Nightmare Fuel / Guild Wars 2

You're gonna need a bigger airship...

Core Game

General

• The mere concept of the Elder Dragons. They're not so much the last boss of a video game that you can simply fight — they're more like natural disasters. Even discounting their immense size, power of flight and absurd durability, they have the ability to corrupt everything in their vicinity from the land to the people. Each Elder Dragon has the power and inclination to wipe out the races of Tyria, and there are at least six of them. Their armies of minions are a serious threat in their own right, and only become stronger as the dragons consume more of the world. Worst of all, most people don't even see them as a serious threat, some even believing them to be myths. There are three organisations dedicated to taking them down — the Vigil, Durmand Priory, and the Order of Whispers — but they bicker constantly and encourage the main races to choose between them rather than working together. If nothing changes, there may not be a Tyria anymore...
  • The initial worst of the Elder Dragons is the Big Bad of the base game: Zhaitan, the Elder Dragon of Death and Shadow. A colossal Eldritch Abomination seemingly made of rotting bone and sinew, with glowing green eyes and a host of smaller dragon heads coming out of his mouth, Zhaitan is perhaps the most horrible thing you will see in Tyria. Its power is on a whole other level as well — it caused global devastation by raising the ruined Kingdom of Orr from the depths of the ocean, which resulted in widespread tsunamis. Worse yet, as its domains are shadow and death, it was then able to use its power to corrupt those killed in the disaster and turn them into its minions - the Risen - who then proceeded to attack the city of Lion's Arch with all the power of a massive undead fleet. In the end, it took the combined power of the three anti-dragon orders, Destiny's Edge, and an airship with a giant anti-dragon cannon to bring it down for good. And even after his death, his minions are still a threat.
    • Zhaitan's minions themselves are rather unpleasant. The Risen are rotting, reanimated corpses similar to zombies that claw at you with their bare hands. Some of them carry foul plagues, and will detonate in an explosion of gore and pus if you approach them. All of them can run, and even swim (well, float, like drowned corpses). And of course, if you die fighting them, your flesh will putrefy and you become one of them.
    • There are undead Krait amongst the Risen too. If you thought Krait were nasty when they were alive, wait until you see them under Zhaitan's influence.
    • There are creatures called Abominations made from multiple corpses of who knows what. The result is a hulking monstrosity that rivals a giant in size, with exposed bones, spikes sticking every which way and hollowed out stomachs. The only thing worse than seeing an Abomination is being flattened under two tonnes of mouldering flesh and bone.
    • Perhaps the worst of Zhaitan's minions are the Eyes and Mouth. The Eyes are giant, red, disembodied eyes carried by skeletal cadavers; and the Mouth is a hulking humanoid who has no lower jaw, two severed arms gripping the metal collar it wears, and a huge mouth in its stomach. The worst thing about them is that they make Zhaitan more powerful: the Eyes scout out magical items, and the Mouth devours them to transfer their energy to Zhaitan. And to top it all off, the Eyes are made from the royals of the nation of Orr, which was where Zhaitan initially rose - and some of them are still conscious, but unable to do anything but serve Zhaitan's wishes.
  • Jormag, the Elder Dragon of Ice and Persuasion, is described as a living blizzard. Their awakening caused earthquakes and floods. Their icy powers alone can cause untold devastation, and were enough to cause proud warrior races such as the Norn and the Kodan to flee their homelands. Not only that, they are also a Manipulative Bastard: they have a fanatical cult of Norn called the Sons of Svanir who they recruit by offering power in return for servitude. These cultists lie, murder, and steal, and eventually turn into Icebrood, murder machines entirely made of ice.
  • The first Elder Dragon, Primordus, is not known as the Destroyer for nothing. His sphere of influence is fire, and his awakening shook the earth to its core, forcing subterranean races such as the Skritt and Asura from their homes and into competition with the other races. He is the only dragon that doesn't normally corrupt living things; his minions, the Destroyers, are made from stone and lava and shaped like living creatures, such as crabs, trolls and harpies. All he and his minions care about is burning down the entire world.
  • Kralkatorrik is the Elder Dragon of Crystal and Mind, once mistaken for a mountain until his awakening. He turns all he touches to crystal, which may sound beautiful, but is in fact horrific. The area affected by him is called the Dragonbrand, which looks like a radioactive wasteland, devoid of life and glowing sickly purple. It is populated by his servants, the Branded, twisted creatures taken over by the corruptive power of Kralkatorrik, with crystalline forms and expressions of agony on their faces.
• Fleshreavers return from the original game. Flying demons that are born as skeletons, their parents help them grow by ripping apart living creatures and melding their flesh onto the juvenile Fleshreaver. After reaching adulthood, Fleshreavers continue to grow by killing and assimilating anything and anyone they find.
• Quaggans are one of the friendliest and most peaceful races in the game, and they look like happy dolphin people. Then they get angry. When this happens, they mutate into what look like piranhas on steroids and they will stop at nothing until they've beaten the crap out of whoever pissed them off to begin with, regardless of whether their victims are Charr or Icebrood.

