Guild Wars 2

So I played through HoT three times- once on a human, twice on a Sylvari. The first time I went through, I was a human. The other two times, Sylvari. I’m fairly invested emotionally in the story, and I liked Trahearne quite a bit, so already as the human I got a bit of a punch in the gut at the ending. Only got worse with the Sylvaris, since their story experience seems to be enhanced.

And then I got to thinking- the gameplay is fun, I love how huge the maps are, and I really like it when I can get lost in a game, but the storyline in HoT felt too brief, and there were, from what I’ve seen/heard, holes everywhere. There was also a lot less major choice available compared to Central Tyria story.

I’m sure these points have been asked already by those here, on reddit, on tumblr and other places, but:

1) What the heck is going on with Malyck? This dragon was perfect for filling in more lore about the Sylvari race as a whole. What happened to the guy that you only saw if you did a certain PS branch who apparently doesn’t come from the same tree as playable Sylvari and most of the Sylvari NPCs? Where does he come from, and how is Mordremoth affecting him?

2) Why can’t I choose to pursue the prisoner caravan? Does nobody realize how dangerous letting 3 members of DE and Trahearne remain captive, possibly to be killed and turned or cloned is? They’re all very powerful, even if gameplay restrictions don’t fully show this. It’s also not known how closely Trahearne is tied to the Pale Tree and what his turning could do to the rest of the Sylvari. It’s been speculated that with Caladbolg, he could have a potentially disastrous connection to the Pale Tree, that if exploited, basically means the end of all the free Sylvari. On a more personal note, I actually consider those NPCs friends and I would prefer to pursue them rather than take all these detours. It’s already been established with Zhaitan that the longer one waits to rescue someone captured by a dragon’s forces, the worse the chances for them escaping become. Mordremoth surely wouldn’t be much different. Related headscratcher: Isn’t it kind of the rule that the lower ranking captives should be trying to free their superiors, on the grounds that at least in this case, DE and Trahearne are more powerful and also have better chances to return and rescue them? (question made by a tumblr user that I can’t remember, if this is your question, credit to you. I’m bad at names.)

3) Why am I going to Rata Novus? Unless I’m an Asura, that place doesn’t really hold much importance beyond being a curiosity to me. The Asura, as noted in mainland lore, are more concerned with Primordus than the other dragons, and generally see themselves as superior to the other races. Aside from armies of Chak and potentially a little data, what will I find there that can help me? We killed Zhaitan already. If one dragon can be killed, so can the rest.

4) What is going on with Caithe? She’s supposed to be a capable Night-Woken thief with way more experience than the Player. She’s supposed to care about her friends- she put so much effort to reunite them in the Tyria storyline. Can someone please tell me why, even taking eggstasy included, she would just leave her best friends and her brother Sylvari trapped as captives when she’s clearly moving much faster than the Player? She even passes through more than one Pact camp, so she must know they’re missing! Running with that train of thought, why does the Player so easily give her a second chance given their current mood and distrust of her after the egg incident? She basically doesn’t do anything between you rescuing the egg and the final battle that you can see!

5) What is Mordremoth doing with Trahearne? I get how he’s cloning Logan and Zojja and why, but why is Mordremoth even keeping Trahearne conscious and looking like he’s trying to…consume or transform…Trahearne slowly…from the legs up? I don’t understand. What is Mordy trying to do? Is there a specific purpose for that or is this just being played for feels?

6) Why did Eir die here? I really don’t get it. Why did Eir just decide she’d die here? I know she’s weakened from starvation and the injury that Faolain gave her, but there were so many ways she could have not died. The jungle makes so little sense for her to kick it at. You don’t even get to see her do all that much! Come to think of it, why did the Player think it was a good idea to send two clearly worn down and injured freshly freed captives running for the exit when one of them is clearly not trustworthy? Those were two high-value targets and ultimately, they both died! And like, if Eir was supposed to further Braham’s character development, can we see a bit more of that please? I know I saw some stuff, but it was really subtle, and I don’t mean the whole going bald bit.

