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
Moved to the appropo place by Gravewit.

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)

Beast Box Redux
After a bit of a discussion with Karlos last night, I thought that this should be brought up as it it already out of hand and we seem to have no set way of handling it. First though I wish to apologize to Karlos for anything that I may have said to him. I have no excuse beyond some inebriation and depression as I had just gotten done celebrating my 30th birthday.

The format for the image in the beast box is all over the place on the wiki right now. I just finished a semi-random poll of creature pages and will post the results below.

First here is how I did this poll (in case anyone cares to know): I started in Category:Bestiary and just went down the sub-category list clicking on each entry. If an entry had a Beast Box with a picture then I checked the code and placed it in one of four categories for this poll:


 * Mouse Over w/no Caption
 * Caption w/no Mouse Over
 * Caption and Mouse Over
 * No Caption and No Mouse Over

I did not pick and chose to support my side of the argument, I went strictly down the list, I did not use any duplicate entries for creatures in multiple categories:

ex. Flint Fleshcleaver was only counted once not twice (in Bosses and Dwarves\Stone Summit).

I counted the first 100 examples that I came across that fit the criteria and here are the results:


 * Mouse Over w/no Caption: 62%
 * Caption w/no Mouse Over: 28%
 * Caption and Mouse Over: 6%
 * No Caption and No Mouse Over: 4%

I would like for us to come to a decision on how how we are going to handle this issue so that we can make the appropriate corrections and go forward in a unified fasion.

My personal thought is that as there is already a spot for the creature's name above the picture, having it show up as a caption to the picture is pointless and can lead to data errors. I'm indifferent to the mouse over option, as I was only using it because it was in the majority of the creature articles that I had seen when I started adding pictures/creating new entries. I am curious to hear what other users think. --Rainith 08:27, 19 Sep 2005 (EST)

