Guild Wars 2

KestrelGirl.9267:

She’s a young, inexperienced, naive, overly trusting queen whose realm is plagued by bandits and pirates. I don’t think you’ve done the Caudecus’ Manor storyline, the human personal story, or any renown hearts in Kryta.

Well… thinking is a crapshot by times, isn’t#it? I’ve done it all, and no, I can’t really find most of this traits. The way she handles Caudecus himself is actually a clever move. Ever heard of “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”? Not trying to hang him and achieving nothing but losing the image of a kind and benevolent ruler and waiting for him to “hang himself” instead while giving the Shining Blade a better shot at unraveling the whole conspiracy is neither naive nor inexperienced nor overly trusting.

No, the way she handles the daily business in times that can hardly be described as a Golden Age of peace or prosperity, is not that bad unless the treshold is “solve every problem immediately and as if you wouldn’t have limited time and ressources”. That’s not how the whole “being in charge” thing usually works.

Nothing of that defines her as a character, though, and that was the point. Yes, she might be a clever politician or she may have good advisors or both, or she might not be as you see it, it doesn’t tell us much about who she is as a person. That’s not enough to build a romance upon or to continue one in a way that’s not just annoyingly superficial. And yes, I have ideas who it could be done propery, but I don’t think that it would be a very compelling story for kids – and you can’t ignore them since they’re part of the intended playerbase of the game. But they could do a little bit more for sure.

Hashar.6082:

That’s interesting. I’ve always considered romance to be one of the series’s weakest and rather disgusting points. You know, the requisite and largely unavoidable legion of hot and powerful (optionally monster) girls, all willing and ready to sleep with the protagonist after you complete their respective quest chains. The first game even offered you cards for each such encounter which you could collect – I’m not sure how can you possibly trivialize romance any more than that.
At the same time, the single most meaningful romantic relationship in Geralt’s life, i.e. his relatioship with Yennefer, was barely hinted at until the third and last game, and then you could simply walk away from it.

Yes, the card collection “mechanic” of the first game was cringeworthy, no doubt about that. But most of that doesn’t exactly try to be romance, it is about sex and Geralt taking advantage of being sterile.
The romance part depends on your choices, though, and whether you’ve read the books or not. In short: The trilogy doesn’t build the actual romance on lust. No matter who you choose, it’s not that hard to spend the night with the potential love interests, but even though that’s a part of Geralt’s way of life, it’s way harder to build up and maintaining relationships, which is rather close to real life.

The foundation of the romance ark of the whole story are two questions: Who is Geralt deep inside and who does he want to become? Geralt is up and foremost an aging monster hunter. He is good at what he does and being a witcher has defined him for most of his life, but the result of him being part of a game of thrones wheter he wants it or not, fatigues him. After decades of living on the edge he is tired and a part of him wants to move on with his life.

How you as the player experience that depends largely on the choices you make. The path I’ve found to be the most interesting one is to build up a relationship with Triss at least for the first two games. While not being an especially likeable character in the books but rather a great manipulator, the games do something interesting with her. Even though she doesn’t stop taking advantage of him by times, if you build up this relationship it becomes aparent that she genuinely cares about Geralt.

Being one of the few persons in the world to understand his plights and his fatigue, the relationship with her offers a way to “move on”. At the beginning of the second game, all Geralt wants from Foltest is Triss being free from her duties so he can start a new life with her far away from courts and kings. As usual, the world enjoys ruining his day, though, and what starts out promising ends up with Foltest being murdered and the kingdoms sinking into total chaos.

The romance ark culminates in the third game with the return of Yennefer. While Triss would allow him to move on and represents his more peaceful and caring traits, thus helping him to develop a new perspective in life, Yennefer represents his wild and violent side, the life he knows and has always lived to the fullest. Yennefer once was his one true love and he remembers that, but depending on how you played and experienced the first two games, things may be a lot more complicated now.

Geralt eventually ends up between two women he loves and cares about. Both represent parts of his personality, both know and understand him, both care about him. The choice he makes eventually defines what he wants his future to be and who he wants to become. There is no “right” or “wrong”, there is no better or worse option. It’s a painful decision because he has to sacrifice the relationship to one person that means a lot to him. He can even choose to abandon both, but one way or the other, it will leave a mark on him.

As I wrote before, experience may differ depending on how much you know about the characters and more importantly how you’ve played the games. The downside of interactive stories is that not all paths you can choose from might be particularly moving and interesting. Nevertheless, I’m impressed by the result, it is a royal pain in the * to write a story with that many different options and outcomes and as far as I’m concerned, they did it well.

Ah, love. The source of emotions most powerful, of greatest joy and deepest sorrow. It bothers artists since ancient times and it won’t stop for the foreseeable future… if ever.

That being said… no. I hope they will never try to involve me as the player of the protagonist of the story. I do enjoy a good romantic story, but apart from GW2 doing a terrible job at storytelling anyway, most video games just cannot handle this properly, with the Witcher trilogy being one of the very few exceptions.

Most video game romances are either cringeworthy, slapdash side quests or both. Let’s hear the preachment of our lord and saviour Jim Sterling on this topic:

-
Side quest completed, achievement unlocked, back to business. Thanks, but no thanks. I would never expect ANet to go all-out on that and trying to tell a really good interactive romance for the protagonist, but that’s pretty much what they would have to do in order to get it right.
Give Jennah some character beyond “young fairy-tale queen with plot convenient mesmer powers” to get on with Logan’s romance, give Marjory and Kasmeer some screen time, all fine with me. But please don’t open the “player romance” can of worms. Please!?

DeceiverX.8361:

If the claims of early labor explicitly for an expansion are true, then the company outright lied, and if they’re not, the company out-right lied on its scheduling. Based on how unpolished and unfinished many aspects of the expansion are, as well as completely contrary to the core game in its design, and hap-hazard elite specialization balancing and design, I think it’s fair to say ANet lied about its development time spent on the expansion in that the content was rushed. implying there were no plans for developing an expansion until fairly recently.

While I cannot prove you wrong simply because I’ve never worked for ArenaNet, I think you’re jumping to conclusions here. While I have critizised ANet on numerous occasions, I don’t see why they would have lied to us in regard of their intended development and release schedule. It’s not like the idea of a fully fledged out expansion would have been unpopular at any point during the life cycle of the game.

