Thoughts on All Or Nothing: Requiem [SPOILERS]

[Kylden Ar.3724]

Other than once again removing my agency to decide how my character feels it's much better reading than I expected.

[Michram.6853]

@"Tom Abernathy II.5241" said:

@Dark Red Killian.3946 said:Great story! Love reading about the lore. It got me thinking though when he mentioned Kralk going off to the mists and if we beat him all of Tyria will be gone. What happens if Kralk is beaten in the Mists? What happens then??

This is EXACTLY the salient question.

What I wonder personally is what condition is the Realm of Grenth in? Devouring the spirits, kicking them out of it... What about Desmina? What about Dhuum? Will he Brand Dhuum and/or Desmina?

Or did he turn to another Realm, or somewhere even beyond?

I'm personally scared for not only our closest Friends' emotions after such massive loss, but also the Mists, that is the fabric of reality, if he destroys the Mists, then he also destroys Tyria, and with his actions in Grenth's Realm, the people that die now, won't find any Judge, nor Domains of Lost etc, it will leave them in nothingness, right?

Also I have a question concerning Gwen. Seeing her young as a messenger made me wonder, because Gwen looks like Gwen from GW, shouldn't she be looking like an old woman, or maybe did she die prematurely? Or you just wanted to make her look just like in GW to make people that played it immediately say: THAT'S GWEN! So it was just for recognition purposes?

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

@"ThatOddOne.4387" said:I'm partly on your wavelength here Konig but on the other hand it is a pretty interesting twist. Not sure about the mechanics of it, but maybe then the magic is simply removed from Tyria as you suggested and thus the overall amount of magic needed to balance on the planet itself is reduced?

This doesn't solve the question, maybe the magic will continue to build on it's own accord or return back to Tyria much more slowly and thus threaten the balance again, but it's not a sudden happening.

It's less a solution in this case and more a stay of execution - Gives people time to figure out another solution or return Aurene or find another replacement.

Incidently, that's what I believe the Gods can be used for as a narrative force - As a stay of execution to give Tyria time to find a solution and/or breathing space. I'm not expecting them to have the solution and solve everything as I agree that is poor storytelling, but they can certainly give the characters time that they're continually short of to come up with that solution. That's a rather... Godly/Parental thing to do, in my mind.

The way it was presented by Taimi in Flashpoint and Sadizi in The Way Forward, that magic overflowing is merely a mitigatable symptom, not the issue. The same way vomiting is a symptom of being sick. They present the issue as imbalance of The All (of those six spheres), not magic's imbalance, and that the solution must be multiple beings who are able to connect to The All and thus replace the Elder Dragons. It's presented as such that, for all intents and purposes, the world could survive another Elder Dragon's worth of magic - after all, we've only just begun to witness the effects of too much magic, and the world isn't close to being Thaumanova or Bloodstone Fen levels of oversaturated magic. But on the other hand, the world wouldn't survive The All falling out of balance due to the domains.

If that weren't the case, then Taimi wouldn't/shouldn't have stated that Kralkatorrik gaining more power would further imbalance The All at the end of PoF.

If the issue ends up being magic's imbalance, we've been led on a massive false quest for over two years now, and everything ever since Flashpoint has been a series pointless actions that merely exacerbates our mistakes when it should have been us fixing our mistakes. The stories since then have largely left a foul taste, personally, due to how they treated the return and defeat of Lazarus, the sudden and drastic personality change of Balthazar, and the gag-death of Joko. And them going and telling us "well you didn't need to do any of that lulz" would just, in all honesty, be like kicking in the teeth of a beaten man.

@CETheLucid.3964 said:I have a theory jumping around in my head that with the introduction of Zafirah, we may be building up to meeting the new unknown god of war that replaced Balthazar. That she ends up being what Desmina is to Grenth and repurposing the Zaishen.

That would be nice, in all honesty. We never really got to witness the birth of the followship of Kormir, as that happens post-Nightfall and we never got to return to Elona after NF for Beyond.

[perilisk.1874]

@Arden.7480 said:

@"Tom Abernathy II.5241" said:

@Dark Red Killian.3946 said:Great story! Love reading about the lore. It got me thinking though when he mentioned Kralk going off to the mists and if we beat him all of Tyria will be gone. What happens if Kralk is beaten in the Mists? What happens then??

