[Update #2]: The Guild Wars 2 team has now revealed the full update roadmap for Fall and Winter 2022.

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

With the August update Guild Wars 2 unleashed a whole assortment of changes aimed at equalizing the damage potential between power (direct damage) and condition (damage over time) builds. Additionally, this update sprinkled a variety of buffs onto the old elite specializations like the Reaper, Daredevil and Scrapper to help them fit better with the more modern ones.

The recently launched October update has continued these efforts by removing most of the mechanical weaknesses built into some of the elite specializations. They were originally meant as a balancing tool to prevent the elite specializations from dominating the basic classes, but these days the average power level has advanced so far that the weaknesses mostly serve to keep interesting builds from becoming relevance. So in most cases these weaknesses have now been removed, and if necessary the affected specializations will be rebalanced in different ways later on.

More importantly, the update has also brought with it a heap of balance changes specifically aimed at PvP. The highlights include major buffs to the Torment condition to make it stronger against moving opponents and weaker against stationary ones, as well as small rework of the powerful passive defensive traits.

Previously these traits were balanced by making them take a massive 300 seconds to come back up after use, but that didn't exactly feel great since players had no real agency about when and how these passives would trigger. As such the October update has made them more reactive whenever possible (by making them trigger when using an elite skill for example), as well as reworked some of the more problematic ones.

You can check out the full list of these changes, as well as the numbers behind each one, over at the Guild Wars 2 website. 

Have fun messing around with new builds, and I'll make sure to let you know once the next big update goes live.