7) Can someone please tell me why after the final fight is done, nobody says anything about the fact that you, the Player, just had to kill who was in game a close friend and your former superior? Why is there nothing mentioned about those that died? Why is nobody asking about Zojja and Logan (did I miss this?)? It’s automatically “okay what’s next”. Hello! People died! People important to the player character died! This was handled so much better in the Tyria storylines- even if you didn’t know the dead person back in that chunk of story, the death was acknowledged. Your mentor’s death was acknowledged, and you knew them for at most, a matter of weeks. Trahearne, who is implied to be someone you the Player knows for at least a few years, kicked the bucket and nobody says anything? What? You’re stuck with the broken sword that belonged to your friend that you were just forced to gut him with! You just stood in the middle of a blast of ley energy and watched your friend get vaporized. Why is the Player not given some option to react, and why aren’t they marked in some way from that?! I’m not even going to get into how this particular death, though poignant, in some way feels contrived and reactive to the vocal portion of the fandom that for whatever reason, dislikes him. You guys, I actually read your arguments and tried to match it with my experience, and I came up with nothing.

8) Now what? What’s going to happen to the Pale Tree? What’s the remainder of the Pact going to do now? They just lost their leader. Player character is not a good choice for a new leader- someone else said that as an adventurer, that role will be essentially lost if they are to lead the Pact. I really don’t relish the thought of doing paperwork, attending meetings, trying to settle disagreements between parties, and organizing troops. I want to be out there, on the front lines, kicking tail and taking names, not worrying about politics and logistics, thanks.

9) What’s up with Glint’s egg? Why is it absorbing magic? Is this a good thing? What will happen to Taimi now? Is she going to be okay? Will she have enough food? Is the White Mantle coming out? Is Kryta about to blow up? How bad is Sylvari discrimination going to get? Will we at least have time to have funerals for the deceased important npcs? Does reincarnation exist?

Opinions welcome. Pardon the rant. HoT stirred up a lot of feels.

1. I presume Malyck is being saved for season 3.

3. You’re going to Rata Novus because it was possible they new how to defeat the dragon. Those Asura are pretty smart. You don’t know it’s a dead city and allies are allies.

1) Malyck. I certainly hope they delve into this more in the next Living Story update.

2) Choosing the prisoner caravan. There may have been some oversight involved, but… it probably has more to do with making one linear story for everyone and giving the players quality over quantity. If they split the story into more choices, they have to do more work and realign everyone, while giving all path choices the same essential info.

It could be said that the role of the hero is to save the weak at their own expense. Also, perhaps only the powerful could’ve created a diversion impressive enough to allow anyone to get away. Maybe the heroes figured they were already screwed, watched too closely, whatever— but the others had a chance because they weren’t worth as much to Mordy, and they could get a message out if they escaped.

3) Rata Novus. It’s presented as a viable and plausible destination on the road to defeat Mordy. Depending upon your character, you may or may not be interested in the dragon lore the Novans may have amassed. However, they did manage to keep their ley energy in Mordy’s shadow, and it could be useful to know how. Also, the Novans could’ve been allies. …Aren’t you at all curious about what happened to them? I am.

4) Caithe. Yeah, her “wyld hunt” explanation for her actions is pretty weak, IMO.

5) Mordy & Trahearne. I do wonder about Mordy’s greater plan. Maybe Mordy had to consume/transform Trahearne in order to plant that evil seed.

6) Eir. I think Anet sacrificed Eir because they wanted the story to be serious business. Eir is/was near-universally well-liked. By showing they’re willing to destroy a beloved character (or city), they prove that the story has permanent consequences. (Had they killed Logan, I feel a lot of us may have said ‘good riddance!’) I agree there were lots of ways for her to not die, but that was a railroad cutscene the player couldn’t change. The player’s impotence in this way may also have been a way for Anet to say, “See! This dragon is really powerful! Don’t you feel small?” or it may have been intended as a vengeance-driven rally point, as the after-scene talk suggests. Maybe both.

7) Epilogue to the final fight. I like how they handled this. They didn’t railroad the player into how they should feel. They didn’t decide for you how you should react. Personally, I hated Trahearne and I may have giggled at the end, there. Just a little. It’s my guess that when the next part of the story launches, they will add some bits of emotional reactions from NPCs and such. We know it isn’t over.

