I find WoW boring, conversely, and gave it a plenty fair shake of five years. Since WoW's first year endgame content was Ashbringer, I find most of the arguments against GW2 for lack of gear and lack of endgame pretty absurd. At a month in, you have not finished the game. You are probably not experienced enough to even give dungeons a competent attempt. I'm sure you can decide at the one month mark whether a game is for you or not, so that's fair- but let's be honest about how much of it you breezed through.
At a month in my thief was 80 in full exotic-tier gear - leather I crafted myself, weapons I got from dungeon tokens and a mystic forge recipe (shortbow) - for Berzerker set and Carrion (I think? The bleed damage stat, whatever that one is) set for when I briefly tried a bleed-emphasis build that I switched off of when it proved inferior to straight up critstab for any kind of group play (since bleed stacks have a cap).
This was before the new content patches even started so Ascended wasn't even a blip on the horizon at the time. And now that it is? Ascended gear, for the most part, is a marginal upgrade over exotic that requires inane amounts of grind to get, far more time than it's worth for such little effective gain. Legendaries at least have some use now with the free stat-switching ability they get, but that's an even crazier grind for, again, hardly any material benefit - a benefit which, to be frank, isn't even necessary given the game doesn't even require full exotics to do everything in it. It's basically a tiny leg up in pvp, which, if you don't care about pvp, doesn't mean much.
Part of the problem is the level scaling zones. This mechanic has upsides: makes it easier to bring friends into the game, helps keep things from feeling trivial when you want to go back in time (though let's be honest, if you're in exotics+ and go anywhere sub-50 it's going to be pretty hard to die regardless, harder if you're a heavy class), means you can effectively "grind" anywhere if that's your thing, that's all well and good. On the other hand, it makes it harder to just quickly farm up materials or just walk through a zone when you can't completely ignore everything in it, things you've been killing for months and, frankly, are sick to death of fighting altogether. The latter's a problem exacerbated by finding pretty much the same enemies
everywhere.
On a personal note: fuck vistas. Seriously. Exploration is generally one of the things I enjoy most in these vast world MMORPGs, it's one of the things I
look for in a game like this. I still don't have 100% map completion because I just cannot scrounge up enough motivation to hunt down all these "stand on this one key spot you have to find a secret path to reach even though it looks like you should be able to climb up to it these three other ways that are blocked by funky geometry/invisible walls/bullshit" points required to count as having "explored" the map. And don't even get me started on jumping puzzles in a game very much not built for refined platforming control. Also, how many of the group events and other triggered deals are
still broken after the game's been open for how long now? Maybe slow down the new content patches to fix some things that haven't worked consistently since release first? Just a thought.
Don't get me wrong, WoW has its issues, too. (Keep in mind that present tense "has" is actually talking about WoW as of several years ago, as I quit for good only a couple months into Cataclysm.) Endgame in pretty much any MMO tends to be a grindfest with WoW being no exception, but at least it made its grinds feel
achievable in a sane amount of time, for one, and for two they had some kind of tangible payoff. "Your sword looks glowier now" does not justify months of material gathering. It just doesn't. And that's all legendaries were in GW2 until very recent changes. Legendaries in WoW were practically game-changing items for the amount of impact they had, and took considerably less time and effort to acquire. Still a lot - several raids, questlines, etc. - but less than GW2 legendaries and far less mind-numbingly repetitive in nature.
Zone diversity was also a boon for alt creation. GW2's leveling system is very smooth, very clean and, overall, I think it's probably the best thing in the entire game. The way partying while leveling is essentially a built-in background feature of the system, everyone seamlessly moving in and out of each others' paths of progression just by being in proximity, it's pretty great as a concept and, in execution, they even managed to pull it off pretty well. As well as could be expected at the very least; there's only so much they could do about the problem of balancing events anticipating that kind of global cooperative effort once the first big wave of leveling is over and far fewer people exist in lower-level zones, making some group events that were unpopular become essentially impossible to complete for people who wanted to try them. That's not really a game issue, that's a playerbase issue and it's guaranteed to exist in some form in any and every MMO - it can't be prevented, only mitigated. Overall I'd give it an A-.
...on my first character.