This is EXACTLY the salient question.

What I wonder personally is what condition is the Realm of Grenth in? Devouring the spirits, kicking them out of it... What about Desmina? What about Dhuum? Will he Brand Dhuum and/or Desmina?

Or did he turn to another Realm, or somewhere even beyond?

I'm personally scared for not only our closest Friends' emotions after such massive loss, but also the Mists, that is the fabric of reality, if he destroys the Mists, then he also destroys Tyria, and with his actions in Grenth's Realm, the people that die now, won't find any Judge, nor Domains of Lost etc, it will leave them in nothingness, right?

At least we still have Sovngarde.

[TheOrlyFactor.8341]

@Kylden Ar.3724 said:Other than once again removing my agency to decide how my character feels it's much better reading than I expected.

Our character/Pact Commander pretty much stopped having agency in the story and became another NPC starting as far back as LWS1 when Anet (understandably) dropped/abandoned/discontinued/stopped giving us the kind of choices we had in Personal Story. This is likely due to resource limitations and streamlining the character to fit a more generalized/generic role. That way they don't have to write/voice different lines of dialogue for each combination of race, profession, sex/gender, Order choice, etc. our character could be.

For better or for worse, the PC is now a vehicle for us to experience the story rather than be our own character with any sort of agency. Personally, I make up for this by making characters that aren't the Pact Commander as well as making stories/headcanons/RP for how my actual Pact Commander character would act/feel outside of the story provided in game and what's been provided in this Requiem series so far.

[Tyson.5160]

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

@"Tom Abernathy II.5241" said:

@"Dark Red Killian.3946" said:Great story! Love reading about the lore. It got me thinking though when he mentioned Kralk going off to the mists and if we beat him all of Tyria will be gone. What happens if Kralk is beaten in the Mists? What happens then??

This is EXACTLY the salient question.

I hope this isn't a hint that the solution will end up being "kill Kralkatorrik in the Mists and the world is saved". I'm not opposed to Aurene's death being permanent, but having that as the solution would pretty much make the entirety of Season 3 and Path of Fire pointless. It would make the already crudely forced antagonism with Balthazar (

we

were the ones who initiated hostility for

no reason

besides "someone is exploiting the White Mantle and offered to use them to assist us!" as if we hadn't done

the exact same thing

in that very season) even worse off because it would mean that Balthazar could have just taken in their magic and everything would have been dandy, that Taimi's prediction that The All needs 4+ Elder Dragons to remain stable, but because she forgot to carry the one that is "what happens if we kill Elder Dragons

and

reduce the quantities of magic?".

It would make the repeated statements by Taimi and Sadizi that "the death of one more Elder Dragons will tip The All irrevocably out of balance" to be moot and pointless, and making us hate ourselves for ever not going "okay Balthazar, eat up Kralkatorrik's magic and save the world!" instead of what we did ("If you kill any Elder Dragon, the world dies!")

I tend to love the whole "the hero makes the situation worse before fixing it", but not if our attempts to fix our making it worse make it worse because a teenager forgot to carrying the damned one and an old man who

should

know his stuff apparently didn't.

/endrant

Perhaps this is an opportunity to see what unbalanced magic looks like when there is not enough magic in the world. We have seen what happens with too much magic, maybe now we will see what happens when it tips the other way now too.

Ogden Stonehealer: Too much magic, and the world spins out of control. Too little, and it crumbles into darkness.

[perilisk.1874]

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:The way it was presented by Taimi in Flashpoint and Sadizi in The Way Forward, that magic overflowing is merely a mitigatable symptom, not the issue. The same way vomiting is a symptom of being sick. They present the issue as imbalance of The All (of those six spheres), not magic's imbalance, and that the solution must be multiple beings who are able to connect to The All and thus replace the Elder Dragons. It's presented as such that, for all intents and purposes, the world could survive another Elder Dragon's worth of magic - after all, we've only just begun to witness the effects of too much magic, and the world isn't close to being Thaumanova or Bloodstone Fen levels of oversaturated magic. But on the other hand, the world wouldn't survive The All falling out of balance due to the domains.

