New player. Just did the main storyline up to the "killing" of Zhaitan. Very disappointed [Spoilers]

Let me just first say that i overall really enjoy this game, it's quite good and my complaint isn't about that. This post is strictly about the main base storyline, in particular the final parts and the fight with Zhaitan. I write this post because wow, i'm sure you saw a million of these on release but they still need to know this storyline was epic bad.

Okay so where do i start. There isn't really any way around it but to say flat out i feel it is top tier cringeworthy and badly executed up to the point it almost made me quit because it felt not just not great or epic in scope but downright bad to a such degree that it took all the air out of my balloon.

It's on a lot of layers this is nonsensical, and badly executed. Let's start with such things as assaulting Orr. Most of these campaign are so obviously focused on how it can be easy for the player to handle, but in the greater perspective it makes everything look so petty and stupid. The undead never really use great forces against you ever, and you are supposed to be facing a horde so tremendous that is it a threat to all of Tyria. There was one time this was good/okay, and it was when the undead assaulted claw island. Like the first real mission against undead. From there downhill. You go to the undead homelands and they come at you in small packs all the time, a few at a time then a few more when the previous are defeated. There seems to be no realistic tactics from undead and no real fear of getting owned all the important things you need are barely even guarded by anything special and as said they just come few by few so they are no threat. Of course in the dialogue they state they the undead are under pressure, on max defensive etc. Yet nothing ever relays that in the game.

You come to the heart of Orr to cleanse the dragon corruption. What happens? There is one pack with 4 champions which would have been the hardest fight in all the storyline, protecting the vulnerable heart. But what do they do? oh wait yea they step aside so you can go right in and kill the sovereign eye of Zhaitan. Because every tactician know that its best not to protect your greatest vulnerable spots. Where is the horde of Zhaitan? where is him trying to stop you? It's just you walking around the land and he completely not reacting and letting you do whatever you please and not even sending any real guards or anything. It's like this is nearly all the final parts of the campaign just complete cringe.

I don't wanna write 20 pages of whining so let's just skip to the final dungeon with Zhaitan. Again it's the almost no protection almost no hordes. Tons of dragons all over in the air out in the horizon and 1 comes then comes 2. In many of the big fights most of the pact and destiny's edge just stand around doing nothing. You have to defend the ship by yourself against dragons, operate all cannons etc they just literally stand there doing nothing. The whole ship afks while you do all. Oh and if you die they will run over and resurrect you, then back to afk. They don't do a shit. What do i need this destiny's edge for at all? it's so lame. It's like it was planned on paper then totally canned in production, with the explaining story still left in but none of it acted out. Also it's just deathzerging at free will if you don't cheese it and kite around all on a ranged. There is no epic pressure no consequence it's all free faceroll in the worst way.Eventually, suddenly comes logan on a suddenly new type ship and they are all so happy because this type ship gets created suddenly right it doesn't take a long time to develop. With a big cannon. Saves you, and then the big cannon oneshot shoots the tail of zhaitain with such ease that if it hit him in the face or heart he will probably have plain died instead. Then you just jump on a cannon and press 1 key till he is "dead"(alone again). Yay what a nice fight? I can't even describe how bad i think this final campaign was executed. Also the voice acting is almost entirely flat at all times, no emotions towards events or anything quite clearly just someone sitting in a room slowly speaking these lines.

As i said it was such a disappoint i got the feeling in my heart like wow i'm not really sure i'm gonna bother with this game that was just maximum meh, but i enjoyed lots of other parts so i'll still have some fun with that methinks. But wow, don't repeat this type of thing ever again please, for your own sake as a company.

To be fair, the final story instance was much harder at launch, but they converted it from a 5 man dungeon to a solo experience. The actual killing of Zhaitan always sucked, though.

Heart of Thorns did a much better job at showing the threat level, but the story as a whole seemed incredibly rushed and felt like parts were just chopped out of it.