The more interesting question is why they changed their plans and released HoT in this state. If you have a closer look at the expansion and count out the XP grind for masteries and the content gating, wouldn’t you agree that HoT almost screams “I was Living Story Season 3?”
The story instances and the open world events are somewhat intertwined, but if you play them, it’s not like the expansion guides you through both of these content types in the most logical order. Releasing them bit by bit and guiding the players as it was in the Living Story chapters would fit much better than this full release.
I’ll go out on a limb and claim that the final story mission wouldn’t have been in such a sorry state littered with game breaking bugs if it would have been released in order with the original release schedule. It was the most complex of them all mechanical wise and was obviously not throughoutly playtested and debugged, but put in a state where it would work at least under some common circumstances.

We can only speculate why the schedules were changed and I wonder whether we would have gotten Heart of Thorns as an expansion pack or rather as a LS release if other NCSoft projects, notably Wildstar, wouldn’t have flopped.
We might never get an answer to that, but I suppose it’s not unreasonable to assume that we as GW2 players got the short end of the stick because of business decisions at the opposite end of the food chain.

Yargesh.4965:

How is what I wrote any different then what you quoted?

Alright then…

Yargesh.4965:

They did not say they were not working on an expansion. Not even close to that.

They did. Quotations to back that up see above.

Yargesh.4965:

The debate was whether to do so entirely through living story or through a traditional paid expansion or through a combination.

No. Quotations see above and read further in the articles. Until they came around the corner with the HoT announcement, the official statement was: No expansions. We’re not working on it, we’re releasing the content via the Living World funded by the gem shop earnings.

Yargesh.4965:

They did not say they were not working on an expansion. Not even close to that. They said they were not sure how they where going to release the content. The debate was whether to do so entirely through living story or through a traditional paid expansion or through a combination.

That’s actually not correct.

Eurogamer.net (03/07/2013)

“So right now we’re not really looking at expansions as an option,” lead content designer Mike Zadorojny told me[…].
“It’s something that’s on the table but it’s not something we’re focused on, because what we want to do is – our idea here is that with Living World, we can do what expansions would have done but do it on a more regular basis.”

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-03-its-unlikely-guild-wars-2-will-ever-get-an-expansion-pack

IGN.com (03/05/2013)

“It’s something that’s on the table but it’s not something we’re focused on, because what we want to do is – our idea here is that with Living World, we can do what expansions would have done but do it on a more regular basis.” (Colin Johanson)

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/05/no-guild-wars-2-expansions-currently-planned

And so on. What they actually not said was: “expansions will never be an option”. But it is safe to assume that the development of the expansion as an actual expansion began relatively late. It includes content or features which have been developed before the decision to release them as part of an expansion, but in order to release an actual expansion they shoved systems and content out of the door before they were throughoutly playtested and ready for the live servers while holding back finished ones resulting in the content drought before the HoT launch. The result is are the varying degrees of quality and some larger and quite a lot of smaller issues and questionable design decisions that they might have been able to avoid under other circumstances.

Thanks for the support so far, but readers beware, this post is going to take a while.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

The beginning of Heart of Thorns was already revealed and set up since Living World.

It’s still part of the plot and its very beginning, so it is relevant.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Complaining about “poor setup” for races when the game exists with Soviet mole rats and Eskimo polar bears is pointless,

Guild Wars 2 is a fantasy game with a well developed and rather complex setting, therefore failing at the setup is not pointless but a failure when it comes to storytelling.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Rata Novus exists for the concept of every dragon having a weakness; if the characters don’t know that even though the audience does, it still has to be in there.

“Getting shot to death by airships with powerful anti-aircraft cannons” counts as “having a weakness” for a dragon now? Seriously, look at what you’re defending. The episode is absolutely pointless, it doesn’t give any new information while it could and should have provided the setup for the actual ending of the plot.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Character development is rare in GW2 anyways, so that is not something to peg on HoT.

I’ll give you that, but that doesn’t make it any better, especially if you prepare characters for such a development just to fail to deliver in the end. Which is again, bad storytelling.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Finally, I find myself much preferring this ending to the core ending. Mordremoth was actually fun and engaging, and the final fight made sense when the dragon is the entire jungle itself. Zhaitan, conversely, was horribly uninteresting.

Putting aside the deus ex machina it was more fun, I agree. The ending of the personal story was a very long and rather boring story dungeon with a bossfight that was not even half as epic as it was on the drawing board while you had to do a whole lot more against Mordremoth. I don’t actually have a problem with the ending itself, but Trahearne growing super powers and the heroes running into the fire just to come up with a plan right before they face the end boss is just off. It came from nowhere and that’s bad practice.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

What are hearts other to “bloat” map completion?

While not all heart quests have unique and especially interesting activities and gameplay elements, there are quite a few to have this. They are content.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

What is leveling other to “bloat” the small story of the core game? The argument still stands; HoT created alternatives to leveling as a form of timegate, yet some portion of the playerbase has taken offence to having to work towards their goal rather than buy it.

Leveling is actually the closest to the mastery system the core game has, and if a leveling system from 1-80 is necessary while I cannot remember missing leveling my character after the tutorial area in GW1, is debatable. However, you can level a character while playing the game without being forced to repeat content which is not true for the mastery system which requires quite a lot of repetition, especially for those players who don’t invest a huge amount of time to play the game.
I would agree with you if this leveling would be on par with the leveling of a character in the core game, but that’s obviously not the case because of the XP grind. It would be if everything you had to do would be gathering the mastery points, which is actually fun by times.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

What would you propose to be done about this, then? There’s very little I can see Anet doing about other people’s Internet.

That’s why you consider what makes it to the live server and what sounds good in theory and won’t work in practice…

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Then what is, making people form together into large groups? Oh god, the horror, MULTIPLAYER online gaming!

Your cynicism is lost on me, especially since all you do is taking an ill-informed personal shot at me. #discussionculture
What HoT actually accomplishes is a better scaling for large meta events, it’s not always perfect and needs some adjustments here and there, but it’s one of the better working systems of the expansion, so that’s not the point. The problems with Taxi Wars 2 are as follows:

• The latest iteration of the megaserver system makes it hard and sometimes even impossible to find or “create” a new map instance if you want to organise a large community event. That was regarded as a major letdown by the big Guild Wars communities especially in the early days of HoT when the meta events had a tendency to fail on maps without good organisation. Most meta events can be done with relative ease now, but the technical side of the problem hasn’t been touched, yet. Even though HoT requires coordination for large scale meta events, it makes it unreasonably hard for communities to actually get organised on the maps, not even counting those who cannot participate at all because of full maps, often resulting in a loss of a considerable amount of game time without being able to get anything done and without the desired reward of being able to participate.
• The map “decay” further solidifies this problem because maps are closing even if the message goes away or doesn’t even appear for those arriving on such a map after larger groups have been brought in.
• The HoT maps have a map participation system but the data is tied to a specific instance of the map, therefore you’ll lose your progress when you use a taxi, even though you’re often forced to for the main event because your map loses players prior to the main event instead of gaining them.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

WvW was dead on arrival.The developers are currently working on trying to fix it. But WvW was not some sudden attack by HoT that instantly killed it. It was on life support before the xpac was even released.