Where exactly do Taimi or Sadizi reference The All? They speak of balance, but nothing to explicitly indicate that said balance is more than just a balance between Too Much Magic and Too Little Magic. At most, there is some vague implication that things may be more complicated than that. The All is just a fan theory.

[Tom Abernathy.5893]

@Donari.5237 said:

@Orimidu.9604 said:I would love to see this scene in the game, there are tons of players who don't visit the website. Ambient NPC dialogue is always a welcome thing to see for hidden backstory, and seeing Rytlock pace the halls of Thunderhead Keep post-story (dialogue bubbles and audio muted for characters yet to complete the story) would add quite a bit of depth to the episode. You could in turn flesh things like this out to mini-episodes where we can go back to the Black Citadel or other areas of Ascalon to learn more about Rytlock's past.

Agreed. However, in the recent AFC the devs confirmed that they have a word budget on how much they can put in to any one episode thanks to not wanting to get murdered by the localization teams. (OK, that's my phrasing, but they did say all the work flows downstream). This story was a

lot

of words. Moreover, if you have it voiced in game, that's a lot of Voice Actor pay that may be beyond the resources.

So nice as it would be, the website story consumes far fewer resources and offers far more information and flavor than can fit in the confines of the episode. If it weren't presented this way we might never get the lore at all.

It's true that voice-over budget and recording time are considerations for us. Thus it's somewhat easier to produce something like this piece from a resources standpoint than to put it in the game or have an actor record it. Not to say we could never do those things, but we're trying something new here and we should probably crawl a bit before we run. :-)

[Randulf.7614]

@"Tom Abernathy II.5241" said:

@Donari.5237 said:

@"Orimidu.9604" said:I would love to see this scene in the game, there are tons of players who don't visit the website. Ambient NPC dialogue is always a welcome thing to see for hidden backstory, and seeing Rytlock pace the halls of Thunderhead Keep post-story (dialogue bubbles and audio muted for characters yet to complete the story) would add quite a bit of depth to the episode. You could in turn flesh things like this out to mini-episodes where we can go back to the Black Citadel or other areas of Ascalon to learn more about Rytlock's past.

Agreed. However, in the recent AFC the devs confirmed that they have a word budget on how much they can put in to any one episode thanks to not wanting to get murdered by the localization teams. (OK, that's my phrasing, but they did say all the work flows downstream). This story was a

lot

of words. Moreover, if you have it voiced in game, that's a lot of Voice Actor pay that may be beyond the resources.

So nice as it would be, the website story consumes far fewer resources and offers far more information and flavor than can fit in the confines of the episode. If it weren't presented this way we might never get the lore at all.

It's true that voice-over budget and recording time are considerations for us. Thus it's somewhat easier to produce something like this piece from a resources standpoint than to put it in the game or have an actor record it. Not to say we could never do those things, but we're trying something new here and we should probably crawl a bit before we run. :-)

As long as things are well written, official canon and kept to the spirit of the game and narrative, I think in this day and age, expanding the story to outside media is a good thing and should be encouraged. Secret World does this more and more on twitter to excellent response. Sometimes things just suit other media and when it boils down to it, expanding the game outwards in this way makes the game feel "bigger" (if that makes sense).

I am often deeply critical of the central narrative, however I do recognise that not everything can be told in the game and there are a lot of stories needing to be told. Sometimes the map can do that (Jahai is a great example of so many stories being told via the map and collections), but sometimes things just need expanding that aren't attached to the current events. To be a truly "Living World" those stories need to be told and this is a great way to do that

[Palador.2170]

@ThatOddOne.4387 said:Zafirah's one is especially interesting given she goes on about a prophecy but she wasn't actually there to hear about it because she was off gathering the Zaishen, and just more Balthazar stuff in general. I'll look forward to hers.

Zafirah's should be interesting, if done right. Not fun by any means, but interesting.

They need to remember not just what she is, but what she's done.

A follower of Balthazar (you know, the god that betrayed the world and was willing to destroy it for his own gain), she dealt with her emotional issues by getting to some high ground and gunning down several members of the Priory in cold blood. The Commander spared her, but ONLY because she was seen in a vision fighting alongside Aurene.

