Talk:Undead

As we can see, the Skeletons are part of Undead. Do the skeletons take 20% more damage from Deathbane upgrade too, not just 20% skeletonslaying ?

Piercing vs. Slashing against skeletions
Which one works better? Eryops3 17:55, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Skeletons have +20 armor against piercing, -20 against blunt, and no bonus against slashing. So, to answer the question, slashing. Colombani 23:05, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

The strength an weaknesses of Undeads against different types of damage
Is there no clear information about it? This page doesn't list them at all (apart from a side comment about Ghost not taking double damage from holy). There a bits of info in the subcategories of Undead (skeletons, zombies, mummies etc.), but it's inconsistent. The rule of thumb seems to be that Undead take double damage from holy sources (just from skills, or from wands/staves, too?).


 * I've heard/read occasionally about fire damage being especially effective against undead, but no further details - may be it's only correct against certain subtypes, like skeletons and mummies (= dry undeads burn better?). If so, are ghosts/graiths etc. exempt from this weakness, since there incorporal?
 * As Colombani pointed out, skeletons have +20 AL against blunt damage and -20 AL against piercing damage.
 * Only fleshy undeads like Mummies and Zombies are effected by bleeding, poison and disease

Pleas add to/correct my statements.--85.181.188.116 09:08, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * These variables (mostly monster only skills) are set per creature by the designers, so a full answer can only be given on induvidual articles. Backsword 10:32, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * As Backsword says, some of the resistances/weaknesses of the undeads depend of its species (skeleton, ghosts....) so it's a bad idea to explain each group's resistances/weaknesses in the undead page when each specie has its own page. About your statements...: 1.- I've never read about any undead being weak to fire damage, and I've not felt like doing more damage to them when playing with my elementalist, so I guess no, they're not weak to fire. 2.- Seems like tha'ts true, and so is stated in the skeletons' page so that's enough. 3.-Yes, only fleshy undeads can be affected by such conditions. Anyway, it's clearly stated in the list which undead species are fleshy and which ones aren't. Oh, and about the holy damage from wands and staves, it's doubled as the damage from any other source of holy damage, but keep in mind that the holy damage from weapons it's not armor ignoring, so you could find yourself making pity damages to undead warriors, paragons or undead enemies with boosted armor, even with the damage done doubled. Lhoj 15:26, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks so far for your information. I have to correct myself about Skeleton's armor rating: It's -20 against blunt and +20 against piercind damge, as Colombani wrote, note the other way 'round, as I did above.--85.181.188.116 16:24, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Abominations
Are Abominations considered undead? If I recall correctly, they are, so should they be added to this page as well? I would myself, but not perfectly sure on this. -- Konig/ talk 08:14, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Although they look like giant minions, abominations do not take double damage from holy damage skills and thus can't be considered undead. Lhoj 09:54, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Some undead don't take double holy damage. :/ -- Konig/ talk 10:01, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, but many ghosts are not even considered undead by the game. Anyway, I did some testing with Tyrian Flesh Golems in Rock of Perdition with a q9 sword with +30 pommel and another one with same stats but a deathbane pommel, beeing 15 the lesser and 38 the top damage in both cases after killing bout 4 golems with normal attacks with each sword. So I guess we can conclude Abominations are not undead, or at least Flesh Golems aren't. Lhoj 14:48, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I suppose this is a difference of game mechanics and lore (similar to the Heket page and the case of spirits/ghosts - different in one way, similar in another), as at least in lore those in the Bone Pits are undead of some kind. Thank you for testing this out. -- Konig/ talk 21:01, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Should Undead be in Category: Creature Types?
A few days ago I added a "Category:Creature types" tag to the main page in order to make Undead show up on the list of creature types http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Category:Creature_types. Someone reverted my change with the reason, "No, actually an affiliation" Is there some drawback to having Undead listed as a creature type in addition to an affiliation and, therefore, showing up on that list with the other creature types? LicensedLuny 23:58, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
 * There's been several large debates about how affiliations/types/armies should be handled, here, for example. It is/was a contentious issue, so you may want to propose something there if you'd like to change something relating to it. Manifold [[Image:User_Manifold_Jupiter.jpg|19px]] 00:07, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Using Ebon Vanguard and Palawa Joko's army as an example, a more accurate way to categorize them could be:


 * Creature: Undead (supertype) & Mummie (subtype); Affiliation: Awakened horde (supertype) & Army devision (subtype);
 * Creature: Humanoid/Race (supertype) & Human (subtype); Affiliation: Ascalonian (supertype) & Ebon Vanguard (subtype);