Events

• He may be a Laughably Evil Large Ham, but Mad King Thorn has his fair share of this as well. He started killing as a child, left his brother to be eaten by a Giant Spider so he could take the throne after assassinating his father, and murdered seven of his eight wives - one in particular he put into a coffin filled with rats, which he then dumped into the sea - simply because he thought it was funny. His subjects were able to overthrow him and seal him in a part of the Underworld, but a cult called the Lunatic Court is trying to break those seals so he can turn Kryta into a twisted hellscape permanently, rather than only on Halloween. Oh, and an offhand quote implies that he eats people and/or souls.
  • His son Edrick seems to have inherited the trait of incredible violence beneath a comical exterior. He may look like a tryhard reject from a heavy metal band and be repelled by candy corn of all things, but in life, he killed his favorite stepmother by nailing her hands to a drake, apparently leaving her to be torn apart and eaten by the beast. (Thorn's dialog implies this happened during a PARTY, and while Edrick struggles to remember it - even seeming a bit horrified when confronted with the truth - the fact that he did this for no apparent reason, to someone he actually cared about, is unsettling.) He also regularly burned hundreds of his father's subjects for entertainment...and kept the guards from stopping him, or warning anyone, by biting off their tongues.
• The death of Belinda Delaqua. Shortly after meeting up with her at Fort Salma, she sends you off to defend against the Mordrem, only for you to return to her grasped and suffocated to death by one of Mordremoth's tendrils.

Heart of Thorns Expansion

Heart of Thorns

• In Heart of Thorns, Faolain is supposedly killed by a minion of Mordremoth... only to show up in the next part of the story, brainwashed and turned into some sort of rampaging dragon-beast. What really makes this example scary is that her face is completely unchanged, and she still talks with a normal voice while relentlessly chasing you down.
  • In the final chapter of the story, Faolain taunts you as you race to save your friends from Mordremoth. Particularly chilling is when she claims there is no Faolain, no Caithe, and no Trahearne. There is only MORDREMOTH.
• Again in Heart of Thorns, the revelation that the whole Maguuma Jungle is, essentially, Mordremoth.
  Canach: It's everything! The entire time we were traversing the jungle, we were afoot on its back. Like fleas on a hound.
• The Mordrem in general, and the Blighting Trees they're using to convert Sylvari, living or dead, into a servant of the jungle dragon. And if you're still alive, but not a Sylvari? Get ready for some even worse Body Horror. Mordremoth kidnaps people and implants them with a seed from the Blighting Tree...and a Plant Person clone of them grows from the inside out.
• Generally, your race doesn't make much of a difference to the story after you complete the level 30 series of quests to choose an order to join. Except for Sylvari in Heart of Thorns. Mordremoth talks to you!

