period, particularly once the Industrial Revolution started (one of the key parts of the Industrial Revolution was finding a way to mass-produce high-quality steel). Broadly speaking, the same metals were being used in the Napoleonic Wars as were being used in the Hundred Years War. For armour and melee weapons, quality is very dependent on materials: there's not much you could realistically do to improve on high-grade 15th-century full plate without making it out of a better material. For guns, there's a lot more that goes into it - quality of the propellant, design of the breech chamber, ammunition type, presence or absence of rifling on the barrel, and so on. Sure, making the breech out of a stronger material means they can get a more powerful shot out of the simple expedient of using more propellant... but even that only helps so far if you haven't figured out how to get the propellant to ignite in a manner that ensures you actually get full usage of the energy released. Now, let's look at gun technology in Tyria. It's a bit anachronistically all over the place, but we see a mix of flintlocks, revolver mechanisms, a couple of simple gatlings, and a few more exotic pieces. That puts the level available to most people at around the early to mid 1800s. There's still a long way to go to get to modern firearms, and a mithril breech just isn't going to fully close that gap.

Now, to be clear on this, because there seems to be some misunderstanding here: This could certainly change. For the purpose of this discussion I'm considering the situation as it stands at the 'present day' of Tyria, circa Thirteen Thirty-Mumble AE. Could it change in another century ago? Certainly. Probably will, in fact. Which way, however, is hard to predict, since advances in gun design might also be matched by improvement in magic, further improvement in armour and melee weapon materials, and so on. We could see a future Tyria go anywhere from something similar to real-world battlefields to a Dune-like situation where melee weapons are back to being what's important because everyone has personal shield bubbles.

To address a couple of specific points:

With projectiles, speed and mass are more important than hardness. Get a marshmallow going fast enough and it could destroy the Moon. Tyrian explosive technology may be in its infancy but we shouldn't expect that to last. Your assumptions about what bullets are made of are just assumptions and your focus on material is inaccurate. Why wouldn't there be mithril bullets?

I've answered why there wouldn't be mithril bullets. In fact, you clearly haven't thought it through, but
you've
answered it. Speed and mass are what's important with projectiles (well... not directly, but I'll get to that in a moment), and while we don't have details on the properties of Tyria's fantastical metals, mithril in pretty much every other setting where it appears, going back to Tolkein, is described as being stronger
and lighter
than steel (let alone heavier metals that are often preferred for projectiles). It's basically fancy super-titanium.

Now, you might say that this means it goes faster with the same propellant, and that's true, but now it's that moment I referred to. Whatever charge you have firing the bullet is going to impart a certain amount of kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is proportional to mass times velocity squared. Momentum, on the other hand, is what broadly determines how hard a projectile is to stop, and that's just straight mass times velocity.
If you fire a lighter bullet with the same kinetic energy, more of that kinetic energy equation is being taken up by velocity, which means that the momentum of the projectile is less.
Density is also important both for resisting air resistance and for punching through armour, since if the bullet has a wider cross-section, it needs to displace that much more armour to punch through (and getting extra mass by making the bullet longer only goes so far before it starts creating other problems). So for armour, you want a material that's light but strong. For bullets, you want a material with a high density, since you want the frontal cross-section of the bullet to be as small as reasonably practical but to squeeze as much mass (and therefore momentum) into that cross-section as possible.

Your argument here gets away from itself. If a massive projectile and a light projectile have the same momentum, the light one will have a lot more kinetic energy. If a light projectile and a heavy one have the same velocity, the heavy one has more kinetic energy. The bolded is a mess. You don't come anywhere close to making an argument against mithril bullets.

Just asking out of curiosity, how many physics degrees do you have?

Mine's a little rusty, but I remember enough of projectile dynamics that if you fire projectiles of different masses out of the same gun with the same propellant, than assuming no changes in efficiency, they'll all be shot out with the same kinetic energy, as the chemical energy of the propellant is transferred into the kinetic energy of the projectile. Now, the "no changes in efficiency" is a pretty rough assumption, but broadly speaking, you can't just say "fire the lighter bullet with the same momentum".

So let's do some maths. Let's start with the assumption of a 10g projectile being fired with 1kJ of energy. Solve for energy:

1000J=(0.01kgv^2)/22000J/0.01kg = v^2 = 200000v = sqrt(200000) = 447m/sP = 0.01447 = 4.47kgm/s

Now, if we half the mass of the bullet (and skip a few steps):

2000J/0.005kg = 400000v = 632m/2P = 0.005*632 = 3.16kgm/s

Notable drop in momentum there. (Note that momentum is still conserved either way - the first case would have a higher recoil.) In order for the lighter bullet to be fired out with greater momentum, it would need to be fired out with greater kinetic energy. While, from the research I've done, the opposite tends to be true: for a given gun, heavier projectiles leave the muzzle with higher kinetic energy, probably due to limits on just how hard the projectile can be pushed before it leaves the barrel.

Of course, APDS and APCR does work on the principle of getting a higher velocity with a lighter projectile - but this is because APDS also has a narrower, high-density penetrator, so the momentum per unit area is higher. Higher velocity projectiles also have the issue that they lose velocity more rapidly due to air resistance, so they lose penetrative power more rapidly over long range.

Which is why, broadly speaking, the penetrating portion of a bullet or shell has generally been made of denser materials as technology advanced, working up to depleted uranium (and generally tungsten alloys for nations that prefer not to work with hazardous material). Mithril, if its properties are similar to other fantasy universes, would not be suitable for the penetrating portion of a projectile. Advanced projectile designs might use mithril for some components, but there's no evidence that Tyrians have developed AP ammunition more advanced than "a slug of the heaviest hard metal you can find". Maybe in a century or two. But not now.

Again, we don't know the properties of Tyrian metals, but for darksteel and mithril, we can make educated guesses. Mithril is pretty consistently presented in fantasy where it appears as being lighter than steel, so it probably makes for an inferior projectile to steel (let alone copper, lead, and the like). Darksteel appears to be an alloy of platinum or some other metal found in platinum ores such as iridium, which would give a density similar to tungsten and lead. Orichalcum and Deldrimor steel we don't really have much to go on in terms of density - being even better for armour means it's probably at least not significantly
heavier
than mithril, though, and even if it was, both seem to be materials that are rare and expensive enough that you wouldn't want to be making every bullet out of it. Maybe you'd see the odd specialist armour-piercing round made out of it, similar to how APCR/HVAP was used in WW2 (namely, generally being issued in small amounts with orders to only use them when regular AP wouldn't cut it).

Regarding the marshmallow example: Technically true, but we're clearly not looking at cee-fractional projectiles in Tyria. Broadly speaking, they seem to be similar velocities to real-world projectiles of about a century ago, maybe even a little bit slower.

Do you mean c-fractional? I don't see why we couldn't see projectiles accelerated to relativistic speeds with magic. True we don't see it, but the reasons are arbitrary. If magic force fields can redirect or absorb kinetic energy then they should be able to add it as well.

I've seen it spelled both ways. c-fractional is more technically correct, but I thought cee-fractional might be more recognisable to some sci-fi readers.

Projectiles accelerated to relativistic speeds by magic might be possible, but like you say, we don't see it. I'm discussing from the perspective of what's in Tyria now, not what might hypothetically show up in the future.

We've been focusing on combat between institutions and heroes. Perhaps guns would have a bigger impact on the lives of the magic poor.

Perhaps, but where's the magic poor? Human armies have generally been presented as having magic-users as a significant minority
at the very least.
The White Mantle I'd consider an outlier (they essentially have a two-tier system, with spellcasters being channeled into the White Mantle proper leaving bandit forces relatively magic-poor), but you can look at Ascalonian ghost armies or several human factions in GW1 to get a broad idea of how common spellcasters are among human armies.
Technology is generally presented as being an equalising factor when a relatively magic-poor group (such as the legions after the overthrow of the Flame Legion) are having to go up against someone stronger in magic... and they still use melee troops because their
enemies
aren't magic-poor.