8) World politics. Much of the answer here is, ‘wait and see.’ I believe a pact leader (other than the player) will emerge. I believe the Pale Tree will strengthen, now that she needn’t be actively, constantly vigilant for all of her children against an awakened, powerful Mordy.

9) What’s next for…? Again, it’s a matter of ‘wait and see’. Anet left room for a lot of loose threads to be woven into the tapestry of Tyria. I look forward to seeing the next portion of the pattern.

The Trahearne death is a response to the metric ton of threads within the first months of the game complaining about Trahearne being the hero and not the player and his annoying VO as well. Very many players expressed desire to engage him in combat and “pwn him”. It finally happened now.

Ugh, the HoT personal story actually makes the GW2 personal story look good. The HoT is a rushed mess. Pacing is all over the place. Most of the chapters are entirely unnecessary. And the characters are so one dimensional, that it doesn’t bother me when they don’t talk about recent events. I don’t care what they have to say. It’s surprising how little of it is connected to main plot of defeating Mordremoth.

In GW2 personal story, you saw the pact build up and slowly push it’s way into Zhaitan’s territory. You saw how you gradually wore him down. In HoT, you go very quickly from having the pact nearly wiped out to having them defeat Mordremoth. There’s very little in between that shows you how they recovered got to the point where they could challenge him. The final battle with Zhaitan made him look weak because he was weak by that time. However, we never wore Mordy down. He was that weak to start with.

Then there are the terrible one dimensional characters. A direct result of players complaining that their characters didn’t feel epic enough. Anet’s response was to simply make all other characters sounding boards for your character to shout orders at. How epic! At least I cared about the some of the characters in the GW2 personal story. The mentor’s, even Tegwen’s, deaths had more impact.

1. Malyck. You are correct. This was the time to address this in some way. Even if he becomes a part of LS3 (which is extremely naive to bet on this), they will try to force in a connection to HoT that simply wasn’t set up.

3. Rata Novus was a disaster from a story-telling point of view. It was all build up with no pay out. There was absolutely no reason for your character to go there. They don’t gain any new information that they couldn’t have gotten in a better way from somewhere else. Trahearne tells your Mordy’s weakness in the last chapter! It’s an odd bit of filler in a story that already lacks substance.

4. Everything with Caithe feels like it was written after the fact. I’m glad that her arc is over. Unfortunately, that probably won’t stop them from writing another equally pointless arc for her.

5. They had no time to explain this. They were too busy having us chase frogmen, place an egg on a pedestal to no effect, and waste time in ruins that gave us no significant information. Where could they possibility fit in anything about Mordremoth in this story?

It’s a sad state that anyone could think the HoT was any improvement in writing from Anet. That was a bit of a rant, but I can’t believe they charged money for this.

HoT story summarized:

1. Go visit frogs and never see them again
2. Put an egg on a pedestal for some reason.
3. Go to Rata Novus and learn nothing
4. Go for a walk in the woods to find your friends.
5. Come across mordremoth very suddenly and murder him.
6. The end

Epic as kitten.

=_= Well that clears up some things and leaves others in a ditch. I thank you for answering.

@Kumion and Dashi: Yeah, I guess I sort of want to know what happened to the Novan Asura. Who knows, maybe they weren’t completely driven out by the Chak. Then again, everything HoT was so rushed that you barely get a chance to form half a question in your mind when whisk! Off you go. Again. I really wish they could have done something with Rata Novus if they weren’t going to let us go chase down that caravan. Maybe a little info on Primordus? Though perhaps that might come later- from Taimi, no doubt.

Of all the HoT characters, the only ones I remember are Laranthir, Ibli, Canach and Taimi. I get that a lot of the in-transit lore is in the meta events. It seems kind of loose, even still.

@Kumion: It still feels unnatural to have no mention and no reaction about…pretty much everyone that just dropped dead/got vaporized in front of you. They didn’t do that in Personal Story, and it felt more natural then. Though I suppose it’s not so bad if your opinion doesn’t necessarily match the story’s- though, if we were still using the charm/dignity/ferocious answer choices, that would at least allow some freedom of opinion.

