When Heart of Thorns released a few months back it brought with it potentially the coolest thing in Guild Wars 2, the ability to glide. Ever since then I've spent a lot of time jumping off cliffs and flying around, a habit that turns quite fatal when you forget that gliding doesn't work in Central Tyria (the original GW2 map).
Luckily the recently released update fixes that issue by adding gliding to the original GW2 zones as well as a new and improved Shatterer boss fight and many other changes, ranging from quality of life improvements to balance fixes. Here's a short overview of what the patch brought in:
Gliding is now available all across Tyria and all of the main cities with only a couple of areas, such as jumping puzzles, being no-fly zones in order to preserve their challenge. You will be able to glide in Central Tyria as soon as you achieve basic mastery in the gliding tree.
The Shatterer has received some much needed updates that will ensure he doesn't spend 100% of the fight completely blinded and unable to hit even a single player. He now has new abilities, tactics to employ and minions to defend him so you will have to put in a bit of effort in to bringing the Shatterer down. As compensation however he now also drops more loot and has a special achievement tab related to him that will reward you with a title and nifty backpack if you can complete all of it.
The Squad UI has received some much needed updates and will now allow you to place down markers and delegate command to lieutenants who will then be able to help you out by inviting and removing players, arranging groups, placing markers and so on. In other words this should make leading public raids much less of a nightmarish experience.
The Lunar New Year festival is back and with it the Dragon Ball Arena. Most of the stuff is back from last year but don't take that as a complaint from me, I remember the festival being a great deal of fun, especially once people got used to the PvP arena and started playing for "real".
The Brew of the Month club has also been updated with a new brew for in-game beer aficionados to enjoy. Collecting all twelve brews will grant you a title, a backpack skin and a guild decoration in recognition of your beer drinking prowess.
The Shatterer has been working out over the past few months
Fractals have received a couple of small but very welcome bug fixes and quality of life improvements. You can now set your fractal scale from within the Observatory, the "World is full" error has been fixed and the achievement tab will now default to Fractal dailies if you're within the mists. A bunch of boss exploits have been corrected so you will no longer be able to cheese the Mossman by standing on that one stick next to his hut for example.
Supporting your allies through healing, buffing and debuffing enemies will now be properly awarded when doing world events. You will still need to do a bit of damage to your enemies but you will no longer be denied gold participation rating because you had the audacity to help one of your fellow players off the ground.
Raids will now award you with a lot more tokens on successful kills as well as more tokens in general even on failed attempts that reach a certain amount of boss health. This change comes after many have complained that the raids, despite giving a good chunk of gold as reward for kills, end up feeling very unrewarding for the effort required.
Finally, on the PvP & PvE balancing front there are so, so many changes there is no way for me to cower them in a reasonable time frame so if you're interested in the fine details of class balance head over to the patch notes.
If you were like me and took a few months break after finishing the HOT content now would be the time to come back as this update does shake up the gameplay significantly enough to warrant a revisit. Have fun!