  Mordremoth: I am the reason you exist. I am the purpose you serve. Obey me!

• When playing as a Sylvari character, at one point you are able to see a delusion of a wraith-like Mordremoth head materializing right in front of your eyes trying to convince you to join it. Your character completely ignores it, probably to cover the fact that they're having trouble keeping control, but to you, as the player... Terrifying.
• In the final battle against Mordremoth, it's scary to realize really how close the Sylvari Commander had been to giving into Mordremoth's influence. If Canach or Caithe hadn't been there to force them out of Mordremoth's control using the rift, the Commander would have succumbed to Mordremoth's presence due to being so close to him since they could no longer resist. Sylvari players could actually see Mordremoth as an Ally and other party members could see said Sylvari players as enemies & actually attack them really says how close you were to falling under Mordremoth's horrid grasp. If the Commander's mind had really given in, who knows what would happen after that.
• The fate of Trahearne. Severe body horror.

Living Story Season 3

• In Bloodstone Fen, there's the ground zero point of the bloodstone explosion. Of note are the shadows of the people who were standing around the altar, forever scorched into the wall in positions that indicate they didn't even have time to try and shield themselves. For all the good it would have done if they had.
• In Living World Season 3 Episode 2 it has been revealed that Primordus, and the other Elder Dragons, gained the powers of the domains of Zhaitan and Mordremoth. What does this mean? It means that every time we kill an Elder Dragon, the remaining Elder Dragons get even stronger.
• Sometime during Living World Season 3, if you happen to encounter a Ley-Line Anomaly running about Tyria, some creepy stuff starts to happen. Picture this: you're among others, minding your own business when you suddenly see a strange anomaly appear out of the corner of your eye. It disappears after a second and you ask everyone around you about the very strange occurrence...only for them to tell you that they have no idea what you're talking about. You insist that you had seen it, but your peers merely shrug and attribute it to a possible bug. You decide to brush it off, but from then on, the anomaly starts appearing to you more and more, yet no one seems to be able to see it, but you. It's almost like you're growing crazy, doesn't it? But you're sure it's there, you can't be hallucinating it right? That's the whole mystery of the /sad Anomaly (a name given to the anomaly by the community), a strange untargetable leyline anomaly that only appears in a player's clientside, meaning that they're the only one able to see it. This occurrence freaked a lot of people out when it first appeared and later was tied to the stealth achievement: Burden of Choice, which has a terrifying tale to tell itself.
• In the Burden of Choice Achievement, after encountering the /sad Anomaly many times, the Commander goes to visit the Durmand Priory, unsettled and looking for a way to stop the visions of the anomaly. They are directed by Tranton to collect special pieces of Bloodstone slivers to put in an artifact called a Shadowstone. The Commander has the two unappetizing choices between giving the Shadowstone to the Consortium and using 'Krait Oil' to suppress the visions or to use the artifact on themselves to stop the visions. Nothing particularly happens if you hand over the Shadowstone to the Consortium, but if you happen to use the Shadowstone on yourself, the Commander will momentarily spazz out while the whole room is shocked with ley energy, but now you're rid of the visions...right? Turns out if you use the artifact on yourself, occasionally while jumping through a rift, the Commander will suddenly split from their physical bodies and become an anomaly fellow player can attack; which is fairly freaky. The result of the choices are still a mystery and it hasn't been brought up again since, but one can only imagine what is result using bloodstone or Krait Oil to cure the erratic visions will have in the future?
  • The theory behind why the Commander is seeing the anomaly is quite horrifying. The theory is that due to the high amounts of exposure to Bloodstone in Bloodstone Fen and the robotic behavior of collecting (craving?) bloodstones (players do this since it's a currency to buy items), the Commander is starting to get crazed by the Bloodstone they've encountered first hand. Of course, they haven't been directly exposed, but they are definitely starting to affect them. Although everything seems completely normal from the Commander's point of view, the very fact that they might be losing their sanity is a scary thought; the best part being that they don't even know it.
• In the Living Story Episode Flashpoint, we get to see a glimpse of Primordus himself. Even if we only see the upper half of Primordus' head, we still get a good sense of how horrifyingly massive Primordus is in comparison to our character, making even the Mouth of Mordremoth look tiny in comparison. And unlike when we meet Zhaitan and Mordremoth, we're alone together with Taimi when we meet Primordus. If not for Taimi's device and Balthazar's hounds, who knows what Primordus could done to the player character and Taimi if he actually noticed us.

