New player. Just did the main storyline up to the "killing" of Zhaitan. Very disappointed [Spoilers]

[Fallesafe.5932]

Overall... I find Anet's quests/stories to be the most tedious and out-of-place thing in this whole game. And nothing boggles my mind more than the players who want to discuss lore and character development.

 

First of all, the stories and the characters are utterly unengaging. I can't stand any of them. And I CAN'T ENDURE listening to them talk!! When I had to "attend Eir's funeral" and feed that stupid dog, and carve ice sculptures, and talk to NPCs for 45 minutes about this wretched character, I thought I was going to throw my monitor at the wall. The dialogue is endless, poorly acted, and unbearable. But the presumption that you like these characters and have an attachment to them is even worse.

 

Then there's the mindless combat, where you just tape down your 1 key and run around in circles killing waves of trash while your eyes glaze over.

[Fallesafe.5932]

Overall... I find Anet's stories to be the most tedious and out-of-place thing in this whole game. And nothing boggles my mind more than the players who are eager to discuss lore and character development (i.e. they actually like them).

 

First of all, the characters are utterly unengaging. I can't stand any of them. And I CAN'T ENDURE listening to them talk!! When I had to "attend Eir's funeral" and feed that stupid dog, and carve ice sculptures, and talk to NPCs for 45 minutes about that ridiculous lady, I thought I was going to throw my monitor at the wall. The dialogue is endless, poorly acted, and unbearable. But the presumption that you actually LIKE these characters (and have some attachment to them) is even worse.

 

Then there's the mindless combat OP mentioned: where you tape down your 1-key and run around in circles killing waves of trash while your eyes glaze over. I could go on. But, suffice it to say that I despise Anet's stories, and consider them just a little more fun than a dental procedure.

[Edelweiss.4261]

> @"Fallesafe.5932" said:

> Overall... I find Anet's quests/stories to be the most tedious and out-of-place thing in this whole game. And nothing boggles my mind more than the players who want to discuss lore and character development.

>

> First of all, the stories and the characters are utterly unengaging. I can't stand any of them. And I CAN'T ENDURE listening to them talk!! When I had to "attend Eir's funeral" and feed that stupid dog, and carve ice sculptures, and talk to NPCs for 45 minutes about this wretched character, I thought I was going to throw my monitor at the wall. The dialogue is endless, poorly acted, and unbearable. But the presumption that you like these characters and have an attachment to them is even worse.

>

> Then there's the mindless combat, where you just tape down your 1 key and run around in circles killing waves of trash while your eyes glaze over.

 

I feel very much the same on the story and characters. The lore, however, I find interesting(if only because I think there are interesting possibilities). As it stands, I just want to know/see more about the dragons.

[Hannelore.8153]

> @"Fallesafe.5932" said:

> Overall... I find Anet's quests/stories to be the most tedious and out-of-place thing in this whole game. And nothing boggles my mind more than the players who want to discuss lore and character development.

>

> First of all, the stories and the characters are utterly unengaging. I can't stand any of them. And I CAN'T ENDURE listening to them talk!! When I had to "attend Eir's funeral" and feed that stupid dog, and carve ice sculptures, and talk to NPCs for 45 minutes about this wretched character, I thought I was going to throw my monitor at the wall. The dialogue is endless, poorly acted, and unbearable. But the presumption that you like these characters and have an attachment to them is even worse.

>

> Then there's the mindless combat, where you just tape down your 1 key and run around in circles killing waves of trash while your eyes glaze over.

 

The voice acting is different in every language, their English actors are just particularly bad because they use mostly in-house VA. And when they didn't, they would hire professional voice actors that are famous for voicing kids stuff, so they sound out-of-place in GW2.

[Stevieboy.4192]

It was a 5 man instance before.

They changed it so people who solo could complete the story.

Such as it is...