We see the bodies of the magic poor pile up everyday. Guns would eventually replace bows and melee weapons among the magic poor. To the bolded; your logic has magic poor melee attacking magic enriched melee and ranged?!?!? Because officer logic I guess.

There is a degree to which engineers and guns in general appear to be more common among magic-poor factions, such as the non-Flame charr and outlaw groups such as bandits and Separatists (and the latter are probably motivated by stealing charr munitions). But if we're talking large-scale warfare... thus far, most known cases of large-scale warfare have had at least one magic-rich side, whether it's humans versus charr or the Pact versus dragon minions. Talking about magic-poor battles is like talking about real-world modern warfare without air power: sure, it
can
happen between really poor countries or between factions in a civil war, but if you're talking about major power conflict,
it's going to be there.

Most of the magic poor aren't soldiers but still need weapons to defend themselves. Guns would change their lives. I imagine there would be two levels of combat for any battlefield, the magic poor and magic enriched tiers. The magic poor would use the most powerful ranged weapons they could. Why would they want to engage magic enriched melee in close combat? In general, I think you are confusing combat mechanics designed to limit the natural advantages of ranged weapon platforms and narrative designed to create and reinforce class distinctiveness for realistic Tyrian combat lore. Which isn't a big deal.

I'm thinking of battlefield scenarios here, where it's reasonable to consider that projectile countermeasures may be used. If you've got a soldier who doesn't use magic, then yeah, giving them a gun is a good idea. We actually see this with most 'magic poor' professions - warriors, engineers, even thieves (which have magic, but generally don't use it as attack spells) all use guns, while among spellcaster professions all we have so far is mesmers using offhand pistols. Problem is that if a few projectile-blocking or, worse, projectile-
reflecting
fields go up, those guns could become useless at best and dangerous to their users at worst. So you give your troops the best ranged weapons you can afford... but you ALSO give them the best melee weapons you can afford so that your troops aren't completely helpless when some cat-hole of a mesmer blinks into the middle of them while invisible, pops a Feedback bubble, and portals in that squad of Guardians.
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@EdwinLi.1284 said:

@EdwinLi.1284 said:Most of the people who lack magic talent tend to go into the Warrior and Engineer profession anyways from what we have seen since GW2 began.

These two require the least magical talent and more into Physical Strength and Intelligence of a person.

Some magic are used for these profession but they are on the lowest magical energy cost than the other professions.

Hi EdwinLi. I am going to pretend you didn't imply Engineers are less intelligent. Hitting things with a hammer to fix them is science. I am not attacking your perspective but the assumption that Warriors and Engineers don't use a lot of magic is an assumption. A lot of Warrior skills function well beyond the natural limits of the body.

With the magic poor we are closest to the real world use of weapon systems. A real world magic poor person doesn't choose a sword over a gun. This is a case where what we see in game emerges from motivations that have nothing to do with making Thyria realistic.

Why do you think I said Engineer require less Intelligence? I never said anything about Engineer requiring less Intelligence. Not to be rude but it is very clear you misread and misunderstood everything I said in my comment.

I said Warrior and Engineer requires more focus on Strength and a person's own Intelligence rather than ability to use magic.

The Intelligence I speak about is not the RPG stats used to determine a character's magic power but the Intelligence of a person as a individual for creativity such as how they fight with their own weapons and ability to assess the situation they are in to determine their actions.

Also, I said Warrior and Engineer do use Magic but they are in the lowest cost of magical energy required to perform so even those who are Magic Poor can use all the Engineer and Warrior's magic ability without worry they may or may not have the requirements to perform them. You can say the skills of a Warrior and Engineer depends more on their Strength and Intelligence to creatively use what little magic they can use in their attacks and tools.

I only misread a small part. You are using a hard dichotomy between classes that is purposefully built as a soft dichotomy. Besides, every skill that may not need magic may be enriched by magic. Could the magic poor wield a magic enriched weapon? My point here is that the power difference between a magic poor armed with a magic poor sword and gun is the same on Thyria and Earth. The magic poor would always be armed with guns. By your own logic, when facing ranged foes any melee attackers would have to shield themselves and quickly close distance. This still eliminates a huge percentage of melee attackers. As gun technology evolves the threshold for shield power and gap closing speed increases. This is the equalizing force you described earlier. It doesn't really matter what weapon a magic poor is wielding when a melee fighter reaches them. That melee fighter just shrugged off the magic poor's most powerful shots. A sword and shield may be effective at close range but it is unlikely. Magic power is too big a part of 1v1 combat. The magic poor may not have any protection or healing skills. My point here is that the weaker opponent will always try to optimize ranged attacks first. Charrzookas are the first step in putting the magic poor on an equal footing with Elementalists. Perhaps we could even look at Engineers similarly.

More advanced weapon platforms would increase the power potential of the magic poor. However, without arbitrary rules, the magic enriched would learn to build magic enriched versions and magic skills to channel through the enriched weapon system. I know I have talked about hand wavy rules and I don't want to build artificial or personal rules. I think this assumption describes a real rule that can't interfere with an active PC protagonist. In the context of lore and not mechanics, we should expect to see more examples of magically enriched tanks driven by specialty professions. Thyria would be an extreme version of Earth. Thyrian's could easily destroy themselves. Thyrians could build a gun that could destroy their moon. Asuran's guns may already be using direct energy acceleration for projectiles. Scruffy 2.0 could have a rail gun powered by magic.

To be clear, I think the representation of combat is as realistic as it can be. Class distinction and balance must come first. Thyrian forces are extremely mobile and a small number of fighters dominate the outcome. We should expect to see the same blitzkrieg strategies used by modern nation states. Front lines would still form where ever foes were equally matched. The strategies we see in game where the Commander leads other .01% magic enriched on a mission that decides the outcome are realistic for Thyria

I think you're too focused on the applications of weapon use.

I am talking about the application of Warrior and Engineer being more common profession for those who lack in magic ability.
I am not speaking about weapon use but what are probably the two most common profession path for those who are low in magic ability.

If applications of weapon use for magic poor is applied then in a strange way these are also the two Professions that have Rifles as their core Main Weapon which some NPCs who are magic poor tend to be either a Warrior that use rifles or Engineer that use rifles or Engineer with the pistol/shield combo. Though among charr forces was have Charr Engineers that use Pistols and Shields. Thus those who depend more on guns and more advance guns that can rival magic in power are commonly a Warrior or Engineer.

If you want to mention, Deadeye then that is rather different matter since it rather new to GW2 due to being introduced in PoF more so Anet can start introducing Sniper Rifle NPCs.

To the bolded, for the magic poor there is no ignoring the weapon. What would the Warrior profession do without weapons? Flex?

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@draxynnic.3719 said:

@Psientist.6437 said:You seem intent on arguing . I agree that magic enriched melee wouldn't become completely obsolete. However your arguments against projectiles are inaccurate and arbitrary.

Funny that you say that, since I'm just pointing out that the situation as it currently stands in-game makes sense. Could it change in Tyria's future? Possibly. In fact, if we consider the ANNIHILATOR quests to be canon, it WILL. But as things currently stand, the balance between melee weapons and projectiles is such that melee weapons are still a significant part of warfare.

@draxynnic.3719 said:Nothing is bulletproof? Really? Tried firing a .50-caliber (about the largest that I'd say you were talking about 'bullets' rather than shells) at the belt armour of a battleship?

So get a bigger bullet. Your logic relies on asymmetrical straw-men match ups. Heavily armored battleships were chased from the seas by lighter, faster missile boats that could maintain range.

