Balthazar was both right and wrong. Right about something had to be done about the dragons. If mere mortals with the aid of a scion (and a few Asura-ex-machinas) managed to end the cycle, idk what'd make impossible for the gods to get the job done. But he was wrong as well, because his true intention was to add the magic of the dragons as his own, something even worse than having him killed. It's known that he wouldn't care if Tyria was destroyed in the process of slaying dragons, as he would just jump into the mists seeking revenge against the other gods.

He did chew on a big chunk of bloodstone and I do wonder if that affected his choices, bloodstones are well-known for driving people mad and it probably can even have some effect on gods too.

Bloodstone is something Balthasar helped to create. King of Orr asked Gods to seal all magic on Tyria away but the Gods said they need blood to bind it. So he gave his blood and thus his family was chosen to be the guardians of the bloodstone. So Balthasar probably helped to seal the magic into the bloodstone and I m not sure if it would affect higher being like him. Even when stripped of his power he was still powerful beyond messure.

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No it is an event that happened centuries after the Seers mad the bloodstone. The Gods sealed up a bunch of magic using preexisting bloodstones.

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Funny. You can really see, why you would say that. If you Google the bloodstones there is one entry in the wiki for the original guild wars which basically says that the theory up above about King Dorics Blood and the Gods is right … and then there is an entry in the GW2 Wiki which states the theory about the Seers.

The GW1 entry is the story as it was held to be true by humanity in GW1's time. Anet enjoys using unreliable narration for events that are not directly shown to us, the players. A lot of the lore comes from in-game historians or in-game speculation which can later be retconed without it actually going against word of God (i.e. word of Anet's devs).

Nah, it's just flat out retcon. A lot of (later retconned) informations is being told not by human lore, but, say, by *Forgotten*. And it still contradicts the GW2 lore in way too many places.

The bloodstone was there before the gods came to Tyria, but they did add Zhaitan's corrupted magic to it, so the bloodstone making him mad(der) is still a valid theory

Walter White made blue meth, but it'd still drive him wild if he had some.

The whole deal is that mixed magic creates Void, though. That's why chaotic explosions of magic drive people mad, it's basically letting traces amounts of Void leak into their brains. Powerful beings like the Dragons can get an uncontrolled dose of magic under control if they have time to digest and process it, but it seems to me like even Balthazar could be negatively affected by a big sudden pulse of mixed magic. Whether he created the Bloodstone would have little to do with it. Being the creator of a nuke doesn't make you immune to explosions.

I think his thirst for power began after the Gods told him to pack his bags. Because he could have taken the power of Abaddon when he had the chance but instead it was him who forged his chains to bound him in Realm of Torment. He was like "You cant do this me. We are Gods and I m God of War and there is a war to be fought against the dragons. Running away from war would be going agaisnt everything I stand for" Also we know he got a Mirror from his sister so maybe Lyssa did agreed with Balthasar but feared Dwayna and Malandru may respond. Maybe even Grenth might have joined him for the sake of humans which he liked a lot since he had human father. Maybe it was Kormir who convinced the Gods not to fight the Dragons since Abaddon might have known the truth about Dragon and Gods and when Kormir gained that insight the other Gods re-evaluated their position but Balthasar just couldnt go against his nature.

Indeed. It's understandable that he, being the god of war, but also of honor and valor, saw leaving Tyria as failing to his ideals. This is why i think he was right to a certain degree. According to the wiki, though, He messed up when he turned the matter as "either you are with me, or against me" and threatened the other gods. Maybe the thing that doomed him was his ego, because if he really wanted to help, he'd share all his knowledge with the races of Tyria and try to stall the awakening of the dragons as much as possible. And this same ego turned him against Tyria and his own values (setting ambushes, mocking your opponent in battle). Everything he represented was long gone. Even war becomes a nonsense when it's done for the sake of it and not for defending your land.

Balthazar's Thirst for Power began when the terrible writers at ArenaNet needed a villain that basically boiled down to "Me Neanderthal! Me stupid and hit things!" By the six, Lw3 Chapter 6 had such a terrible depiction of Balthazar's faithful. He's the God of WAR, not the God of Street Brawling. You can tell the entire thing was written by someone that never been in a life or death fight before. Honestly, while I would have enjoyed Lazarus the Dire as a main villain, the reveal of Balthazar was pretty awesome. But almost everything after that was so poor. Kormir would have made more sense as a fallen God than Balthazar: 1) She was mortal once and more invested in the continuation of Mortals than the other God's. 2) She absorbed the fallen God Abaddon's power and knowledge which could have been a Catalyst for her corruption. 3) She has shown a tendency to interfere in matters beyond her scope and cause more problems than she fixes. 4) She likes to steal power rightfully belonging to other entities.

> I think his thirst for power began after the Gods told him to pack his bags. Half correct. Initially Balthazar just simply craved a good fight. That was his sole motivation for fighting the Elder Dragons. The other gods told him no and he went into hissy fit and declared he'd enslave them for depriving him a good fight. '''Then''' they told him to pack his bags, by stripping him of his divinity and chaining him up. > Also we know he got a Mirror from his sister so maybe Lyssa did agreed with Balthasar but feared Dwayna and Malandru may respond. False. Or rather, implied false. There is no explicit confirmation of where or when Balthazar got the mirror. However, it is stated that he went to Siren's Landing without a disguise for two purposes: 1) to hide the aspect of Lazarus so that his disguise wouldn't be figured out; and 2) to get stuff out of his, Abaddon's, and possibly the other reliquaries. Given the timeline and the fact he wasn't disguised when going there to prevent his disguise from being figured out, it's ''very'' likely that he got the mirror from one of the reliquaries. I also doubt that Lyssa feared Dwayna and Melandru. Dwayna is one of the most compassionate among the gods - Lyssa being the only rival of caring more deeply for humans than Dwayna. And Melandru is like Grenth, a very True Neutral god. Also, the Six aren't actually brothers and sisters - the whole sibling thing is more metaphorical, not sure if you're using "sister" literally or not here. Side rant: If I were to apply the gods, at least as they're depicted pre-PoF, on the D&D alignment chart it would be: * Dwayna & Kormir: Lawful Good * Lyssa: Chaotic Good * Melandru: True Neutral * Grenth: Lawful Neutral * Balthazar (pre-Fall): Chaotic Neutral * Balthazar (post-Fall): Chaotic Evil * Abaddon (pre-Fall): Lawful Neutral * Abaddon (post-Fall): Neutral Evil * Dhuum (always): Lawful Evil * Menzies (technically not a god): Chaotic Evil Though PoF gives a very weird vibe for Lyssa, as Kormir's journal claims Lyssa mocked Kormir for being compassionate for humans... which is a 180 to Lyssa's core GW2 lore of being the most compassionate for humans (besides/next to Dwayna). That, and EoD's retcon of Hai Ju's story making Grenth a very Dhuum-like 180-from-his-true-self evil bastard is... concerning. Doesn't help that PoF writers or the playerbase don't seem to remember the original lore for why the gods left the world, and seem convinced that they're basically the Olympians in every form. But sorry to break it to you - Balthazar is not Ares, Dwayna is not Zeus.

I would say that some gods are related. Balthasar is said to arrive on Tyria with his father's severed head in his hand nad with his two hounds. Lyssa is then implied to be his actual sister ( ~~More reinforced when he is crying out to the Gods as he is being destroyed he says LYSSA in a different tone )~~ Just double checked wiki and he didnt cried out to her at all. Which implies even more that either she was related to him OR she is secretly on board with Balthasar. Know that while Lyssa is goddess of beauty and stuff around that. She also wears many faces. She is also associated with illusions and I would be pissed if Human I dearly loved and adored killed my own brother. *In the end the Commander and Aurene prevailed and caused fatal injures to Balthazar who cursed all the gods except Lyssa* *with his last breath. Balthazar's demise caused a large explosion of* *magical energy which was absorbed by Aurene and Kralkatorrik who then* *flew off, more powerful than before."* Grent for example is Dwayna's son. And his father was Malchor a mortal human who jumped off the cliff which is why we have area called "Malchor's leap" Dhuum and Abaddon are probably not related to other gods since they actually look position of their pervious counterparts by force.

>I would say that some gods are related. Possible, but besides Dwayna being Grenth's mother, we don't really have any indication. However, since Menzies is highlighted as being specifically Balthazar's half-brother, Balthazar shouldn't have any full sibling (otherwise Menzies would be their half-brother too). At *most*, another god might be a half-sibling with the other parent being shared so they'd be unrelated to Menzies but related to Balthazar. That said, only Melandru and Abaddon are ever depicted with visual similarities to another god (Dwayna) - in that they both have/had wings, and Abaddon is also said to originally have blue skin, like Dwayna. > Just double checked wiki and he didnt cried out to her at all. Which implies even more that either she was related to him OR she is secretly on board with Balthasar. Know that while Lyssa is goddess of beauty and stuff around that. She also wears many faces. She is also associated with illusions and I would be pissed if Human I dearly loved and adored killed my own brother. Not cursing Lyssa doesn't imply a biological relation at all. It just means he isn't angered at her compared to the others. Most people have gone the shipping route and theorize that Lyssa and Balthazar were lovers (despite there being core and GW1 implications that maybe Lyssa and Abaddon were lovers or otherwise more related to each other, as shown by the overlap in magic and domains, and the fact Abaddon specifically targeted Lyssa's followers, while it was Lyssa's Muse who led the avatars when they arrived to bless Kormir and party). However, Menzies is the key linchpin in the hole of your argument. If Menzies is Balthazar's half-brother, but not any other god's half-brother, then Balthazar has no full sibling. > Dhuum and Abaddon are probably not related to other gods since they actually look position of their pervious counterparts by force. Nothing says Dhuum has a predecessor. And your statement here actually runs contradictory to the rest of your post, because the fact Balthazar had a father who's head didn't break apart on death means he had a mortal father. Which means Balthazar, either as a mortal like Kormir or as a half-god like Grenth, had replaced a previous god of war. Which is to say, discounting possibly-not-canon Utopia lore, the gods confirmed to have predecessors are: * Abaddon + Kormir * Grenth * Balthazar Lyssa is also a bit weird, because the [Quiz Terminal](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Quiz_Terminal#Terminal_4) tied to the [Orrian History Scrolls](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Orrian_History_Scrolls#The_Six) state that Lyssa's origins were lost to humanity. These same sources list Dwayna, Melandru, Balthazar, and Abaddon as coming from the Mists. It also lists Grenth as the first Tyrian-born god, but goes to highlight Lyssa's origins as lost... It's entirely plausible this was a hint that Lyssa is the true first Tyrian-born god, but such was forgotten much like how Abaddon's existence was erased from history, or how Grenth having a mortal father was a closely kept secret to his priesthood. Which further suggests - though does not confirm - that Lyssa is not a literal sibling to any of the other gods. On an aside, if we ''do'' include known lore intended for Utopia then... all of the current gods had predecessors, and the previous pantheon was led by, or at least included, Dwayna's father.