The game mode had a flawed concept from the get go, that’s true, and the failure to evolve it is one of the biggest letdowns of GW2. Nevertheless, despite its flaws it was a well received game mode with a numerous and quite dedicated player base, calling it “dead on arrival” is bonkers. The HoT meltdown is well documented and has been analyzed and discussed to death and no flat out denial will change this. Everyone has a right to his own opinion, but not to his own facts and that’s the end of that.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

What is DotA? What is Magic: the Gathering? These both are games that thrive on the idea of shaking up the meta. If Anet can do the balance patches correctly to make every class viable but have a different playstyle within times, then they have a lifetime supporter. Will they do it correctly? Probably not. But if they can, they will make things interesting. ANYTHING is more interesting than the last couple years of PvP gaming on GW2.

You may educate yourself about the differences between balancing of multiplayer online games and patches to evolve said games, you even quoted the part where I gave a hint that there might be more to balancing than just shaking up things. That’s all there is left to say for me on that part.

Alright, that was it for today. I apologize for having to pluck the post to pieces, but it would have been even harder to follow than it already is without the citations.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Pretending like these problems are only inherent of HoT is also whistling in the dark.

I didn’t do that.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

The main issue with the story is that it wasn’t long enough. I won’t deny that that is an issue, but for the story parts we got, a lot of it was actually good IMO. I also happened to get a bit lucky and have the first character I played the story through go through Living Story Season 2 and Heart of Thorns in one long go, which made the whole thing much more enjoyable. Even if that wasn’t intended, at least try it once.

Issues with the story without going into too much detail here:

• The plot starts with a plot convenient device: The full-scale airship attack at a jungle and the subsequent total loss of the fleet. It serves to start the story with a bang, but doesn’t make much sense at all and could have been achieved in a much more clever fashion.
• The setup of the jungle and the new pact allies is done poorly.
• The Rata Novus episode is entirely pointless for the plot.
• The character development is handled poorly with Braham and Rytlock not getting any kind of development despite being prepared for it, Caithe’s story being underused and not really resolved and several characters not being used at all.
• The story ends with a big deus ex machina without any setup whatsoever.

The length of the story is only one part of a major design problem that might be attributed to HoT being developed without the necessary amount of time.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

So…leveling? Masteries were created so a big level cap increase was not a side effect of the expansion. If leveling is not a problem for you to continue through the game, then masteries should not be either. It’s the same concept executed differently. As for collections, complaining about being forced to play the game rather than grind gold to pay as quickly as possible for your legendaries and specialization weapons is a much better alternative IMO. I intend to play them as intended by gathering the materials for the precursors and going through the collections. If you would rather play the game by putting your credit card in and getting as much gold as possible to speedrun your loot without earning it, you only have yourself to blame for your disappointment.

Nothing of that relates to those systems trying to bloat a rather small amount of content.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

From what I have seen, most adventures are in the passable and good section, with very few (Shooting Gallery comes to mind) being universally hated.

It’s apparent that the adventures were not tested in respect of ping issues, which is important for an international MMO. The requirements to achieve the medals are imbalanced and not throughoutly playtested and haven’t been corrected for months despite the data the developer could gather since launch.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

I won’t argue with the Dragon’s Stand issue. On the other hand, it’s not like zerging through the difficult content wasn’t already common place. Before HoT, people taxied the world bosses. Now they taxi the meta events.

That’s not the crux of the matter.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

WvW has been dying since launch. It has barely ever been supported, and for the last year and a half it has been heavily declining. Don’t peg this one on HoT, peg this on Guild Wars 2 as a whole.

Every games dies beginning the day it launches, so that’s a fallacy. While the WvW player base was on a decline, partially due to the lack of support, the HoT launch resulted in a collapse of the player base for every single server for a number of reasons elaborated by many players in interviews and the respective forums.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Balancing the game constantly in drastic ways can work if Anet does it right. While I’m not in high hopes that they will, successfully doing this can actually be one of the best moves they have done. It’s worked with other genres, and I have no reason to doubt that creating a changing meta will better the game as a whole by making things less stale. If you would rather sit through 2016 in stagnation, PvP is not for you.

With the rise of e-sports we have seen a lot of professionalisation when it comes to balancing multiplayer games, so it’s not unreasonable to expect a professional approach from a developer trying to make a mark in e-sports and to call them out if they don’t. Shaking up metas is a way to evolve a game mode, it hasn’t proven to be a successful way to balance a game for professional competitive play which is what ANet pushes for.

I don’t remember seeing many of threads with numerous players criticising the work of the art team or the sound design. They got the job done, no doubt about that, but if that would be the deciding factor whether a game is good or not, Destiny would have been game of the year 2014 instead of being one of the biggest disappointments in years and Star Wars: Battlefront would have been a flying success instead of being outperformed by every other AAA shooter on the PC platform despite having one of the most popular licenses of our pop culture.
Of course you can say that people complain about the 1% wrong, but well, let’s look at it, shall we?

• The story is a mess, even for the rather low GW2 standards.
• The content is artificially stretched out by gating and a huge number of collections.
• Numerous mini games have been introduced without proper quality management, leading to an unacceptable range of quality from “good for live server” to “kill it with fire”.
• Taxi Wars 2 has become a popular term for communities trying to organise meta events for their players on the new maps and getting kicked out of Dragon’s Stand in the middle of the fight is an issue that hasn’t been fixed for months, either.
• WvW guilds and small guilds have been screwed over by losing their progress and having to deal with a massive PvE grind to get it back.
• WvW is on life-support and the developers haven’t even tried to stop the bleeding or even talk to their alienated WvW players. They kicked a lot of very dedicated long-term players in the teeth this way and it’s not like a WvW player was spoiled with ANet’s attention in the first place.
• PvP suffers from the elite spezialisation powercreep and other terrible balancing issues and their answer was “balance patches every three months to shake up the meta”. Balancing by hitting the system with a sledge hammer in 2016 isn’t looking all that professional, especially for developers trying to establish their game in the e-sports scene.

