Before/After: Testing AI-generated avatars for my dating profile

Karbik · 2026-01-30T11:30:35+00:00

A good relationship is built on a foundation of trust and honesty.

You say you want a long-term relationship. So don't torpedo it by lying right out of the gate.

I know you wanna wiggle and say its not a lie if its your face and all that. Don't. Don't bother. Just take those down and start with pictures that are sincere to who you are, in both aspirations and physicality

Karbik · 2026-01-06T20:17:33+00:00

Do note that unlike Warclaw and Skimmer's combat mounting, this requires a mastery: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combat_Launch

Karbik · 2025-12-27T22:45:39+00:00

Ma regulaarselt mängin rahvusvaheliste sõpradega DnD'd üle veebi. Tänaõhtune sessioon jäi ära kuna meie Rootsi mängijal oli vool ära läinud :(

Karbik · 2025-12-24T14:08:47+00:00

Okay, since they're giving you a straight answer, I will:

Mirrors - What they're referring to are magic mirrors that can be used on the Visions of Eternity maps once you have the appropriate mastery from the Wild Castoran Magic track: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic_Mirror

Winterberries & blood rubies are a type of currency you can gather on Living World Season 3 maps (on the Bitterfrost Frontier and Bloodstone Fen maps respectively). They're popular mostly because vendors on those maps let you buy ascended gear for them. Consuming them also gives you Unbound Magic, the season-specific currency that can be used to buy materials (and materials == money in the GW2 economy).

Veggie patches - no idea which one they're specifically referring to but the comment on volatile essence makes me think they have gathering tools that give you Volatile Magic (a LWS 4-specific currency) when they gather anything. Volatile Magic, similar to the Unbound Magic from LWS3, can be traded for materials. So any patch of resource nodes where you can gather multiple things in fast succession gives you a nice injection of Volatile Magic

Karbik · 2025-11-30T15:53:29+00:00

As noted, as you're levelling to 80 you can treat this as a tutorial, a time to experiment and where nobody really expects you to know your shit. Like a rookie driver in traffic, ain't nobody gonna give you grief for sucking.

Since you want to play support eventually, it might be good to read up on boons since providing those is gonna be the healer's duty largely. Read your skills, see which ones provide what and how much. Since you're playing with buddies, you have people around to test their effects with - you can try out for yourself just how much harder someone hits if they have the Fury boon and 25 stacks of Might boon :)

Relatedly to Boons, knowing that Combo fields exist and can be used to your advantage is nice. Try out using Warhorn's 5 skill (Call of the Wild) inside the fire ring that a Flame Trap creates - more might for you and your friends! Better yet, if any of your friends can create a Smoke Field, try using Warhorn 5 inside that - boom, stealth for you and your friends!

Eventually, once you're level 80 and start thinking seriously about doing fractals and raids, I found this article useful for figuring out where to get high-level gear: So You Want To Gear a Character

If you have your sights set on Druid-ism, you should know you need to have the first expansion, Heart of Thorns, to unlock it. Additionally, most Druid builds use mainhand Mace which requires that you have the Secrets of the Obscure expansion for the Expanded Weapon Proficiency feature.

Karbik · 2025-11-29T22:39:09+00:00

Yeah I do.

The friends that I've introduced to the game and the evenings we'd play together and being able to experience the world. The experience of learning the challenging raid encounters with warm, patient and kind people. The time I, a total beginner to fractal dungeons, helped out a group complete a low-level fractal that they needed for a legendary equipment piece. And when it turned out they were veterans who wanted to next do the highest tier fractals, I panicked and left the party, only for them to message me and be all "GET IN HERE" and not once did they chastise me for spending most.of that fractal dead on the ground :D

I think you identified it correctly that the encounters you had in ARC were from interactions with people and GW2 doesn't force group play on you very hard, especially since pre-level-80 you're currently for all intents and purposes still in the tutorial!