Path of Fire, however, got the story and the threat level right. There are some legitimately difficult fights in that story and the actual writing is good.

Core Tyria and personal story are worst part of GW2 content. Good stuff is gated by expansions. However, reworking old content is wasting resources. This is 6 year old game. It's not going to grow. Devs should be focused on maintaining current playerbase for as long as possible. That's why releasing new content is more important than going back to old maps or god forbid personal story.

Well i don't expect at all for them to redo it, i just post it because.. Please do not repeat that.

Glad to hear the others parts are better though.

Dungeons in general are in a sorry state. Anet have pretty much officially come out and said that they have abandoned them in favor of other PvE content. The last thing they did seem to have been just gone over them all and nerfed the crap out of them.

So I’ll echo the sentiments of my fellow veterans: killing Zhaitan used to be a very hard dungeon instance that required a full party and felt really epic. I still remember killing him with my main and guild mates all those years ago.

Personally I have great nostalgia for dungeons and I am very sad to see them not really played at all anymore. Or when they are done, they’re a pathetic cakewalk. I got into a AC party yesterday and it was almost disgusting. Lt. Kholer used to be such a challenge that you actually had to plan out Reflects and the like to survive his mega-pull-spin thing (or if you were lucky you could get the randomly spawning Troll boss to aggro and kill him for you - member that? Oh I member...) but we just lured him into a corner and beat the snot out of him in mere seconds. How the mighty have fallen.

@Crackmonster.2790 said:Well i don't expect at all for them to redo it, i just post it because.. Please do not repeat that.

Glad to hear the others parts are better though.But they did redo it, years ago. Alot of the story was changed (it was even more nonsensical before with missions out of order). You are playing the new player experience, the fixed story.

Of course that doesnt change the fact its still crap and all over the place, but hey they tried.

@Dawdler.8521 said:...but hey they tried.

Famous last words =)

Oh and for the record the open world aspects of Orr have also been nerfed. The mob density used to be much, much higher and the mobs were way more intimidating to boot. You couldn’t take but a few steps before you were spammed with Immobilize, Fear and other conditions and promptly mobbed by Risen.

However, much like dungeons, Orr has lost it’s appeal and suffer from such relatively low player numbers that they had to cut back on it. Personally I agree with it: getting around Orr was a royal PITA back then.

But for sure, it definitely felt like you were wading through the nesting grounds of Zhaitan.

I did it solo a couple of days ago after years. It' remember it was horrible, but I don't remember it was that horrible. It's beyond believe they greenlit this sorry excuse of the final story step. As you mentioned: the rest of Destiny's Edge literally afk stand around and do NOTHING. I mean wtf? Also you alone 'kill' Zhaitan by shooting aka pressing 1 repeatedly for 2 minutes while the rest of the crew just stand around. It's absolutely ridiculous. I think they had to rush this. I am pretty sure it was planned that you fight him on the soil of Arah in an epic battle.

Luckily, PoF and HoT did it far better.

TBH, story is not a greates part of the game. Core had some bright spots closer to the beginning, but devolves into terrible slog in Orr. Oh, and fuck Orr itself. Horrible horrible boring horrible washed-out horrible impossible to navigate horrible place.

Expansions and LW are also all over the place, some parts good, some bad. But they all have advantage of not being in Orr. And not having Traherne in them (HoT actually gets bonus points for killing him off). Whoever voiced this fucker should be ashamed. I still feel like they don't know which direction they want to go though, and it gets dragged down by all the GW1 references. LW3 is a perfect illustration of how messy it can get.

@ProtoGunner.4953 said:I did it solo a couple of days ago after years. It' remember it was horrible, but I don't remember it was that horrible. It's beyond believe they greenlit this sorry excuse of the final story step. As you mentioned: the rest of Destiny's Edge literally afk stand around and do NOTHING. I mean kitten? Also you alone 'kill' Zhaitan by shooting aka pressing 1 repeatedly for 2 minutes while the rest of the crew just stand around. It's absolutely ridiculous. I think they had to rush this. I am pretty sure it was planned that you fight him on the soil of Arah in an epic battle.