If that’s just 1%, well… then I never saw how huge this expansion really is. I just wonder where all this content is hidden, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen everything but raids. In other words: Yes, it’s not all doom and gloom, but pretending that this expansion is a paragon for the genre is like the proverbial whistling in the dark.
ANet has done better in the past and I won’t stop nagging until they live up to their old standards… or until I leave the franchise for good, that is.

It would be great to have that.

HoT has nothing to do with the sudden death of WvW. Not directly, at the very least, and this is why:
The hardcore raiding crews are needed to face the Mordrem in open field fights to help out the pact. The roamers who have given up in the mists are actually roaming the Tangled Depths, because ganking the Mordrem is essential to win the war against the jungle dragon. The borderland defense crews which have left are actually in the jungle to back up the pact with their valuable knowledge on how to defend towers and keeps against all odds.

If you want to join the fun, just listen to the Reyana’s interviews with veteran commanders and read the WvW forums. We’re always hiring! Mordremoth must die! Then we can go back to WvW as we know it.

When I first read about shared slots, I was excited about it. When I saw that ArenaNet actually charges 700 gems for one single inventory slot, my excitement went from 100% to null. 700 for a shared bag? Not exactly a steal, but with a 20 slot bag in it, it would be decent and I would have use for it. But 700 for a shared slot? No, no, no, no, no.

The Guild Wars franchise never had any subscription fees.

Indeed, there is no reason to hype any upcoming RvR game or MMO in general. Does anybody remember the times when The Elder Scrolls Online was said to become the GW2 killer? Or Wildstar, the big super hardcore MMO? Both slipped faster than you could say “whoops!”.
Therefore let’s continue squeeking. I won’t try to pretend that I have a lot of hope left, getting this convoluted mess of a game mode fixed is about as hard as clearing out the Augean stables if you’re not Hercules, but it’s better to make noise for the slight hope that something existing is getting fixed than hyping the next probably not so big thing.
If we really get something better, we can still jump ship.

Yeah, whatever.

I’ll give up on the story discussion. I gave enough examples on how to do it right – from Guild Wars: Eye of the North, by the way – I gave enough input on how to do it, but all I get is some Texas Sharpshooting, because accepting anything beyond that would result in seeing a flaw in GW2 and that is obviously not allowed to happen.

As you’ve stated yourself, the postulate was the storytelling was bad because no memorable characters have been introduced and this is still relevant because there are no memorable characters which have been introduced in HoT, although they introduce new characters which are important for the plot and the setting they tried to build up with the Maguuma Jungle.

I got the message. You love HoT, probably more than anything on this earth since you roam the forums for months now each and every day to defend it. There is no point in discussing love. I somewhat envy you because I will never be able to appreciate this expansion the way you did, but on the other hand… after decades of experiencing, playing and – quite of lot of – writing interactive stories, I cannot overlook such basic flaws and I’ll never allow professionals to get away with such shlock, because I know firsthand how lazy it is, even though I give the author of HoT that he was at least partially a victim of the circumstances.

Vayne.8563:

This isn’t War and Peace. It’s a video game. You meet people early. they become the main characters, and then you move onto the end of the story with those characters. The idea that the writing is good or bad, really has nothing to do with whether characters introduced later are memorable or whether you can describe them.

Not entirely wrong, but not right on the mark, either.
First of all you can introduce well fleshed out characters pretty much whenever you want for the first two thirds of your plot. It becomes increasingly difficult to do so, but you can make it work if you’re good at writing stories.
Second: If you don’t want to waste screen time on new and not that important NPC, then don’t. Let one of the other characters handle it, let’s say Roxx somehow knows how to get along with the Itzel and deals with them in your name. You cannot communicate with them yourself and therefore cannot really relate to them and leave the development of the Itzel entirely to the open world.
Third: If you don’t use the method mentioned before, you have to develop characters because you want the player to relate to them. They’re allies, they’re important, therefore you cannot afford them to be boring or the players won’t care and that aspect of the plot fails to connect with them.
An NPC like this doesn’t need the depth of the protagonists as the story is not really about her, but zero personality doesn’t count as getting the job done.

Vayne.8563:

I can think of a dozen famous books off hand where the important characters are all introduced up front and no new characters were introduced at all. So the whole conversation is a moot point anyway.

No, it isn’t, because the story introduces new characters and goes pretty much nowhere with them, but even that’s only part of the problem, because the one single character with at least some kind of development in the HoT story is Canach. They even failed at developing Braham or doing anything interesting with Rytlock.
That poor meanie kittencat is hanging around since the start and has gotten no development at all, he is only used to be a gruffy charr, because being gruff is what charr are all about… oh, wait, no.

Vayne.8563:

Not to mention the character we’re talking about isn’t a main character that’s around for seventeen chapters of a story. He said none of them were memorable and I thought one was…because I remembered him. Sort of the definition.

Sort of, but not really. In the end, you cannot describe him because there is nothing to describe and that was the point. There were times when ArenaNet had better writers even for characters like Ibli.
When you were first introduced to the culture of the Norn, you had Jora and the struggle with her brother Svanir and when you first learned more about the charr, you had Pyre Fierceshot who’s rubble with Gwen taught you way more about the charr and their worldview than any expository dialogue option in Guild Wars 2. Heck, even Nightfall’s Zhed Shadowhoof had a lot more going on than any HoT NPC.

Uriel.6310:

On the contrary, I agree, the developers in the end are to blame but in retrospective to all of that, the players had the biggest chance to tell developers what they wanted to see. When things were being announced or not being revealed yet, these forums were constantly bombarded with post that created a separation in the community. One group made statements like, “We want to see X in game”, or “Why is Y not happening or explained more clearly”, and then you would have other players who loved “X” and did not even stop to think about “Y”. In essence, those same players who are now dishearten by how let down this expansion is were giving Arenanet too much credit.

Players would defend the decisions of the game saying, “They are working hard, the content is great” or “X is fine and this is what we want, if you other players don’t like it then stop whining and go play something else”. Things like that is what also helped make the game what it is today. And voting with the wallet is probably speaking the loudest, but I’m not advocating that decision right off because simply saying something in these forums is enough to make the devs notice something. Just how like now these type of threads are constantly popping up each time about how disappointed players are with parts of the game.

Had players noticed the little content that was revealed for this “expansion” or some of the questionably decisions made by developers, then they could have voiced their opinion more loudly to where the developers would “maybe” notice them. So I cant really have much sympathy for players who finally realize this. Too many, yet a minority, of fans tried to say something about it before the release. But in the end, had it gone the opposite way, the developers still have the final say so. Which causes me to have moments where I have to stop and think, “who are they really making this game for. Us, or them?”

