Kossage.9072

It could be hinting at the enigmatic Nephus who is mentioned in a few lore books and dialogues in Inner Nayos. Ambient dialogue and texts suggest that Eparch and Queen Labris potentially are the Nephus trio of siblings' uncle and aunt, while Nephus is some kind of folk hero who the Kryptis are very divided on (some revere Nephus, some react with anger when the name is mentioned). If Nephus is in fact Eparch's sibling, and Peitha, Cerus, and Deimos are Nephus's children, we could be looking at Eparch possibly being an usurper and the "true" king was supposed to be Nephus (even if Eparch was really the person who, as far as we know so far, established the rigid caste society among Kryptis). In that sense Peitha, as an heir to Nephus (if there's a relation due to the house bearing Nephus's name), could thus be the "true king" for real. 🙂 The one oddity I wish the writers would explain is why the Ravenous Wanderer of Gyala Delve (an oni presumably formed from Captain Thess based on how his human version's looks in the first phase of the Gyala boss battle resemble Thess from Silent Surf fractal) who is suggested to be a wanderer not tied to Eparch, aka the unaligned Kryptis we meet in various events in Inner Nayos, could be hurt by positive emotions but Kryptis seen in SotO feast on both negative and positive emotions alike. Does it have something to do with the Wanderer potentially being a transformed human and thus not a pureblood Kryptis, so that mixed heritage background creates a weakness for this impure demon, or could there be another reason? The curious thing here is that if Mabon, Glint or anyone else's information is so crucial, why don't we just use powerful necromancers in the Astral Ward (Livia, for example) to summon their ghosts from the Underworld or whatever afterlife they've been sent to? If Priestess Rhie could summon Alastia Crow, a pirate she hadn't known before, or how the norn spiritcaller Lefsi Spiritchaser could summon Gwen's mom for a favor to give Gwen emotional closure, and the only potential danger in these rituals is that it may attract some nightmares to disrupt the summoning, surely it should be child's play to summon Mabon back even if we had to anchor him to one of his darling items (even if as a ghost he wouldn't be able to linger for long) and ask for pointers while we have a few Astral Ward on guard to handle any hostile stragglers that may emerge to cause trouble. Perhaps Glint, due to her prophetic abilities, might also know something useful that we could use in this conflict.

I did find the mursaat's ties to Janthir curious here. Sure, in GW1 lore the mursaat sent Saul D'Alessio to retrieve the Eye of Janthir from that place, but the whole eye motif and revealing true potential vs. the Unseen (aka mursaat) felt a bit off to me. Compare it to the Seers whose very name evokes eyesight and such and how the Eye could've been one of their constructs to study beings' magic potential and later granting the gift of True Sight to unveil their rivals, the Unseen, to Seer allies. It would've been a delicious bit of irony if the mursaat, who had already repurposed the wizards' Bastion of the Penitent for their own use, would've also repurposed a potentially Seer-made Eye of Janthir not for a benevolent but malicious purpose (identifying suitable sacrifices for the bloodstones to keep the Door of Komalie shut). Not to mention that Saul's story suggests that the mursaat had a city in the forest rather than on an island, implying as if that forest might be Woodland Cascades. Would this suggest that the mursaat, despite their low numbers, had more than one city on Tyria, or that they didn't resettle Janthir after returning to Tyria (or the site was abandoned due to the later Seer-mursaat war)? Curiously the whole mursaat use of alabaster and golden filigree kinda fits the aesthetics of Amnytas and Wizard's Tower architecture. Interestingly Bastion of the Penitent seemed to suggest as if one of the political prisoners there may have been a Forgotten as there's a mention of scales in the prisoner fabric and that it was fit for a multi-armed being. Yet we didn't see any Forgotten body among Samarog's piles of victims, so I wonder if a lone Forgotten (possibly driven mad by centuries of Eye of Janthir torture) could've somehow escaped from the prison intact while cairn and Samarog focused on slaughtering the rioters, and this sole remaining Forgotten on Tyria could now be wandering in the Woodland Cascades, maybe looking for the hidden mursaat city to unlock the secrets within...

Here you go. It was Scott McGough answering players' questions on the old-old GW2 forums in a lovely Lore Q&A thread. I wish we had either that kind of direct rapport between players and devs again where devs kept answering people's questions as the thread expanded, or at least the old "Dolyak Express" type of "answers" threads where a community manager would compile player questions for devs and would then share the devs' answers to those questions in a dedicated thread.🙂 As for Scarlet's actual goals, I've always been in the camp where the short story "What Scarlet Saw" suggested Scarlet to be against both Mordremoth and the Pale Tree, pitting the two against one another to destroy both and thus free sylvari from their respective yokes so sylvari can be truly liberated as opposed to Soundless who can still fall prey to both Pale Tree (as devs confirmed that the Pale Mother can reach out to Soundless if she puts in enough effort) and Mordremoth's influence. In that sense you could view Scarlet as a villain (killing the Pale Tree and thus preventing new sylvari from being awakened) but on the other hand she could also be seen as a kind of antihero (wanting to end Dream and Ventari's Tablet influence via the death of their conduit Pale Tree and thus also silence the Nightmare which lurks within the Dream as well as Mordremoth so he could not corrupt sylvari either) who just wants to let sylvari truly follow their own path instead of Nightmare Court subjecting themselves to Nightmare's influence. 🙂 So yeah, based on this Scarlet was never good even when she set out to carry out her plan. She just wanted to give sylvari a true "tabula rasa" where the four influencers (Dream, Nightmare, Mordremoth and Pale Tree+Ventari's Tablet) couldn't dictate the paths sylvari should take anymore. Freedom in chaos and all that. 🙂

Well, the recent press preview of SotO did reveal this baddie's name:

If by dragon magic you also mean the unstable (and later volatile) magic unleashed by Zhaitan, Mordremoth and Balthazar's deaths, it appears that it may not have been dealt with fully even if Aurene now regulates the flow and, according to Kuunavang's dialogue in Arborstone, has been sharing magic with at least some mortals to lessen the burden (without outright bonding with more people). Kuunavang: It's a new era, to be sure. I've seen many of them pass. Of course, the one thing that has been a constant...was her. But the space she left behind is filling. Player: With Aurene, you mean? Kuunavang: Not just Aurene, but...you all. All that she carried seems to no longer be so concentrated... (Source) The existence of the ley-infused skelk and other "bounty" creatures with volatile abilities etc. in Gyala Delve's the Deep either means that these creatures have been infected since Mordremoth's or Balthazar's magic dispersed around the world and some of that magic hit Cantha before Soo-Won ate most of it, or they have recently been infected somehow while the ley line nexus didn't seem to affect the Commander's party at all during the fights against the ravenous wanderer. Based on HoT ending cinematic, Mordremoth's magic dispersed in four cardinal directions and split off into multiple branches from there due to ley line shenanigans. The northern flow led to Tarir (boosting the egg containing Aurene) and eventually entered the Maguuma Bloodstone and apparently reached even as far as Drakkar/Jormag based on Bitterfrost Frontier Bjora Marches lore. The eastern flow seemed to have gone to Kralkatorrik in the Crystal Desert (as PoF's "Road to the Desert" article mentioned that Kralk stirred from his roosting place in Desert Highlands and flew south to Vabbi for unstated reasons after getting a good taste of that Mordy juice) and potentially beyond that. The southern flow led to Ring of Fire where Primordus hurried off to in Season 3 and eventually to Soo-Won. The western flow is still unaccounted for but seems to have traveled to the "Sunrise Crest" region across the ocean and probably hit potential undersea civilizations along the way (assuming that the unknown horrors/shadows of the depths haven't already wiped out undersea civilizations from those areas if such civilizations exist there). Then there are also the four surviving bloodstones out there (one on Ring of Fire unless the Flame Legion excavated it and took it elsewhere somehow, another near Straits of Devastation in the cave leading to Bloodstone Caves unless it has been moved, and the fourth bloodstone and the fifth aka keystone's locations are still unaccounted for) that must've also taken their share of the dispersed dragon magic within them like the now destroyed Maguuma Bloodstone did. Once Balthazar's magic transformed the unstable unleashed dragon magic/ley magic into volatile magic, we've seen that it has affected regions from southern Elona to Blood Legion Homelands and Far Shiverpeaks in the north and even Central Tyria etc. to the west based on the skyscale flight collections featuring orbs of volatile magic in central regions as well as the volatile "bounty" creatures. We haven't seen any of it in Cantha likely due to Soo-Won nomming it all up with the reactor's assistance (so much so that even the dispersed magic from Dragonstorm somehow flowed south to Yong Reactor in Cantha instead of spreading all over Tyria). There are no doubt still many ley-crazed creatures and people out there as well as dragon champions who have consumed some of the dispersed magic to grow more powerful, not to mention whatever nefarious nature spirits that could've also gotten a power boost from this magic if they chose to consume it (or it was forced into them). So the problem still persists even if Aurene is now the stopgap to prevent further leakage shenanigans aside from whatever people or beings might do with other ley nexuses and the other bloodstones if they get to them.

Yep, the developers have left it unclear if dragons (at least of Elder Dragon lineage since "lesser" dragons seem to mate given the existence of wyvern matriarch and patriarch) only ever lay eggs without a partner or if they can actually mate to provide stronger genes to their offspring. Dragonlings are curious in that they need a lot of magic before they can hatch from eggs even though they're already aware of their surroundings within the egg as shown with Aurene. Interestingly End of Dragons story and the Aurene legendaries do seem to suggest that Aurene is suffering from loneliness due to losing her blood family, so the writers could try exploring this angle later if she wants to create scions of her own to ease her anxiety. Then again, she already supposedly has access to the Mists so she could just chat with the ghosts of Glint and Vlast whenever she wants (I would like a family reunion of the three of them in the Mists if Aurene projects herself there as an avatar, but alas), she has her foster parents Caithe and the Commander as well as her two saltspray dragon friends (I would expect her and Kuunavang to grow close over time because Kuunavang is suffering from loss as much as she is), and Dragon's Watch etc. to keep her company, so we shall see what happens. 🙂 If Aurene is to ever lay eggs to create scions of her own (considering that Glint and the Forgotten believed that one scion wouldn't be enough to handle the world's magic and how the goal was always to have multiple entities balancing the burden that would be too great for one being to bear), I wouldn't expect her to repeat the two mistakes Soo-Won made: 1) she likely won't create her scions as mindless tools (unlike what Soo did with her kids according to Mother's Lament dialogues) even if they were created to help her balance the burden of magic, so her scions would already have personalities from the get go, 2) she would ensure that each scion would receive its own mortal champion to bond and share the burden with so these scions learn to love and respect mortals instead of viewing them as distant ants (as was the case with the indifferent Vlast and the eventually misguided Elder Dragons).

I also remember the mention of grubs but I haven't been able to locate the interview mentioning that specific food yet. I did, however, find these answers from old Jeff Grubb interviews which mention wild game and fungi as part of the original asuran diet:

The Void has existed before Soo-Won became Mother to regulate it and before the creation of most life on Tyria as Soo-Won herself explains, and Kuunavang elaborates on it in Arborstone. It's just that Soo-Won and her five scions kept it in relative check (it was still affecting them "under the hood" but very subtly because all six Elder Dragons, even Soo-Won, lacked the unique nature that Aurene has regarding proper filtering of the magic and the bond with mortals to lessen the burden) until Zhaitan fell. Then things escalated from there as each dragon was slain over the course of the decade, worsening the effects of the increasing Void on the remaining ones. Soo-Won only managed to stay relatively sane via the Yong Reactor taking most of her magic and filtering it into dragonjade as per her arrangement with Joon. The Void creatures didn't start manifesting until Ankka had shot the Extractor and forced Aurene's magic into Soo-Won to accelerate the torment process, and the Void essentially manifested as Soo-Won's "minions" as she began spreading it all over upon breaking free from the reactor. Only Caithe and Aurene's actions at Jade Sea, along with later Canthan reinforcements, kept Soo-Won locked within that region so she couldn't spread the Void to the rest of Tyria...at least until the "birth" of the Dragonvoid. The Kaineng events show how things got worse since Dragonstorm and how Void was coalescing in dragonjade due to the "corrupted" magic being filtered from Soo-Won after she had consumed the majority of the released magic from Dragonstorm via the global ley lines (why Aurene couldn't absorb the lion's share of two dragons' magic despite being at ground zero at Anvil Rock wasn't explained in EoD, sadly). Basically, timeline-wise, Kaineng meta occurs before the Commander and Ankka's encounter with Soo-Won in Yong Reactor, so what we're witnessing in Kaineng is the Void first trying to manifest itself in the world via dragonjade tech. Yao recognizes that there's corruption in dragonjade and that it's sentient with the way it's moving and targeting stuff although at that point in story everyone but Kuunavang and Soo-Won were unaware of the Void being the cause. Dialogue during Kaineng meta:

I like the PoF character selection theme. I admit I was initially confused when I first listened to it as I was expecting something bombastic like the core and HoT themes considering that Elona was descending into a four-way war between Commander's Pact, Balthazar's Forged, Joko's Awakened, and Kralkatorrik's Branded, and instead we got a rather serene theme instead. However, upon reflecting on it more, I'm starting to see what might've motivated Maclaine to write it the way he did beyond the obvious Lawrence of Arabia influences. While it's more calm than the other main themes, it does kinda fit lorewise if we look at what it may actually represent thematically. In GW1 we rid the desert of Abaddon's influence, and in PoF and Season 4 we rid the desert of the threats of Balthazar, Joko, and Kralkatorrik...and the desert endured through all of that. In the PoF timeline article Scott McGough wrote it beautifully: So, to me, the calm PoF theme represents the desert and Elona as a whole through both the turmoil and the peaceful times. While we get our epic heroic moments felling the three villains with appropriate battle tracks, the desert has been there a long time, and even before that it was the bottom of the Crystal Sea, so it has seen a lot of things and will see things long after we have passed away. As Joko poetically exclaims in Season 4, "War. Plague. Gods. Dragons. I've seen them all. They come and they go. Like the tides." Except this is basically the POV of the desert where even Joko himself is but a footnote in the vast history that the region has witnessed over several dozen millennia. 🙂 I feel Maclaine struck a delicate balance with EoD theme: on the one hand it has its peaceful moments at first to depict the ancient wisdom of this spirit-filled land that has been the birthplace of various dragons and more (as we later learn) but that it also doesn't forget its heroic, adventurous side in the second half as it's seen its share of heroes emerge and rise to the challenge over the course of millennia.

