1) They’ve toned down the spell effects a lot. A lot. It was amazing to throw axes through a fire wall whilst fighting alongside 10-20 other people and still be able to tell exactly which flaming axes were mine.
2) My day job and commute spared me the worst of the server/login drah-HAH-ma, and it wasn’t long before ANet brought down the servers for 30 minutes, then came back up incredibly improved performance. My Asus GJ73JH is pulling ~40fps no matter who’s on screen at the time, but obviously it’s a bit of a crapshoot whether you have the lucky good PC build or the unlucky scorned PC build. Reminds me of the early Rift semi-open beta weekends.
3) Older lady face.
Casual Is As Casual Does 
You need to post the sliders for that face; that’s amazing.
I’m still surprised at the variety the creator can make, and you wouldn’t think it looking at the premade faces.
That was a pre-made face!
I’ll try to show off the character I made using sliders vs. the default face in a later post, if I can re-create them (the screenshots came out borked at the actual moment of creation); the amount of versatility was definitely nice.
I actually still had performance issues into the night but only when i was hanging out in very early areas. Once you start to move out of there it really helps.