I got incredibly burned (no pun intended) by Path of Fire; I hated mounts, I especially hate the jumper mount. It's so pathetically one dimensional and encourages a kind of level design I despise, which is to place "stairs" that the jumper can navigate. I got griffon and stopped playing because I also hated bounties and thought they were a really shitty map metagame, especially after having so much fun doing Dragon Stand.
I played through the newer content and I can say that some of it is really good. There's a few map metas that are really good, Drizzlewood and Dragon's End being chief among them. Strikes are ok, I didn't really dig into challenge motes too much because my guild died and so I stopped, but it seems like the devs are putting good, repeatable content in the game again. I might get back in when the next Living World season drops. Raids have been nixed in favor of strikes, which is kind of a shame because Strikes, as a whole, are much easier than raids.
The Icebrood Saga living world gets absolutely dicked because of covid and the restructuring of the company, and it shows. If you're a lore nerd, seeing Primordus and Jormag get shafted because of budgetary restraints is a real disappointment. The maps released with Icebrood are some of the best, though, with Drizzlewood Coast being a real standout. It's basically a PvE version of a WvW map, and you move up through the map taking objectives that end in huge set piece battles. The other map with Icebrood, Bjora's Marches, isn't as good, but it's still got its moments with two different map metaevent chains.
The Isle of Cantha stuff with the new expansion are, as a rule, pretty good. Granted, some of the new maps really suck to navigate, with New Kaineng probably being the worst. There's a lot of straight verticality and weird dead ends that are frequently irritating. Echovald Wilds are the most reminiscent of Heart of Thorns maps, with small pockets everywhere and vine verticality. Dragon's End, though, is a map meta very similar to the Dragon's Stand meta from Heart of Thorns. It culminates in a fight with a different dragon, and the final boss fight is punishing if you can't pay attention and split properly. Even still, after multiple nerfs and people having acclimated to the difficulty, runs will fail because people cannot manage the rules.
As a whole, I'm happy with where the game has gone, there's a guarantee of another sequel since they've stopped work on GW3, so it's worth playing again if the itch takes you. Getting a good guild is definitely, if not a must, heavily recommended like all MMOs. I got all the new mounts, and I heavily recommend the first thing you do is to get a Skyscale mount, it's very labor intensive, has multiple time gates involved, but it absolutely shrugs off all the verticality in the game. It's the logical end conclusion of a mount system like GW2's.
As for the new specializations, it really kind of seems like the newest ones are a little overtuned. I mostly just play Engi, and it's kind of bananas how much more damage you put out with the jade bot. I doubled my DPS just switching from Holo to Mechanist, before I really got the rotation down. All the specs from End of Dragons are ridiculous, Warrior's new spec is the highest damage class in the game if you manage it right. Like 40K DPS with 100K bursts. It's absolutely stupid. I saw someone basically solo T4 fractals with one.
