Guild Wars 2

First of all, let’s forget about mechanics of the fights, about Zhaitan’s firework demise and let’s look at those two fights from the lore and story standpoint.

If I compare those two battles against each other, it feels like Zhaitan was much more dangerous opponent. Sure, we go behind enemy lines and lobotomize Mordy while the army is fighting his body/Mouth but it’s an infantry fight.

But to defeat Zhaitan we needed Airships and cannons! Yes, the mechanics of the Zhaitan’s fight were lame but it seemed much more dangerous, epic and in larger scale.

I’m not saying that Mordy fight was lame, on the contrary. The mind fight is a very interesting concept and the battle with the Mouth is great. And yet I hope that with the next dragon’s, we’ll return to something similar as Zhaitan’s fight.

I don’t care whether it will be in an instance or an open world. I just want a fight that will feel like that it’s not an ordinary battle that any infantry can do. Give me a flying asura fortress full of cannons, give me a chase on the charr tanks, give me a Kodan Iceberg naval fleet attack.

There are so many awesome possibilities. I believe that Anet will make other fights epic, I just hope that they will feel as urgent and largescale as Zhaitan’s fight. It would make that dragon seem much more threatening and dangerous. At least for me.

I somewhat agree with what you’re saying, but I hope Anet doesn’t do epic battles just to do epic battles.
I actually liked the fight against Mordy far more than the one against Zhaitan, and not just because of mechanics.

The fight against Zhaitan, while indeed more “epic” in its setting, lacked all sorts of… … interest actually. Personally, in the PS, I felt far more invested when taking down the Eye or even the Mouth. Yea Zhaitan is the big meany, but we never interact with him before that. He just appears out of the sky and we shoot and never ask questions.

What I loved about Mordy is actually the techniques he uses against PC, the attempt at manipulation. It’s something we’d seen before that fight. It’s his very own style of fighting. Zhaitan felt like he had absolutely no characteristics, unlike Mordy. And as a result, the fight against Mordy felt far more epic to me.

Maybe a cross of two would work well; but you have to take into account what makes each ED unique.

i hope the story doesn’t get cheesy and we actually get defeated, half the world destroyed and we find a way to put dragons to sleep, MOVE ON and forget about them and actually get some high quality story about gods, mists, rift etc. and palawa joko

anyway, zhaitan fight was much better. he didnt talk, he was what he was meant to be – a primal force of nature, magical entity, wild anomaly that needs to be stopped. mordremoth talked, which immediately turned him into a villain. and that “my body is unlimited, you have to kill me inside the dream” thing was so obvious and weak attempt at giving opportunity for easy kill of an ED.

I think (mechanics aside) I liked both for different reasons.

The Zhaitan fight was definitely more dramatic and epic. And after the long build-up throughout the personal story I think that was needed. It was great to finally see your enemy face to….faces and get to fight directly, even if it was with a cannon and not your own weapons.

But the Mordremoth fight was a lot more involved. It’s the kind of thing where if I’d read it in a book I’d be wondering how on earth anyone could adapt it for a visual medium, and I think Anet did a really good job of it. I like that we actually went into the dragons mind and fought it on it’s own terms instead of simply blasting away at it, and given what we’d seen of Mordremoth’s abilities it made a lot more sense too.

What I’m wondering now is how they’re going to top those two. If they do an epic airship battle it’s going to be hard to beat the Zhaitan fight, and they’re going to run into the same problems, and if they do it like Mordremoth it’s going to be too similar, that’s not really something you can keep re-using.

Maybe next time we’ll have a dragon we actually fight on the ground?

Well, we do have the opportunity to see what a naval or undersea dragon could be like with the DSD which would be vastly different from what we’ve done so far, and also a underground elder dragon with Primordus, which could be different or not depending on how they will go. There are possibilities to make each dragon interesting.

the Zhaitan fight was mechanically dull to me but it still makes more sense then whacking away at it with our tiny weapons xD the fight could have been interesting if we had to actually drag down zhaithan ourselves and then damage it

i actually enjoyed mordy’s dual front fight it felt kinda grand to me (since the story imply the pact was detracting the body)

it will get dull to me. if we face every Dragon with a large ready pact fleet each time.

I feel like the big difference was error in strategy. Against Zhaitan, the pact sent special forces out first, gathered information, performed strategic raids on his weak points (mouth, eye) then brought in the full force to take him down. Against Mordremoth, the pact tried to just go in full-force first and got wiped. Then, after getting wiped, sent special missions and had to hold him back while a special mission actually finished the job.

Which one is weaker then? Hard to say. Both had big armies under their command. Mordremoth himself seemed stronger than zhaitan, but as I said the pact weakened zhaitan a lot before engaging directly. Modremoth though we found a greater direct weakness by invading his dreams, something we couldn’t do to Zhaitan.

Narcemus.1348:

Well, we do have the opportunity to see what a naval or undersea dragon could be like with the DSD which would be vastly different from what we’ve done so far, and also a underground elder dragon with Primordus, which could be different or not depending on how they will go. There are possibilities to make each dragon interesting.

My hope is they take the story in a different direction. Instead of knocking off dragons one at a time, they either bring some sort of existential threat forward or some plot twist that makes the dragons irrelevant. Maybe us breaking the rules by killing the dragons makes one of the dragons break the rules by eating another dragon and trying to take over all of them or something.

