Guild Wars 2 makes me think I really wish WoW had more exploration.

The world in WoW is heavily structured on go to the quest hub, pick up the quests, go to the quests, go back to the quest hub, go to the next quest hub. You never really get that much reason to break from that structure and go explore, and even if you did, mostly what you'd find is areas where there's nothing to do because you didn't pick up the quests.

Being able to pick a direction and go where you want and find events happening and stuff to do along the way is just fun and refreshing and feels adventurous.

They did a little bit of that in WoD with rare monsters and treasures and I liked that. There were also the bonus quests to find but they could do so much more to make them feel like they have lore and flavor and purpose instead of being a bit bland. The equivalent in GW2 has NPC(s) you can talk to and the objectives are about how some people from some faction are doing something and you can help, and that develops your sense of who the minor factions and locals are and what they want and how they operate and there's a purpose to doing this. What do you learn and see about what the WoD factions are doing while leveling?

And overarching quest chain to tell story is nice and should be kept, but I'd love it if following quest breadcrumbs wasn't so overwhelmingly the main and most important thing.

I also feel like exploration is more social that a strict procession of quests. You can be like 'hey, I'm doing this zone, want to come along?' 'sure I've gone around the south but I haven't done anything in the north yet if you want to go there' 'cool' whereas if you aren't on the same quests in the line of quests what's the point?

Exploration is awesome.