Yeah, I'd like novels to explore backstories of some key or side characters and expand the world of Tyria. The three current novels helped flesh out so much, so it's a shame we haven't seen any since. Sadly I doubt ANet will invest in new novels as those would require significant research on the world and building extensive lore while making sure the events wouldn't contradict with what's already established in game. Some of my picks for future topics with proposed titles: 1) Prince of Winter This book would detail the final tumultous days of Dwayna and an Orrian sculptor's (Malchor? ;D) doomed romance that led to the birth of Grenth. We'd see how he'd fare living in Orr as a demigod and how the other gods and mortals treated him, his relationship with mortals and eventual friendship with the mortals who'd become the Seven Reapers, and their fateful decision to overthrow the unjust god of death Dhuum in a clear suicidal mission with seemingly little chance of success. It would show how Grenth prevailed against Dhuum, why he was unable to slay Dhuum (is it because Grenth was a demigod as opposed to a full mortal like Kormir, so he couldn't make the choice "only a mortal can make" and thus Dhuum retained some divine power?), his redecoration of the Underworld, and recruiting Desmina as his first follower once the Reapers have been elevated and the Church of Grenth grows in power. We'd see early hints of Abaddon's fall and how Grenth would respond to the insurrection, the climactic battle at the Gates of Heaven and then at what would become the Desolation where Abaddon was finally cast down. We'd witness where Grenth's anger at false authorities stems from, why he is quite cruel as a god in his strict pursuit of justice, what messed him up to create the bodyhorror grentches that steal presents from innocent children (did Grenth not receive enough presents as a kid so he wants to punish other kids so they appreciate what they have?) etc. It could lead all the way to GW1 time of witnessing Abaddon's ultimate defeat, and we could see glimpses of Balthazar's growing madness and if Grenth sees a pattern forming based on his experiences with Dhuum and Abaddon before. We could witness how Grenth feels about Mad King Thorn becoming his unpredictable ally and why he tolerates Thorn's presence in one section of the Underworld, the Mad Realm. We could get teases of why the gods didn't reach out to Glint regarding the Legacy project, Lyssa's potential shenanigans with Balthazar, and why they kept Glint in the dark about their plans, elaborate on Grenth getting pissed off at Zhaitan stealing his followers' souls to embody Risen manifestations, and why the gods left Tyria and what they hope to achieve in the worlds beyond as a potential setup for gods' return in GW2. 2) Firstborn This book would chronicle Trahearne's life as the first sylvari to ever awaken until he'd gradually meet his other awakening siblings over the following year. We'd see him being the special child who has direct connection with Pale Mother and how that makes others feel, we'd get some fun interactions with the doomed Riannoc as well as the two still unknown and unnamed Firstborn out of the twelve (perhaps teasing their eventual return in a GW2 living world season or even a future sylvari expansion), the schism between Trahearne and Faolain, Trahearne's growing racism towards asura after what they did to Malomedies until he learns to forgive the asura for their transgressions, all that good stuff. His views on Cadeyrn and Faolain's fall and the forming of the Nightmare Court would likewise be interesting and if his views on the court are more complex than other sylvari's. What would also be fascinating would be Trahearne's gloomy trip to Orr and him and Caithe being the only two living souls to witness Zhaitan in the modern day and live to tell the tale, perhaps even some teases of Caithe and Faolain's travels and if they first encountered Nightmare in Orr or somewhere else while giving us hints of what the Dream and Nightmare actually are (since they're unrelated to Mordremoth) and how we might start to get teases of Mordremoth via Wynne's cryptic talks. We'd also get more screentime for the less used Firstborn like my fave Aife, or the valiant Niamh, or the clever Kahedins among others. Other fascinating tidbits would be the few tidbits of Trahearne backstory that GW2 has teased us with. He somehow managed to befriend and earn the trust of the reclusive largos Sayeh al'Rajihd in an apparently epic teamup, the tengu smith Izu Steelshrike, as well as Riel Darkwater after he helped her slay the previous Master of Whispers who had fallen under a dragon's corruption (maybe Zhaitan so the novel could tie Trahearne's Orr quest together). The whole Sayeh teamup need not necessarily be a fight against Risen but against the horrors of the depths, thus teasing and exploring that angle and what awaits us in the Unending Ocean and why Sayeh swore Trahearne to not tell anyone the specifics of their mission without her approval. We'd see how he also earned the trust of not just Whispers but Priory and Vigil too, setting the stage of him becoming the only viable candidate for Pact Marshal in the future. We'd also see the less explored side of Trahearne as the shy scholar with a seemingly impossible quest (cleanse the fallen Orr) which many sylvari actually ridiculed and bullied him about. We'd see his heartwarming friendship with the sylvari seer Amaranda the Lonesome (who has such lovely dialogue to the sylvari player if we defend Trahearne in front of her) and the curious rapport with Caithe who, save for Amaranda, is the only one to truly understand Trahearne's burden at first. We could see glimpses of Trahearne's actions and thoughts during Season 1 Scarlet's War when he wasn't around in game, how the threat of Mordremoth affected him, his growing friendship with the Pact Commander etc. And we'd see firsthand how the Pact fleet fell down, how Trahearne tried to defend the Pact soldiers alongside Destiny's Edge only to be captured and eventually ending up in Mordremoth's embrace. His "bonding" with Mordy could also reveal some key insights about the dragon cycle and the Void, and Trahearne could come to see Mordremoth as a tragic monster with a sympathetic past who nevertheless has to be put down so he can't tell the Commander too much. And if we're lucky, we might even see what happens to him after death. Will his and Mordy's souls merge so he becomes a literal spectral Voice of Mordremoth who has two souls inside him? Will he enter the dragon or sylvari afterlife, or are they one and the same (depending on if sylvari are literal grandchildren of Mordy as the anniversary art book may have teased)? It could even foreshadow Trahearne's eventual return to narrative as a ghostly Twilight Messiah who'll play a part in a future expansion or living world where he helps us one last time before we get to say true farewells to him. 3) Soulkeeper This book would detail the early life of Almorra Soulkeeper in the Blood fahrar as she bonds with her Soul warband, her eventual friendship and fiery romance of true passion with Bangar Ruinbringer and how their paths lead them to different destinations and relationship drama as Bangar rises in power while Almorra remains a legionnaire. We'd see how the births of Ajax and the unnamed daughter affect Almorra as a mother as well as the daughter deciding to join Ash Legion instead of Blood Legion while Bangar gets his claws on Ajax to twist him to his liking. We'd get hints at why this daughter (Ember Doomforge's mom) apparently has as juicy story behind her as Ajax did as Almorra never elaborated on it in game. We might explore Almorra wading through complex charr politics, how her and Smodur's views match on the future of the charr, and what she feels about the youngest imperator Malice and what Malice's goals may be in regards to Khan-Ur (to possibly foreshadow the teased plot element in EoD about some imperators apparently gunning for Khan-Ur seat again despite all of them saying that none of them want it during Champions time). After all, Malice is a pretty nasty name, so maybe there's more behind her than meets the eye in true "Ash trash" fashion? 😉 We would witness Almorra's Massacre firsthand and the horror of Kralkatorrik's Branding. How Almorra becomes suicidal after losing and being forced to kill her corrupted warband until a few kindly souls such as Laranthir of the Wild, Efut, Jhavi Jorasdottir and Lord Rodrigo of Cormoch among others snap her out of her depression and turn her quest for vengeance into a quest for justice. We'd see how this friendship becomes very deep and unbreakable as they all swear loyalty to her in a time when charr and human truce still hasn't come to pass. We'd see the nigh impossible funding of the Vigil in a mere five years from a group of rag-tag friends into a massive well-funded army and how they accomplished this feat when unity between races was still a dream of Trahearne's and Pale Tree's. We'd get to experience Almorra's feelings about Aurene, the granddaughter of Kralkatorrik, and she eventually lets go of her hate and comes to see Aurene as not the same as her grandpa but a savior, something I wish Season 4 had gone into before the budget cuts. We would witness Almorra's elation at Kralkatorrik's fall and how she has finally avenged her warband while she tries to figure out what to do with the remaining Elder Dragons. We'd experience Almorra's horror first-hand at Jora's Keep as Jormag's influence creeps in, how Bangar has gone off the rails and she realizes he has to be stopped no matter the cost while there may still be some love left for him after all despite her brave act of defiance. Perhaps we'd even see an epilogue of sorts where she gets to meet with Glint's ghost in the Mists and what their new adventures will be in the worlds beyond. Perhaps she gets to meet Trahearne too, tying into some events teased in the Trahearne novel and possibly the Grenth novel if there are some hints of gods returning etc. and why Glint wants Almorra and Trahearne to be her vanguard for what's to come. These are just some of the many examples the authors could explore. The stories would practically write themselves as Tyrian lore is rich from GW1, GW2, all the manuals, interviews, blog posts, wikis, internal lore bible etc. While I think it's unlikely we'll see any future GW2 novels, I would happily welcome more novels if they were as lengthy as the previous ones and went as much in depth as those novels did with key characters' stories. It would certainly deepen my and many others' appreciation on Tyria's lore and world. 🙂

While he's not a genius on par with Taimi, Spearmarshal Zaeim is still a capable, charismatic, wise and strategic man whom Tahlkora chose as her successor. Not flawless, of course, but he learns from his mistakes and grows stronger because of it. While the Commander is the Hero of Tyria, Zaeim is known as the Hero of Istan and arguably became the Hero of Elona in the process of Season 4. I'll keep my fingers crossed that we get to adventure with him again in and perhaps even outside Elona if Sianna's Seitung statement of Elonian politics finally stabilizing into a republic holds any weight. At least I was happy to see Zaeim's brief cameo in EoD. 🙂 There's still one mystery ANet hasn't answered about Bound by Blood: who sabotaged the Brand stompers throughout Grothmar Valley? Curiously a seemingly random asura noticed that something was amiss and offered some tips to the charr engineers on how to fix the stompers, so it made me wonder if that was just a convenient coincidence or if, say, the Inquest had deliberately sabotaged the stompers to draw the Branded out and thus force Aurene to intervene in the ceremony, which then led to riling up the charr and Bangar speeding up his plans. After all, the valley had one asura clad in what looked like Inquest clothes arguing with a charr about how best to weaponize Aurene. Perhaps the devs could even tie this sabotage to the ongoing experiments by Overseer Kuda who is very interested in dragon research. While I think one of the anniversary livestreams suggested that Ryland's profession might be engineer (which could in turn imply that he was the saboteur), that would require Ryland to have enough knowledge of Aurene's personality to hope for that preferred Branded intervention outcome, which would be odd given how oblivious Ryland seemed to be of dragon personalities and hierarchies during Darkrime Delves mission. As for the bias in GW2 writing favoring women over men, I've definitely noticed some patterns since early worldbuilding, core story and novels, intentional or not. Some examples: The females Jennah and Pale Tree are the truly competent leaders out of the five nations. From core, Knut Whitebear is suggested to be capable but just stays home except for that brief Grove trip in Season 2 and does nothing (maybe this could've changed if the saga had been allowed to last longer, but I hold out hope he'll get his chance to shine and fight alongside his wife Gaerta one day as a true power couple) as he basically was a stay at home dad who raised his two sons while Gaerta was out there building her impressive legend. The Arcane Council's male members such as Flax, Yahk, and Phlunt are either corrupt or bumbling antagonistic comic reliefs (in early S4Ep2 drafts it appears that Phlunt was intended to be revealed as some Inquest higher-up all along, turning the lovable jerk into a hidden villain to remove him from the board) while the female Ludo and Zudo are apparently subservient to Flax in his villainous schemes, and Haia is an actually clever mastermind to rival even Flax. From the charr leaders, Bangar and Gaheron turned out to be rotten eggs, and they were replaced by the commanding and diverse female Crecia and the soft male Efram. Even the progressive old dog Smodur needed the younger female Mia Kindleshot to convince him to sign the Ebonhawke Treaty lorewise, and he ultimately went bonkers during the Icebrood War due to many reasons (one of which I hope the devs will reveal to be Jormag's subtle mental manipulations of Smodur to ensure Ryland's defection to Jormag since I can't see Jormag leaving something important as that to chance) and was put down to be replaced by Mia who's essentially described as female Smodur except less prone to war antics. Malice, the sole remaining original imperator (for now) was revealed to be the true mastermind behind the Ebonhawke Treaty as she, Almorra, and Jennah essentially conspired to make it happen as revealed in Ghosts of Ascalon although Malice never brought it up during the Drizzlewood conflict and let Smodur take all the glory for it. Malice even complained how annoyed she was at dealing with Bangar and Smodur's "crap" all the time, painting them both as backwards coots who should've been replaced ages ago. In Lion's Arch the male Captain Magnus was written as a rather shortsighted and gullible buffoon in the latter half of Season 1, ultimately being unable to convince the council to fortify LA for the attack to come that cost them dearly. The female Ellen Kiel was the only one figuring out Scarlet's master plan out of the council, but her sage advice was not heeded. Meanwhile her political rival, the male Evon, was written as a caricature "villain" (even if, amusingly enough, Evon's campaign video paints Evon as far more competent than Ellen's Evon-slandering video does). Out of the order leaders, the male Gixx is often paired off comedy-wise with the goofy Sieran and has to play straight man to her antics. Meanwhile, both the female order leaders Almorra and Riel are written seriously; even Almorra's few moments of levity don't come off as forced comedy but mainly show her very sarcastic side. As far as the major core villains go, we notice that Sons of Svanir and Flame Legion are misogynists who either ridicule women and/or abuse them (e.g. Flame Legion breeding farms that traumatized Salina Scorchstep who lost her name, identity and sense of time because of constant abuse). Meanwhile there's no counter faction of women embracing misandry and enslaving men yet. Caudecus tries to be a mastermind in his backstory but comes off as a buffoon in his on screen appearances with suggested repressed closet gay/bisexual feelings for Logan. He even has this odd fetish with having mostly female White Mantle lieutenants, all of whose names start with A. Gaheron is a one-note leader of a cult of personality who enslaves women and desires godhood. Kudu is revealed to be a successful womanizer who has abused and seduced his female lieutenants with sweet words of poison. Fraenir, who only becomes a thing later in the saga, is likewise shown to be a one-note religious fanatic. Meanwhile, the female Firstborn Faolain overthrew the Nightmare Court's original Secondborn male leader Cadeyrn, thus negating that whole jealousy angle of the court where Cadeyrn wanted to be seen as being above the Firstborn and make his mother listen to him; Cadeyrn is reduced to a one-note side boss in a dungeon who is subservient to Faolain and cast aside, while Edge of Destiny initially suggested that Faolain might be the only villain with a potential for redemption. Even when Faolain became irredeemable by HoT time, she was ultimately enslaved by the male dragon Mordremoth in a fit of irony, turning her into a tragic victim of circumstance after her previous rebellion against authority. Among the gods, Balthazar had to go as the toxic warmongering man, while the progressive deities are all women. Based on ANet artist notes I found on ArtStation, it appears that the writers had potentially considered Grenth as another villain candidate in early PoF drafts, so yet another male deity could've bitten the dust. And then there are, of course, Abaddon and Dhuum, both toxic men. In Elona the Primeval Kings really started with the female Queen Nadijeh who first founded the Sunspears. It was during the male King Wasi's rule that more wars broke out in the desert. Meanwhile, the last female rulers Dahlah and Nahlah were led astray by some councillor/vizier and I wouldn't be surprised if that advisor turned out to be an evil man. In Elona's defense, Spearmarshal Zaeim and Redeemer Kossan are competent men who balance out women such as Boticca and Zafirah; sadly we get little info on the Master of Shadows to find out what kind of a person he might be. Out of Joko's three marshals, the male Olori Ogun is ridiculed by both the Commander and his fellow female marshals, while the female marshals Oluwa Eranko and Osa Ekolo are shown as scarily competent commanders worth their title. Grand Vizier Utumishi is shown to be a servile and cowardly weasel whom the Free Awakened leader Sianna keeps ridiculing all the time, and Archon Iberu is downright psychotic with only a sliver of redeeming qualities during his brief aside in the Jahai summit until Aurene's intervention makes him embrace villainy again. Joko is the only major bisexual character in GW2 so far and unfortunately he embraces the "depraved bisexual" trope; it's unclear if Caudecus should also be considered bisexual or if he's just closet gay based on his implied lust for Logan despite getting into a political marriage with Lady Wi's cousin. I hope we'll see a more positive representation of a bisexual character in the future without painting them with tired villain tropes. Recently in Cantha we've seen several powerful women vs. comic relief or downright villainous men. Empress Ihn is just as progressive as her great grandma Haebaragi (who dissolved the corrupt Celestial Ministry and defeated the evil Ministry of Purity while forging peace with tengu) as she understands that change is inevitable and necessary for Cantha's survival, while Ihn's dad Taejeong is described as xenophobic, retaliating and dismissive (if statements from Li, Joon, and Ihn are to be believed). We know very little about Taejeong and even less about Ihn's unnamed grandfather (Haebaragi's son whom Navan first revealed her true identity to) whose name may potentially be the enigmatic Seung-Gi (who has a landmark named after him in New Kaineng unless that's meant to refer to some minister given the location). Only Ihn and Haebaragi have confirmed monuments out of the modern Canthan rulers in New Kaineng while the unnamed grandfather and more curiously Taejeong have none as far as I can see. Why the preference over the rare female monarchs (Haebaragi and Ihn are the only confirmed empresses regnant ever in Canthan history) over male emperors in modern Canthan reverence? Did Ihn remove her traditionalist dad's monuments after his passing, or was Taejeong somehow so humble that no major landmark was ever named after him? Unlike Emperor Kintah who had been fond of his concubine Yuki and their son Togo and had let them enjoy the privileges of palace life alongside his wife and "legitimate" son Prince Kisu in GW1, Taejeong did not extend the same generosity to his extramarital affair Dal-Rae and Joon for unknown reasons, which made Joon incredibly bitter and caused friction between Joon and Ihn and why Joon felt she needed to rise above her half-sister whenever she could. As mentioned earlier in the thread by others, the male Li and the female Joon's handling is rather different; the bad older guy gets ridiculed at every turn while the female Joon is sympathized with even when she, too, commits questionable if downright horrible acts during the story and as revealed in some of her backstory in ambient map dialogue and in the journals found throughout the maps. Rama is written as a comic relief even at times when he shouldn't be (the Void battle and him commenting on the Commander's new look was unneeded given how destruction of reality was imminent; at least he was briefly serious when he learned the truth about Li, which I appreciated). Rama chooses not to pursue the career as a minister despite Li grooming him for it, so the more competent woman Cho Min becomes the acting minister instead. Even Captain Fa Yang, who is shown to be competent, is written off as the "straight man" archetype of comic relief when set against the competent female DE lane commanders Caithe and Navan who override his decision much to his confusion in the early meta dialogue. Navan and Caithe don't joke around during their lanes while Fa has to handle banter with his rival Chul-Moo. On the dragon side the male Albax is written as being grieving and almost cowardly (albeit for understandable reasons) while it's the female Kuunavang who was the brave and wise one and whose kindness ultimately helps Albax come out of his shell in a truly heartwarming moment. As far as other antagonistic Canthan factions go, we also see curious writing preferences. The male Chul-Moo is charismatic but he's also revealed to be a momma's boy under his influential mom Matron Park's thumb (as revealed by the amusing dialogue between him and his lieutenant who delivers him the mom's "ultimatum" that embarrasses Chul-Moo in the Jade Brotherhood base). Even when he becomes our ally, he becomes a jokesmith who frustrates Fa to no end in Dragon's End. Meanwhile the female Tetra is written as being scary and competent all the time, and her rapport with Navan (an unlikely but welcome pairing as I enjoy their back and forth!) leads to her comforting Navan when they have to keep killing corrupt saltspray dragons for the good of all. Even Ankka and Scarlet, the most influential and mostly independent villainesses, ended up being shackled to males: Scarlet was abused and enslaved by the male Mordremoth, and Ankka's journals revealed that her start of darkness was partly influenced by Gorrik remaining oblivious to her affections, which made her bitter. As for the Elder Dragons, it turns out that the female dragons of the bloodline (Soo-Won, Glint, and Aurene) are pure benevolent motherly figures who only want what's best for Tyria even if tragedy follows them. Meanwhile the male dragons Primordus, Zhaitan, Kralkatorrik, and Mordremoth are basically pure evil with Kralk's sole redeeming trait as a dragon supremacist being his love for his family. Curiously the only non-binary dragon Jormag is shown to arguably be the most evil of all Elder Dragons from the get go with the way they tattle on Zhaitan's fascinations to mommy and how they ultimately ree their toxic male brother Primordus to death (as confirmed by the order we fight the Void dragon manifestations in that are in reverse order of their deaths, so Primordus died before Jormag in Dragonstorm). I find it curious how the only major nonbinary Jormag is presented as arguably the most villainous of the bunch based on Mother's Lament dialogues, while Zhou Yao, the other major-ish non-binary character with potential, was merely bait and switch in EoD story and was reduced to a side character who accomplished even less than Captains Fa and Min despite heavy promotion in advertisements; Yao didn't even participate in the final battle where almost everyone else with combat capability was present but at least they contributed to it a bit off screen. Regarding Kasmeer and Marjory's relationship, devs have revealed that initially Marjory was meant to be a guy but VA availability forced them to rewrite her and Ellen Kiel as men. Given how Season 1 original ending was meant to show "Marjory" dying, it seems that the writers intended to use a subversive trope where Kasmeer (the apparent bimbo damsel in distress) is not endangered as one would expect and actually grows more confident and heroic after witnessing her more experienced male mentor/love interest's death at the hands of the villain Scarlet as she avenges her love's demise. This list is simply scratching the surface, and I could find even more examples from the storylines. Thankfully it's not completely one sided as there are occasional competent men here and there from obscure characters to more notable ones, but the bias, whether intentional or not on the many writers' part, is clear. I like that GW2 has many strong heroines and villainesses and that we have many women in power in the world of Tyria (I for one can't wait for Jennah and Ihn's long-awaited meeting as I imagine they'll have lots of chemistry based on what we've seen of them individually, and hopefully we'll get to see Navan and Anise interact one day too!). However, it seems that the writers, in their effort to adjust the balance to include more influential and competent women in the narrative over the years, have gone a bit too far in one direction and painting many males of various races in a confusing, comical or downright antagonistic light as a result when compared to the women. I hope they'll adjust the balance as they move onward and offer us independent villainesses not shackled to male entities or feelings related to them (perhaps even a faction of man-hating or man-enslaving villainesses as a counter to Svanir and Flame Legion or just powerful female rulers leading an invasion of Tyria, Elona, and Cantha from Sunrise Crest or wherever?) as well as more balanced writing for men so we'll get more nuanced male antagonists like the relatable villain Gavin was in the sylvari White Stag storyline. 🙂