@Dashi: It’s nice to know I’m not a crazy for thinking this way. I went from being neutral to Caithe to starting to dislike her now. I just hope they fill things in in LS3. I was actually hoping they’d try to develop all the NPCs more and not leave say, Marjory and Kasmeer being token party members (on a revenge kick in Marjory’s case, which helps her- a little.) Rytlock never goes into Revenant-dom in much detail. And pardon my slight fangirliness but I was hoping Trahearne would be more than an intellectual door to the weakness of the dragons this time around. If they wanted to intimidate us though, why not assault the player character themselves? We’ve had characters close to us die on us before…for some, the shock and the sting has been blunted.

They did some things right with this arc. Pacing, unfortunately, wasn’t one of them. Felt kind of unfinished. Here’s to hoping the LS3 stuff has lots of caulking, ‘cause those holes are gonna need fillin’.

vespers.1759:

HoT story summarized:

1. Go visit frogs and never see them again
2. Put an egg on a pedestal for some reason.
3. Go to Rata Novus and learn nothing
4. Go for a walk in the woods to find your friends.
5. Come across mordremoth very suddenly and murder him.
6. The end

Epic as kitten.

THIS!
I had no idea what the hell was going on in the story if I’m completely honest, it didn’t feel very grand at all, some of the events that were suppose to be “big” didn’t feel big, like finding the lost city….. and I question ANET’s definition of “city”, even the Exalted City didn’t feel like a city either thinking about it, both of these places felt more like an “Outpost”.

Also I don’t understand the reasoning behind the Chak… they seem like a big presence but it’s like they get zero attention in the story…. I feel so much work has gone into the development of the zones but as you go through them I always start to wonder… what is the point of this? why is this there? …

Yeah, they didn’t actually answer ANY questions that were presented in GW2, LS1-2, and during HoT. Very frustrating.

What about the other Sylvari trees, Malyck?
What happened to the Pale Tree?
Aside from not all crumbling to dust, what’s going on with the Sylvari after Mordremoth’s death?
What happens to the Pact without Trahearne (I assume we just become warmarshal in name, though we are already in charge in function)?
There were dozens of Trahearne clones in the same cutscene that revealed the Logan and Zojja ones. What happened with them? Is Trahearne, or Mordremoth, actually dead?
What’s going on with Logan or Zojja (whoever you save last)?
Did the Exalted have a larger role (I remember in their reveal media they looked like they were much more pro-active) that got cut?
Why is Rytlock being such a jerk about explaining his new profession? Like, why have Rox ooh and aah and ask about it repeatedly just to have him brush it off (or have a throwaway handwave placed in idle dialog).
What IS the deal with Scarlet? We went through tonnes of stuff to learn about her and it all started hinting at some other motivation than “Wake Dragon, Dragon wrecks face”.
Canach suggests that the Chak could be used to fight Elder Dragons. This is immediately dismissed for the CHANCE that there could be some nebulous research that MIGHT help them kill them. AND THEY FOUND WHAT AMOUNTS TO NOTHING. Oh, the dragons have a specific weakness, but who knows what they are. O.K. Well, we just killed one, so …duh. Also, with the Asuran obsession with Primordus, do they know his weakness?

It feels like a lot of the story was cut or changed. Like, I’m enjoying the expansion, but have all this stuff set up over the course of years, with no pay off is frustrating, ESPECIALLY with the abrupt ending. No celebration or talking with comrades, or remembering ALL THE FRIENDS WHO WERE MURDERED, no nothing. Just a stinger with the egg that seems to imply that each Dragon we kill makes the others stronger, including the one in the egg.

And a quick additional question, which should be able to be answered: What happens if you play through the Heart of Thorns story missions without choosing an Order? Who do you get as a surprise visitor during the final story mission?

Someone surely has done this, given how many people say how much they don’t like the core Tyria personal storyline (and how many people have tome-levelled Revenants to get to HoT directly). My guild leader mentioned this thought to me, and it’s been gnawing at me since then.

