Guild Wars 2

After just leaving Arah story mode, I’m staggered how some things are terribly out of place in the personal story, and how certain things (like the dragon itself) are given so few attention on how it fits into said story.

First of all, it’s extremly disapointing that in a game so focused on overstretching events orienting the flow of action for entire zones since the initial levels (or atleast from level 70 onward) the final battle against the great elder dragon is INSTANCED. This is a huge sign of lack of confidence on their own content design (which is amazing) by Arenanet. After the great extensive efforts to liberate the temples of 5 of the human gods alongside an army of other heroes, who would think Zhaitan only needs 5 of us to be taken down? Good for him his Risen priests minions never revolted.

I don’t even want to mention how Trehearne is the worst possible character that Arenanet could consider making a central point of the personal story for 30 levels. He’s boring, has zero (0) personality and no presence whatsoever. But well, I wasn’t going to mention that.

Coming out of that terrible cicle about Trehearne, we enter Arah for the final battle with the Threat of Zhaitan. Now, I’m using a capital letter here because the Threat of Zhaitan is what we’ve been facing time and again throughout the maps and personal story, it’s a very well known enemy. Cunning and wrathful. The problem is what we find is Zhaitan, a dragon we never seen before, never spoken to, never made any presence at any point in the story.

The Threat of Zhaitan is a much more ineteresting character that manifest itself through agents but is always present. Zhaitan himself stayed hidden the whole time, never came forth to terrorize us, and even now, he refuses to present himself as anything worth of notice. His eyes and mouths and agents say a lot about him, and yet he says nothing, like there is no character Zhaitan, only the Threat of Zhaitan. In short, the way he is presented to us for the first time – and as far as we know at this stage of the story, the last time – is like he’s nothing of importance at all.

Well, the other part of the pittifulness that is Zhaitan is the actual confrontation. We only fight him through cannons, in a very very VERY long and boring turrent section where he stands there grabbing his tower and NOT REACTING and we keep pressing the SAME KEY OVER AND OVER, until his huge useless healthbar is depleated and he falls into the fog.

The worst thing about the fight is that JUST BEFORE THAT, we had much more intense and challenging ship vs dragon confrontations against multiple of his Plaguebringers. How is it that the same battle concept can be amazing and hard against his servants and boring and pointless against the master himself.

Also another hole in the overall plot is the new fantastic juggernaut ship that just happened to appear out of nowhere that we – AS SECOND IN COMMAND of the Pact – never heard a single word about. Just like Zhaitan, this amazing ship that the cinematics are so thorough in presenting as some character worth of notice, in fact is not, as we’re not even told its NAME, or where it was built, or by whom, or even that we were expecting the “pride of the Pact” to engage Zhaitan in the end.

It boggles my mind how can Forgal have such an amazing presence in his course of the story, or the unworthy and boring Trehearne after Forgal, and such presence and iteration through the story is denied to the actual NEMESIS of the whole game in the time of release.

My sentiments exactly. Horrible ending to the story. Absolutely terrible.

This is how you finish a story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDpayS4UNVE (WoW Lich King ending)

The Zhaitan story falls a great deal short

You actually do hear about the flagship if you pay attention to NPC chatter, like I do. There were Pact members talking about it and how it wasn’t quite ready for combat a few missions prior.

I see… but you don’t recieve that information in a formal manner, Trehearne doesn’t say anything (if he knows about it). You don’t even know where it’s being build. For the importance it is given to it in Arah, you would imagine you could have seen it at least in parts being put together in some asura shipward, possibly in Rata Sum.

I would say it’s not only how well the Lich King saga ends, but how many times you confront him during the whole WotLK expansion, specially with the amazing starting area of Death Knights.

You enter the Citadel knowing who the enemy is, how he looks like, what he can do. You even tried to steal his weapon, and had to flee from him.

We just never seen, confronted, scouted, smelled or skirmished with Zhaitan before Aran. Not even inside Arah before the final battle.

Anet already announced they’re still trying to get Zhiatan to work properly since the battle with him was never meant to be like the way it currently is. It seems Zhiatan didn’t perform how he originally meant to do when we fight him.

I figure everything we did to weaken him up to that point, he was just begging to be killed. Either that or he was overconfident.