Yeah, and there's even lore suggesting that the proto-druids may have appeared in Kryta and Maguuma and were eventually driven to the jungle by proto-Krytans (coming from Orr etc.) in the Prophecies manual if I recall. Whether the Aztec-y ruins that the asura found on the Tarnished Coast are remnants of druid civilization or even preceding the druids' arrival is unknown, but it could make sense if those ruins that the asura repurposed for their own use could've actually been been built by first settlers from Sunrise Crest before they vanished for whatever reason if the devs wanted to tie the Mesoamerican-inspired Utopia/Xotecha culture to deeper Tyrian lore and justify why asura are using the scrapped Utopia/Xotecha assets in their culture. As for why Crestian culture would resemble Xotecha in any way (while containing elements from the other human cultural influences like Elonian, Canthan, Orrian, Ascalonian etc. styles), a plausible explanation could be that the first human refugees from their homeworld (or the gods if they instructed them what to build on their new homeland in Sunrise Crest) simply built in the style of the old homeland or the legendary home of the gods, hence replicating the Mesoamerican style of Xotecha on Tyrian shores. The devs could even retroactively reveal that the cultists trying to bind and possibly harvest the magic of the Cliffside Colossus in the Cliffside Fractal were the first human invaders from Sunrise Crest trying to subjugate the other races for the glory of Balthazar etc. Depending on how thorough the gods were of erasing knowledge of preceding traitor gods, perhaps Sunrise Crest could indeed contain statues of not just Abaddon but Dhuum as well in some secluded corners if nothing else, assuming that Dhuum was well regarded enough and if he did enter Tyria with the other gods back in the day. Lyssa's origins are likely said to be unknown, curiously enough, so it's always possible that she first appeared on Sunrise Crest despite current lore suggesting Grenth to be the first demigod born in Tyria...but that could just be propaganda to hide the existence of other demigods. Sunrise Crest could even have references to Balthazar's potentially divine mother; we know that the head of Balthy's father didn't disintegrate as he carried it with him for a time (whereas Balthy himself disintegrated immediately upon death as did Abaddon), which suggests to me that the father was in fact mortal or a demigod depending on what happens when a demigod dies vs. a real god and opens the possibility of the mother being the previous deity of conflict, a demigod, or another mortal. If so, it'd be fun if there was some grove of "lost gods" that some of the faithful barely remembered from their past in the homeworld before Lyssa helped "them" (whether the Six Gods, humans, or both) forget the past, and this alcove could have statues of some of these lost gods like Balthazar's potentially divine mother, Dwayna's father who was teased in Linsey Murdock's comments, and Abaddon's predecessor teased by the Apostate. It would certainly be a big "wham" moment of lore, especially if we found some hidden tales relating to these predecessors and what may have led to their replacement or if there could've been more than six gods active at any given time before the exodus to Thyria. 🙂

While Kralkatorrik genuinely loved his family and was saddened that Torment forced him to attack and kill some of them, Tom Abernathy did confirm in guild chat that Kralkatorrik was always evil even before Torment accelerated his madness, and that his love for his family was his good trait. Even Glint's speech in Season 4 Episode 5 suggests this as she could initially argue against Kralkatorrik's order to end the mortals and how Kralk didn't desire peace between dragons and mortals. That kind of free will argument couldn't have taken place once Glint was Branded (we know she wasn't always so because Arah explorable explains that Glint regained her free will after the Forgotten purified her, which means that Kralk must've Branded Glint to make her blindly loyal to him some time after she had argued against Kralk's plan eons ago). As we learned in Episode 6, Kralk was not afraid to die unlike his mother, so it wasn't even the prophetic vision of a world without him that spurred him to action; he clearly just thought mortals were lower than him and not worth considering as allies. So you could view that Kralk was a dragon supremacist and thus evil (since he never wanted peace to begin with). As for former narrative director Tom Abernathy's "Jormag doesn't lie" argument, it is curious to me that no NPC ever brings this important detail up and everyone just keeps calling Jormag a deceiver. I think this was one of the sadly dropped plot points from the rushed Icebrood Saga and we would've been in for a revelation. Technically Jormag could be right in all its arguments (the only iffy thing that borders on an outright lie is its promise to spare Asgeir and the norn while we have the detail of Jormag slaughtering norn as it supposedly pursued them all the way to Snowden Drifts and "killing" Owl, unless Owl's sacrifice happened before Asgeir's confrontation...and that could work if Owl entering Jormag's maw damaged Jormag enough to make it land and allow Asgeir to attack Jormag directly). Devs did state that the "Root and Madness" discrepancy for Mordremoth in the S4 Kralk fight was deliberate and why Zhaitan didn't have similar changes to its spheres of influence. So Jormag now having "Frost and Deception" seems to suggest that there's more going with the spheres tied to the domains than we currently know similar to Aurene's spheres of influence transforming from Kralk's Crystal and Fury to her Crystal and Light. So I wouldn't say that Persuasion is always about Deception because you can also persuade someone with logical arguments based on truth (e.g. our confrontation with Captain Fa in "Fallout" if we play our cards right). What I theorise is that each sphere of influence has "subdomains" tied to it, just like the Priory's map of the All shows many smaller spheres tied to the bigger domains (e.g. both Mordy and Zhaitan have six smaller spheres tied to the big one related to them). These smaller spheres may be the "subdomains", so in that case Plant has the subdomain of Root, Mind has the subdomain of Madness, Ice has the subdomain of Frost, Persuasion has the subdomain of Deception etc. Why we didn't get variants for each Elder Dragon for that final fight is curious and could be a clue to something bigger going on with the spheres of influence and domains of magic since those many orbs shown in the Priory map haven't been elaborated on since Season 2. I would say that--and even Bobby Stein and Angel McCoy backed me up on this back in Season 1/2 days--developer blog posts are very much considered canon until they're retconned by later in-game information. Unlike forum, video, interview etc. comments that can be written or said in the fly without necessary background lore checking, blog posts like "The Movement of the World", "The Mostly Harmless Quaggan", or "The Ecology of the Charr" take considerably more work and are actually published as de facto documents online for people to peruse, so fact-checking would be more rampant on those official documents released to the public. However, back when Jeff Grubb and Ree Soesbee still held the reins of lore continuity, I don't recall them even making contradictory lore comments that needed to be retconned, so every dev comment regardless of medium (forum, video, interview, or blog) could always be trusted to be canonical. Well, aside from the narrative team's consensus to retcon GW1's human and god-centric lore to wider lore in GW2 which revealed that some of the GW1 reveals had been biased like gods creating Tyria, magic, and Glint and how Glint was actually the scion of Kralkatorrik and the bloodstone had originally been a Seer creation etc. The only arguable cases beyond those were the ideas from "The Movement of the World" that it was Balthazar and not the asura who opened gates to the Mists in Lion's Arch, or the claim from "The Ecology of the Charr" how most NPCs would now call the Flame Legion as Gold Legion as an insult in GW2 when ultimately the Gold Legion was only ever referenced in very few comments as the legion retained its former name. Once Jeff and Ree's focus was elsewhere (likely the many side projects being developed alongside GW2 as early as 2012 as revealed by LinkedIn infos, which might explain why GW2 didn't make expansions initially like Jeff Grubb had teased in an interview but moved to the Living Story model that later evolved to Living World seasons and the rush to get the first expansion out) and others took the reins from Season 1 onward, more lore discrepancies began showing up throughout the seasons and some expansions (whether because of QA not finding those like e.g. the lore discrepancy from the "Book of Vlast" that Vlast had been fighting against the Branded in Elona for generations when Kralk had only been awake lorewise for about a decade) and the team had to establish primary canon (game) being superior to secondary canon (anything said outside game like interviews, blog posts, forum comments etc.) if lore conflicts arose between the two. With that said, retcons aren't necessarily bad if handled well. I think the transition from GW1's human-centric stuff to GW2's multiracial stuff and expanding the history of the world to span to a time before the gods (e.g. the revelation of Glint and the bloodstone's true origins) didn't hurt lore that much although it was a bit funny that devs said that humans contributed old knowledge and history to the Pact when much of that knowledge ended up being outdated anyway to give other playable races an equal standing with humans, while they also had to figure out how to write the gods out to not give humans an advantage (even though in GW1 the gods were not solely called human gods but were gods of Tyria and accepted faithful from all races in general). And even then humans have still received the most development in GW2 culture, lore etc. compared to other races so far although this has to do with devs relying heavily on GW1's human-centric lore: each expansion so far has heavily featured human cultures and lore in some critical way (the Exalted, Druids and White Mantle teases of Maguuma in HoT, the Crystal Desert and Elonian cultures in PoF, and now the Canthan cultures in EoD) often with much involvement in the actual relevant seasons too, and it wouldn't surprise me if we eventually get another human-centric expansion for "expansion four" or beyond thanks to the teases of Doern Velazquez's potentially Hispanic homeland that could potentially be Sunrise Crest to the west across the ocean. Meanwhile I'm still waiting for that norn expansion because norn didn't even get a time to shine as a race (poor Knut Whitebear, I hope you get your limelight in the plot one day to address the prophecy surrouding your and your bloodline's fate!) in the Icebrood Saga when most of our focus was Braham specifically or charr politics. I agree. In AuroraPeachy's PoF YouTube lore interview with PoF leads Scott McGough and Matthew Medina, both of them pointed out that the idea of "god vs. dragon" didn't even materialize until they began developing PoF following HoT's rushed launch. Even when they settled for that plot in Elona rather than other ideas like "dragon vs. dragon" (which would later evolve into the Icebrood Saga), Balthazar apparently wasn't even their initial idea for the god antagonist. There are some ArtStation dev art pieces (e.g. one artist's notes about a planned encounter with Grenth) as well as in-game comments that suggest that Grenth or Lyssa (e.g. the idea of Lyssa mocking Kormir for lingering behind, and how Vabbi was one of Lyssa's most beloved regions in the world) might've been other candidates, but that's just speculation on my part until further evidence comes to light. So while writers may have vague ideas for where to take the story (I think the Aurene being the One Dragon or at least one of the major balancers was always in the cards ever since she was teased in the second Zephyrite festival appearance via that curious glow on one of the Zephyrite airships at the Zephyr Sanctum, and we may yet see Kralk's prophetic line "She's the first of her kind" play out based on Commander's story journal comment teases that she may not handle the burden alone forever), they leave a lot of leeway in case plans change due to demands from the suits, changing writers as devs join and leave the company etc. And yeah, retconning Soo-Won out of being the true deep sea antagonist and that she may have been holding back another sinister force (until she decided to not only leave for Cantha to save the continent but then also chill out there apparently doing nothing for two centuries until reactor completion for some reason) allowed devs to not tackle the many still open plot threads about the Unending Ocean that simply couldn't have fit into the already jampacked EoD story filled with so many Canthan factions, characters and plot points. Now that EoD has addressed the origins of the blue orb (Eyes of the Ocean) while still leaving some things about them mysterious, we can potentially explore other ocean story ideas. These would include: 1) The aforementioned horrors in the depths and what they're truly after. 2) What other races and civilizations Soo-Won may have shielded Glint-style in previous dragonrises as speculated by Kurt Bengtsson in the Ministry of Archives. 3) Why Soo-Won didn't contact her granddaughter Glint in the past two centuries after saving Cantha so the Forgotten wouldn't consider Soo-Won yet another enemy (as seen with their Tarir trials featuring damaging splashes of salt water). 4) If Soo-Won was ever in contact with Abaddon (The God of Knowledge and Water and Lord of the Everlasting Depths) thanks to Abby's domain/portfolio (and the gods' interest in the history of Tyria when they gathered artifacts to Arah) and thanks to her mind communication shenanigans and how dragons have been shown to communicate even while asleep. Perhaps the gods learned the Elder Dragons' names and spheres of influence from Soo-Won to record them in the Tome of the Five True Gods all along to tie it all back to Season 2 revelations? The Apostate's book "The Map of the All" found in the Priory even references how an imbalance in the Antikytheria system in the All would lead to Tyria falling into the void, so perhaps Soo-Won had warned Abaddon about the Void, and the Apostate (who knew some of Abby's deepest secrets such as Abaddon's predecessor) then wrote this information down in a cryptic manner in that book. 5) Whether the abyssal ascended krait prophets who have promised to flood the world are real (whether tied to the horrors in the depths or not), and the origin of the mysterious "krait" obelisks. While the krait blog post "Shadows in the Water – The Krait" suggests that the stories are false in order to not draw unfortunate parallels to certain faiths with prophets and concepts of religious jihad war against unbelievers like Islam, I hope the topic gets addressed in the future. 6) The fate of the quaggan goddess Mellaggan and if she's truly dead, corrupted, or in hiding like Owl. Despite some NPCs viewing her as merely an aspect of Melandru, to me there are enough differences between the two due to their different domains/portfolios (even pointed out in "The Mostly Harmless Quaggan" blog post) that Mellaggan may actually be a native Tyrian deity/spirit similar to Koda, potentially the Great Dwarf etc. Maybe there could even be some connection to Soo-Won as well? 7) The fate of the missing quaggan markissios royal family from the aforementioned quaggan blog post, and if we could one day see a Return of the King/Queen scenario of a lost heir emerging and finally uniting the southern and maybe even the northern tribes into one quaggan kingdom. 8.) Finally exploring the ruins of the krait and quaggan kingdoms, and possibly visiting the largos nation which interestingly has some Catholic religious terminology (Sayeh al'Rajihd is referred to in a spiritual sense which could make her a kind of assassin priestess, and the Concordat of the Tethyos Houses likely calls back to the Holy See terminology suggesting a religious society of underwater Order of Assassins). 🙂

