Interview with Arena net on Guild Wars 2

These are some highlights for me. The bits in Italics are me reading between the lines.

They mention that they are balancing the damage of attacks. So balance is important, theu emphasis it early.

Heal reduction, a poison that reduces heals. It is possible to debuff a heal.

11 common debuffs and 8 common buffs. This is done to make balance easy.

Traits: you can specialise all the way down a line or spread very widely. They recognise people might be a bit lost at first. They believe either approach is viable now, he mentions that this is what they are seeing but they havent a very strong idea of all possible combos.

Attributes: The major and minor skills define the profession build but the versalitilty is the main motivation.Min/Maxing could be very complex and rewarding.

Warrior Shouts can be traited to give an AoE Heal and there is a warrior Banner that increases it’s heal. The warrior can reduce shout cooldown and trait shouts to give adrenaline. A support warrior is viable.

There is some rock papper scissors. He suggest versus a guardian to fire an arrow so there aeges goes doen to block it so that your next big hit lands. Counter: burn your aegis whenthe enemy is spotted for its buff, it then begins its cooldown.

Engineer: an awful lot of play style choices.

Balancing: leaning towards esports. They have balanced one on ones and 5 v 5. They play the characters against each other.

Armour: you can build towards your strenghts. Every piece has a rune slot, you can build the 6 pieces to get a set piece bonus by having a full set of the same rune.

They had issues with rangers pet AI.

The mail system can be used any where, it is in fact a ranged trading system.

and some pvp.