Guild Wars 2

Amidst all the complaints about Lost Shores, one thing is for sure:
The Ancient Karka’s entire event chain required lots of work, had great rewards, and was really epic

Sure killing a couple thousand karka in the reinforcement stages was boring as all hell, but that’s a minor detail. The battle against the Ancient Karka was well-staged, well-played, well-planned, and epic in scale. It was massive, required hundreds of people to succeed, and rewarded well. It had all the scale right for something of that magnitude.

Here’s my suggestion: Do the same for Zhaitan

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We “killed” Zhaitan. Yeah, we saw him fall from the sky into the clouds, never investigated the body, and are assuming he’s dead because when we explore Arah afterward we find little pieces of him. But here’s an idea, bring him back as an epic battle like the Ancient Karka. Say he did die, but that as the Elder Undead Dragon, he, too, is coming back from his own corpse and is building power again slowly.

Use this as a great excuse to make a battle with him that will truly stun players with the environmental interaction and event structuring that you proved possible with Lost Shores. Give the players who participate in the battle against Zhaitan true rewards, just like the Lost Shores chest did. These sorts of things will create stories that people will tell about GW2 forever, unlike the current Zhaitan letdown that we have where he just gets shot up by cannons, falls off a tower, and gets reminisced upon as an unworthy finish to our personal story.

Maybe no developer will ever read this. Maybe they don’t want to revisit Zhaitan. Maybe I’m wasting my time. However, I’d like to think that ANet is learning from their design issues, as can be seen with the Ancient Karka, and it’d be incredible if they took those lessons and applied them to an epic weekend event to slay Zhaitan once and for all. The specifics of that weekend event are not something I care to discuss here, all I am suggesting is that Zhaitan deserves a better boss fight, and I know ANet wants to give him one, they just need to buckle down and do it.

as much as I love everything you wrote and think it is exactly what they should do, I see one major flaw here. There are new players all the time, and people are not all done with the personal story. So how would you fit an event such as this that takes place after the end of the PS into such a massive common event? I do hope something like this could happen with the other dragons though… anything but the horrible throw a dungeon in ending they have now.

Maybe it could be a repeatable chain event that happens in the Cursed Shore (or a new Orr zone, or maybe even a new Arah path), but that you can’t do until you’ve completed the main story. Then, you could limit the completion rewards (loot chest at end) of this event to one time per character so that people wouldn’t take advantage of it.