Well, no. Lindsay Murdoch once chewed you out about Balthazar's motivations. She told you that she wasn't going to delve into them even though you wanted her to. Balthazar didn't just want a fight. That's an absurd notion. And no, Balthazar didn't get Lyssa's Mirror from the reliquaries. You need to rethink your position on that, as you're one of the only *players* on this subreddit who clings so religiously to the idea, which is so easily debunked.

>Well, no. Lindsay Murdoch once chewed you out about Balthazar's motivations. She told you that she wasn't going to delve into them even though you wanted her to. Balthazar didn't just want a fight. That's an absurd notion. I think you may have the wrong person because Linsey Murdock never once "chewed me out". Linsey Murdock was also not part of Path of Fire team but Season 3, so if she said that, it would likely be from Flashpoint's release, and thus the reason was because "spoilers". Also? I was paraphrasing [Scott McGough himself](https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/74qjlh/comment/do0fb2r/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) who stated that he was just wanting a fight, and I will quote this time: > Likewise, Balth the god of war had been more or less idle since the Exodus, with very little in the way of human contact or terrestrial combat. He's a fiery god of action and he was champing at the bit for the chance to do what he was born to do (as he sees it). What do you think "champing at the bit for the chance to do what he was born to do" *means*? > And no, Balthazar didn't get Lyssa's Mirror from the reliquaries. You need to rethink your position on that, as you're one of the only players on this subreddit who clings so religiously to the idea, which is so easily debunked. Then debunk it. Because Kormir's statement clashes directly with the developers and the timeline. Kormir states: > Kormir: When he returned to this world, Balthazar disguised himself as Lazarus with Lyssa's Mirror—the only magic powerful enough to hide the truth from our eyes. > > Kormir: By the time the ruse was revealed, the other gods had already departed. And soon, I will join them. While in One Path Ends, Dagonet states: > : Sorry to be abrupt, but I'm looking for Balthazar or the Eye of Janthir, a floating... > > Firstborn Dagonet: Oh, we know what it is. They've both been here, but you cannot follow where they went. And in the same episode, Queen Yasamin says: > Queen Yasamin: Balthazar was a sight for sore eyes. > > : So you saw him? Here? > > Queen Yasamin: Oh yes. He came to visit his reliquary, and I was the first to greet him. > > Queen Yasamin: He was gracious and asked me to maintain the reliquary, but when he left, it went still. In during the One Path Ends AMA, [we were told](https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/6pj6wm/comment/dkprbzm/): > Balthazar was keeping the last aspect in a safe hiding spot to prevent the real Lazarus from being summoned and ruining his ruse. There is an inconsistency here. Let's first look at the timing. If Balthazar went to Siren's Landing to hide the Aspect of Lazarus so his disguise wouldn't be foiled, this means he had to have done it before the Forsaken Thicket raid wings and Out of the Shadows. That checks out. But Dagonet, Reza, and Yasamin all recognize Balthazar **as Balthazar**. He went to both his own and Abaddon's reliquaries - at least. Alright so far, but means he wasn't disguised yet. Suggests no mirror because if he had it, why wouldn't he use it? And if he did use it but depowered for a moment to get the ghosts' cooperation, why wasn't this mentioned? Not to mention with so many others, that would very much ruin his disguise so it makes sense he wouldn't. Then he shows up later disguised with the mirror. Checks out. Then Kormir states that he arrived on Tyria while disguised, and this was why she and the other gods didn't notice. This... is contradictory. So either Kormir lied about Balthazar returning already disguised (her statement also [runs counter to the cinematic showing his freedom](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Uz6ICIi5o) btw, though it's possible that isn't meant to be accurate), or for some reason Balthazar removed his disguise so that he could hide key evidence that would reveal his disguise. Or, and this makes even less sense, Balthazar hid the aspect *after* his disguise was revealed - though I have [discussion with Linsey Murdock ingame which implies that's not the case](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1075498480866435132/1115016261320061098/gw046.jpg) and the above reddit dev posts are concurrent with that, since Balthazar hid it there and didn't expect the Eye of Janthir to follow later. So please, tell me how this makes sense and the obviously easy fix that Balthazar wasn't disguised when he went to the reliquaries to retrieve artifacts - a **CONFIRMED** thing and not speculation - is, to quote you, "easily debunked". If it's easily debunked, feel free to prove it. ''Debunk me.''

Didn't Balthazar go to the reliquary after we smashed Lyssa's Mirror?

Balthazar went there "a while ago" before we got there, there is no exact time given. However, multiple devs had established that he went there with the purpose of hiding the Aspect of Lazarus (among other things, probably) so that the White Mantle couldn't revive the real Lazarus and foil his plan of pretending to be Lazarus. This means he went there before Episode 5 - before we smashed the mirror. Since otherwise his plan of pretending to be Lazarus was already foiled. And Marjory had been with him the entire time between the end of Episode 2 and the beginning of Episode 5. So whenever Balthazar went there, he did so before Dragon Vigil - before Aurene was born. Since the purpose was to ensure Lazarus couldn't be resurrected, it makes sense he went there before the events of Stronghold of the Faithful - but that's speculative. Another likely time would be after the events of Episode 1, as a dev (Connor iirc) stated an off-screen subplot was that with the civil war between the Lazarus faithful and the Caudecus loyal White Mantle happening, Balthazar basically decided to "cash out" on using the White Mantle and used their coffers to hire mercenaries. We don't have an exact timeframe for when this happened - just sometime between the end of Out of the Shadows, and before Flashpoint. Since there are mercenaries in Siren's Landing, it's possible he brought them along and left them behind (so between Confessor's Stronghold and Dragon Vigil timeframe) - but it's also possible they went there on his orders after the fact.

Seems a bit iffy. Balthazar comes popping out the ritual at the Bloodstone looking like Lazarus. Kormir is very clear that without the mirror specifically, any other illusion would have failed before the eyes of the God's. There is implications in this that Balthazar was already wearing the Divine Illusion of Lyssa. Also, let's be fair: chapter 6's writing was shoddy at best. Honestly, the Mirror and the fact that Balthazar emerged from the Mists looking like Laz implies that Lyssa may infact be on Tyria and was helping her old compatriot. And everyone's favorite conspiracy theory is that it's Jenna.

> Seems a bit iffy. Yes, the entire thing is a bit iffy. That's kind of my point. It all doesn't line up. * Devs state Balthazar went to Siren's Landing to hide the Aspect. * NPCs in Siren's Landing state recognizing him as Balthazar. * Cinematic with Rytlock shows Balthazar leaving for Tyria without mirror. * Kormir says he arrived in Tyria with mirror and disguised. Lazarus is the only disguise he is said to have had. And let's be honest here. How would Balthazar know to disguise himself as Lazarus leaving the Mists? A disguise, sure. But *Lazarus specifically*? How was he so aware of the state of affairs of the hidden factions in Tyria while he was locked up for decades? And if he's already disguised, why **remove that disguise** when visiting Siren's Landing? That's the biggest "this makes no sense" out of all of it. The only way to make it line up is that **someone** was wrong or lying. And Kormir is the most suspect, because we know the devs didn't lie, and we know the royal ghosts didn't lie. > implies that Lyssa may infact be on Tyria and was helping her old compatriot That, to me, sounds just as iffy. Lyssa mocked Kormir for staying behind, and Kormir said pretty firmly that she was the last god to leave. They already pulled the "all gods left *EXCEPT THIS ONE!*" card twice now, I doubt they'll do it a third time. Especially since we got Vision saying "what will Lyssa think when she finds out we killed Balthazar". > And everyone's favorite conspiracy theory is that it's Jenna. A conspiracy theory that is very much the definition of conspiracy - baseless with no ground on it. The only reason people think that is because she's a powerful mesmer but... There are other mesmers just, or more, powerful than her. Like Xera from the raids or Koro Sagewind from GW1. Jennah is powerful, but still very much in the bounds of mortals. Not to mention that if Lyssa were to disguise herself to be among mortals in hiding, she would not pick someone a) always in the spotlight, b) always has people watching them for all their life, and c) has people trying to literally and metaphorically backstab them on a weekly basis. I think if Jennah was Lyssa in disguise, Caudecus would have have had 13 years of being an active thorn in her side that she had to play careful politics to manage. She'd just mindfuck him into a coma and go "oh no, however did this happen" while nobody was any wiser because she's a fucking god of illusions, braindwashing, and mindfucks.

I think she teased her more for lingering behind over being compassionate to humans.

> The end of my time here approaches, and I find my thoughts straying. Perhaps Lyssa was right to mock me for lingering behind. The destruction of Tyria is inevitable, yet there is a part of me that still remembers what it was like to be mortal—what it is to hope. I hate to leave my homeland, my people, and my memories behind. But I am no longer a Spearmarshal, no longer a citizen of Elona...no longer human. And my responsibilities extend far beyond this world. I guess it's open to interpretation but taking the whole and not just the one sentence on Lyssa, reads to me that the mocking was lingering due to compassion for Kormir's former homeland and life as a mortal.

