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(Opinion/Rant) What's your worst story mission in Gw2/Expansions?

Bastrii.3047

By Bastrii.3047
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Bastrii.3047

Bastrii.3047

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Have you ever come across a mission that hit every "this is terribly designed and paced" nail on the head? One story chapter that you absolutely despise above all else.

Because Weight of the World (End of Dragons) somehow fits this perfectly. Let me tell you, the story intro to this chapter is great. You enter, you're pulled into a small instance with Soo-Won, you fight some Void, and you learn about the sheer urgency of your quest. That if you don't move now, it's GG, game over. And when you leave this instance, your character is legitimately angry and urgent to make progress. I was highly motivated to take some DRASTIC action forward and press on, kick down some doors, and demand answers.

Queue the follow up! "Weight of the World". After saying you're not going to do any more talking or playing by the rules, you go out to do some talking and play by the rules. This is the biggest break in immersion you could ask for. I was pumped to fight some baddies, maybe stumble upon Joon's lair being over run by Void or something - instead, you're brought in, and... everything is perfectly fine. Except Joon is crying and making everything about her. You know what? That's fine. I can get over that. End of Dragons was a great story so far, but I can deal with one frustratingly paced chapter - whatever.

And then you're pushed into a Jade tech puzzle. Go collect batteries, haha! Reroute power for 15 minutes. 🙂 Aurene isn't holding off the power of an Elder Dragon alongside Caithe, isn't literally fighting the Void as you make funny quips about jade tech, haha. And you know what? I could deal with that. I could manage it just fine. I wasn't frustrated because of how shoehorned in this felt, noo. Of course Joon doesn't want to talk. She's a progeny of Jade-Tech science, it's not like this has happened a dozen times before where a character wants to fight instead of deal with their emotions in literally any capable manner.

So you go through her mansion and dig through all of her books and belongings while dealing with *really* forced puzzles. Fine. Do that, move on, you're finally right in front of her. And you give her your Aetherblade evidence, and she STILL doesn't want to have a normal conversation. So you know what she does? Why, she wants to fight because she's sad! Like 90% of other encounters with an NPC you're supposed to talk to, it somehow ends in a fight. Again. *Great.* I can deal with this. I'm used to these story beats at this point, and while it's not a bad plot point, there comes a time when it starts to grate on you. And this? It grates on me.

But then the "fight" started. Kill mob, smash battery. Easy. Right? Haha! This is a personal problem, now. Because the platforms, of course they move. So while I'm breezing through this and about to get my speedy completion achievement, the platform beneath my feet springs up, and clips me inside.

I was then imprisoned in baby jail. My first solution was to see if the pulsing floor smasher would kill me, costing me my achievement progress (and forcing me to redo this instance later). Nope. It pulses SO SLOWLY, I drop combat and heal 120% of the damage it does to me. Okay, I can't die.

I struggle until my speedy completion achievement fails, until I manage to clip my jade bot (which has horrible controls and moves like lubed butter over polished glass) outside of the baby gate I was trapped in. Now, this wouldn't do anything for ANY class in the game, except two: Mechanist, and any spec of Ranger.

And I was playing my Druid. Lucky. So I was able to target the mobs 1 at a time, and command my pet to kill them. In the meanwhile, I had to reclip my jade bot back in-bounds and raise/lower platforms (except the one I'm stuck in - obviously this is one of the six that does NOT move) so my Pet could run over and attack the next mob. This bug took me 30+ minutes alone.
I entered this instance at 06:00. I finished it at 07:10. Not because of a lack of skill, or missing signs. But because of poor design and horrendous bug testing.

What's your horrendous encounters with story instances? Please, don't let me be the only one who vents here. Surely there's at least a few others who had a bad time and wanna talk about it.

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DanAlcedo.3281

DanAlcedo.3281

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So, I didn't read your post before thinking about the worst one and my mind went to Joons Home. 

Girl, the god kitten World is ending and you are throwing a tantrum that you are not awesome enough? Jesus. 