My sentiments exactly. Horrible ending to the story. Absolutely terrible.
This is how you finish a story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDpayS4UNVE (WoW Lich King ending)

I agree that the Zhaitan fight is disappointing but to put that crappy wow Boss fight as an example of a good one is even worse !

The Zhaitan story is great, people are just complaining about the fight itself !

I was hoping to pound him to the ground myself with my own power, not using a cannon and pew pew peck him to death, you can’t even see damage numbers at all feels kind of not epic and he’s to small for an elder dragon.

Latinkuro.9420:

The Zhaitan story is great, people are just complaining about the fight itself !

I was hoping to pound him to the ground myself with my own power, not using a cannon and pew pew peck him to death, you can’t even see damage numbers at all feels kind of not epic and he’s to small for an elder dragon.

I’d love to see a more interesting fight, but I doubt that fighting him with your own power would even work. If Zhaitan was a human, you would be a wasp. You could sting him; but then he swats you to the ground and stomps on you.

So to me it would be more a fight against time where you had to fend off his attacks and minions long enough for some giant Asura mega-laser to become fully charged. Then something unexpected might happen where the crew manning the laser would die and you have to dodge-rush through mobs in order to press the button. Then, during a short cinematic, you see the laser firing, shearing off one of his wings and he slams into the mountainside and tumbles down into the mist.

This is just a quick example ofcourse, but it could be a more intense fight compared to firing little cannons the whole time I think.

Then again, I have yet to complete my storyline so I don’t know what’s going on at present time (wanted to go yesterday, but the door to Arah seems bugged and will not open)

Latinkuro.9420:

The Zhaitan story is great, people are just complaining about the fight itself !

If you read my original post, I am exacly complaining of both the fight AND the story about Zhaithan, and how the actual dragon character is (not) introduced to us.

“Sup, guys, I’m Zhaitan. Bye, guys, you won.”

Yeah because its not like Zhaitan had a bunch of minions to do his dirty work for him like Eyes or Mouths or anything….

But what do I know?

I’m apparently one of the few people who actually enjoyed the story.

Latinkuro.9420:

My sentiments exactly. Horrible ending to the story. Absolutely terrible.
This is how you finish a story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDpayS4UNVE (WoW Lich King ending)

I agree that the Zhaitan fight is disappointing but to put that crappy wow Boss fight as an example of a good one is even worse !

The Zhaitan story is great, people are just complaining about the fight itself !

I was hoping to pound him to the ground myself with my own power, not using a cannon and pew pew peck him to death, you can’t even see damage numbers at all feels kind of not epic and he’s to small for an elder dragon.

I’ve said it before, we’re -never- going to get to fight an elder dragon under our own power. Zhaitan’s just too kitten big to care about us, and they only get bigger from here on out. And it’s not just the fight that people are complaining about, it’s the whole presentation surrounding him. Zhaitan doesn’t show up at all until the last 20 minutes of the game, there’s no buildup of tension or sense of awe, no looming sense of “oh sweet crunchy christ we’re actually going to fight that immense monstrosity we saw back there. How can we even do anything to him, he nuked a whole mountainside with a wingbeat and gave no craps about all our strongest artillery.” Or something like that.

Also FYI, your fanboy is showing.

I actually just created a thread, talking about the same.

Zaithan fight is horrid, i am wanting to keep playing this game, but the deeper i go, the deeper i see there’s nothing there.

No challenges, boss fight sucks, not only zaithan most of them are horrible and require no brains.

Maybe it’s time to start thinking of reinstalling WoW, i play GW1 since release, completed everything, went to WoW for 9 months, loved it, but GW2 finally was announced so i stopped WoW and focused for GW2, now… i just feel empty.

I’m not trying to be a hater, just trying to be really honest, this game is very boring, battles are horrible, nothing challenges me, and the Zaithan fight was disappointing to the unbelievable.

Beware, spoilers below.

Yesterday, guildmates and myself finally got around to killing Zhaitan.

The start of the dungeon is great.
Collecting the power cores is fun and has great bosses.
I really enjoyed that part.

Then you get on the airship.
The first fight is pretty lacklustre but it’s all right.

After that you get to clear out the landing.
Again, a good part. Taking down the Orrian towers and fighting the mouth of Zhaitan is pretty fun and challenging. Well balanced.