If you're curious and don't mind some map "spoilers", the full version of EoD's extended map (uploaded to the "Tyria (world)" page in GW2wiki) is even bigger than the bits of map currently shown in game, expanding farther north and west with some really curious map art. The same happened back when PoF and Season 4 extended the map and the datamined map back then contained a lot more areas to the east that we couldn't see then but can see now in the in-game EoD map. I don't know why the devs can't just reveal the whole map in game and instead choose to hide parts of it since it's not like we explored those far eastern areas during Season 4 or the Icebrood Saga anyway so releasing that map art in game wouldn't have been spoilery anyway. With that said, I do also subscribe to the theory that the aforementioned enigma that is Doern Velazquez (one of the few humans with a Hispanic name) could potentially be hailing from this western "Sunrise Crest" region and that this might be a "lost" human nation where all the human refugee tribes originated from once gods took humans somewhere upon arriving at Orr's Artesian Waters. While Cantha is the first known human nation with a date in recorded history (786 BE) on the three continents (Cantha, Elona, and Central Tyria), there are some clues that the gods didn't take all humans to Cantha and that they may have initially placed them in a currently unknown location from which they later expanded to the rest of the world. The Priory's world map linked earlier in this thread notably depicted what appear to be naval routes between notable port cities. We can see Lion's Arch, Palawadan/Kamadan and Kaineng City there all leading to the port at the Battle Isles, but we also see naval routes leading to unknown ports at Sunken Islands and Sunrise Crest regions, which to me suggests potential trade between the four continents via the central hub of the Battle Isles. We also have these curious tales and historical documentation: What we can figure out from these texts is that Tyrians didn't originate from the Canthan people as the news of these "primitive barbarians" of the north came as a surprise to Canthans just like Tyrians were initially unaware (for the most part, as the text curiously states) of Canthans. So Cantha can't be the birthplace of all human ethnicities such as proto-Orrians/Krytans, proto-Ascalonians, proto-Elonians etc. Likewise, the Luxon and Kurzick origins are unknown, while Luxons have tales of a homeland across the ocean, which further points to another point of origin for humans. Now for some fun speculation with no basis: It would be fun if Sunrise Crest was Thyria's version of the Americas and Spain combined, a kind of extension of some of the already developed Utopia lore that was semicanonized as Xotecha folktales/legends in the anniversary art book. If Sunrise Crest is the home of all human ethnicities after gods transported them to Thyria and if various ethnicities sailed to other continents for reasons (ethnic, religious conflicts, or need for more living space?), it means the Crestians/Xotechans could claim to be the gods' chosen people in case the gods first lived among them for a time just like gods took some humans to Cantha and wandered among them later before deciding to settle in Arah. The whole Luxon legend of the Three Queens being supposed demigoddesses Alua, Elora, and Ione could even point to other potentially Grenth-like demigods (before his ascension) living among the Crestians/Xotechans and ruling them to this day. Imagine if we encountered Balthazar's half-god daughter who was revealed to be one of these Three Queens as the Triumvirate rules that fourth human continent, for example. If the writers wanted to expand the idea and introduce a potential threat with this continent's reveal, it'd be quite easy too if Sunrise Crest (unlike the increasingly disillusioned and less religious Cantha, Elona, and Tyria) was still highly religious and even zealous with an army and navy of conquistadors who view themselves to be the Six's chosen ones who must carry out Balthazar's creed to subjugate the "savages" of the new world and bring enlightenment to them. Instead of being moustache-twirling villains, they could genuinely believe they're the good guys saving the other continents from themselves and that the poor ignorant savages can only thrive under the benevolent autocratic rule of the wise and "immortal" Three Queens. Having such a zealous nation would present opportunities for manipulators to step in and "steer" the faithful in the "right" direction. Perhaps Menzies could make his return, posing as an oracle in the imperial court to manipulate the rulers to wage the war he's after for his ulterior motives, and/or perhaps Lyssa (or her chaotic half) returns and seeks revenge for Balthazar's death and sees that Sunrise Crest has an army still loyal to the gods ready to serve one of the Six who return to grace them with her presence after such a lengthy absence. For all we know, Doern could've even been a spy sent to infiltrate Central Tyria and report their weaknesses to his masters so the conquistador armada can sail and "liberate" the new world from its ignorant and non-pious rulers. Perhaps Doern's wife also hailed from this continent, or she was born in Tyria, and Doern went native after falling in love and losing his wife on field duty, and he decided to abandon his masters' mission to no longer spy on the Order of Whispers but defect for real while keeping the existence of this potentially hostile nation a secret while he and the Order of Whispers brass decide what to do with that information. With End of Dragons ending the Dragon Cycle, that potentially opens up more naval passages in the Unending Ocean for the armada to finally sail east and make a dramatic entrance. There's the whole plot point of Jennah being a direct descendant of King Doric and how the gods ordered Doric's line to guard the bloodstones so they could never be abused. Perhaps Jennah's blood is key to activating the Keystone (whether it's Jennah's throne or somewhere out there) and thus uniting the remaining bloodstones into one so a villain can try to unleash four bloodstones' worth of power (especially if each of those bloodstones is now supercharged from Elder Dragons' and Balthazar's deaths despite the deep sea dragon's attempts to contain it as we did see a major chunk of Mordremoth's magic going west across the ocean when the magic split into four cardinal directions in the HoT finale cinematic) that can even pose a threat to Aurene in the long run. 🙂

Well, based on "The Mostly Harmless Quaggan" blog post from before GW2 launch, southern quaggans would've only migrated to Central Tyrian waters 50 years before the beginning of the game (1325 AE), so circa 1275 AE. Meanwhile, Zhaitan's canonical awakening is depicted in the Sea of Sorrows novel and took place in 1219 AE. However, Bobby Stein and Angel McCoy did state back in the Season 1/2 lore discrepancy discussions on forums that lore is malleable and that what's written in the game is more relevant than what was said in "out of game" sources like blog posts, interviews, forum/reddit/twitter etc. comments, dev streams etc. What is likely here is that the quaggans were possibly able to migrate to Central Tyria so late due to Risen still building their forces or if the Risen were initially focusing their efforts on that implied war on the northern Elonian border (based on commentary in "The Movement of the World"), so a potential Risen vs. Awakened war on Scavenger's Causeway. We know that the dragons go through periods of inactivity and high activity while awake, and Zhaitan was repelled from invading Lion's Arch during the Great Krytan Blockade in 1256 AE as depicted in the Sea of Sorrows novel, and the next time was the later champion Morgus Lethe and the Maw causing trouble for Destiny's Edge to solve in 1319/20 AE as depicted in the Edge of Destiny novel. As it happens, the quaggan migration of circa 1275 AE would neatly fit into that timeframe of two periods of invasive activity from the Risen so they may have simply been lucky to flee to Central Tyria when they did and not encounter as much opposition as they otherwise might have. If Soo-Won was truly the second dragon to awaken some time after Primordus as implied by the order of the "orbs" lighting up in "The Machine" cinematic in Season 2 (the order of other dragons' awakening fits into the pattern in the cinematic based on the canonical dates, after all), it would've happened between Primordus (1120 AE) and Jormag (1165 AE). We know that Primordus's attempted awakening (1078 AE) was delayed by the death of his herald in GW1, but Jormag and Soo-Won likely awoke on schedule, so the gap between Primordus and Soo-Won was likely smaller than the gap between Soo-Won and Jormag (whose champion Drakkar had already been influencing the north for some time). Based on the times of awakening and how some Elder Dragons' awakenings were either delayed (Primordus due to the death of his herald the Great Destroyer, Kralkatorrik due to betrayal from his herald Glint who didn't gather magic for him anymore after being cleansed, and possibly Zhaitan too given how gods had siphoned magic off of him while he slumbered although his unknown herald likely was able to become active regardless if it hadn't been slain in the previous dragonrise...at least lupicus had survived since the previous dragonrise as confirmed in Arah) or accelerated (Mordremoth thanks to Scarlet Briar redirecting the ley lines to him, and possibly Jormag due to Drakkar's shenanigans), each Elder Dragon would've awoken once every 50 years or so in this cycle. If so and remembering Primordus's original awakening attempt, we can calculate Soo-Won's potential awakening date 40-50ish years after Primordus's original awakening date, so circa 1130 AE if the pattern holds. That would neatly put it 35 years before Jormag's awakening date (1165 AE) and 10 years after Primordus's delayed awakening (1120 AE). It would be similar to how Kralkatorrik's awakening was delayed until 1320 AE while Mordremoth's awakening was accelerated to already occur in 1326 AE (only 6 years gap between these two dragons!). As such, I don't see a discrepancy here. We know from Kuunavang's account that she reached out to Soo-Won around the time of the Great Tsunami of Zhaitan's awakening in 1219 AE, after which Soo-Won moved to Cantha from the depths, saved the continent, and then did...something until she made a deal with Joon at some point in her engineer career. All we know for sure is that the reactor that would contain Soo-Won was finished in 1836 CC (1326 AE, so after Zhaitan's death, which Soo-Won must've felt through the ley lines) based on the date in the New Kaineng Zoning Record 1342 found in New Kaineng City. Which means that Soo-Won was chilling out or doing something in Canthan waters for two centuries (while she had only protected the depths about a century from her awakening circa 1130 AE(?) to Kuunavang's plea for help circa 1219 AE), allowing whatever shadowy things that she had originally kept at bay to finally invade the now unprotected depths around the time of the krait and quaggan exodus of 1275 AE. What makes Soo-Won's actions curious is the fact that she had circa two centuries to do whatever she pleased until Joon's reactor was complete, and she could've used those centuries to reach out to Glint and give warning to the mortals; while she may have seen mortals as mere flickers in her infinite lifespan, she was still swayed to aid Cantha somehow, so why not Tyria? What arguments did Kuunavang use to convince her to interfere since even Kuunavang herself was surprised that her tactic had worked? However, even if Xunlai Jade had somehow been siphoning Soo-Won's magic even earlier in another proto-reactor base before the completion of the main base, it couldn't have been for more than two decades at most given Joon looking like someone 30-50 years old (her husband has some gray hair but it could just be a stylistic choice) and the fact that her daughter looks to be about 10-12 or so. I wonder why Soo-Won never bothered to contact her granddaughter Glint. Was she aware of her and the Forgotten's Legacy plan and the idea that all the Elder Dragons had to be slain? Glint apparently didn't know that Soo-Won was benevolent (why else include the sprouts of damaging salt water in the Forgotten's trial of facing each Elder Dragon's representation in Tarir?) even though Kurt Bengtsson's leading theory in the Ministry of Archives is that Soo-Won may have protected some races/civilizations Glint style in previous dragonrises due to the existence of the Eyes of the Ocean (blue orbs). Perhaps Soo-Won simply didn't care to elaborate on it and let Glint do what she wanted as Soo-Won was more concerned with broader topics. But it still seems weird to me; maybe the story will elaborate on this one day. We've had the cited source on the deep sea dragon's wiki page since 4 September 2020 although I think it has existed as a source on another wiki page somewhere earlier. That interview with Jeff Grubb is from before GW2 launched, around the time when Ghosts of Ascalon novel was released based on his comments (sometime after 27 July 2010). 🙂