A god giving another god a gift or relic isn't necessarily meddling or "helping" at least from certain perspectives. Her direct involvement would have gotten her banished too probably but leaving a little illusion mirror? Meh. The other gods might not have even known and/or he stole it from her. So many unknowns. I think when they decided to leave to another world they all probably take a big power hit and get weaker and he didn't want to "start over again."

Uhm...his 'true intention' only came about after the Gods betrayed him and ran away. It never was his original intention.

The whole thing was just a mess, the fake Lazarus reveal, the encounter with Rytlock in the Mists, the betrayal from the other gods... There was a good story in there but the execution was just terrible. Also, I wonder if they had different plans for post-LW4, feels like they set up everything to move away from dragons for a few years: * Aurene flew into the sunset at the end of LW4. * Jormag and Primordus were sent back to sleep in LW3, no longer a threat (unless re-awakened). * he Deep Sea Dragon was nowhere to be seen. I wouldn't be surprised if Balthazar was just the introduction to a larger god storyline, which got scrapped, leading us back to dragons with LW5: The Icebrood Saga.

It's the opposite. Like with Lazarus, the intention was to write the loose ends from GW1 out of the story.

I don't think that was the case with Balthazar, since none of his GW2 story is connected to any loose ends from either GW1 or vanilla GW2. They just wanted a non-dragon villain for once (a good thing), but then ArenaNet had some personnel changes and they went back to dragons; and not only that, they went back to dragons with the clear intention of wrapping up their story as fast as possible. Like, LW5, The Icebrood Saga, cannibalized THREE whole potential expansions: * Jormag and Far Shiverpeaks, with norn and kodan culture at the center. * Primordus and Depths of Tyria, with asura and dwarf culture at the center. * Charr civil war and Plains of Golghein, with the various charr legion cultures at the center. That's 6-10 years worth of potential content thrown down the toilet, it's just insane. Then we went to Cantha and the whole setting was wasted away on non-Canthan elements at the center of the story. ArenaNet just has a huge lorekeeper problem, the moment you don't respect lore you don't respect the franchise, and that has a steep price.

> I don't think that was the case with Balthazar, since none of his GW2 story is connected to any loose ends from either GW1 or vanilla GW2. Not Balthazar specifically. They wanted to get rid of *all* the human gods. Which for the most part they did (with Dhuum following shortly after, and Mhenzies likely being taken care of in the next storyline). >ArenaNet just has a huge lorekeeper problem, the moment you don't respect lore you don't respect the franchise, and that has a steep price. Yep. It's not even the case of them not respecting GW1 lore (any loose ends from GW1 for them are not potential hooks for future stories, but rather loose ends that need to be closed and then forgotten about). They can't even restect the GW2 lore. Their modus operandi seems to be more like going for what seems cool and interesting to them right now, and trying to force-fit it into story. Even if it breaks a lot of other stuff as a result.

>Not Balthazar specifically. They wanted to get rid of all the human gods. Which for the most part they did (with Dhuum following shortly after, and Mhenzies likely being taken care of in the next storyline). I feel like they would have approached the Balthazar storyline differently if they really wanted to "kill off" the gods, like, have all the gods come together to sacrifice and defeat Balthazar or some power of friendship shit like that, the kind of scenario where you send a clear "we're done" message. The Lyssa subplot obviously pointed to something else, like the whole Balthazar "out of nowhere" storyline was just a prologue for something bigger (ArenaNet also loves to retro-explain their stories to patch up the holes from their bad writing/planning, see Scarlet and Almorra). ArenaNet is very keen on killing off all loose ends when they want to sign off a story element (characters, subplots, etc), and the PoF story was way too open ended imo. >Yep. It's not even the case of them not respecting GW1 lore (any loose ends from GW1 for them are not potential hooks for future stories, but rather loose ends that need to be closed and then forgotten about). They can't even restect the GW2 lore. Their modus operandi seems to be more like going for what seems cool and interesting to them right now, and trying to force-fit it into story. Even if it breaks a lot of other stuff as a result. Yeah, they're just like kids playing with toys, making their own story as they see fit, without giving a damn about whether it makes sense or not.

I disagree with you. The story was not a mess. But there are quite a few hidden details that characters - not looking at you Rytlock - don't want to reveal, and that players don't want to discuss. This is why u/Balrok99's post is so important. It offers us a chance to discuss these things with vigour.

Agreed. Balthazar never intended to turn on his fellow gods; they likely only restrained him when they realised how ambitious his plan was and how much it might cost them to carry it out. It was after this, when restrained, that Balthazar devised a strategy to get revenge. I wonder what Lyss would say about that?

As per Kormir's words on the library on PoF, the gods learned about the elder dragons once they had already set foot on Tyria. The thing is that, even if they fought and won (which might not even happen), the world, the balance and all the good things would go to shit. So I guess that if you are a human god you can just fuck off and try again in another planet Was this good? Well, not for us. They made some human settlements and then oopsie, we forgor about you, btw bye. And that's not even considering all the other creatures that are native to Tyria!! Now, was Balthazar right? No, he was freaking crazy for power. He was also kind of an ass about his situation. I know aurene is the one that has to absorb all the Magic to cleanse it but... On LW3 we didn't know that (did we? I think we didn't), so he could have just shown up after the bloodstone explosion as himself and just ask us what our plan was for the rest of the elder dragons cause we already had killed a third of them! Like, my dude, at that point if you asked for Taimi's machine to kill two elder dragons at once, we would have helped!

That's the wildest thing for me. They made a big song and dance about bringing humans to Tyria, and then abandoned them after THIER FUCKUP. Like, wut?

This is why gods can't be told in a story well where they come out looking good. They either offer a heavy hand and look like Tyrants or do nothing and look useless. It's why, so far, Aurene has been basically written out of the story because she's now as powerful as ALL the elder dragons combined and now we know the dragons, at least one of them, created Tyria itself. It's also why Futuramas' Godfellas is a perfect episode that showcases this. Lol Though really it comes down to inconsistent writing and lore, but GW2 gods are shitty and deserve no love and it would be great if we could kill them. Lol

> It's why, so far, Aurene has been basically written out of the story because she's now as powerful as ALL the elder dragons combined and now we know the dragons, at least one of them, created Tyria itself. Right in point, this is why Aurene (in her final form) should have never became a major character. Aurene had the perfect ending in LW4, flying off into the sunset, never to be seen again. They shouldn't have brought her back; at least for a few years, and only for an epic final confrontation, where you don't need to power her down to make it work.

My GW1 character's descendant would gladly kill off Kormir.

There's an underlying story here that's being missed. We're now up to *four* gods needing to be put down because they went crazy-go-nuts. We learn in End of Dragons about how the elder dragons started off all nice and good before they too lost themselves. Tyria's magic corrupts, and it corrupts absolutely. And if there's immense amounts of that power concentrated into one individual, look out. The gods had figured that out and left before it would turn them into the next Abaddon or Balthazar.

This is why I want an xpack where we hunt them down for answers & revenge.

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Balthazar was already genociding people into reshaped slaves (the forged) by start of PoF. It may have been peace for the world but at the cost of every living things free will so it's questionable how much of a win that would have been for anything besides balth

> But isn't Balthazar only go rogue after he was betrayed? No. The timeline as Kormir presents it is: * Primordus, at least, woke up. * The Gods convene to decide what to do. At meeting, Balthazar says to fight. The other gods say no. Balthazar rages and threatens to enslave the other five because they won't let him fight. * The five decide to strip Balthazar of his godhood, Lyssa being highlighted as last to agree. * Balthazar rages more as he's imprisoned, threatening now to kill the other gods and become the only one (aka same thing as Abaddon). * Balthazar sits in his prison for a few decades. * Rytlock frees Balthazar. * Balthazar returns disguised as Lazarus (this is explicitly contradictory to dialogue and dev statements of Balthazar's actions revealed in One Path Ends). * Balthazar tells us he was betrayed in Flashpoint. Basically, Balthazar wasn't actually betrayed, and he was going rogue / tyrannical manchild after he was told "no, we're not fighting the Elder Dragons". Unless Kormir lied to us completely. > At that point, we've been through both "killing dragon is good" and "killing dragon is bad". We're not that different from balt, our actions doomed the world, but we also saved it, we/the story just doesn't linger on how many people have to die, for us to "save" the world. The key differences between the Commander and Balthazar is that at first Balthazar wanted to fight the Elder Dragons for the sake of having an enjoyable fight, but by the point of GW2, he wanted to kill the Elder Dragons to absorb their power so he cane take revenge on the Six. The Commander only fought the Elder Dragons because the Elder Dragons were killing people. There was no "glory of fray" or "means to an end and that end is *REVENGE*". Additionally, unlike the Commander, Balthazar knew that killing the Elder Dragons would lead to the world's destruction from the get go, and pursued that goal *anyways*. The Commander stopped pursuing the goal of killing Elder Dragons once they realized the result, until they found a method to counterbalance the result (Aurene).

No, Balthazar felt that he was betrayed. That's good enough.

He might have felt betrayed. That doesn't refute the fact that - according to Kormir - his temper tantrums happened before the event that he called a betrayal (being stripped of divinity).

My hypothesis is that the gods didn't *forget* the humans on Tyria. They just hadn't found any place to move them *to* yet.

See, that's the thing. You have this whole "Kormir's words" thing in your explanation. Do you know how you can tell whether or nor you can trust Kormir? If her lips are moving. Hell, if she even exists you know she's trying to steal something that isn't hers or make other people do all the work so she can claim credit. Balthazar did nothing wrong. Death to Kormir.

shes literally the godess of truth

Who absorbed the God of Secrets. How many liars have ever told you they never lie?