Path of Fire Expansion

Path of Fire

• In a tragic and agonizing fight against Balthazar, the Commander is killed and they appear as a lost spirit, having forgotten who they were due to the trauma of their death, only that they had died. Not only is that a scary thought, if they don't find out who they were and what their purpose had been, they would remain a lost spirit forever, wandering aimlessly through a desolate zone forever.
  • If you pay attention as Balthazar kills your character with a fireball to the face, you'll notice that the screen doesn't immediately turn black, but instead your point of view gets knocked back by the blast while darkness and blood closes in on your vision. This meant that your character was still alive after the last devastating blow. They were only alive for a few more seconds, but that meant they got the full experience of getting blasted in the face by the God of Fire and War. Or, they could be so close to the brink of death that they no longer felt pain; that they only felt it hit before burning to death in the blazing inferno. Either way it's terrifying to think that you'd still be alive after a supposed killing blow.
    • In Living Story Season 4, you have to buy an urn of your own ashes to craft the Dauntless Commander backpiece, implying that yes, Balthazar did fry enough of you that coming back to life meant rebuilding parts of your own body, if not all of it. Shudder-inducing.
  • The Commander's only way to get out of the Mists is to fight and win against the Eater of Souls, a monster left in the Domain of the Lost by Balthazar. This is terrifying, mainly because it's a creature that sucks up lost spirits and consumes them, destroying their souls via processing them into Forged for Balthazar's army, meaning that if the Commander loses, they will completely cease to exist. They decide to fight it anyway.
• The Crazed Doppelganger event in Elon Riverlands. Imagine if you will, you riding out there in that zone on a mount of your choice, minding your own business. Then suddenly, without warning, an ominous message flashes across your screen saying "Something is coming for you..." on a red background and notifying you that waypoints has been disabled, complete with haunting music playing afterward. Approximately one minute or less later, you notice that a giant clone of your character (named 'Legendary <Character Name>') is running over toward you at high speed. Despite your attempt to escape, the Doppelganger's speed is too much for your mount and it knocks you off the mount, initiating combat with you. If you're unlucky enough that there's nobody nearby you when this happens, the doppelganger will likely kill you. It's possible that you're fortunate enough to be nearby a waypoint where players from across the map can teleport in to fight the doppelganger, but if you're not? Good luck surviving it.
• At the end of the Path of Fire expansion we finally get to see Kralkatorrik. At least we see part of him; the Elder Dragon is absolutely colossal, so huge that all you can see is his castle-sized head and neck protruding from a massive cloud. According to descriptions, he's supposed to be a thousand feet tall and after you prevent Balthazar from destroying him (and the world with it) he not only absorbs the god's released power, but he becomes very angry. Right at the very end of the expansion, the earth starts to quake and a massive sandstorm builds up as the dragon sweeps across the desert again, turning everything beneath him to crystal...
• In case we haven't made this clear yet, how obscenely titanic is Kralkatorrik? Well, just study this image◊ comparing Kralkatorrik's head to his champion, the Shatterer. That's right, the giant crystal dragon that takes an entire army of players with heavy artillery to bring down that you fight in the Blazeridge Steppes could be swallowed by its master with a single gulp!