Luckily, PoF and HoT did it far better.

That’s what happens when you reduce the number of enemies in order to make it soloable. Pretty sure it used to spawn more than enough mobs to keep the NPCs looking busy originally.

@Oglaf.1074 said:

@ProtoGunner.4953 said:I did it solo a couple of days ago after years. It' remember it was horrible, but I don't remember it was

that

horrible. It's beyond believe they greenlit this sorry excuse of the final story step. As you mentioned: the rest of Destiny's Edge literally afk stand around and do NOTHING. I mean kitten? Also you alone 'kill' Zhaitan by shooting aka pressing 1 repeatedly for 2 minutes while the rest of the crew just stand around. It's absolutely ridiculous. I think they had to rush this. I am pretty sure it was planned that you fight him on the soil of Arah in an epic battle.

Luckily, PoF and HoT did it far better.

I played it in 2012 and there was a lot more enemies around ofc. Still they could've changed it the way that Destiny's Edge actually do something instead of just afking.

@Crackmonster.2790 said:The undead never really use great forces against you ever, and you are supposed to be facing a horde so tremendous that is it a threat to all of Tyria. There was one time this was good/okay, and it was when the undead assaulted claw island. Like the first real mission against undead. From there downhill. You go to the undead homelands and they come at you in small packs all the time, a few at a time then a few more when the previous are defeated. There seems to be no realistic tactics from undead and no real fear of getting owned all the important things you need are barely even guarded by anything special and as said they just come few by few so they are no threat. Of course in the dialogue they state they the undead are under pressure, on max defensive etc. Yet nothing ever relays that in the game.

You come to the heart of Orr to cleanse the dragon corruption. What happens? There is one pack with 4 champions which would have been the hardest fight in all the storyline, protecting the vulnerable heart. But what do they do? oh wait yea they step aside so you can go right in and kill the sovereign eye of Zhaitan. Because every tactician know that its best not to protect your greatest vulnerable spots. Where is the horde of Zhaitan? where is him trying to stop you? It's just you walking around the land and he completely not reacting and letting you do whatever you please and not even sending any real guards or anything. It's like this is nearly all the final parts of the campaign just complete cringe.

Okay, but srsly what did you expect? This is not a single player game or some movie, this is an MMORPG that is played by 12-90 year old ppl. This is not a strategy game either.

The story in GW2 is not something that wanted to push the limits in terms of difficulty or challenge, where you'd have to prepare and use strategy to be able to beat it. It's something additional that should help you understand how Tyria works and why the things are the way they are, it is there to give new players a reason to go to the certain areas the game has and to give them at least some basic connection to the game world.

Could they've done it better? Yes, of course. But there are other MMORPGs that have even much worse story experiences. From an MMORPG perspective the vanilla GW2 story is somewhat mediocre. The good thing is that at least PoF is quite decent in terms of how the story is built and also ls3 and upwards the story is quite okay.

But if you search for strategic, challenging and truly massive epic battles you really need to ask if GW2, especially its storyline is really the right place to search for it. Maybe certain single player RPGs would fit better.

Personal Story is quite good IMO, UNTIL YOU JOIN THE PACT. Then things began to fail here and there...

Then Mordremoth will be a blast for you.^^

voice acting has always bin really bad in this game, i have played player made mods (for fallout NV and 3) that have better quality voice actors.i was also disapointed by the last fight, i expected an actual fight like a saw in the trailer but nope, just a lizzard on a stick.

@"Crackmonster.2790" said:Let me just first say that i overall really enjoy this game, it's quite good and my complaint isn't about that. This post is strictly about the main base storyline, in particular the final parts and the fight with Zhaitan. I write this post because wow, i'm sure you saw a million of these on release but they still need to know this storyline was epic bad.