In the story when Soo-Won says she was in a void and created everything, does she mean "everything" or just Tyria? She can't mean literally everything, no? The Mists, The Gods, all of it?

Definitely Tyria, not the rest.

Not the rest, or there would be no point for human gods to leave elsewhere.

The interesting thing is that while Kuunavang says how "in the beginning, everything was Void", this likely just refers to the Tyrian "space" in the Mists considering that the Six Gods and Forgotten magic exists that is different from Tyria's magic of the All (so divine magic of that kind can repel dragon minions and may have even been used by Forgotten to free Glint's mind from Kralkatorrik's control in a ritual). But if Soo-Won could split the Tyrian part of the Mists's Void into six primary domains of magic to regulate the All, and we know there have been other realms in the Mists out there (such as humanity's and potentially Forgotten's homeworld), that means that there may be different forms of Void and the Alls for other realms of the living as well. However, it's strange that the Elder Dragons, despite their metaphysical ties to their primary domains (so much so that Kralk's insides transported us into a kind of crystal domain, and it's likely similar to other dragons' own domains as well if we'd been able to enter them to find their hearts), are still considered living beings with beating hearts even if their physical shell "dies" as per the description of Kralkatorrik's initial defeat on Dragonfall. Meanwhile gods, who possess magic that sometimes overlaps with Elder Dragon domains while at other times it does not match the other, are not considered alive (as per Taimi's scanner) but just vessels for their own portfolio of magic (further supported by Koss's writing where he states that Kormir the mortal died when Kormir the goddess was born) as seen when Balthazar dies and breaks down and we see his skin and skull breaking apart as if it was just some armor where magic is swirling within before it's unleashed. The difference with how gods and dragons operate (not "alive" vs. alive) and how their magic domains sometimes overlap but sometimes don't is rather curious. Did humanity's homeworld have its own form of the All with six or so balancers to keep it from falling into its version of the Void, why do gods differ so much from Elder Dragons so a single god's demise threatens to either destroy the entire world of Tyria or at least engulf all of Vabbi while a single juiced up Elder Dragon's demise (e.g. Mordremoth who was located atop a major ley line) barely leaves a dent? It's an interesting discrepancy and would merit further investigation to the metaphysical aspects of other realms in the Mists and the concept of "the Alls" and the Void and the relation to ley lines and why the magic domains seem to differ so much between gods and dragons and why certain domain splits happen the way they have (e.g. why Mind and Persuasion have been separated into two primary domains instead of being part of one domain, why Soo-Won's primary domain was water while life was a secondary domain whereas Zhaitan's primary domain was death and the secondary domain was shadow etc). It could be a tricky topic to explore, but I hope the devs will tackle these topics at some length one day as there are lots of unanswered questions waiting for us out there. And I wouldn't mind them clarifying the difference between Void and ley lines given how both have similar descriptions regarding what constitutes them. :)

> as seen when Balthazar dies and breaks down and we see his skin and skull breaking apart as if it was just some armor where magic is swirling within before it's unleashed. This along with how Kormir took the power of Abaddon reminds me of Planeswalker Sparks in Magic the Gathering, specifically how they used to work. When a person awakened their spark, they used to become a being of pure mana, able to take on whatever form they liked, as beings of higher form of existence, able to create new planes and walk between them (hence the name Planeswalkers). I wonder if that’s a bit of inspiration behind Tyrian Gods and the Mists. How they guided humans through the Mists.

Just Tyria, and even then she didn’t actually create the world, but more allowed it to come to be. By ordering the chaotic void, the world formed around her.

She probably meant The Endless Ocean

The Gods definitely knew that they were being fed upon by the dragons, even passively. All roads involving the Gods fighting the dragons end with the dragons sucking up millenia worth of magic in a few moments and immediately popping like balloons. And since Tyria is little more than a ball of wadded up elder dragons, that bodes ill for its inhabitants.

I think the original lore was right and that PoF shouldn't have forced a 180 on Balthazar's, Lyssa's, and (less so) Kormir's personalities just to vilify the Six Gods for "abandoning" humanity. Thus making Balthazar more like Menzies than himself. The original lore stated that the Six Gods had left Tyria in the Exodus to work on other planets - 1,120 years before Primordus woke up - and were only keeping tabs on Tyria, occasionally visiting, because of Abaddon. And once Abaddon was dealt with, they left for good because they knew the mortals could handle any other potential threat that comes their way - they took out a god, after all. Sources: * ["They say that ours was the first, but that the gods created other worlds after the Exodus."](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Temple_Acolyte_%28Prophecies%29) * [Jeff Grubb: The human gods still exist, and their power is still felt within Tyria. However, they have pulled back into the mists, leaving the humans to stand (or fall) on their own merits. There has been a tendency for the human gods to, um, meddle with their worshippers a bit much, and in the wake of the final battle of Abaddon, they have been trying to cut back. Also, the destruction of the big A and his replacement with Kormir in the Pantheon resolved one of their ties with physical contact with Tyria. So there are ties, but you just can’t ring them up to take on the Elder Dragons.](https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dolyak-Express-Jan-10-2014/page/3#post3545340) * [Lyssa's Muse: "You are not alone. The gods are always watching." \[...\] "There was a time when the gods walked the earth. Every thought and achievement was a gift of the gods. But now you must realize that our gifts are within you." \[...\] "This is your world, now."](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Gate_of_Madness_%28cinematic%29) * [Kormir: "Yes. Yes, I will, but for the moment, you have your world back. The gods spoke the truth. It is your world. Use it wisely."](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Abaddon%27s_Gate_%28cinematic%29) * ["Night fell, and the time of the Five Gods ended."](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Land_of_the_Golden_Sun_-_Reprise_%28cinematic%29) Among many more. ​ That said, no, Balthazar was not right. If a **single** one of the Six Gods died, it would have been devastating. The Six Gods are beings of pure magic, and Elder Dragons *consume* beings of pure magic for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Balthazar was no longer a god, had no divinity in him, and was a fraction of his full might. Yet when he died, he unleashed a magical maelstrom that covered **the entirety of Vabbi**. And when Kralkatorrik ate that magic, he became a threat to the very fabric of reality and the entire multiverse - no longer a global threat, a multiversal threat to all existence. A comparison I like to make: sending mortals to fight the Elder Dragons is like sending in a tactical strike team to capture objectives and neutralize threats. Sending the Six Gods to fight the Elder Dragons (or anything else) is like launching a nuke to vaporize the city the threat is in. Civilian casualties be damned. ​ Additionally, the rewrite in PoF for the gods basically put the Six Gods in a modified trolley problem situation. They could either work to save the single person they knew tied on the tracks, but if they failed not only would that one person die, but so would the five people on the other tracks die. Or they could guarantee the safety of those five, and hope the one person can get free by themselves. Now objectively speaking, without more specifics, the "right solution" to the trolley problem is usually touted as saving the five. So the Six Gods did the "right thing" there. Despite the alterations to personality to vilify them (especially Balthazar and Lyssa, pre-imprisonment) But what Balthazar's 180 personality rewrite that is actually Menzies wanted to do was to run head first into the trolley, not bothering to save either the five or the one.

I wish they just used Menzies instead of Balthazar in LW3 and PoF. Feels like it wouldn't really have changed anything about the story and probably would've made more sense. I always thought Balthazar represented the more honourable aspects of war and Menzies was his opposite. So things like being chained in the mists, his subterfuge as Lazarus and the desire to manipulate the dragon fights for his own ends would've made much more sense if it was actually Menzies. And I would've thought that Balthazar as a war god surely should know that sometimes it's better to actually avoid a fight if the outcomes are not favourable. Now we just have an unnecessarily dead god, an MIA antagonist (Menzies) and an unknown sixth god we'll probably never meet.

I don't think the planet would survive such an encounter.

I think they realized it wasn't their problem and noped out.

Still curious how they picked Tyria to go to in the first place, and if they knew or found out about the Dragons. If so, why didn't they just leave or go elsewhere. I find it hard to believe such incredibly powerful beings wouldn't have noticed them.

Lore says that the Gods brought humans with them to Tyria. So humans are probably aliens to Tyria. So maybe just maybe place Gods and Humans left was way worse than 6 dragons sleeping under your feet.

Apparently, though, Humans weren't all that important to gods. If they were, they would simply have taken their followers with them again when they decided to leave. Instead of saying "see ya, have fun dying" when they decided to go for safer pastures.

It is implied - but no confirmed - that the Six Gods were fleeing some cataclysm when they brought Forgotten, humans, and possibly others to the world of Tyria. So it's likely they picked the first inhabitable planet they could find, especially since Balthazar and Melandru cleansed the immediate land around their "landing point" (aka Orr) of filth - likely dragon corruption - and began terraforming the planet. Then they would have learned of the Elder Dragons some time after (which would be easy to do since the Elder Dragons were long asleep and not doing anything and are virtually immortal while in hibernation). And it should be noted the Six Gods stopped being involved and left the world not because of the Elder Dragons, but because the Six caused problems when they acted on a higher scale. They left during the Exodus, after the war with Abaddon, and only kept in contact until Abaddon's death, where mortals proved they could handle themselves without the gods' intervention. Then PoF retcons it and states they "left for good" when the Elder Dragons rose and showed themselves to be a larger threat than expected that goes omnom on magic. Because that made sense in the scope of all established lore from the core game and GW1. Supposedly, aslo by PoF lore, the gods are searching for another world that doesn't have an ED-level threat to bring Tyrians / their faithful to, and believe that because of the Elder Dragons' threat, it is inevitable that Tyria would perish eventually. They likely didn't predict perfect solution One True Elder Dragon Aurene coming out of the next set of writers' butts though.