Living World Season 4

• Palawa Joko. In the first game, he was clearly past his glory days and occupied more of a comic relief role. Now? He rules almost all of Elona. His subjects are reanimated after death to serve him and are essentially brainwashed, although there are several cases of those who defied him being aware of this and unable to fight it; failures are tossed into a massive series of underground caverns with no way to die and achieve rest. When players reach Vabbi, they're confronted with a kingdom whose populace have been Conditioned to Accept Horror; fed endless propaganda, they worship Joko as a god and look FORWARD to becoming his undead slaves. And for an extra helping of creepiness, he has a living harem - some are there willingly, but others were either abducted, sold, or sacrificed by their families or villages to spare his wrath. Finally, there's what he did to the Last Spearmarshal, Princess Tahlkora. As one of the few who could disprove his claims of having slain Abaddon, he removed her eyes and tongue to prevent her from reading or preaching the words of Kormir. Then he had her tortured and executed with the intent of raising her as an Awakened, only to find that she retained her will... so he took away all but the smallest amount of power needed to keep her in that state before abandoning her corpse in a far corner of the desert. She can't be put out of her misery, and, until the player comes along, is only capable of communicating with the minds of animals. She's been in that state for over 200 years.
  • Koss reveals further creepiness with the Awakened. They're compelled to obey Palawa Joko's commands. This puts the Vabbian propaganda glorifying awakening in a different light. He wants people to desire awakening, so that his grip and control over them is strengthened.
  • And then there's what happens when he gets hold of modern Tyrian tech via the Inquest. Specifically because he knows it will hurt the Commander, he has the Awakened Inquest agents seal Taimi up in Scruffy 2.0 and set it to begin cutting off her oxygen and attack the Commander, setting up a boss battle in which Taimi is audibly having a breakdown, apologizing and begging for her life as she suffocates — and if you can't defeat Scruffy, it's implied she dies.
• The trailer for the Living Story episode "A Bug in the System" got this reaction from a fair amount of fans, mostly due to its use of sudden glitch effects and a warped version of 'Fear Not This Night'. And upon release, we got confirmation of something a lot of people (both in and out of story) rightly feared: Joko now has access to the Scarab Plague (potentially even one that the Inquest have ENHANCED).
  • The final battle against Commander Lonai has the Commander and Braham jumping through unstable portals in pursuit. Each area change is accompanied by a completely alien splash screen and ??? for the area text before landing in familiar but dangerous situations (Lonai Awakening the dead in Divinity's Reach, the caldera of Mount Maelstrom with a very pissed off Megadestroyer, deep in Frostgorge Sound with a Claw of Jormag bearing down on them). The final leg goes one further, with the area text displaying ERROR: SIGNAL LOST and the destination being best described as nowhere.
• "Long Live the Lich" is chock-full of examples of Joko sadistically torturing people for no other reason than that it amuses him. A statue that can be found in the bottom of the ship in the first instance describes how he forced his personal sculptor to eat his wife's liver. Later, you find a widower being tormented by a projection of Joko that entertains the idea of slicing off and Awakening bits of the man's flesh, one piece at a time, and covering him in extra mouths to hear more screaming. Then the player enters Gandara, the Moon Fortress, and discovers a massive torture chamber full of copies of their own corpse. The fact that the bodies are under a glamour doesn't really make it much better, because the implication is that Joko slowly, brutally killed innocent villagers just so he could see the Commander die over and over. Not only is there a chair with some wine and cheese beside it, but one of the torture devices appears to be a Judas cradle.
• The revelation of what Kralkatorrik is up to in "A Star to Guide Us". Thought you were done with impending omnicide after stopping Joko and his plague? Well, now you're dealing with an Elder Dragon poised to eat the fabric of reality. When it comes to Apocalypse How scenarios, you've jumped out of the frying pan and into the Sun.
• After all the time you've spent bonding with Aurene, her multiple premonitions of being gruesomely killed if she goes against Kralkatorrik as she currently is are both heartbreaking and horrifying.
• In All or Nothing you fight Kralkatorrik and the battle seems to actually be going well. And then he specifically starts targeting the Commander and Aurene, collectively using Zhaitan's, Mordremoth's, and Balthazar's magics to wipe out and crystallize the entire area you were just fighting in, likely killing or branding dozens of allies fighting with you. Despite that, it seems like you still have a chance and manage to get up close and gouge out one of Kralk's eyes, knocking him out and seemingly killing him. It all seems over and and the Commander and Aurene try to get close to Kralkatorrik's body to confirm that he is dead... and he raises his head up suddenly, opening his mouth and blasting you and Aurene as everything fades into black. He kills Aurene and would have killed you if she didn't block his attack's path. It seems like her vision was true - there was no true way to win against Kralkatorrik and she was doomed to die no matter what. You almost lose Aurene, and Kralkatorrik leaves the battle alive. The fact that you came so close, almost lost what pretty much was your child that you raised since birth only for her to be nearly horribly murdered by what was pretty much her grandfather and nothing you did prevented that sells how horrifyingly depressing the ending of this episode this. If it wasn't for Aurene becoming immortal thanks to Palawa Joko's magic, everything you did throughout the entire game would've been FOR NOTHING. No one else could have stopped Kralkatorrik, and he would've devoured the Mists, damning reality itself. Tyria and all of existence would've been destroyed forever.
• Due to her immortality, Aurene was left in an And I Must Scream state, as the Branded crystals left her immobile and unable to heal herself.