Affiliation/Creature Type
How is it that -every- Undead is affiliated with each other; isnt that like saying every Humanoid and/or Human is affiliated? --Falconeye 20:47, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Undead are not affiliations; there are affiliations within undead (Orrian Undead, Skeletal Army, Awakened Undead/Joko's Army, Ancient Undead/Zoldark's Army, Murakai's Army, and the other random groups found in EN), and the things like zombies, skeletons, ghosts, and mummies (and technically Abominations if one were to go by lore) are subgroups (btw, there needs to be some kind of page or link for subgroups because those are put under creature type which is not completely accurate. -- Konig / talk 20:57, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Looking through it all, it seems that either monsters have two types, or two affiliations - especially when it comes to undead. I'm in fact starting to think "undead" is neither an affiliation nor a creature type. Just a code saying "receives double damage from holy damage" or something. -- Konig / talk 06:16, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thats why I was trying to cover all logical bases (mechanics, lore, common sense, etc.) its alot easier to move/delete/merge then to create new content. Also, how should the Servant of Murakai (Murakai's Army) be classified, and are the "Orian Undead" any way affiliated with Undead Lich, similar to how Awakened and Ancient are to their respective masters? Other then commanding Titans, it was never clear to me as to wheather Lich "MM"-controlled them, or just cut them lose like a plague of rapid dogs (similar to how Shiro unleased his affliction to sow chaos and distract his foes). --Falconeye 07:47, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * The Undead Lich controlled the Orrian undead. And I still think that the non-Zoldar, non-Shards of Orr, and non-Cathedral of Flame undead are Orrian undead (they use similar builds, have only the same models, and have a similar naming system). But that's speculation. -- Konig / talk 08:20, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * In lore, there are different undead 'factions', usually represented by who is controlling the undead: The Lich, Joko, The Mad King, no-one, etc... In mechanics, anything that takes extra damage when hit with an undead-slaying weapon mod is part of the very same undead army. It's like with Hekets, there are there are different tribes of frogmen and toadmen in lore, but they are all 'hekets' internally. Mith[[Image:User MithranArkanere Star.png]]Talk 12:27, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Stygian
Are the Stygian undead? 192.203.160.241 23:41, 14 June 2010 (UTC)
 * No, they are demons - they just look undead. In a similar fashion, abominations while are considered undead in lore are not in game mechanics. -- Konig / talk 00:30, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Afflicted, Sickened and Vampires
Are they technically sub-types of undead in terms of game mechanics, or only in Lore? --Falconeye 06:12, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't think vampires are a subtype of undead in either way (they're closer to blooddrinkers, gaki, and incubii). Afflicted are undead in a way in lore, but not game mechanics (no double damage) just like Abominations. -- Konig / talk 06:22, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Since you added "Sickened" - those are not even dead. They are just diseased, living, people. So no, not undead in any sense. -- Konig / talk 08:20, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Confusion
There was a big debate about it a long, long time ago, so we finally asked a dev. I think it was Andrew McLeod. And he answered the 'rules' that define creatures. And I think that Linsey also stated a bit about that. I would look for the page. But after the change in the Feedback pages, looking of it is hell and would take a while.

This is what I remember of what we know. For game mechanics:
 * Every creature has one affiliation(army).
 * Most creatures, but not all have one type(family). They may not have any, but they will have only one. No subtypes. No supertypes. One type. One example of creature with no type set are the Charr in Ascalon. They are all part of the charr army, but they don't have the charr type set. This happens mostly with old creatures. Newer ones are correctly set.
 * Each creature has a list of 'traits' that can be tweaked, such as health, armor, attributes, being passive, fleshy, immune to certain conditions, etc.
 * And then they can have skills that affect them with extra traits like taking double damage from holy damage, knocking down enemies on criticals or being immune to knock down. One notorius case is all versions of Natural Resistance. Although I think none has been added to any boss page, most Prophecies bosses have one of them equiped.
 * Once in an area, they will have a final 'faction' trait. Each party may or not attack others, but that's not just set from affiliation or type, that set manually for creatures in there. One example of that is seen often in Sorrow's Furnace. In there, there is a bug that sets one of the Stone Summit as ally with some Rebel dredge. Although its type is still dwarf and its affiliation is still stone summit, he's in the same party as some dredge and will attack with them.

And that's all.

