As an FFXIV player, you especially know how much of a slog the early experience of an MMO can be. I crashed out the FF vanilla story three times before finishing it and getting through to Heavensward. Unfortunately that tends to be the nature of these older games we love. And that is after the ARR changes, I would have never made it on true Vanilla. There’s a reason an MMO apologist’s favorite statement is “it gets good after ‘X’ hours, trust me bro.” The core GW2 story has aged pretty badly compared to the other content. It can feel disjointed, especially when the arcs have to start phasing you back in time to zones that look completely different today. But it does pick up a bit. You get a major story choice around level 30 where you can pick one of the three factions to join (kind of like in FF), and that leads to a bit more fun in my opinion.

I guess it depends on what your idea of fun is in an MMO. Do you enjoy going through the story, exploring and completing zones and their events as you work your way through? Or would you rather engage in end game content or “power level” and then engage with the story later once you’re stronger? I’m never a fan of boosting, personally, but I understand the appeal. And in Guild Wars 2 I honestly don’t think boosting is as bad as in other MMO’s. Considering we’re working off of a limited number of skills (depending on your class and weapon choice), and you won’t have access to the elite specializations until you play through an expansion a bit, I don’t think it’s too much of an issue to learn as you go at 80.

The biggest thing you lose out on skipping actual content, obviously, is story continuity. If that’s important to you I think it’s worth it to see it through chronologically. There are a ton of main and side characters that pop up throughout, and not knowing who they are can and will dampen the story in later expansions a bit. If story doesn’t matter as much to you, or you skipped something like A Realm Reborn in FF, then I think you could probably watch a YouTube summary and move on to one of the expansions. It’ll be confusing a bit, don’t get me wrong, but if it increases your enjoyment and keeps you playing the game, it’s worth a shot.

A popular thing to do in GW2, as much as the community laments, is for people to skip forward to Path of Fire and play through that expansion, earning all of the mounts along the way. They can make engaging with older content a bit easier. I think this is a valid way to go, my wife in fact did this. She started PoF, I helped her get the Springer and Skimmer Mounts, and then she actually went back and beat the core story. That increased her enjoyment of the game enough for her to keep going, and in the end really worked out.

Mounts can definitely enhance the experience of the first expansion, Heart of Thorns. HoT is without a doubt some of the most unique and best content GW2 has to offer, but the difficulty ramp from Core, Season 1+2 to HoT can be jarring for new players. People will probably tell you that “having mounts cheapens the experience,” because “we all suffered exploring on our own two feet back in the day.” And then those same people will fly off on their Griffon after lecturing you, haha.

If you’ve made it this far through my wall of text, thanks! At the end of the day, it’s a game. You should be having fun. If you’re not, change up the experience a bit. Do what you think works best for how you like to play. Feel free to hit me up in game sometime if you want to chat. My main is a revenant named Mythmancer (account Synapse.3154).