Okay so where do i start. There isn't really any way around it but to say flat out i feel it is top tier cringeworthy and badly executed up to the point it almost made me quit because it felt not just not great or epic in scope but downright bad to a such degree that it took all the air out of my balloon.

It's on a lot of layers this is nonsensical, and badly executed. Let's start with such things as assaulting Orr. Most of these campaign are so obviously focused on how it can be easy for the player to handle, but in the greater perspective it makes everything look so petty and stupid. The undead never really use great forces against you ever, and you are supposed to be facing a horde so tremendous that is it a threat to all of Tyria. There was one time this was good/okay, and it was when the undead assaulted claw island. Like the first real mission against undead. From there downhill. You go to the undead homelands and they come at you in small packs all the time, a few at a time then a few more when the previous are defeated. There seems to be no realistic tactics from undead and no real fear of getting owned all the important things you need are barely even guarded by anything special and as said they just come few by few so they are no threat. Of course in the dialogue they state they the undead are under pressure, on max defensive etc. Yet nothing ever relays that in the game.

You come to the heart of Orr to cleanse the dragon corruption. What happens? There is one pack with 4 champions which would have been the hardest fight in all the storyline, protecting the vulnerable heart. But what do they do? oh wait yea they step aside so you can go right in and kill the sovereign eye of Zhaitan. Because every tactician know that its best not to protect your greatest vulnerable spots. Where is the horde of Zhaitan? where is him trying to stop you? It's just you walking around the land and he completely not reacting and letting you do whatever you please and not even sending any real guards or anything. It's like this is nearly all the final parts of the campaign just complete cringe.

I don't wanna write 20 pages of whining so let's just skip to the final dungeon with Zhaitan. Again it's the almost no protection almost no hordes. Tons of dragons all over in the air out in the horizon and 1 comes then comes 2. In many of the big fights most of the pact and destiny's edge just stand around doing nothing. You have to defend the ship by yourself against dragons, operate all cannons etc they just literally stand there doing nothing. The whole ship afks while you do all. Oh and if you die they will run over and resurrect you, then back to afk. They don't do a kitten. What do i need this destiny's edge for at all? it's so lame. It's like it was planned on paper then totally canned in production, with the explaining story still left in but none of it acted out. Also it's just deathzerging at free will if you don't cheese it and kite around all on a ranged. There is no epic pressure no consequence it's all free faceroll in the worst way.Eventually, suddenly comes logan on a suddenly new type ship and they are all so happy because this type ship gets created suddenly right it doesn't take a long time to develop. With a big cannon. Saves you, and then the big cannon oneshot shoots the tail of zhaitain with such ease that if it hit him in the face or heart he will probably have plain died instead. Then you just jump on a cannon and press 1 key till he is "dead"(alone again). Yay what a nice fight? I can't even describe how bad i think this final campaign was executed. Also the voice acting is almost entirely flat at all times, no emotions towards events or anything quite clearly just someone sitting in a room slowly speaking these lines.

As i said it was such a disappoint i got the feeling in my heart like wow i'm not really sure i'm gonna bother with this game that was just maximum meh, but i enjoyed lots of other parts so i'll still have some fun with that methinks. But wow, don't repeat this type of thing ever again please, for your own sake as a company.

I'm not going to comment on this too much, I'm just going to say that (spoiler?) you fight Modremoth in the open world in a 150-man raid.They did not repeat the same mistake they made with Zhaitan.

Personal Story is basically just a tutorial for new players now.. Living World Season 2+ are much harder.

Wait, when did that happen actually? Because I switch back and forth in the stories (Core, PoF, Hot) and realized too that suddenly in several Orr fights, my NPC and even the enemy NPC just stand around. There is some awesome epic audio background of 500 people brawling and then there like groups of 5 hostile and friendly NPC just standing still like marble columns. But since the game glitched with the lighing (bright square blocks instead of smoothed radial light sources) I thought something might be wrong during loading and just cheezed my way trough these fights.