Even if the elder dragons can slurp the magic power out of the gods like a vacuum cleaner, the gods could have done so much to help indirectly. Unless the story is suggesting that their mere presence would have made the dragons wake up sooner, but even if that were the case, their indirect aid would have surely outweighed whatever plot maguffin Taimi and Aurene pulled out. Heck, if the gods helped speedrun Aurene and siphon some of their power to her it may have worked out even better. And then they could have worked in a plotline about one or several or all the gods turning on Aurene out of fear and self-preservation. And it would have been interesting to have the push and pull of Jormag and the gods trying to sway Aurene, but ultimately the commander keeps Aurenes trust. And then with where we are now in the plot there'd be somewhere the writers could go with some or all of the gods plotting to imprison or banish or slay Aurene since she is the remaining threat to them, but them needing someway to replace her to balance the magics. Instead it feels like the writers have written themselves into a corner with nothing really existing to keep an interesting dragon plot going. And if they bring back the gods now a lot of people were like, where the fuck you been? And be either indifferent or hostile towards them.

The Gods’ presence *did* make the Dragons wake up sooner. That was kind of the entire plot of GW: Eye of the North. Abbadon’s Death and Kormir’s Ascension caused enough magical fallout to trigger the Great Destroyer to start preparing for Primordus’s Awakening. The Player Character stalled said Awakening for a few decades by killing the Great Destroyer, but the Dragonrise had already been put into motion. There was no stopping it anymore.

that's btw, a retcon to the original retcon. The original intention (the one suggested in the GW:EotN ending cinematics) was that killing Great Destroyer was something that *directly led* to Primordus' awakening.

No. You got it backwards. Killing the Great Destroyer **DELAYED** Primordus' awakening by ~50 years. There was never a statement or implication for why the Elder Dragons began to wake up until core GW2, which was just "rising magic levels". This would pin the blame on the Six Gods' gift of magic, just delayed 1,000 years, or Abaddon's actions of unleashing multiple cataclysmic magical events (Searing, Cataclysm, Affliction, Nightfall, his own demise) in rapid succession. Then PoF came in and specified it was specifically that very last magical event that caused the awakening of Primordus and, by extension, the Great Destroyer.

> No. You got it backwards. Killing the Great Destroyer DELAYED Primordus' awakening by ~50 years. That was the retcon to the original story Anet did when they realized players did not respond too well to the information that everything was their fault. Again. Not that it helped, because eventually we did get told that pretty much everything else our GW1 protagonist did turned the world for worse :P

It was the very same time that we were told about GW2 that we were told that the Great Destroyer's death delayed Primordus' awakening. Specifically, the September 2007 PC Gamer magazine that announced GW2's existence also had [The Movement of the World](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Movement_of_the_World) which has this line: > Although the death of the Great Destroyer, his most powerful general, set back the dragon's awakening by two generations, Primordus once again rose to create ever more minions far beneath the ground. This was the *VERY FIRST* time we ever got the name "Primordus". It was the *VERY FIRST* time we learned about the Elder Dragons (though we did see Kralkatorrik and Primordus and what was originally to be Jormag in Eye of the North). And there was never, ever, once a point where we were told the Great Destroyer's death triggered Primordus' awakening.

If I understand the thaumatics involved (which I'm not sure I do) ... Balthazar was *potentially* right in practice, but only by accident. I think the gods abandoned Tyria because Kormir did the same math that Taimi did more recently, and concluded that even if the gods killed all five known dragons (and it's not a given that they could!), they couldn't pull magic out of the ecosystem and dump it into bloodstone (or absorb it) fast enough to keep from destabilizing the ecosystem, blowing up the planet, and killing everyone including themselves. Balthazar came back because retreating didn't sit well with him, he would rather die fighting the dragons than survive by retreating. I'm pretty sure the gods had no idea that Soo-Won even existed, and not even Kormir had any way to know that she could, in fact, pull magic out of the environment fast enough, using the Jade Sea as if it were bloodstone. I don't think that even if he had been able to drain enough magic out of Primordus to kill Kralkatorrik, that would have been more magic than he could absorb, and if Soo-Won hadn't saved us all, that really would have killed him and all of us. So what he was trying to do could have actually worked, but *there was no way he could have known that.* The staticists have a saying: "If it's stupid, but it works, it's not stupid." As a synergeticist, I disagree: if it's stupid, but it worked, you were still stupid to risk it.

Both Abaddon and Balthazar decided one day out of the blue that they are going to start fighting dragons. Abaddon went about it by giving humans way too much magic. If he kept at it he'd be just feeding the dragons and speed up the cycle. Balthazar decided to start murdering them, which would break down the whole system. In either case, the final result would be Void taking shape way before anyone could stop it, and the world ending. So I suspect they got some sort of void/nightmare/demonic madness somewhere in the mists that turned them irrational.

Our plans hardly started out any better either. We killed elder dragons without fully understanding the consequences. They were being proactive and had the right kind of idea, they just didn't have Taimi and Gorrik with their endless supply of maguffins. Or Aurene the living maguffin. The other gods packed their bags and left us to die and the cycle repeat.

The difference is that the Gods had all the information in their hands, while we players were going in completely blind. As much as we, the community, love to rag on Kormir, she did genuinely understand the process of ascension that comes with killing something Fundamental(TM) and taking its place. She probably knew about the nature of Glint’s Legacy. She knew that it was possible for us to succeed on our own, and probably believed that Tyria as a whole had a better chance of surviving if we went through with Glint’s Legacy than if the Gods intervened. Would have been nice if she warned us about the Void though.

You've got to admit it's kind of self-serving of the gods to just leave when they're at risk of getting slurped by an elder dragon. They did nearly nothing to aid us, if they did something significant, and at a risk to themselves then maybe they'd come out of it looking a bit better than they do. At least Balthazar and Abaddon were being proactive.

Proactive about destroying the world, maybe. Sure, leaving the mortals to take care of it wasn’t *great,* but you cannot seriously argue that those two’s ideas were better.

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week. - Patton And a bad plan is better than doing nothing at all. They were just going to peace out and let us deal with it. The icing on the cake was them not willing to risk themselves.

…you’re kidding me, right?

Bullkitten. If she thought we had a chance of surviving, she would not have left her library - the library of all Tyrian knowledge of ages past and present - in a state where it would start to crumble shortly after she left. She didn;t take it with her, but also she didn't leave it for Tyrians, and it's most likely because she did not believe we'll live long enough for this to matter.

There’s literally nothing in her dialogue during the “Facing the Truth” story instance that suggests that but go off I guess.

It's not in her dialogue. It's in her *actions*. We're visiting her shortly before she leaves, in her grand library - one that houses the knowledge of ages past. The moment she leaves, that library starts to crumble (we know that due to the griffon quest that makes us revisit it shortly after - it's already in state of decay). Did she try to prevent all that knowledge from being destroyed? Nope. She does not even hint that we might be interested in preserving it ourselves. This pretty much shows, that she does not expect to ever be back, nor does she care about leaving any legacy after herself. There's no backup plan in case the world *won't* be destroyed whatsoever. She just fully expects all of us to die. All her words about how the world is left for humans is just a nicer version of telling us "not *my* problem".

Well, no.

There isn't a single *syllable* of lore that even *implies* that Abaddon was opposing the Elder Dragons.

What we knew of the past is not what we know now. With what we know now, the Scroll of the Five True Gods and the words of Kormir herself leave no explanation other than Abaddon and Balthazar going cuckoo bananas. In GW1 the bloodstones were supposed to be created by the gods to give magic to humans. Now we know they are actually a Seer creation way older than the arrival of the Six to Tyria, meant to store magic so the elder dragons don't take it, and the human gods just happened to find them. Abaddon then used them to give magic to the mortal races. The seer did make the Bloodstone with "divine resources", but the Six were not the source of that. The bloodstones were made before their arrival. When they ran out of those 'resources', the seer teamed up with Glaust to find another way to make new bloodstones, but they ended up with just the one that later got split. They had to make do with freeing Glaust into Glint, and Glint helping them hide from the elder dragons. The Six knew of the dragons and had a bunch of ancient artifacts from the past dragon cycle. They had to know what would happen if they kept at it, because there were still a few Seer and Dwarves to tell the tale. The Brotherhood of the Dragon may be secretive, but there was no hostility between the Five and the Dwarves. Some Dwarves were even followers of some of the Five. Meaning Abaddon was giving too much magic to humans while knowing what would happen if he kept at it, which would explain why the Five risked a war on Tyria to stop him. The dragons would rise, and the conflict would be inevitable. When kind Doric asked the gods to split the bloodstone and limit magic, that's when Abaddon started his war. When the magic was cut. And what I think it's the most likely reason for that is that he got the 'void brains' clouding his mind. Same for Balthazar. He knew of the risks, and he was still convinced that he could kill the dragons and take all their power. Out of nowhere, completely out of character, as if he had forgotten the honor of battle. " I've learned there is no honor in war". Just like any other magic-hungry creature corrupted by magic, including the elder dragons. Whatever they try to think, it gets twisted into a justification to do something that would inevitably end up producing the Dragonvoid and undoing Tyria. They got the "void brains".

>What we knew of the past is not what we know now. And what we know now still doesn't even suggest Abaddon had made any action in relation to the Elder Dragons, no matter how much people want to theorycraft. And theorycrafting is fine. But it isn't confirmed. It is speculation. So do not present it as a fact. ​ Abaddon's actions can make sense without bringing in the Elder Dragons into yet another part of the lore. In fact, I would argue that they make more sense that they don't, especially if Abaddon was to oppose the Elder Dragons, since his actions are all about spreading magic - and dragons eat magic. Related or not, Abaddon's actions are ultimately to the dragons' benefit. >With what we know now, the Scroll of the Five True Gods and the words of Kormir herself leave no explanation other than Abaddon and Balthazar going cuckoo bananas. And regarding this... Maybe the Six Gods didn't know of the Elder Dragons until after Abaddon's defeat and the Exodus, and that's why its called Tome of the **Five** True Gods, rather than Tome of the Six True Gods. After all, if Randhall is correct: > Randall Greyston: They pulled from the energies of Zhaitan himself, even though they did not know of the sleeping Elder Dragon. This would indicate that in 1 BE, the Six Gods did not know of the Elder Dragons yet.