The latest information on Zojja on written form came from a German interview during "All or Nothing" release which suggests Zojja is very much alive but still recovering from severe brain trauma: Tom Abernathy did mention in the 3-hour deeg chat that they haven't forgotten about Zojja but simply haven't found the right moment to bring her back. He also mentioned in a forum post that Felicia Day's schedule would force the team to write and record Zojja's line circa 6 or so months in advance, which means they can't change the lines in case an episode goes through story rewrites as was the case in e.g. Season 4 and the Icebrood Saga. Expansions, however, are longer projects which allow more leeway (even though they also end up affected by late rewrites as was the case with both HoT and PoF). More importantly, ANet shipped several voice actor home recording kits due to Covid during the Icebrood Saga's later episodes, so they could feasibly ship one to Felicia Day and just have her record lines at her leisure when her and the voice director's schedules match. So, I wouldn't count Zojja out just yet. Felicia has expressed interest in reprising her role as Zojja, and we know narrative devs are still invested in her. It's just that Taimi and Gorrik already fill that niche of researchers, and EoD will also introduce us to the engineer Yao who Taimi will apparently have some banter with, so bringing Zojja back now would have to have a narrative reason that doesn't make her superfluous when we'll already have so many geniuses in the group. But I'll keep my fingers crossed for Zojja's eventual appearance. 🙂

I've been around since late November of 2012, so I've almost managed to experience the hyped up launch of GW2. It's a bit unfortunate that I didn't get to experience the first Halloween and that one-time Lost Shores event, but I've had a fun time since. As for the narrative, it's had its ups and downs, the rushed Champions and HoT especially being notable in that regard. I do think a lot more could've been done with all of the dragons and their champions, even Zhaitan despite him receiving the most time in the story via buildup thanks to the lengthy personal story. Same applies to most villain factions and their leaders; e.g. Gaheron and Faolain could've easily carried a living world season or two on their shoulders if given enough development. As such I worry that the deep sea dragon's story will be rushed too as it has had the least setup out of all the dragons as we've yet to even see any of its minions. Just like I'm worried that most of the Unending Ocean lore setup since core Tyria (e.g. krait obelisks, abyssal prophets, the blue orb and why it prevents dragon corruption, the fate of the royal quaggan markissios heir, the truth behind Mellaggan's disappearance, and exploring more of the largos society and finding out what secrets Sayeh al'Rajihd and Trahearne shared that Trahearne couldn't tell us about) won't necessarily be followed up on while EoD focuses more on its new diverse cast of Canthan characters. With that said, I look forward to finding out what EoD has to offer lore and exploration-wise. The new characters shown on stream so far have been intriguing even though I lament that we likely won't get to meet any cool NPCs wearing those fun Ministry of Purity armors since they want to move away from Ministry of Purity and the Am Fah/old Jade Brotherhood stuff. It'll be interesting to see what remains the same and what has changed in Cantha in the past 250 years, or rather since Cobiah Marriner's last visit to Cantha about a century ago, and how the writers juggle between old lore and their new lore while hopefully honoring some of the plots set up in Winds of Change. Would be cool to see Reiko Murakami, the architect behind the Ministry of Purity, either being ensconsed as a hero spirit in Tahnnakai Temple (if Usoku saw her as a martyr like much of Cantha apparently did at the time), or having been turned into an envoy to atone for her crimes similar to the role the envoys wanted Shiro to play originally. I don't plan any celebration per se once the expansion launches. I'll just try not to rush with mounts as I play at my own pace and explore each zone carefully on foot at first like I've done with previous expansions for added immersion. Given what the devs have teased so far, there'll be lots of lore snippets and fun easter eggs and beautiful areas to be found throughout Cantha, so I'm sure the journey will be enjoyable as long as I remember to lower my expectations and understand that some things will necessarily not show up due to budget, story rewrite etc. reasons. 🙂

While Braham's survival was curious, former narrative director Tom Abernathy did state in deeg's 3-hour chat (available on YouTube; it's well worth a watch) that the reason Braham survived was to 1) subvert expectations as players and characters in-game didn't expect him to survive after his heroic sacrifice, and 2) to explore a hero's story after he's fulfilled two prophecies and what he'll do now that he's finished his mom's work and has "clear skies ahead of him." I kinda agree with Tom's reasoning as Braham's survival allows us to explore further norn stories such as power struggles between the known and unknown Spirits of the Wild while the Big Four are weakened and recovering, learning more about the past of Braham's black norn dad Borje the Sun Chaser and if Braham can try to find and connect with his father's tribe (would be cool if those black norn were revealed to be seafarers with ties to the potential human kingdom of Sunrise Crest across the ocean in the west), exploring Garm's backstory and what happened to the rest of the dire wolf pack and why he teamed up with Eir originally (which former narrative designer Angel McCoy wanted to explore back in the day but which we've yet to see happen in game), the impact of the revelation that Asgeir's story was built on a lie and how it affects the family of his once revered descendant Knut Whitebear etc. What I disagreed with Braham's Champions ending was him surviving without any physical changes, though, given what we know of the persistence of dragon corruption in affected minions. After all, when Glint was cleansed by the Forgotten, she remained in her corrupted crystalline form despite regaining free will and never returned to her original form. I would've preferred one of two options for post-Champions Braham if he had to survive: 1) the Spirit connection allows him to regain his personality after the clash, but he remains in his admittedly hot destroyer form which acts as a physical reminder of his somewhat selfish sacrifice and the thousands of lives he took while under Primordus's influence, or 2) the corruption does leave him due to two dragons' clashing somehow negating corruption altogether, but all his already corrupted body parts fall off so he essentially becomes blind and armless and requires jade tech or whatever to gain new mechanical arms and possibly new magic-infused "eyes" that "see" the world with magic similar to Daredevil series or Y'shtola in FFXIV etc. The story would then explore where his destroyer sense originated from (did it have any ties to his fire-enchanted bow or some other source?), and he'd have a temporary Jon Snow ending from GoT TV series where he exiles himself and wanders to the north to use his enhanced senses to kill the remaining destroyer champions and lead what other lesser destroyers remain away from civilization so they'll eventually fizzle out, thus performing a true heroic sacrifice to save the peoples of the north from remaining dragon minions while atoning for his crime of awakening Primordus and thus causing the deaths of thousands. That ending would not only allow the writers to keep him away from the story for a while in a logical manner but also allow him to return to the story later when enough time has passed. As for the deep sea dragon, if it dies in EoD, it will have received the least development out of all dragons, including even Primordus who at least had a few core zones and much of the Eye of the North expansion to set him up. DSD is a mystery, and we haven't even met any of its minions yet; even Mordremoth's minions were already teased in Season 1 and were fully revealed by Season 2, to there's been barely any setup for DSD who's been the only dragon to not migrate towards Central Tyria yet (likely because it may have awoken close to the magic-filled krait obelisks in the depths and might've been content feasting on that magic for all we know). As far as the generic Tyrians and Elonians care, DSD has never been a threat to them, and most Tyrians ignore stories about krait, karka, quaggans and arguably largos suffering from DSD's spreading influence. Given how the EoD logo depicts two dragons and how each main GW2 product has always shown a dragon antagonist in the logo, it suggests that we'll face two dragons in the expansion. Since neither of those dragons looks like Aurene, it's possible that those yin/yang dragons represent DSD who could be two dragons who are one Lyssa-style (if the writers want to draw further parallels between the gods and the dragons). Maybe they can justify one half of DSD being "friendly" and trying to aid humanity while the other half is chaotic and wants destruction, so they'll basically give us a tragic Jormag 2.0 story but with more bathos if we need to kill both the evil and the good half of DSD similar to how Hellboy the Golden Army ended. It's of course possible that they'll pull a PoF ending and end the story with a catastrophic twist that empowers the DSD further and turns it into a primary antagonist in Season 6 where its story is finally resolved. This would be preferable to me given how little buildup DSD has received so far, but time--and EoD--will tell what path the writers take. The one benefit they have with writing DSD as opposed to most dragons is that DSD has barely any lore attached to it (apart from the underwater hints in quaggan, largos etc. dialogues and blog posts) so they're free to take it in any direction they want. With that said, given how the writers wasted Cadeyrn, Gaheron, Faolain, Lazarus, removed Malyck from HoT, didn't involve the likes of Gixx and Riel and solely focused on Almorra out of the order leaders among many other narrative hiccups, it would be wise to keep our expectations low for now so we'll be positively surprised by EoD. I worry that they're still following the "blockbuster narrative" approach in storytelling where we'll be in a constant hurry to defeat the villains so there's barely any time for a slower pace and more exploration of characters like FFXIV does between its major story beats. However, what gives me hope is that Connor Fallon mentioned that we'll be traveling between zones in EoD story, so there's a chance we'll have some time to explore some characters and plots in some detail even if not as in depth as I'd like. We shall see. 🙂 I hope that the devs will be able to open up one day and reveal why they had to rush the saga ending instead of either continuing it in a Depths of Destruction expansion (so saga would kinda serve the role of Season 2 setting up HoT, and we'd get a proper Depths of Tyria, Woodland Cascades etc. expansion) or, if they had to enter Cantha no matter what because the suits demanded it, just put the saga on hold for now and give us the DSD detour (similar to how Mordremoth was a detour from the core dragon storyline because its threat became more imminent at the time) before returning to finish the Jormag/Primordus stuff in the Destroyer Epic or whatever it would've been called after Canthan season 6. Imagine if Jormag had remained our "ally" and became our skype buddy while we explored Cantha so it could reveal some juicy lore about the continent, the origins of dragonrise cycle, weaknesses of DSD, and the identities of Mother etc. while trying to recruit us to its side for that inevitable confrontation with Primordus. It remains to be seen how EoD story turned out although I was rather worried about a narrative dev tweet which mentioned they had to cut out a lot of lines from EoD due to a limited VA/text/dialogue budget. However, the few glimpses we've seen of the cutscenes so far with some impressive mocap, as well as the multitude of characters shown on stream so far, give me hope that they'll give Cantha the time it needs to tell its story with a diverse cast of characters. Unfortunately, based on what we've seen so far on streams, it seems that the writers might not get to explore the deep sea lore setups from core Tyria as they'll mainly focus on their new diverse Canthan cast on land instead. I'd love them to explore the abandoned krait capital and discover the truth behind the obelisks and the ascended prophets, find out if any royal quaggan markissios heirs still live out there so we could rescue them and unite the quaggan tribes into one kingdom again, explore more of the largos with the return of Sayeh al'Rajihd and perhaps even get to visit the largos capital, find out if the quaggan goddess Mellaggan is dead or in hiding or corrupted by the dragon as a cool world boss etc. If any of these topics are brought up in EoD at all, I worry that they'll just get a side reference in some lore book or become a quick meta event without deeper exploration. But maybe they can explore that stuff more in Season 6 if so... 🙂 In my opinion Caithe apologized way too much in Season 3, so much so that it felt like the writers pandering to Caithe haters when the Commander knows Caithe better than that. Her apologies in HoT and in early S3 were more than enough. Yes, she's done terrible things, but the egg theft was adequately explained as her Wyld Hunt and Mordremoth both manipulating her so she had no idea who to trust at that point. As for why Caithe earned the right to become Aurene's first "corrupted" champion, there are a few reasons for it. The devs needed someone to speak for Aurene, and they couldn't just let the Commander become crystallized due to fashion wars. Besides, while the Commander was a deadbeat dad who barely spent time with Aurene (we briefly witnessed her hatching, then did some exercises with her for a couple of hours at most, only to abandon her for nearly a year) and instead explored the world and fought baddies, it was Caithe who was the "stay at home" mom who tended to Aurene for about a year in Tarir. So Aurene's "I love you" to Caithe makes total sense to me, and it retroactively makes Aurene's hasty flight to Elona in mere hours to save the Commander a headscratching moment considering that the Commander had barely spent any time to bond with her to begin with. So I can understand why devs referred to both Caithe and the Commander as Aurene's parents, and it's unfortunate that Caithe couldn't accompany us to the final battle against Kralkatorrik when she really should've been there to support Aurene. If only Aurene could carry more than one rider back then... Taimi's fate is going to be interesting to witness. GW2 has lately avoided killing any of the main cast FFXIV style, and I'd be surprised if they change the formula this late in the narrative unless they just instantly reverse it with magic as happened with Aurene, and how Tom Abernathy even wanted to bring Blish back until he was vetoed by the rest of the narrative team. However, Taimi acts as a representative to the disabled players of GW2, and many of them have threatened to quit GW2 if anything happened to her (or Aurene). So this puts the writers in a difficult position: if they miraculously heal Taimi via tech or magic, they'll undermine the IRL struggles of their disabled players who have identified with her struggle. If they let her die as would be a natural progression, they provoke said players' ire for killing off disabled person representation in game (and because many people appear to love Taimi and don't want her to die). Given that the illness has been referenced in recent dialogue, it seems we'll see some resolution to this subplot, but I'm curious how the writers are going to handle it based on the aforementioned problem points. With that said, I hope they'll consider killing off characters when the plot requires it, whether it's a fan favorite character or not, and that they don't just kill characters because it's cool. Wars have casualties, and even in fantasy stories and fairytales you see that not everyone makes it to the end (hence why the scenes with Boromir, Theoden etc. are so powerful in LotR as they show the conflict has real stakes...although it also undermines the conflict by bringing Gandalf back at the same time, but still). I like Braham, but I don't like how inconsistent his writing has been. I've written at length about it, but in summary his progression from HoT to S3 doesn't make sense, nor does his progression from S4 to the saga unless they retcon it all being part of Jormag's grand master plan manipulation (while they still haven't explained why Jormag spared Braham despite being aware of him being the Norn of Prophecy). He left Garm to die in the jungle and didn't bother to attend Eir's vigil, both of which are very un-norn things to do. He never apologized to Rox for nearly getting her killed in the ice cave and didn't understand her desire to stay with the Olmakhan as he still pines for her as revealed via the conversation with Ryland. He also goes against his word to the Commander from Season 4 when he acted behind the Commander's back to awaken Primordus in Champions and thus led to countless deaths, which will apparently haunt him for the rest of his days based on his Dragon Bash dialogue. I can understand that all this inconsistency stemmed from the devs being forced to divide our group of friends for Season 3 to justify PoF premise and how Champions was forcibly rushed, but in so doing they ignored Braham's arc in HoT (where he stated he loved Commander as a friend and felt he had avenged Eir) and also his Season 4 progression to basically revert Braham back to his Season 1 persona by Champions ending, curiously enough. I do think the hate for Braham is overblown, but I think that dislike along with other dislikes (Taimi, Trahearne, Scarlet) is just a symptom of them being scapegoats for the real issue which is inconsistent writing. I'm sure we'll see Braham again as there are still bunch of stories left to tell about him (we don't really know much about his black dad's background and what the dad's tribe is doing, so that could be a worthy avenue to pursue etc.). I enjoy Kas and Jory but I also feel they've been victims of limited storytelling budget and changing writers. There was that cool setup with Belinda's spirit being in Jory's blade which we may witness more of in spirit-influenced Cantha, and Jory's family is very abusive and anti-noble which might present its own problems with her relationship with Kas who's been reinstated as a noble. I hope we get to meet the rest of Jory's family one day as Season 1 painted them as intriguing people. Likewise, we haven't delved deep enough into the story of Kas's gambling brother Kyle and what he's up to; his story could've been resolved in the White Mantle arc, but alas. Writers also mentioned that we'd one day see Jory solve the murder of Mendel which involved the necromancer Kraig the Bleak, a corrupt minister performing human sacrifices in DR, and E who first alerted Jory to the conspiracy, but we've yet to see this story resolved. Maybe we'll get a chance to see more of it, and E, in the future, perhaps tying that sacrificial cult not to White Mantle but the Cult of Verata for all we know. The unfortunate thing with Kas and Jory relationship is that we've mostly seen them having some relationship crisis but we don't know where it originated in as it was merely teased in HoT and may have had its beginnings with Belinda's death traumatizing Jory. I imagine we'll finally get some answers to this mystery in EoD and see their relationship resolved either via a proper breakup or reconciliation as even the Icebrood Saga suggested that, despite their year-long honeymoon in Elona, they still haven't resolved some issues. As for Jennah being Logan's "shackle", this is basically the result of newer writers retconning old lore. Even now, based on my twitter conversations with devs, some members of the narrative team are in two camps regarding the Logan/Jennah ship. In personal story's "The Queen's Justice" mission Jennah admitted loving Logan but couldn't act on it because her political enemies would use a relationship with a commoner against her, because she wanted her partner to be her equal and not her lesser, and because she felt guilty over being partly responsible for calling Logan away which cost the lives of Glint and Snaff and broke up Destiny's Edge. It was because of this reason she originally sent Logan away to battle dragons and fix things with Destiny's Edge so he'd become the man he was meant to be. But Season 3 suddenly retconned this into it being a one-sided relationship all along, which doesn't make any sense lorewise. Perhaps the writers can salvage things and reveal it's yet another ploy from Jennah to ensure that Logan becomes the Pact Marshal and makes a name for himself as a self-made man, but it's going to be tricky to explain the discrepancy either way as Jennah never confided her feelings to the Commander in Season 3 as opposed to her heartfelt confession in personal story. Sometimes hype can be justified, though, if lore has adequately set it up with an expectation that it's going to lead somewhere. People were right to be hyped about the Scepter of Orr, Livia, and Lazarus after EotN ending cinematic set it up to be a major plot point: Lazarus had sworn to have his revenge on Tyria, and Livia getting hold of the scepter was shown to be equal in importance to Primordus waking up, Pyre leading the charr rebellion, and Pale Tree growing up in the cinematic, setting things up for GW2. Similarly, personal story set up Malyck's return with an army from his Grove to fight the dragons while he wandered east into the jungle, but he was cut out from HoT in rewrites, thus leaving that plot point in limbo for the time being. So in these cases it's understandable why people would be disappointed since earlier buildup didn't lead to satisfactory enough conclusions (we've yet to learn of the fate of the scepter or Malyck, but perhaps both of them will be resolved in a future living world season). To be fair, people misremember what was actually said during the announcement. It was the host Greg Miller who kept pestering the devs on stage about the saga being equal to an expansion instead of just a beefed up living world season, and the devs had to roll with it while looking extremely uncomfortable as they couldn't just refute what Greg mistakenly said without causing issues and making the audience confused. In internal dev documents that I've seen, the saga was called Living World Season 5 for quite some time but was then branded as the Icebrood Saga, likely for marketing reasons to differentiate it from other seasons as it had unique content like Visions of the Past included in it. However, it's possible that Season 5 initially was meant to be a proper saga all along, being way longer than a typical 6-episode season given that there are clues of them planning to release elite specs during the saga (based on the datamined hero challenge icons found by that_shaman and how devs referred to willbender as Almorra's spec even though their current lore states that that elite is Canthan only so Almorra couldn't have ever learned it) and them mentioning masteries for all the Four Great Spirits when we only got masteries for Raven and a few of the Lesser Spirits. It's likely that around the announcement, or sometime after it following Mike Z's quiet departure, the saga was retooled as Season 5 while most of the team was shifted to working on EoD due to NCSoft dictates, hence them suddenly being "gifted" with an opportunity to work on an expansion after the saga announcement didn't receive as warm a welcome as the suits had hoped. Hopefully, as years or decades go by, we'll eventually get some devs or ex-devs to open up about what was going on behind the scenes during that time and why so many devs suddenly left the studio quietly following Mike Z's departure when the studio was moving people from saga to work on the expansion. It's certainly a story worthy of intrigue. Based on dialogue with Crecia in Champions, the Dominion has been defeated following Bangar's capture. They, like the White Mantle, are done for, and so are Renegades. If we're ever going to see a Dominion equivalent among charr ever again, it'd be the followers of the human-hating but well-respected Iron tribune Fume Brighteye who didn't show up in the saga and should thus still be alive to act as Mia Kindleshot's political opponent in Iron unless devs just retcon her out of existence. Devs did leave story open for future hostilities even after this civil war since some of the United Legions charr openly threaten their human allies in Drizzlewood and state that they're only allies for the time being. So once the threat posed by the dragons, Adelbern's empowered Foefire ghosts, and Separatists have been dealt with, it's possible that Fume sees the time fit to have another campaign against humans if the writers deem it so. She'd certainly have a lot of support from surviving legion allies based on Drizzlewood ambient dialogue. Hopefully we get to explore Adelbern and the Separatists in a future Living World season after Cantha's Season 6 since the Foefire ghosts should be beefed up from all the released dragon and god magic they've absorbed over the years. 🙂 Personal story isn't as bad as some people make it out to be. Concept-wise it has lots of great story beats about introducing the orders, exploring the various good and bad factions throughout Tyria and the resulting politics, and showing the horror of the dragons and their minions. It's just that the writing is uneven due to late story rewrites and because some devs spent more time on instances than others (compare e.g. that straightforward and quick "rescue allies from a volcano" mission to the alternate story path in same narrative where we instead go on a lengthy journey to discover black market deals in the Pact and corruption in higher-ranked officers). I do hope that the writers will explore more nuanced villains than just pure black hat moustache-twirling baddies who want to rule or destroy the world in the future. Bangar, Jormag, Ryland, and Gavin from the White Stag storyline were a step in the right direction, and it seems that EoD's Chul-Moo, Tetra, Minister Li, and possibly Joon may also prove to be complex characters if written well enough. Just like I hope heroes get their share of ruthless antiheroes without revealing them as hidden villains (like how original S4 plans involved revealing Phlunt as some hidden Inquest mastermind to justify us killing him, but thankfully they removed that story beat and kept Phlunt as our lovable hero jerk). Smodur could've been a great antihero if written with as much nuance in saga as he had been written in personal story and Season 2, but alas. I'll keep my fingers crossed for improved characterization in the future. 🙂 I definitely agree that folks shouldn't be required to play the earlier game or browse wiki to understand key concepts of a storyline. That was a huge sin in Season 3 where devs assumed that every player had the knowledge of us forum lorehounds when it came to Kryta's history and that folks should immediately know who White Mantle, Shining Blade, mursaat, Eye of Janthir, Livia etc. were. What I disagree with, however, is calling GW1 ancient as a game; it may be dated in some aspects, but hardly old in the way scholars categorize games. I hope you used that term as hyperbole because objectively GW1 is a rather modern game, released in the 2000s, even if it may not be as sleek as later generation games. Even games from early 90s and late 80s like Sonic, Super Mario, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy IV, Golden Axe, Turrican, Bard's Tale, King's Quest etc. wouldn't be called ancient by today's standards. For real "ancient" games you'd have to go to the early 80s or even 70s era games by definition. It always makes me sad to see that graphics mean so much to certain players; then again, this has always been the case as far as I can remember to the game reviews of the late 80s and 90s where people had big arguments about which game's graphics were superior and how no one should play the old games with "worse" graphics. Sprite graphics still look very fresh today, and even some early 3D or vector graphics like Super Mario 64 or Star Fox have a lovely art style that has withstood the test of time. What GW1 and GW2 (whose graphics are also showing their age, to be fair) did well was have a specific art style that made their graphics look timeless. Sure, you see janky artifacts, lack of detail etc. here and there, but they're both still remarkably beautiful for their age, and it's all thanks to art direction at the time. It remains to be seen if current art directors at the studio can keep up the same standard as their predecessors, but I imagine they'll at least do a decent job based on what we've seen of EoD zones so far even though I'm not a fan of the oversaturation in zones from HoT onward or the jade's color in EoD zones. I noticed that devs had bookmarked my post on these forums back in the day before they changed some aspects of these forums when players discussed a potential title for the then-unnamed third expansion set in Cantha. I proposed the potential names of Age of the Dragon and End of Dragons, and I was happy to notice that End of Dragons became the official name of the expansion in a later reveal. Whether devs had been inspired by my post (as they had bookmarked it for whatever reason although at the time I thought they just simply liked my explanations for titles with multiple meanings) or it was just an accidental similarity, it was still a fun discovery. My argument in that post was that Dragon in my proposed titles would have multiple meanings all based on existing lore and how the age of the dragons could end in many ways: 1) Dragon would mean the deep sea dragon , of course, but also potentially the numerous saltsprays existing in Cantha and what their fate may be. A literal end of the last old school Elder Dragon. 2) Dragon would mean the reigning imperial family who took the Celestial Dragon (whom the imperials revered) as the empire's namesake, and we might see the end of the imperial dynasty (at the time I thought that we might overthrow the government if the Ministry of Purity was still in power and influencing the emperor, but this later turned out to not be the case). Given how the devs have now teased some tension between the half-sisters Empress Ihn and Joon, I could see that Ihn might not make it to the end of EoD, and if she dies childless, that leads to the collapse of the oldest known continuous dynasty in Tyria's history. 3) Dragon would refer to the astrological Age of the Dragon in Canthan calendar which was ongoing since the Jade Wind lorewise. Depending on if that age still continues in the present day, it'd make sense to end that era and usher us to a new age in the calendar upon DSD's passing and Cantha finally embracing the outside world regardless of if the empress is alive by the end of EoD or not. 4) Dragon would refer to the end of the old order centering on dragons and the rise of potentially non-draconic "entities" referred to in Sadizi's speech in Kesho in "The Way Forward". S we move from an era of dragon balancers to possibly more humanoid balancers depending on how the crew will figure out how to balance the burden of magic in non-dragons without driving them insane or killing them. Sadly Taimi's later dialogue in post-Champions suggests that only Glint's offspring would ever inherit this role, which conflicts with Apostate and Sadizi's statements, especially since no known offspring of Glint survive besides Aurene unless we find the third scion of Glint safely tucked away in Cantha or unless Aurene lays eggs that contain the future balancers and thus becomes the new Mother. But yeah, as we can see End of Dragons have plenty of potential meanings which fits with the earlier titles (Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire) also having multiple meanings. Whether DSD dies at the end of EoD or its story continues to Season 6 Kralk-style remains to be seen, but I'm curious of finding out more once the expansion releases. 🙂 4) Dragon As proven with Mordremoth and Jormag (via Scarlet and Bangar/Svanir), dragons can influence mortals even when asleep. While the lore surrounding the Empire of the Dragon was originally more tied to the Celestial Dragon (who may or may not be the same entity as the cardinal celestial Tahmu and who seemingly had no ties to the Elder Dragons but to humans instead), they could reveal that the emperors were always being influenced by the deep sea dragon without realizing it and what they thought was the Celestial Dragon was always DSD depending on what the second domain of DSD ends up being. This would make sense on some level, especially if the human legend of Cantha being the home to all dragonkind turns out to be true as it'd mean that even all the Elder Dragons originated from Cantha in prehistoric times billions of years ago. Whether the writers will go with this explanation remains to be seen, but it is a distinct possibility. 🙂

