Xiahou Mao.9701

The issue seems to be related to the quantity of players present. Only the first X amount of players to tag the boss (be it Hablion or the Unbound Guardian) will get achievement credit. It doesn't have to do with dealing lots of damage, just arrive fast and hit it quickly to start. This has been an issue in the past with big events like world bosses, where only a certain number of players would get the champ bag drop from the Champion Svanir Shaman at Frozen Maw, for example. I did a lot of testing back then on whether it was related to a damage threshold or not, and came to the conclusion that it was just first come, first serve, and tagging the champion early would guarantee you its drops, while if you weren't among the first however-many players to tag it you'd miss out. While it would be nice for that long-standing bug to finally be fixed, the temporary fix for these achievements should be to tie achievement credit to event participation rather than a drop (apparently invisible this time) from the boss.

While you're levelling, test out all the weapons. You're already using S/D, so try out S/P, D/D and D/P as well, along with Shortbow, just to see how they play. When deciding what elite to aim for first, how well you're enjoying what you have should be a factor. Daredevil introduces Staff, which is a very strong melee option. If the current melee options for Thief don't really capture your interest, then Staff might be the improvement you need. On the other hand, if you're enjoying your play with mainhand Sword or mainhand Dagger, then consider Deadeye. While it introduces Rifle as a ranged weapon, most gameplay in GW2 should be focused on melee, so you'd still mainly be using Sword or Dagger as a Deadeye, just with the enhancements given by Deadeye's Mark to give you a lot of Quickness and improved stealth attacks, among other things. You can test either of these elite specs out in the PvP lobby, as long as you own the expansions. In PvP, you can set elite specs before you've unlocked them in PvE, so you can try out the new weapons and traits there on training dummies or even on NPCs in the lobby, without actually needing to play PvP games. A handful of traits might have differences between PvE and PvP, but you should get the gist of it.

The biggest issue I have with the templates is that they aren't really templates, they're loadouts. I had hoped that when I saved a template, it would be saved and able to be recalled by pressing whatever hotkey I assigned it, but that isn't the case. Any changes I make to whatever build or equipment I happen to be using at the time actively edits whatever template I'm on, changing it until I manually go back and edit it again. That's not really how templates are supposed to work. The only way around that without doing all that manual fixing is to store the template I want to preserve in Build Storage to retrieve later, and that only works with the build part, it has no effect on any equipment changes I might make. If it could be fixed so that whatever build and gear you're actively using is saved separately from your templates, so you can easily revert to the template whenever you want to, that would be a big improvement to the system and make me more inclined to buy extra slots.