Try Out Guild Wars 2's Three New Elite Specs In Next Week's Beta

Guild Wars 2 has had a busy week, wrapping up with this week's Guild Chat stream, which went into greater detail regarding the three elite specializations that were revealed over the past few days and will be arriving in the End of Dragons expansion. Those are:

• The Vindicator (Revenant), who calls upon a pair of legends from Canthan history and wields a greatsword "to deliver massive attacks and crush foes by leaping straight into battle instead of dodging."

• The Bladesworn (Warrior), who uses a new weapon type, the gunsabre, letting you live out all your Final Fantasy VIII Squall fantasies. Despite its violent-sounding name, it enables the Bladesworn to meditate and power up its attacks with magically imbued cartridges.

• The Catalyst (Elementalist), who takes a hammer into battle and summons jadetech spheres to focus their elemental power.

You can try out all three of the new specs in the free open beta event that kicks off next Tuesday, September 21. Just like with the last event, you'll be granted additional temporary character slots to try out the new builds anywhere in Tyria.

Finally, in non-expansion-related news, DirectX11 support is coming to Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet revealed today. As Senior Engine Programmer James Fulop put it, the decision was made upgrade to help the nine-year-old game "continue to look beautiful over time" and to grant the dev team options to "do more shiny things," which is frankly all any of us ever wanted.