You don't gear grind for more ilvls every content patch, you mostly material grind for ascended or legendaries which allows you to switch your stats easily among the 40+ stat combinations for your builds. Very long term goal that requires either raiding or playing wvw or pvp a lot, and gathering a lot of materials to craft, or buy the gen 1 legendary weapons off the trading post.
You can get ascended gear which have the same amount of stats as legendaries, but requires materials to switch the stats out, some of the stat combinations are expensive to change to, these you can get from drops in various areas of the game, or buy them from vendors, or craft them. The reason why you would want to switch stats is because many of the classes have multiple roles available for them to use, dps and support among them, and you may want to use multiple sets of gear to make them more effective, and depending on the area of the game you may want to play more defensively than the other.
For example a dragonhunter could use power spec in pve and use berserker gear which is power, crit, and crit dmg, in wvw they could use the same spec but use marauder gear instead which gives the berserker combination plus vitality for more hitpoints for more survival in pvp. Or you might want to use the same dragonhunter spec to do condition damage instead with their burns, so you plug in dire or trailblazer gear which has condition dmg and extend condition duration, or go to their core or firebrand spec to do healing so you switch to minstrels for more healing and buff duration instead. All that on just one class, and there's many other hybrid ways to build all those, especially with runes(95+ different types) which are what gives your gear the 6 piece set bonuses.
Plenty of content to do, two expansions and their stories, four seasons worth of living stories to do, each episode having a new map to explore and complete, daily world bosses, zone wide meta events, dungeons, fractals(advanced dungeons basically they get harder as you get higher tiers), 10man raids, 10man strike missions(pre raid content), dragon response missions, wvw, spvp with season and tournaments, festivals, ton of masteries to earn.
As for down state, yeah still have the weird projectiles lol, each class has a theme to their down state skills, like yesterday I went down to a ranger pewpewing me from behind at long range while I was in zerg fight in wvw, they came up to try and stomp me, but I hit them with fear and since that's what my build was made for, it did damage and had them running away for another couple seconds, enough for me to hit them with my weird projectiles and ground aoe, they also went down, then someone passed by and ressed me up and I went over to get the stomp on the ranger XD Over the years they made changes to it in wvw, a dying person can only instant res one enemy on their death not multiples like before, and if you're dead dead you can only be ressed by someone out of combat.