Edit - I forgot to mention, I'd say there is a margin of error of +/- 3% for my poll. It wasn't exactly exciting to do, and I may have put things in the wrong category a couple of times. --Rainith 08:46, 19 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * I'm quite indifferent here. As you said, the name of the creature is already there, so we don't need it another time - neither as caption nor as mouse-over (actually, in terms of HTML, that would be the "title" attribute; mouse-over is done with java-script). But this issue doesn't affect data integrity in any way (well, maybe in such as whoever creates a new entry and copies the code from an existing one may forget to overwrite the name. I'm probably not the only one to whom this has happened ;) ). It's more like a display glitch. Of course it would be nice if everything looked the same, that's why we have a template after all. So I'd say, just stick with #1 (Mouse Over w/no Caption) because the most are already that way. Less work fixing. ;) I've been adding entries like #2 (Caption w/no Mouse Over) lately, but as I said, I don't really have any preference. --Eightyfour-onesevenfive 08:59, 19 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * Me too, I do not care one way or the other. I was simply defending the template. I say out with both of them, the caption and the hover.
 * Now since we are talking about redoing the beast box.. How about what I did with the beast template? Instead of using 7 or 8 templates, we use one. You can see it here: Template:BeastInfo and you can see a sample in White Mantle Abbot. Simple, elegant, one and a half lines of text. :) Please let me know your thoughts. I know it's going to be a HUGE pain to change all the beasts, but we can do it in time. For now, I suggest we use this for new beasts and then convert the old ones perhaps one species at a time.
 * I also believe the same can be done for the Skills templates and the item templates. --Karlos 16:39, 19 Sep 2005 (EST)
 * I like the new template. Less lines of code are always an improvement. Somebody has done a new template similar to this for skills already, I think. --Eightyfour-onesevenfive 17:51, 19 Sep 2005 (EST)
 * I don't care. Most of the time I use neither caption nor mouse-over, because all the information I need is already in the box title. However, I think it won't hurt to leave the options in the template, in case somebody wants to use them. If we remove one of them, then we should remove the caption, but leave the mouse-over. --Tetris L 18:01, 19 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * Kudos to you Karlos! :) I like the new template, my only complaint is that it still has the creature name showing twice, once in the box on top (which I like) and once right under the picture (which I think looks ugly).  But at least now we won't have one creature name on top and a different one underneath as they both pull from the same variable.  So that would be my only suggestion, remove the ugly (IMO) name field from under the picture, and then we can start going through and changing all the creatures to this new format.  If noone else feels that the second name is an issue, I'll STFU and we can still go and start making the changes.  :) --Rainith 04:37, 20 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * I don't see the second name field as an issue, but I agree we don't need it and wouldn't object to removing it. --Eightyfour-onesevenfive 05:17, 20 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * I don't see it as an issue any more as it will always be the same as the name above it. I just see it as unnecessary and I don't find it aestheticly pleasing.  --Rainith 06:21, 20 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * Ok, I removed the caption from the BeastInfo template since all those who care about it, want to see it gone and the rest just don't care. We can't do the same with the old template because the many pages that DO provide a caption will now show messy data (the image will have "caption =" under it).
 * Is everyone in favor of swtiching to the new template? And before ratifying it, is there anything else we could possibly conceive that should go into it? --Karlos 07:29, 20 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * I think it looks great now. :)  This should also clear up the few instances of people changing the colors of the box to reflect the class of the creature.  I vote that we institute this change post haste.  --Rainith 07:48, 20 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * I've started to go through and change the beast boxes. So far I've completed Category:Behemoths, Category:Centaurs, Category:Charr, Category:Demons, Category:Devourers and Category:Dragons.  I'll work on more later on Saturday.  --Rainith 17:11, 24 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * GOOOO Rainith!! :) I'll see if I can to some also tonight. I'll list here the ones I finish off. --Karlos 18:04, 24 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * Yes, I know, it's kinda late for that, but here's something I noticed that could possibly be improved about the new template: Currently it sill has a little redundancy in it (you can tell I like that word, redundancy, do you? ;) ). It has one variable for the profession and one for the profession icon, which basically is the same information. Would it be possible to just substitute the part where the profession name is in the name of the icon image file with the profession variable? Something along the line like this:
 * | [[Image:-icon.png]] ||Profession:||
 * I don't know that much about how templates work, so this may not be possible and I don't want to mess something up when trying. But if it does work, I think it would be an improvement. Of course this would generate problems with creatures where the profession is unknown, but we could simply add another icon (like a question mark) for those. :) --Eightyfour-onesevenfive 18:40, 24 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * Ture, I did worry about that when I was making it. I agree that it is an "implementation detail" and should be boxed away from the users. I wish I had "if... then" and "switch... case" :) In any case. I made another one called Template:BeastInfo2 It has what you want, but the biggest draw back it has is the "unknown" profession. Not only do we need to make an icon but will have it "wikified" i.e. it will say "Profession: Unknown" which is kinda silly.
 * The reason is that to put the "prof" into the icon name, Prof has to be sent to the template WITHOUT ... . But f that happens then the prof in "Profession" will not be hyperlinked. So, the hyperlinking has to be done in the template. But if that is done then "Unknown" will be hyperlinked.
 * I don't mind passing the parameter for an icon to the template as much as I mind the parameter being cumbersome. I wish we could pass it something like "icon = W" and the template would then place a warrior's icon. --Karlos 19:31, 24 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * I don't think it's a good idea to have templates auto-link or auto-categorize, in general. --Fyren 19:44, 24 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * I agree, I just did it so people can sample it themselves. When we're done, remind me to put White Mantle Abbot back in the old template. --Karlos 20:42, 24 Sep 2005 (EST)

