If you could become God, just for a moment, and looking at the past and the future all at once, discover a flaw right at the beginning that just fouled everything up from then on, would you feel compelled to just reach out and fix the mistake and go back to your mortal life in a more perfect world, one without pain and suffering?
That’s the question the hero Asura Vloxx wants answered. It was his life’s goal to gain enough power to fix what the gods got wrong — first by allying with the rebellious Inquest, and then stealing the power of the immortal Seers and undergoing a ritual to ascend him to godhood.
Do we help him or try to stop him? And if we decide we need to stop him… how do you kill a god?
Guild Wars 2 not being an RPG, there is actually no option to decide Vloxx was right or, once we gain the godlike powers Vloxx and the Seers all possess, to correct it ourselves.
It all comes down to a final fight where we try to kill Vloxx enough so that he sees our side of the story and backs down, in a fight described by a random player outside the boss portal as “this fight really sucks”.
Readers, it does in fact suck.
The Seer Isgarren brings us into his personal Fractal in order to show us the drawbacks of godlike power before he sends us to confront Vloxx himself. I, as a loyal Asura, was loving it and I was absolutely sure I could rewrite eternity with me at the center and without all those annoying other races. I successfully hid my true intentions from Isgarren as he sent us off to our final confrontation.
Vloxx attempts to convince us one last time to allow him to fix eternity. I was all for it, but the game forced us to try and get him to back down, give up all the godlike power and just become a good citizen who only wants to obey the Wizard overlords.
Vloxx resisted, and so we had to go all Elder Dragon on his finely sculpted ass.
He retreated immediately to a mech suit made of cosmic star-stuff. We, possessed of the exact same godlike powers, chose not to. Why? I dunno.
The fight is in several phases. Vloxx summons weapons as the fight progresses, and these weapons perform mechanics that must be dealt with immediately, or they become more powerful. So you’re dealing with Vloxx attacking with a bunch of AEs and direct attacks, and the weapons doing the same, and while you’re dodging all this and trying to do damage, you’re also trying to handle the mechanics and stay alive.
Of course, this is impossible to do. I switched to heals and just figured if I could keep everyone alive, the others could figure out how to kill it. And somehow we did. Vloxx saw reason, atoned, and allowed himself to be confined in the wizard’s tower until he would die, and we would continue to enjoy this flawed world with us, Commanders all, at the top of the heap.
In the end, even Seer Isgarren is depowered, so there really is nobody left in the world who can challenge us. The Elder Dragons are dead or sleeping, the Wizards are beholden to us, with the one Wizard who could stand in our way neutered. The Asura who in his hubris thought he could fix the world is imprisoned. Somehow, though, nobody is really worried about what we might do.
They should be.
With this last chapter of Guild Wars 2 before Guild Wars 3 comes out, our Sunday nights are going to be a little ad hoc. It’s been Enshrouded recently, but we’ll see what happens afterward. If someone suggested WoW Forever, I’d be inclined to try that… just saying.
