Yeah, that's one thing that's always felt off to me about GW2.

I feel like the decisions you make in combat are just so ephemeral as to really lack meaning. Conditions are intense, but short, and optimally applying them is usually a matter of rigidly following a rotation, or just spamming them off cooldown because there is an optimal circumstance to use that ability, but it's obscured by such tidal wave of particle effects and numbers that human's can't really read and react. So you might as well maximize your chances of getting it right by using it a lot.

I still enjoy GW2 for what it is, but I find the moment-to-moment combat with a lot of builds to be a really underwhelming combination of frenetic and unrewarding.