Then you get back onto your airship. And this is where it all goes down the drain.
I can deal with the huge amounts of minions spawning on the deck, but the poison fields make it impossible to clear without dying.
The best tactic is just unequip your armor, spawn, run up to the cannons while ignoring everything, fire a couple of shots and die again. Rinse and repeat.
If only the poison fields could be bounced back by the cannons shield function, this would be a decent fight.
I tried to stop the poison bombs 5 times but it just went straight through the shield.
As it stands now, it’s just impossible to do this without death-rushing it.
Which takes away all of the fun. If someone did find a way, please share.

You simply don’t have enough room to defend yourself from the poison and man the cannons and the same time.
The pressure from the minions should stay, but the poison fields need to be sorted.
Most of the time the whole deck was filled with poison. Nobody in our party had room to manoeuvre or heal.
And not to mention the chain-knockback the poison bombs inflict. At one point I got hit by one at full health and got knocked back. Only to get up on my feet and get knocked back again. And it kept doing that until I died. I literally couldn’t do anything about it.

The second fight, which let’s you fight 2 champions at once, is pretty much the same mess but bigger.
In short, either remove the poison fields, vastly shorten their duration or give us some way to counter them. You gave us shields on the cannons, allow us to use them?

Then we got to the big man himself.
Zhaitan has an impressive design and wasn’t what I expected.
I like his style and he looked really threatening.

Protecting Zojja was a good part.
Only thing I would add here is, make Zhaitan actually say stuff while he is circling around the ship.
Let him talk! This is so important!
Let hem taunt the players! Stuff like: “You’ve come all this way for your own demise” and other stuff along those lines.

The big shot that almost tears in him half would have felt that much better after fighting of hordes for Zojja whilst Zhaitan is threatening/taunting you.

Then, the Zaithan-clingy part.
I know the fight itself is still bugged but even when he would do his attacks properly, it still would be pretty lame.

You nailed it so well in Nightfall I can’t believe I’m actually having to post this.
Let us poke Zaithan’s face with our actual weapons.
That little thing is so important. Any NPC could have fired those cannons.
You want us, the players, to feel like heroes?
Gw1 vets already poked a God with their puny weapons. A God!

Imagine this.
Zojja fires her shot. Zhaitan lands on the tower.
The airship moves in closer. Towards Zhaitan’s head.
NPC’s are shouting towards the players to get ready.
Zhaitan roars and tells the players they’ll be all dead soon.

Players have to fight the snake-like creatures from his mouth and when they are all cut off (or retreat) die we finally get a stab at Zhaitan.
Zhaitan’s attack could be:
- Roar: Causes fear to players.
- Poisonous breath: delivers damage and poison to players, forcing them to retreat.
- Let some of the snake-like creatures come back.
- …

After Zhaitan’s HP goes down he roars and cries one final time before letting go and crashing down.
And by the way, the fact that nobody goes to make sure he is really dead is beyond me.
I thought the destiny’s edge members would love to get a confirm on his kill.
The first thing that crossed my mind when slaying him with the cannons was: “Well, we’d better land this thing and make sure he is really dead.”

I don’t know what happened dear Anet devs.
It just feels like the whole Zhaitan fight was rushed.
You really have the best Pc game ever made in your hands here, despite the bugs and minor inconveniences. It’s not perfect, but it gets pretty kitten close.

Please, just rework the whole Zhaitan fight.
Players who have already done it will be thankfull and players who didn’t will not be disappointed as I am now.

Every big boss fight in Guild Wars 1 was so awesome.
You really felt like you had achieved something when coming back from that fight.
Shiro, the lich, abaddon. All great and vastly superior fights in terms of excitement and fun.

I really hope you read this thread. Would love a response.
If you want me to further elaborate on something, just ask.

I still haven’t reached that mission (still level 49), but I think that ANet should include 2 or 3 missions regarding Zaithan itself, where in the end he would wipe dozens of soldiers, in a single breath!

That way the final battle would be more anticipated!

“The Threat of Zhaitan is a much more interesting character”

I find this to be an insightful critique.