The Icebrood Saga

Episode 1: Whispers in the Dark

• The very fact that Jormag is talking to you. Imagine the whole shindig that happened in Heart of Thorns when playing as a Sylvari, but worse. The voices are fairly consistent, tending to speak right after completing certain events and tasks. Unlike Mordremoth, whose dialogue was mainly just oppressive and mean, trying to force control on the Sylvari player, Jormag sounds benevolent, kind, and gentle, if not a bit creepy. Most if not all of their dialogue is akin to sweet talk. The whispers don't knock you down or jazz up your vision like Mordremoth did. If anything, Jormag is trying to comfort you and let you know that they're there for you. As if this isn't enough, during the quest step, The Invitation, Jormag actually uses the Commander's friends to belittle them. It wouldn't be hard to reject these voices at first, but imagine the malicious whispers of your friends chipping away at you, making you feel tired, unnerved, and alone, while the only thing who offered you any comfort was Jormag themself. What Jormag is doing is psychologically manipulating and warping your perspective until you join them willingly, rather than be forced like the other dragons. Jormag, Dragon of Ice and Persuasion is a fitting title indeed.
• Judging by the last dialogue shared between the Commander and Braham, the whispers have already taken a toll on the Commander. Their delayed and rather uncertain response to Braham's question about not joining Jormag seems to imply that the Commander was actually considering Jormag's offer, even if only in passing thought, and had to remind themselves which side they were on.
• The Boneskinner. While many enjoyed the Boneskinner's design and found it 'cute', it still stands that the creature is pretty fearsome. It hunts people and gathers them up to eat them, luring them with a similar method to the one Jormag employs, mimicking voices. Don't be surprised to hear a cry for help somewhere to find an empty camp, only for the Champion level Boneskinner to show up.
  • There's a hidden achievement for transforming into a Boneskinner (using a tonic) called 'Sweet Surrender'. The dialogue seems unsettling, at the very least. Foreshadowing? Who knows. For now.
  You have accepted Jormag's strength and transformed into one of Jormag's minions. The flesh of mortals is yours to devour.
  • You can find a Norn Vigil member surrounded by the dead bodies of his allies, holding a dagger and talking about how he "doesn't want to do it". There's also an achievement that involves bringing several food items to a stranded and starving Kodan, the last of which is Boneskinner flesh, and said Kodan describes it as tasting sweet (even worse, the log dropped by the Boneskinner implies it may have been one of his missing companions).
• There is an additional hidden achievement called 'Give in', which you can get by sleeping in Bjora's Marches. The description of the achievement describes how tired the Commander is, how their trials are endless, that what they should do is just sleep. Rest. The scary thing about it is that Jormag uses this same lie to win over the people at the keep, promising them warmth and sleep, only for them to perish out there in the cold. The whispers even 'lament' on the fact that the Commander is tired during the story. This hidden achievement seems to imply that the Commander actually fell for this lie, even if just for a moment.
• Jormag speaking through the corpse of the Fraenir is frighteningly detailed. The whole time the body is being moved around, you can see broken bones hanging at wrong angles - particularly the Fraenir's dislocated jaw, which Jormag repeatedly forces into a smile while trying to coax you...
• The ambient map of Bjora Marches is terrifying. If you wear headphones, you can hear whispers in the background, and you're not the only one Jormag is whispering to. You can cross paths with Vigil soldiers being led off to let themselves die in the snow, Kodan talking to empty air, and one memorably disturbing instance where you find a Kodan logger standing in the middle of a ring of bodies. If you try to talk to him, you get hit with his hallucinations and see them as trees. He murdered all his companions and has no idea.
• Like any other part of the story, you can replay this map and episode for achievements. However, when you talk to other characters, they're vaguely aware that they've already been through this and are even more confused and afraid of what's going on. It's not just a gameplay mechanic that events can be repeated in Bjora Marches the same way it is everywhere else — Jormag is messing with your minds, and every time a character begins to remember they've already been through this, they forget immediately after.

