Awakened Height

[Jon Howard.6523]

Something about the awakened bothers me. Why do some of the awakened have normal proportions but somehow end up ridiculously tall?

This annoyance came to a head when I faced awakened Koss and he, as a human, was taller than my max-height norn.

Koss is a human. He's wearing the same armor he was wearing during nightfall in gw1 when he was a normal height human. What is going on with this stuff?

[Randulf.7614]

Sometimes for gameplay purposes major or significant bosses/chars are boosted in size to either accentuate their status above lowly trash mobs or make them more visible in fights. This often true of undead humanoids, but it occurs in various parts of the game. As essentially magically animated/enhanced beings, it's easy enough to pass their size off as "magic" as well

[Jon Howard.6523]

Interesting. So it isn't a lore thing but rather a situation where lore takes a backseat to mechanics.

[Oglaf.1074]

@Jon Howard.6523 said:Interesting. So it isn't a lore thing but rather a situation where lore takes a backseat to mechanics.

Pretty much. Very noticeable with content focused around human enemies as (mini) bosses often tower over Norns, too.

See for example the utterly gigantic Bandit Executioner open world boss.

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

@"Jon Howard.6523" said:Interesting. So it isn't a lore thing but rather a situation where lore takes a backseat to mechanics.

Yes.

All veterans, champions, and legendaries have this innate mechanical "size scale increase" attribute that makes them look bigger than regular ranked NPCs. Naturally, the higher the rank, the larger the model. However, elites do not have this, or at least core elites don't (I haven't really checked whether ToN and on elites do or not); this is likely due to how elites were originally never given a rank prefix and were "normal" dungeon foes despite having the silver circle around their portrait; originally their internal name was "dungeon veterans" (it appeared in a couple update notes) - the term elite actually came from the community, and was adopted by ArenaNet with the Tower of Nightmares release which retroactively gave all elite ranked foes the "Elite" prefix to their name - and normal veterans, when they spawned together, would be larger than the elites).

Now Koss specifically is a strange situation, because he's elite ranked and as mentioned, elite ranked foes don't have this innate upscale attribute like veteran, champion, and legendary foes do. And while ArenaNet has done "additional non-innate size scale increases" for foes, particularly in open world, they don't usually do this for story instances. It's possible that elites do upscale for S4 (or earlier) now and I just haven't noticed, though.

[Rognik.2579]

There also seems to be a trend with Awakened being changed by Joko. For instance, the canids were also made from human stalk, but got twisted and morphed into this form. Perhaps Joko can make a human grow bigger, if the soldier was important enough like the generals.

[Overlord RainyDay.2084]

@Oglaf.1074 said:

@Jon Howard.6523 said:Interesting. So it isn't a lore thing but rather a situation where lore takes a backseat to mechanics.

Pretty much. Very noticeable with content focused around human enemies as (mini) bosses often tower over Norns, too.

See for example the utterly gigantic Bandit Executioner open world boss.

Any Legendary rank Asura boss is quite funny as well. Pretty sure Arkk in shattered observatory is taller than a norn. It happens to allied NPCs as well, but not always. I definitely remember Logan towering over everyone in a few instances.