What amazes me about GW2 is the amount of stuff to learn and do. When you make a character, all that stuff you choose affects your personal storyline. There are 5 races to choose, each with different stories. I think there are 9 permutations of backstory you can choose, times the 5 races, making 45 different stories you'll see. It may only affect the cutscenes/dialog, but for RPG fans, this is just awesome! It took me two BWE's to beat the personal storyline, which was disappointing, but a lot of areas and races were missing in the beta, so the story may have been cut short.

Next are the classes themselves. Each class has different weapons, opening up different skills. Then there is the Trait system, which is similar to WoW's Talent Tree system. This allows even more cool builds; while most of the traits are just number multipliers (ie +20% burning durations), I've seen some interesting traits you can select, such as moveable Ranger spirits or elementalist attunement switching causes AOE effects. There are also a bunch of utility skills you can choose. While Guild Wars 1 had a much more strategic build system (each profession has 150 skills to choose, and you can have a secondary profession), since it played more like a Magic the Gathering card game, GW2's build system is definitely no slouch.
I personally didn't like WoW's build system, since it was too obvious; each class' role is predefined; you only really have to choose between pure PvP, PvE soloing or PvE party. In GW2, you have all sorts of cool builds you can do; support, healing, damage, aoe, crowd control, running and so on. For example, I have a build which boosts my movement speed at the cost of other skills. This is great for simply traveling around or collecting resources, but it sucks for doing events/hearts. When I'm in a party, I veer to be more supportive with healing etc. Depends on what professions are in my party, too. It's just so cool being able to do everything, but you have to make a choice and be strategic about it. I remember in WoW, you were basically screwed without a tank or a healer, and there was no way around it. That problem simply does not exist in GW2.

GW2 isn't without its faults, though. I hope they add a build-swapping system; it's a pain swapping different skills etc.
The auction house downtime really sucks. I'm packing my mules to the brim here!
GW2 starts to feel like a grind. I feel like the hearts, and dynamic events don't matter; I will rush through some, especially the boring city ones with no combat. I hope there are longer dynamic event chains in later areas, and maybe a more enticing server-wide impact. What I really enjoyed in GW1 was the linear, epic story - it made it feel less of a grind. I hope GW2 still has that kind of thing; the personal story kind of sucks. I guess Anet can't have too many people not doing the dynamic stuff.

This comment was edited on Aug 29, 2012, 02:54.