Episode 2: Shadow in the Ice

• The offering to Wolverine Event. The other two events (Eagle and Ox) are pretty straightforward and require you to do a relatively simple task. Wolverine is the same way, but it involves having to navigated through twisted woods, stalked by Champion-leveled Boneskinners with Toxic Frost shrooms dotting your path. Have fun quietly sneaking past the danger just to give Wolverine an offering.
• Bangar's drive for power and ruthlessness is fully showcased when he shoots an arrow which pierces the Commander's heart, fatally wounding them in order to stop the Commander from stopping him from claiming he defeated Drakkar. He seemed fully ready to deal the final blow if Braham had not gone enraged and transformed into Wolf to protect his friend. Bangar is not a Charr to be underestimated.

Episode 3: No Quarter

• Smodur goes off the deep end in this episode, with standing orders to set a firing squad on traitors rather than take them prisoner. It's one of the first things the Commander gets to see when they touch down in Drizzlewood. He's fervently pushing for a bum-rush into enemy territory with no regard for strategy or safety, and doesn't even flinch at fire-bombing the Dominion's non-combat personnel in the name of winning the war. He ends up killing Cinder Steeltemper in the middle of a negotiation with Ryland, which turns him against the United Legions for good. It's a far cry from how reasonable Smodur's been in Tyria's past.

Episode 5: Champions

• Braham slowly being subsumed by Primordus' personality. While it's clear by his actions that he's trying to stay in control, seeing him reduced from his usual combat banter to a simple enraged "Kill. Ice." is disturbing.
• Ryland's breakdown after Jormag is defeated. Unable to accept that he's lost and stand down, he repeatedly throws himself against Rytlock, Crecia, and the Commander's weapons, even though he's so exhausted that merely attacking depletes his stamina... but what really gets through to him, more than all their pleas and threats, is Crecia saying she should've killed him when she gave birth to him to spare the world. He throws himself at her in a maddened rage, only to be stabbed and killed by Rytlock, who holds Ryland and apologizes in a broken voice to his corpse.

End of Dragons

Act I / Seitung Provence:

• End of Dragons starts off on a strong (and terrifying) note with the Old Friends story step: Gorrik's old friend Ankka has lied to him and taken him as a hostage of the Aetherblades. On your frantic fight through the Aetherblade fleet, Aurene begins attacking the ships to help you out... but Ankka was prepared for that. Against the commands of her captain, she attacks Aurene with a device that extracts Aurene's magic as the dragon screams in pain and falls out of the sky.