Actually, my logic was pointing out the folly of speaking in absolutes. In discussion of real-world ammunition types, however, the cutoff is about the point at which projectiles start being called "shells" rather than "bullets". The Germans had a 13mm heavy machine gun in WW2, which was slightly bigger than a half-inch. They also had a 15mm automatic cannon, although 20mm cannons were much more common. Certainly, if you get to 20mm, you're definitely in shell territory by modern ordnance terminology.

Also, with regard to battleships being chased from the seas by missile boats? No. No no no. Battleships were rendered obsolete by aircraft carriers. For the price of a WW2-era battleship, you could build a WW2-era carrier, and the carrier just offered more bang for longer range. If it was just a matter of missile boats, navies would have responded to them the same way they did to torpedo boats before them - have a slightly heavier class of ship that could chase them off (that's where the term 'destroyer' came from - it used to be short for "torpedo boat destroyer"), and an increasing series of bigger ships until you got to the ships of the line. If it was just about missiles, there'd still be room for big, heavily armoured floating missile batteries that would be the modern equivalent of battleships. We have aircraft carriers because, for the same resource investment, an aircraft carrier is far more capable.

The bit about "bullets" vs "shells" is pendantics. The statement to get a bigger bullet is wrong because bigger bullets are called shells?!?!? Aircraft carriers contributed to the doom for battleships because they could use range. Airplanes are a type of projectile weapon platform.

An extreme example, but it shows the folly of absolute statements. "Bullet proofed" historical armour wouldn't necessarily hold up to every bullet. And even if it did, non-penetrating hits could certainly be enough to knock you around. But no armour was expected to be perfect - just good enough that you're better off with it than without it. And having materials that are as far above steel as steel is above bronze is going to
substantially
delay the point at which guns outmatch armour to the point where armour stops being worth wearing. Perhaps indefinitely - the "firepower always outmatches armour in the end" mantra is a popular one, and it's true if you're thinking about armour rendering you invulnerable instead of simply
less
vulnerable than you'd be without it, but historically the period during which personal body armour beyond helmets was abandoned was pretty short, it's just exaggerated in people's minds because it was most of last century. It wasn't until WW1 that the cuirass was completely abandoned, and body armour has been undergoing a renaissance in recent decades - in part because you don't need as much armour to protect against shrapnel, but in part because, guess what? Advanced materials! And when you get down to it, kevlar isn't actually THAT big of a step up from steel in terms of the ratio of its protective qualities versus weight - it's just that steel had been the best we had until then. I don't think Tyrians will be abandoning their mithril, orichalcum, or deldrimor steel armour any time soon. Maybe people who can only afford steel armour would also ditch it like in real life, but mithril in Tyria seems to be pretty common for an exotic fantastical metal.

So, historically, as projectiles, guns and explosives evolved, armor offered less or niche protection. The change takes time.

Because armour hit a hard block to its evolution around the 15th century. They'd pretty much hit the limit of what could be achieved with the materials they had at the time, within the weight that a soldier could bear and still be an effective fighter, while guns continued to evolve. With the advent of modern materials, personal body armour is starting to work its way back into a modern soldier's equipment, so the period where personal body armour was virtually nonexistent seems to be over, at least when it comes to armies of advanced nations. If medieval armoursmiths had a material that was as far in advance of steel as steel is from bronze, I'm pretty sure that armour would never have been dropped altogether.

Melee weapons, meanwhile, benefit from advanced materials just as armour does. Lighter materials aren't as much as an advantage for weapons since with weapons it's important to have a certain degree of weight to the blow, but that can be compensated for by simply making the weapon
bigger.
Firearms, on the other hand, are more complicated - stronger breeches would certainly
help,
but it's not such a direct conversion of better materials = better weapons.

Better materials directly translate to better gun weapon platforms just as easily as armor and melee weapons. We wouldn't have the historical evidence of firepower gradually and persistently out classing armor and melee if what you say is true.

Not really, because the period where that transition happened was a period where materials technology was pretty much stalled. There
were
metallurgical improvements during the period, particularly once the Industrial Revolution started (one of the key parts of the Industrial Revolution was finding a way to mass-produce high-quality steel). Broadly speaking, the same metals were being used in the Napoleonic Wars as were being used in the Hundred Years War. For armour and melee weapons, quality is very dependent on materials: there's not much you could realistically do to improve on high-grade 15th-century full plate without making it out of a better material. For guns, there's a lot more that goes into it - quality of the propellant, design of the breech chamber, ammunition type, presence or absence of rifling on the barrel, and so on. Sure, making the breech out of a stronger material means they can get a more powerful shot out of the simple expedient of using more propellant... but even that only helps so far if you haven't figured out how to get the propellant to ignite in a manner that ensures you actually get full usage of the energy released. Now, let's look at gun technology in Tyria. It's a bit anachronistically all over the place, but we see a mix of flintlocks, revolver mechanisms, a couple of simple gatlings, and a few more exotic pieces. That puts the level available to most people at around the early to mid 1800s. There's still a long way to go to get to modern firearms, and a mithril breech just isn't going to fully close that gap.

Now, to be clear on this, because there seems to be some misunderstanding here:
This could certainly change.
For the purpose of this discussion I'm considering the situation as it stands at the 'present day' of Tyria, circa Thirteen Thirty-Mumble AE. Could it change in another century ago? Certainly. Probably will, in fact. Which way, however, is hard to predict, since advances in gun design might also be matched by improvement in magic, further improvement in armour and melee weapon materials, and so on. We could see a future Tyria go anywhere from something similar to real-world battlefields to a Dune-like situation where melee weapons are back to being what's important because everyone has personal shield bubbles.

If we to drill down into this, the rapid emergence of many gun types partially defeats your argument. Thyrian technology obviously evolves very quickly. Thyrians have had access to Mithril and such materials for a while. There are also many natural projectile users. Thyrian armor tech should already be near maturity.

To address a couple of specific points:

With projectiles, speed and mass are more important than hardness. Get a marshmallow going fast enough and it could destroy the Moon. Tyrian explosive technology may be in its infancy but we shouldn't expect that to last. Your assumptions about what bullets are made of are just assumptions and your focus on material is inaccurate. Why wouldn't there be mithril bullets?

I've answered why there wouldn't be mithril bullets. In fact, you clearly haven't thought it through, but
you've
answered it. Speed and mass are what's important with projectiles (well... not directly, but I'll get to that in a moment), and while we don't have details on the properties of Tyria's fantastical metals, mithril in pretty much every other setting where it appears, going back to Tolkein, is described as being stronger
and lighter
than steel (let alone heavier metals that are often preferred for projectiles). It's basically fancy super-titanium.

Now, you might say that this means it goes faster with the same propellant, and that's true, but now it's that moment I referred to. Whatever charge you have firing the bullet is going to impart a certain amount of kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is proportional to mass times velocity squared. Momentum, on the other hand, is what broadly determines how hard a projectile is to stop, and that's just straight mass times velocity.
If you fire a lighter bullet with the same kinetic energy, more of that kinetic energy equation is being taken up by velocity, which means that the momentum of the projectile is less.
Density is also important both for resisting air resistance and for punching through armour, since if the bullet has a wider cross-section, it needs to displace that much more armour to punch through (and getting extra mass by making the bullet longer only goes so far before it starts creating other problems). So for armour, you want a material that's light but strong. For bullets, you want a material with a high density, since you want the frontal cross-section of the bullet to be as small as reasonably practical but to squeeze as much mass (and therefore momentum) into that cross-section as possible.

Your argument here gets away from itself. If a massive projectile and a light projectile have the same momentum, the light one will have a lot more kinetic energy. If a light projectile and a heavy one have the same velocity, the heavy one has more kinetic energy. The bolded is a mess. You don't come anywhere close to making an argument against mithril bullets.

Just asking out of curiosity, how many physics degrees do you have?

In general, flashing the potential of a physics degree for a discussion of something as simple as momentum and kinetic energy is a good indicator that the degree doesn't exist.