My second, though? Well...here's the thing. On my first character, because of how
fast you can burn through all the "quests" in an area and start wanting to move into the next, it's very easy to end up outleveling all your local options in short order. This presents you with a couple of options: go crafting to level up to the next "tier" of content so you can get back to quest-farming, grind enemies and repeat dynamic events in the areas you can survive to level up the direct (read as: hard) way, or just go to some other race's starting zones and burn through their quest hubs, too. This meant that by the time my thief was done leveling I'd already gone through the content of pretty much all the zones available (exceptions: Sparkfly Fen, Caledon Forest, Frostgorge Sound, Blazeridge Steppes, and about half of Mount Maelstrom), so when I tried making an alt the already repetitive gameplay was exaggerated: I had almost no options for doing content I hadn't already done (several times, in some cases) to level a new character to cap.
Making new characters was pretty much what kept me going in WoW as long as I did. If I'd just stayed on my first Warlock and never found another class/race combo that appealed to me for grinding up, I doubt I'd have even made it into LK. Instead, when I grew tired of my raid-geared face-melting 0/21/40 warlock (ah, the good old days of shadownuke), I rolled up a few others until I found one that stuck: Belf Rogue. The Blood Elf starting zone, despite being heavily undead-themed, felt surprisingly different from the Forsaken starting zone (less emphasis on torturing/destroying humans, for one), left things pretty open-ended on where to go after around 20, and there were enough zone options around the map that I could go to places I hadn't already done to death on previous playthroughs. This was more of a problem after getting into BC/LK content where, again, your options for regrind are pretty narrow, which is when Cata came along and mixed everything up so much that I had fun leveling a brand new paladin from 0 to cap in a few weeks of bunny justice (...it's a long story). The classes all played through the content very differently, the content itself I chose to go through was varied (until the expansions x.x), there were new things to DO.
GW2...it's just a samey, repetitive mess after a while. It's so
static. The "content updates" don't really update anything so much as paste new distractions into the middle of the same ol' same ol'. The classes do theoretically play very differently from one another, but I can't find it in me to care, especially when I have to keep listening to the same battle cries
constantly with the same voices reminding me of how my character just has no soul (since every character of a given race has the same "attitude"). "I could outrun a centaur!" "Eat my dust!" "I could outrun a centaur!" "Urge to kill rising!" "Time to do some real damage!" "I could outrun a centaur!" "I feel strong!" "I could ou-" SHUT. UP. (I'm sure there's an option to turn off those messages, but that doesn't exactly help with the whole "faceless everyperson" aspect either.)
The lore? It never really grabbed me. I liked the voiced main quest interactions, those were mostly done pretty well. It was all set up to be handled well. It just...never seemed like it could decide how seriously it was taking itself, I guess.
Yes, I'm looking at you, Tybalt.
It was hard to get any sense of gravitas from the game's storyline when it rarely felt like anything dramatic was really happening, or when your actions didn't really change the outcome. You get this big dangerous set piece of an invasion and oh my god the horror and bad shit going down and...then fight some zombies. The same ones you've been clearing in droves for days. BUT THIS TIME IT'S SERIOUS! OH THOSE ARE SOME BAD ZOMBIES. That you just killed. Five at a time. Like it was nothing. Hunh.
Oh well, everyone dies anyway. What? Why was I even here if I have no impact on the outcome of events? This is without even getting into how storyline quests could be broken to the point of impossibility to complete. I just never managed to stay immersed in the game long enough for its lore to feel like it had any importance. It just didn't gel with the gameplay.
I did, however, find it
hilarious that the game
spoils itself if you take too long to do story missions. How, you ask? Well, if you don't go do the dungeon storyline missions as they come up, if you instead just keep leveling and doing your personal thing, you'll keep getting mail from NPCs about the progressively higher level dungeon story missions as you level up to their range. NPC letters which will completely spoil whatever happened in the previous dungeon, usually by reminding you of your role in them.
Remember how Character W betrayed us at the end of Dungeon Y? (Uh, no, I didn't do--) And how you helped us escape their trap? (But I didn't--) Well we've found out Character W is joining forces with Character X in Dungeon Z! Come help us out again! (...Character X? You mean the one giving me this quest? Oh. Well, I guess it's good to know I'm secretly working for a bad guy. Thanks. I look forward to their completely surprising ambush in the next quest or two.)
GW2 is just kind of a mess. I think of it mainly as a great game design lesson. There are some excellent mechanics in it that other games (WoW included) could stand to learn from, mainly the grouping/event things and some of the other dynamically generated stuff, crafting acceleration (dear lord I wish LotRO made you craft things faster if you're smelting 200 bars at a time, PLEASE TURBINE, PLEASE), some other gameplay elements like those. But as a game to actually play? Not so good. Fun for a first playthrough, depending on how determined you are to get to the end (because Orr can fuck right off, honestly), but after that, eh. C+/B- material overall, maybe.
Edit: ...holy hell that got long. ._.;