She failed her God, and was still standing after he fell. (So much for following the God of War bravely into battle, Sunshine.) And when she was spared to help give Aurene a fighting chance, she failed her too. And survived again! She's failed utterly. TWICE!

And the story should end with a bunch of Priory researchers, believing that the world is now going to end anyway, gunning her down as some last minute justice before Kralk destroys everything. It's not like she's of any use any more. It's not like she's ever been of any use. Send her to the afterlife for her next emotional breakdown because Balthy-senpai never noticed her.

[perilisk.1874]

If this becomes a thing going forward (which would be nice), it would be great if there was an in-game but not in-world resource for these types of things, for accessibility. Maybe just a new section in the Story tab?

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

@perilisk.1874 said:

@"Konig Des Todes.2086" said:The way it was presented by Taimi in Flashpoint and Sadizi in The Way Forward, that magic overflowing is merely a mitigatable symptom, not the issue. The same way vomiting is a symptom of being sick. They present the issue as imbalance of The All (of those six spheres), not magic's imbalance, and that the solution must be multiple beings who are able to connect to The All and thus replace the Elder Dragons. It's presented as such that, for all intents and purposes, the world could survive another Elder Dragon's worth of magic - after all, we've only just begun to witness the effects of too much magic, and the world isn't close to being Thaumanova or Bloodstone Fen levels of oversaturated magic. But on the other hand, the world wouldn't survive The All falling out of balance due to the domains.

Where exactly do Taimi or Sadizi reference The All? They speak of balance, but nothing to explicitly indicate that said balance is more than just a balance between Too Much Magic and Too Little Magic. At most, there is some vague implication that things may be more complicated than that. The All is just a fan theory.

At first, they don't use the words "the All", but whenever talking about balance, they show The All and the six spheres which represent the Elder Dragons / their domains. But Taimi also stated during Elder Druid Protection during Flashpoint that the magical fallout has been manageable. And later on, Taimi does explicitly mention "the Elder Dragon imbalance", not "the magical imbalance", during the end of PoF:

: Taimi, focus... When Balthazar died, Kralkatorrik absorbed most of his freed energy.: Kralkatorrik's even stronger and more dangerous than ever.Taimi: Oh boy. That could seriously accelerate the Elder Dragon imbalance. I should run some worst-case hypotheticals right away.Again: "the Elder Dragon imbalance" not "the magical imbalance". Too much magic isn't the issue so far as narrative actually tells us...> @Randulf.7614 said:> > @"Tom Abernathy II.5241" said:> > It's true that voice-over budget and recording time are considerations for us. Thus it's somewhat easier to produce something like this piece from a resources standpoint than to put it in the game or have an actor record it. Not to say we could never do those things, but we're trying something new here and we should probably crawl a bit before we run. :-)> > As long as things are well written, official canon and kept to the spirit of the game and narrative, I think in this day and age, expanding the story to outside media is a good thing and should be encouraged. Secret World does this more and more on twitter to excellent response. Sometimes things just suit other media and when it boils down to it, expanding the game outwards in this way makes the game feel "bigger" (if that makes sense).> > I am often deeply critical of the central narrative, however I do recognise that not everything can be told in the game and there are a lot of stories needing to be told. Sometimes the map can do that (Jahai is a great example of so many stories being told via the map and collections), but sometimes things just need expanding that aren't attached to the current events. To be a truly "Living World" those stories need to be told and this is a great way to do thatI'm very much encouraging of adding lore in external methods. Be it novels, short story articles, this method or something else.The Side Stories/Current Events content was great for me since it delved into important lore without deterring the main story. Fractals *could* do that, but apparently the devs decided against it(??). But short/interactive stories would be a cheaper means to do it.But still there is one critical, vastly important question that must be asked: more novels when?

[Zania.8461]

Ah, so are we planning to pull the same thing with Aurene as we did with PC in the Domain of the Lost? Murder Kralk in the mists, have her soul absorb the released energy and self resurrect? I guess Glint (having been dead for a while) might not be eligible for resurrection (although her body seemed pretty intact, unlike Vlast).