Mine's a little rusty, but I remember enough of projectile dynamics that if you fire projectiles of different masses out of the same gun with the same propellant, than assuming no changes in efficiency, they'll all be shot out with the same kinetic energy, as the chemical energy of the propellant is transferred into the kinetic energy of the projectile. Now, the "no changes in efficiency" is a pretty rough assumption, but broadly speaking, you can't just say "fire the lighter bullet with the same momentum".

So let's do some maths. Let's start with the assumption of a 10g projectile being fired with 1kJ of energy. Solve for energy:

1000J=(0.01kgv^2)/22000J/0.01kg = v^2 = 200000v = sqrt(200000) = 447m/sP = 0.01447 = 4.47kgm/s

Now, if we half the mass of the bullet (and skip a few steps):

2000J/0.005kg = 400000v = 632m/2P = 0.005*632 = 3.16kgm/s

Notable drop in momentum there. (Note that momentum is still conserved either way - the first case would have a higher recoil.) In order for the lighter bullet to be fired out with greater momentum, it would need to be fired out with greater kinetic energy. While, from the research I've done, the opposite tends to be true: for a given gun, heavier projectiles leave the muzzle with higher kinetic energy, probably due to limits on just how hard the projectile can be pushed before it leaves the barrel.

Of course, APDS and APCR does work on the principle of getting a higher velocity with a lighter projectile - but this is because APDS also has a narrower, high-density penetrator, so the momentum per unit area is higher. Higher velocity projectiles also have the issue that they lose velocity more rapidly due to air resistance, so they lose penetrative power more rapidly over long range.

Which is why, broadly speaking, the penetrating portion of a bullet or shell has generally been made of denser materials as technology advanced, working up to depleted uranium (and generally tungsten alloys for nations that prefer not to work with hazardous material). Mithril, if its properties are similar to other fantasy universes, would not be suitable for the penetrating portion of a projectile. Advanced projectile designs might use mithril for some components, but there's no evidence that Tyrians have developed AP ammunition more advanced than "a slug of the heaviest hard metal you can find". Maybe in a century or two. But not now.

Why would it take a century or two? The evidence that Thyrians are limited to simple slugs doesn't exist. We see truly amazing projectile effects from all classes that couldn't be produced by simple slugs. Your evidence for lore is evidence of game mechanics designed to create balance.

Your math is right but what does it have to with stronger Mithril breeches and the potential to use more propellant? Why wouldn't metallurgists who can already work mithril into armor and weapons not be able to shape mithril into guns immediately at the invention of guns? Same applies to projectiles. You can do simple math but your overall logic doesn't work.

Again, we don't know the properties of Tyrian metals, but for darksteel and mithril, we can make educated guesses. Mithril is pretty consistently presented in fantasy where it appears as being lighter than steel, so it probably makes for an inferior projectile to steel (let alone copper, lead, and the like). Darksteel appears to be an alloy of platinum or some other metal found in platinum ores such as iridium, which would give a density similar to tungsten and lead. Orichalcum and Deldrimor steel we don't really have much to go on in terms of density - being even better for armour means it's probably at least not significantly
heavier
than mithril, though, and even if it was, both seem to be materials that are rare and expensive enough that you wouldn't want to be making every bullet out of it. Maybe you'd see the odd specialist armour-piercing round made out of it, similar to how APCR/HVAP was used in WW2 (namely, generally being issued in small amounts with orders to only use them when regular AP wouldn't cut it).

Regarding the marshmallow example: Technically true, but we're clearly not looking at cee-fractional projectiles in Tyria. Broadly speaking, they seem to be similar velocities to real-world projectiles of about a century ago, maybe even a little bit slower.

Do you mean c-fractional? I don't see why we couldn't see projectiles accelerated to relativistic speeds with magic. True we don't see it, but the reasons are arbitrary. If magic force fields can redirect or absorb kinetic energy then they should be able to add it as well.

I've seen it spelled both ways. c-fractional is more technically correct, but I thought cee-fractional might be more recognisable to some sci-fi readers.

Projectiles accelerated to relativistic speeds by magic might be possible, but like you say,
we don't see it.
I'm discussing from the perspective of what's in Tyria
now
, not what might hypothetically show up in the future.

We've been focusing on combat between institutions and heroes. Perhaps guns would have a bigger impact on the lives of the magic poor.

Perhaps, but where's the magic poor? Human armies have generally been presented as having magic-users as a significant minority
at the very least.
The White Mantle I'd consider an outlier (they essentially have a two-tier system, with spellcasters being channeled into the White Mantle proper leaving bandit forces relatively magic-poor), but you can look at Ascalonian ghost armies or several human factions in GW1 to get a broad idea of how common spellcasters are among human armies.
Technology is generally presented as being an equalising factor when a relatively magic-poor group (such as the legions after the overthrow of the Flame Legion) are having to go up against someone stronger in magic... and they still use melee troops because their
enemies
aren't magic-poor.

We see the bodies of the magic poor pile up everyday. Guns would eventually replace bows and melee weapons among the magic poor. To the bolded; your logic has magic poor melee attacking magic enriched melee and ranged?!?!? Because officer logic I guess.

There is a degree to which engineers and guns in general appear to be more common among magic-poor factions, such as the non-Flame charr and outlaw groups such as bandits and Separatists (and the latter are probably motivated by stealing charr munitions). But if we're talking large-scale warfare... thus far, most known cases of large-scale warfare have had at least one magic-rich side, whether it's humans versus charr or the Pact versus dragon minions. Talking about magic-poor battles is like talking about real-world modern warfare without air power: sure, it
can
happen between really poor countries or between factions in a civil war, but if you're talking about major power conflict,
it's going to be there.

Most of the magic poor aren't soldiers but still need weapons to defend themselves. Guns would change their lives. I imagine there would be two levels of combat for any battlefield, the magic poor and magic enriched tiers. The magic poor would use the most powerful ranged weapons they could. Why would they want to engage magic enriched melee in close combat? In general, I think you are confusing combat mechanics designed to limit the natural advantages of ranged weapon platforms and narrative designed to create and reinforce class distinctiveness for realistic Tyrian combat lore. Which isn't a big deal.

I'm thinking of battlefield scenarios here, where it's reasonable to consider that projectile countermeasures may be used. If you've got a soldier who doesn't use magic, then yeah, giving them a gun is a good idea. We actually see this with most 'magic poor' professions - warriors, engineers, even thieves (which have magic, but generally don't use it as attack spells) all use guns, while among spellcaster professions all we have so far is mesmers using offhand pistols. Problem is that if a few projectile-blocking or, worse, projectile-
reflecting
fields go up, those guns could become useless at best and dangerous to their users at worst. So you give your troops the best ranged weapons you can afford... but you ALSO give them the best melee weapons you can afford so that your troops aren't completely helpless when some cat-hole of a mesmer blinks into the middle of them while invisible, pops a Feedback bubble, and portals in that squad of Guardians.

In the context of lore, guns make shields for melee essential. In the context of large scale combat, that is huge. Guns would displace all unsupported magic poor and support would have to include shields. All shields below a threshold would also be displaced. The broad strokes of Thyrian combat is portrayed accurately but the role of guns isn't. The portrayal of guns in combat is shaped more by the demand for class balance and distinction. We already see projectile weapon systems that would change the landscape of war more than they are shown. Which, again, is good and necessary.
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@Psientist.6437 said:

To the bolded, for the magic poor there is no ignoring the weapon. What would the Warrior profession do without weapons? Flex?

I know weapons are important to the Profession but I am talking about the concept of Profession that is more prefered by the Magic Poor.

However, we are just focus on two separate things as of now so I don't think there is much to discuss between us since you are full commited on focusing only on the applications of weapons for the magic poor over everything else involved in what the magic poor such as prefered professions, chosen life path, and methods of compensating their magic poor ability beyond just weapons. However, I will leave one final comment.

