This is a Colin Johanson post from the GW2 forums with a lot of interesting notes!: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/hot/Handful-of-HoT-Notes
Guild Missions: Week 1
With the new guild mission system (https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-mission-changes-and-improvements/), missions each week are randomly generated. There is a toggle you can use to allow your guild to select between PvE, PvP, WvW guild missions, or a mix of all three for more diverse guilds. When you make a change to the toggle, it’ll go into effect during the next week of missions. We’ve defaulted all guilds to the mix of all three mission options for week one, which means every guild will have the mix of missions option selected for week one.
The random roll for this week already happened and we’re seeing on our internal servers that week ones missions rolled a mix of PvP and WvW missions for the first three mission slots that guilds have unlocked once you’re able to access the expansion (as you unlock deeper into your guild hall, you’ll be able to unlock more mission slots). We wanted to make sure everyone knew this information ahead of time.
TL;DR - All guilds are forced to do WvW + PVP missions week one.
Combat Visibility
One change you’ll notice when the expansion goes live – a number of FX for skills have changed. We’ve tried to cut back some of the visual noise of some of the “noisiest” skills to make it easier to see what’s going on in combat with multiple players/mobs on screen. We’ve also made some skill FX end much faster to align with the length their actual combat effect happens in the world – previously some FX lingered much longer than the actual outcome of the skills combat interaction would occur. This is also to help make it easier to see what’s going on in combat.
TL;DR - Yay! Less visual confusion in large group content.
Engineer Profession Icon
We’ve had some issues over the years with folks being able to tell the difference between the Engineer and Elementalist profession icons, in particular when they are shrunk down to smaller sizes for party UI. This became even more apparent when we began testing our updated large squad UI. As a result, we’re going to be changing the engineer icon to better differentiate between the two. We’ve also done a bit of re-work to better differentiate the icons between Scrapper, Tempest, Engineer and Elementalist.
There's also a discussion of Fractal Leaderboards in this post which amounted to 'they won't be ready for HoT launch'.