[Tiny Doom.4380]

I'm very happy to see text stories or other media used outside of the game to enhance characterization or further the narrative. That said, I hope future efforts are a lot better than this.

The decision to humanize Rytlock is shockingly misguided and that's being generous. Rytlock is not human. Assigning what are very evidently 21st Century human priorities to a long-established non-human character from an imaginary time and place that in almost no way ressembles contemporary Earth may play to a certain audience but it didn't work for me. Rytlock's defining characteristic for a decade has been self-confidence bordering on arrogance. Infodumping a "poor Rytlock" backstory on a character who has never shown the least sign of self-doubt, anxiety or, as this piece verges on, self-hatred, reminds me of the days of "fill-in" issues on comics, where some staff writer would be called on to sub for a missing regular writer and would just drop in a story appropriate for whatever title he (usually he) regularly wrote.

As for the whole doting father part, there is evidence in-game for parents following the progress of their cubs through the Fahrar (NPCs talk about it in Iron Citadel) but the tone was completely at odds with anything - no, everything - we know about Charr society. It's interesting, although not particularly surprising, that Rytlock has cubs but I found it impossible to believe in his humanistic feelings for them

This story may be official canon but it reads uncomfortably like fanfic.

[Zania.8461]

Olmakhan broke off from Flame Legion and they have society with pretty strong parental ties. Just because the current Legion structure does not necessarily promote it, does not mean that Charr don't have those feelings toward their cubs.

Behaviorally all races in GW2 are more or less humans with (reasonably) small deviations at this point. Which to an extend makes sense as they would have extremely difficult time coexisting if they had absolutely no common ground, but also waters down the uniqueness of the races.

[NASATT.3678]

Very nice additional story and art! :) <3

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

@Zania.8461 said:Ah, so are we planning to pull the same thing with Aurene as we did with PC in the Domain of the Lost? Murder Kralk in the mists, have her soul absorb the released energy and self resurrect? I guess Glint (having been dead for a while) might not be eligible for resurrection (although her body seemed pretty intact, unlike Vlast).

Glint, the Elder Undead Crystal Dragon.

Make it so.

@"Tiny Doom.4380" said:The decision to humanize Rytlock is shockingly misguided and that's being generous. Rytlock is not human. Assigning what are very evidently 21st Century human priorities

How is Rytlock being humanized? Because he learns to care about relatives?

News flash, animals care about their kids too. And this is very obvious if you follow human behavior. That's not a human thing, it's a living thing. It's a parent thing.

What "21st century human priorities" are you talking about? The fact he feels guilt for his past actions? Guilt, too, is more than just human.

You don't need to be an emotionless machine to be "not human".

[PseudoNewb.5468]

Family does matter to Charr, even if they don't know them. They do hints of the same thing in the Charr commander's and the Vigil story lines too.https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Personal_story#Chapter_II_.E2.80.94_Level_20https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Minister%27s_Defense#At_Vigil_Keep

On a side note, I missed that Almora has a daughter too :open_mouth:

[Zaklex.6308]

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

@perilisk.1874 said:

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:The way it was presented by Taimi in Flashpoint and Sadizi in The Way Forward, that magic overflowing is merely a mitigatable symptom, not the issue. The same way vomiting is a symptom of being sick. They present the issue as imbalance of The All (of those six spheres), not magic's imbalance, and that the solution must be multiple beings who are able to connect to The All and thus replace the Elder Dragons. It's presented as such that, for all intents and purposes, the world could survive another Elder Dragon's worth of magic - after all, we've only just begun to witness the effects of too much magic, and the world isn't close to being Thaumanova or Bloodstone Fen levels of oversaturated magic. But on the other hand, the world wouldn't survive The All falling out of balance due to the domains.

Where exactly do Taimi or Sadizi reference The All? They speak of balance, but nothing to explicitly indicate that said balance is more than just a balance between Too Much Magic and Too Little Magic. At most, there is some vague implication that things may be more complicated than that. The All is just a fan theory.

