[Update #2]: Guild Wars 2's highly popular Shadow of the Mad King event is returning on October 18th.

[Update]: The October update has now arrived alongside a couple of extra tweaks.

As a part of the August 23rd update, Guild Wars 2 released a massive array of changes to equalize the damage potential between power (direct damage) and condition (damage over time) builds and make it so every class has access to at least one of each build. In order to help them keep up with more modern specializations, the update also dished out some nifty buffs for Reapers, Daredevils, Deadeyes, Scrappers, and the list goes on.

The upcoming October 4th update will be a continuation of these efforts, though mostly on the PvP side of things. First and foremost, the Torment condition is getting some much-needed love. Expect to see increased damage and scaling against moving opponents, as well as reduced damage and scaling against stationary opponents. Since you pretty much never want to stand still, especially not in PvP, this should give Torment-based builds a sizable damage increase.

Back in February 2020, the Guild Wars 2 team increased the cooldown of many powerful passive traits to 300 seconds because they didn't want these types of effects to have a significant impact on competitive play. With the October 4th update these traits will be getting rebalanced and reworked yet again in order to make them more proactive and interesting to use, rather than simple fire-and-forget passives.

As for the PvE side of things, the definite highlight is the removal of mechanical weaknesses built into some of the older elite specializations. While they were originally a key method for balancing these specializations, these days they're mostly an anchor that keeps some of the more interesting builds from reaching their true potential. So in most cases, these weaknesses will be getting removed and the specializations rebalanced in different ways if necessary.

You can check out all of these changes, as well as the aforementioned PvP tweaks, over at the Guild Wars 2 website.

Have fun figuring out new builds, and I'll make sure to let you know once the big update goes live.