What is the end-game of this game?

I have a roughe idea but I would really like you veterans to constructively tell me about the end-game of Guild Wars the complete game.
I know as far as getting skills beyond max level + PvP. I have no idea about the details, or if there is more to do.
My goal in this thread is to study about the replay value of Guild Wars.

There are many elite-areas in the game. Also, the Eye of the North expansion has quite a few dungeons that are unique and very challenging. Furthermore, after you complete a campaign in Normal Mode, you unlock the ability to do everything in Hard Mode.

I'm not sure what you're looking for though. Do you have any specific questions?

I'd say you gave me 50% of what I wanted to know, so thanks for that.
The other half specifically is Loot.
What does modding mean?
Say I finished all this content, now I just really wanna perfect my character, what do I need to aim for? How does enhancing work in the game? How challenging is it? And is bossing ultimately the best way to get items?
Another question is how big the world of GW is? In comparison to Skyrim or GW2 which are both on the 'huge' scale.

In terms of modding, you can add 2 types to your armor. The first type, called insignias, can give you stuff like more energy, health, or armor; but sometimes it can affect the skills that you use, such as increasing knockdown time on foes from 2 to 3 seconds, or reducing the casting time of spells that exploit corpses by 25%. The second type, called runes, can increase your energy, health, reduce the duration of certain conditions on you, or increase one of your attributes.

Now, for your weapons you can get 3 types of mods that can increase your damage, energy, armor, reduce the duration of certain conditions on you, halve casting time or skill recharge of certain skills, or increase one of your attributes by 1.

The best way to get all of these upgrades is to just buy them from a Rune Trader (for your armor) and buy them from real players (for your weapons). You may also find the weapon mods that you need from doing elite areas or Hard Mode and you can salvage those and place them to the weapons that you actually like using; the same goes for runes and insignias. Otherwise, you could try to get or even buy green weapons which drop from killing certain bosses or doing certain elite areas; these green weapons come already equipped with their own mods which are maxed but can not be changed in any way. For example, the weapon may have a +20% enchantment mod but what you wanted was a +30 health mod.

You will not be able to complete all of those elite areas any time soon. Within a few weeks, you might get all the skills and equipment that you need in order to be useful for your team or, as you said it "perfect your character", but it's going to take a while before you figure out what strategies you feel comfortable using and how to counter the specific enemies that you will be facing.

So, basically, after you completed all of the content in GW, all that is left is getting the rare skins (all of which have a rather low drop rate so you may have to do that difficult content multiple times) or buy those weapons from other players (for ridiculous prices, most likely). You could also buy Obsidian armor which is the only armor in the game that is more than 10 times more expensive than the second cheapest armor or go after certain titles (see God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals).

GW is pretty big, not sure it's as big as Skyrim but I feel it's big enough. There's plenty of places that I rarely have a reason to visit because I have much more stuff to do elsewhere.

Are those skins, Obsidian etc, one-time usable? Or do you wear it along with your armour?
One time use being that you choose a single piece of gear and then transmogrify the look of it.

Sounds like you have a WOW-style gaming model in mind, which cannot be applied to Guildwars.

Sure, there are loads and loads of elite end-game missions and areas to beat, and yes, some of those are extremely challenging. But such is the diversity of content and possible combinations that you can almost choose a career for your own personal endgame content. You can play as part of high-end teams doing the hard areas as fast and (professionally) as possible. You can chase titles for as many characters as you have made. (Achieving the maximum number of titles can take years sometimes). You can make the move into player-versus-player. You can trade items for profit to other players, or start a collection if rare relics.

Once you have achieved what you want to, you can move onto something else. There's enough to keep you interested for years.

There is no single specific end-game content. There is lots of end game content. Levelling up to 20 and kitting your characters out with the best gear is just the start. The real content starts just as you finish the storylines in the game.

Max

I do daily Zaishen quests from Embark Beach almost daily as end-game. PUGs are fun.

When I said "skins" I actually meant "entirely different armor/weapon with max stats". The only skins that can be applied over your current equipment or turned off whenever you choose, are costumes. Everything else is basically a different item in your inventory. GW 1 doesn't give the transmogrifying ability like GW 2.

I started playing in December 2005.
8 years later I have 15 characters who played in Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall and The Eye of the North campaigns. Did all missions in both normal as hard mode. Hard mode unlocks after completing on normal mode and as the name suggests, it offers a much bigger challenge with higher level enemies serving a severe risk.

To me though, it felt as if the addition of Factions, then Nightfall and last but not least the eye of the north expansion, the skills that were at hand offered a bunch of overpowered builds for PVE gameplay that Arenanet decided to give the players equally overpowered enemies. I remember blasting through pretty much anything in normal mode once I had captured the elite "Searing Flames". It was insane back then and felt unfair against normal mode enemies, especially in Prophecies. This was a campaign designed to be faced with fireball and meter shower. I can't even think of any good useful fire elite skill that you could capture in Prophecies. If you then show up with something like Searing Flames, ... You get it.
Anyway, searing flames is just one example. There are many other elite skills that made the game a lot easier.

Assumed you have beaten every mission in normal and hard mode and have completed them including the Bonus objectives, then you can still find stuff to do. You're a bit unfortunate to have arrived just now, because in the old days I spent a lot of time farming certain areas. Sorrows Furnace, once claimed as the hardest explorable area in Prophecies (Fissure of Woe and Underworld not included, those are specially designed areas with its own set of rules such as "entire party dies = kicked out and back to outpost, you pay to enter again and get another shot). It was fun farming the furnace with a 5 man team (tank, healer, bonder prot monk, necro mm and necro ss) and get spoiled with the green (unique) weapons that dropped. Especiall Rago's Flame Staff was a much desired weapon. Again, this was all before Factions etc came out, where you had lots of boss enemies dropping unique weapons.
Ooh, forgive me my trip down in memory lane, but I also remember the tomb of the primeval kings. Another challenging series of areas, farmed with a healmonk, two necros and the rest all Barrage rangers with pets. So fun!

