You hit level 80 in Guild Wars 2. What now?
There is no single right endgame, and that is the actual problem. Here is how to pick a direction without reading a wiki for an hour.
Most games answer "what now?" with a gear treadmill. Guild Wars 2 does not have one, which is a design decision people praise right up until they hit 80 and find themselves holding a map with no destination marked on it.
The honest answer is that there are several endgames and none of them is correct. What follows is what each one actually asks of you, so you can pick on something better than a forum thread.
The only thing that is genuinely a prerequisite
Fill every gear slot. Not with anything good — just fill them. An empty trinket slot is a straightforward loss of stats, and exotic gear is cheap enough to be a rounding error. Everything else on this page can wait; this cannot, because it makes all of it harder.
After that, ascended gear is worth having for exactly one reason that matters mechanically: it takes infusions, and infusions are how you get Agony Resistance. If fractals are not in your plans, ascended is a small stat upgrade and no more.
Fractals
Short instanced content, scaling difficulty, run in a group of five. It is the most structured progression the game has, and the one place where a number genuinely gates you: past a point you need Agony Resistance or you die to something you cannot outplay.
It is a good first direction because the steps are legible. You can see what is blocking you.
Raids and strikes
Ten-player encounters with mechanics that expect you to know them. Strikes are the gentler entry. The barrier here is not gear — it is knowing the fight, and nothing about your equipment tells anybody whether you do.
Be wary of any tool, this one included, that tells you that you are "raid ready" from your gear. It cannot know.
Open world and masteries
Masteries are account-wide unlocks tied to each expansion's region, and some of them change how you move through the world permanently. Gliding and the mounts are the obvious ones.
Mastery points are locked to the region that earned them, which trips everybody up at least once: having thirty spare points does not help if they are all in a region whose tracks you have finished.
Collections and legendaries
The long game. A legendary is months of work and its real value is convenience — stats you can swap freely — rather than power. Worth starting only if the journey itself appeals, because the destination is a modest upgrade.
What most people should actually do first
Fill your gear slots. Run the Wizard's Vault dailies for a week, because they pay well for very little and they will drag you through several kinds of content you have not tried. Then pick the one you did not resent.