- No details on raid wing 5 yet. The team reiterates it’s not working on difficulty tiers for raids. “We’re hard at work on the next raid and development is going well.”
- There’s apparently nobody working on guilds (so no current plans to develop further) and no dungeon team attached to the expansion.
- The studio said among its chief story goals were tighter integration and not all cinematic moments happen in cutscenes. The choice to go darker and use fewer characters was also intentional.
- Map-wide metas weren’t an intended part of the expansion, but maybe in the future. They’re watching to see what we do and will go from there.
- Anet says it did indeed modify all the old maps in Tyria and Maguuma in order to add mounts.
- The bounty system was designed to be easily insertable into old content, but no promises.
- Vabbi was supposed to have a PvP event, but it was cut.
- Ree Soesbee apparently left ArenaNet at the beginning of the year, one of a number of key Anet devs who’ve left, many of whom flocked to Amazon Game Studios. She was a core narrative designer for the studio for 11 years and authored one of its pre-launch GW2 novels.
- “Have no fear though, you’ve not seen the last of Palawa Joko!” Praise Joko.
Several specs are also being watched closely; Scourge and Weaver are mentioned specifically, with the former being particularly OP in too many categories. In response to a question on DPS balance between old specs and the newest Path of Fire specs, the studio implies it knows that current specs are relatively overpowered and does plan to bring them closer to parity, but it doesn’t want to make them exactly the same.