I agree with you on that, thanks for the reply.

The video, while not written as a complete analysis for the expansion, was not all negative and he mentioned the open world conflict with the sylvari, albeit briefly. You should not try to rate a video that long based on the first few minutes, IndigoSundown.

Uriel.6310:

They probably would also think that GW2 was going to be something totally different in some aspects than what we have today, but because some players are ok with being thrown pieces of bones, instead of receiving the steak we deserve as paying customers, we now have a half baked game.

While I agree with the rest of your post, you’re letting the developers get away way too easily with blaming it on the customer, I guess. It’s undeniable that if the players would demand much more and vote with their wallet, things would change, but that’s only one side of that coin.
The other one is a developer getting lazy and not trying to push boundaries outside of those the business economists ask them to. There might be multiple reasons why this happened and although some players adress those things to Mike O’Brian it might as well be nobody in particular to blame.
The crux of the matter is a developer past its best. Ruining the WvW and not even trying to stop the bleeding, the amateurish attempt to create an e-sport out of a game not even remotely ready for it, both those things say a lot about a distinct lack of motivation behind the scenes. Things like that just don’t happen if the team behind it is passionate about what they do.
However, that’s something you’ll get if many of the original developers are no longer on board. The problem is: While they make money now, they will inevitably run into trouble in the long run unless they somehow manage to turn around. ArenaNet wouldn’t be the first nor the last studio to fall from grace this way.
That’s something I would hate to see.

Apart from the adventures I also found myself agreeing with most things MagicMike said about HoT, including his conclusion. Was HoT a complete failure for me? No, it wasn’t. But it wasn’t a success by any stretch of the imagination, either.

There were just so many bizarre design decisions that made me say “What on earth where they thinking?” and “Who thought this would be a good idea?” One might argue about whether some things are actually fun or not, but some things speak for themselves. Here are three Wtf?-moments that don’t depend on your personal taste.

1. The dungeon scene has lost their favorite toys after being neglected since release with no better reason than “Because we can. Play something else.” Wait, what? You want to cater to almost every possible audience and run a free to play shop but you take away something your players enjoy without being forced to by any means? Wtf?
2. The PvP scene, while never in a brilliant shape, is in a sorry state and the attempts to create an e-sports scene without even trying to get the game mode into shape first subsequently backfired. You don’t believe it? Well, then just look at it, the numbers are there for everybody to see and they say “Nobody cares”. You don’t believe there is a game breaking meta? Well, then just look at it. If the professional scene cannot do a thing about it and every tournament match becomes a borefest because of it… there might be a balance problem. For months. Wtf?
   There is no successful e-sports game with game breaking balance problems for months. This is 2016, not 2006.
3. The WvW has been gutted. There is a forum full of reasons why it is and a forum full of reasons why this was about to happen, the latter being found in the archive. The GvG scene is dead, the roamer scene is dead, the borderlands crews are dead and even zerging used to be a lot more fun. You don’t believe it? Well, then just look at it. The borderlands are empty, the GvG scene is nowhere to be found, you can roam around for hours without getting anywhere with it, nobody actively defends any borderland, and hitting a brick wall because of turtle banners or getting blasted to hell and back by dragon banners is <insert random curse here>.
   ANet shrug it off, they didn’t care before and they don’t care now. If that’s not a wtf moment, I don’t know what is. If you lose a lot of long term customers who kept loyal to the game even though you didn’t exactly treated them as kings and it doesn’t scare the heck out of you, you’re doing it wrong.

As I wrote about the story that I simply loathe: I don’t hate the game and I don’t hate its developer. However, I want them to push forward to show the world that they are striving to be best at what they’re doing, to create the best game they can in their particular niche, a niche that ArenaNet once created themselves, a niche that became a thing because they had confidence in it, went big on it and got the job done.
I do not want them to succumb to mediocrity or worse. Even if you defend HoT to the death: There is no way to deny that HoT was mediocre and in no way up to the standards they set themselves in the past. Filler content and busy work were once beneath the dignity of this franchise. I want these times back.

Red guard videos… I haven’t seen one of those for quite some time now. Good old times, even though you’d usually end up with the bad end of the stick if you had to fight them. I remember fighting one of their follow-on guilds and another hardcore guild in a matchup against Piken Square while running with a public blob with mostly veteran players, it was one of the best WvW reset fights I’ve ever had.

Well… it’s a blast from the past. Let’s hope that ArenaNet doesn’t bury WvW once and for all with their big overhaul, if it returns to at least some of its former glory, I’ll support you if you try to rally players for this game mode.

Cedric Ambidexter.9174:

So, you’re saying I need a degree in game mechanics to be able to effectively ‘kill’ a low-level monster?

Well, ‘degrees in game mechanics" are fairely easy to aquire in GW2, but yes, that’s pretty much what it means. Mesmers aren’t exactly praised for the damage output, but if you understand how the class works, you can blow up everything in the open world without working up a sweat.
The leveling phase of the mesmer has never been a lot of fun, though. It’s manageable, but it’s not unusual to feel like a kitten by times because you don’t have access to a lot of damage multiplication effects before you’re all grown up.

It’s not as confusing and hard to navigate as it seems on first glance, but you need some masteries to make life easier: Updraft gliding, mushroom jumping and nuchoc wallows with the latter being most useful to find your way through the Tangled Depths.

Auric Basin is rather simple: Head to the center of the map first and unlock the Tarir waypoint. It’s open unless the main event is running and makes life a lot easier, especially if the outposts are still locked. If you take this as your starting point, you can use the event chains to discover most of the map with ease, there is just one part you can only reach with a friendly mesmer or Ley-Line-Gliding.

Tangled Depths is a bit of a nightmare without nuchoc wallows, but not that hard if you can use them. Your most important waypoint is “Ley-Line Confluence”. Once you’ve found one of the lanes you can hardly miss it. From this point you can discover the lanes and with the wallows most of the territory behind it without getting lost.

Dragon’s Stand is an event map, many GW2 communities do this one on a regular basis. Join them for the event and you’ll get to see everything the map has to offer.

In order to properly introduce mounted combat you would have to add an entirely new layer of complexity to the combat system. The combat system itself has enough rough edges and bugs at its current state and don’t get me started on balancing. Even if the engine could handle it, it would mostly add another layer of chaos that’s not really needed.

Flop Sweat, I’ve played all of Season 1 and I can assure you that you’re better off not knowing exactly what you’ve missed. Some of the zerg events were fine, but when it comes to the story and its NPCs or Scarlet… let’s just say you’re better off thinking about how cool it would have been to experience it first hand and hoping that you’ll never have to see how cool it actually was.