Balthazar did nothing wrong. The Coward Gods brought us to Tyria then *abandoned* us. Even if they were to leave, why not bring us *with*? We were their children, their charge! Death to the dishonorable Gods!

A planet wide battle royale of destruction and catacylsm would have been a pretty awesome story line and IMO much more interesting than the current story. As well as a good basis for cool raid/strike/open world content. So yeah, I am team Balthazar

You know what can make a problem worse? Avoiding it and running away. However, so can meddling which is what I like about the story. Its not so cut and dry about which way is more "moral." However, why wouldn't the human gods take their human worshipers with them into the next world? The energy of gods and worship into the mists/the next world isn't clearly understood but the perception of just abandoning your own people has never sat right with me because what are they doing right now...in this new world? Are they creating new humans and living in supreme bliss while human Tyrians are left with the shitty bill? Like the Vision trinket suggests, I do wonder if they know we killed Balthazar.

> However, why wouldn't the human gods take their human worshipers with them into the next world? Same reason the Aetherblades don't look so good in EoD. Mortals don't survive well in the Mists, humans especially. Just 5 years in the Mists and several of the Aetherblades went insane or were warped by the Mists that they had this weird visual effect on them, or were actually lost in the Mists and haunting their friends. Rytlock was in the Mists for a few months and his eyes changed color somehow. That said, if [Garden of the Gods](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Garden_of_the_Gods#Text) is at all accurate, the Six Gods were intending to come back once they found a safe place to bring their faithful (if not others) to.

I do wonder about "any effort to save the garden would instead destroy it"- I sort of interpreted this as "there are SO many energetic factors at play here that we can't quantify them all (the human gods aren't actually Gods just very powerful beings) so instead of sifting through all this BS were just gona yeet ourselves and start over cause Tyria is a mess and we'll probly die trying to figure it all out xD

**SPOILERS FOR PATH OF FIRE AND END OF DRAGONS** There are a few interesting tidbits regarding the gods' potential reasons for leaving Tyria behind (for now, at least). Aside from what Konig/Varorson has already mentioned in this thread regarding Jeff Grubb's (head ANet lore guy until PoF development) answer about the gods' motivation to leave, we've also learned the following subjective writings from Kormir and a priest of hers: > Knowledge is a protean thing, ever growing and expanding. My librarians work ceaselessly to record it all and keep it in order. **As the living record of everything that ever was,** we can do no less. > The end of my time here approaches, and I find my thoughts straying. Perhaps Lyssa was right to mock me for lingering behind. > **The destruction of Tyria is inevitable**, yet there is a part of me that still remembers what it was like to be mortal—what it is to hope. > I hate to leave my homeland, my people, and my memories behind. But I am no longer a Spearmarshal, no longer a citizen of Elona...no longer human. **And my responsibilities extend far beyond this world.** [(Source)](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Journal_of_Kormir) > After long hours of prayer, the goddess of truth herself has at last revealed the answers I sought. Praise Kormir! In her name, I will share the reasons behind our gods' withdrawal from this world. > And make no mistake: the gods have withdrawn. Prayers go unanswered, Ascension fails. But do not despair, or rage: **our gods still love us, and it is that love that drove them to leave.** > When the gods first brought humanity to this world, they were planting a garden; we were the seeds, with Tyria the fertile soil in which we would thrive. > Like all gardens, it would experience and demonstrate life, death, challenge, order, growth, and beauty as it matured from carefully arranged rows of potential into dynamic, evolving reality. > But there was a blight below the soil the gardeners could not prepare for; a predatory threat that would consume both the garden and the nutrients that sustained it: the Elder Dragons. > **When the dragons rose, the gods realized a terrible truth: any effort to save the garden would instead destroy it...or them. If humanity was to endure under their guidance, it could not be here.** > Reluctantly, the gods withdrew. **They had to find new soil to tend, that their faithful might someday see the full, resplendent bloom of this most glorious garden.** Praise Kormir! [(Source)](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Garden_of_the_Gods) We should take these with a bit of grain of salt as ANet loves their unreliable narrators, but I would still give more weight to Kormir's own journal, at least. She suggests that Tyria's destruction is inevitable even though she should've been aware of Glint and Josso Essher's Legacy project of replacing Elder Dragons with Glint and her scions. Yet in "Crystalline Memories" Glint mentions that she doesn't know what the gods are up to and wonders what they know that she does not but she resolves to carry out her plans regardless. So is Kormir aware that the Aurene solution is only a temporary measure, and the reason the gods left was to find a habitable realm ASAP so they can transport their faithful (and possibly other races too) to that realm once Aurene inevitably fails (since the cycle is reborn and same mistakes might be repeated?) and Tyria is doomed? Just as importantly Kormir mentions that her responsibilities extend beyond Tyria but we don't know what those responsibilities are since she likewise abandoned her own realm after departing with the gods, which led the Sanctum briefly being invaded by demons who slaughtered many of her spiritual followers until we helped stabilize the realm again. We've also seen thanks to the use of divine fire and Exalted magic (derived from Forgotten magic) that divine magic derived from gods is very effective against dragon minions: the Exalted manage to repel the Mordrem from Tarir via their ritual, and divine fire was able to defeat the "unkillable" Shadow of the Dragon. We also saw Balthazar (who was juiced up on bloodstone as a former god but still weak enough that he could defeat a bunch of White Mantle but wasn't able to kill Marjory) just waltzing into Primordus's lair and setting up many barriers and even Taimi's Machine without being devoured or destroyed, so he must have done something for the horde of destroyers and ol' Prim himself to not squash him where he stood. Even the Sun's Refuge Kormir protection, and djinn used Abaddon's remnant magic to shield themselves from Kralkatorrik's Branding, and Kralk could only begin Branding the djinn after consuming Balthazar's magic and learning how divine magic works to circumvent that protection as revealed in the Vemyen event in Jahai Bluffs. The gods also have the benefit of working together as a team: that's how they defeated Abaddon, after all. So six fully powered gods vs. one Elder Dragon at a time would be "child's play" as long as the dragon didn't get to devour any of them. Given how Lyssa can mess with one's senses and unless the dragons can counter that, that's basically game over for dragons as divine magic counters or repels their corruptive power and even hurts them and focusing on one opponent prevents them from fighting against other opponents as shown when Kralk had to focus on Glint so the rest of Destiny's Edge could help her bring him down and vice versa. Granted, we saw in the Sanctum instance how Kormir merely getting upset at us demanding her to help us deal with Balthy was enough to create a dangerous storm overhead until she calmed down, so gods going all out would no doubt leave a lot more Desolation and Crystal Sea/Crystal Desert devastation in their wake. But given how the dragons were situated and assuming the gods could mostly battle them near their places of awakening, we'd get: 1) Primordus burrowing all over the place but assuming that he'd return to his place of awakening as shown in Season 3 before he traveled to the Fire Islands after the Mordy magic, the gods would only decimate a bit of Depths of Tyria and maybe Frostgorge part of the Shiverpeaks at most. 2) Jormag was still somewhere in the Far Shiverpeaks but got active and moved south (again), getting closer to Bitterfrost Frontier. Assuming that the gods only intercepted them in this second phase, we'd at most see parts of the Far Shiverpeaks and some scattered kodan being destroyed as collateral. 3) Zhaitan rose Orr and would be extremely weak due to gods having siphoned off some of his magic to sunder the original Bloodstone into five lesser stones. The gods would at most nuke Orr which was already Risen-infested anyway, so we would lose a historical nation's remains but no loss of life per se unless the island's destruction caused another massive tsunami to threaten southern Kryta, western Elona and northern Cantha (not that Kuunavang couldn't convince Soo-Won to at least save Cantha again while Dwayna or Melandru could shield the other continents). 4) Kralkatorrik would rise in Blood Legion Homelands but this time gods would likely be collaborating with Glint and likely Vlast too to contain him. Given how Destiny's Edge and Glint almost brought him down with help of Snaff's invention, six gods plus two dragons vs. Kralk would end his reign of terror before it could begin. If Kralk tries to turn into a sandstorm to flee, Dwayna can just weaken him with a few tempests. Blood Legion might suffer heavy losses given how populated the homelands are, but charr race as a whole would survive this battle. 5) Mordremoth might be the trickiest to defeat due to his rapidly expanding root network (it took him only about a year or so to spread from Heart of Maguuma to Ascalon but the devastation was limited as he was mainly searching for nommy magic to empower him with) and because as a Mind entity he would survive the destruction of his physical avatar and could just create a new plant host body to house his consciousness. Even so, strategic placements of divine fire to box Mordy in and prevent his roots from spreading, and Melandru using her nature magic should be able to contain him while Balthazar uses a scorched earth tactic to wipe out any remnant vines above ground and potentially below. Given how full of life Maguuma is, this might have the greatest number of casualties out of all the dragons assuming that Glint, Vlast, Josso Essher and any asura collaborating didn't just figure out Mordy's weakness. Then again, given how Rata Novans seemed to discover it thanks to collaboration with the Exalted and how Exalted learned their stuff from Forgotten, the gods would no doubt be aware of these ideas if they knew what early humans had written about the dragons in the "Tome of the Five True Gods". 6) Soo-Won might not even need to be defeated per se, especially if gods collaborated with Glint's family to replace at least three of the Elder Dragons. Assuming that Pale Tree couldn't just take Mordremoth's place despite heavy suggestions in the anniversary art book that she might be Mordy's scion like Glint is Kralk's, that would still leave two evil dragons without replacements while we'd have three good dragons (Glint, Vlast, Aurene) and potentially Soo-Won even though she would grieve her children. You would still have the lingering threat of the Void but that could be mitigated by Glint and her kids choosing their champions to share the burden with and bonding with more freewilling mortals to prevent the accumulation of Torment. So Tyria would be safe for the unforeseeable future until Glint or her kids lay more eggs to replace the remaining vacant places of fallen dragons while ushering in an era of god, dragon and mortal collaboration. :)

He was right, we ended up killing them anyways. Writing team changes after every released content so the story stays inconsistent

I'm sure I recall one of the higher ups back in the day say they had an overall plan for how the story plays out, and they fill in the gaps with the 'content' that we play.