Yesterday I realized I ended the PoF main story after the speech and the game set it to the "Fight Zhaitan" chapter by itself. I walked around in Orr as if I am shopping in the mall. I remember, one of my first threads on the old boards was how to get around in Orr, because at once point, a Veteran zombie in a narrow place blocked me and downed me when I just came close (with 123,033 conditions and helpers). I was thinking a bunch of people might just raided that place and I got lucky, but it kept being like that. I just rode my Springer and scratched my head.

It must have been in the end of 2016 or something..

The German voice acting is as fine as always but it improves SO MUCH in PoF.

Excelsior.

@Hannelore.8153 said:

@"Crackmonster.2790" said:Let me just first say that i overall really enjoy this game, it's quite good and my complaint isn't about that. This post is strictly about the main base storyline, in particular the final parts and the fight with Zhaitan. I write this post because wow, i'm sure you saw a million of these on release but they still need to know this storyline was epic bad.

Okay so where do i start. There isn't really any way around it but to say flat out i feel it is top tier cringeworthy and badly executed up to the point it almost made me quit because it felt not just not great or epic in scope but downright bad to a such degree that it took all the air out of my balloon.

It's on a lot of layers this is nonsensical, and badly executed. Let's start with such things as assaulting Orr. Most of these campaign are so obviously focused on how it can be easy for the player to handle, but in the greater perspective it makes everything look so petty and stupid. The undead never really use great forces against you ever, and you are supposed to be facing a horde so tremendous that is it a threat to all of Tyria. There was one time this was good/okay, and it was when the undead assaulted claw island. Like the first real mission against undead. From there downhill. You go to the undead homelands and they come at you in small packs all the time, a few at a time then a few more when the previous are defeated. There seems to be no realistic tactics from undead and no real fear of getting owned all the important things you need are barely even guarded by anything special and as said they just come few by few so they are no threat. Of course in the dialogue they state they the undead are under pressure, on max defensive etc. Yet nothing ever relays that in the game.

You come to the heart of Orr to cleanse the dragon corruption. What happens? There is one pack with 4 champions which would have been the hardest fight in all the storyline, protecting the vulnerable heart. But what do they do? oh wait yea they step aside so you can go right in and kill the sovereign eye of Zhaitan. Because every tactician know that its best not to protect your greatest vulnerable spots. Where is the horde of Zhaitan? where is him trying to stop you? It's just you walking around the land and he completely not reacting and letting you do whatever you please and not even sending any real guards or anything. It's like this is nearly all the final parts of the campaign just complete cringe.

I don't wanna write 20 pages of whining so let's just skip to the final dungeon with Zhaitan. Again it's the almost no protection almost no hordes. Tons of dragons all over in the air out in the horizon and 1 comes then comes 2. In many of the big fights most of the pact and destiny's edge just stand around doing nothing. You have to defend the ship by yourself against dragons, operate all cannons etc they just literally stand there doing nothing. The whole ship afks while you do all. Oh and if you die they will run over and resurrect you, then back to afk. They don't do a kitten. What do i need this destiny's edge for at all? it's so lame. It's like it was planned on paper then totally canned in production, with the explaining story still left in but none of it acted out. Also it's just deathzerging at free will if you don't cheese it and kite around all on a ranged. There is no epic pressure no consequence it's all free faceroll in the worst way.Eventually, suddenly comes logan on a suddenly new type ship and they are all so happy because this type ship gets created suddenly right it doesn't take a long time to develop. With a big cannon. Saves you, and then the big cannon oneshot shoots the tail of zhaitain with such ease that if it hit him in the face or heart he will probably have plain died instead. Then you just jump on a cannon and press 1 key till he is "dead"(alone again). Yay what a nice fight? I can't even describe how bad i think this final campaign was executed. Also the voice acting is almost entirely flat at all times, no emotions towards events or anything quite clearly just someone sitting in a room slowly speaking these lines.

