It's a long post and all of this is just my opinion.
Short list of the good stuff for me, I don't really need to go into too much details for that since that's not what people will scream at me about anyways:
Story is nice, the final battle in End of Dragons was one of the best fight I've seen in any game ever, achievements, collections, crafting and unlocks are great, but that's about where it stops for me in terms of good things to say about the game.
So... the bad stuff for me...
1) Bugs. Lots of them, every time I looked online regarding a bug, it was the same thing every time, months or years old bug that never got fixed and never will. Were talking story instance breaking bugs that requires going back to the character screen to reset the instance. Happened at least every other story instance and it ruined many of the achievements I was trying to get.
Honestly? I can cope with this bullet point, the game is huge, and I don't know how much finance or staff they have for this game.
2) Content bloat. Too many metas. So many of them are now irrelevant and barely done anymore. Dungeons, Fractals and such have less groups running them too. In short, the player base is spread too thin. It makes completing those collections, achievements and such much harder than it should be, especially when some metas aren't as attractive as others (Looking at you Dragon's End).
It just feels like there is a lack of focus when it comes to group activities because of how it is mandatory for so much of it to have a large group of players to complete.
I think one of my more favorite content was Forging Steel, because it was like doing a zone Meta event but that could be done by yourself if there was no one else doing it.
3) Numbers. Now, this is gonna be contentious, but... I will never understand the purist mentality of not showing enemy health numbers or having things like DPS meters. I've heard all the arguments against it but I simply can't accept any of those as reasonable (Toxicity, realism, immersion and other arguments). Having no point of reference on how impactful your abilities are outside of a health bars that all looks the same regardless of which enemy you attack, having no way to tell whether or not you improved because of the lack of feedback, that's just bad to me and I don't see why someone's immersion means we can't have more options on how we want to enjoy the game.
Another small annoyance for me with numbers is the cumulative number you get when you hit with an ability, you can't tell how hard your ability hit without looking at your combat log because the value just keep stacking. It's mostly just for the first ability of a weapon since it has no CD, but it is annoying nonetheless.
And I know a third party parser exists for GW2, but it's not officially endorsed by ANet, even if they tolerate it, and that's really the issue I have... They want their game a very specific way, even at the cost of limiting how many players can enjoy their game. Sure, plenty of people like the minimalist, immersive UI, but some of us do not and want more practicality and information on our UI.
4) Strafing. It shouldn't be slower than going forward. Yes, I know you can't move sideways that fast in real life, I get that, but you also can't ride a dragon in real life, so that argument makes no sense. Gameplay wise, strafing being slower just feels bad to me, a punishment for wanting to be more efficient. It's especially bad in PvP. It just goes back to #3 again. I don't find the arguments against this reasonable. Because in the end, you can just point at dodge rolling and ask the question: Why is dodge rolling distance and animation speed not different depending on the direction of the roll?
5) Skyscale. Yeah, it annoys me so much that it deserves it's own bullet point. Surprisingly, I'm not going to complain about the time investment to unlock the mount, I think it's fine, I enjoyed the unlocking process, what I'm going to complain about is how bad the mount itself is. It constantly cling to every little bit of collision, there are invisible walls everywhere, even in newer maps, which makes it annoying to travel around and, most importantly... The mount is just slow. I'm sorry but it just is. I can legitimately run as fast on foot with certain classes, the barrel roll dash being the only thing making it faster. Let me put it bluntly here, all these restrictions in terms of movement for the sake of keeping other mounts or certain area relevant is just bad game design, period. Going fast is fun, it really is just that simple.
6) PvP. I find it bad, sue me. I'd have to write a novel about why, so I'll just TL;DR it to these two points: Every abilities do too many things at the same time and too many immunities (blocking, evading, reflect, etc.). I don't find it fun when I can't figure out which part of an ability killed me, the damage, the poison, the stun or the unblockable part. Nor can I have fun when my abilities don't do what they are supposed to do because they get completely denied. As far as I'm concerned, I hate dodge rolls as a mechanic in PvP, I love them in PvE.
But that's just me.
All in all, I think overall I can sum my feelings about the game to this:
The game just feel too restrictive for the sake of being restrictive.
I would argue that this is just a failure on making those other mounts relevant in their own aspect. I'll take the Jackal as a good example of proper design. It uniquely allows for fast transportation with the sand portals (If only there was more portals like that just to traverse terrain, skip mountains or reach closed off sections). Add more breakable walls for the roller beetle, or give it another interactable in the world to make it go in hyper speed to go from point A to point B, like going from the Grand Piazza to Fort Marriner, or vice versa, in Lion's Arch for example. We could use a lot more masteries for those mounts. Make the raptor tail swipe twice the area so we can use it for combat to group up more enemies. Add super jump pads for the springer so that you can leap 300 meters into the air like a bouncing mushroom on crack. There's really no reason to not just go crazy on any of these.
