One of the greatest feelings in an MMO is working your way through a difficult dungeon and then having a giant treasure chest filled with various trinkets waiting at the end.
I get that ANet has to make bank somewhere but I find that the lack of worthwhile rewards from actually playing the game is starting to hurt the experience. The current paradigm is that you grind gold and then you use that gold to purchase gems and finally you spend those gems on cash shop items.
Am I the only one who finds this model lacking? Even the creation of legendaries is just a matter of grinding out gold. Where is the adventure in this?