Ask yourself this: If HAL 9000 had only been a voice and a series of actions performed by the various parts of the ship, would he have been nearly as creepy? No. It was the eye – that glaring, unblinking eye. HAL’s eye gave him presence, and that presence made him real.

For the vast majority of the story, Zhaitan is just a word. He’s not made real until the very end, and by then it’s too late to impress the majesty and power of his presence upon me. There was nothing to connect this being to the idea; the word you keep hearing throughout the story.

Unless there’s a twist involved in revealing/showing a major character for the first time, there’s no good reason to hide it from us until then. Connect me to that character along the way with an actual presence. Let that presence destroy a character I’m supposed to care about. Let that be the heroic sacrifice rather than the nameless, pointless mob of undead. (By the way, why did that even happen? As depicted in the scene, we could just have easily closed the gate with your mentor on THIS side of it)

I also think that the boss fight would have been better served up as a PQ. The dragon fight PQs in this game are pretty awesome, scaling in complexity as you go up to Jormag (although I would have enjoyed more unique stages rather than repeating the corrupted wall/fly/shoot down/corrupted wall stage). The PQs to retake the temples in Orr could have culminated in another step – the Mother of All Steps – wherein the assembled army of players takes on Zhaitan in a series of epic fight stages. Jormag on steroids. I would have found that far more “believable” and rewarding than five dudes taking him down.

Actually general PVE in GW2 is mostly brilliant. It’s challenging and not subject to fixed recipe strategies (aside from exploits). Some of the best examples are the thief boss in Ascalon explorable and Kudu in CoE story, they require a lot of attention, environment awereness, endurance/block/blind management and supporting and reviving all around. The only problem I saw in dungeon PVE in terms of mechanics is the endless respawning during boss fights, because that encourages fights that actually rely on it, and systematic corpse running is really not a fun mechanic or tool to defeat any boss. It’s boring and frustrating and sometimes you feel you have to die multiple times to win, and learn nothing.

Well, Zhaitan doesn’t have any of that, it’s basically “remember WoW? don’t stand on fire, obey the kill order and use cannons”. That’s it.There is no reason why should even worry about blocks and managing the enemies attacks. Swarm fights and turrets sessions are just what GW2 combat was not designed for.

SPOILER ALERT (as in the rest of this thread)

I agree with nearly everything that’s said in here, Gakvar and Siofra Crumble made some very good points.

I want to summarize what bothered me most in this mission:

- the stupid amount of poison shots that throw players around on the deck of the ship
- the cannons’ shield function does absolutely nothing in all the time the ship flies between dragons, all the dangerous attacks go right through and around the shields
- zhaitan does not have a HP bar, or not one my team managed to view
- related to the previous: firing on zhaitan shows no damage number
- zhaitan does nothing while players are firing on him, he’s one of the most powerful beings in existence and he does nothing
- the camera is beyond horrible in the final fight against zhaitan
- the turrets are weird / bugged (you can’t aim them, because they only have 3 modes (left / mid / right) instead of the continuous range that a regular treb / catapult has, and it says you can hold to fire further which isn’t true)

and last but not least:

- the loot sucks. How come that for the epic huge final battle in which I defeated a being more powerful than the gods, I get 2 blues and 1 green (and a wvw blueprint of choice)? I could have farmed random mobs for 2 mins and got better stuff….

Overall impression: rushed, the idea is good and the start of the mission is well worked out (the story is imo bad but not worse than in the rest of the 40+ story), but the zhaitan fight is the least epic boss fight I ever had. Fighting the champion troll in Sparkfly Fen felt more epic. There at least I had to press more buttons than 1.

Haette.2701:

Latinkuro.9420:

My sentiments exactly. Horrible ending to the story. Absolutely terrible.
This is how you finish a story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDpayS4UNVE (WoW Lich King ending)

I agree that the Zhaitan fight is disappointing but to put that crappy wow Boss fight as an example of a good one is even worse !

The Zhaitan story is great, people are just complaining about the fight itself !

I was hoping to pound him to the ground myself with my own power, not using a cannon and pew pew peck him to death, you can’t even see damage numbers at all feels kind of not epic and he’s to small for an elder dragon.