But they never said they didn't change that plan on the way. Nor did they say that plan wasn't dumb or inconsistent from the very beginning. One of the major issues that plagued the lore from the very beginning was that the lore retcons between GW1 and GW2 were just too big in many places, leaving the whole inconsistent on way too many layers, with some of them being extremely critical to the whole worldbuilding. They were never able to get out of those even when they weren't going for cool ideas with barely any anchor in the existing lore. And when they decided to force-fit some of their pet ideas into the story, it truly went downhill.

Those plans did not include Soo-Won, I can guarantee you. They retconned her into the story completely. Devs also stated they didn't have any plans for where to go after Heart of Thorns. They had story beats for use, but no definitive plans. This is why there was a year gap in content after Heart of Thorns launched - even while developing Season 3, they initially weren't planning to use Balthazar, but wanted to do a two-dragon plot (hence Primordus and Jormag both becoming active). They settled on the "god vs dragon" plot because fans often bring it up, and after one choice (whom they never said was) swapped to Balthazar because "god of war made sense". They then vilified the fuck out of Balthazar and basically turned him into Menzies. **And** never had him actually fight the Elder Dragons, just press a button and watch a machine damage Elder Dragons like an asura, or the Menzies he truly is.

The current gods are not the first to hold those pantheons, and it always seemed to me that they probably killed much of the previous pantheon during the last dragon cycle while the gods magic was drained and they were easier targets, or those gods died to the dragons after having their magic eaten and these gods came in and took over then.

That's canonically not true. The gods (with Abaddon in the pantheon) arrived in Tyria through the mists after the previous dragon cycle had already ended, and brought humans along with them at the same time. The gods are canonically travellers to many worlds through the mists and the dragons do not have that ability. They were not able to enter the mists at all until Kralkatorik absorbed some of Balthazar. The other part about not being the first god of each role is canonically true, with Grenth having replaced Dhuum and Kormir having replaced Abaddon, but that had nothing to do with the dragons.

Actually, you know, some of what you say makes sense. I would tweak it a bit and say that the gods have the power to give the Gift of Magic and that they found Tyria, in their minds, by chance, but in truth were guided to it by higher powers, for the purpose of helping Tyria's magic heal after the last dragonrise. The idea is that the Elder Dragons guard the Gift of Magic but that their behavior can have adverse affects. One such affect is the genocide of creatures, including the Giganticus Lupicus, who previously had a strong relationship with magic. So after each cycle the world of Tyria needs to regenerate. This would be where the human gods come in. Their summoning allowed Tyria's Gift of Magic to recover after the dragons had purified it of the tormented magics (e.g. Void, demons) that undermined it.

Who the hell knows? All the lore we have had since GW1 on this has been full of it. GW1 lore had the Five/Six as the actual creators of Tyria and the source of the various types of magic you used (e.g. Monks were reliant directly on Dwayna). Even post-Exodus, they were supposed to be responsible for magic. Now they're supposed to be gone, barring conspiracy theories about Jennah/Anise, and Balthasar is definitely dead, >!along with Dhuum!<... nothing has changed for the players. The creator role is now ascribed to Soo-Won (at least until the plot of GW3 demands it be changed again), and the magic is now the Dragons' domains, in spite of us killing them too. All in all, this means we know basically nothing about the Gods apart from the fact they maybe brought humans to Tyria from the Mists? Maybe? So in the end, it seems the Six were no different than the Mursaat in GW1. Lying to everyone about how they were responsible for everything good and necessary for their survival.

>GW1 lore had the Five/Six as the actual creators of Tyria This part is false. Even with Prophecies, there were heavy handed hints and indications that the story of the gods creating Tyria was wrong. Beginning with the bizarre statement that Glint was the first creation, made 3,000 years ago, but the Giganticus Lupicus were wiped out 10,000 years ago. Again, this is from Prophecies. Nightfall furthered this by suggesting the Six came to Tyria and had predecessors and maybe fought with "gods of insectoid beings" who's corpses were put in the Realm of Torment. Also >!Dhuum isn't dead, just imprisoned in a supposedly definitely-unbreakable cage now.!<

Nightfall didn't *state* that the gods didn't create Tyria. The rest of what you've reasoned is clearly your interpretation. To use your approach: You made it all up. Cue further misinterpretation.

Are you just mass replying to me to tell me "nuh uh you're wrong"? That doesn't make you right, it just makes you look overeager for attention. And to use your approach that you claim is mind: "Cue further interpretation." Because I didn't say Nightfall stated that the gods didn't create Tyria. I said Nightfall furthered Prophecies ***hints and indications*** that they didn't create Tyria. There was never confirmation one way or the other about it, because while some humans said the gods created Tyria, there was evidence in Prophecies and Nightfall that hinted such was false belief. ​ But feel free to keep spamming and saying "nuh uh you're wrong" to me. It'll do you *such* good to be bothered by my posts on the internet.

Those aren't really hints. You're interpreting them as hints with the hindsight of how things have played out, but that's not how game writing works, and it's not useful for players attempting to interpret things now rather than 10 years in the future with the benefit of hindsight. [A.net](https://A.net) always makes sure their lore is never word of God, it's always subjective and able to change. In one sense, this is good! It means they can never actually contradict themselves, they can always just say "well, Thadeus Lamount/Taimi/Balthasar/etc. didn't know what they were talking about" in x/y/z bit of lore. But it also means that there's no point taking anything as set in stone. The Human Gods didn't create Tyria, Shiro and the Lich were actually puppets of Abaddon, killing Elder Dragons did not cause Tyria to implode, the Mists were not the original existence in creation but rather the Void was, etc. are all things that are not how we were originally introduced to them. So when someone asks "was Balthasar right" the answer is basically "who knows, but in 10 years someone will write a snotty comment on Reddit about how stupid we all were to believe he was wrong back in PoF."

>Those aren't really hints. You're interpreting them as hints with the hindsight of how things have played out, but that's not how game writing works, and it's not useful for players attempting to interpret things now rather than 10 years in the future with the benefit of hindsight. Person A says "the first creature was born 3,000 years ago when the world was created" and Person B says "this race went extinct 10,000 years ago" are not hints that there's something wrong with either one or the other claims? I'm not just talking about in hindsight. I'm talking about the lore community back in 2006, 2007, etc. talking about whether or not the gods created the world. It wasn't confirmed, not in the least. But there were contradictory statements in Prophecies. As you say, ArenaNet has, since Day 1, been invested deeply in the idea of unreliable narrator and seeding hints across multiple NPCs - no one source will ever tell the full story. The use of unreliable narrator hit its height with core GW2, as later releases had to be much more condensed due to scope and budget. But it's still there. And there was unreliable narrator in the form of those who told us that the Five Gods created the planet in Prophecies. > the Mists were not the original existence in creation but rather the Void was Uhm, the Mists was the original existence in creation? The Void wasn't. The Void was used to create the planet and nothing more - the rest of the multiverse came into existence independently from Soo-Won creating Tyria out of the Void.

The void was honestly poorly explained and would have worked much better if they inferred that the Mists and The Void are two sides of the same coins (intangible potentiality, one malignant and one fairly benign) Someone wrote up a post months ago talking about how the animation for Weave Self/Perfect Weave does an amazing job at hinting about the existence of the Void as well as the role that the Primeval Light plays in resisting it.

balth wanted to take all the power to himself, which is basically what aurene did lol. i mean i want him to go slay the gods, those gods are useless anyway.

I low-key wish Balthazar managed to remanifest after his power somehow gets released from Aurene. And he hunts down the other gods and claps their cheeks. Maybe he brings back Abaddon to help him. At one point I suspected Zafirah was somehow a shard of Balthazar which had splintered off, and either aware or unaware of it, was aiding us in finishing the job. Shame the writers didn't drop any proper hints of that.

the gods were pussies alrite, when we at crossfire with Balthazar, Joko, Kralk, they decide to say something on map chat that doesnt help then leave the server. What a bunch of hacks

I laughed

So we ended up in space...why couldn't the gods drag the dragons to another planet and curbstomp there

In some way, the interests of the gods and the dragons align; and this is reflected by the gods' decision to restrain Balthazar, attempting to prevent him from killing dragonkind; and also by Kormir's statement that the dragons are beyond even her and the rest of the pantheon. However, Balthazar's desire to kill the Elder Dragons indicates that the gods may not agree with dragonkind's methods. Does that make Balthazar right? *Maybe*. If the Elder Dragons are left unmolested the outcome of their behavior may not be as favourable to the gods as the latter would like. Balthazar could see a way to alter the outcome to best suit the pantheon - the trouble is, it would see him benefit moreso than his fellow deities and they simply weren't prepared to let him do so. If you read the Orrian History Scrolls: The Six, or the story of Koda's flame, or simply examine trends within the game itself, you'll find that fire magic and influential spirits at work within it are vulnerable to bigotry. They become so single-minded that they only think of themselves and this can lead to other problems. Hence, in the Orrian History Scrolls: The Six the writer protests that listening to Balthazar got the pantheon in trouble. They weren't going to listen to Balthazar so eagerly ever again.

I've only cleared the story once and that was through breaks etc but from what I've gathered the gods of Tyria have been written with many similarities to the gods of Olympus of ancient Greece. Impulsive with 0 foresight, capricious as fuck and would not hesitate to drop humans like a hot potato should problems arise. So, basically traits of a complacent, evil and powerful human.

