What's preventing you from coming back to/playing Guild Wars 2?

[Aeula]

I think I played the game once when it came out... but I really don't like the art style. I find it off-putting. And the gameplay wasn't all that enthralling iirc.

[Deleted]

I enjoyed leveling a Ranger and an Elementalist back in vanilla GW2. I liked the fact that there was no gear progression, as I came from a long period in WoW and was bored of that. Then as soon as I had the best type of armor, they suddenly introduced another tier. WTF? That bothered me quite a lot. Then there was the fact that the dungeons were boring and bosses were not fun like in WoW Cataclysm. Still, I stayed in for WvWvW, which I enjoyed, but after a while I lost interest.

There are plenty of healing builds, most notably Druid, who is dedicated raid healer.

Wait. There is a dedicated healer now?

[Leyre]

dont have any of the expansions, lol

[Edge-]

Wait. There is a dedicated healer now?

HoT firmed up class roles a bit more, though I believe mostly for raiding. There's more "tank" oriented builds as there's a certain level of threat management in raids (folks who raid can correct me if I'm wrong on this), and the support role has been expanded both in terms of importance and classes that can fill it. Not quite a dedicated healer proper, but there are a number of more healing/buffing oriented support builds that are pretty important for raiding and higher difficulty fractals. Still completely optional for open world and more casual group content.

[Boricha]

I played from launch until MoP came out about a month later. Got to max level and fully geared to the point that everything else was just cosmetic and I didn't feel like farming any of it. It was fun, but I thought the dungeons were chaos and I didn't like not having a trinity system. PvP was good for a bit, but got boring fast. I remember mesmer being OP. Leveling was the most enjoyable part. I have too much commitment to WoW to really play GW2, and the endgame content didn't seem that worthwhile.

[Shrugal]

I was hugely exited for GW2 before its launch and enjoyed the beta very much, but after playing the finished game and hitting the "endgame" on some chars some shortcomings revealed themselves that pretty much ruin the enjoyment for me. I still have it installed and play it from time to time (mainly when new LW chapters are released), but I wouldn't consider myself an active player at this point.

Some of the things I don't like ...

Non-existent progression: When I finished my full ascended set it really felt like hitting a brick wall, because from this point forward I'd only be able to acquire cosmetic and QoL rewards. That really sucks when playing an RPG where you want to progress your character. I realize that a constant gear-treadmill like WoW is not great either, but at least you always have something to work towards that's not just for looks. I think the mastery system is supposed to fix this (horizontal progression instead of vertical), but it just completely falls flat on its face in this regard!

Dungeons being abandoned: I know there are fractals now, but for me dungeons are not just random levels that you queue for in a lobby. They need to be set in a world with stories that culminate in the dungeon, and they need to include areas that are not on the "optimal route" but give the whole place a bit of flavor. On launch the GW2 dungeons where awesome in this regard (although the actual gameplay was pretty shitty), but then they abandoned them in favor of faceless fractals. I know they have a story of their own, but I cannot relate to it whatsoever.

Lackluster group content: As good as the combat system is for solo open-world gameplay, I really think it sucks for the most part in group settings, organized or PUGs. Maybe I never really understood it or got into it the right way, but to me it just feels very chaotic and random. There is also not nearly enough structured group content to make this my main MMO of choice. WoW releases 3 raids in the time it takes Anet to create one raid wing with 3 bosses.

Open world zerg: The open world content mainly consists of mindless kill and collect "quests", or bosses that are zerged to death. I know the bounty system tries to make bosses a bit more interesting, but at the end of the day what you are doing is zerg the boss to death, even if you die a few times while doing it. I really loved the coordinated metas in HoTs, but it seems they won't be adding those in future expansions.

Character models and art-style: The whole character art style is just disgusting to me at this point. I never liked the doll-like look of some races, but nowadays most characters I come across look like shiny Christmas trees more than anything else. I want to have a cohesive middle ages or steampunk setting, and I don't mind some real world references or fun outfits, but what's happening in GW2 nowadays is just to much for me.

Storytelling: I think we can all agree that the personal story in classic GW2 is just bad, very very bad. The LW storytelling is much better, but I still have to cringe every few minutes. Not just because of the many bad and misplaced jokes, but also because some things just don't make any sense whatsoever. Some things are also just extremely disappointing, like how we killed one elder dragon with a simple airship, another (the elder dragon of minds!!) in his mind after a completely bullshit turn of events, a god of war in a 1v1 fight, or the "unkillable" Palawa Joko by just letting Aurene eat him. Those are just extremely boring endings to foes that should be muuuuch stronger than our player character (imo). I do like most of the character building and progression in LW however, that's the main thing that keeps me playing them.

Minor things: Not updating old zones, no variation in ground-ability tells so the entire floor is just covered in red/white/orange circles, outdated graphics engine (even WoW updates it every other expansion), WvW battles being far to ephemeral and having no real consequences, lackluster class rotations, buffs/debuffs being pretty hard to read in combat (for me at least), loading screens in between zones, bugs or exploits often not being patched for weeks or even month, every new open-world map being just another grind.

[Nyel]

I love love love GW2 but classes don't keep me entertained. And I don't like to be stuck at level 80 forever. I want some kind of treadmill. I loved GW1 because you could farm gear or skills and that's missing in GW2.

[Lane]

Storytelling: I think we can all agree that the personal story in classic GW2 is just bad, very very bad. The LW storytelling is much better, but I still have to cringe every few minutes.

