I tried it a couple of years ago with the steam controller and the action camera. It works surprisingly well.

GW2 works surprisingly well on controller. I've been playing that way since launch, first with Xpadder and now with the Steam controller mappings. Inventory management and crafting are the only regular things I switch back to mouse and keyboard for.

FFXIV works great with a controller, I don't see why GW2 wouldn't with a similar gamepad oriented UI.

Been doing it for a while - WvW and Open World it’s been great. I wouldn’t try and do raid rotations on it.

and there’s a well-defined mission in each zone

It's been a long time but I remember there being missions with scripted events and objectives and stuff, but then also areas where the main thing to do was simply travel through it to get to other places. My favorite moment from the game was when I worked out that you could skip a portion of the normal progression by getting to a higher level area early to buy more powerful equipment, but actually getting there was a real challenge due to being underleveled and the difficulty of getting past enemies without killing them. I got a group to make the attempt (which took some explaining and persuasion because it wasn't the normal next thing to do) and we spent hours on it and got to the last leg of the journey, but ultimately had to give up because our death penalties were stacked too high to get through that last bit. I was able to make it on a later attempt with a different group using character loadouts more specialized for the task.

Something I think GW1 did really well was doing various things like this to build up a sense of location and meaningful travel, which does a lot of work to compensate for the gameplay itself happening in isolated instances and making the world of the game feel expansive and epic.

That sounds kinda cool tbh. I'm mostly intrigued about the class system, although I've bever really looked into it.

It sounds pretty similar to Fellowship (although with an RPG part), though, and I'm loving that game.

If I'm getting back to a game with gear treadmill, I can just clean uo my inventory and start the next exoansion with a clean slate.

I have around 70% of the world cleared, several characters leveled to max, but I got through kike half of HoT and a bit of Path of Fire. I opened my full inventory that had a lot of random crafting stuff, consumables a a gew gear sets and I had no idea what's anything for, or what am I even supposed to do next. Did a few quests then gave up in trying to sort it out, since it was just too overwhelming.

I'll probably give it a try again, love thw game.