The thing about Mordremoth is, we’ve been fighting him since the first season of Living Story. Scarlet was essentially his avatar from the beginning, and we worked hard to survive his awakening in season two. Season two ended with the typical second act ending of leaving the heroes at their darkest moment (the destruction of the Pact fleet). Heart of Thorns is the final act of the story that began with the seasons, where the heroes finally pick themselves back up and win.

Confronting Zhaitan with a massive airship army was an awesome climax, but I’m impressed with the different ways they’ve been confronted.

In hindsight, we were lucky. We didn’t know much about the Elder Dragons yet, but Zhaitan was a corpse. A corpse isn’t exactly resilient, making his body weaker than the others, especially Mordremoth, whose body is so large you’d practically have to glass the planet to beat him that way.

Likewise, while the mind was one of Mordremoth’s favorite weapons, just because you use poison doesn’t make you immune to it. Mordremoth is a force of nature. His mind is big. Really big. He can control all of the Mordrem and could control all of the Sylvari. The Pact lost less because of the reach of the vines, and more because of the betrayal they weren’t expecting. But while his mind may be big, being a force of nature means that Mordremoth’s mind is also relatively simple. It’s a good weapon, but it’s not good armor, especially since he leaves himself open through those he is attacking.

If we keep going down the line of Elder Dragons at this pace, I at least hope they remain clever with details like that, but I think part of that can easily be not having us go down the list like that.

It would be interesting if we had to reluctantly team up with Palawa Joko again to finish off Kralkatorrik, or we get down there only to find that Palawa Joko’s already taken care of it, and now he’s the bigger threat, with the Desolation as his equivalent to Orr or Maguuma.

Keep in mind that with Zhaitan, we didn’t just shoot at him. He starved then poisoned him.

When we destroyed the Mouth of Zhaitan, destroyed his minion factory, and cleansed the temples (last one being open world), and finally cleansing the Source of Orr, we took out a lot of Zhaitan’s magic – equivalent to blocking most if not all the ley line energy flows leading to Mordremoth.

Then after that we used Gorr’s research to steal magic, turn it into something poisonous to Zhaitan and his risen but not mortal races, and sent it back into him. Further, we used the Inquest’s study on Elder Dragons in a laser canon that was originally derived from one that was tested on -repeatedly – Zhaitan’s champion Tequatl.

Metaphorically, it would be like not eating for a day, then vomiting and being forced to eat that vomit while being assaulted with lethal weapons.

So while we didn’t know much about the nature of Elder Dragons compared to now, we didn’t go fighting Zhaitan unprepared. Rather, during the personal story we specifically research a method to counter Zhaitan specifically, without bothering to look into the role and nature of Elder Dragons which we learn in Season 2.

Yeah, so far, both Elder Dragons are technically being fought throughout most of their story. They’re not just big enemies, but forces of nature. Unlike a human enemy, capturing their territory and destroying their army is directly weakening them.

Like the original poster, delivering that finishing blow in an airship fleet is the sort of thing I want to see with future fights.

I’d personally like to see Primordus and Jormag confronted at the same time, with a fire and ice theme. You could do a lot of cool things with that finale, anywhere from a fight about getting them to finish each other off, to some sort of split fight with a Kodan fleet using ice against Primordus while, I don’t know, we steal some crazy Flame Legion stuff to deal with Jormag.

I mean, I feel like Kralkatorrik should have some sort of closure for the Edge of Destiny story, and Jormag should have more closure for the Norn, but I’m just brainstorming.

Remember that the Pact had every intention of using a big air raid but Modremoth had the power to reach out instantaneously and take down every ship in one go. No, Modremoth had to be fought in a different way from Zhaitan. Air raids may not work against any other dragon even. I think all remaining dragons could cause elements to erupt from the ground to take out a fleet. Icicles, volcanoes, crystal shards, water tentacles.
The pacing with Modremoth was so chock full of droughts though, you forget he took out the fleet, two forts, town of prosperity, corrupted a player race, and empowered the White Mantle after his death. Zhaitan wasn’t nearly as devestating. He populated uninhabited lands, and took Claw Island. Corrupted a krait tower and made the PC face his own personal fear. His rising caused a tidal wave that perhaps unintentionally wiped out Lions Arch.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

So while we didn’t know much about the nature of Elder Dragons compared to now, we didn’t go fighting Zhaitan unprepared. Rather, during the personal story we specifically research a method to counter Zhaitan specifically, without bothering to look into the role and nature of Elder Dragons which we learn in Season 2.

Which is also probably why the Pact just charged in the way they did. They thought they had “how to kill elder dragons” down, when in fact they only had how to kill Zhaitan down. They also thought they were hitting Mordremoth before Mordremoth had powered up, so Mordremoth would be on a similar level to Zhaitan. As it turned out, Mordremoth had powered up more than they’d thought… but while Mordremoth was stronger than Zhaitan when we killed Zhaitan, I’m inclined to think Mordremoth never got as strong as Zhaitan was at its peak.

Regarding the mission itself: Up to the sparkle-cannon part, Victory or Death was fairly well done. Being part of a fleet of airships, fighting your way through multiple champions and defending a ship as it cripples the dragon… I think that part was a good demonstration of the effort it takes to get to and then cripple an Elder Dragon. Where it fell down was the anticlimactic ending. What it needed was for Zhaitan to have a final refuge for it to flee too once it was crippled where it couldn’t be smoked out by artillery, therefore requiring a small team to go into its lair and finish it off. A fight against a crippled Elder Dragon could then play out similar to the Shadow of the Dragon fight at the end of Season 2.