There’s something I noticed when did my first GW2 dungeon, and I cannot be certain if it was unique to that dungeon (and no I cannot remember its name) or that this is the situation with all dungeons in the game… But, the dungeon was a mixture of killing mobs, killing bosses AND solving a few puzzles in between it.
The person who stepped in when I said I was new to the dungeon was explaining all the time, and when I said how different it was compared to WoW dungeons I discovered he/she was an ex-WoW player.
What was highly different there was the fact that the dungeon felt like it was its own zone, had a connection to the personal and zone story, and never felt like you had to do it really quickly because people were in a rush. The speed of how quickly we did it (it was a longish dungeon) came from how each of the players was able to make their own impact in the dungeon.
It was “you go into the left corridor and clear, you go right, we do this room and you clear the corridor up ahead.” (that was when I said I was new at the time). I was able to clear the mobs in my way, using my game play style, and at the speed I was capable of. The “boss” was untargetable until we’d cleared the adds… As I said before, I don’t know if this was specific to the dungeon I was in, and nope, I didn’t make it easy for myself either by entering it on the “hard mode” as I discovered I had done when I got the “epic weapon reward.”
There was something intuitive about HOW they did the dungeon, and taught me to do it, that I brought back with me to this game, and which has made me more capable of handling tougher mobs. Nope, I don’t do raids or M+ so I’m probably squishy compared to those who DO this type of content. The toughness comes in from having more patience around other players now because of the experience… Maybe that’s what players need to play in WoW a bit more…
Oh and if you hate the puzzles of WoW, you’ll hate them even more in GW2 where they’re a STAPLE and where, at times, you can see hundreds of players all working on solving it, copying one another, telling in chat what way to do it, cooperating, especially when they’re part of what we would call a “daily” or “world quest.” Maybe the way to solve how this game is perceived is by teaching us again, like in vanilla, that certain things take a few ounces of patience to do…