Information overload! ArenaNet Game Designer Jon Peters has taken to the Guild Wars 2 blog to talk about some of the new changes they've made to attributes and traits in Guild Wars 2. Since the press closed beta test, new attributes have been added to the game in the form of Prowess (increases damage multiplier on crits), Malice (improves damage done by conditions), Expertise (increases duration of conditions), Concentration (improves duration of boons applied by character), and Compassion (improves all outgoing heals from your character). Unique profession-specific attributes have also been added that uniquely affect the profession at hand (ie: Engineers get "Ingenuity," which reduces the cooldown on tool-belt skills. 

The above changes were added in to give players more of a build choice when creating their character in Guild Wars 2. Jon Peters also goes into detail regarding GW2's trait system, with the big change being that all major traits should have 12 traits to choose from, as opposed to the usual 7 (occasionally we'd get 12 to choose from) that we had during the press closed beta.

All in all, this has me really excited to fine-tune my tanking dual-dagger wielding Elementalist even more, so let's hope ArenaNet gives me that option for major traits when the next beta rolls around.