Indeed, but that doesn't mean ANet can't adapt a similar approach in the far future; they've shown during the Icebrood Saga that they can get stuff done even with a smaller dev crew as they gradually siphoned people to work on EoD while still managing to deliver maps with new enemies like Bjora Marches, Drizzlewood Coast, Forging Steel, Darkrime Delves, and Dragonstorm. Given the typical GW2 expansion development of 2-3 or so years and how each expansion has had at least four zones (packed with events, collections, minidungeons etc. as well as some major features like a new class, elite specs, gliding, mounts, skiffs, fishing), they can reduce the workload for future stuff if they only ship some future expansions with just, say, three zones at most, which cuts away needed dev time for creating a fourth detailed zone and use that saved work force for living world content or other content like raids/fractals/strikes/drms/etc if needed. If they keep the main storyline for future expansions short like the HoT story path was with its few and mostly short instances, they don't even have to worry about that complex story instances either (whereas EoD seems to ship with some major story instance blockbuster setpieces based on dev teases). As long as the devs manage to find a decent enough balance with repeatable and rewarding enough map-wide meta events and other features (e.g. collections, side quests tied to Arborstone and Sun's Refuge type of upgradeable instance stuff etc.) to encourage people to return to the zones for several years, as well as allowing some single player oriented exploration and safe areas in these zones for people to marvel at map art and ambient worldbuilding without being attacked every other second by resilient armies of mobs with a huge aggro radius, they'll do fine. The biggest issue I'd see them facing under such a scenario are the huge voice actor costs (and the resulting localization and translation fees) because almost everything needs to be voiced in GW2 which is packed with dialogue worth of several dozen novels (due to the living open world and focus on events with a lot of ambient dialogue) as opposed to many of the older and even more recent MMOs (such as FFXIV which, even after its budget increase for more voiced stuff for Shadowbringers and Endwalker story content, still delivers much of the story in text only form and even in many voiceless cutscenes without having to worry about using 10 high profile VAs like Nolan North per language to voice the main character as the Warrior of Light is "mute"). If they can figure out where to cut their VA budget to reduce those costs while still making the world feel alive and the story coherent enough for those players who only focus on voiced story content over written story content, they'll have things covered cost-wise for the most part. Yeah, even under the best possible financial and development circumstances I doubt we'd have ever gotten 20+ episodes worth of story and lore and worldbuilding for the Icebrood Saga because that's not how ANet has historically operated with story releases. Joko and Kralkatorrik could've easily had a season each instead of half a season (although the devs' hands were forced on that issue as they were unsure if GW2 would continue after S4 so they needed to wrap the post-PoF loose ends with the given timeframe as stated by Jessica Price and Tom Abernathy), and the White Mantle and human civil war stuff with mursaat involvement and Livia could've easily been the only focus of Season 3 if they had wanted to (but they had to involve other plots there too in order to set up the PoF story premise as revealed by Scott McGough and Matthew Medina). However, the saga was shaping up to be longer than the typical six-episode season given the teases (the confirmed cut centaur content that likely would've encompassed at least one half of a two-episode zone, the teased krait and norn naval content in the saga announcement trailer, and the same trailer teasing some conflict at the Eye of the North and how there was even a datamined map of a bigger zone encompassing EotN and Gwen's Garden with a frozen lake area somewhat similar to Dragonstorm's icy lake which makes me wonder if that was their original planned location for Dragonstorm given Aurene's teases in Ep2 of huge magical confluence at the Scrying Pool that attracted her there), and curiously Episode 4 even ended with an instance titled "Epilogue" in EotN coinciding with Jormag's awakening and Aurene's foreboding words of the future before we were rushed to the shortened Champions that served as an extended Episode 5 integrating other planned episodes' content into its runtime. It would be fascinating to learn what the devs' original plans were for the saga before the budget cuts, and if we would've indeed only gotten 4 more episodes (and if the krait and norn naval content would've been integrated into the second half of that planned centaur zone, or if it actually teased the possible inclusion of the Sea of Desperation zone and the ruins of icebrood-infested Gunnar's Hold as GW1 fanservice) to set up and conclude Primordus and Jormag stuff or if they were intending for there to be Acts 2 and 3 (with 4-ish zones each) because saga prologue to Ep4 felt only like the first act (hence the Ep4 "Epilogue") of a three act story structure to me for a total of 12 or so episodes with two or so visions of the past (one being Braham's Primal Kiln adventure, and the other vision possibly being a flashback of the spirit-empowered Asgeir's confrontation with Jormag and Owl's vision of hope to set up the later Spirit of the Wild stuff). All I'm saying is that theoretically there was enough lore to easily support a 20+ episode storyline with all the races and teased subplots (from GW1 to GW2 personal story all the way to the recent festival updates and earliest Icebrood Saga episodes setting stuff up such as the emergence of female norn followers of Jormag to challenge the Svanir), not that ANet would ever have tackled that content in such depth even in optimal circumstances because historically living world seasons have never been that lengthy to begin with and playerbase likely wouldn't have tolerated several years of living world content before the studio tackled another expansion. Interestingly many of the Depths of Tyria, Far Shiverpeaks and charr plots can technically still be visited later if the writers decide to do so, they just have to do it without the Jormag and Primordus influence and instead show these locations post-Dragonstorm as we witness asuran and norn resettlement efforts and charr recovery process as we run into new threats from the inside (e.g. High Councillor Flax's plans for asuran world domination in a post-dragon world once he gets his hands on the lost knowledge of Quora Sum etc.) and the outside (if High Inquisitor Maut or someone else leads the Inquest which is the only evil organization from core Tyria whose leadership we haven't really defeated yet, the power vacuum among the Spirits of the Wild while the Four Great Spirits are weakened and recovering, and if the ominous prophecy surrounding Knut Whitebear and his family comes to pass, and the fate of the fire bow which Ryland hid somewhere and which Braham swore to get back someday as seen in Champions, the resurgence of the Separatists as teased by Malice, and the return of Adelbern so he can use the weakened charr state to launch a massive ghost invasion, to mention a few of the loose plot threads the devs could follow up on). This is a topic better suited to be discussed in the other thread that already explores the idea of the balance of the All and what it means, as well as Aurene's role in it, but I'll write my reply here for anyone curious enough who doesn't want to jump between threads as it and the emergence of "dragon guilds" technically still fits into the topic of this thread as it could be the key to exploring new expansion and living world stories as I suggested in my earlier post. While Champions discussed the balance between Jormag and Primordus and how neither one could be allowed to gain the upper hand in their empowered state lest we suffer a worse repeat of the Zhaitan-Mordremoth imbalance (hence our need to kill both rather than just one), earlier story all the way from Season 2 to PoF suggested that the balance of the Antikytheria system is far more complex than just keeping the opposite pairs of dragons equal. The Apostate, one of Abaddon's Margonite followers who went rogue and had access to some of the god's deepest secrets which led to the fellow being hunted by his fellow Margonites, basically explained that the All and the balance (consisting of the cosmic Antikytheria mechanism which is tied to the six balancers) requires the magnetic push/pull of opposites to keep spinning, or else Tyria will fall off into the void. Think of the Antikytheria as a perpetual motion machine of unfathomable complexity; however, this machine needs the magnets that pull towards each other and reject one another in an endless dance to keep the perpetual motion going. If too many of these magnets (i.e. balancers tied to the six Tyrian "spirit realms" with two or more spheres of influence each) are removed, the motion starts to get shaky as it can no longer be properly balanced. If all the magnets are reduced to just one (Aurene), there's no opposite force to push back against her, and thus the Antikytheria stops moving, will tilt, and all life will fall into the void. Now, interestingly Taimi theorized back in Season 3 and PoF that the world couldn't suffer a third Elder Dragon's death without a replacement, hence our need to stop Balthazar. Of course the interesting thing here is that Balthy would've just consumed the dragon(s') magic and then hopped off into the Mists, and we know that an elder balancer's or their replacement's extended stay in the Mists doesn't destabilize Tyria as long as the balancer isn't killed there and the magic leaks out (as stated in War Eternal), otherwise Kralk's extended Mists trip would've doomed Tyria back in Season 4. The bigger problem may have been Balthy's intention to drain at least two dragons of magic simultaneously, but even that is put into question given how the world has seemingly survived the demises of Jormag and Primordus without replacements. There's a possibility that Glint, the Forgotten, the Exalted, the Apostate, Taimi, Ogden, and the gods were wrong all along and it is alright to kill as many balancers as we want as long as at least one pair of opposites remains in the system to keep the Antikytheria spinning. This might be why the deep sea dragon isn't a problem we can solve with violence without a replacement as there's a likely possibility that DSD is Aurene/Kralk's opposite in the All (just like Prim and Jormy were confirmed to be, and Zhaity and Mordy were heavily teased to be based on the unstable abomination's reactions to Zhaity and Mordy-infused grubs' explosions in its vicinity) and is that negative effect to counter her positive effect. This might be one of the reasons why EoD logo depicts two dragons in the logo as yin/yang symbology: not only could DSD actually be twins who are one if they want to tie into the Lyssa analogue (after all, each GW2 expansion logo has always depicted the main dragon antagonist, so why include two dragons when one of those dragons doesn't even resemble Aurene, unless there's more to DSD than meets the eye?), but it shows that the world needs that constant push/pull to stay alive. Glint never intended Aurene to be the "be all and end all" solution to the problem, and Glint had the gift of prophecy that extended so far that she already saw the optimal outcome for the Dragonstorm conundrum and thus couldn't reveal the truth in order to not upset the optimal timeline Dr. Strange style (as explained by the Exalted envoy Dulann in EotN); in short, Glint had had a prophecy and knew a scion (Aurene or otherwise) would absorb multiple dragons' magics and replace Kralk but only him to fulfill one part of the Legacy. Jormag likewise only calls Aurene the Crystal Dragon like Kralkatorrik and not as whatever an amalgamation of Death, Plant and Crystal would be, which suggests that Zhaity and Mordy's magics are still out there, unclaimed by potential successors...we don't even know where the HoT end cinematic's western ley line of Mordy magic went from Dragon's Stand although the Priory world map indicates it might've hit the so far unseen western Sunrise Crest continent (Doern Velazquez's potential homeland as the continent had naval trade routes to Battle Isles and thus to Cantha and other continents?) across the ocean. Taimi already discussed the multiple replacements idea during the Living World Return content, mirroring what Sadizi had said, and even foreshadows the deep sea dragon stuff as a counter to Aurene. Perhaps the reason why Aurene couldn't consume most of the magic unleashed from Dragonstorm (when typically Elder Dragons can do so as seen with Kralk absorbing the majority of Balthy's magic at ground zero) was not because of her Prismatic nature that might've prevented proper magic absorption but it could also have to deal with the Antikytheria mechanism panicking about losing two balancers at once and forcibly redirecting the magic (with or without Joon's influence depending on what significance those six tubes lighting up with dragonjade energy have in the EoD trailer) to Aurene's opposite all the way south to balance the scales and keep the magnetic positive and negative energies in motion. What's notable about the speech above is that Sadizi uses not only a plural term for future balancers but the term "entity" rather than "scion"; he had used the latter earlier in the instance to discuss Glint's offspring specifically. So at least Sadizi and his Forgotten masters (who collaborated with Glint) seem to have intended there to be multiple balancers, some of whom might not even be Glint's offspring but other worthy beings as long as such beings can connect with a mortal champion (or champions) to share the burden of magic with and to empathize with their "lessers" whom they must safeguard. Likewise, the last Forgotten's speech in Tarir suggests the Legacy is more than just Glint's offspring. The speech mentions that the legacy has "essential elements" and that "all its pieces" (plural) must develop and become defined. This could refer to more babies bonding with a champion like Aurene or just some enlightenment for already mature beings (if, say, the Pale Tree, Malyck's Tree, Kuunavang, Albax or Shiny could become new replacements) as the wording is ambiguous there. If the EoD story reveals the saltsprays to be scions of the deep sea dragon somehow (as there is lore about the legend of a "dragon king" who wanted "his" saltspray children to be safe from humans via a pact with Luxons) and if the anniversary art book's curious phrase of the Pale Tree being the "sapling of Mordremoth" also suggests some scion shenanigans, these could be potential other replacements depending on the rules of what beings can safely replace Elder Dragons without either dying or going mad from the influx of so much magic into their bodies. If Aurene, or Vlast, were ever intended to be the sole solution(s) to the problem (as Glint foresaw the future to a great extent all the way to the present day of End of Dragons if not beyond, and the prophecy was apparently unavoidable as seen with Kralk and Primordus and Jormag's fates), Glint and the Forgotten would never have discussed the need for multiple replacements. We still don't even know the fate of the other eggs as there were dozens in GW1 time as we only know the fates of Aurene and Vlast from their dozens of siblings. Given how Factions suggested that there had been a Forgotten presence in Cantha, how the first Zephyrites formed from Elonians and Canthans specifically, and how many regions with heavy Forgotten activity had been shown with nurseries near slumbering Elder Dragons to rear Glint's scions in (Tarir in Maguuma to contain Aurene to replace Mordremoth with; Kesho in the Crystal Desert to contain Vlast likely to replace Zhaitan with; no word on any nurseries near Kralkatorrik, Primordus and Jormag but not impossible as we know from charr lore that Forgotten also lived in Ascalon and battled the charr successfully before the Forgotten worldwide were recalled to the desert, and we never explored the Depths of Tyria and Far Shiverpeaks in full to know if some Exalted hadn't built nurseries near the slumbering dragons there in the past 250 years just like the Exalted had a presence at Thunderhead Keep). It wouldn't surprise me if the Master of Peace's visit to Cantha that coincided with him fetching Aurene from someone with a deep voice (Vlast or someone else) could've also been not just about establishing trade contact with Cantha but also about delivering another egg, the third scion of Glint, to Cantha to be looked after by some Exalted until it's time to put the next phase of the Legacy plan in motion. After all, it is curious to me that Taimi brings up the plan for Glint's multiple scions for the Legacy in the recent dialogue (despite Sadizi's speech suggesting that more than the scions could be involved) when we only ever knew of Vlast and Aurene...unless it's foreshadowing that we'll finally learn about the fates of the other eggs. Perhaps Kuunavang and Albax, if they were ever in contact with Glint before the latter's demise, can share some knowledge on this matter with us. 🙂 And this leads us to why the future "dragon guild" idea may not be as farfetched as it may seem. We've had multiple sources, now even Taimi, suggesting the idea of multiple replacements. If the theory holds true that Tyria needs at least one opposing magnetic pair for the Antikytheria to function, and if the deep sea dragon must die as per Glint's Legacy plan (even if the deep sea dragon could turn out to be an even more tragic antagonist than Jormag if we explore the forming of Torment and how Aurene may succumb to it too based on Tom Abernathy's teases and Glint's dire warnings about how important it is to share the burden with champions), that means that the rise of another replacemet is inevitable unless there will be more reveals in EoD about how this might not be the case. Regardless of how the dragon saga ends, Aurene has established a cult around herself that is now forming into a proper religion with the integration of the Zaishen who essentially view as a neo-Balthazar of sorts. I for one hope that, regardless of if we only have Aurene or multiple replacements by the time of the fourth expansion, we get to explore the trappings of such widespread religious ideologies and how some unsavory people may try to benefit from it for their own ends and we see schisms forming in this new church (similar to the Orthodox and Catholic divide for Christianity, and the Shia and Sunni divide for Islam, among many others) and how Aurene will handle mortal ambitions, misunderstandings, fears and greed and whether she will try to not get too involved or stomp her foot down to tell them to get along. It could lead to some fascinating discussion about the pros and cons of zealous faith and how the rest of the world reacts to this international "megaguild" centering on Aurene and if more influential people than just Bangar are starting to get uneasy about one organization holding so much military and political power on Tyria and if this utopian "dawn of a new civilization" will be beneficial in the long run or if we're one step away from benevolent dictatorship, especially as we now know that prophecies have been written in advance (although we don't know the source) and that these prophecies are unavoidable (as seen with the fate surrounding Aurene's inevitable ascension) so free will no longer exists.