HiggsBoson.1976:

To all the complainers, instead of whining about “waaah too hard Nintendo” or “waaah FPS in my MMO”, why not appreciate how great it is that this game is flexible and adaptable enough to even offer these fun Adventures at all?

I appreciate creativity with the game mechanics when it’s fun for me. I have a hard time doing so when it asks me to accomplish things that are questionable even from a technical point of view.

The most successful platform games, for casual and hardcore audience alike, have some things in common: Tight controls and getting the players to the places where they failed in order to try again without spending an arbitrary amount of time on things they’ve already completed.

GW2 gates the minigames in general behind metaevents, thus preventing you from getting back to them outside of a small time frame. The controls are clunky because of lag issues to the point where you simply cannot pull off difficult moves time and time again because of it.

The PC is the best platform for FPS games. The GW2 engine however is not suited to that genre by any stretch of the imagination. If you still want to include a FPS minigame, make it fun and casual experience. Don’t expect the players to go out of their way to handle the clunky mechanics in order to hit small targets with a crosshair that’s nowhere to be seen when you need it.
Make the players cheer for you for implementing it by keeping it as a fun distraction while you wait for the main event instead of forcing them through it and making them do things the engine handles rather poorly to begin with.
Shooting gallery gives you a gameplay experience (or torture) usually found in shovel ware or asset flips, and not AAA material by any stretch of the imagination. That’s a disgrace.

All this can be summed up under “don’t try to shove an expansion out of the door without giving the developers enough time to get the job done”, though. Some minigames work well, some are even easy to do, while others simply don’t work well on the live servers. Under normal circumstances you would cut the latter out of the final product, in HoT however they’ve bundled together everything they got to have at least some content to show for, including unpolished minigames.

Swagger.1459:

I have conference call facts, financial document facts and I have patch note facts…

You are all pulling the “lemme see the facts for the facts for the other facts and where are hidden document facts and you need to fly to Korea and talk to the suits and get the facts”… argument… It’s very ridiculous of you all to dismiss the current facts I’m given…

I know those documents. If you’d take time to read my post instead of immediately trying to defend yourself, you’d see that I don’t think that your assumptions are unreasonable or invalid. But there is a line between assumptions and facts and that’s the problem.

Swagger, I cannot help but think that this topic is going over your head. First of all: Whenever you claim something, it’s your job to support it with evidence unless you state: “This is what I’ve read, and therefore I assume a), b), c). I don’t know for sure, but this sounds like bad news to me.”

And there is reason to predict that “cost-efficiency” is going to bite the players in the behind. NCSoft has income problems? GW2 already has a fully fledged out and supported free to play model on top of the buy to play model since launch, there have been content droughts and HoT was at least partially bloated content. None of that is a sign of “we want to make the best possible MMO” but “we play it safe and try to make as much money as possible” and with NCSoft wanting to appease shareholders, it’s not unreasonable to assume that this is going to continue because they need or at least want that money.

But it is an assumption, not a fact. Unless you can come up with evidence – for example internal documents proving your point – these are not facts, therefore stop claiming that. There is no way you can know all the facts without being an ArenaNet executive or having the same sources of information like one – and you don’t.

“One wrong-way driver? Hundreds of them!”

ham.8209:

and my post here. is to show how the server numbers have dropped since hot came out.

While this might be your intention for this thread, you have not given us any evidence for that. Numbers might not lie, but that doesn’t mean that you happen to know what they say in the first place, besides you didn’t presented us any numbers or statistics to work with.

You didn’t even know how the server population is calculated when you started this thread and your claims that you know for a fact that ArenaNet didn’t increase the server population are questionable at best. They might not have been, but since this is hardly something that’s crucial for the community to know about, it might as well be an undocumented change from our point of view. And your ramblings about employment… geez, don’t ever do that. You’re just making a fool of yourself.

That being said, it’s not unreasonable to assume that there has been a decline for the active part of the player base, but without evidence it remains an assumption and nothing else.

Reasons for being angry at the current state of the game, especially regarding WvW, are plenty, but how ArenaNet deals with hackers is not among them. There have and always will be players who don’t play by the rules, but they haven’t become a big problem for years now, so it’s safe to assume that the devs don’t hesitate to take them down rather quickly.
Therefore naming & shaming is neither allowed nor even necessary, so don’t do it, end of story.

The changes are nice and well and under other circumstances I would even welcome them. Unfortunately the circumstances are dire and the outlook is grim. This forum has a large number of very elaborate posts about what’s wrong and what’s needed to save the game mode and if this “sneak peak” is the attempt to show the WvW community that ArenaNet communicates, it’s nothing but a big middle finger and the crystal clear message: We don’t care at all.
Again, the changes are nice and well, but with the WvW in ruins, I couldn’t care less. Adress the real problems, then we’re talking.

Entenkommando.5208:

You also have to think from the company’s perspective. They’ve been working on this map since 1-1.5 years and it cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars.

While I have no faith in ANet doing the right thing by deleting the new map for good, what you point out in this phrase is exactly the fallacy ANet has been prone as of late. Creating video games is a creative process and being creative always includes running into the wrong direction, often multiple times. It’s really hard to create a good PvP map and you’ll inevitably fall into some traps on the way to the best possible map.
It has happened before with other games, too, League of Legends being the most well known example with creating buzz for a big map with teleporters and what not years ago and ending up admitting that it never reached the point where they were satisfied with the gameplay, subsequently dropping the project.
ANet didn’t test the map. They announced a beta for it, but it was merely a sneak peak. In the end they were too proud of their beautiful map to pull the breaks when the testers stopped playing way before the beta tests were over and gave feedback that includes almost everything that has been criticized since the desert borderlands went live.

I’m aware of myself preaching to the choir, you’ve hit the nail right on the head with your initial post, Entenkommando, I just want to point out that even this business perspective is a fallacy from my point of view. In the end, ANets inability to communicate, it’s inability to listen to the community and the mentality of “just go with it, no matter what” is the difference between one of the most well known e-sports games getting the job done for more than ten years and GW2 losing a considerable chunk of its player base after three years.

I’m glad that the effects have been reduced. I like nice graphic effects as much as anybody, but whenever I actually have to put effort into playing because I’m facing a challenging opponent, I’d rather see what he’s doing right now.
It would have been nice to make the effect reduction optional, though.

Both classes perform reasonably well in PvE, with the warrior having the edge when it comes to dungeons, fractals or raids. It’s easy to run solo with both classes in new and old content alike and with the pet management not being as horrible as it once was you’ll get the job done easily most of the time.

