Finding achievements you are one step from finishing
The game tracks thousands and sorts them by category. Neither of those is the sort you want.
Guild Wars 2 tracks several thousand achievements per account and presents them sorted by category. That is the right sort for browsing and the wrong one for the question most people actually have, which is: what am I nearly finished with?
Why the game cannot answer it for you
The achievement panel knows your progress on each one. What it does not do is rank them against each other, because "nearly done" is not a single thing — an achievement at 16 of 17 map sectors and one at 4,900 of 5,000 kills are both at ninety-seven per cent, and only one of them is an evening's work.
What makes an achievement worth chasing
- Steps remaining, not percentage. One step left is the useful signal. A ratio is not.
- Whether it awards a mastery point. A point in a region you have tracks left in is worth far more than the achievement points.
- Whether it can be finished at all right now. A great many achievements are seasonal, retired, or gated behind a festival that is not running.
The flag most tools ignore
ArenaNet publishes a flag on each achievement called
IgnoreNearlyComplete, and it means exactly what it says: this one is
not a sensible nearly-complete candidate. Seven hundred and forty-four
achievements carry it.
It is there because some achievements have progress that does not mean what it looks like — repeatable counters, tracking that resets, or sub-goals that are not equally weighted. Any tool that sorts by "closest to done" without reading that flag will confidently recommend several hundred things the game has already said are unsuitable.
We read it. We also exclude the dailies, weeklies and monthlies, because "one step from done" on something that resets tomorrow is not a finding, and the PvP achievements, because that is a different game with its own progression.
A caveat worth stating
Even after all of that, an achievement described as one step from done is one step from done according to the API. The step itself might be a jumping puzzle, a meta event on a two-hour timer, or a map you have to cross a continent to reach. Closeness is not the same as ease, and nothing we can read tells us which.