Not to be rude but I am trying to discuss something other than just weapons for the magic poor and look into what other concept that may be involved with the magic poor's ability to fight in warfare for this world since weaponary is not the only thing that affects people in Tyria when it involves warefare.

Their choice of Profession is important to determining their ability, weapons, and choice of combat such as those of magic poor may often choose between Warrior for a more versatile choice for combat between different weapons which in certain cases they may choose Rifles to cover their lack of ability or poor ability to use magic.

A magic poor person may also choose Engineer profession as their life's choice instead and make up for their magic poor ability through the use of engineering devices that will allow them to perform magic abilities in their place as we have seen such technology in GW2 such as how Holosmith holotech uses the Magic powers of Zephyrite crystals to create and use their holographic powers created from magical energy. They may even create new type of exoskeleton or craft special potions that enhance their body so they may rival those with magic talent when it comes to melee and develop tech that will make them resistant to projectiles as well.

Weapons are important in warefare to benefit and compensate the magic poor but one of the most important factor in warfare in Tyria has been a person's creativity with how they compensating for magic poor abilities using their strength and intelligence to make it possible. Weapons are only one possible factor into this concept and the other is their Profession of choice. Profession of choice is a reflection of the person's creative ability towards handling their magic poor abilties and how they may or may not apply that knowledge such as weapon's of choice, combat style, strategy, techniques for combat, gears of choice, and etc which is why Warrior and Engineer profession is most commonly made up of those with magic poor abilities.

In a way, we may consider Anet intention of making Warrior and Engineer the only two professions that use Rifles as their core weapon when GW2 began a way to reflect how the Magic Poor handle their chosen life path in warfare since the Rifle was made to be a more effective and easy to use weapon for those who lack magic abilites and it is given to the two professions in the beginning of GW2 that the magic poor people tend to choose in their life path.

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@EdwinLi.1284 said:

To the bolded, for the magic poor there is no ignoring the weapon. What would the Warrior profession do without weapons? Flex?

I know weapons are important to the Profession but I am talking about the concept of Profession that is more prefered by the Magic Poor.

However, we are just focus on two separate things as of now so I don't think there is much to discuss between us since you are full commited on focusing only on the applications of weapons for the magic poor over everything else involved in what the magic poor such as prefered professions, chosen life path, and methods of compensating their magic poor ability beyond just weapons. However, I will leave one final comment.

Not to be rude but I am trying to discuss something other than just weapons for the magic poor and look into what other concept that may be involved with the magic poor's ability to fight in warfare for this world since weaponary is not the only thing that affects people in Tyria when it involves warefare.

Their choice of Profession is important to determining their ability, weapons, and choice of combat such as those of magic poor may often choose between Warrior for a more versatile choice for combat between different weapons which in certain cases they may choose Rifles to cover their lack of ability or poor ability to use magic.

A magic poor person may also choose Engineer profession as their life's choice instead and make up for their magic poor ability through the use of engineering devices that will allow them to perform magic abilities in their place as we have seen such technology in GW2 such as how Holosmith holotech uses the Magic powers of Zephyrite crystals to create and use their holographic powers created from magical energy. They may even create new type of exoskeleton or craft special potions that enhance their body so they may rival those with magic talent when it comes to melee and develop tech that will make them resistant to projectiles as well.

Weapons are important in warefare to benefit and compensate the magic poor but one of the most important factor in warfare in Tyria has been a person's creativity with how they compensating for magic poor abilities either using their strength and intelligence to make it possible. Profession of choice is a reflection of that creative ability and how they chosen to handle it which is why Warrior and Engineer profession is most commonly made up of those with magic poor abilities.

In a way, we may consider Anet intention of making Warrior and Engineer the only two professions that use Rifles as their core weapon when GW2 began a way to reflect how the Magic Poor handle their chosen life path in warfare since the Rifle was made to be a more effective and easy to use weapon for those who lack magic abilites and it is given to the two professions in the beginning of GW2 that the magic poor people tend to choose in their life path.

Please forgive me for anything that looked like an attack and there are clearly things that could be taken for an attack. However, you aren't saying anything I am not. You're just making it sound like you are. For the magic poor all warrior martial skills are just swinging a weapon in a different way. The equivalent is true for Engineers with triggers and buttons. The potential physical strength of a magic poor Warrior isn't important when guns are part of the picture. Sure, intelligence and other qualities are important but the magic enriched have those same qualities. We are talking about averaged differences between the magic poor and magic enriched in large scale combat. The magic poor aren't going to have an intelligence or creativity advantage.

The transformative power of guns for the magic poor isn't dealt with in any meaningful way.edit: Which is fine. I don't know how you would tell that story without destroying class balance mechanics and alienating many PC protagonists.

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After thinking about this more I want to adjust what I have been saying. Powerful, natural explosives that the magic poor could create and use, not "guns", would transform Thyrian warfare.

In the real world, guns fueled the early evolution of precision machining. As did steam engines and the internal combustion engine within their respective eras. In Thyria magic would have provided a power source very early in any people's history. The demand for intricate, magic enriched and powered machines would drive material and manufacturing technology well past the threshold needed to produce complex guns parts. Magic would enrich Thyrian precision manufacturing. However, the magic enriched dominate warfare and many of them can create projectiles. Theoretically, an Elementalist could power a traditional gun. I would easily believe lore that the first cannons were designed to increase the power of elementalists. My point here is that the threshold technology isn't "guns" or even precision manufacturing in general. We also have to be careful of implying similar conditions would exist in the real world and Thryia.

Powerful, natural explosives that the magic poor could create and use, not "guns", would transform Thyrian warfare. In some ways this is an easier story to tell. Magic would suppress the demand for natural explosive technology. The magic enriched would monopolize the supply of explosive technology. As well, material technology and magic enrichment would set a very high threshold for the power of the explosive. Projectiles that don't need natural explosives have already pushed the evolution of defense. Thyrians could build exotic rounds and guns, but guns would be toys or inconsequential at scale until explosive technology evolved past a threshold that magic set very high and long ago.

This is going to sound cold hearted and the logic behind it is. The PC perspective of Thyria is skewed toward the magic enriched. We don't see most of what doesn't matter. We would only see the gun weapon platforms that matter. So far, those are the artillery type guns and the extravagant variety of pistols and rifles the Commander can equip or that are powerful enough to threaten or support the Commander.

If we move the threshold from the evolution of guns to the evolution of explosives and accept our limited view, the dilemma posed by guns on what we see in Thyria disappears. More importantly, the active PC perspective isn't effected. They still need powerful guns and bullets.

In some ways this is a harder story to tell. There is obvious inequality. Explosives would be a great commodity for an NPC economy. Economies always have a hard story.

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@"Psientist.6437" said:

The bit about "bullets" vs "shells" is pendantics. The statement to get a bigger bullet is wrong because bigger bullets are called shells?!?!? Aircraft carriers contributed to the doom for battleships because they could use range. Airplanes are a type of projectile weapon platform.

Because, as it turns out, some things are bulletproof.

Some things have also been shellproof, although there's a point at which putting more armour on something becomes impractical. On the other hand, there's a point to which "build a bigger gun" also becomes impractical, especially when talking about small arms fire. Which is, essentially, where I think the line between a machinegun and an automatic cannon is drawn: a machinegun can be realistically carried around and used by a single person, even if it starts to get pretty awkward with heavy machine guns. Cannons can't. So the line between bullets and shells is more or less the line between small arms and heavier weapons. Your statement to get a bigger bullet is essentially pushing something from being an infantry weapon to being a weapon for vehicles and fixed emplacements.