[Carlin Sanders.3587]

personally I felt the beginniner part of the personal storyline was good. even the factions storyline (vigil, whispers, priory) was okay but nothing great. it was probably at claw island and trehearne the story dropped out in my opinion, as it started feeling very rushed from there. if they honestly combined the first two parts (staying with your racial but also working with one of said factions in that area) eventually making your way to zhaitan would have been better honestly. it doesn't need to be a (this race did it not the others) kind of thing, it could be that due to the respective member of DE amongst the other races that said race is also in orr, with all 5 members of DE reuniting and bringing together the races to combat the dragons and you're also inaugurated officially as a member of DE due to your talents. we could also go with the 'unspecified hero' card for the other races but that seems a bit lame.

 

just my two cents.

[Mea.5491]

I'm a beta player and I totally enjoyed the story with my first character. I even liked the Zhaitan mission EXCEPT for the fight with the dragon, I find it boring that I just have to spam 1 with some turret instead of using my own skills. I agree that fight is underwhelming but the core story still has plenty of enjoyable moments and I've replayed the whole thing at least 10 times in the past 5+ years.

[Urud.4925]

The fight with Zhaitan is indeed easier than the previous one on the ship, and watching that huge dragon flying around the ship's cannons "like a noob" (whereas he could have destroyed them in a couple of shots) was a bit lame. But I didn't care that much. It's a personal story, that should be completed in solo. There are still players that complain because it's hard for them, it's pointless to add hundreds of veteran mobs to make it more epic. The story itself is good imo, there's no need to scale up the difficulty to enjoy the plot. The dialogues are good enough to compensate the gameplay.

[casualkenny.9817]

Single ships with no covering fire, and dragons that obligingly fly around and under the ship till it is time for them to line up nicely in front of the cannon to die...

 

Oh.. This char you just met is so gonna die soon... Yep she died. Please don't introduce unnecessary deaths to bring out the horrors of war.

 

Voices that have no emotion and stuff - even in pof. Everyone talks slowly, there's no sense of pressure... (and you can't skip the voicing!) the only one I liked was tonn, maybe his wife too.

 

Ppl tell me that the whispers storyline was better, but I'm so not going to go through all that again just to see if they are right. I mean, these guild members also say that the story is between okay to awesome.

 

It might be worse for me because I've been reading fiction since I was a kid, but the main plot and scripting is bad. I am sorry. I did it only for the mps.

[Sir Alric.5078]

I must be the only one who likes the Personal Story, even though i agree that the last battle with Zhaitan is underwhelming to say the least. Of course, after 3+ years of playing GW2, i have no trouble at all in completing the PS with my alts, but i remember it not being so easy as people claim when i did it for the first time as a total noob with my Elementalist dressed mostly in greens (and a few yellow items i got from drops. I did not know you could buy things on the TP at the time).

[Knuckle Joe.7408]

tbh i always thought that you, as the commander, along with a handful of elite people, were always behind enemy lines in ultra stealthy, key secret missions of critical strategical importance, like destroying the ossuary, the mouth, retrieving the undead-reppeling orb from the krait, etc. The reason you never saw tremendous battles, lord of the rings style is because they were happening somewhere else, while you were kind of spec ops, and Zaithan himself never attacked you because i dunno if you figured it out already, but the elder dragons in this game aren't the fighting type, they're more like natural destructive forces, just existing somewhere, corrupting everything. But yeah Zaithan fight was meh, didn't bother me at all though, there's so much you can do with a MMORPG, this is not an action game.

[Aethron.6704]

> @"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:

>

> Anything in the Gem Store is available at no cost using the Gold-to-Gems exchange. Also, one can purchase, at least, the Season Two bundle along with either/both expansions on the website.

>

> Welcome to Tyria, and good luck.

 

Yes, and being able to get it for gold via exchange is a good thing, but not of much use to a new player. LW2 is on the website, but not LW3, and in any case they don't really make it clear that you'll be missing half the story and a bunch of playable zones without them.

 

A big part of the problem is that these aren't really separate DLC, they are part of the core story line. I think the expectation from a new player is that buying all of the available expansions will include all of the core story line.

[DeceiverX.8361]

> @"Zedek.8932" said:

> Wait, when did that happen actually? Because I switch back and forth in the stories (Core, PoF, Hot) and realized too that suddenly in several Orr fights, my NPC and even the enemy NPC just stand around. There is some awesome epic audio background of 500 people brawling and then there like groups of 5 hostile and friendly NPC just standing still like marble columns. But since the game glitched with the lighing (bright square blocks instead of smoothed radial light sources) I thought something might be wrong during loading and just cheezed my way trough these fights.

