Guild Wars 2

I thought it would be worth making a forum thread to offer constructive feedback about Arah story mode, since there has been a great deal of controversy over it, especially the Zhaitan boss battle.

The content leading up to boarding the airship, while very blatantly filler, is also made interesting by the involving boss mechanics that it features. No complaints here.

Once you board the airship, I find the sequence of using your cannons’ shields to deflect the giants’ projectiles to be a very engaging way of teaching players to use the ability, while also incorporating a great deal of spectacle.

Clearing a safe landing zone for the ground troops – while, once again, blatantly filler, was made interesting by the Mouth of Zhaitan boss, which I personally found very enjoyable. The mechanic of using the flame orbs to interrupt the boss’s vortex ability was a very good idea.

The sequence in which you go up against the first dragon champion is something that I think is engaging, largely because it is the first time in the game that you are battling a dragon that is in the air, rather than grounded like in the open world. However, this is where criticism comes into play. From here on in, the dungeon begins to feel more and more unfinished. Don’t get me wrong, it’s playable, but feels wildly unpolished.

To start with, I would recommend that ArenaNet ensure that appropriate music plays during each of the dragon battle segments. Sometimes it does – particularly when going up against the two dragon champions at once – but I have also experienced it stopping, for reasons that I, unfortunately, cannot diagnose. Ensuring that appropriate music always plays during the dragon battle segments is something that I believe is absolutely essential.

Now for the Zhaitan encounter. Oh, boy. This is where the dungeon rapidly became the most disappointing content I have yet to play in Guild Wars 2, but I feel like it could be remedied in some fairly simple ways.

First of all, every time that I have done the Zhaitan boss, I have had no music playing whatsoever. Why? In both the cutscenes and the ‘battle’ itself, the atmosphere feels… wrong due to the lack of music. Everything is oddly silent because of it. This needs to be remedied.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, why do you never actually get to really fight Zhaitan? The only times you ever see it are during the cutscenes where it is breaking your ship apart, and during the very disappointing final ‘battle’, that I will get onto now.

The final battle, I would like to assert, is either horribly broken or incredibly poorly designed, and I’m not sure which (though I would like to think it is the former). My complaint is very simple (other than the lack of music issue): It is a 10-minute-or-so long segment of the dungeon in which the only thing you are doing is mounting a turret and repeatedly pressing the ‘2’ key. That is it. Zhaitan never even attempts to fight back.

The dragon champions harassing the other airships never think it might be a good idea to attack you before you kill their master, and no undead adds even spawn to try stop you. This feels, to me, like there must be some massive bug going on here preventing adds from spawning. I say that with some evidence, as I saw one add spawn right as we killed Zhaitan, that looked like one of the tentacles in its mouth. Since ArenaNet went to the effort of creating a unique mob for that, I would like to think that some freak bug was causing them not to spawn during the fight itself.

So, in summary:

-Most of the dungeon is great
-Falls short at the Zhaitan battle
-Zhaitan should attempt to fight back, at least spawning adds to try stop you
-I get the feeling that current incarnation of the Zhaitan fight is heavily bugged
-The atmosphere feels very oddly silent due to lack of music during Zhaitan/dragon champion battles

That’s pretty much my thoughts on the dungeon. Anyone else have any thoughts? I would especially appreciate finding out from an ArenaNet employee if the Zhaitan fight is intentionally designed this way or is currently bugged.

Guild Wars 2 is a stunning game, and the Arah story mode dungeon is great, but the Zhaitan fight lets the entire thing down in my opinion, and I would very much appreciate ArenaNet revisiting it and making it less mind-numbingly disappointing.

Thanks for reading.

I agree mostly, to me it feels like the dungeon is alot easier than some of the other story modes. ( Crucible/ascalonian catacombs) But that was not the major issue. I liked the dungeon but when the Zhaitan fight started it seemed really buggy with the sounds, and so on. The actual real problem with it was that he was just leaning on one pillar while we spammed ‘2’ on the cannons and slowly watching him die. It was rather depressing

Otherwise good job!

Zhaitan was so small, he should have been as big as he was in the concept art,

i mostly agree with you OP, i had the same audio bugs. which i find weird, because i think that’d be a problem that’s relatively easy to fix by now.
same about the fight against zhaitan, i think it’s bugged. zhaitan does actually summon small poison AoEs during the fight. but they disappear very quickly and when i deliberately stepped into them, they only caused about 150 damage per second or maybe twice per second. and they leave a pretty harmless poison on you as well.
i really feel like in this last part, it was supposed to spawn minions to fight us while some of us man the cannons and try to bring it down.
is this really what the fight was supposed to be like, Anet?

Yitsul.8342:

Zhaitan was so small, he should have been as big as he was in the concept art,

i thought so too, at first. but it was pretty big compared to the airship, and you have to consider that the airship itself is pretty huge, iirc.
then again, i really thought the elder dragons were supposed to be still larger than this. i think i read somewhere kralkatorrik is suppposed to be as big as a mountain (range)?

Zhaitan in general was a big letdown. The “fight” with him was so boring, it just wore out my 2 key. And how he attacked the ship by body slamming into it?! He’s a DRAGON, why didn’t he just breathe deathly fire and kill everyone right there? Did he suddenly turn into a Snorlax that just woke up? Everything leading up to him made Arah a pretty good dungeon, but Zhaitan was just boring.

I found the end of that instance to be one of the worst endings and battles ever.
The ending was one o the most anti climatic ever… The whole fight against the dragon is done by GUNS where lat 5mins is to just sit and hit number 2 button. Also there is a big issues with the with the fights on first air ship against the small dragon then 2x small dragons and the massive amounts of adds..
Again the dungeon become a zombie run. I dont know but looks like the the devs makeing the dungons are like 4 year olds just that put everything in one big mess. That fight should be made so adds spawn when dragons flight around you need to fight off adds and then when dragons stop you need to jump in to guns when dragons start to fly again you need to jump out of gun and kill ads again and so repeat a few times.
At the moment it was almost no way you could make it in to a gun and shoot coz there the whole deck was full of aoe and mobs its kind of ridicules when you die more times in a STORY instance then e Exp and i start to think this big talk about no trinity is just replaced with big repair bills and zerg fest on bosses.

I enjoyed the dungeon but yea the fight with Zhaitan was a bit anti-climactic spamming 2 the entire time. We didn’t come all that way, Learn our skills and our profession just to spam 2.

I did however really like the bit before it with the dragons on the smaller ship. I think if it had been done similar to that it would’ve been much better. Otherwise it was a really awesome instance.