As i said it was such a disappoint i got the feeling in my heart like wow i'm not really sure i'm gonna bother with this game that was just maximum meh, but i enjoyed lots of other parts so i'll still have some fun with that methinks. But wow, don't repeat this type of thing ever again please, for your own sake as a company.

DS cap is less than 150 players.

I just started playing a couple of weeks ago, and you're right, it's pretty bad. It's all handled MUCH better in the expansions, though.

HOWEVER... this brings up a major gripe of mine as a new player of this game. You may not realize this, but half of the game's story line (and a bunch of zones) are locked until you purchase them in the cash (aka "gem") store. You'll have to spent another $35 to unlock them, they are NOT included with the expansions. I found it very annoying to find out that buying every available expansion still didn't unlock all the zones, and left half the story line incomplete. They should either add those to the expansions, or sell them as DLC alongside the expansions on the website and via retailers. I feel like hiding them in the gem shop makes it seem like they are trying to trick their customers into making another purchase, after thinking they thought they had already bought the full game. I know I will be hesitant to buy anything from ArenaNet again until I know there aren't any hidden costs involved.

Unfortunately, the personal storyline is pretty lame. Although I think it gets a lot better after that. The HoT storyline had excellent integration with the open world maps and the whole thing just feels more immersive. The final battle with mordremoth is kind of drawn out and boring, but certainly a lot better than the battle with Zhaitan. At least you actually get to fight mordremoth and not just push 1 over and over!

@Ardid.7203 said:Personal Story is quite good IMO, UNTIL YOU JOIN THE PACT. Then things began to fail here and there...

Agreed....

@"Aethron.6704" said:I just started playing a couple of weeks ago, and you're right, it's pretty bad. It's all handled MUCH better in the expansions, though.

HOWEVER... this brings up a major gripe of mine as a new player of this game. You may not realize this, but half of the game's story line (and a bunch of zones) are locked until you purchase them in the cash (aka "gem") store. You'll have to spent another $35 to unlock them, they are NOT included with the expansions. I found it very annoying to find out that buying every available expansion still didn't unlock all the zones, and left half the story line incomplete. They should either add those to the expansions, or sell them as DLC alongside the expansions on the website and via retailers. I feel like hiding them in the gem shop makes it seem like they are trying to trick their customers into making another purchase, after thinking they thought they had already bought the full game. I know I will be hesitant to buy anything from ArenaNet again until I know there aren't any hidden costs involved.

Anything in the Gem Store is available at no cost using the Gold-to-Gems exchange. Also, one can purchase, at least, the Season Two bundle along with either/both expansions on the website.

Welcome to Tyria, and good luck.

Personal Opinion: Epic fights with large, legendary dragons seem a problem to me. I recall from Brand X game with a dragon as a the major boss in an expansion...We fought it initially by landing on its back while it was flying and fought its spine...kinda weird. Then we fought it by landing on platforms and fighting different parts of the dragon on each one. Nowhere did we have the opportunity to "fight the dragon."

Even in HoT, we only fight parts of him at a time. In old Tyria, we have the Shatterer, Teq, and the claw of Jormag. All are nicely presented dragons in the whole, but they are large scale events. If they were scaled down so that one person, or even a team of five could fight them, I suspect they would be a bit underwhelming, for a dragon fight.

In PoF, the final fight of the main story is with a somewhat oversized humanoid figure, which makes it, in my opinion, a very dramatic fight for one person. My experience with other games parallels this. Fights with bosses somewhat larger than the players, without being "dragon sized" work really well. But when we get to the point where the bosses are the size of dragons that suit the vision of "legendary," anything suitable for a small group seems out of place.

I think that the best way to go with fighting elder dragons is as world bosses. I think if they added a new map with Zhaitan as a world boss at the end of a meta chain with decent rewards, then that content would see a lot of traffic. They don't even need to come up with a reason for Zhaitan to come back. Just have it happen in a pre-HoT world.