Guild Wars 2, much like Guild Wars 1, is based upon this idea of cosmetic rather than statistical progression. You aren’t tied to some loot treadmill to keep your character competitive. Which is great!
There is a slightly significant time investment in getting full 80 exotics, but I kind of view these as being the same as the superior +hp runes in GW1. I’m sitting at 30 HoM with my primary character in fully black dyed elite Kurzick gear, yet I’ve never bothered getting a superior rune of vigor because while it does offer a statistical advantage, the difference is completely negligible. 78 exotics and 80 exotics in GW2 are pretty much the same. Not really necessary in the slightest, and the 78s are dirt cheap. So if 80 oranges are going to be a little bit pricey, then yeah, sure, whatever. I have the cash for 80 exotics but I’m fine with my 78s. If I ever feel like it, maybe I’ll upgrade.
The problem I have here is not in the statistics, but the aesthetics. In Guild Wars 1, elite armor skins didn’t really require anything but money. You could get money in a variety of ways. The harder content in the game tended to be one of the quickest routes towards getting that money, but it wasn’t the only way. I could just do my dailies/weeklys to get cash. I could take a new character through the campaigns. I could do pretty much whatever, and while it wouldn’t be as fast, it would still be decent progress.
In Guild Wars 2, this isn’t at all the case. There is only one, single way to get your neat armor sets. And that is to do explorable mode dungeons, which have the excplicit design goal of being impossible for the vast majority of your players to complete. They’re for a small percentage of elite, hardcore players. Which means that the majority of the playerbase is locked out of this “cosmetic progression” that the game absolutely hinges upon.
So where does that leave everyone else, exactly? I’d like to continue playing the game to get some nice armor/weapon skins, just as I spent years doing in GW1, but I’m afraid I fall into that majority category who are not going to be doing hardcore dungeons. I really don’t have any options at all to make my character look the way I want. The closest thing out there is the expensive T3 cultural armor, but one single armor set that I don’t like the look of is unfortunately not anywhere near enough. I think the GW1 model of having elite dungeons be a more efficient path, but not the only path, was the way to go. Now I really just have nothing to do in the game other than PvP, which is fine every now and then but like many players I’m not super into the whole PvP thing. So what are we supposed to be doing without anything to work towards?