I’ve played a fair bit of Guild Wars 2 in the last weeks, my Norn Warrior is Level 47 and my Asura Necromancer is Level 17.
It’s not the best game ever, but I’m really enjoying it – the crafting is nice. It’s possible to craft stuff for your character while levelling, with the materials you gathered. OK, I needed to invest some money to buy cloth, because I did not have enough at all for Armorsmithing. Had plenty of metal though, that was a bit weird. But I’m wearing stuff I crafted – that’s nice.
Map completion is awesome. People sometimes say you shouldn’t use the Renown Hearts as Quests but do as you please… but if I’m running around, doing events, doing hearts, grabbing Vistas and PoIs… I complete the maps I play on. Then there’s world bosses and unlike in WoW where only at the start of the tier the max-level chars form a raid to down that enemy… people of all levels gather every 30mins and down that enemy. And they all get level-appropriate gear! Actually the automatic downscaling is the killer feature here – max-level chars, mid-level chars, and level-appropriate chars all working together on that world boss. Awesome!
Then there’s small QoL things that are better than WoW: you can revive escort NPCs if they die (and the event doesn’t automatically fail) and they usually don’t pull 400 mobs while walking, everyone can tag along even after it started (escort events, and events in general).
I also like the personal story bits every 10 levels. It’s not too much and you especially don’t have to rush there the moment you hit 10, 20, 30, … because this also scales down. But the rewards are kind of fixed level I think, so you should do them in time, but at least you can finish what you started.
So far I didn’t feel pressured into buying anything, after ~50h of play time, I think that’s pretty good. Sure, I could use some gold, or bigger bags, or whatever – but apparently you can easily get to max level without having to buy anything after the initial box – this is very nice. They’ll absolutely get my money for the expansion unless I’ll totally lose the fun in the game over the summer.
There’s probably a dozen things I forgot now, but so far I’m very, very happy.