I’ve said it before, we’re -never- going to get to fight an elder dragon under our own power. Zhaitan’s just too kitten big to care about us, and they only get bigger from here on out. And it’s not just the fight that people are complaining about, it’s the whole presentation surrounding him. Zhaitan doesn’t show up at all until the last 20 minutes of the game, there’s no buildup of tension or sense of awe, no looming sense of “oh sweet crunchy christ we’re actually going to fight that immense monstrosity we saw back there. How can we even do anything to him, he nuked a whole mountainside with a wingbeat and gave no craps about all our strongest artillery.” Or something like that.

Also FYI, your fanboy is showing.

ugh, one of these moronic responses again…! just because I like the game doesn’t make me a fanboy !

On topic:

Zhaitan showing up in the last 20 minutes is indeed a problem, also his size was a letdown he looks about the same size as his lieutenant big disappointment there.

even subject alpha which is a mere dungeon boss has to be fought 3 times and he keeps retreating. It takes a lot more skill and coordination not to mention a lot longer to kill subject alpha than it takes to kill Zhaitan.

It feels like Zhaitan was rushed out the door for release.

for the next elder dragon A.net please make him bigger and the fight more engaging and interesting.

How about this, the fight against X new elder dragon begins outside his body and transitions into an inside the elder dragon’s body dungeon style run to locate his weakness (his heart) destroying his heart weakens him enough to fight and kill him from the outside, once outside destroy his wings so he can’t fly away and continue to destroy him until his head is cut off.

And please don’t even think about taking the stupid deathwing route wacking at a dragon’s paw is not gonna kill him in a 1000 years.

I heard how bad the final mission was, and insisted they won’t be as bad as my friends were making it out to be. And then I did it.

That was the WORST fight I have ever done in an MMO. This fight was SO bad, it made a training dummy on WoW look like a epic, well thought out challenging enemy. Here’s some of the problems;

Zhaitan is an ELDER dragon. He was barely bigger than some of the other dragons flying about, and I’m sure the 3 DE dragons are his size/bigger. That said, he did look AMAZING.

He was the dumbest boss I have ever fought. At the start he just flew round the ship in circles doing bugger all. After he had just ripped the front of the ship off, you would think being this brilliant, cunning force of evil, he would of had the brains to hit the engines at least? NOPE. Instead he patiently waits for the cannon to be readied to take him down.

Once he is shot by the cannon, after you have mindlessly slain a load of dull mobs over and over, he just sits there, doing nothing, and you just sit there, pressing 2 about 100 times until he dies, occasionally leaving to kill a tentacle that spawned close to you (which dies in ~3 secs), then jump back in and repeat.

There were only 4 cannons, for the 5 man team. We had one guy who just sat there, with nothing to do. I’m sure he had a blast!

The rewards are being fixed with the Halloween update last I saw, so not much to mention there, but I am still confused as to how the dev’s thought 3 greens (1 of which of mine was a lvl 79) was a suitable reward for killing a freaking ELDER DRAGON?

Overall, I love GW2, in my eyes it’s a huge success. However, Victory or Death is the biggest let down of all my years of gaming. Absolutely terrible effort, after such a great build-up from the rest of the personal story.

i think the problem is with the battle itself, not the fact that it’s instanced or that zhaitan is just a beast of destruction (which i think is just fine).

you can’t have zhaitan as a DE, or else he’d just keep sprouting back to life, and there would be no conclusion to the story. what i propose, instead, is adding more visual flair to the battle (after redesigning the whole thing, because that battle is boring as hell).

what i mean by that is fix the sense of “only 5 of us and a laser cannon are enough to take him down” by adding more background effects. you know those ship-vs-dragon-champion thingies you can see on the sky in orr? add a bunch of those. that’s for starters.

then, add a bunch of other airships, just as big as ours, some small too (why not), and show them attacking zhaitan. they don’t have to actually do any damage, they just need to look like they are attacking. give the illusion that it’s a much bigger battle than it is. you can even have zhaitan blow up one or two of them every now and then.

last but not least, give zhaitan more presence. instead of dividing his fight in two segments (fight his minions and shoot him when he’s down), interlace those segments, and add segments where we fight zhaitan while he’s still strong. make the mutilator laser and the pink tether beams stun him rather than nearly kill him, and make the players manage those (like how in monster hunter 3 you had this huge spike gun the players had to time right to use, which would deal massive damage and stun the monster, and go on a really long recharge).