Now. You are mixing 'lore' and 'mechanincs'. The wiki uses only lore types and families when the mechanics ones are not known, and they never mix them when we can't investigate if they are the same. In the same way Titans, Shiro'ken, Golems, the bound constructs and even Juggernauts are all constructs created by stuffing souls or spirit in an artificial body, but they are all different ans separate types. The Titans are titans, the Shiro'ken are shiro'ken, the bound constructs re just constructs, the golems are either 'asuran golems' or elementals and the Juggernauts are plants. They are all constructs, but that just lore. So we may note it in the description, trivia or notes, but not in the creature page infobox or the listings. Vampires are just vampires, afflicted are just afflicted, and so on. It doesn't matter how they look, lore doesn't matter when we know the mechanic, and we should never use names decided on a whim by players. What will EoE do when you find two of those in the same place? That's what we note in the wiki. When we don't know the type, and we can't contrast it with other creatures, we use their own names for a type. For example, vampires and incubi may be related, since hoping vampires look exactly like incubi, but we can't know, because they are never found close and we can't use EoE to check, so all we can do is ask a dev, and use vampire for vampires and incubi for incubi until they answer.

Undead may be a little weird and confusing, but one thins is sure: ALL OF THEM ARE UNDEAD, AND THAT'S THEIR AFFILIATION. But how canbe so when many of them seem unrelated? Like the orrian and elonian unddead? As we have seen in the Desolation, they are almost always mindless killing machines that attack anything alive that they detect. But it seems that a few of them, like the Lich or Joko (and a few others) that have kept their minds and can control other undead and put some sense in them when they are around. Take out the leader, and they become mindless and act as one army again. I'm just guessing here, but the reason why they act like a single army no matter where they come from when no 'leader' is around it's probably because they have a 'default' leader: the undead dragon. If I'm guessing right, that would explain why all undead are part of the same army, and why any other army that may seem to us that they belong to is just a 'faction' within that army, but just a temporal lore faction created by that 'temporal leader', not a mechanics one. But for the wiki, it doesn't matter why are they part of the same army even when they don't seem to be related at all, like orrian and elonian undead, all that matters is that they are. That's why any 'afiliation' in the undead page is actually irrelevant, since all undead are undead, because that's their afiliation. Anything extra you note there won't be mechanics affiliation, just lore factions within that affiliation. And if you really want to note them, you must note them with a separate term, not affiliation.

We may note some 'lore' subgroups that we note, but those are just categorized manually. In the infobox, we note the type and the affiliation. For example. Sickened are humans and beasts. You can check that with EoE when you damage them, humans in the party will be affected when you attack the sickened humans, but not you animal companions when you attack the animals. But they are in the same army as afflicted, as when they are found nearby they go together, do not attack each other, and when one attacks an animal, the others run to help too, and the afflicted are in the same army as shiro'ken and the bound constructs (they'll fight on the same side against other creatures too). Let's call that army 'Shiro's Army'. Now, The sickened type is Human, and their army is "Shiro's Army". Yet they are all sickened. So we may set a page to list the sickened and talk about its lore, but in the infobox will put "Shiro's Army" and Human for the humans, and Beast for the beasts. And use a category at the bottom of the page to note they are all sickened, or just a wiki link to the sickened page in the description.

With undead, we note this with pages like the Awakened one. That's not their army. That's not their type. That's just a lore thing made up by players because they are found together, fight together and have similar names. But in their respective pages, we note their respective correct affiliation and type, and the awakened thing, in this case, goes just as a link in the creature description at the top. But they could have a category, added manually at the bottom of the page. But awakened is NOT their affiliation. Their affiliation is undead.

I wish myself the creature categorization was more logical, for example, making all beastmen a type, and then having subtypes like charr and dredge. Or making undead a type, and then having subtypes like mummies and ghouls. Or making saurian a type, and then having subtypes like skale or dinosaur. Or making construct a type, and then having subtypes like golem, elemental construct, juggernaut, etc... But it doesn't work like that, so we can't categorize them like that. MithTalk 15:34, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Is User talk:Andrew McLeod/Species the page you're talking about? --Silver Edge 20:06, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Should of read this before I started trying to fix the undead pages. As I wasn't sure if the undead in elite areas (which all seem to be linked to the area) are undead, the elite areas' affiliation, or both. -- Konig / talk 22:33, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * That's one! I actually have that under watch! Thanks, that should help a little. I think there are at least one more place where Andrew answered, though. Mith[[Image:User MithranArkanere Star.png]]Talk 22:35, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Ghosts
Do ghosts take additional damage from an "of Deathbane" mod? If not, I don't think they would be part of the undead army. Same goes with the Elementals listed. The ghosts actually may be a part of the Nightmare type, as most nightmares are souls/spirits/ghosts as well by lore. -- Konig / talk 06:06, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * The Deathbane checks for the affiliation. It doesn't matter if they take double damage or if they are ghosts. The deathbane will work if they are part of the undead army. And not all ghosts are. So, you'll have to test with every single ghost. You can't bunch them all up. Mith[[Image:User MithranArkanere Star.png]]Talk 15:42, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

