HALLO I ANSWER UR QUESTIONS <3 OK, last batch for the moment, then I'm going to get some lunch and read the GW2 novel,
Ghosts of Ascalon. That's not shameless promotion, it actually IS what I'm going to be doing! Also the novel is quite good FO REELZ.
EVENTS: I like this! A question I can answer, and with specific examples! Whee!
Okay so - you're running by a field of wheat and you hear a farmer yell in panic that bandits are burning his hay. Maybe you help and put out the hay with water buckets, and you kill the bandits. Or maybe you're like "hey man, I'm an adventurer, and I got shit to DO" and you run right by - thus the bandits torch all the hay, and when you go into Shaemoor and you talk to the baker, she's like "hey, sorry, I can't sell you bread - we're fresh out since bandits torched all the wheat." Or a fisherman screams about a huge broodmother down by the dam - if you don't kill that critter, they can't fish down there, and you can't buy stuff from them.
Or how about this - there's a waypoint at the Shaemoor Garrison (which can be used to fast travel for a small fee). An event fires where centaurs attack the garrison. If they're not fought off, they'll knock out and imprison the Seraph protecting the fort, and take it over - thus deactivating the waypoint there. If you want to go to that Garrison and/or buy stuff from merchants there, you've got to retake it from the centaurs (which you can do alone, or join the force of NPC Seraph dispatched to try and take it back) Once you've got it back, that waypoint activates again, and you can revive the downed merchant to buy stuff from them.
These events aren't hidden, NPCs react to them happening, and their effects chain and spread throughout the world. You could level to max and then go back and look at different areas in the game, and very likely event chains that you'd never seen before would be happening, simply because when you played it before, maybe, say, you stopped those centaur from taking over the garrison, so you never needed to take it back. Maybe you prevented bandits from poisoning the water of Shaemoor so you never had to collect an antidote for it. These are small chains I'm talking about here - some of the ones you see in the world are like 5, 10+ events long, and branch in different directions.
...So yeah, it's pretty sweet
OMG HEALING: Each class's method of healing is absolutely different. Necros can summon a blood fiend, which does ranged damage to their foes until a hurt necro decides to reabsorb them as health. Rangers have Heal as One, a skill that heals both them and their pet. Warriors have a skill that gives them adrenaline as well as healing. And they can get different heal skills!
Also say I'm an elementalist and I'm killing the heck out of some dudes with my fire attunement. Then a friend comes along and is like "hey man let's take on some really tough ettins or something," and I'm like "eff yeah," and I swap to water attunement (which is more about life regen than fire's sweet, sweet damage), and now I have skills like Healing Rain that I can drop on an area to heal all friendly critters in that range. That's not even a specific Healing-slot skill, it's just a skill I've got on my staff that HAPPENS to heal.
WvWvW:
This probably has the best info current about it. We're not separating it by race, since we don't want to punish friends who don't all want to play as one race type. Also, the human nations have either fallen almost entirely (Ascalon is basically toast, the only thing remaining being the fortress city of Ebonhawke, which is basically under Krytan rule) or inaccessible (Palawa Joko took over Elona and cut it off from outside contact, and Cantha has been out of contact from the outside world for over a hundred years) - so human citizens of Divinity's Reach are simply counted as Krytan citizens (although their racial background may differ from the Krytan norm).
WHAT I DO: I was keeping coy about it before, but since I could give details at GamesCom, I can tell you all about it now - I'm working on the personal story part of the game (along with some incredible developers - which, hell, is in line with the rest of ArenaNet, in that EVERYONE there is amazing at what they do!). So when you play the demo (if you have at GamesCom or you will at PAX) and you go "oh hey, human storyline" - that's me and my team what did that. I'm using human here as a specific reference since it's what's out there on walkthroughs and such on the internets, but in general the development of the personal story for the player is what I'm doing. I loves it, I does