As for the aircraft carrier vs missile boat distinction - yeah, the advantage of aircraft carriers is range, but the point there was that if it wasn't for aircraft carriers, the powerful navies of the worlds would still have capital ships. They'd just be big floating missile batteries that could carry bigger and longer-range missiles, and more of them, than their smaller counterparts. As it happens, though, once a ship gets big enough to be an aircraft carrier, it's more valuable as an aircraft carrier than as a battleship, missile-armed or not.

An extreme example, but it shows the folly of absolute statements. "Bullet proofed" historical armour wouldn't necessarily hold up to every bullet. And even if it did, non-penetrating hits could certainly be enough to knock you around. But no armour was expected to be perfect - just good enough that you're better off with it than without it. And having materials that are as far above steel as steel is above bronze is going to
substantially
delay the point at which guns outmatch armour to the point where armour stops being worth wearing. Perhaps indefinitely - the "firepower always outmatches armour in the end" mantra is a popular one, and it's true if you're thinking about armour rendering you invulnerable instead of simply
less
vulnerable than you'd be without it, but historically the period during which personal body armour beyond helmets was abandoned was pretty short, it's just exaggerated in people's minds because it was most of last century. It wasn't until WW1 that the cuirass was completely abandoned, and body armour has been undergoing a renaissance in recent decades - in part because you don't need as much armour to protect against shrapnel, but in part because, guess what? Advanced materials! And when you get down to it, kevlar isn't actually THAT big of a step up from steel in terms of the ratio of its protective qualities versus weight - it's just that steel had been the best we had until then. I don't think Tyrians will be abandoning their mithril, orichalcum, or deldrimor steel armour any time soon. Maybe people who can only afford steel armour would also ditch it like in real life, but mithril in Tyria seems to be pretty common for an exotic fantastical metal.

So, historically, as projectiles, guns and explosives evolved, armor offered less or niche protection. The change takes time.

Because armour hit a hard block to its evolution around the 15th century. They'd pretty much hit the limit of what could be achieved with the materials they had at the time, within the weight that a soldier could bear and still be an effective fighter, while guns continued to evolve. With the advent of modern materials, personal body armour is starting to work its way back into a modern soldier's equipment, so the period where personal body armour was virtually nonexistent seems to be over, at least when it comes to armies of advanced nations. If medieval armoursmiths had a material that was as far in advance of steel as steel is from bronze, I'm pretty sure that armour would never have been dropped altogether.

Melee weapons, meanwhile, benefit from advanced materials just as armour does. Lighter materials aren't as much as an advantage for weapons since with weapons it's important to have a certain degree of weight to the blow, but that can be compensated for by simply making the weapon
bigger.
Firearms, on the other hand, are more complicated - stronger breeches would certainly
help,
but it's not such a direct conversion of better materials = better weapons.

Better materials directly translate to better gun weapon platforms just as easily as armor and melee weapons. We wouldn't have the historical evidence of firepower gradually and persistently out classing armor and melee if what you say is true.

Not really, because the period where that transition happened was a period where materials technology was pretty much stalled. There
were
metallurgical improvements during the period, particularly once the Industrial Revolution started (one of the key parts of the Industrial Revolution was finding a way to mass-produce high-quality steel). Broadly speaking, the same metals were being used in the Napoleonic Wars as were being used in the Hundred Years War. For armour and melee weapons, quality is very dependent on materials: there's not much you could realistically do to improve on high-grade 15th-century full plate without making it out of a better material. For guns, there's a lot more that goes into it - quality of the propellant, design of the breech chamber, ammunition type, presence or absence of rifling on the barrel, and so on. Sure, making the breech out of a stronger material means they can get a more powerful shot out of the simple expedient of using more propellant... but even that only helps so far if you haven't figured out how to get the propellant to ignite in a manner that ensures you actually get full usage of the energy released. Now, let's look at gun technology in Tyria. It's a bit anachronistically all over the place, but we see a mix of flintlocks, revolver mechanisms, a couple of simple gatlings, and a few more exotic pieces. That puts the level available to most people at around the early to mid 1800s. There's still a long way to go to get to modern firearms, and a mithril breech just isn't going to fully close that gap.

Now, to be clear on this, because there seems to be some misunderstanding here:
This could certainly change.
For the purpose of this discussion I'm considering the situation as it stands at the 'present day' of Tyria, circa Thirteen Thirty-Mumble AE. Could it change in another century ago? Certainly. Probably will, in fact. Which way, however, is hard to predict, since advances in gun design might also be matched by improvement in magic, further improvement in armour and melee weapon materials, and so on. We could see a future Tyria go anywhere from something similar to real-world battlefields to a Dune-like situation where melee weapons are back to being what's important because everyone has personal shield bubbles.

If we to drill down into this, the rapid emergence of many gun types partially defeats your argument. Thyrian technology obviously evolves very quickly. Thyrians have had access to Mithril and such materials for a while. There are also many natural projectile users. Thyrian armor tech should already be near maturity.

Maybe it is nearing maturity. Maybe there'll be some other breakthrough that we can't predict. Maybe it's already strong enough - how does mithril, let alone even more advanced Tyrian metals, compare to kevlar?

To address a couple of specific points:

@"Psientist.6437" said:

With projectiles, speed and mass are more important than hardness. Get a marshmallow going fast enough and it could destroy the Moon. Tyrian explosive technology may be in its infancy but we shouldn't expect that to last. Your assumptions about what bullets are made of are just assumptions and your focus on material is inaccurate. Why wouldn't there be mithril bullets?

I've answered why there wouldn't be mithril bullets. In fact, you clearly haven't thought it through, but
you've
answered it. Speed and mass are what's important with projectiles (well... not directly, but I'll get to that in a moment), and while we don't have details on the properties of Tyria's fantastical metals, mithril in pretty much every other setting where it appears, going back to Tolkein, is described as being stronger
and lighter
than steel (let alone heavier metals that are often preferred for projectiles). It's basically fancy super-titanium.

Now, you might say that this means it goes faster with the same propellant, and that's true, but now it's that moment I referred to. Whatever charge you have firing the bullet is going to impart a certain amount of kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is proportional to mass times velocity squared. Momentum, on the other hand, is what broadly determines how hard a projectile is to stop, and that's just straight mass times velocity.
If you fire a lighter bullet with the same kinetic energy, more of that kinetic energy equation is being taken up by velocity, which means that the momentum of the projectile is less.
Density is also important both for resisting air resistance and for punching through armour, since if the bullet has a wider cross-section, it needs to displace that much more armour to punch through (and getting extra mass by making the bullet longer only goes so far before it starts creating other problems). So for armour, you want a material that's light but strong. For bullets, you want a material with a high density, since you want the frontal cross-section of the bullet to be as small as reasonably practical but to squeeze as much mass (and therefore momentum) into that cross-section as possible.

Your argument here gets away from itself. If a massive projectile and a light projectile have the same momentum, the light one will have a lot more kinetic energy. If a light projectile and a heavy one have the same velocity, the heavy one has more kinetic energy. The bolded is a mess. You don't come anywhere close to making an argument against mithril bullets.

Just asking out of curiosity, how many physics degrees do you have?

In general, flashing the potential of a physics degree for a discussion of something as simple as momentum and kinetic energy is a good indicator that the degree doesn't exist.

Hahahah.

See, the physics of guns isn't my specialty (wasn't a course that was offered, that's something you're really only likely to go into if you specialise in gun manufacture - there might have been some in fluid flows but what I recall of that course focused more on the dynamics of jet engines), so I was worried that you might actually know something on the subject rather than bullcatting. Then you claimed that firing a lighter bullet with the same momentum was a simply matter of, well, firing it out with the same momentum. So, even if I'm lying, basic physics seems to be more than you know.

