On Friday's episode of Points of Interest, Guild Wars 2's Colin Johanson discussed the games combat, the roles players play within it, and how ArenaNet aren't dismissive of the holy-trinity, simply that they wanted to create a game where content could be completed with any group, as opposed to always waiting around for one particular class or profession. So far, so normal. Colin later expand upon the fact that they want people to be able to undertake a more traditional role more. He's since clarified his statement further (I'm assuming because some people took on Youtube completely missed what he was saying) with the below:

I think some of my point was either misunderstood or lost here, in particular reading Nikes comments on the youtube section so I'll try and clarify more simply:

We like the way combat works right now, we really don't plan to change it much other than add more options with elite specs. It works the way we intended: you can play control, support, and DPS actively. To folks who prefer to define by the holy trinity, Gw2 doesn't force you to pick one of the three from heal, tank, or DPS and only do that - it blends a mix depending on your build and allows you to actively swap roles or soft play between roles. Our goal was to remove the forced singular role per you're locked into, people often mistake this as saying gw2 has no trinity elements, that isn't true - we just don't believe in a forced role per for Gw2 for the reasons I covered in the live stream.

That said the point I really wanted to make in the live stream was the issue with the combat system in PvE isn't the combat system. It's that the mobs and encounters we have provided so far very rarely allow/encourage you to make use of the combat system as intended. There are some exceptions, but one of our goals with HoT is to help allow more room for players to experience the full range of the combat system in PvE. From the common world mobs up to the challenging group content we will talk about later, we are asking our design team to design encounters in PvE more focused on using the system we have built.

Hope that helps a bit! - CJ

More than anything, I'm just looking forward to seeing what this challenging content is.