I tend to think that we shouldn't do that for the profession icons, in addition to the (Unknown) professions, there are all the NPCs that seem to have no profession. Instead of putting in (Unknown) some of them are listed by their profession, like Merchant, Skill Trainer, etc.. and I don't think we want to have icons for all of those. That way the Icon tag can just be left blank. Either that or we need a different box for the NPCs. --Rainith 07:59, 25 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * Edit - Ok, I'm done with Category:Drakes, Category:Dredge and Category:Dryders. I'll start on the next category in a while.  --Rainith 08:59, 25 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * I started from the bottom to avoid clashes... I did Wurms and Worms then saw Undead coming so I decided to call it a day. :) --Karlos 15:23, 25 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * Wimp. :P
 * I should be done with Category:Dwarves and its sub-category Category:Stone Summit in a little while. I may need to take a break before my eyes start to bleed though.  ;)  --Rainith 15:40, 25 Sep 2005 (EST)
 * Edit - Done with Category:Dwarves and Category:Stone Summit. Taking a break for a while.  There were quite a few entries in there.  --Rainith 16:33, 25 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * Done with Category:Enchanted, Category:Eternals, Category:Ettins, Category:Forgotten and Category:Gargoyles. That's enough for me today.  I'll continue on the G's tomorrow.  --Rainith 15:10, 26 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * Finished Category:Ghosts and Category:Giants today at work. Very tired now so that's it for today.  As always, if anyone else helps please post what you've done.  :)  --Rainith 12:24, 27 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * Just fiished Category:Hydras. --Karlos 21:22, 28 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * done with Category:Imps, Category:Jade and Category:Minotaurs --Thundergrace 17:08, 29 Sep 2005 (EST)
 * and the rest of Category:Mursaat --Thundergrace 17:39, 29 Sep 2005 (EST)
 * Done with Category:Bandits, Category:Elementals and Category:Golems and its sub-Category:Abominations --Rainith 15:32, 1 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * Category:Grawl, Category:Griffons and Category:Nightmares are done. I'll be taking a break now for a bit, maybe even to play a little GW :)  I skipped over Humans for now, as I'm not that masochistic.  --Rainith 13:04, 2 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * Category:Pets, Category:Phantoms and Category:Plants (all three sub-categories) are done. I might get more done later tonight.  --Rainith 10:35, 3 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * Category:Riders is done. --Rainith 17:12, 3 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * Category:Undead is done. Took me a while (a week), but I made it!! :) --Karlos 20:25, 3 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * Category:Trolls done. --Karlos 20:47, 3 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * Done with all 4 subcategories of Category:Humans and A thru B --Thundergrace 03:56, 4 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * Finished Category:Titans, Category:Tengu, Category:Spiders, Category:Skales, Category:Shadow Army and Category:Scarabs today. I think all the species categories are done now except for Category:Humans, which Thundergrace has done some work on (thanks :)) and anything in Category:Bosses that did not fall into any of the normal categories (I don't know if there is anything there, but its something I'll check when we finish Humans up).  --Rainith 11:27, 4 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * DONE! Nothing uses the old template anymore. Everything has been updated.  Whew, ok, that was fun.  Let's not change that again.  :)  --Rainith 13:38, 6 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * Wow!! That was an excellent job! A search for "beast_begin" reveals only this talk page!! :) Way to go Rainith. Thank you very much. --Karlos 17:33, 6 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * somebody really need to place an example of this new beastinfo template into Style and formatting/Bestiary. People are still creating new articles using the beast_begin template, unknowingly making even more work for you guys to do.--Thundergrace 15:47, 27 Sep 2005 (EST)
 * I don't think putting an example there would help since they are obviously not getting it from there. :) --Karlos 18:55, 27 Sep 2005 (EST)
 * By the way, 84.175 placed an example. --Karlos 21:22, 28 Sep 2005 (EST)

Beast Statistics
I propose a new section in each monster's page that describes their "Statistics." By this, I mean Attributes as well as any known damage reductions, damage resistences/weakness. This section is for STATS, not speculation. i.e. As I did in Reed Stalker, I measured his Wasterl's Worry against the progression table and his Clumsiness.

The name of the section and the layout are not the issue, but what about the idea itself? --Karlos 13:00, 14 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * It will be difficult to figure out the values for a lot of mobs. Mesmer stuff is easy, since damage isn't modified by armor.  Some necros would be easy for the same reason.  Elementalists would be a problem, in general, since you'd have to take armor into account.  Warriors, rangers, and monks would probably be near impossible because of damage ranges or simply not using skills on enemies often..  --Fyren 15:10, 14 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * Oh, I am sure there's a lot we don't know and a lot we won't know (how can you measure a warrior's strength?), but for what we know/can find out.. Let's have a section for it. Removed if empty. --Karlos 17:25, 14 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * I like the Reed Stalker stats. If this is completed for as many monsters as possible.. wow. Prima would be coming to US for info. 148.177.129.213 21:16, 14 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * I think if you can figure the stats out and want to put them in, go ahead. I'll leave that up to you folks though.  --Rainith 01:10, 15 Oct 2005 (EST)

Proposing Criteria for Species delineation
See Talk:Golem for why I want to formalize the criteria. Below is my proposaled set of criteria:


 * 1) Results from Edge of Extinction.  If creature A takes damage from EoE due to the death of creature B, then they must be in the same species, though it is possible for them to be in different sub-species.
 * 2) "of ...slaying" upgrade.
 * 3) Collectable Drop.  If the collectable drop is not related to political/military forces (such as Stone Summit, White Mantle etc), creatures dropping the same type of collectable drop (typed by inventory icon and keyword in the name) are assumed to be of the same species.
 * 4) When the above criteria cannot be used, the 3D models of the creatures as well as the in-game background context shall be used to determine whether creatures are of the same species.

