If it were the achievement by itself, I’d certainly agree with you. The problem is—it’s not just the achievement. In the case of the Personal Story…you basically aren’t allowed to see the end of the story without the dungeon.
But with the Living Story, it’s much much worse. If you’ll look in the Living Story achievement pane, the only one that provides an overall participation reward (The gauntlets) requires completing 5 achievements (and meta-achievements, as I think some have multiple sub-tasks)—the 5th tick for this is not the dungeon itself. It’s for the achievement that has the dungeon as a pre-requisite, which involves you going and watching the scenes with Rox and Braham afterwards.
So if you don’t do this dungeon, not only are you barred from seeing last proper content scenes (as compared to just NPC dialogue-boxes in the Epilogue), but the past few months of effort you’ve put into fixing signs, gathering momentos, fighting off Molten Invasion groups, tracking down multiple flavors of ‘hidden objects’, helping Rox and Braham liberate Cragstead and the Hatchery, and getting bounced around the landscape by the Microphones? You might as well have not even bothered doing any of it, because you’re getting absolutely nothing for the time and effort you put into the event. There’s no secondary prize, no nothing.
The maddening thing? The way this is set up, it’s very obvious that Anet could have provided an alternate mission or something that could also serve as a pre-requisite for those last scenes, with the ‘penalty’ of not getting the unique item drops from the dungeon, but for some reason didn’t.
This.
I’m never going to be an incredible player. I’m just not. That’s fine. I don’t need amazing gear as a status symbol. I don’t need all the things. I don’t have the time or the smarts to figure out the absolute best, hardcore, tricked-out gear for myself. While I love random party events, I haven’t had great experiences in dungeons or with PUGing (generally). It’s not fun for me. That said, I’m willing to try stuff and will pour hours into it if necessary. I’m part of a small guild and we gave several runs at MF and wiped, repeatedly and terribly. We spent close to 4 hours on it last night (close to 6 if you count the first, aborted run) and couldn’t get past the final bosses. I’m not a fantastic player, but I’m generally not useless, either, and this was a disappointing, frustrating exercise.
I accept that I’m going to suck at certain things. But it’s crappy to not be able to see the ending to a storyline after going through all of the events and tasks up to that point because it’s tied to something I can’t do. Again, I don’t need the stuff or the status, but I’d at least like to be able to see what happens.
Loved the suggestion of providing an elite reward for those that do like to dungeon or party up and aren’t going to humiliate themselves in the attempt. If GW2 is truly geared to making the living story accessible to everyone, then I hope consideration is given in future to making it do-able (or at least view-able!) to more than just experienced dungeon-runners.