Chriswok, apologize for the length on this!
At 80, there's absolutely no direction- that much is 100% inarguable fact. Once you beat the final personal story quest, you've "beaten the game"- and it's up to you to decide what you want to do afterward.
Here's the thing. It sounds a lot like you're looking for a bulleted list of "stuff to do when you log in" and I'm more than happy to provide one of those. What I'm trying to ask you is this: what is it you want to do? Not "which of the available options appeals to you, but "what do you actually want to do"? What do you want there to be that isn't there?
From your post above, I can identify three things you seem to want to do but are averse to doing-
1. WvW (I gathered from your mention of World PVP in WoW), which feels pointless to you
2. Getting unique, visually-appealing gear for your character, which you don't want to do because the methods of acquiring either dungeon tokens or gold don't appeal to you
3. The dynamic and meta events out in the world (I gathered this from your mention of the hype), which you rule out because there aren't enough people out in the world to complete
As far as specific advice with regard to those three concepts:
1. Try to only think of WvW in terms of the fun you have while playing an individual section. If you captured 3 supply camps and a couple control points in a party of 5, or stormed a keep in a zerg, that's awesome. The fact that it might get wiped away overnight has no impact on the fun you had while you were playing. Obviously, if it isn't fun for you at all there's no reason to do it (this will be a running theme so bear with me
).
2. If you legitimately can't identify anything you want to do when you log on, what do you want the visually-appealing gear
for? You'd just be standing there, just as confused at what to do, in nicer-looking clothes!
The true irony is that if you literally don't want to do any of the things you can do in-game to acquire this nice-looking gear, you
don't have to end up doing it anyway. You could just pay money. You could pretend that the four months that have elapsed were actually charging you WoW's $10/month (or whatever it is), buy $40 of gems, convert them to gold and go hog-wild looking up the coolest armor and weapons you could find. True, the dungeon skins would be out of your reach- but I very much like the idea that they are recognizable indicators of mastery in addition to simply looking cool.
3. Two things here, one being that, for all the complaints of the world being empty (and of course, plenty of the time you will find yourself in an empty zone, it's true), within the last week I've done meta and dynamic events in Caledon Forest, Harathi Hinterlands, Fireheart Rise, Kessex Hills, and Sparkfly Fen (this was actually on my run to Operation Tidal Sword
). All with 5 or more people who just happened to be out there too. And those zones are hardly the "most popular" or "typical" zones to find players in. Don't get me wrong, of
course there should be more emphasis on getting players out to more parts of the world more reguarly; but the claims of desolation across the entire map are a bit exaggerated. Second, if you run into an event that you want to do but you can't because you're alone, that's exactly when you call in your guild for help! It's always a lot of fun, you get better everything from partying up, and earn influence together.
So in essence maybe a change in perspective could actually get you some enjoyment out of the things you already do want to do.
But as for a list of "what is there to do when you log on," here goes. Note that I'm completely excluding
goals such as "get an infused, ascended back piece" or "get the Dungeon Master achievement" or "collect all the dyes" or "obtain a legendary," even though goals comprise a large part of my incentive to play, because those aren't the things you do, they're the result of the doing of the things. And this of course is assuming you've completed the story with one character.
Stuff to do:
-
Zone/World Completion
-
WvW
-
Dynamic/Meta events
-Play the TP
-
Dungeons
-Farm
-Mini-games: there's currently one permanent (Keg Brawl), and of the four months of release, 2 of them had events with multiple (pretty awesome) others
-
Professions/crafting
-
sPvP
-Fractals
-Jumping Puzzles (dunno how many you've done but many are legit tests of skill!)
-Play an Alt
If we expand it to "if you log on when there's a world event going on"
-Unique quests (i.e. the Halloween scavenger hunt)
-One-time events (i.e. the invasion of Southsun)
I've gone ahead and crossed off the things you've already ruled out yourself for one reason or another. If you go ahead and cross off the rest, it doesn't mean there's a lack of things to do in the game, it just mean's you're
done with it, at least for now. I get the impression that maybe you're being influenced by a mindset that would characterize an older MMO ("welp, I'm paying for it- what should I be doing?") whereas it might help you to compare it directly to other games sold at its price point. For the money, you'd have been
done with a standard AAA single-player release 50 or 100 or 300 hours prior.
So that's the stuff you can do- you just need to decide if it's fun for you to do or not. That should be what compels you to play, nothing else- if you aren't able to find a way to have fun with what's available, there's absolutely no reason to continue. Maybe in a month or a year, things will have changed and you can check out what's on offer then!
Which brings me back to my question- please do answer it. If nothing else, I'm really curious if it's stuff that I would personally want to have added to the game too and/or stuff that eventually will be.