Yeah, the maths is pretty basic physics. But it's apparently basic physics that you don't know. The maths for calculating the effect of a collision are a little more advanced, but to summarise - broadly speaking, in a direct collision, the more momentum, the more of that energy is likely to transfer into the target. In simple particle-particle collisions, lighter particles with high kinetic energy usually just ricochet with relatively little influence on the heavy particle (unless it's a photon striking with just the right energy to be absorbed). On the macroscopic scale, it's more complicated, but high kinetic energy and low momentum usually results in the kinetic energy going into heat, sound, possibly ricocheting or the projectile fragmenting, rather than into punching into the target.

Mine's a little rusty, but I remember enough of projectile dynamics that if you fire projectiles of different masses out of the same gun with the same propellant, than assuming no changes in efficiency, they'll all be shot out with the same kinetic energy, as the chemical energy of the propellant is transferred into the kinetic energy of the projectile. Now, the "no changes in efficiency" is a pretty rough assumption, but broadly speaking, you can't just say "fire the lighter bullet with the same momentum".

So let's do some maths. Let's start with the assumption of a 10g projectile being fired with 1kJ of energy. Solve for energy:

1000J=(0.01kg
v^2)/22000J/0.01kg = v^2 = 200000v = sqrt(200000) = 447m/sP = 0.01
447 = 4.47kgm/s

Now, if we half the mass of the bullet (and skip a few steps):

2000J/0.005kg = 400000v = 632m/2P = 0.005*632 = 3.16kgm/s

Notable drop in momentum there. (Note that momentum is still conserved either way - the first case would have a higher recoil.) In order for the lighter bullet to be fired out with greater momentum, it would need to be fired out with
greater
kinetic energy. While, from the research I've done, the opposite tends to be true: for a given gun, heavier projectiles leave the muzzle with higher kinetic energy, probably due to limits on just how hard the projectile can be pushed before it leaves the barrel.

Of course, APDS and APCR does work on the principle of getting a higher velocity with a lighter projectile - but this is because APDS also has a narrower, high-density penetrator, so the momentum
per unit area
is higher. Higher velocity projectiles also have the issue that they lose velocity more rapidly due to air resistance, so they lose penetrative power more rapidly over long range.

Which is why, broadly speaking, the penetrating portion of a bullet or shell has generally been made of denser materials as technology advanced, working up to depleted uranium (and generally tungsten alloys for nations that prefer not to work with hazardous material). Mithril, if its properties are similar to other fantasy universes, would not be suitable for the penetrating portion of a projectile. Advanced projectile designs
might
use mithril for some components, but there's no evidence that Tyrians have developed AP ammunition more advanced than "a slug of the heaviest hard metal you can find". Maybe in a century or two. But not now.

Why would it take a century or two? The evidence that Thyrians are limited to simple slugs doesn't exist. We see truly amazing projectile effects from all classes that couldn't be produced by simple slugs. Your evidence for lore is evidence of game mechanics designed to create balance.

Simple slugs for armour piercing purposes. Yeah, explosive, poison-bearing, incendiary, and similar types of rounds existed. These are all relatively primitive - they were around during World War 1 at the latest. There's also weird stuff like lightning shot, but that can be attributed to having access to materials with magical properties

Advanced AP rounds like APCR, ABDS, and HEAT didn't really start showing up until World War 2. There's no evidence Tyrians have developed anything like that. Yet.

Your math is right but what does it have to with stronger Mithril breeches and the potential to use more propellant? Why wouldn't metallurgists who can already work mithril into armor and weapons not be able to shape mithril into guns immediately at the invention of guns? Same applies to projectiles. You can do simple math but your overall logic doesn't work.

The math was to show a simple demonstration that using a lighter projectile with the same propellant means losing momentum.

I've always acknowledged that stronger breeches could improve performance, but I think you're exaggerating by how much. Increasing the ability of the breech to resist pressure does not directly translate into a proportional increase in the momentum applied to the target - there are various inefficiencies that increase as the amount of propellant is scaled up that prevent this. The most visible - literally - is that a lot of the energy is lost when the bullet leaves the barrel - this is largely why longer-barrel guns have better performance. If the bullet is leaving the gun faster (and this applies to lighter bullets as well as to using more propellant, incidentally, so while my mats above assumed that the lighter bullet goes out with the same kinetic energy of the heavier bullet, the truth is that the lighter bullet likely actually leaves the barrel with less energy), the gas from the propellant escapes faster and less of the total energy from the propellant has gone into driving the bullet.

There are also some physical limits as well - the bullet is never going to be accelerated faster than the gas pushing it along (and as it approaches that velocity, the amount of additional work done on the bullet by the expanding gas is going to start dropping off) and there's substantial resistance to accelerating anything beyond the speed of sound and once you do, a lot of kinetic energy starts being bled off in the form of shockwaves and the projectile will quickly decelerate back to below the sound barrier if it doesn't have some means of replacing that lost kinetic energy. I'm not sure how much these limits apply to firearms (although I do note that the calculations above suggest muzzle velocities above Mach 1), but they do provide additional sources of inefficiencies.

The end result is that if you make the breech and barrel out of a more advanced material that resists pressure better, say 50% better, and take advantage of that by using 50% more propellant, you're not going to get 50% better performance. I don't know how much of a drop-off there'll be, but there'll be some.

Conversely, however, if you make armour out of a material that resists pressure 50% better, than it IS going to perform 50% better, because the effectiveness of armour is pretty much defined by its ability to resist pressure.

Again, we don't know the properties of Tyrian metals, but for darksteel and mithril, we can make educated guesses. Mithril is pretty consistently presented in fantasy where it appears as being lighter than steel, so it probably makes for an inferior projectile to steel (let alone copper, lead, and the like). Darksteel appears to be an alloy of platinum or some other metal found in platinum ores such as iridium, which would give a density similar to tungsten and lead. Orichalcum and Deldrimor steel we don't really have much to go on in terms of density - being even better for armour means it's probably at least not significantly
heavier
than mithril, though, and even if it was, both seem to be materials that are rare and expensive enough that you wouldn't want to be making every bullet out of it. Maybe you'd see the odd specialist armour-piercing round made out of it, similar to how APCR/HVAP was used in WW2 (namely, generally being issued in small amounts with orders to only use them when regular AP wouldn't cut it).

Regarding the marshmallow example: Technically true, but we're clearly not looking at cee-fractional projectiles in Tyria. Broadly speaking, they seem to be similar velocities to real-world projectiles of about a century ago, maybe even a little bit slower.

Do you mean c-fractional? I don't see why we couldn't see projectiles accelerated to relativistic speeds with magic. True we don't see it, but the reasons are arbitrary. If magic force fields can redirect or absorb kinetic energy then they should be able to add it as well.

I've seen it spelled both ways. c-fractional is more technically correct, but I thought cee-fractional might be more recognisable to some sci-fi readers.

Projectiles accelerated to relativistic speeds by magic might be possible, but like you say,
we don't see it.
I'm discussing from the perspective of what's in Tyria
now
, not what might hypothetically show up in the future.

We've been focusing on combat between institutions and heroes. Perhaps guns would have a bigger impact on the lives of the magic poor.

Perhaps, but where's the magic poor? Human armies have generally been presented as having magic-users as a significant minority
at the very least.
The White Mantle I'd consider an outlier (they essentially have a two-tier system, with spellcasters being channeled into the White Mantle proper leaving bandit forces relatively magic-poor), but you can look at Ascalonian ghost armies or several human factions in GW1 to get a broad idea of how common spellcasters are among human armies.
Technology is generally presented as being an equalising factor when a relatively magic-poor group (such as the legions after the overthrow of the Flame Legion) are having to go up against someone stronger in magic... and they still use melee troops because their
enemies
aren't magic-poor.

We see the bodies of the magic poor pile up everyday. Guns would eventually replace bows and melee weapons among the magic poor. To the bolded; your logic has magic poor melee attacking magic enriched melee and ranged?!?!? Because officer logic I guess.