As you can see, there was a lot to do and I didn't even sum up half of the things I participated in. Too bad most of those things aren't done anymore, except maybe with guildies.

That said, you can always count on quite a lot of people still farming the zaishen quests. These are 3 types of challenges to complete a mission / defeat a boss / complete objectives in PVP and earn you rewards in the form of coins that you can trade for specific items.

I don't think you'll squeeze out another 8 years but the game offers enough to stay busy for quite a while.

Difficult. I'm playing both, gw and skyrim right now, and if you take all expansions gw1 is definately way bigger. It also feels like that prophecies alone is way bigger than skyrim. I don't know, in skyrim the map looks very big but actually getting from one point to another can be done in a very short time. In gw1 it's the opposite (ignoring fightings time, just running).

GW1 has tons of replay value. It is more the matter if you like it. What I like the most is that you have tons of options of what to do since you can't really apply the endgame term of other mmo's. The amount of choices is imho a huge point for me to keep playing. Because if you are tired of something you have fun with something else. And after two years you think "woah, I havn't done that in a while" and it feels almost new.
PvP is huge and has a lot of different modes ranging from highly competetive to casual. Elite Areas. Vanquishing. Story. Titles (it's mentioned, some of them take years to complete). Holiday Events with their own mini games (which are more competetive than most MMO's pvp modes, lol). Solo farming. Aesthetics of your character. Collecting stuff.

There's one more thing that I forgot to mention.
The GW story has been expanded with the War in Kryta (a source of Oppressor weapons), Hearts of the North (more Oppressor weapons), and Winds of Change (a source of Imperial weapons). Also, after you finish Prophecies, you can do a few very difficult quest called the Titan quests; the NM version only offers experience as its reward but the HM version offers Gold Zaishen coins, which are very rare.

All of those, while they're not exactly the end-game, are something that most players go through at least once.

Thanks again for all the info guys.

You couldn't be more wrong in thinking I have a WoW-model style in mind. Surely I would just play that if that's what I was looking for.
I do, however, have some Diablo-elements in mind. Most importantly finding loot.
You gave me a lot of enough and I would like it even more if you can tell me, just how easy is it to get the best gear? One of the main reasons I'm here, like I said, "just looking to study about the value of the end-game content," is because I don't like GW2-like 'model style' which lets you have access to the top gear whenever. Even if just in PvP. In my own eyes, PvP is as much as a complex version of Tekken with an arena if you are geared up to perfection from the get-go. You are not completely wrong in thinking I have some kind of WoW-model in mind, but it's only about PvP. In my opinion I think it's pretty cool the way PvP servers work there + dueling. It adds a lot of fun. But that doesn't mean I am looking for that here.

It's very easy to get the gear with the highest stats. Around level 10, or earlier if you know what you're doing, you can usually get max armor from armorsmiths (but not elite armor) and weapons with max stats from weaponsmiths or collectors. Sometimes those weapons will have the mods that you want, other times they might not, either way you can buy your desired mods from other players and only a few of them are somewhat expensive. Armor mods, namely runes and insignias, are even more convenient to get because Rune Traders are available very early in the game and only the Superior Rune of Vigor is rather expensive (around 45k or 45,000 gold) when all others cost between 100 gold and 5k.

There are some normal and elite skills that take a little more effort to acquire (i.e. you get them towards the end of the campaign) but most of this game is based on encouraging players to increase their skill and knowledge of the game rather than their gear.

If by 'best' you refer to best protection then you can just buy it off the armorer very early in game (except in Prophecies). If you mean 'best looking' then it's very personal. There's standard and elite armors, only difference is the cost. Some can only be reached end of a campaign, but they still offer the exact same stats as standard armor.

Now by your study, I would put common phases in game like this:
1. New players still learning skills, builds, and strategies. Completing Normal mode and generally just learning the ropes on staying alive.
1b. Some might not even like PvE and just focus entirely on PvP.
2a. Doing hard mode missions for the first time.
2b. Getting some elite armors for better looking skins.
2c. Some might start working more serious on titles, filling their Hall of Monuments.
2d. Maybe start farming more to build up your wealth and afford more elite armors and rare items.
2e. Elite missions and dungeons, preferrably in hard mode.
2f. Daily Zaishen missions
3a. Better armors, maybe go for Obsidian and Vabbian armor, the most expensive sets.
3b. Some start with serious power trading, buying cheap and selling high.
3c. Collecting rare items like low requirement (ie. Q6-Q8) max shields/weapons, extremely rare minipets, rare promotional items or items no longer dropping in game.

This is not listed in a specific order as there generally isn't any except for the basics. After 1-2 years most probably mastered a lot of the game, while even after 4-8 years of playing you still find things to do.

Personally I think you get incredible value for your money, where many people log over 3000-8000 hours of game play.

I hope this helped answering some of your questions.

I just want to add about the whole mod on your armor and weapon-topic that mods are really not essential except for few specific builds that focus e.g. on a special enchantment duration. So, while it makes the game easier to have the most useful mods, you can really finish most if not nearly all of the PvE without special equipment. So yeah, like the others said, this game is definitely not about slowly progressing your equipment and feeling the change in power or whatever little by little.