I don't agree. I enjoyed the personal story. LW (season 1) was horrendously awful and, frankly, one of the main reasons I quit the game. I wanted an expansion. Knowing content going forward was going to be more LW I completely lost interest in continuing to play (I already had 100% map completion and an alt of every class). I finished Battle for Lion's Arch and haven't touched the game since.

[Rainbow Sun]

At this point it's the fact that I have been gone so long I have no flippin idea what's going on.

[escalprillo]

The fact that every time I install and log in, there's like 1k items on my bags that I do not know where they came from and what are they used for. Too overwhelming when you are just coming back into game. And I'm not talking about gear or crafting materials, its the items the game gives you after login or crap like that? not even sure. They have arrows on them.

[Bugg]

I dislike the art style and I think the class design is 'cheap' somehow. But mainly the art style.

[Zelliaind]

It's going to seem pretty lame, but I can't get used to the difficulty curve from other MMO's. I've been a WoW player since the middle of vanilla and switching to GW2 when it came out was pretty interesting but none of the classes really held my attention. I came back in HoT and holy jeez things were nearly one shotting me despite getting out of the way of attacks. Same thing in PoF but at a much lesser scale.

It took me until now to find Mirage where I can actually survive things in melee without being one shot by a bullshit mob mechanic.

Basically, I'd come back if some of the mobs got tuned down just a little bit. I know that's probably an unpopular opinion but there it is.

[Demsi]

World of Warcraft

[Deleted]

Greetings champions, good to see you, as always.

This is a question for those who do not play Guild Wars 2 - either people that have already played it, or those who didn't try the game yet and lack something to try it.

What's preventing you from coming back or playing this game?

It actually being a decent MMO. It's a pretty "game" but it lacks impact and meaningful progression for me.

[Deleted]

Lack of roles, gear progression feels very lacking. The combat despite being considered something special is super floaty and the ability combos rarely feel impactful, the cleave attacks feel like you are brushing enemies with a fantasy rolled up newspaper.

The public quests or whatever they are called also feel massively wank when you spend ages going through multiple stages only for it to reset in front of your eyes to really highlight the fact it's an illusion and what you are doing doesn't really matter. It's like those little stations you could use as a scientist(i think) in Wildstar, except for instead of a little terminal its a whole area that's integral to the game.

[John Freeman]

Dev's in general, and Anet's overall company policy towards casual playerbase [will write in detail]

Out of all multiplayer games that i've played, when it comes to communication with it's playerbase, this one is the worst.
Balance patches are "kinder-surprise", even though community 'll state that a certain class is insanely UP or OP, the balancing team 'll do something fifth, and usually make the class even worse, or even more broken than it originally has been.

There's no community-"open" beta testing for future patches/game progression, it's just one major load of dump after another.

While i personally enjoy that there's no item progression in a sense "lets finish this raid wing, and when we start next one loot'll have 5+ more stats or w/e", the end-game progression itself, is just way too slow.
You tend to wait for 8+ months, for a "single raid wing with 3-4 bosses" to be implemented within the game.

PvP is garbage, - i honestly wish they had ranked arenas like WoW does, or even battlegrounds, because WvW is a joke, and what they consider to be PvP aka, capping points/rotating, on maps that pre-date _infinity itself_ is insane.

The community's to blame as well, it's filled of passive aggressive retards, that're whiteknighting anet almost every single time.
It's 2018, and majority of the community [about 90% - check efficiency stats for legendary insights] still hasn't killed VG, [1st boss, of W1, there're 6 wings now, in span of 3 years]

Even their forums are trash, it's so insanely stupid that in order to be "heard and ignored"you actually have to write on gw2 reddit section, god forbid that you do it on their official site, for the automods/mods themselves 'll delete the post for w/e reason comes to their mind.
Thus freedom of speech is not existant there.

I'm a raidrat - it's the content that i enjoy, been that in WoW, it's been here as well.
The lack of content for veteran players is disgusting.

Combat itself is great, open world is beautiful to explore, mounts are a great addition to the game,
However, every single thing that they've ever made, they usually gave up on it.
I strongly believe raids were supposed to be the "Heart of thorns"thing, and then be left with, however people took liking to it way too much, at least the vocal one.
So now we're left disatisfied with severe lack of content.

- All in all, lack of content here, game's addictive, it's repetative, however, there just aint point playing the game in which almost nothing changes.

[Tavin]

Been thinking about coming back, but I've heard that it's a long progression farm/grind to get ready for raids (proper raiding guild etc). Not sure how true that is after reading this thread though.

[8bithamster]

because of the b/s "LOL YOU MISSED STORY SO SCREW YOU" system, the horrible dungeons due to a lack of trinity. And the holier-than-thou playerbase who loves to shout that nothing is as good as Microtransaction Heave.. erm I mean Guild Wars 2

[criminon]

I have two legendaries in the game. Before the 1st expansion came out I was doing fractal scale 50 with my eyes closed. I originally quit because I just found myself spending money on gems just to do RNG shit like the candy corn shit to get the special aura glows. I never really PLAYED the game anymore. They never released new dungeons and a lot of the shit that I originally liked about it was never touched up on. What I originally expected to get and what I had sank time into quickly became something else entirely and nothing they have released so far has changed my mind about it.

I had A LOT of fun with this game at first but it quickly changed (or rather stayed the same for too long without providing the content that originally hooked me)

[Phasetwist]

AS soon as im bored with wow, ill start playing gw2 again