Warrior:
While it’s not easy to shine with the berserker specialization (or the warrior in general) in a PvP environment, it helps you to rack up damage multipliers in PvE which results in reasonably high dps with a skill rotation that is neither overly complicated nor static. Once you’re getting used to use activate all multipliers and keeping them up as long as possible, you can pretty much move around as you feel like without losing a significant amount of dps which makes playing on the new maps or fighting bosses with a pick up group bearable.
Furthermore your weapon collection is actually useful at least if you play on the HoT maps: Apart from some hero point champions there is no opponent you cannot kill without having much trouble, even the more annoying ones can be dealt with easily if you’re willing to swap in some weapons you wouldn’t normally pick.
You can adapt to many situations: If you want to be useful for a group, grab your greatsword, use a phalanx strength build and some banners and you’ll be welcome even in raid teams. If a metric ton of CC is needed: Just take the right weapons or even CC skills and stunlock everything your comrades need you to. If you want to run around solo: Swap some skills to buff yourself instead of others and you’re good to go.
You can take more punishment than most other classes and get away with mistakes more easily because of that.

The downside is that you’ll rarely be able shine as a warrior. You’ll get the job done and once you’re used to it you’ll do so reliably which is good but not exiting. You can pretty much pick this class even if you’re tired and you’ll still perform reasonably well most of the time. Again, that’s not a bad thing, but if you want to feel like a real kitten apart from charging right into the fray, the class might not be the right choice for you.

Ranger:
Ugh. I like the class even though I probably shouldn’t, especially in PvE. To cut a long story short: Play a sword spirit spotter build with sword/axe and longbow, don’t kick opponents out of melee range with point blank shot and your comrades won’t hate you. They will most likely not love you, either, spotter is a nice group buff and a frost spirit always comes in handy, but in general you’re not the best supporter the game has to offer.
The problem is: You’re not the best damage dealer, either. Once you’re used to the sword dancing, you’ll get along, but as somebody who used to play ele and thief you’ll definitely miss the feeling of blasting opponents to hell and back after putting so much effort into your damage rotation.
As a druid you have a niche role as a healer/dd, but don’t expect to be sought after in raid groups or dungeons.

On the other hand: Running solo even through the ‘tougher’ parts of the HoT maps is a breeze. Once you’re good at the sword dancing you can make some nice plays and being able to swap to the longbow, one of the better ranged options of the game, gives you pretty much everything you’ll ever need.

Nevertheless, you’ll play ranger because you like it or you’ll not do it at all in PvE. When it comes to efficiency, warrior is your best bet.

Creating collections which force players to fail events this way is horrible, horrible game design and provokes toxic behaviour. Why the responsible developers at ArenaNet thought this would be a good idea is beyond me.

Melanion, the players have voted with their feet and the result is clear as day: The new borderlands have been rejected and that’s the bottom line. Force me to get there and I won’t just be estranged from the game mode but gone for good.

A PvP map should be the hidden star of a game mode, the foundation on which the gameplay unfolds. The new borderlands have been designed with a similar mindset as the HoT PvE maps: The map is the star and what you do there unfolds around its obstacles and challenges and therein lies the rub.

Well, it’s not like they can make it much worse, can’t they? Either they manage to fix it this time or they’ll merely speed up the sink into insignificance.

It’s hilarious that this is something to be suggested by the community instead of being done right away.

Vayne.8563:

The story isn’t Shakespeare, obviously. But I haven’t played any MMOs where it has been. In most MMOs stories are a motivation to do something. They provide the motivation for your character to act. If I want actual story I read a book.

Weasel-words. There haven’t been open world games telling compelling stories either until a developer actually tried to push the boundaries of the genre and blew the contenders out of the water in the process. Video games in general have a lot of potential to tell compelling and even complex stories, whether this is something you as an individual look for in a video game or not is an entirely different matter.

As Doam pointed out, the HoT story was a step backwards from living season two. That’s not what I’m looking for from a developer, I’m looking for a company to man up and try to push boundaries, to knock the competitors down a peg instead of surrendering to mediocrity.
HoT is mediocre, unfortunately.

Yes, the story is lackluster, it’s an attempt to tell a huge plot within the limits of a short story combined with deus ex machina plot devices which is always a sign of the writers not getting the job done – maybe because they were not capable of doing so or more likely because they weren’t given enough to work with by the other developers, which wouldn’t come as a surprise.
Even though some players actually think that HoT took three years to make (which is hilarious, to be honest), they had half this time at best which is by far not enough to deliver a top notch story in a video game.

A well played warrior is useful both in PvE and WvW. Don’t ask for the moon while playing the class, but a competent warrior gets the job done and that’s usually everything you and your fellow players need in both game modes and unless you play a DPS warrior in WvW it’s also rather easy to pull off.
In WvW it’s not a fantastic class outside of the zerg, but if you actually know what you’re doing, you’ll find enough players picking the wrong fight when they decided to challenge you, therefore no sweat. You have to bite the bullet by times, but that’s life.

The guardian offers more support and flexibility at the cost of requiring a lot more active defense which is not easy in a game doing a poor job telegraphing attacks by times. If you face a lot of standard situations, for example in dungeons or fractals, you’re safe by simply playing the content over and over, but outside of that it can be frustrating to play a berserker guardian in melee range.
In WvW the guardian is the backbone of a zerg and always sought after, whether you play with the offense or the defense.

Using a waypoint once you’re dead is something the game tells you to do once you’ve been killed, as you might or might not have noticed. But yeah, it’s an exploit, so ArenaNet should start banning the whole community for… something they told them to do… ouch, just ouch.

Thanks for listening and reacting to the concerns about the grind. While it won’t solve all problems with it, it’s an important step into the right direction.

No, SelenaDread, briggah is missing the point, I’m sorry. He argues against something nobody asked for, he exaggerates the issues players have with HoT’s gating mechanics so much that he’s right again. Instead you can just try to stomach that a lot of players vent their frustration about having to do time consuming things they don’t really want to do in order to continue doing what they would like.

If you like to grind, that’s fine. Since the first Guild Wars and it’s expansions right through three years of Guild Wars 2 there has been grind and farming and it has been optional so people who like grind and people who dislike it got along just fine. With HoT that’s a thing of the past and whether this irks you or not, this is an issue that quite a few players dislike.