As long as the company earns enough revenue and the powers that be decide to keep developing the game (even if/when other projects emerge from the studio), we should keep getting expansions. If older games such as EverQuest 2 and even the original EverQuest still get expansions, I don't see why ANet can't deliver such even if some far future expansions might end up being smaller in scope due to resource allocation reasons. Cutting up and sacrificing the sadly rushed Icebrood Saga in favor of End of Dragons is enough proof that the suits who gifted the devs the opportunity to work on an expansion (while seemingly wanting the expac done now rather than allowing the saga to run its natural course with additional zones before leading the story to EoD) aren't happy with just the living world model's revenue and player interest, and it makes sense financially. While I would've been thrilled to have a 20+ episode Icebrood Saga (as there definitely was more than enough charr, norn, asura, dwarf, dredge, skritt, jotun, quaggan, centaur, human etc. lore and recurring characters as well as newcomer heroes and villains for the planned Jormag and Primordus storyline) to truly flesh out the Far Shiverpeaks, charr lands, the Tarnished Coast, Woodland Cascades, and the Depths of Tyria and allow us players to receive said content for "free" over the span of many years, many (if not most) players preferred the true and tested paid box expansion model with living world seasons in between, so here we are. Regarding the plot of GW2 after the overarching dragon storyline ends, we're basically facing a similar closure of a decade-long story arc that WoW and FFXIV are currently undergoing. While FFXIV's Endwalker appears to signal the end of the overarching Zodiark and Ascian threat as a new dawn, they have more ideas and new threats in store for the Eorzean heroes in the future. Andrew Gray, one of the lead developers at ANet and one of the still remaining veteran devs from very early GW1 days, posted a rather fascinating comment on these forums a few years ago that I agree with: he views the GW1 god-focused plot and GW2's dragon-focused plot as all part of a greater tapestry that basically involves the burden and responsibility of magic. Both gods and dragons used magic for their own desires, hurting the lesser mortal races in the process. Similarly, mortals in their neverending greed will eventually want to become powerful via harnessing magic, so they'll repeat these greater entities' mistakes before long just like the great wars of King Doric's time were waged for the control of magic. As such, I can see future GW2 storylines dealing with powerful entities (return of the gods, arrival of demons, emergence of the god-slayers and tanneks if they're still canonical etc.) or just mortal nations/factions fighting for magic as Tyria will be experiencing a new golden age with the demise of planet-ravaging old guard of Elder Dragons. Who's to say that more Bangars, Jokos and Faolains can't emerge from the shadows? Will Aurene's ever-expanding Crystal Bloom religious cult turn fanatical in their worship of her as certain IRL religions became (imagine if Sons of Svanir start gradually viewing Aurene as the new Dragon and the mightiest predator on Tyria despite her being a "girly" dragon, and they start killing people in her name to honor her?), will we see new balancers rising to protect the All and each of these Elder Dragon replacements gathering similar cults around themselves? If all of these cults and their "dragon" masters want to protect the world but disagree with how to accomplish that (mirroring the fascinating if all too short Caithe and Ryland philosophical debate in the Brisban Wildlands dragon response mission), these "dragon guilds" could eventually come to blows and potentially lead the world into the Fourth Guild War canonically while we try to prevent a religious/philosophical war from breaking out between these global multiracial factions. Similarly, we know that demons are antagonists that are even worse than Elder Dragons because they are pure evil (due to literally being born from malignant energies in the Mists...although it'd be fascinating to meet potential antivillain or antihero demons who try to forge a different path than their sadistic brethren while trying to understand their reason for existence); demons hate mortals and desire to tempt/torture/manipulatethem while the magic-hungry dragons could be argued to not care for such things in such a manner and thus aren't as evil as demons. Who knows if a disguised archdemon or two (or even Balthazar's evil half-brother Menzies the Lord of Destruction if he still lives) could try to manipulate, say, the leader(s) of Doern Velazques's potentially Hispanic but oddly secretive human homeland (potentially west across the ocean in Sunrise Crest?) to invade Central Tyria, Cantha, and Elona to bring enlightenment to the "new world" of ignorant savages now that the Elder Dragons of old no longer pose a threat to their crusade, while the demons use the "righteous" bloodshed that follows as a means to prolong death and suffering on all the four continents so they can feast on all the emotions and pain and flesh while making the mortals they so despise pay for the sin of existing. We could explore other aspect of the fallout of dragon demises too such as the revelations about other Pale Trees such as Malyck's Tree and the sylvari within those Groves and how they differ from the Dreamers, a Nightmare Court civil war to mirror Duchess Chrysanthea's struggles for the throne with Efram's hard path to do the same in the Flame Legion, the current power vacuum among the Spirits of the Wild while the four Great Spirits are weakened and recovering (likely as long as the Pale Tree herself is weakened) and if some ambitious and morally dubious spirits like Nulfastu (if he still lives) could try to usurp the Pantheon of the Wild while we may run into more "exotic" Spirits of the Wild like Gorilla and Whale, the existence of black norn (we still don't know where Braham's black norn dad Borje the Sun Chaser came from and why he was regarded as a great hero equal to Eir), potential discovery of a savage goblinoid clan of cavemen-level asura (similar to the earliest asura concept art) in the darkest depths of Tyria and us hopefully finally meeting with King Jalis and his dwarven clansmen if they still live, the revenge of Adelbern and his empowered Foefire army who should be charged up with all the slain dragons' magic via the ley lines while we find out who the Heir of Ascalon is and if Ascalon have ever truly have a proper charr/human duumvirate leading the land in true harmony, the exploratory awe of finally entering not only tengu's Dominion of Winds but also the so far undiscovered largos capital under the sea, political turmoil among charr if the charismatic populist tribune Fume Brighteye decides to challenge Mia Kindleshot for the Iron throne while being more politically savvy about her ambitions than Bangar was, metaphysical exploration of Tyrian cosmology via revealing the truth behind Koda the Creator and his dark Rage and if he's the creator deity of Tyria etc. The above are just the tip of the iceberg of the hundreds of possibilities for future plots just from the wealth of GW1 and GW2 lore shown so far, not to mention what other, unrelated plots the writers may yet wish to explore. Planet Thyria and her many continents and peoples are ripe for exploring once the Elder Dragons are no longer blocking our way, and hopefully this means not only making new friends and enemies but also witnessing the occasional return of old ones too (not just the major players but also some of the folks from core personal story times too). 🙂

