In 2025, the Zhaitan capstone encounter for the base story is still embarrassingly bad

I love this game, and it has wonderful and amazing strengths that no other game right now comes close to. That being said, the Zhaitan encounter in the final chapter of the game is a low point and is one of the most embarrassingly anti-fun parts of this game or any modern mmo.

I did this fight solo many months ago, and I remember hating it and it nearly leading me to put the game down for good, as that was my first play through and I hadn't yet seen how great the game is in the expansions and living world seasons. Likewise, my wife just got to this part of the story, and knowing how poor my experience was trying to solo this encounter, I offered to accompany her so that she (hopefully) wouldn't have as poor of an experience as I. Nonetheless, it was still extremely rough (though less infuriating with two of us), and she was even laughing during the instance about how terrible it all was.

Discussing it with her, this biggest sins of this encounter are:

1. It's terribly boring. For the capstone, final-fight of the whole base game, there's just tons of standing around waiting for the ship to travel. Likewise, there are large minutes long periods where there's no music or dialog, and if you don't notice that the ship is moving you might mistake the instance as actually being bugged and/or frozen.
2. The whole sequence where you need to shoot down the lesser dragons is clunky, unintuitive, and unfun. This whole section of the encounter should be re-tooled or scrapped entirely, because the current iteration is embarrassing. For example:
   • You can't shoot the cannon until the dragon is lined up in exactly the right spot for ~10 seconds. And outside of that window, you're just waiting around as the dragon flies around you, unable to do anything. Likewise, the game doesn't give you any useful feedback, about why the cannon isn't work. The #2 ability just doesn't work, and despite the dragon being in perfect shooting distance, you just can't shoot it outside of those specific windows.
   • To fire the cannon you need to have the dragon hard-selected, otherwise the cannon won't fire. She wasted 2 or 3 of the ~10 second windows unable to shoot the dragon, not knowing why, and it was because she didn't have the dragon selected (even though the cannon literally only has one target it can possibly shoot). Fixing this should be a no-brainer.
   • If you're doing this event solo, the game decides to spawn adds right as the ~10 second cannon window pops. So either you kill the adds and miss some or all of the window, or you just go for the cannon while being beat down, even if it results in you dying.
   • Caithe just stands there and does nothing, only offering to help if you need to be resurrected, but provides zero combat support. This is just insulting more than anything. Solo, you're getting wrecked trying to get to the cannon while adds beat on you, and your NPC allies just stand there.
3. Basically, the entire Zhaitan fight happens in a cutscene. Outside of a few waves of baddies and the aforementioned waiting around and clunky cannon-shooting at lesser dragons, the entire fight with Zhaitan is relegated to a cutscene, and then it's just... over... Within about 4 minutes, a brand new mega-warship shows up that you've never seen before, Logan returns (the game only puts about 10 minutes between his noble sacrifice and his return), Zhaitan gets his tail shot off in a cutscene, then you wait around to shoot a cannon a couple more times and then it's over.
4. It isn't fun. Nothing in the whole final encounter from start to finish is enjoyable content. I know that this is a subjective opinion, but even looking at it through the rosiest of glasses, I can't really figure out how the game designers shipped this. It really feels like they ran out of money or steam, and just needed to wrap the story up quickly.

It's really tragic that this fight is still in the game in this state. It's a deflating climax to what is otherwise a moderately solid core game, and it stands as a stain to this games reputation. I could see the conclusion to the Zhaitan story arc as a reason people put the game down and never return to it, which is such a shame with how wonderful the game is in the later expansions. Even just within the context of the base game, the Battle for Claw Island is a far more exciting and well-told chapter of the story. It's such a bummer how flat the whole base game story falls, and I really, really hope that Arenanet finds some resources to fix this encounter to, at the very least, smooth out the biggest of the rough edges.