Longtime player of the original Guild Wars, and an avid fan of Guild Wars 2. Sure it has its problems, but what MMO doesn’t? I’m not here to start a flame war or get into a heated discussion, but I’ve been toying with this idea for a while now. I’d like to get any advice or even criticism you can offer, and maybe even someone from Arenanet will read over this and possibly apply it.
What is the real threat to Tyria? Scarlet Briar? These alliances? No!
The dragons are the real threat to Tyria, and they seem to have taken a backseat to all the action. I have said from the start that the fight with Zhaitan should have been an open world event with many dynamic pre-events leading up to it, allowing guilds and players to get prepared for the epic confrontation. Then, once Zhaitan was weakened and brought down from the sky, he sought refuge within the recesses or Orr, at which point a five man dungeon would become available. This dungeon would need to be epic, have more branches and paths than your regular dungeon, and better than average loot.
We have what? Four more dragons to worry about? The fact that Arenanet hasn’t settled on an releasing expansions for us to purchase, one would assume these dragon updates would be integrated into the living story, but I seriously doubt we want a living world story-line to end up like the Toxic Alliance and what not. Not that they are bad, but they are lackluster in terms of the real threats to Tyria: the dragons.
If Arenanet sticks to the Living World model, they need to make the progression of fighting an Elder Dragon a truly grueling, epic, and time consuming process. Months of content filled updates, slowly paving the way to the final showdown with Jormag or Primordius or whichever Elder Dragon comes into our sights first.
There should be new dragon lieutenants. Being defeated by the races of Tyria, I’m not so sure the Shatterer could keep his job for long, and would be replaced by a more powerful minion dragon, and would be relocated to a lower level instance giving lower level players a chance to try out some epic content. This could be explained by Kralkatorrik (sp?) stripping the Shatterer of some of his power.
All in all: the Living World can work very well for an epic Elder Dragon encounter storyline, adding new NPCs, new dungeons, and new tactics to bringing down these epic final bosses.
This could be a good opportunity to introduce new races as well. Having the Elder Dragons take a more proactive position in the spotlight could spur the Tengu to emerge from their home after a vicious attack, prompting them to ally alongside the other races to battle the threat. The Kodan as well.
TL;DR: We want to fight the Elder Dragons, but we don’t want to have it be a two week long living world event. We want it to be a month-to-month escalating struggle.
Thank you all for your time.