There is a degree to which engineers and guns in general appear to be more common among magic-poor factions, such as the non-Flame charr and outlaw groups such as bandits and Separatists (and the latter are probably motivated by stealing charr munitions). But if we're talking large-scale warfare... thus far, most known cases of large-scale warfare have had at least one magic-rich side, whether it's humans versus charr or the Pact versus dragon minions. Talking about magic-poor battles is like talking about real-world modern warfare without air power: sure, it
can
happen between really poor countries or between factions in a civil war, but if you're talking about major power conflict,
it's going to be there.

Most of the magic poor aren't soldiers but still need weapons to defend themselves. Guns would change their lives. I imagine there would be two levels of combat for any battlefield, the magic poor and magic enriched tiers. The magic poor would use the most powerful ranged weapons they could. Why would they want to engage magic enriched melee in close combat? In general, I think you are confusing combat mechanics designed to limit the natural advantages of ranged weapon platforms and narrative designed to create and reinforce class distinctiveness for realistic Tyrian combat lore. Which isn't a big deal.

I'm thinking of battlefield scenarios here, where it's reasonable to consider that projectile countermeasures may be used. If you've got a soldier who doesn't use magic, then yeah, giving them a gun is a good idea. We actually see this with most 'magic poor' professions - warriors, engineers, even thieves (which have magic, but generally don't use it as attack spells) all use guns, while among spellcaster professions all we have so far is mesmers using offhand pistols. Problem is that if a few projectile-blocking or, worse, projectile-
reflecting
fields go up, those guns could become useless at best and dangerous to their users at worst. So you give your troops the best ranged weapons you can afford... but you ALSO give them the best melee weapons you can afford so that your troops aren't completely helpless when some cat-hole of a mesmer blinks into the middle of them while invisible, pops a Feedback bubble, and portals in that squad of Guardians.

In the context of lore, guns make shields for melee essential. In the context of large scale combat, that is huge. Guns would displace all unsupported magic poor and support would have to include shields. All shields below a threshold would also be displaced. The broad strokes of Thyrian combat is portrayed accurately but the role of guns isn't. The portrayal of guns in combat is shaped more by the demand for class balance and distinction. We already see projectile weapon systems that would change the landscape of war more than they are shown. Which, again, is good and necessary.

So you'd have soldiers that mostly use guns when their opponents are magic poor, and switch to melee weapons if their opponents have countermeasures (or, as was largely the case pre-guns, their opponents have armour that can resist their projectiles). Your point being? Most significant opponents will have countermeasures. Heck, engineers can make shield generators now (probably by using magical materials as a power source), so the enemy doesn't even have to be spellcaster-heavy. A squad of scrappers with bulwark gyros could mess up projectile-based tactics just as badly, especially if they're also packing rocket boots.

Either way, as things stand at the moment, how Tyrian warfare is portrayed makes sense. Armour technology and the existence of projectile countermeasures keeps melee combat relevant, for both the magic-rich and the magic-poor.

@"Psientist.6437" said:Powerful, natural explosives that the magic poor could create and use, not "guns", would transform Thyrian warfare. In some ways this is an easier story to tell. Magic would suppress the demand for natural explosive technology. The magic enriched would monopolize the supply of explosive technology. As well, material technology and magic enrichment would set a very high threshold for the power of the explosive. Projectiles that don't need natural explosives have already pushed the evolution of defense. Thyrians could build exotic rounds and guns, but guns would be toys or inconsequential at scale until explosive technology evolved past a threshold that magic set very high and long ago.

Hrrrmn. I'm sceptical about this too - there's probably a practical limit on the size of explosives that would be practical for infantry to use.

What I suspect would actually revolutionise Tyrian warfare is basically similar to what happened in the real world: mechanised warfare. At the moment, war vehicles are at a roughly WW1 level of use: they're present, but infantry still does most of the work. Even now, though, vehicles make weapons and pieces of magitech that are too big to be practical to be used by an infantry soldier actually useful in mobile warfare. With a bit of refinement and reconsideration of tactics, though, this could lead to a paradigm shift similar to that which occurred with WW2.

I suspect infantry would still want to carry melee weapons, though. I don't think Tyrian warfare is ever likely to evolve into something quite like ours, because Tyrians have capabilities that we just don't have. Body armour will continue to be used, because material exists that makes it protective enough to be worthwhile while practical enough to be used. Swords will never be phased out entirely, because you have anti-projectile countermeasures and people who can teleport directly into your face from a starting point that's barely in range of most ranged small arms.

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@The Greyhawk.9107 said:How about a lead bullet with a mithril jacket?

Hrrrmn. The approach would probably be to have a lead bullet with a mithril tip, so you've got the momentum of the lead behind a hardened penetrator. I wouldn't expect it to outperform darksteel, however, since what we know of darksteel seems to indicate that it's pretty much the Tyrian equivalent of tungsten carbide: high density (since it's refined from platinum ore - which could mean other platinum-group metals, but the lightest of those is still denser than steel) but hard enough to serve for military purposes.

In fact, per unit volume, it's possible that darksteel is tougher than mithril - platinum and platinum-group metals are between 50% and over 200% heavier than steel, so to be an upgrade over steel for the purposes of armour design, it'd need to remain tougher than steel while being in thinner plates in order to keep the weight comparable. Mithril, on the other hand, you can afford to make thicker than equivalent steel armour, because it's lighter. Which means that a darksteel projectile of a certain caliber is probably not just significantly heavier than a mithril projectile of the same caliber, it might also be more resistant to shattering or deformation.

So if there is a weakness in the argument, it might well be that while darksteel is a step down from mithril for the purpose of making armour and weapons, it could be pretty much exactly what you want for armour-piercing projectiles.

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@"draxynnic.3719" said:What I suspect would actually revolutionise Tyrian warfare is basically similar to what happened in the real world: mechanised warfare. At the moment, war vehicles are at a roughly WW1 level of use: they're present, but infantry still does most of the work. Even now, though, vehicles make weapons and pieces of magitech that are too big to be practical to be used by an infantry soldier actually useful in mobile warfare. With a bit of refinement and reconsideration of tactics, though, this could lead to a paradigm shift similar to that which occurred with WW2.

Tank General: "We are bringing 1000 tanks into battle to drive a wedge through the enemy lines and take the enemy city!"Elementalist: "The city is gone, I just meteor showered it"Tank General: "... well we still got lots of infantry to deal with!"Elementalist: "Died from the same meteor shower."Tank General: "... enemy tanks?Elementalist: "Who the kitten even brings tanks to a battle where a single person can literally pull meteors from the sky?"Tank General: ":("

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@Dawdler.8521 said:

@"draxynnic.3719" said:What I suspect would
actually
revolutionise Tyrian warfare is basically similar to what happened in the real world: mechanised warfare. At the moment, war vehicles are at a roughly WW1 level of use: they're present, but infantry still does most of the work. Even now, though, vehicles make weapons and pieces of magitech that are too big to be practical to be used by an infantry soldier actually useful in mobile warfare. With a bit of refinement and reconsideration of tactics, though, this could lead to a paradigm shift similar to that which occurred with WW2.

Tank General:
"We are bringing 1000 tanks into battle to drive a wedge through the enemy lines and take the enemy city!"
Elementalist:
"The city is gone, I just meteor showered it"
Tank General:
"... well we still got lots of infantry to deal with!"
Elementalist:
"Died from the same meteor shower."
Tank General:
"... enemy tanks?
Elementalist:
"Who the kitten even brings tanks to a battle where a single person can literally pull meteors from the sky?"
Tank General:
":("

I think this basically the short of it. While i think that individuals in the lore have not been typically capable of calling meteor storms on cities by themselves, I don't really see why, for example, the charr couldn't just streamline some sort of ritual to basically call down the searing whenever they please. With that kind of power playing at attack and defense, armies are probably put into occupational and guerilla roles. That being said, anet has no problem handwaving away that sort of reality, as we have seen time and again throughout the story.

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