Wow, there’s really a lot to these posts and there’s plenty of points I agree and disagree with. Thanks for posting, this is really thorough and good.
As it’s mostly fun to complain, I’ll only mention that I’ve been playing since launch and I’ve felt my hard earned gold (or cash) feel more drained by the Gemstore as the updates have gone on, and so for the better part of a year now. I blame the gemstore and Anet/NCsoft’s increasing obsession with it for the lack of new dungeon armor and the dungeons to go with them. I feel bad when I’m asked to fork over 350 gems for hairstyles and faces that look (subjectively, I’ll admit, but they’re also objectively better-crafted) better than what I can get by creating a new character. It makes me go ‘If I want to look the way I want to, I will have /always/ have to rely on the cash shop, because my core character’s features depend on it.’, and that feels wrong. The hairstyles and faces should be available from character creation to all; I feel like I and at least a dozen other players find that paying for the convenience and the utility rather than the content is easier to swallow. Now I know NCSoft/Anet /is/ a business, but there are fair businesses, and greedy ones, it seems Anet/NCSoft gets away with the latter a little more each time under the pretense that GW2 is b2p.
I personally think your leveling experience felt bad because you actively gated yourself into playing what the majority thinks is efficient, when there are in-house builds you can make and have fun with. Of course, I go with the efficiency over fun most of the time, but they’re really not mutually exclusive. Necromancer is also a very dreadful class in PvE, I’ve rolled a couple and found no interest in the gameplay, no punch in the skills, not to mention necros have been plagued with bugs and erroneous tooltips as well as silly trait mechanics for as long as I can remember. It might have changed though, I don’t know.
You have my full support as well in terms of the dynamic events not being dynamic, though I can excuse that one because the current system has grown on me and is reliable. Still, proper dynamic events being added to the world, outside of Living Story ones (because those are still just randomly activated events contained within the same exact circle. The way I imagine a dynamic world event would be: A dragon flies overhead in Diessa Plateau, landing somewhere in the north east. Shatterer-like world event. You wouldn’t have to worry about people having trouble finding it because the information of such events would spread like wild fire due to how different they are from the rest of the world. True randomness is hard to do, and I imagine the good devs at Anet already thought of something like that and decided against it, but I’d like to see them reconsider. I remember the Beta Weekend Events where people got corrupted, or with the large scale battle royale event. That’s the kind of spark I miss from the game. It’s still there, but it’s being downplayed, and it’s hurting my enjoyment of the game to an extent. I still love it, like Eirdyne said, but I can’t help but be bothered by some of the financial and design-direction choices.
Great post, once again. Valid concerns too!