Sorry it took so long to respond to this.
I wanted to collect my thoughts instead of replying right away.
You might have had a different time in other games, but I still have days where I remember the troubles I had trying to play my specific setup of my Paladin in WoW. In that game, I wanted to play a certain style, a certain way, but the top tier content (raiding) would not allow me to be that way. I always pushed for it; even when it wasn't viable. All of the guilds I had been in (including the one where I had a lot of IRL friends) really discouraged me from playing that way, saying "it's not optimal" "it's not viable" and so forth. This lead me to play the game in the way I didn't want to, but I wanted to still raid, so it had to be done.
So when GW2 started to get into that, especially with DnT (a notable hardcore MMO guild in other games) fine-tuning the raid for ArenaNet in the beginning, I thought the same things were going to emerge here. I would be forced into playing something I didn't like, to change up the way I had enjoyed playing or worse, entirely be left out because I didn't "prepare for the raid" enough by having a specific stat set of gear, or what-have-you.
That type of drama, even though it didn't affect me personally, affected me by bringing back those thoughts and feelings from long ago. I had an aversion to the idea of even logging into the game if it was going to devolve into pigeonholing-nightmare-schedule-pocalypse.
I absolutely hate discussions of "meta" this and "meta" that. Nothing makes me more turned off than trying to figure out the max numbers of a specific build or what extra % I can get out of this ability. All of that stuff drives me nuts, and raiding naturally drives conversation toward that.
Yeah, that really sucks. I ended up in a similar situation in Monster Hunter, although it was more my fault. Basically, with Tri and 3U, when my friends and I played together we always played what weapon set we want, tuning our playstyles for the monster and for a bit of synergy with each other. But because you're fighting the same monsters anyway, we didn't care about being suboptimal. Monster Hunter is first, a very hard game to be absolutely optimal in, and second, a game where no one expects you to be close to optimal, just viable. GW2 blindsided me a bit when the dungeon meta became Berserker, and so many people jumped on it because, from my point of view, they mostly disliked dungeons for both their trash mobs and general length of encounters. People wanted to get in and get out quickly instead of savoring the combat in double the time. I will admit, it did also look like they were going at a frequency much higher than any person plays Monster Hunter, and the overall game of GW2 is easier than Monster Hunter.
Things changed for me when 4U came out. Basically, my friends ended up having more time to play than me, but their schedules aligned and mine didn't. So they played more with me, always played together, and from there they began to optimize at a higher level than before. They sped through the ranks. They spent their off time specifically farming certain monsters to get a new armor set ready. It could just be that they were directly using the experience from the previous games, but the end result was that when I did play with them, I felt mostly superfluous. They were inching more towards optimal, although it didn't seem that they could see it. And me being essentially underleveled meant that I wasn't having much fun seeing them complete a quest together I wouldn't be able to even take for a while longer, and then show up trying to speed me through a bunch of quests just so I could be on their level, but then I'd still have the weapon/armor grind to go through to actually get to that raw stat level that they wouldn't stick around for. And they already had more time to grind than me, so the only way I'd catch up is if I looked up upgrade trees and specifically grinded for only one weapon and armor set and funneled everything into one direction.
So I said fuck it. I played at my own leisure. I played with strangers. I collected every single weapon set I could and took my time doing it. And I started saying no to them alternatingly carrying me through fights before throwing me in over my head on one of their much harder quests, and trying to force me to catch up. I eventually lost interest in the game because even the single player started getting on my nerves on a level that Tri never did, and not being able to harmoniously play with my friends still left a hole in my heart that was almost as bad having negative experiences with them. But if another game comes out and a similar situation develops then I won't hesitate to cut and run even sooner. I have the time I have, and I'll play the game I way I want to play. If I really value getting something done, then I'll alter myself if even temporarily so that it can get done.
But, GW2 is a lot like Monster Hunter in ways. There are many paths to being viable. And I'm not about to replace my gear with toughness just because the stat isn't valued in one out of three modes of the game. That said, if I do finish a build with low toughness on a class soon then I'll join in on the newbie raid tomorrow night. I'd bring my Reaper to tank otherwise, but people probably don't want to see me approaching 3K total Armor.