long story short, make it look like zhaitan was downed because there was a huge collaborative force during the battle itself, and give players more things to do and to look at during the fight. a little visual flair goes a long way to sell the setting.

link to the spike gun i mentioned

actually, watch the entire fight (that’s part 2 of 3 videos), because that’s how i thought the zhaitan fight would be, and to an extent, that’s how the fights preceding him go.

notice how even the music changes on part 3, when they hit him with the side spike. that change in tone to the battle does wonders. THEN you should let zhaitan go in his “omg i’m dying” clinging to a tower moment. almost more than 20 minutes of constant struggle against zhaitan himself, THEN he shows he’s starting to fall, and even then, he still puts up a fight.

I really hope they rework this mission. I half expected the ship to land next to where he fell and complete the fight on land.

What they need to do is make the last zones into one giant zone and one giant continuous meta event that requires everyone to push from the starting zone and uncontest towns/bases/wps, and eventually end with a world battle against zhaitan. Where you can choose between fighting on the ground with lots of NPCs fight other monsters, or fight on airships in the air. Make it so it happens a few times each day so no one misses out on a particular event. Like the dragon bosses, but more complex.

^ like i said on another post, the problem with making it non-instanced is that it would mean zhaitan never actually dies. it works with the dragon champions because they’re disposable. they die, the elder dragon makes 3 more. but with zhaitan, it would either mean that he was never truly defeated, and would just run away after each fight, or that he couldn’t be killed for good, essentially turning the entire story into a lost battle against an immortal being.

BrunoBRS.5178:

^ like i said on another post, the problem with making it non-instanced is that it would mean zhaitan never actually dies. it works with the dragon champions because they’re disposable. they die, the elder dragon makes 3 more. but with zhaitan, it would either mean that he was never truly defeated, and would just run away after each fight, or that he couldn’t be killed for good, essentially turning the entire story into a lost battle against an immortal being.

You can’t ruin it more than they already did themselves with what we got.

^ it’s one of the worst fights i’ve ever fought in any game, true, but at least from a lore perspective, he’s still dead.

the big DE chain to get to him is already there, in the form of the corrupted temples that block passage to the dungeon (though i’ve entered the dungeon with the temples contested… did they drop that concept?). they need to remake that fight badly, yes, but they need to keep it instanced, as the fight against zhaitan only makes sense if you’ve finished the personal story (or at the very least you are near its end).

Well you actually don’t need all temples secured to enter Arah. And you can always repeat the dungeon story mode to kill him again, and he just falls into the fog. He doesn’t die in any verifiable manner.

They could make it a hard enough event that requires weeks or months to complete, in a manner similar to WvW maybe, where every server has to accumulate a certain number of points (troops, munitions, supplies, you name it) for the final encounter that scales with the population of said server, maintain all temples secured, and then the event happens once per server, an event that requires hundreds of players to succeed. If successful, the uber duber elite gear designed around Zhaitan himself is unlocked for karma for all players in that server. Maybe after that some bard or skaald would sing songs about the battle, and listening to the song give players access to a dungeon emulating the memories of the battle, so people who missed could catch a glimpse of that epic event. But Zhaithan would be dead, his body becomes part of the environment on the battlefield.

TravisTrout.6803:

I also think that the boss fight would have been better served up as a PQ. The dragon fight PQs in this game are pretty awesome, scaling in complexity as you go up to Jormag (although I would have enjoyed more unique stages rather than repeating the corrupted wall/fly/shoot down/corrupted wall stage). The PQs to retake the temples in Orr could have culminated in another step – the Mother of All Steps – wherein the assembled army of players takes on Zhaitan in a series of epic fight stages. Jormag on steroids. I would have found that far more “believable” and rewarding than five dudes taking him down.

I believe you’re refering to the Claw of Jormag. He’s a lieutenant. We actually beat the claw of the Claw of Jormag, which sounds a bit weird. But the fight is awesome, and could be used as a framework for Zaithan or other dragons in the future, specially the fact that we fight a series of layers of his weapons: first his minions, then his wings and finally we fight him. Zhaithan is so massive that it could take several airships (and a few player boarding actions along with Destiny’s Edge) to take his wings down, then other players on the ground would fight each of this claws and tails as individual boss events. Finally, as he gets his limbs severed, finish by fighting his many tongues before he’s dead at last.

