Spoilers inside.
So first of all I've been very excited about this game since hearing about it. I quit World of Warcraft months before its release because I thought I would never consider playing it ever again. And yes, it is fun. Up to a point. I got to level 80 on the fourth day and was still having fun, since then I've been doing some explorable mode dungeons and World vs World. It is by no means a bad game and I'm not saying that you shouldn't buy it.
I've had an undecided opinion on the personal story quest. I thought it was all a little cheesy, it was too easy in my opinion and the story made no sense half the time. And of course, Zhaitan, the main "boss" did a Deathwing all the way through the story. We saw him once. When we killed him. And it reminded me so much of Dragon Soul, right down to the fact that in the last dungeon, Arah, we jumped on gunships and did a couple of bosses before killing Zhaitan for good. This was a terrible instance, and I really expected ArenaNet to come up with something better. We had absolutely zero combat with Zhaitan, in fact, he gets shot by a laser cannon in a cutscene twice and then we finish him off while he's cowering like a little girl with cannons on a gunship. To say that it was a disappointment is an understatement.
Secondly, every little feature that has been hyped up is hyped up way too much. "OH MY GOD UNDERWATER COMBAT" yes, it's stale and boring and it's the same old shit. "OH MY GOD SKILLS THAT CHANGE DEPENDING ON WHAT WEAPON YOU'RE USING?!?!?!" seriously, this one's bad. I have to choose what weapon to use based on what skills I want, and I can't mix and match. I have to put up with shit skills for other good skills because we can't change them. "OH MY GOD ALL CLASSES CAN HEAL" yeah. on a 20-40 second cooldown depending on what class you play and what healing ability you choose. "LEGENDARY WEAPONS!!!!!" they take more effort than WoW's legendaries, sure. But they're just cosmetic and well... some aren't even that great.
My next problem is with the dungeons (explorable mode dungeons etc) let me guess, you're thinking "LOL he's gonna complain about how it's too hard." ah, wrong. It's all the same stuff. Every dungeon. And because of the fact that there's no holy trinity, it means all classes are meant to avoid damage. Which means 99% of the time in an explorable mode dungeon, mobs and bosses are running around like headless chickens because they don't know what to do, who to attack. The problem with this is that there's never tactics to take down a boss, and when there are tactics, the most it'll ever be is "dodge this" ... "dodge away from that dude" ... "oh that thing on the wall is breathing fire at you... better dodge away".
Of course the dungeons are hard but they're hard for the wrong reasons. Sometimes you can't do anything but run away because non-avoidable damage is inevitable and your heal is still on cooldown for the next 15 seconds. When I first heard that all classes could heal I initially thought we'd have to find the right balance between healing and damage to max throughput etc and survivability. I never expected that we'd have to wait 30 seconds between our heals. The problem with this is that dungeons are designed so that your health effectively lasts 30-45 seconds and well that affects the difficulty in a negative way (in my opinion) it limits the difficulty of a dungeon, otherwise it would just be too hard (and of course even if it could be harder you'd just be dodging more stuff anyway)
Well the combat is just the same as any other game in my opinion, but with the addition of a dodge move. This is NOTHING SPECIAL. All it is is an evade button that you can use twice and then wait for it to recharge. It just has a fancy animation, is all. This doesn't make the combat any more "action-ish" or however you want to put it. In fact, the combat is too slow, especially in PvP. Because of the 30 second heal thing that I've talked about already it's basically who can do the most damage first. There's a serious lack of control abilities for most classes.
Oh, have I mentioned the downed state. I really feel like this doesn't have any place in PvP at all. I think it's one of the most stupid mechanics to ever be placed in a game ever. In a lot of cases, it's just delaying the inevitable. You can't effectively do anything while down except wait for someone to waltz over and heal you, or of course you can wait until you're dead (or if by some miracle you get out of combat heal yourself and get back up again) but sometimes I really hate it. Especially in World vs World where your whole team tries to "finish them" and of course get nuked the shit out of by AoEs while they're effectively useless because of course, we must finish someone off by stabbing a banner through their heart or kill their second health pool, it's kind of unfair that I've beaten them to within an inch of their life and they're still laughing at me and throwing rocks. It ruins any kind of 1 vs multiple PvP, because even if you've knocked one guy into the downed state fair and square when you're outnumbered, it's still an unfair fight even when you're obviously the better player since you haven't died yet. After that, you're done for. If you take the first guy out, guy 2 will kill you while you're performing your pointless takedown animation. Of course, instead you could whack the second guy and keep the first guy in combat so he can't heal but there's nothing you can do if guy 2 decides to start healing guy 1 because of course with a lack of control abilities it's almost inevitable that guy 1 will return with 50% health. Even if you withstand minutes of combat with 2 people and they both return several times if you even go down once you're fucking dead.
It feels like I've been ranting about this for a while now and still haven't even outlined my entire problems with the downed state, so I'll stop now. I think it's cool in PvE but in PvP it can suck a dick.
"There's no grinding in Guild Wars 2" Yeah, sure. The personal story feels like a grind to finish it, because there's a distinct lack of any sort of hard content and there's also a very real lack of a decent storyline. The heart quests are disguised grinds that you can't know exactly how much you need to do to finish it, and so are dynamic events. Escort events are all the same, often escorting a dolyak or equivalent down a path while you face several waves of centaurs or whatever (depending on what zone you're in) there's invasion events, where the enemies come to you instead of you finding them, while you have to deplete their morale. Let me find the grind in there. Each mob that dies reduces the enemy morale by 4%, so if you work out 100% / 4 and flip the text it's actually "kill 25 centaurs".
I have no motivation to do any dungeons because all story modes suck balls as much as the personal story quests, and all of the explorable mode dungeons are the same stuff "kill this dodge this" - the only reasonable dungeon is Twilight Arbor which I've been farming recently for the Nightmare gear. It takes over 45 runs to get a full set of Nightmare gear, if that's not a grind I don't know what is. I don't even have any motivation to do sPVP, because the tournament rewards are fucking shit, and there's no sense of progression because there's literally no rewards. Oh, except maybe a Glory rank that is entirely useless. I can't even be bothered to do World vs World because it's just the same, and in fact the most action is at midnight when the server lineup changes and the zerg enters Eternal Battlegrounds. Of course, it's not much fun because it's just 100 people zerging their way through everything, at 1 fps on even a high end PC.
When I first saw the Mists of Pandaria expansion, I thought, what a joke. There's no way I'm playing something that fucking pathetic, but here I am, and I'm buying MoP. What I thought was the salvation I was looking for when it came to MMORPGs, all it has done is driven me closer to something that I would have rather given up entirely.