At first, they don't use the words "the All", but whenever talking about balance, they show The All and the six spheres which represent the Elder Dragons / their domains. But Taimi also stated during Elder Druid Protection during Flashpoint that the magical fallout has been manageable. And later on, Taimi does explicitly mention "the Elder Dragon imbalance", not "the magical imbalance", during the end of PoF:

: Taimi, focus... When Balthazar died, Kralkatorrik absorbed most of his freed energy.: Kralkatorrik's even stronger and more dangerous than ever.Taimi: Oh boy. That could seriously accelerate the Elder Dragon imbalance. I should run some worst-case hypotheticals right away.Again: "the Elder Dragon imbalance" not "the magical imbalance". Too much magic isn't the issue so far as narrative actually tells us...~snip~

What would your opinion be if narrative has been leading us down the wrong path the entire time by calling it "the Elder Dragon imbalance" when it's actually just been "the magical imbalance" the entire time and everything we've been doing is completely wrong?

[ThatOddOne.4387]

Still wanting Taimi to remember what she was trying to tell the Commander through white noise about the Exalted and the Gods.

[Weindrasi.3805]

I really liked Rytlock's backstory. I sincerely hope it is a sign we will visit the Blood Legion Homelands in the future. The vast majority of my charr characters are from the Blood Legion. It was always a little off putting to me that they are in the Iron Legion capital with no mention of the Blood Citadel or Ruinbringer. My head-canon for them has always been that they came from the Blood Legion Homelands.

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

@Zaklex.6308 said:

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

@perilisk.1874 said:

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:The way it was presented by Taimi in Flashpoint and Sadizi in The Way Forward, that magic overflowing is merely a mitigatable symptom, not the issue. The same way vomiting is a symptom of being sick. They present the issue as imbalance of The All (of those six spheres), not magic's imbalance, and that the solution must be multiple beings who are able to connect to The All and thus replace the Elder Dragons. It's presented as such that, for all intents and purposes, the world could survive another Elder Dragon's worth of magic - after all, we've only just begun to witness the effects of too much magic, and the world isn't close to being Thaumanova or Bloodstone Fen levels of oversaturated magic. But on the other hand, the world wouldn't survive The All falling out of balance due to the domains.

Where exactly do Taimi or Sadizi reference The All? They speak of balance, but nothing to explicitly indicate that said balance is more than just a balance between Too Much Magic and Too Little Magic. At most, there is some vague implication that things may be more complicated than that. The All is just a fan theory.

At first, they don't use the words "the All", but whenever talking about balance, they show The All and the six spheres which represent the Elder Dragons / their domains. But Taimi also stated during Elder Druid Protection during Flashpoint that the magical fallout has been manageable. And later on, Taimi does explicitly mention "the Elder Dragon imbalance", not "the magical imbalance", during the end of PoF:

: Taimi, focus... When Balthazar died, Kralkatorrik absorbed most of his freed energy.: Kralkatorrik's even stronger and more dangerous than ever.Taimi: Oh boy. That could seriously accelerate the Elder Dragon imbalance. I should run some worst-case hypotheticals right away.Again: "the Elder Dragon imbalance" not "the magical imbalance". Too much magic isn't the issue so far as narrative actually tells us...~snip~

What would your opinion be if narrative has been leading us down the wrong path the entire time by calling it "the Elder Dragon imbalance" when it's actually just been "the magical imbalance" the entire time and everything we've been doing is completely wrong?

I've already established my opinion on that.

[Zaklex.6308]

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

@Zaklex.6308 said:

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

@perilisk.1874 said:

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:The way it was presented by Taimi in Flashpoint and Sadizi in The Way Forward, that magic overflowing is merely a mitigatable symptom, not the issue. The same way vomiting is a symptom of being sick. They present the issue as imbalance of The All (of those six spheres), not magic's imbalance, and that the solution must be multiple beings who are able to connect to The All and thus replace the Elder Dragons. It's presented as such that, for all intents and purposes, the world could survive another Elder Dragon's worth of magic - after all, we've only just begun to witness the effects of too much magic, and the world isn't close to being Thaumanova or Bloodstone Fen levels of oversaturated magic. But on the other hand, the world wouldn't survive The All falling out of balance due to the domains.

