Guild Wars 2

I believe zhaitan is supposed to be an epic and mind-blowing encounter, but when we actually encounter it in story mode arah, the actual fight mechanism was disappointing. All we get to do was fighting his minions, then spam cannon and watch him die. It really wasn’t much of a fight.

I’d love to see Zhaitain returns with a reworked mechanism but the personal story is already finished, so I have this idea in mind:
why not make a living story update called “zhaitan’s revenge” where we get to fight the elder dragon head on (no airships or cannon spamming) this time?
At the end of arah story mode, we see the dragon falling down into the abyss. That means we never really get the confirmation of the “kill”. It’ll be interesting to create a living story update that expands on this.

Summary of main ideas:
- Make this the 5th path for arah explorable mode.
- Fight against zhaitan (head on this time) with the members of destiny edge
- Each member of destiny edge offers special mechanisms for clearing certain sector of the dungeon
- Make this a medium difficulty path so that hard core players will find it a casual but fun experience, whereas casual players will find it challenging but manageable. It is zhaitan after all, so everyone should have the chance of facing the dragon without too much frustration
- allow this dungeon path difficulty to scale with the number of party members in the fashion similar to how dynamic events are scaled.
- Make it a permanent addition to arah. (player can “relive” this instance even after the living story event is over.)

I’ll post some other details in a bit:

Suggestion details:

-story background:
A group of priory scholars are investigating the incident of tequatl rising and discovered a suspicious source of energy that traces back to the ruined city of arah. After further investigation (players participate in a scavenger hunt type of achievement), the team makes a shocking discovery that the elder dragon Zhaintan survived the attack and is recovering from its injuries in the depth of arah.

The members of destiny edge are informed of this and reunite with the heroes of tyria (players) to kill the dragon (for good this time) before it can unleash its revenge. Due to the terrain, airships are unable to provide support this time. The group has to travel on foot into the abyss, locate and kill the dragon before it’s too late.

-dungeon details:

+picking the path:
If the path is picked during the living story event, the npc will urge the player to act quickly. If this path is picked after the living story event is over, the npc will instead ask if the player wishes to review the history of zhaitan’s defeat. (confirming it will bring the party into this path)

Players are joined by the 5 members of destiny edge who’ll assist in combat.
Not far into the dungeon, the group sees Zhaitan hanging onto a cliff side. It is still recovering from its injuries so it cannot fly.

+first boss fight:
The first boss fight involves fighting Zhaitan’s hand that’s hanging onto the cliff. Each of zhaitan’s fingers is a dragon head with unique attacks (idk how many fingers he has. 3~4 dragon heads should be good enough). One head can bombard the party with poison aoe. The other does melee attacks (biting. Slaming into the ground to creat shock waves etc.). the last one spits out mini versions of tequatl ( about the size of griffons and make them silver normal mobs to veterans or champions depending on party size). Make the individual dragon heads separate targets so that the party can choose one to kill first to disable the attacks that particular head has.
Allow the head that recently made a devastating attack to take increased damage while it recovers and readies for the next attack.
The scale of the hand should look like this concept art to better reflect zhaitan’s massive size (perhaps a bit smaller than the drawing. The point is to make it big but not so big to the point where the players have to rotate camera upward just to see the heads):

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Dragon_05_concept_art_(The_Left_Hand_of_the_Dragon).jpg

I’d suggest camera automatically zooms out like it would during a large world boss encounter.

After the 3 (or 4) heads on zhaitan’s hand are defeated, the elder dragon loses its grip on the cliff and falls further down into the valley. The party pursues further down to the bottom of the valley and fights the head of zhaitan. (add some interesting events like sneaking past undead army, running past collapsing tunnels while avoiding falling rocks, etc.)

+second boss fight:
The zhaitan head should be of similar size to this: (again, automatically zoom out camera for this fight)

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Dragon_06_concept_art_(The_Dragon_Head).jpg

I mean, these are some cool concept arts that we never really get to see them realized in the game.

To limit the fight to just zhaitan’s head region, there can be 2 cliff walls to either side of zhaitan’s neck so that players can’t run past behind his head (for various reasons. Such as getting stuck by the dragon body, glitching the boss making him unable to do any kind of melee attacks etc.)

The dragon heads coming out of zhaitan’s mouth with each do unique attacks of their own, but this time, make the entire zhaitan head a single target since there’re too many dragon heads coming out of its mouth. It would be painful to cycle between them if they’re separate targets.

One head in particular, would randomly target one member in the party and spits out a ray of green blast to one-shot the target similar to the jade maw laser in fractals. As soon as a player is targeted, Logan will stand still and create a bubble that absorbs all ranged attack. To avoid this attack, the targeted player needs to get into a bubble created by Logan which will block off the incoming blast. (but if logan is dead then he won’t be able to create bubble. This will give players the incentive to keep him alive.)

Other members of destiny edge should also have a special role. For example:
Rytlock will be buffing the party from time to time with “for great justice” (longer cooldown than the version players have).
Eir will create healing spring if a party member drops below a health thresh hold (long cooldown).
Caithe will stealth downed players and attempt to revive them (long cooldown, but if stealth is on cooldown she’ll still attempt to revive).
Zojja will be charging an asura invention which, once fully charged, will fire a shock that randomly disable one of Zhaitan’s abilities, and weakens zhaitan to make him take increased damage for a while. (if zojja dies the charge resets. Upon revival, she’ll resume charging the device. If zojja gets hit by CC, the charge stalls for a bit then resumes.)

+final boss fight:
Upon defeating the zhaitan head, the dragon is seriously weakened. The entire dragon body explodes, shooting out piles of undead corruption all over the place but leaving behind the final boss called “Heart of Zhaitan”.
My idea of this boss is a dragon with a large green, glowing orb in its chest (because zhaitan glows green for some reason. Let that green orb be zhaitan’s core).

This boss should roughly be the size of the legendary clockheart. Why? It’s mainly because bosses with massive size are stationary, and we’ve just fought 2 in this dungeon so we should get a smaller one that actually utilize movement as part of the fight mechanism.
With the reduced boss size, there’s a lot of freedom for the mechanism design of this final boss. I’d like to leave this mostly to Anet.

I do want to suggest one mechanism though: dragon flight attack.
When heart of zhaitan drops below a health threshold, he would fly into the sky and bombard the players from above.

While he’s in the air, he’ll target a player and dive down. As he approaches ground level, the players need to signal destiny edge members for a combined attack (this can be done by interacting with zojja’s golem to give off the signal.). if timed correctly, the 5 npc will attack the dragon at the same time, and doing this successfully 2 times will cause the dragon to crash land and be stunned for a long duration.

Failing to do so on the first dive will cause the targeted player to take damage. Failing again on the second dive will cause the dragon to snatch up the player and drop them to the ground for falling damage. However, allow this to be dodgeable so that the targeted player doesn’t have to be the victim of others’ poor timing.
(note that because of the long stun benefit, there’s still the incentive to time this successfully even if the dive can be dodged.)

And so that’s some ideas I have for improving zhaitan. Any thoughts?