Eh, I'll list the things I'm looking for then. To summarize it:
So there was this game I played once, the name escapes me, but it really bugged me how whenever a big "raid boss" would appear everything just turned into a cluster of everyone doing things themselves. The same for dungeons.
If WoW and games like it had the "Holy Trinity", Guild Wars took that to the next level. End-game PvE content meant not setting up your build, but setting up a build to work well with the builds of everyone else on your team. Will this guy trade another damage skill so he can take a hard res, in case this guy goes down? Does one of the BP Rangers need to bring trap skills? Is one guy going to have to kite half of the mobs to the other side of the map so the rest of the team can take down the others?
PvP takes it up to the next level. GvG especially would mean every team is highly coordinated. If you ever look at the actual gameplay footage, there isn't a single moment that goes by where anyone isn't firing off their skills and releasing massive damage, and yet almost nobody ever goes down - and when someone does, it's a massive hit, because everything ties together. You have to coordinate not just on the field, but beforehand.
In contrast, that other game had huge sieges with dozens of people, but absolutely no coordination other than "AoE people throw shit here because there's lots of people" and that sort of crap. No teamwork at all - just everyone firing their best shit off at the other guys and hoping it would do something. A complete mess of effects on screen.
A lot of games love having massive level caps that take forever to reach. The game content barely changes at all - just more reskins of the same shit. Monsters use the same mechanics at Level 5 as they do Level 90.
Guild Wars caps low at Level 20, and you can power-level that high in a day with someone high-level to run you to the high-end content and go at it. Once you reach Level 20, though, the ride isn't over yet. Nearly the entire game is "end game" content - hard mode, shit like the Underworld/Fissure of Woe, etc. Monsters in the end game areas have more skills than those you met lower level, and the hard mode variants of the absolute end game content have monsters with full skill bars and secondary professions just like you do - and often, with higher levels and greater numbers!
You acquired skill points in Guild Wars by leveling up, or by passing the level up XP bar after you hit the level. The best way to get XP was to use the Signet of Capture on elite skills. To get elite skills, you had to find the monster that had it, kill it, and use your Signet to take its skill (which, if you were brave enough, could lead to hilarious situations like a guy carting around five elite skills at once by the end of an extreme farming run, because that shit wouldn't reset until you returned to an outpost).
More than that, completing quests would also net you skill points. Meaning that just by playing the PvE content, you were constantly acquiring more skills and powers, and more than enough gold to spend on that.
As for gear? You can outfit yourself in end-game armor, weapons, runes, and insignia just with the shit you set aside by selling stuff and salvaging across the game. As a result, there is only one reason to grind: vanity gear. Vanity gear looks nice. Vanity gear shows that you're playing the game. Vanity gear is mechanically identical to regular gear, and in the case of unique weapons, you're technically better off using a Gold Weapon with a (req13) performance if your attributes are high enough.
It's all cosmetics or unlockable shit, the latter of which is completely pointless if you don't know what you're doing, and is only there so players who bought the PvP only pack can get shit the PvE players unlocked for their account just by going from 1 to 20. The only thing you could really argue against was "character slots", though the only reason I every knew of a player doing that was to increase storage space. I knew a guy who literally bought a slot just to have a spare character for all of his bones.
There's no such thing as Guild Wars 2 user.
Guild Wars does have a hot bar, but you bring eight skills, one of which can be an elite skill. The skills are selected from your primary profession list and secondary profession list, and you can change secondary professions whenever you're in an outpost.
Though technically, if you have a full team of heroes, you might find yourself managing four different people with their own skill bars all at the same time. Or eight, as it is now.
