Guild Wars 2, which I knew by name but I always mocked as "
wow surrogate which will never be as good as my beloved Blizzard mmo".
I casually found a
Reddit post about GW2 mounts and fell in love with it. I then decided to be a little more oben minded, go deeper, read some comments and finally installed the free client. One days later I purchased the base game and expansions (49€ bundle). This gives you an idea of how much it hit me :-).
Main differences with WoW:
- world exploration is meaningful (and fun)
- no class trifecta (tank, healer, dps)
- combat is engaging and fun even when you kill a rabbit (I'm dead serious!)
- level-scaling content everywhere with loot/rewards that adapt to your real level (a level 50 running level 10 content will be lowered to level 11 but still get level 50 loot)
- extremely rewarding and fun to play, each level gain, login, discovery... gives you something (loot, experience, points, etc)
- lots of classes/races to play with with almost no restrictions
- alt-friendly
- great AH (called Trading Post) that can be used everywhere on the field
- mats can be dropped to your bank from anywhere with a simple click
- lots of QoL features
- extremely cool and helpful community, people will support/revive you while playing and give hints/help even when not asked
- no gear outleveling and no power creep
- gold has a real value (rich players have few hundreds, VERY rich players hoard few thousands).
- great-to-amazing graphics (if you can handle ultra + filters)
After 10+ years in WoW I can't deny GW2 seriously changed my mmo life, that's it. I could once again feel the thrill of leveling, exploring, looting, killing, etc. It's not a perfect MMO of course, it will not please everyone... But coming from WoW I find it amazingly fun and engaging. This is the first time I feel the desire to level alts, for example. Exploring the world is fun (secrets, mini-bosses, mini-games, ...), level-scaling adds a lot of replayability to every zone, etc.