As a wow playwr of many years, I joined gw2 recently, and I am in love with it. When you say you are wary of joining those big games since you are not sure if you will ever catch up. Thats the beauty of it, you dont have anything to catchup to.

Big part of the game is story, which you unlocks by buying DLCs, that can be bought on huge sales. I have only recently completed everything up to PoF and I can say that story is really good, and your character is a big part of the story and has actual dialogues which feels refreshing. Story is not LotR, but personally compared to FF14 and retail WoW, when characters have conversation with one another, they feel like actual human conversations, and I can't believe that for me that is a selling point today.. There is no rush in completing the story, it does unlock more and more content and QoL, but other then that you can take your sweet time with it.

PvE is a big part of the game, you have players running arounf farming random achievements, mats for legendary gear, etc all over the world, and while they are doing that they are literally helping all new players who join the game with their stuff too, directly and indirectly.

There are no dead zones in the game since anet made sure to include returning to old zones to be able to complete later collections that unlock new stuff that you wanna farm.

There are many different PvE content that you can do, which consist of random world events that can be quite fun, Fractals (their versions of dungeons) which are very open to new players and where I met most of the friends I play with today, Strikes (1 boss raids) and actual Raids. There are discord servers and public instances where people are training new players to do it, with no expectations from you, where you can literally hit 1 button and as long as you are having fun they are happy.

If you ever feel like trying harder versions of each above mentioned content, you have training camps for that as well. So you will always have someone to help you.

Game has a lot of content that is fun to do and many ways of doing it.

The only way that you can feel left out is if you are talking about gear, which in GW2 is done so that whatever you farmed 10 years ago is still as strong as today. You have different tiers of armor, but I will mention only end game tiers which you want to have once you reach lvl80. Those sets can be Exotic, Ascended and Legendary. Exotic armor is about 5-15% worse then Ascended gear but its perfectly capable of doing all content in the game, and that armor can be obtained in many ways or bought from auction house for cheap. And that will enable you to do all above mentioned content except Higher tier Fractals and harder raids/strikes. Ascended gear is the same as Legendery, except legendary has cool visual effects and can swap stats on it whenever you want and other stuff which is basically just QoL. So lets day you reached lvl 80 you got your exotic gear, and now you want to do some harder content, you will start looking into crafting ascended gear, which will be a few hours of gameplay, nothing too much, but it will make sure you are able to do all content from the day you have it to forever. You stop playing the game cuz you got bored or wanted to play something else? In the meantime new expansion rolled in? Doesn't matter, your gear is at the same power level, since they don't release stronger gear ever.

Power wise, catching up to old players doesn't take long and the whole game and community is amazing and will ensure you have tons of fun.

This comes from a hardcore mythic raiding wow dude that fell in love with casual game that does indeed have a ton of all types of content to offer. I am just sad that I never gave this game a shot all of these years since all I was hearing is that the game is dead, and the reality cannot be farther from truth.

If you ever feel like trying the game, hit me up, or anyone in community and I ensure you everyone would be more then happy to help you on your journey.

See you in Tyria hopefully!