If there is a job that can do anything

[Shurrikhan]

This is exactly the reason I quit GW2. When I participated in combat, I felt like it didn't matter whether I was there or not. I didn't fill an important role, I was just... there.

I, too, fell out of GW2 for the same reason, yet I suspect we attribute the reasons for why our parts in any given group felt unimpactful very differently.

As far as I can tell, that lack of impact wasn't necessarily due to the depth or division of roles into basic types. Consider Call of Duty, for instance, vs. something like (pro matches of) CS:GO, Rainbow Six: Siege, or any other one-life-per-round competitive shooter.

The first, until middle-high levels of play with enemies not too far beneath your mechanical skills, can feel utterly independent even in a team-based match and despite having varied ranges or loadouts from which to create specializations. (Granted, at higher levels of play you tend to be hyper-aware of the fields of view, ranges, and loadouts of your teammates while advancing and readily expect the usage of certain toolkit parts if you ever play a few matches in a row with the same people and/or at low enough a maximum player count to get a feel for it all quickly enough.)

The latter set may eventually have you working solo from a particular flank for a time, but rely heavily on the surrounding team. They've the same extent of customization, but because the situation has been made more punishing, they feel vastly different.

To me, GW2 feels sloppy and its participation largely invisible simply because it is in most cases too lenient or lacking in clear and impactful short-term goals.

Consider also, if a wiping-power mob has to die within an amount of time that requires the entire group to be dealing damage to their theoretical near-fullest, with not a man or second to spare, even if you're doing nothing unique per se, your presence and (more importantly) your attention still accomplishes something new that could not be accomplished without you: survival. There's nothing inherently special about what you'd be doing there, and yet the group lives or dies through your efforts. Your performance makes all the difference in the world. The problems occur when the range in player skill (such as due to poor difficult curves, support systems, or rewards for self-challenge) demand the bar be lowered to where more and more players are no longer necessary to meet the given goal. Those events stop having a clear performance indicator; there's no real or obvious feedback, nothing to spur engagement or intensity thereof.

But take "goal-setting" through trinity systems. Most of those goals can be met through the basest engagement and simply bringing enough of each base type. It becomes challenge more and more through simply meeting an unvaried checklist, and in the end healers typically feel their interactions just with their cohealer, at best with their tanks, tanks with their cotank, and DPS with their raid (de)buffs, each a smaller set of means of engagement than any and all having to mitigate, prevent through suppression or CC, fully avoid, bait out, embonus, deal, and reverse damage as per a role-less or open system.

:: I actually consider GW2 as somewhat having roles, or at least not as generalized in that very few jobs, as in XIV, are capable of everything. The vast majority of GW2 classes prior to PoF, or even now really, here would be defined simply and solely as DPS. There are a few hybrid healers, and there are a few pseudo-tanks. But the game itself provides little opportunity for visibly impactful coordination in the majority of content short of its most serious levels of play.