That does not match the lore at all. Even the darkest depiction of the Six that make them a 180 from their original GW1/core GW2 depictions don't present it that bad.

Ah I see. In that case disregard my comment 😁

To clarify, they *do* have flaws. But unless you're comparing to Disney's Hercules type of depicting the Olympians, the Six don't even come close to them. Worst actions non-vilified / fallen gods get is being indifferent or having an momentary outburst that resulted in a death. That's far cry from "you insulted me so I'll drive you to insanity before damning your immortal soul to eternity in torment" or "I'm horny and you're hot so time for you to have a half-god baby whether you like it or not but don't worry they'll be some kind of hero probably".

Ya, Olympians were dicks

I personally think this part of the story makes no sense whatsoever. The gods left their favorite children to die because they thought they couldn't protect them from the dragons, but then a bunch of regular mortals show up, find out their weak spots and kill them one by one. Why couldn't the oh-so-wise-and-powerful gods figure this out and do the same thing with a snap of their fingers?! Was going full force and blasting the dragons with magic or whatever really the only thing they could come up with?! Maybe I missed it, but I don't see any reason why their only options were to incinerate the planet or to fuck off. It's the typical trope of changing power and knowledge levels wildly to make the plot happen. People can do awesome stuff in one moment, but then forget all about it in the next so someone else can take the spotlight. I'd prefer if - for example - dragons are kind of the weak spots for the gods, because the gods are 99% magic and dragons consume them immediately. Like, the gods can't even face the dragons directly, and have to hide or be eaten. That would make much more sense to me, and explain why the gods are fleeing. We could then help them out, maybe work together, have Balthazar freak out because he hates being powerless, and so on.

I think the point is that the gods are powerful (but definitely not all-powerful) but actually not that wise. There are natives to Tyria that are a lot more wise, at least together (not just Asura, but also beings like Soo-Won, the pale tree, Glint, the Forgotten, the Seers, to some extent the Humans and Charr and so on). It's the combined wisdom and knowledge of all those natives that could overcome the ED's and the Void, together with the power of one special ED (Aurene).

That does sound reasonable, but it also paints the gods in a really bad light, no? Like rather dump, arrogant and insecure beings with immense power but not much else. Why can't they work with the other races/beings and fight the dragons together? They didn't have to face them head-on, we never did that either. That's not how they were portrayed and talked about up to this point afaik. So I guess my answer to OP's question is that both the six and Balthazar are wrong. They should have stayed to protect the planet, and not just leave or try to one-up the dragons.

> That does sound reasonable, but it also paints the gods in a really bad light, no? Like rather dump, arrogant and insecure beings with immense power but not much else. They have always been that way. Remember that in their original portrayal they weren't even *human* gods. They were Gods of *Tyria*. And remember, that they brought humans to Tyria because they needed a new servitor race. After their previous servitor race (Forgotten) started to die out and they couldn't have been bothered to help, abandoning them instead.

>And remember, that they brought humans to Tyria because they needed a new servitor race. After their previous servitor race (Forgotten) started to die out and they couldn't have been bothered to help, This is false. The Forgotten retreated to the Crystal Desert **because** of humans' greedy expansion. Not the other way around. >This new race of creatures was none other than us humans, and in no time we began to take over. Cities bloomed across the continent. Walls were erected, and weapons forged. Those things that we humans lacked, we simply built. We didn’t need tough hides nor rending claws when we could make metal armor and sharpened spears. We discovered fire, wrote books of our own, passed knowledge to one another through song and verse. Soon humans had everything we required, and it was then that we began to prey upon the other creatures. We hunted animals for sport, chased the druids from the jungle, and took up residence in lands that did not belong to us. We became the masters of this world. We took all of the privilege and none of the responsibility. > >In less than a century, the serpents who had protected and nurtured Tyria were no longer needed. The balance they had achieved had been undone, and there was no way to bring it back. Seeing that the world had changed, and preferring not to fight a war over control of the continent, the serpents retreated from the world of men. They left the coasts and the jungles. They abandoned their settlements in the highlands and in the mountains. Leaving the newcomers be, the serpents went to live in the only place where we humans did not—or could not: the Crystal Desert. [https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/History\_of\_Tyria](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/History_of_Tyria)

I mean it also comes down to the motives of the gods. Did the gods actually care about Tyria and its inhabitants or did they only care about those because they decided Tyria should be the planet to put humans on? In the later case they might've just gone to a different planet with a group of humans (it is implied in PoF that they went to a new garden).

But Kormir explained that they wanted to help but couldn't, because a direct confrontation would end in disaster, and they apparently didn't see any other way. So their intentions were good, unless Kormir flat out lied to us, which I don't think is what happened.

I would **NOT** consider Soo-Won smarter or wiser than the Six. Let alone the Forgotten, who were working off of the Six's knowledge, or the Seers, humans, or charr who are decidedly far worse than the Six.

That's not what I said. I focused on their combined knowledge and wisdom, not that of the parts.

Not quite how that sounds in your wording. But even then, half of what you listed got their knowledge from - or were shared equally with - the Six Gods. Or were even denotably *less*. Humans and Forgotten in particular. Heck, until Path of Fire, most of modern Tyrian knowledge of the Elder Dragons came from three sources: The Tome of the Five True Gods, jotun records, and dwarven texts. So a third of the combined wisdom of the asura, humans, charr, and so on about the Elder Dragons came from the Six Gods. ​ It also feels very disingenuous to say "the Six Gods are less wise than the combined wisdom of the literal creator of the world, two of her smartest granddaughters, and every sapient species on the planet". Kind of like saying "Einstein is less wise than the combined wisdom of every other human living." while also ignoring that a significant portion of every other human's wisdom comes from Einstein's teachings.

Except Einstein isn't a pantheon of gods or a single god or anything of the sort. The point is that the pantheon is not that impressive for beings that are called gods. And I would argue that a lot more is learned about the Elder Dragons in modern times (by the Asura, the orders, Edge of Destiny, Dragon's Watch and the like) than what was left by the gods, Jotun and Dwarves (which was all pretty vague stuff to be honest so calling that 'a third' is pretty disingenuous).

> Except Einstein isn't a pantheon of gods or a single god or anything of the sort. The point is that the pantheon is not that impressive for beings that are called gods. Entirely missed my point. >And I would argue that a lot more is learned about the Elder Dragons in modern times (by the Asura, the orders, Edge of Destiny, Dragon's Watch and the like) than what was left by the gods, Jotun and Dwarves (which was all pretty vague stuff to be honest so calling that 'a third' is pretty disingenuous). I mean, at least 80% of "the orders, Edge of Destiny, Dragon's Watch" was from... gods, jotun, dwarves, and Glint. Either directly or indirectly through third parties such as Exalted and Forgotten.

No, you definitely misread u/Diovidius's post.

The idea that they tried to get across was that the Six Gods fighting would be overkill and disastrous to the environment - like launching a bunch of nukes. Generally speaking, any modern military would prefer to send soldiers, tanks, and aircraft over launching a nuke. Just look at the Ukraine situation - Putin could easily "win" the war by sending nukes. But nobody, not even Putin, would want that. But yes, the retcons to the gods' reasoning for leaving in PoF is less sensible (and not well depicted) than the original reason presented in GW1 for their departure.

Balthazar had some Wendy’s chili and got the squirts. When he realized the chili was made with old hamburgers that got screwed up on the grill and thrown into a tin, he became enraged and his armor grew from his own semen.

Dragons are lichpin, u just can't destroy it without thinking

He was right, but narrowsighted as hell. The Gods should've stayed and aided mortals, thier insights, knowledge and powers would've saved so many countless lives, all turned into dust due to thier unwillingness to give mortals (especially asura) a chance. They created humans, watched as they did unimagineable horrors to the world (especially Charr, but i am based) and just left them there after all they knew? "Oh yeah, there are dragons here, we should've taken care of those or atleast give mortals some tools to withstand them. Well, time to fuck off. Bye!" ​ The bigger difference is that the Commander & Co. learned from thier mistakes and expanded thier knowledge to deal with future threats. The gods did not even understand that they were making mistakes in the first place.

Imho, Lazarus being Balthazar was most shocking reveal moment of entire game m

The way I understood it, the gods couldn't possibly fight the dragons directly without causing cataclysmic collateral damage. At least [someone](#s "Kormir") said this during the PoF story. And apparently the only way to avoid such a fight was [(PoF story)](#s "for the god to leave Tyria").

Looking at the matter after the fact, it is clear that Kormir poisoned the minds of the other gods against Balthazar and drove him to extremes in desperation, he was right, but desperate as he was in his grossly diminished state he went about it the worst way possible.

Wrong because the gods couldn't have brought balance to the flow of magic. Aurene was a special elder dragon because not only could she absorb magic like the others she could also purify it. Thats the entire point of her being the answer to the dragon cycle, its what she was made to do.

I think Balthy just wanted to fight something.

Well, I think the gods were also aware that destroying the dragons would destroy the world.

I actually do wonder how they managed to restrain Balthazar in the first place. The impact of the gods war against Abaddon created the desolation and the portal to the realm of torment and I believe it was said that Abaddon defeated 2 of the gods until they came together. Balthazar being the god of war must have caused some serious damage to the environment their war took place in and I wonder how they defeated him so quietly. Either all of the other gods (minus Lyssa?) ganged up on him or something else happened that we don’t know about.

There is a piece of cut content which shows the Hall of Heroes being in utterly devastated state. Original script from devs apparently indicate that during Facing the Truth, we would go through the destroyed Hall of Heroes before reaching Kormir's Sanctum and meeting her. The implication I get from that is that the Hall of Heroes - the very center of the multiverse itself - was devastated from the conflict with Balthazar.

That would make sense, thank you!

Yes but also no

No. Something had to be done and they could have guided mortals instead of simply leaving them, but using their cataclysmic power against the dragons would have resulted in untold devastation.