I think there are many valid criticisms of GW2. Criticisms that amount to "I like the old way better" don't seem to deserve a response beyond "Kiss Some More WoWBum You cartoon humper."
The real criticisms of GW2 PvE:
1. Most of the Living Story in the first "season" was a mile wide and an inch deep. The changes were very shallow and mostly temporary. The story was weak and inconsistent as befits something very rushed. The rewards were all cosmetic and in no real way enhanced your character for playing the game.
Response: Delivering that much content is going to result in thin spots and at least you felt like there was something to see every two weeks if you left the game on your hard drive. There were some really pretty great individual updates even if many were stinkers. Making permanent changes to the world is much harder to do and would have taken too long. Cosmetic rewards allow for the preservation of the no gear treadmill design decision as well as allow us to sell lots of gems and keep the game financially afloat.
2. Dungeons suck. They are easy to game with specific strategies and those problems don't get fixed. The fights are almost all DPS races of the "this one we stack" or "this one we range" variety. Also, dungeons that are not "open" but that you can hunt around on other servers for an open version is a dumb mechanic.
Response: More true for the in the world dungeons than it is true for fractals which were designed and implemented later. Some dungeons have received at least one pass to fix some of the easy methods players have found to go around bosses in them. Rewards have been "adjusted" to make doing a few different ones is more beneficial than running CoF a hundred times in a row. Fractals are actually pretty good with many more interesting fights and strategies. I got no real response to the "dungeon is not open thing." I think that is a dumb mechanic but at least it's really only annoying and not game breaking.
3. Rinse Wash and Repeat: We spend our time doing the same events over and over again. Either Champ Trains or World Events.
Response: Almost every game has been unable to solve the "what do I do now" endgame problem and encouraging players to do the 50 different events in the Boss mob/champ mob cycle is not too bad a variety. Players tend to sort of like doing the big world events with other and it does encourage some degree of socialization.
However it could be made better by making specific loot available for specific world events that are not those big champ train events or world boss events. Make some better loot available on random events out in the world. Reward the zone events that are not the big boss mob events better with nice skins every once in a while and some vanity pets. Create sets of skins for every zone that only drop randomly after events in that zone so that farming events in the zones would be better.
4. Pew Pew Pew One Spec to Rule them All. The only really viable spec is a might based direct damage spec and everything else, all the other specs, are weak compared to this. This is the correct criticism of the combat system and NOT the "there is no trinity wah wah wah."
Response: Combat in GW2 is not some slow ass strategic thing like the games that came before. At its best, it is a very active button mashing type of combat that rewards keyboard dexterity like no other MMO. However, Arenanet seems to have never be able to figure out how to make group interdependence work well in such a speedy environment. Instead what they did was make three systems that made combat more fun but all but eliminated interdependence.
First, dodge avoids all damage. The best healing is to not get hit and each player is encouraged to time their dodges. Unfortunately dodges were made almost independent of the spec system and so you can be a glass cannon and still avoid almost as much damage and have just as much survivability, as someone speced tank or even balance speced. Dodging is certainly a fun mechanic, it's just too powerful and way too independent of the spec system. It's also too individual. Every character has the same dodges basically and no class can make another class dodge more. Combat is happening so fast that there is no "used dodge hit me with the dodge restore!" type interdependence.
Second the downed state/res system. OK so I generally love this mechanic as it does require your group pay attention and it does require group interdependence but it does not require any real specs to res. Everyone pretty much can res at the same sort of effective rate. So, there is no reason to spec into any kind of a res/healer since any pewpew pew glass cannon can res as well and anyone speced healer. They have tried to fix this stuff a little bit by adding some new healing skills and boosting the effective level of survival ger but in my opinion it didn't come close to solving the problems.
Third Random Aggro: I have fought some dungeon bosses 50 times and I still have no idea what the pattern is to their aggro. No sense in specing tank or survival if there is no way to predictably hold aggro or get aggro back. Aggro can bounce... we have all seen aggro dropping and second tank aggroing and top of the dps gets aggro type mechanics but it cannot be so random as to essentially discourage anyone from wearing tank gear.
Solutions should be obvious from this and I do think some sort of "less than holy" trinity would help: 1. Limit the use of dodge per character but give specialized heal characters an ability to grant others more dodges. 2. Decrease all self healing in dungeon and other group situations to only minimal amounts. Increase the power of heal specced characters to heal self and others in group situtions. 3. Decrease the power of everyone to res and give that power mostly to heal specced characters. 4. Derandomize aggro to the extent that tank specced characters can grab aggro (maybe not hold aggro but more grab it for short times). Substantially increase the fragility of DPS characters BUT give healer type characters barrier abilities that they can use to halt damage before it hits - but make those barriers short lived create a damage barrier rotation of sorts.
edit: Oh my god that got too long TL