He could also take his toll before dying, falling over Trehearne. His Wyld Hunt is complete and he would be a much better dead martyr than a living Marshall.

I do agree with a few people in this thread.. The whole Zhaitan character is flawed. Massively.

The fact that the enemy of our worlds, is seen and gone within 20 minutes is broken.
I mean if it was like Harry Potter, and every time we killed one of his minions a part of him died or something, I could understand maybe not ever seeing him at all. But it isn’t, and therefore this is a terrible use of the character of Zhaitan…

When I was first told about the Arah dungeon I assumed that completing it was simply a perquisite for the last story mission where you would have a personal instance involving going in on the ground and finding the last remnants of Zhaitan after he fell and making kitten sure he is finally dead. To my mind this made a lot of sense, in the dungeon you fight and defeat Zhaitan and send him crashing to the ground, then in your last personal story mission you go in and finish him off for good.

Given how well thought out 90% of this game is it never occurred to me that they would just tack the last story mission onto the dungeon AND set it up so you have to do the dungeon at the right point in the story to get credit for it AND not tell you this. The whole setup of the last story/dungeon is flawed in just about every element of the design.

Agree with the opening post. There’s just some things lacking in the storyline. I was expecting so much more as well.
I really can’t understand how writers that created such an amazing piece of lore can create a personal storyline with so much flaws. The whole set up is great, but the execution is really lacking. And i’m saying this while i love this game, this is the best game i ever played. I’m just disappointed with the writing.

1. trahearne stealing all the thunder in your personal story
2. the fight with zaithan was rather disappointing. (especially after beating those plaguebringers)
3. after beating zaithan there were still plaguebringers flying around, didn’t seem like much changed.
4. we see nothing of the actual purifying of orr.
5. the home instance hardly changes, just a few npcs.
6. You get almost no reward for what you have done. ‘beating an elder dragon’.

Zhaitan’s battle should have been a massive explorable dynamic event with countless players, on par with Claw of Jormaq or better. Not an instanced shooting gallery with a dragon holding on to a pillar and doing nothing.

I hope they create a new battle with Zhaitan.

I havne’t gotten to Zhaitan yet, but is it true around last month they finally fixed him? I hear he does kind of fight back now, but it’s still not the big, epic battle everyone was hoping for. At least he just doesn’t stand there staring as you kill him, I guess.

Honestly, though, I think the big problem is how hyped he was. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Dragon_09_concept_art_(Last_Shot).jpg
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Dragon_02_concept_art_(Zhaitan).jpg

Just look at how gigantic he looks! Then he shows up in game, and mind you he’s nto tiny, but… What?

I never expect we’d be able to rush Zhaitan with swords and guns, and we’d need big weapons like the Tequatl and The Shatterer’s fights. When they announced his body would be comprised of other dragons, I thought that most of the dragons would just be fodder, with a ‘heart’ deep within all of them that wouldn’t be gigantic, and could be killed much easier, and we’d be blasting away at Zhaitan’s main body until the dragon that really matter came out, then blast it to hell. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Zhaitan.jpg This is all he is, right?

Really hope ANet gets Kralkatorrik and Jormag right- just look at the size of Jormag’s tooth, and we’ve seen how big Kralky is.

Arah Storymode would actually be better if the entire last fight with Zhaitan was a cutscene, imo. If they want it to be about an airbattle with airships, lasers, and dragons a cinematic would be much more epic than the ’fight eternal trash mob waves on deck, then pew pew a boring cannon while not even being able to get a good view of the dragon" event that it is now.

Thedenofsin.7340:

My sentiments exactly. Horrible ending to the story. Absolutely terrible.

This is how you finish a story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDpayS4UNVE (WoW Lich King ending)

The Zhaitan story falls a great deal short

And Deathwing’s story had the same quality? He exploded into SPARKLES.

Don’t reference Blizzard, their writing abilities died with Wotlk.

As for contribution to the thread, I don’t care about Zhaitan being instanced. It’d be disgusting to see 93298 bots swarming around him like the rest of Cursed Shore.