In case you missed the big news from PAX South of the weekend, well, ArenaNet finally quashed all of our wild speculations by finally confirming that there will be a Guild Wars 2 expansion: Heart of Thorns. Since then, we've been getting some tidbits of information trickling out, through the official forums, Twitter, Reddit and any other internet medium. Since Guild Wars 2 launched in August of 2012, it's kind of a big deal that an expansion has been announced, regardless of how long we've been speculating that we'd hear the news.

On Twitter, Guild Wars 2 writer John Ryan (who my fingers keep trying to rename to Jake Ryan and I had to fix that three times now) tweeted that they won't just be boring ol' buildings. “Guild Halls, baby. Happy to say I'm working on the narrative for it.” Yeah, so, narratives for guild halls. How cool is that? We know that guild halls will be claimable and growable, but not really much else. Even though we have these descriptions, we still don't know exactly what ArenaNet has up their sleeve. While it's fun to speculate (which is pretty much all the discussion on Reddit in regards to this tweet is, and mostly about whether or not there should be guild hall related anything on the Gem shop). I loved guild halls in EverQuest II, so it'll be fun to learn more about this new game system. If ArenaNet does it right, this will give guilds, regardless of size, another way to interact within themselves, but still not shutting off the outside world.

Speaking of speculation, there was an unofficial after party Q&A that happened during PAX South. Over on Reddit, some folks are putting together a list that's part wild speculation, part rumor, and a good bit of truth. Whether or not polearms are not coming to game, gliding kept out of certain maps, or what precursor crafting will look like are all labeled as rumor at this point, but if you are like us, you like speculating about Guild Wars 2, so you should definitely check out the thread. Have some rumors that can't be sourced? Give us a yell in the comments!

Lastly, over on the official forums, Colin Johanson dropped a huge chunk of news that has people fairly excited, but once again, wildly speculating over how this will work:

Now that the HOT is out of the bag, we’re able to update this thread with more details. With the introduction of the new account based mastery system for end-game progression and growth in PvE, we’ll also be re-evaluating our other systems of character progression to ensure they match our over-all pillars and goals for Gw2.

 

In doing so: we’re going to be removing the current trait unlocking system currently on live and replacing it with a more simplified system that supports where skills-traits-specializations are going in the future. We’ll go into more details between now and the release of HOT on how skills, traits, and specializations will work in the new Gw2 world.

Beyond the speculation for the Mastery system, people keep asking for when this change will be expected and whether or not they'll have to wait until Heart of Thorns is released, stating that they've been discussing these issues for ten months already. The players in this thread are stating that while they're trying to be patient here, knowing this change is coming before the expansion would make them feel better.

Not into wild speculation? Lewis has been busy at work collecting all of the things that we do now and getting those posted as individual guides, features, and news articles here on TTH. So you don't have to go looking for them, see our current promotion, where you can find links to everything in one place! Even better, as more confirmed information comes out, this promo node will be updated with it.