Where exactly do Taimi or Sadizi reference The All? They speak of balance, but nothing to explicitly indicate that said balance is more than just a balance between Too Much Magic and Too Little Magic. At most, there is some vague implication that things may be more complicated than that. The All is just a fan theory.

At first, they don't use the words "the All", but whenever talking about balance, they show The All and the six spheres which represent the Elder Dragons / their domains. But Taimi also stated during Elder Druid Protection during Flashpoint that the magical fallout has been manageable. And later on, Taimi does explicitly mention "the Elder Dragon imbalance", not "the magical imbalance", during the end of PoF:

: Taimi, focus... When Balthazar died, Kralkatorrik absorbed most of his freed energy.: Kralkatorrik's even stronger and more dangerous than ever.Taimi: Oh boy. That could seriously accelerate the Elder Dragon imbalance. I should run some worst-case hypotheticals right away.Again: "the Elder Dragon imbalance" not "the magical imbalance". Too much magic isn't the issue so far as narrative actually tells us...~snip~

What would your opinion be if narrative has been leading us down the wrong path the entire time by calling it "the Elder Dragon imbalance" when it's actually just been "the magical imbalance" the entire time and everything we've been doing is completely wrong?

I've already established my opinion on that.

That covers Balthazar and onwards, but what about if everything starting with Scarlett was just a complete waste of time...maybe even killing Zhaitan at the end of the Personal Story didn't really do any harm to Tyria in the grand scheme of things(but it did stop the Risen, which was the primary goal)...or it's something else we haven't even thought of.

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

@"Zaklex.6308" said:That covers Balthazar and onwards, but what about if everything starting with Scarlett was just a complete waste of time...maybe even killing Zhaitan at the end of the Personal Story didn't really do any harm to Tyria in the grand scheme of things(but it did stop the Risen, which was the primary goal)...or it's something else we haven't even thought of.

Nothing pre-S3 was influenced by the idea that killing Elder Dragons was bad. Or more specifically, the plot didn't go in the direction working on the assumption of "we can't kill another Elder Dragon" while being constantly reminded of that notion, just to learn that hey, we can.

Killing Zhaitan, dealing with Scarlet, or killing Mordremoth didn't have a "we can't do this so we got to take precautions" slapped in our face repeatedly, just for it to go "oh, so we don't have to worry about that after all".

I'm not talking about retrospective "the hero fucked shit up" stuff. That's actually something I like. Probably one of the larger reasons I enjoyed GW1 so much. It wasn't your typical "the hero always does good and succeeds" story that is so prevalent in fantasy. It's about having a plot point shoved in the face repeatedly, paired with a narrative that was contrived at points and at other points felt more insulting than entertaining to long time audience, just to have the plot point made redundant and in that, all the contrived and insulting points made unnecessary.

It's about ArenaNet going into one direction so far, that by the time they decide to go the other direction in a plot twist, the twist isn't unexpected, it's downright contradictory.

Like the sylvari reveal. ArenaNet went into so much effort to try to dissuade people from making the correct conclusion, that the notion of sylvari being mordrem remains contradictory by the fact that there is not just no similarity, but things about the sylvari are the opposite of the same things about dragon minions.

Or the Balthazar reveal. Where there was literally no hint or suggestion that could actually be read as a hint or suggestion except by tinfoil hat theoriests, and the reasoning for why Lazarus must have been fake outright contradicts and retcons the very basis of that reasoning (Lazarus splitting himself into aspects and needing all five to resurrect; when in GW1 he resurrected then hunted down his aspects).

So I guess it's just par the course, really.

[Mickey Frogeater.1470]

@Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

@Zania.8461 said:Ah, so are we planning to pull the same thing with Aurene as we did with PC in the Domain of the Lost? Murder Kralk in the mists, have her soul absorb the released energy and self resurrect? I guess Glint (having been dead for a while) might not be eligible for resurrection (although her body seemed pretty intact, unlike Vlast).

Glint, the Elder Undead Crystal Dragon.

Make it so.

Glint and Aurene's Undead corpses becoming Zhaitan and Mordremoth's replacements seems reasonable once we've found Kralkatorrik's own replacement and claim Kralkatorrik's Magic.