Also the BS of the shield protecting the door? I seriously would have burned the house down to get her. 

You can cry later. We have a world to save. 

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Teknomancer.4895

Teknomancer.4895

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15 minutes ago, Dante.1508 said:

Living Story 2 - chasing that moronic Sylvari..

EoD was bad but nothing was worse than LS2 for me.

For me it's pretty much anything to do with the Sylvari. As newly emergent sentient beings, they could have been really interesting. Instead they ended up being just another bunch of pretentious woodland elves with posh English accents. Yawn.

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bruakumfd.4817

bruakumfd.4817

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I was thinking more of any HoT story since that was just punishing for casual players. I can understand why you'd have an issue with Weight of the World. It wasn't as bad as the first time around since the wiki had a detailed guide. A lot of it was still really unnecessary, though.

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Bastrii.3047

Bastrii.3047

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1 hour ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

So, I didn't read your post before thinking about the worst one and my mind went to Joons Home. 

Girl, the god kitten World is ending and you are throwing a tantrum that you are not awesome enough? Jesus. 

Also the BS of the shield protecting the door? I seriously would have burned the house down to get her. 

You can cry later. We have a world to save. 

I seriously wished the Commander just kicked down the door and fought her on this. Diplomacy is not an option at this point of the story, it should be do or die. Like for real - be the bad guy for 2 seconds to be the good guy for the rest of written history. "Sorry I broke your door, but the time for coddling emotionally immature adults is over."

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AliamRationem.5172

AliamRationem.5172

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As boring storylines with annoying achievements go its hard to top LS2.  But for head-scratching writing the last two episodes of LS3 were like a train derailment. 

For bugs it's everywhere and you never know when it will strike or how bad it will be.  I had to give up on LS4 for months because of a disconnect bug when fighting Kralk in LS4, for example.

And don't even get me started on IBS champions...

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DanAlcedo.3281

DanAlcedo.3281

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1 hour ago, Bastrii.3047 said:

I seriously wished the Commander just kicked down the door and fought her on this. Diplomacy is not an option at this point of the story, it should be do or die. Like for real - be the bad guy for 2 seconds to be the good guy for the rest of written history. "Sorry I broke your door, but the time for coddling emotionally immature adults is over."

Absolutely.

 

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Ashantara.8731

Ashantara.8731

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3 hours ago, Bastrii.3047 said:

Have you ever come across a mission that hit every "this is terribly designed and paced" nail on the head?

Yes. My most hated mission to date is the Shining Blade initiation ritual mission in Season 3. While the fight against your own Doubts is interesting, the writing for everything else in it is just horrendous (like most of the writing in Season 3, to be honest), and so is the execution of it:

  • Anise and Livia as live role-players, making obvious fun of a dramatic moment of the past
  • The initiation with all that hilarious stuff falling down on us while we are sitting in a large tub: water, rocks, etc
  • The badly written dialogue from A to Z
  • The fact that no one asked me whether my characters wanted to become members in the first place!

This story mission completely ruined the Shining Blade for me. Truly embarrassing.

Edited by Ashantara.8731
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Endaris.1452

Endaris.1452

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I don't think I ever got so many disconnects, stuck-in-wall and progress-blocked issues as in the Temple of the Forgotten God instance. Absolute hell.

I definitely can symphatize with the one who mentioned their great journey through Weight of the World too though, it seems like about EVERYONE gets the instance to bug in the last battle, either you or a mob gets stuck underground (for me it was the latter).

Edited by Endaris.1452
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Duglaive.5236

Duglaive.5236

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As less than stellar writing and pacing can be found in various spots throughout all the game's story, I'm just going with the bugged mission that plagued me the longest and all but drove me mad (not that that'd take much at times).

A Kindness Repaid.

It sounds so pleasant, like a break from the usual life and death struggle. Of course, that brief illusion disappears quickly. But that's ok, I like combat. And then ... the first bug hits. Several hours and many restarts later I get passed the bug, and soldier onward. In less than a couple of minutes bug #2 rears its head. /Sigh. It will take almost a week to dodge this bug. Bugs 3 through 6 will play out in turn, and in total it will take almost 3 weeks to complete a 10-minute story mission.