It'll be interesting to learn more about the lore of Cantha's rapid development considering what we know of IRL technological development (often caused by financial competition between nations or warfare use such as how ARPANET that would become Internet's foundation was developed for the US Department of Defence) and Tyrian history. There are quite a few reasons for Central Tyria's rapid development compared to Elona (even if Elona had never fallen to Joko): 1) Tyria had the benefit of forcing multiple intelligent races to mingle and share knowledge, having sensible enough leaders of various nations and tribes who eventually overcame their differences, and the mutual threat of the Elder Dragons that would gradually lead to considerations of alliances despite some naysayers in each race's political spheres. For example, if it weren't for the far-reaching Ebonhawke Treaty that Almorra Soulkeeper, Queen Jennah, Malice Swordshadow, Smodur the Unflinching, Mia Kindleshot, Logan Thackeray, and Wade Samuelsson each helped make happen, humans and charr would never have collaborated and thus wouldn't have contributed crucial know-how to the multiracial Pact to bring the airships to life. Similarly, the threat of Primordus forced the exiled asura to begin developing their magitech at an increased pace in order to find a way to solve their greatest conundrum yet, leading to yet another industrial revolution. The eventual alliances of the three orders and the knowledge of Priory and Order of Whispers opened whole new avenues of science to pursue, leading to Pact's many breakthroughs in the year of the Zhaitan campaign. 2) Tyria had access to some of the surviving records of the elder races via the Priory's efforts, allowing them to gradually decipher some of the mysteries of the dwarves (whose inventions led to charr experimenting on gunpowder and ushering in a technological revolution), Forgotten, jotun, mursaat, and Seers. These discoveries helped pave way for some of the groundbreaking stuff we've seen in the story since. Taimi may be standing on the shoulders of asuran giants like Zinn when it comes to utilizing knowledge, but Zinn only had his knowledge thanks to a partnership with the Exalted who in turn had been taught by the Forgotten...who in turn had been collaborating with the gods and Glint. Meanwhile, Cantha wasn't afforded similar luxuries due to not only its forced isolation from the rest of the world (thanks, Zhaitan and potentially deep sea dragon!) but because of the Ministry of Purity's campaign to exterminate or subjugate any unwanted beings in Cantha (ranging from human criminals to other ethnicities like Kurzicks and Luxons to entire non-human civilizations like the tengu). While there's a suggestion in the An Empire Divided document that some Forgotten ruins or artifacts might still exist in Cantha, the humans would still lack the wealth of knowledge from other elder races as well as from nonhuman races (it seems that the empire's currently friendly status with the tengu is relatively recent-ish development similar to the charr/human truce although it's not called a truce or treaty here but the Amnesty of Shing Jea which speaks of whole other power politics at play) unless we learn that Canthans also made peace with the dredge of Echovald (if any survive after the dredge's war against the Kurzicks) and potentially separated asuran refugees fleeing to the surface from the asura gates underneath Kaineng City (as suggested in the potentially canonical alternate Canthan path to the Far Shiverpeaks' Boreal Station in GW1). As for the timeline of events, we can make a few educated guesses. Before the Zephyrite visit to Cantha around 1326 AE after Zhaitan's defeat, the latest known outsider to have visited Cantha and returned alive was Cobiah Marriner on the eve of Zhaitan's awakening and the Rising of Orr (including the Great Tsunami that flooded Old Lion's Arch and much of the Maguuman and Krytan coastline, as well as destroyed Atholma and turned Dajkah into an archipelago) in 1219 AE as depicted in the Sea of Sorrows novel. Back then Cobiah did not mention any curious jade tech in Old Kaineng. It seems plausible that jade tech truly began flourishing after Zhaitan's rise and the Risen Dead Ship blockade that prevented any Central Tyrian and Elonian ships from reaching Cantha and vice versa since then (save for some rare survivors of shipwrecks at least on Tyrian side--no intel on any Canthan castaways in Elona, or any Central Tyrian or Elonian shipwrecks on Canthan shores yet). Perhaps the Great Tsunami and the earthquakes on the sea floor affected northern Cantha too (based on tengu stories of why some tengu fled from Cantha and why tribes from other parts of the world also migrated to their new "promised land") and damaged Old Kaineng, forcing the government to build New Kaineng on safer ground as a result. If so, this would've been the biggest ecological disaster Cantha faced since the Jade Wind and would force Canthan minds to figure out a way to prevent any such catastrophes in the future as they realized they were seemingly cut off from the rest of the world. There are some suggestions in the Priory's world map that Kaineng had naval trade route to other continents' port cities such as Kamadan and Lion's Arch via the Battle Isles that sunk around the time of the Great Tsunami; interestingly that map also depicted trade routes leading west to port cities in so-called Sunken Islands and Sunrise Crest (potentially Doern Velazquez's possibly Hispanic and oddly secretive homeland and thus the so far unknown human nation on the planet Thyria?), but supposedly the Dead Ship navy and/or the deep sea dragon (or other unrelated threats) might've prevented Cantha from contacting their western trade partners either, thus leaving them truly alone. Given how the current year will be circa 1334-35 AE by the time we visit Cantha and how Joon mentions a century's worth of progress in the EoD story trailer, the empire would've only had roughly a century (from 1219 AE to circa 1335 AE) to speed up their jade tech to the current level and without the benefit of ancient nonhuman texts and nonhuman allies that Central Tyrians had. While the Canthans had the benefit of basically sitting on top of jade which seems to have been charged with enough magic to become a sixth bloodstone of sorts (then again, who knows if one of the two still missing bloodstones could've landed in Cantha or washed ashore after the volcanic eruption on Ring of Fire, which separated the five bloodstones, to boost up magic research if the scientists began experimenting on the stone like White Mantle did with the Maguuma Bloodstone?) and possibly gained the ancient knowledge of saltspray dragons such as Albax and Kuunavang (if they cared to get more involved in human politics after witnessing Usoku and the MoP persecuting the Luxons who had made a pact with the saltsprays and the "dragon king" long ago), they'd still be at a disadvantage compared to Central Tyrian masterminds. From what we've seen, the emergence of the tech-savvy neo-Jade Brotherhood as an antagonistic force is a relatively recent development after the fallout between Joon and Chul-Moo (neo-JB's founder) in the wake of Xunlai Jade corporate shenanigans, and the tech-advanced Aetherblades only became a nuisance sometime after Mai Trin's escape to the Mists in the aftermath of Season 1 in 1326 AE, so Canthans only had to deal with the traditionalist warden Tetra's Speakers (who despise jade tech and want nothing to do with that kind of progress), and the raids of the somewhat "primitive" naga/kappa alliance and potential krait involvement based on some of the trailers; not exactly great enough technologically advanced threats compared to the past to inspire military minds of this forcibly isolated empire to develop more and more advanced weaponry to take them down. Then again, we may yet be in for a surprise depending on how resourceful these armies have been, if the deep sea dragon's minions have actually been far more invasive than shown so far and we're witnessing a Zhaitan type of lull before the next invasion (even though Shing Jea only seemed to care about the Aetherblade and naga threats based on the NPC dialogue on stream, so the deep sea dragon's influence doesn't seem to affect Seitung to the same effect as the Branded or Adelbern's Foefire army do to Ascalon for some reason), or if there are yet more nefarious and far more dangerous forces at work such as the oni and demon hordes or other great threats. I look forward to finding out what "outside" help (saltsprays, asura, dredge, tengu etc. if any) Canthans received with their jade tech as they've basically been underdogs due to lacking the resources, alliances with other well-developed nations/races, discovered ancient knowledge, and military necessities that Tyrians had when developing their tech. Given how the developers teased that we'd get lots of lore about the turmoil Cantha's been through between Winds of Change and End of Dragons in the expansion zones, I imagine we'll get some fascinating answers to this mystery that helps expand worldbuilding and make jade tech and New Kaineng City become a natural progression of Cantha's development despite the setbacks (and sometimes lack of such) that the nation experienced. 🙂

Well, the last time old Kaineng City was seen was during Cobiah Marriner's last visit to Cantha on the eve of Zhaitan's awakening and the Rising of Orr that created the Great Tsunami as depicted in the Sea of Sorrows novel. Given how that tsunami killed a lot of the Olmakhan and forced them to rebuild Atholma all the way southeast at Dajkah which had been transformed into an archipelago as a result (as revealed in the Atholma lore books), and how the tsunami flooded old Lion's Arch and much of Krytan land even more north of it (leading to Krytans abandoning their old capital Lion's Arch, fleeing north and eventually building Divinity's Reach on a safe hill), it wouldn't surprise me if the tsunami and the earthquakes on the sea floor managed to reach all the way south to the northern tip of Cantha too and damaged Old Kaineng significantly while simultaneously leading to the nation's forced isolation via the Risen Dead Ship blockade etc. Curiously the flooding of northern Cantha was even teased in the Priory world map (which also depicted heretofore unknown naval trade routes from the Battle Isles to the so-called Sunken Islands and Arid/Wetland of Sunrise Crest) although the map has some outdated ideas by now such as Shing Jea being a peninsula and the Desolation having a huge lake in the middle of it. If the old city suffered as much as Lion's Arch and Atholma did (despite Cantha's distance to Orr being far greater than those other two examples), it'd make sense for Canthans to build a new city in a safer area in the aftermath. Whether Old Kaineng is fully submerged over a century after the tsunami, in ruins, or slowly being rebuilt is unknown, but I imagine we'll get some answers to this mystery as the developers have mentioned writing a timeline of how big events have affected Cantha since the Winds of Change story. 🙂

The change of DR watchknights would've been received better if the return of the Twisted Marionette had retained the original model instead of using Mists shenanigans to retroactively change its look. Not only was the marionette Scarlet's experiment, she was also unhinged and liked outrageous designs for many of her inventions (even when adapting others' work such as the Krytans'), so the sexualized look works there due to being linked to a villain. Especially since it's the memory of the marionette manifesting on Tyria, so retaining the original look works for the historical narrative angle too. It would've been pretty cool to keep one or two of the original curvy Watchknight models around while most of them would be replaced by the sleeker model, and we'd get NPCs discussing the change and how Jennah's engineers improved on the original design for better combat maneuverability etc. so the original artists' work isn't fully deleted. That way both sides of the argument would've been satisfied enough, and it'd fit the lore of Tyria moving forward. As for time marching onward in Tyria, GW2 has established itself as progressing with new breakthroughs in the study of Eternal Alchemy, magic etc. to enable rapid change in just a few decades. I like that at least they didn't continue with the constant map changing of the original Living World iteration as it was sad to see earlier devs' lore being tossed out in favor of the new (plus trying to update the wiki with constant changes to area dialogues was very time-consuming) while it also burned out many devs in the process. I'll reserve my judgement on dragonjade tech until I see more examples of it in context while exploring Cantha itself (since the whole inclusion of dragonjade tech plays a major part in Cantha's backstory as well as the three-way conflict between the Empire of the Dragon, neo-Jade Brotherhood, and the Speakers as devs explained on strem), but I imagine they'll find a way to make it blend in well enough to fit into the world of Tyria aesthetically. 🙂

Perhaps Jalis is gone. But we've also seen the Destroyer of Hope fail to slay Aurene or the Destroyer of Life fail to destroy Rata Sum despite similar prophetic names. The survival of these champions, or having the Destroyer of the Last King just chilling out near Primordus while the Destroyer of the Ironhammer Line attacked Metrica Province rather than stayed in the depths to eradicate the remaining stone dwarves, would thus not necessarily mean that Jalis and his family are gone and that these champions' priorities might've changed when Primordus needed a full-scale destroyer invasion of the surface to speed up its awakening. For all we know, the Destroyer of the Last King could've been on a mission to hunt down Jalis but was recalled to Draconis Mons when Taimi's machine not only injured Primordus but also caused the instant death of dozens if not hundreds of destroyers there, so Primordus needed a champion to protect it while it was recovering in the caldera. We also know that revenants can invoke legends that are still alive from both dev comments as well as the rev Commander invoking Joko's legend during early Season 4, so Jalis doesn't need to be dead to be invoked as a legend. The dwarves we met at Biergarten during Dragon Bash did suggest some losses in the war against Primordus and Jormag, but sadly they didn't confirm Jalis's demise. Perhaps that's something the writers will keep up their sleeve and leave ambiguous for now if they ever intend to explore the stone dwarves and the Depths of Tyria in the future now that Primordus is gone and the depths can be repopulated again by asura, skritt etc. 🙂

While the change is jarring, we've had similar changes to other notable character voices such Glint's warm and motherly voice from PoF changing into Jocelyn Blue's more sharp voice in Season 4, or Almorra's voice changing from Jeyne Taini's gruff and elderly voice from personal story and Season 3 into Courtenay Taylor's younger and less deep voice in Season 4 and the Icebrood Saga. At least with Canach the vocal change can be explained in-universe. Now that he's won his major bet and become very rich while traveling the world with Sayida to collect all that money, he can afford to stop acting like the gruff firstborn-despising fugitive or servant of the crown and can finally showcase some posh attitude as a rich man who has made his fortune from nothing. All things considered, Matt Mercer does an admirable job trying to replicate John DiMaggio's mannerisms; he just needs to add a bit more gruff tone and a bit more sarcasm to his performance and he'll get suitably close.🙂