Is Guild Wars 2 for me?

[Meledelion]

snip

You're thinking about CoF Storymode, if all your experience comes from SM dungeons you'd better hold your horses a bit.
(granted CoF explo isn't very hard either but ok)

The thing most people seem to forget about this game is that it's built around your team and team effort so ofcourse you on your own will have a hard time to keep everyone alive and what not. Especially if you take into account that most lethal dmg in gw2 comes from obvious things which should/can be avoided by dodging or simply strafing.

Another issue is that tanking=/= healing. In a trinity based mmo you have 3 roles, dps, tank and healer. If you're trying to "tank" by healing your team you're doing something wrong.
A better way to look at "tanking" is simply doing massive dmg in melee whilst knowing how to dodge so your team doesn't have to or using cripple/immobilise/daze and kite the boss (this only works if everyone is ranged since the agro system takes proximity into account)

All issues you've described so far come from lack of knowledge, be it fight mechanics, class mechanics or how to compose a team.
Being able to do a dungeon with 5 of the same class doesn't mean all of those same class were 30/30/10/0/0 specced using a Staff and the same utility skills.
If you see an ele who's built for condi dmg and uses fire combofields to help keep burning up whilst you're a guardian who also grabs the fire combo field to help with dps, you'd be better off with dropping that skill for something else, sadly not many players are open to sugestions or skill advice.

Lastly I'm going to make a point with which many people seem to disagree: toughness/vit/healing are overrated and very useless. I can expand on this but I think already have somewhere on the forums.

None of the dungeons are very hard and that's the major issue I personally have with GW2.

[Marn]

I played GW2 casually since it came out, so I only have about 500 hours played right now. I was excited for the chance to play a new MMO that threw away all the conventional catechisms of the genre, even the ones that were popular, to just make their own vision of an MMO and try to provide a fun game to tell their RPG story. Recently I got Mists of Pandaria and I hate it. I hate LFD, I hate the holy trinity of roles, I hate quests, I hate mob tags, I hate seeing other players, I hate not being able to dodge roll to avoid damage (or in fact just moving to avoid damage at all), I hate the gear treadmill, and I hate leveling to experience a brief and fleeting period of endgame before having to re-farm best-in-slot gear again and again each content patch. In Guild Wars 2, I actually really like how even though you don't pay a subscription, every month there's a new content patch. I like jumping puzzles, I like map completion, I like vistas, I like the crafting system so much more than WoW's archaic system. If I have to make 39 bracers I really enjoy how in GW2 they just whoosh by, increasing in crafting speed exponentially...AND you get experience points.

I'm trying to figure out what WoW has that would compel me to stay, because there just hasn't really been any innovation on Blizzard's end. MoP is just Cataclysm with pandas, it's the same game, it's not new or exciting. Oh, archaeology is slightly less awful? That ship has sailed. New battlegrounds for your team to fail at? YAWN. At least in GW2's sPvP I can be amongst any group of players I want, at any time, in any of a multiple of maps, starting from level one, and not worry about having a gear advantage. GW2 has World vs World which you choose to participate in to help your server receive PvE buffs for everyone; WoW has cross-server realms now, so if you're on a server with a distinct lack of the opposing faction, no need to worry—players from every other server are waiting to find you and kill you.

Map travel is vastly superior to getting on your mount and flying somewhere as you ignore 99% of stuff that you pass. Quests are inferior to dynamic events, and the gathering system in GW2 is so much better...you don't have to exclude yourself to one or two gathering professions at the cost of a crafting profession. Once you gather all that ore you can sell it on the trading post which is all-realms-aggregate. If you lived on a low pop server (half the servers are full and the other half are so high they're at risk of being full if one guild decides to move their home), you would have access to the same supply at the same price as everyone else. In WoW if you live on a low pop server, hope you like farming everything you ever need or paying ridiculous prices!


TL;DR: GW2 isn't for you, because Blizzard is banking on you being so accustomed to their brand of MMO, so content with mediocrity, that you will not be able to enjoy the absence of an automated dungeon-finder tool, the absence of roles pre-defined by icons to tell you how to play your class in a dungeon, and a combat system that puts the onus on your shoulders for whether you live or die. Map travel, dynamic events, the mail system, the trading post all really icing on the cake, quality of life improvements compared to the big changes Arenanet implemented. When WoW first debuted, everyone said EQ was going to kill it because it did things differently, but people liked different. I think people will still like different now, especially since the WoW-clones like Rift, Aion Online, Star Wars MMO all failed pretty handily. WoW does WoW better than anyone...so thank god that GW2 is actually different.

[Squibins]

Another issue is that tanking=/= healing. In a trinity based mmo you have 3 roles, dps, tank and healer. If you're trying to "tank" by healing your team you're doing something wrong.
A better way to look at "tanking" is simply doing massive dmg in melee whilst knowing how to dodge so your team doesn't have to or using cripple/immobilise/daze and kite the boss (this only works if everyone is ranged since the agro system takes proximity into account)

All issues you've described so far come from lack of knowledge, be it fight mechanics, class mechanics or how to compose a team.

...

Lastly I'm going to make a point with which many people seem to disagree: toughness/vit/healing are overrated and very useless.

I disagree with this completely, and I'll explain why.

First off, I never said I was healing the team. My attacks placed boons on myself and all team members, and one of my traits healed me for every boon that I apply to anybody. This was based off my crits, where I had a very high crit chance. The flow was basically: I crit -> I buff everybody with might -> I get healed 5 times for that single crit. Going off your model of tanking, that sounds pretty correct to me. I was buffing my team's damage with boons while doing high damage myself.

Saying "all issues I've described so far come from lack of knowledge" is a very big stretch. I would say that the only point I made that could be based on a lack of knowledge would be the exploration mode difficulty. However, just because the ability to complete something exists does not mean that it was implemented well or tested thoroughly. Running through a long hallway filled with unavoidable traps that kill you in 2 hits with no obvious way to disable them is bad dungeon design.

Secondly, saying that toughness/vit/healing are completely worthless, which makes up 3 out of 9 of the games attributes, is a game flaw. Period. If having these on an item means you don't know what you're doing, then the developers failed to implement a meaningful attribute system.

[Meledelion]

snip

My bad, I indeed didn't read the me part in the post I replied to, my sincerest of apologies. I assumed (wrongly) that the healing you were doing was ment to be party wide (through symbols/regen/...) due to you talking about trying a group centered build.

Sadly you bring up something that can be avoided 100% if you know how to. I take it you're talking about the hallway leading up with a graveling patrol running through it, straight after the spider room/boss.
These traps have a set pattern in which they appear (when the circles disapear the traps aren't active and you're free to run over them) If you reach the end of the hallway on your left there's a chain when you pull it you disable the traps.
It was obvious to me that the pattern repeated itself...
So again you simply lack a bit of knowledge with the example you described.

I see where you're coming from but the issue is that people with less experience in general need a way to live longer. I look at those stats ass buffers to fck up. The more experienced you are the less you will fck up and the less you need those stats.
If those stats weren't in place we'd get the same reacting you showed previously "this is impossible since there's no way I can take that much dmg and live" so they have to put them in.

[Drakoes]

I think you'll love the lvl'ing experience of GW2. I quit several months ago, after finding a huge lack of end-game content, and getting bored of the serverwide zergfests, that became very repetitive.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't play the game. I found the lvl'ing experience to be breathtaking, and enjoyed it very much. I think you should give it a go, since there is no subscription cost anyway, so it's not like you have anything to lose, after a one-off payment.