>

> Yesterday I realized I ended the PoF main story after the speech and the game set it to the "Fight Zhaitan" chapter by itself. I walked around in Orr as if I am shopping in the mall. I remember, one of my first threads on the old boards was how to get around in Orr, because at once point, a Veteran zombie in a narrow place blocked me and downed me when I just came close (with 123,033 conditions and helpers). I was thinking a bunch of people might just raided that place and I got lucky, but it kept being like that. I just rode my Springer and scratched my head.

>

> It must have been in the end of 2016 or something..

>

> The German voice acting is as fine as always but it improves **SO MUCH** in PoF.

>

> Excelsior.

 

They nerfed Orr hard several years ago because people complained the content was too difficult (the irony). I remember the good old days of being absolutely swarmed, as frustrating as it was when player counts were low haha. That map was absolutely mean but a proper endgame if you ask me.

 

And powercreep. I can solo the map metas on a Daredevil these days which back then was completely unheard of.

 

As far as the OP goes with the story... yes, it is horrible. I'm not a PvE guy and usually only do it when I need to, so I didn't finish the PS on my main character until a few years after I started playing. I laughed out loud with how bad they handled killing Zhaitan.

 

"I'm firin' my laser" in the most literal of senses.

 

The writing continues to be poor throughout HoT and bits thereafter. I haven't played the LS3 finale or PoF's story to comment further, though. Sadly, story is not a strong suit of this game.

 

[Kururu.8140]

Yeah, I completely agree it was incredibly dull. I have 9 characters and over 4,000 hours and I only bothered to finish the personal story on 1 of my characters. I also got a friend to play GW2 as well and they completed the personal story and said it was really awful and disappointing.

[ReaverKane.7598]

To be fair... The reduced numbers are explained in previous story steps. You have to understand that there's several choices that you can take and in the story they all happen in tandem whether you do them or not. (For example the Krait/water Orb that protects Fort Trinity from the corruption is there whether you do that mission or not).

So basically, regardless of which aspect of Zaithan's army you choose to attack personally, the others will also be attacked, and as such their numbers are culled canonically. Which is why you usually go against smaller numbers.

 

About the final instance... Well it was never the best thing about GW2. The final battle was always lacklustre. And that was made worse with the redesigns and changes stemming from the NPE and subsequent redesigns (like making the final instance soloable instead of a Story Dungeon).

 

Living World and expansion stories, however, have been steadily improving their quality, and it's pretty much the best thing about gw2.

[lynspottery.6529]

> @"ProtoGunner.4953" said:

> I did it solo a couple of days ago after years. It' remember it was horrible, but I don't remember it was _that_ horrible. It's beyond believe they greenlit this sorry excuse of the final story step. As you mentioned: the rest of Destiny's Edge literally afk stand around and do NOTHING. I mean kitten? Also you alone 'kill' Zhaitan by shooting aka pressing 1 repeatedly for 2 minutes while the rest of the crew just stand around. It's absolutely ridiculous. I think they had to rush this. I am pretty sure it was planned that you fight him on the soil of Arah in an epic battle.

>

> Luckily, PoF and HoT did it far better.

 

There is still an issue with the "heroes" who stand around twiddling their thumbs while you get wailed upon by the mobs in these story instances. If the AI was fixed so that these "heroes" would actually participate as a team with you, it would make these story instances much better. As it is, I've given up expecting "my heroes friends" to actually step in and help me with any of the fights I've done in my story lines. In fact I did better with a couple of guildies to party up with and we ignored the "heroes" completely.

 

About the only thing that they are helpful for are the times I needed to be rezzed in a single story instance I was soloing, because the mobs just overwhelmed me. That is when I realized that some of these story instances are not easily soloed by all professions. Some builds are much better than others and they are not all on the same profession. It would help if there was a better build balance so that whatever build you use, you have a chance to succeed without having to depend on outside help just to complete any particular step.

[Goettel.4389]

Never cared for story in games, probably never will.