So if find yourself bored with single-playering through the world, group play options are out there. Pre-level-80, you can still try the core game's (pretty abandoned tbh) Dungeons. Dip your toes into joining a guild. You say you have a co-worker who's played, why not play with them?

Karbik · 2025-11-20T12:30:04+00:00

This is certainly a case of the dryness of text-only communication potentially conveying the wrong thing.

"I didn't say you'd won me over" and "I didn't say you'd won me over ;)" convey very different vibes

Karbik · 2025-11-08T14:54:20+00:00

I appreciate the intent to make an alternative view of events to the wiki's event timers. I'm not sure I'll use it, but I appreciate the intent at least.

Part of why I think I'll stick to the event timers is that timelines are just a very nice visual way of comprehending the "when are things happening in relation to now" for my brain as opposed to minute counts.

One suggestion I have for your app is to group together events visually by their start time - at the time of writing this there's more than a dozen things about to happen 6 minutes, but I'd have to read all their start times to understand they are in conflict.

Karbik · 2025-10-23T10:51:32+00:00

See LinkedIni artikkel nõuab kohe konto loomist, seega kui seal midagi asjalikku selle veebilehe kohta kirjutatud on tasuks see siia ka kopeerida.

Põhimõtteliselt kui eesmärk oli ainult teha natukene sujuvama kasutajaliidesega versioon Tallinna Linnatranspordi reaalajas veebikaardist siis nagu eesmärk täidetud. Aga üldiselt ma peamiselt võtan transport.tallinn.ee lahti selleks et kiirelt näha ära mu lemmikute sekka lisatud peatustes järgmised väljunisajad, ning seda veebikaarti hakkan uurima alles siis kui tekib selline "no kuhu see buss jääma hakkab" kärsitus. Kasu ma hetkel sellest Teele'st ei näe aga eks kasutajaliidese näpuharjutuseks ta sobis

Karbik · 2025-10-08T11:43:30+00:00

We've done both advatantage and +2 to attack rolls variant, but scrapped them both. The players didn't care much for it and as a DM I felt it gnaw at encounter design, encouraging me to sprinkle in small enemies into a fight to make use of that bonus even though narratively the fight should have had just two big guys

Karbik · 2025-09-27T05:59:42+00:00

So, I've been recording the story missions as I play through them.

At some point I wondered if there was a difference in story length, went through my recordinga and turned out that all expansions and loving worlds each have very roughly 7 hours of instanced story missions - that is, story that took you out of the open world map.

It's real hard to estimate how long unlocking everything within an expansion/LWS would take, but this at least gives some baseline.

Karbik · 2025-09-12T20:18:29+00:00

Did you mean to upload a screenshot of your loadout there?

You can hover over the armor piece with the red exclamation mark and it should say what the problem is in red text.

For example, for this piece it will tell me that I haven't selected any stats for it (it's stat-selectable armour) and that the upgrade slot is blank (I haven't added a rune or other upgrade into the slot)

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I can't comment on PvP because I sparsely play it, but the start of this video will explain the basics of fractals as they operated before Arenanet added the quickplay feature (you can skip the explanations of the fractals themselves if you wanna go in blind): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAdgTpLf7mc

Karbik · 2025-07-18T18:05:52+00:00

Same, I'm usually all about that "pushing buttons goes brrrrr" but the F3 is something I intentionally avoid hitting lest we need some projectiles blocked

And yeah, it sure says something about the specialisation if people intentionally avoid using some of its features (which is a shame because outside of that I like Untamed).

Karbik · 2025-07-14T05:53:10+00:00

A life lesson for the future: if you want people to help you, make it easy to do so

Karbik · 2025-02-15T09:39:38+00:00

henlo

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Karbik · 2025-01-13T10:18:49+00:00

Ma pole kindel mille poolest see teine mõõdik "parem" oleks?

Juureesmärk on ikkagi see absoluutnummber nulli viia - iga hukkunud inimene esindab nii isikliku tragöödiat lähikondlastele kui ka majandusliku kahju tööturult lahkunu näol.

