If you have never played it, I'd still say the base game is very much worth playing and exploring, since it is beautiful and fun to explore. Some of the vistas give me an artistic boner. After that it's grinding for cosmetics and the smallest stat upgrades, which some people enjoy, others don't. I think it's the best realized world since vanilla WoW, the combat is very active and you are expected to dodge constantly, the game scales you down to low lvl zones, so the whole world is worth exploring and you can run into people everywhere and the way they handled cooperation with random strangers is perfect. The problem is that in the expansion they moved away from solo exploration towards group content in the maps, where the maps keep going through a cycle that last 1-2 hours, where you need people doing events all over the maps for max rewards, but those are once again mostly cosmetic... And well, if you fail at any moment, you just wasted a lot of time.
My personal beef is also with the way combat works - there's not much feedback on how well you are doing, you can never outgear content due to scaling, so you never get this power trip feeling present in other MMOs.
The tradeskills are well done, however to make money on them is close to impossible outside of a few specific niches, but for example the way you can discover new recipes in cooking makes for some enjoyable experimentation, the other professions follow a more predictable formula.
In the end, there is no subscription and Anet typically doesn't change much, so you can revisit the game a year later if you get bored, unlike WoW where you usually have to relearn your class from scratch every expansion.