Please post in support if you agree. Please post constructive critisms if you disagree. -PanSola 01:10, 27 December 2005 (UTC)


 * You had me at "delineation". You fancy talker you! Haha. Yeah I agree --The King Tarosian 01:18, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

If no one else has anything else to say, I'll assume the above is an approved criteria for species delineation, until someone challenges it. -PanSola 03:05, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Sounds good to me. LordKestrel 03:41, 5 January 2006 (UTC)


 * So are you saying that the opposite would be true for your rules also? That if the results for an EoE test came back negative, then they wouldn't be the same species?  So would we need multiple Golem/Elemental species if it turns out that Stone Elementals and Ice Elementals (in pre-searing from a note you left in another talk page) do not take EoE damage from each other then?  --Rainith 12:10, 5 January 2006 (UTC)


 * PanSola's criteria sound very good to me, except I would add the following criteria to determine sub-species or main-species, if necessary:
 * Double damage from holy damage: Undead
 * Is it a fleshy creature? Is it immune against certain conditions?
 * Does it leave a corpse that can be exploited?
 * Can it be knocked down?
 * -- 12:29, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
 * If a creature takes double damge from holy, but does NOT take extra damage from deathbane, I will NOT consider it an undead. The other criteria might be useful to delineate sub-types, but not to make main species. -PanSola 13:07, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

One more criterion: Disease is supposed to be contagious among creatures of the same species. This should be a good way to determine species in some cases. On the other hand, some species that are the most tricky ones to determine are non-fleshy and thus immune against disease. :( -- 15:14, 5 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Lovely, this will be easier to use than Edge of Extinction (since aoe spells and/or many combatants really makes things hectic with EoE), at least on hostils suspecitable to disease. I have a hunch that if I get diseased, Prince Rurik still will remain quite healthy though (ie I bet species work the same way with EoE and disease). -PanSola 16:10, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Actually the in-game description of "diseased" say it's contageous between creatures "of the same kind", not of the same species. Notice the wording is different from Edge of Extinction (which says "of the same type").  Frankly as I go through many ingame text of skill descriptions, I find Anet don't really do a good job using consistent terminology.  But in this particular case, I was standing next to a renegade (human mob) and a devourer.  Casted Rotting Flesh on one of them, diseased spread to the other, while I don't get it at all.  Looks like "same kind" means hostile vs party member (not sure if allies fit under a third kind or also belong to party member, but neutral NPCs such as ascalon guards outside fort ranik I'm pretty sure is a third kind).  Disease is still useful for testing fleshieness though. -PanSola 19:54, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

The Goal?
"...is to collect as much information as possible on all of the various foes one might face in the wilds of the game's many explorable areas."

Well, that's the current goal stated in the article. However, we do include things that are not foes in the explorable areas in the Bestiary, so I'm fairly certain the quoted text isn't the entirety of our goal. Ideas? -PanSola 06:21, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
 * hmm change 'foes' to 'creatures'? --William Blackstaff 14:16, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
 * and remove "the wilds of" and "explorable", since we want NPCs in the towns too... Is there even a point to stating the goal?

Prima Guide
In the context of Bestiary, I'd like to mention the Prima Guide. I know it is full of errors, and because of this we should be VERY careful to use it as reference, but as it's been said in Talk:Prima Guide, the guide is supposed to be "official", and it is likely that ANet provided Prima with at least some insider information for it. This applies especially to the "Foe Stats" table, which includes information that is near impossible to find out with in-game methods. So I assume especially for "Foe Stats" that some or all of the info in that table has been provided by ANet. And this means, that maybe the structure of the "Foe Stats" table in the Prima guide reflects the actual in-game species structure. So IMHO we should have a close look at it!

For those who do not have the Prima guide, have a look at GameAmp. GameAmp ripped much of their site content straight out of the Prima guide (including the blatant errors :rolleyes:). The structure of their "Monsters" section is an almost exact copy of the Prima guide. -- 12:34, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Actually from what I understand of the powers of an alpha-testing account, all the Foe stats in the Prima Guide can easily be determined (assume you know beforehand where to go to find the particular foe you need stats on), with the single exception of what it drops... All it takes (the power of alpha account used) is infinite gold (to have many weapons and armor to switch between), god mode toggle (infinite health), and the ability to instantly level characters to lv20 and learn all skills.  This presums you know the Damage equation too.
 * As for the species organization in the guide, I was happy they separated out Stone Elemental from Ice Elemental and count them diff species (as it supports my theory), I was also pleased to find them listing Tower Golem as an Enchanted. But then Flesh Golem and Ice Golem are the same species?  Um, THAT really gave me a big frown.  Rift Warden also got double listed under "Ghost" and "Rift"
 * Finally, Jade is considered as Mursaat by there organization. Now that's something we can test, so I'll report back later. -PanSola 21:31, 5 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Initial observation seems to be that the Jade, teh Ether Seal, and Mursaat are the same type of creature. However I would like independent verification, since it's often hard to tell in the heat of battle.  I'll also do re-tests later. -PanSola 22:20, 5 January 2006 (UTC)