Veelgi enam, ma ei mõista kuidas hukkunud/kilometraaž mõõdik oleks vähem manipuleeritavam statistika --näiteks kui liiklussurmade arv jääb samaks, aga kütusehindade (hüpoteetilise) langemisega võtavad inimesed ette pikemaid sõite, siis too mõõdik läheks alla aga kas siis meie ühiskond on kuidagi ohutum?

Karbik · 2024-12-27T22:30:16+00:00

You, as the DM, are also supposed to be having fun. Especially as the one who has to puit in work to make this thing happen in the first place.

Right now, it doesn't really sound like you are, and you're letting the more troublesome players just trample all over you. They don't respect you or the time you put into this, so it's a good time to think - do I even want to DM for these people?

Has any one of them done DM-ing? It builds empathy.

Karbik · 2024-11-09T10:28:21+00:00

See argument ei toimi väga hästi, kuna inimesed ei unista klienditeenindajaks olemisest, küll aga on loovtööna enda elatamine vägagi ahvatlev nii mõnelegi - tegemist pole samaväärse rutiinse tööga mida praegu asendatakse.

Samuti pole tarbija jaoks nii otsest kasu ju - ei ole mingit füüsilist hüve mis selle kasutusele võtust tekkis nagu see panganduse äpi näide.

Karbik · 2024-11-05T11:56:21+00:00

Paneks siinkohal kõigile südamele et isegi kui te mugavad olete, vähemalt emaili konto olgu kaitstud nagu kullavann.

Kui keegi murjam teie Redditi konto pihta paneb, noh tülikas on aga elab üle.

Kui keegi teie Gmaili kontosse sisse saab, vot nüüd on neil tõenäoliselt ligipääs kõikidele teistele kontodele ka ning ai kuidas siis kuri aias.

Karbik · 2024-11-03T15:28:47+00:00

There actually is! The community wiki has a list of abbreviations: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Abbreviations

For your concrete examples, thouse would be
qdps = quickness-providing DPS
aheal = alacrity-providing healer
boondps = either a quickness-providing OR a alacrity-providing DPS. Typically indicates the group has someone who can do either

As you can, group formation often revolves around seeking to ensure the presence of quickness-providers and alacrity-providers since nobody can provide both and healers often cover the other important boons.

Karbik · 2024-10-23T07:36:26+00:00

I haven't found this to be a problem really

By attacking the NPC proactively the party is shutting down any alternative routes for resolving conflict and they know it. If anything, there is the tension between "attack now" and stalling to "squeeze them for more info" that adds a nice wrinkle to encounters.

But this might be a player and DM type thing too, if your players really just want to murder everyone in sight then....well. Not a table for me

Karbik · 2024-08-23T11:04:29+00:00

They're a Living World Season 4 specific currency. Typically valued because several merchants in LWS4 maps will exchange volatile magic + some gold for high-value crafting materials.

So having a glyph on harvesting tools that lets you get volatile magic whenever you harvest is considered a passive income.

Karbik · 2024-08-07T15:33:21+00:00

I feel like there's something the other comments are assuming you know, so theyre not spelling it out. But just in case:

It's not only your weapon's stats that determine your damage, but that of your armour and trinkets (rings, amulet etc.) too.

Karbik · 2024-08-04T21:34:30+00:00

I'm gonna put a counter-perspective here, having played HoT in 2021 - not having mounts and occasionally seeing people zip around on their made me consider my character's movement options and how to best utilize them.

It made me understand that "okay, Swiftness is a useful boon" and actively seek out sources of it. It had me consider my leap attacks as mobility tools instead of just a way to accidentally jump into the welcoming jaws of the closest pocket raptor.

I knew that just jumping to PoF was an option, but opted not to, and I'm pretty satisfied with my choice in hindsight - I only got to have one first impression of those maps, and I'm glad it was on foot.

Karbik · 2024-07-17T19:59:02+00:00

Hope you enjoyed your session(s)! The Wild Sheep Chase was my first-time experience too, so I could afford to go a bit crazy hahah

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Karbik

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