That one? http://safr.kingfeatures.com/idn/ck3/content.php?file=aHR0cDovL3NhZnIua2luZ2ZlYXR1cmVzLmNvbS9DdXJ0aXMvMjAxNS8xMC9DdXJ0aXMuMjAxNTEwMjZfNzYwLmdpZg==

Orpheal makes a post that makes me giving him an upvote… now I’m sure that the world I knew has ended. But credit is given where credit is due.

Fade.5904:

Got Master Daredevil yesterday, played 3 days. Spend less time whining and more time playing – because that’s all i did, play the game (not grind

I’ve played since friday and I haven’t unlocked anything meaningful. The difference between you and me might be that I have a life besides Guild Wars 2 and don’t play it like a 12h per day job – and don’t even try to tell me that you’ve unlocked those things with a game time of about two hours per day.
I played the games of this franchise precisely because they allowed me to stay on top of things without giving up my life for it. I’m not even a casual player, I’m actually quite wary of builds, equipment options and ways to master the game mechanics to be able to compete on a skill level above average at least.
What you arrogant white knight call “whining” is players – often long term players of this franchise – being upset about a fundamental change in design philosophy that shakes the very foundation of this franchise, the very reason many players who don’t like the standard MMO formula play Guild Wars and not WoW and other standard MMOs.

And to Colin: It’s great that ArenaNet is discussing this. And no, I’m not sarcastic about that one one bit. But let’s face it: All this didn’t happen by accident, your company isn’t composed of morons and rookies but professionals. Even if some of you may have not been happy about the shift in design philosophy, they were not able to defend the old way of doing things.
Therefore I’m not convinced that any internal discussion ArenaNet will lead will improve HoT to the point where it no longer alienates a significant amount of it’s unique player base.

But I don’t want to finish this post as the merchant of doom I never wanted to be for this franchise. I love it, I don’t want it to die, I don’t want to be driven away from it. Therefore I will preserve a beacon of hope that the HoT grind might be pushed out of anything that’s not optional.

art design: 9/10
The frogs look silly, but overall the art team did their job with flying colors. The maps are beautiful, end of story.

Story (at least the first few steps): 8/10
The devs try to make the most out of an engine that’s not really suited to tell a story to tell their story and I can respect that. Furthermore, what I’ve seen so far is enjoyable.

game design: Urgh!/10
I hate the slow progression. No, I don’t want to breeze trough the game in a couple of hours, but the progression HoT enforces is just tedious grinding. I don’t explore the world and the story and become stronger and more skilled while doing so, story and map exploration are gated content and require hours of grinding.
If the asian market is that important to ArenaNet and NCSoft because grinders are apparently very popular there, fine, but as a player who plays Guild Wars to avoid the tedious and boring asia grinders, I feel left behind.

Yes, he does, but it doesn’t mean a thing because it never feels like Trahearne is crucial for the Orr campaign in the first place and the player character has almost no development in the story.

The problem with Trahearne is mostly the bad writing. The character itself isn’t bad at all, but the storytelling in the second half of the personal story is so bad it’s hilarious. ArenaNet has improved on a lot of this points during LS 2 which came as a surprise to me because LS 1 was even worse than the personal story, but nevertheless.

The nail in the coffin for the personal story is the Claw Island mission. In fact, this mission is so hilariously bad I cannot help but wonder who thought it was a good idea to put it into the final game. It pretty much sums up what’s wrong with Trahearne and pretty much the whole second half of the story.

1. The plot hole
The plot hole in this mission is so big Zhaitan could disappear in it. It’s the death of the mentor. The intention behind the death is to highen the stakes in the fight against the elder dragon, but it doesn’t work because it’s so poorly written it’s ridiculous. Two of the three mentors don’t have a legacy of being particularly good fighters. Capable, yes, but strong enough to stop an undead horde for any significant amount of time? Not by a long shot. Especially not if they try to hold a huge gate against them which already is capable of holding them back for a short amount of time and is too large for the mentors to keep an undead horde from trying to break it even while they fight the mentor. It doesn’t make sense at all.

2. No Storytelling via game mechanics
The personal story doesn’t tell the plot by the use of game mechanics which is crucial in video games.
Your faction loses the battle, but unless you’re a newbie you’ll hardly feel threatened by the zombies at all, in fact you wipe the floor with them and feel like you could go on for quite some time. The game fails entirely at giving you any sense of urgency to retreat which could have been avoided easily:
Show the player that his forces are being crushed, show that more and more soldiers die on the battlefield, bring more and more zombies and increase their strength more and more while your allies shout at you to retreat to the gate. Depending on your skill you can fight them off longer, but staying on the island is not an option, you have to make a run for it or you’ll die, plain and simple.

3. The Trahearne setup
You more or less meet Trahearne as a scholar who studied Orr and knows a lot about it. He is introduced as somebody you would call on for some advice, but not as the big shot he becomes very quickly. The setup is rubbish, plain and simple. Let’s imagine a different approach:
You don’t meet Trahearne at Claw Island, you have to go to Orr to find him because taking down Zhaitan is his chosen purpose in life, and that’s before the pact is armed and ready to invade it. You meet some more or less untrustworthy guides and make your way to find him while he studies the undead.
You blow his cover and bring him in jeopardy but you can make up for it by at least bringing him home alive. While you got him in hot water because you’re neither experienced nor prepared for the realm of the walking dead, you also proved that you have potential, therefore he decides to teach and guide you so you can do what he cannot and that’s delivering the necessary punch to actually kill them once and for all.

Now Trahearne is in the position where you look up to him. He’s not a great hero or leader, but he’s the one who can show you the ropes and is bound and determined to do everything to get the job done and that also means to combine the three very capable orders to one force. He’s not a military commander, but he can show all of them how to use their strengths to greatest effect against the undead menace, thus slowly becoming the leader the pact actually needs.
Under his guidance you become the dragon killer and when the time has come to finally invade Arah, he has tought you everything he knows while you’ve also reached the peak of your strength. What you’re doing during the final battle is beyond Trahearnes capabilities and with the ultimate defeat of Zhaitan you become Tyria’s greatest hero.
Now also the final ceremony makes a lot more sense, Trahearne is no longer the big shot, you are, but you bring him with you because without him you’d have never reached this point. With showcasing that Trahearne did a fine job coordinating the effort of the three orders during the final battle to keep Zhaitan’s army away from Arah, he also grows as a character by becoming the true leader of the pact and growing as a character himself.

Please note that I didn’t add anything to the personality of Trahearne this way, but I guess most of you would agree with me that he would be much more likeable now and wouldn’t feel as unnecessary as he does in the personal story. In the end the bad storytelling broke the character, but not what he actually is or did in the personal story.