New Suggestion: Lore Faction
Based on Mith's details. In cases of Creature Type overlap, the primary takes precedence while the secondary takes desciptor "(-)", and Lore Faction frees up Affiliation for The Undead Army while allowing StoneSummit/Dredge, Afflicted/Sickened/Shiroken, etc. This would actually allow for notable distinctions such as Bandits, Guilds, Warbands, etc, (such as Arred's Crew, The Fierce, The Oddbodies, The Obsidian Flame, The Peacekeeper, and The Ebon Falcon) that operate seemingly independently within any said Affiliation/Creature Type.
 * Example 1: After presearing, "<-insert your party->" are recruited into the ranks of the Ascalon Vanguard, an elite "special forces" Faction of the greater Ascalon Army Affiliation composed entirely of the Racial Creature Type known as Humans. --Falconeye 19:13, 17 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Example 2: Maybe D&D Ranger and Hunting Grounds can help is out with better ideas. --Falconeye 05:20, 18 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I'd rather do what I've been doing before - if there is a row for it, and there is a lore group for the type and/or affiliation, just put the lore group in parentheses and place a note denoting the one in parentheses is lore-based and the one not is mechanic-based. -- Konig / talk 22:35, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * On second thought, looking though the various pages, a lore column would work interestingly. Faction can work as a name. Though for the lore-based types, such as Constructs, that would be hard (too hard?) to figure out... We're still unsure on what defines something as a construct. -- Konig / talk 23:05, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Note that I've used 'faction' to refer to the 'lore faction'. But faction is an over-used word I had to use because I could not think of anything better. Allegiance is also used for the Guild Wars Factions' factions and Balthazar's faction. There are other words we can use, though. Let's see some examples: Adherence, fealty, association, attachment, order, organization, affinity... I would go with 'adherence', if you ask me. But faction just doesn't sound righ for that... hm... we should make some kind of poll about this. Construct is a FULLY lore description. No relation whatsoever between each other. Construct just refers to how where they created. Nothing else. You and me are living things that were born. Constructs were made by other cretures for a purpose. Each one has their own affiliation, type and even their own 'lore factions'. It even refers to some landmarks that are not actually creatures, such as The Iron Forgeman, and can even refer to 'things' like Ether Seals. They are constructs because they were constructed, and just that. Mith[[Image:User MithranArkanere Star.png]]Talk 23:11, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Eh, I was having a confusing thought about the classification of construct (as all of those which are called constructs in lore are animated via a soul - such as Shiro'kens and Juggernauts - so I was thinking of construct in lore being just that: an inanimate object being animated via the use of a soul). But anyways, for names: Of those you listed, I like either association or affinity. -- Konig / talk 23:26, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, shouldn't we need 2 columns? One for lore types (like construct), and one for lore affiliations (Awakened)? -- Konig / talk 23:29, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Again, 'construct' is not a type, it's just a term that refers, only within lore, to constructed creatures. The only construct awkened are the carven effigies. So for them it would be like this: They are construct(just lore info) elementals (type) that belong to the awakened (lore affiliation) undead(affiliation). Mith[[Image:User MithranArkanere Star.png]]Talk 23:32, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, I get that. It's not a type in mechanics, but it is a "type" (in a way) in lore much like undead is a type in lore but where undead is an affiliation in mechanics, construct is nothing. A better way is to put it like this; in lore, there are four kinds of animate beings: Living, undead, construct, and ghosts/spirits/souls. Living isn't worth putting in, undead is an affiliation in mechanics, ghosts and spirits are a type, so where does that put construct? -- Konig / talk 23:38, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Discrepancy?
Why are Skeletons not listed as being vulnerable to holy damage in the list, whereas on the Skeleton page it says they take double damage from holy sources? Tong2 18:14, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
 * It... doesn't? I don't see where Skeletons are listed as not taking holy damage - only ghosts and the elementals are listed as such. -- Konig / talk 18:49, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Factions Undead?
Was just wondering y the afflicted had a link to here, but are not listed? Red Qyeen 10:31, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

NM didn't see above comments Red Qyeen 10:34, 29 April 2011 (UTC)