The problem is, the entire HoT experience is behind group content. In base GW2, as a casual you had open world for solo stuff. You could do map completion, quests, even some events in Orr, all of which went towards a progression for your character, like getting a legendary weapon. You could accept, as a solo/casual player, that the group content was in fractals/dungeons, but you could still work towards the same goals/items/etc, just in a different manner (eg. open world stuff).
Now comes along HoT. fractals and dungeons no longer are enough for the group oriented folks, they need to now take over open world. As a solo/casual person, what progress is there now? First off, open world is not solo able, more or less. Some aspects, but not all. Even if you get ‘help’ with some open world group content, what progress was made? You cannot even work towards a legendary anymore, as they gated it behind fractals/group quests (talking about pre cursor crafting) which are account bound. Even map completion is completely useless as a casual/solo person now.
Bash me if you want, I no longer care. All I know is, that I log in, and there is nothing for me to work towards. There are some days where I cannot spend 2+ hours on a meta event. I just want to kill stuff and have fun. I just do not understand the design decision to move group content fully into open world. Isnt that what fractals/dungeons were for? Or more importantly, why they took away player options. It use to be, that we had many different options to obtain the same goal: you could farm in open world to get materials for legendary, you could run dungeons/fractals for gear/money/material for same legendary. You could buy the bloody thing off the TP. Now its all gated/account bound, group content protected.
And why does everyone think that harder=group content? My hacking away solo at a well designed mob takes no less skill than being in a group of 5-20+ people, using the same skills/rotation (probably less so, as people can ‘hide’ and get lazy in groups and just use ‘1’ all the time). This game went for the time>skill in HoT..
Thats why all your hard core basement dwellers are coming out bashing the casual folks now.. they are in heaven, as their egos are stroked that the time they put into the game is being rewarded and others are being punished for not putting in the same time. They can walk around with new shinys that casual folks cannot hope to get and brag how great they are…