I really loved LWS4, but A Kindness Repaid almost ruined it for me.

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Randulf.7614

Randulf.7614

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32 minutes ago, Ashantara.8731 said:

Yes. My most hated mission to date is the Shining Blade initiation ritual mission in Season 3. While the fight against your own Doubts is interesting, the writing for everything else in it is just horrendous (like most of the writing in Season 3, to be honest), and so is the execution of it:

  • Anise and Livia as live role-players, making obvious fun of a dramatic moment of the past
  • The initiation with all that hilarious stuff falling down on us while we are sitting in a large tub: water, rocks, etc
  • The badly written dialogue from A to Z
  • The fact that no one asked me whether my characters wanted to become members in the first place!

This story mission completely ruined the Shining Blade for me. Truly embarrassing.

This one. Honorary mention goes to the finale of season 4. An island sized elder dragon beaten up by his tiny resurrected granddaughter (removing the dramatic tension built by the previous episode) and at the end calling for his mummy was… not good.

I did enjoy Joons Mansion. More for the puzzles than the story. The issue was EoD Act 4 was an odd one. I thought the first three Acts worked rather well, but we should have spent more time on Soo Wan and the void after Ankka went down. The White Falcon stuff could have been part of an earlier Act or cut to a side story.

 

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AliamRationem.5172

AliamRationem.5172

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39 minutes ago, Ashantara.8731 said:

Yes. My most hated mission to date is the Shining Blade initiation ritual mission in Season 3. While the fight against your own Doubts is interesting, the writing for everything else in it is just horrendous (like most of the writing in Season 3, to be honest), and so is the execution of it:

  • Anise and Livia as live role-players, making obvious fun of a dramatic moment of the past
  • The initiation with all that hilarious stuff falling down on us while we are sitting in a large tub: water, rocks, etc
  • The badly written dialogue from A to Z
  • The fact that no one asked me whether my characters wanted to become members in the first place!

This story mission completely ruined the Shining Blade for me. Truly embarrassing.

Seriously.  Although I really enjoyed LS3 up until that episode.  I liked dealing with Caudecus and the associated maps were fun and rewarding as well.

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Doggie.3184

Doggie.3184

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Thunderhead Peaks LS is my worst memory for that because both the Sniper Duel and the battle VS Kralkatorrik inside the cave took a long time with unskippable stuff and had a bug (and may still have it) where it instantly kicks you to character select screen after cutscene/dialogue, causing me to have to redo them multiple times. EoD's first mission on the Airships also had that problem at the end after the cutscene. Super annoying. I had to redo the Kralk one soooooo many times to get my leggy amulet due to cutscene kick.

I also went through Zhaitan's Arah story instance again for first time in ages when I rerolled my main to change race in past year and wanted to full 100% him like old char. Holy hell is that mission a nightmare because it's also cursed with random kicks-to-char-select-screen at multiple specific points with 0 checkpoints throughout the insanely long and slow mission. I had to loiter around entrance waiting for a newbie to ask for help and when that eventually happened I joined their instance and could finally get through it. Some instances are just cursed with this glitch and there's nothing technical you can do about it on your end to fix it. Something's just wrong with their scene transitions in them. For that reason those 4 missions are the worst in the game to me.

I wasn't a fan of Weight of the World either though as it's designed to be replayed multiple times while not being a fun mission to replay to get all the achievements. It's one of those 'one time is enough and don't want to see it again' kinda missions. Plus; Joon is very unlikeable.

Edited by Doggie.3184
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Gibson.4036

Gibson.4036

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Seeds of Truth and Point of No Return. Stealth mission was annoying. Hated having to kill the centaurs. Hated watching Caithe kill Wynne instead of protect her from Faolain. After that, I can't stand Caithe.

IBS Champions, for all the obvious reasons.

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