Guild store still isn't a horrible place to get a new character. With 3 active raids and a bit mor guild currency for daily activities, you have enough to split it between farming the occasional new character and gear. Even diverting some to more characters, we can still farm more gear from there than before the new raid flooded us with more guild currency. I think they should also add the occasional character to the gw and arena store too even if it means less shard shop currency which I use for gear. Hopefully they'll stat putting some new ones in ship battles and a few more in cantina battles as well. Though hard nodes aren't the worse things either. While you can only do 5 battles a day, the refreshes are only half the cost for energy. If you pick 5 or so characters and farm them you can get them as quickly or more so than 5 cantina characters. You just get them all progressing together rather than one at a time. And if you have a need for one character, you can refresh the node for 50 crystals. For the 100 crystalsbit costs for a cantina refresh you can get an energy refresh and refresh the node. I don't refresh nodes often since I just farm multiple characters at once, so I'm not positive how many refreshes you can do before the price goes up. Assuming 2 or 3 you can actually farm characters as quickly from hard nodes as from hard cantina nodes for nearly the same cost (difference is hard nodes use 20 energy and hard cantina use 16).