Dream Shake.8741:

The Trahearne death is a response to the metric ton of threads within the first months of the game complaining about Trahearne being the hero and not the player and his annoying VO as well. Very many players expressed desire to engage him in combat and “pwn him”. It finally happened now.

Yeah, and many also said they liked him and his place in the PS, and some said they would like him more if he was given more development. It’s really sad that the only feedback that seemed to be considered is the “let me kill him and give me his my sword” ragefest.

The story left me with the same questions as the OP, and I have yet to see a satisfying answer to any of them. Additionally (brace yourselves for text walls):

-Where was the Nightmare Court? The PC asks why Mord is locking so many up, but we only see two in the story (and a free one in Dragon’s Stand). And then we get no information, no NMC plot at all, because Faolain decides that being eeeevil and turning both our group and Mord against her was a better idea than allying with us for her own benefit. And why was she imprisoned with Eir? Why was Eir not with the rest of DE? Is there an actual reason besides setting them both up to die early?

-What is the Dream? It’s supposedly unique to the Pale Tree’s kids, and beneficial to them, but then… it’s also the home of Mord’s mind? How does that work? How did we just teleport our minds into it, when previously it was only accessed by non-sylvari/awakened sylvari via an actual portal that sent them wholly into it? Do the rifts have an explanation or are they just game mechanics?

-Why is the Elder Dragon of Mind such a dolt? He leads us right to his heart by baiting us with Faolizard and then dragging Trahearne in there while we watch. The only resistance inside is a small group of standard mordrem enemies. Mordremoth hears us figure out his weakness and our plan to exploit it, but then does nothing to stop us. I know he was distracted by the assault outside, but if he can just regrow his body, why didn’t he prioritize protecting his mind? Why did he make us aware of the seed he left in Trahearne instead of hiding and regrowing later? And why didn’t he plant seeds in any of his other minions, as a backup plan?

-Not really a plot question, but what was wrong with giving us a somewhat happy ending? Was the story not bleak enough already? I didn’t expect another huge party, but it would’ve been nice to actually rescue our friends after 15 chapters of babbling about it (and sabotaging our own efforts by taking detours), and have a small celebration/memorial afterwards. Instead, I felt like a failure. The triumph over Mord’s mind was meaningless because he just jumped into someone else. I had to euthanize my friend and the leader of the friggin dragon slaying organization, and nobody cares, not even his sister. And if Laranthir’s dialogue in Dragon’s Stand is canon, then even killing Mordrahearne did nothing because the Mouth still regrows and causes trouble. Did we actually accomplish anything?

The HoT story was the perfect time to answer lingering questions about sylvari and pick up old plot threads like Malyck, but that was shoved aside so we could screw around with the egg and a dead asura city, two detours that completely nullified the sense of urgency we were supposed to feel (and this “urgency” was the reason given for the brevity/pacing of the story). So we’re left with even more unanswered questions, no new information, and fewer sources of potential sylvari lore, since two important sylvari characters were killed off with almost no screentime and zero development.

UnfairOphelia.9763:

And a quick additional question, which should be able to be answered: What happens if you play through the Heart of Thorns story missions without choosing an Order? Who do you get as a surprise visitor during the final story mission?

Someone surely has done this, given how many people say how much they don’t like the core Tyria personal storyline (and how many people have tome-levelled Revenants to get to HoT directly). My guild leader mentioned this thought to me, and it’s been gnawing at me since then.

If you don’t pick an order, Trahearne shows up and says ‘’This won’t end well…for you!"

To answer OP: Yeah, we can all agree that HoT’s story sucked.

My main problems:Some of the ’’chapters’’ consisted of just nothing but pure filler of going from point A to point B, there was no mention of anything from the sylvari personal stories (I really wanted to see what happened to Maylck,Carys and the White Stag.),the deaths of Eir, Faolain and Trahearne were VERY uncalled for, and the way Arenanet handled Mordremoth.

Still hoping that the theories are true and that the story we’ve got for now isn’t the end of the line for the Heart of Thorns plot.