Act II / New Kaineng City:

• Mai Trin's entire situation. Imagine having a murderous lunatic like Scarlet Briar not only in your head at all times, but potentially able to influence your actions because you weren't properly trained in the magic that binds you together. It's presented as being just as exhausting and frightening for her as fighting off Mordremoth's control was for a Sylvari Commander.
• The way Soo-Won writhes in agony after Ankka uses the extractor on her is hard to look at.

Act III / Echovald Wilds:

• The Arborstone instance gives everyone their first glimpses of what The Void can do.
  • A corpse just lazily floating in the air with no way to get it down.
  • A group of several people who were quite literally scared to death.
  • A corpse that's missing all his internal organs with no sign of an incision on his body, just the empty space.
• The entire Echovald Unmade achievement. The Void has begun corrupting Echovald Forest and the people inside it, and two of the incidents needed for this achievement strike a terrifying chord:
  • A doctor has been called to take a look at a village girl by her frantic father. Her father says that his daughter asked to sleep in her parents' room - and said something was in hers - but he didn't let her. Now she's possessed by an eerie, terrifying power, and continues to speak in a toneless voice about how tomorrow isn't coming, and the end of the world approaches.
  • A tengu has to be restrained because she's tearing out her own feathers. Her daughter pleads with her to calm down, but she can't stop screaming about what she's seen and begs those around her to kill her.
• The Shadow versions of dragon minions that the Void's presence creates are shudder-inducing, especially the champion variants lurking under one of the villages. The fact that even benevolent minions like the saltspray dragons can be killed and converted makes it worse.
• Ankka. Ankka. So mentally damaged by the Thaumanova incident and the time she spent in the Mists, it's clear at this point that something is horribly, terribly wrong with her; she really thinks that the best thing for the world would be to have everything destroyed by entropy, and in her dying throes, she says all she ever wanted was a little stimulation.

Act IV:

• The Kaineng Unmade achievement is just as bad as the Echovald one:
  • An entire room full of Xunlai Jade employees is massacred by something that came out of a portal. One of the survivors is so traumatized that she's barely coherent and one of the guards throws up when talking to you makes him remember the condition the bodies were in.
  • A woman is trapped in her home in pitch-black darkness. As her husband outside tries to encourage her, she screams in panic that something's hunting her.
  • There's a corrupted jade servitor that randomly spouts nonsensical comments about the end of the world. The disembodied voices around it add their own unsettling commentary.

Act V / Dragon's End:

• Soo-Won is begging you to kill her throughout the entirety of her boss fight in the Dragon's End map. She knows she can't hold back the Void forever — it's causing her to fight you right now, even with her trying her best to stop — and she knows, also, how dangerous she could be if the Void fully overtook her and sent her on a rampage. Failing to defeat her in time results in her sacrificing part of herself to contain the Void, with the implication that - eventually - there won't be anything left to sacrifice.
• The Void variations of the dragon minions are creepy. The Void versions of the Elder Dragons themselves are downright terrifying, especially Zhaitan and Mordremoth.

Deep Research

• Gorrik's description of his Haze-induced nightmare is absolutely godawful.
  Gorrik: Blish was sitting across from me. Not in his golem body, but exactly how I remembered him from before his illness took over.
  Gorrik: He stared at me in a menacing way he never had before. Then his body...disintegrated...into a mass of writhing beetles...
  Gorrik: They swarmed me. I can still feel the prickle of their claws across my skin. At the point I thought I might suffocate...
  Gorrik: They vanished.
  Gorrik: Next thing I remember, I was clinging tightly to Yao, sobbing. They comforted me until I could pull myself together.

Secrets of The Obscure

• Escaping from Cerus is nerve-wracking. The Commander is badly wounded and can only stagger slowly from hiding place to hiding place, and the entire time, Cerus is prowling up and down the hallway ready to pounce on the Commander like a big cat on prey.