I had not planned to buy GW 2 but someone gave it to me for Christmas so I've played it a bit. I have played WOW for years.
First, I got the downloadable version and that went well. No problem getting the game up and running. The problem has been with frequent game crashes. I have an AMD Radeon HD 7800 video card which is a good card but from what I'm reading doesn't run well with the game. I updated the video driver and then ran the latest AMD Catalyst™ Application Profiles which was supposed to fix the problem. It didn't. The game crashes most frequently when I go through portals.
The best thing I can say about the game so far is that the art work is excellent. Very pretty. Lion's Arch looks great with it's holiday decorations, btw. The character models, themselves, aren't particularly impressive but the scenery is great. I started with a human ranger for an easy introduction to the game. The character creation is pretty detailed and my human's clothing came out somewhat distinctive. So I had some measure of individuality.
The 'dynamic events' and 'hearts' are by any other name, questing. I can't imagine anyone claiming otherwise. It's a bit more free flowing than getting quests from NPCs but not much since you're still talking to NPCs to find out what to do. And there's really no difference between a bar you have to fill up with boar kills and having the NPC tell you to kill ten boars.
I've been doing what, apparently, is the personal quest. It is extremely linear even including arrows on the ground to show me where I'm to go. I'm surprised there is so much hand holding in GW 2. My other main objection to this quest line is that there are way too many cut scenes. I disliked that in SWTOR and nothing's changed. They still annoy me a lot.
I've figured out where to train for crafting and am tentatively finding mats. I like professions in WOW so this should be an enjoyable activity in GW 2. I tried to buy and sell items on the Trading Post but again seemed to run into a game glitch. I managed to sell one item very quickly and then the trading post dialog box stopped responding. I couldn't get it back. Assuming I get it running, it seems like it will be a nifty way of buying and selling items since it can be done remotely.
I haven't tried any PVP and probably won't since I don't do PVP in WOW either. It may be that GW 2's PVP game is its best feature.
While playing GW 2, I was thinking about its similarity to other MMORPG's and, of course, there are many. By now the genre is pretty fixed. Questing, crafting, some kind of dungeons at end game and some kind of PVP. GW 2 has all those things to a lesser or greater degree. I'm not entirely sure that I'm interested in devoting the amount of time to yet another MMORPG when there is, in the final analysis, so much similarity between the games. I think GW 2 plays better than SWTOR, Rift and LOTR but certainly doesn't hold a candle to WOW in terms of depth of game play. I do keep in mind that WOW has been around for years and Blizzard has had plenty of time turn WOW into a highly polished game. Comparing other newer games isn't entirely fair.
So that's my first impression.