Guild Wars 2 was supposed to be different.
In my view, they've screwed up in a few ways:
- Gear treadmill: Added a new best level of gear about two months after release. At first it was three slots (out of a possible 13 armor slots) available in a dungeon, but it wasn't just another dungeon. The dungeon was gated not solely by skill like other dungeons, but by a stat not useful for anything but that dungeon (Agony Resistance). Remind you of World of Warcraft resistance fights?. The other new gear slots aren't so bad (uses a daily currency) but it's rather sad compared to the initial state of the game, where best-in-slot equipment was a lot easier to obtain. What was wrong with introducing the new dungeon
- sPvP: Mediocre at best. It's nice that you can make a character with all skills/equipment unlocked (an improvement over GW1!) and go PvP right away, but that's about the only improvement. No other aspect of sPvP is near GW1 levels of quality. Has taken an obvious backseat to PvE, even though Arenanet has expressed esport aspirations.
- "Play How You Want": Yes, to a certain extent, you can't play how you want and be as effective as everyone else in any game, but there is a huge disparity between damage over time vs direct damage specs. If two players in a party have the same condition (damage over time) spec then that party is a lot more gimped because of the way conditions of the same type are capped at 25. Two direct-damage players do not suffer in the same way. It's definitely a little better than the way everyone "Build Wars"ed PvE encounters in GW1.
The last two can be fixed. The first can't be since they've already committed to the gear treadmill.
They fix the first issue by making Asceded gear a lot easier to get or normalizing the stats outside of fractals. I feel they can still step back from how far they've gone with it. Even though I've spend laurels and used 10 gold to craft Ascended peices, I would have o hard feelings if they 'fixed' the Ascended gear issue through normalization or easier access. I would just be happy for the improvement it would mean for the game in the long run.
I think they are working on a fix to the condition cap. They could actually do some cool things with that situation. Someone suggested that hitting cap would create a secondary effect. Though I don't know how that helps with conditions that only increase in length.