Talk:Bestiary

So what's the basic information that every beast/monster/mob/lunchbox should have? Thinking things like:


 * list of skills it is known to possess
 * tactics the enemy uses (Plague Devourers will ALWAYS corpse bomb, frex)
 * type of "collector item" it drops (Fetid Carapace, Enchanted Lodestone, etc) which should link to related collector database
 * the enemy's class; giant, dwarf, Charr, and so on
 * possibly a wiki-created subtype such as "healer" or "melee fighter"
 * primary damage type/weapon
 * zones it's located in
 * a nice clean screenshot and/or text description

Not sure how it would all look, mind. First step is figuring out all the needed information.. Nunix

We can add Vulnerabilities and Resistances as well. Adam

re: Bestiary
Hi Nunix, yeah that sounds pretty good. I'll try making a Beast box template, like the skill box, a little later on. Since that only needs the most relevant information I'm not sure which parts it should contain. Some parts are pretty obvious.


 * the name of the creature
 * an image of the creature
 * the species of the creature
 * the profession of the creature (rather than use wiki created subtypes we could just link them to their actual profession, since all creatures in guild wars relate to one of the 6 professions, that's how signet of capture works)

Other than that I don't know what else should go in there. I suppose what skills the creature uses could go in there, and what items they drop, but since this information could be exhaustive we might find one creature with a load of skills and items, making the skill box take up half a page ;) so really i think this information is best left to the detail of the article.

As a kind of side note, I realised there was no documentation on how to write skill articles, so I wrote Style & Formatting and Style & Formatting/Skills. They are far from complete, but perhaps once we formalise what should go in your average Beast article we could put it in Style & Formatting/Bestiary or Style & Formatting/Beasts. - LordBiro

beast box
I've added a very minimal beast box to Charr Ashen Claw. I don't know if it should contain anything else or whether the other details should be in the article itself. Also, I was just thinking, should Shining Blade/White Mantle/Bandits be under Bestiary? Are they really beasts? ;) hehe, I guess they should be, but it made me laugh for a bit :D

Well, yeah, Bestiary is just a generic term, really.

Should also make sure we make notes about names mobs somehow... their own seperate pages? Or is that overkill? Gravewit

well, in theory at least i do agree they should have their own pages. I mean, the alternative is that we list them all on one page, and that it grows to an enormous unmanageable size! I mean the armor collectors page is growing quite big now, but there is no real way of splitting that up. I think having smaller (even near-empty) articles is preferrable to one unmanageable article, where possible. - LordBiro

Armor collectors split
I think we can rig up a split on the armor collectors page. If we provide a disambiguation page at armor_collectors, and have Armor Collectors (Pre-searing) and Armor Collectors (Lion's Arch Area), it might do the trick. It would certainly make the pages more user friendly. Adam

Yeah, that's not a bad idea! I have noticed the page is getting pretty big, but I hadn't thought of a way of splitting them up. That sounds like a good possible solution though Adam, go for it :) - 62.254.64.17 <- that was supposed to be me LordBiro

Species categories?
I'm kind of ambivalent on this one. On one hand, you can see all of the members types of the species in the category interface. On the other hand, we're going to have a zillion different categories, one for each species, and this list is only going to increase as we gain expansions. Adam

Well, I think that's the point of this whole thing, yeah? A titanic copendium of all things Guild Wars. I definately want to do a taxonomy sort of thing. We'd be crazy not to. I say, just Category:SpeciesName and Category:Species on the SpeciesName pages. Gravewit

Also, RE: Known Habitats, I think we should try to list level ranges, too. Gravewit

Hey Gravewit, I had started something similar, Charr Ashen Claw is in the Category:Charr and Category:Charr is in Category:Bestiary. I also started Category:Humans. At the moment it looks like this (The categories are in red because they have no description, they all do currently exist though)...

+ Category:Bestiary | +--+ Category:Charr | |  |  +--+ Charr Ashen Claw | +--+ Category:Humans |    +--+ Category:Ascalons | |     |  +--+ Prince Rurik or something |    +--+ Category:Shining Blade | |     |  +--+ Some shining blade character, I dunno, Carlotte the spider maybe |    +--+ Category:White Mantle |       +--+ White Mantle Abbot |       +--+ White Mantle Seeker

Obviously not all of the articles are there, but the structure is as shown at the moment. - LordBiro 20:28, 19 May 2005 (EST)