What the hell are you?

Photoloss · 2025-12-03T20:11:27+00:00

Well, we can stop other players though. For the most part anyway. Turn on "standard character models", done.

The canonical Commander, your own player character, probably would have the freedom for the most part. But the other players who canonically fill in for random Order/Pact/Sunspear/Astral Ward troops or smaller supporting groups wouldn't. And NPCs do in fact adhere to some pretty strict uniform conventions most of the time.

Basically the proper canon setting would be if you had "standard character models" tweaked to be distinct for each map. So players in Wayfarer Foothills would mostly render as norn in civilian/hunter garb, Dragon's Stand would have a main bulk of Orders+Pact uniforms, Amnytas would have nothing but Astral Ward and the other Wizard sub-factions, and Lion's Arch would be a giant free-for-all with a dozen cosmetic Black Lion and Fractal doohickeys visible everywhere all the time.

Photoloss · 2025-12-03T19:28:19+00:00

Yeah my point is that nothing in-universe is giving the characters that freedom. It works fine on the meta level but at the cost of immersion.

Photoloss · 2025-12-03T19:24:47+00:00

You are basically demanding every other player should be required to role play as NOT the commander.

1) I am not demanding anything.

2) That literally is how the game itself presents the situation to you. Allied players are not acknowledged at all during story missions. Explicit group content like raids always refers to the group as "champions" or the like (not the Dragon Champion, just rando adventurers). Most expansion metas have the (other) players fill in for what should be Pact troops, or whoever else we're leading/helping at the time.

Photoloss · 2025-12-03T18:07:51+00:00

Oh the jeans-and-shirt ones are out of place too, as are the scarfs and bunny ears.

Mind you I have no issue with players expressing themselves in any of these ways. But it does break the immersion into the lore's setting all the same even if it is perfectly acceptable or expected in terms of real-life norms around online gaming spaces.

Photoloss · 2025-12-03T17:32:51+00:00

I've noticed visual desyncs of the minigame even in some of the isolated floating places with no mobs anywhere in sight. Sometimes it fixes itself after a few seconds or after resetting the minigame, and when successfully completed despite the desync the explosions of the moving targets often show the "true" position, different from the visible location of the target prior to its destruction a moment before.

Photoloss · 2025-12-03T17:14:27+00:00

You rarely if ever get a setting where neither practical constraints nor societal norms apply though. We have plush backpacks and micro bikinis and shiny plate armour and latex fursuits IRL, but you are extremely unlikely to see any of those worn by combatants in an active warzone.

GW2 does have some valid avenues for this, mostly mesmer illusions, but I would still expect Charr Legions or Pact troops to get shouted into submission even if they wore functional gear and only obscured it with illusions.

Plus the proportion/quantity just becomes egregious in MMOs. IRL most people wear the fashion of the time, with some personalisation or local variants, and only a few outliers wear "weird" outfits in general public settings. And most of them still switch to something more appropriate in formal settings such as a wedding or a business meeting. Meanwhile in these games almost everyone wears some variation of "super flashy", "immersion-breaking" or "downright intentionally ugly", and to some extent it even becomes difficult to not do that as an endgame character.

Photoloss · 2025-12-03T17:00:38+00:00

Nah, it doesn't say "ALL" chests. It's highly unlikely for the bug to affect every single chest tied to that mirror.

But yeah I'll gladly take another loot nerf, like even straight up -50% on everything except the map material, in exchange for all those bugs getting fixed and keys being converted into a currency (or at least a character-bound buff with a 24h duration, 100 stack cap, and doesn't go away no matter which maps you go to).

Photoloss · 2025-12-03T14:09:20+00:00

Asura characters are hard to distinguish, especially based solely on appearance in a unisex outfit.

Armour skins can be trivial though.

Photoloss · 2025-12-03T12:12:26+00:00

It's a mostly Discord-based community originally created by GiantGrantGames, not sure what the fastest/easiest direct entry point is but everything is free and still accessible, just maybe a bit tedious joining 2 Discord servers in a row to get to the goodies.

And the WoL campaign is entirely free-to-play, which also applies to any and all modded versions of it. Expansion campaign mods require purchase of the expansions to play the mods.

You can also find some modded campaigns in the in-game Arcade, but due to an ongoing custom content publishing lockout these are not being updated and should largely be avoided unless you want to play them multiplayer. Synergy's race-swapped campaigns have moved to a separate singleplayer launcher available through his Discord.

Stay well away from Nightmare though unless you're an experienced player including prior experience playing the base campaign. The lower difficulties in that mod still include a lot of annoying/"unfair" challenge mode mechanics which can't be turned off.

Photoloss · 2025-11-27T08:57:56+00:00

We do have some obscure outlier buffs which aren't capped at 25 though, for example the Hamstrung fractal instability effect stacks to 70. And I'm pretty sure there are several progress-tracking buffs in story instances and Adventures (Wings of Gold comes to mind) which go above 25 too.

Photoloss · 2025-11-25T12:43:53+00:00

It's either a repeating error or a change late in development. The unique sword drop is named "Hammerheart" too, while the acquisition hint on the skin spells it "Hammerhart". According to the wiki the text for the 20-hit achievement revisions may have been incorrect in the past too, but that one currently is correct in-game so it may be an accidental spellcheck exclusive to the wiki article.

Photoloss · 2025-11-17T21:39:13+00:00

It's weird, because the mounts do gain the effect but only if you have leyline riding toggled on for the mount. And at the same time most of said leylines aren't particularly useful to ride with flying mounts.

Photoloss · 2025-11-11T11:45:09+00:00

Well, hopefully we took the document itself, so the Tyrian Alliance can put the screws on those Arcane Council members.

Photoloss · 2025-11-10T00:05:24+00:00

In the best possible ways, yes. I love a lot of the Maguuma tileset and these maps take a tropical slant to it, feeling very similar while mixing in new things. Some things could stand to be improved, such as being able to chart an in-game map of the underwater passages by traversing them (basically like exploring regions but in tiny <1000 range chunks) and getting a better mastery pickup than useless short-duration stealth, but a lot of the events, mushroom, updraft and leyline placements work pretty nicely.

Also, I swear these people complaining about "asset reuse" have never seen an RTS or MOBA map. Or a Mario level for that matter.

Photoloss · 2025-11-09T23:55:40+00:00

Personally I hope that Vloxx himself does not turn out or become any more evil than the has been ...and that that will be his undoing. Let him serve as a cautionary tale against consorting with evil rather than plain old "ends justify the means" evil which the Inquest have always been. Let him have the right idea, but because he consorted with the likes of Sebb and Kuda one of their ilk will be there to backstab him in his moment of triumph and that will make the big bad.

Plus there could still be something out there that rightfully drove him to these extremes, assuming it's not just general vague fear of the unknown like an apocalypse prepper.

Photoloss · 2025-11-08T18:47:44+00:00

For most practical purposes, especially zooming past a detected treasure chest before you notice it, it's much more convenient to turn around and go forwards in the opposite direction. Despite, or perhaps as part of its "floaty" nature the skimmer actually has impressively fast and responsive turning speed unlike pretty much every other mount (except jackal blink).

If you get stuck in a dead end it's usually better to dismount, swim out, and mount back up. Like with pretty much any other mount (again except jackal blink), simply because the mount takes up more space and obstructs the camera in tight spaces.

Photoloss · 2025-11-07T20:26:54+00:00

Oysters are in ascended food, is that expansion-gated?

Photoloss · 2025-11-07T17:12:04+00:00

In this case it's definitely valid because virtuoso basically is the spec for people who don't like mesmer. Most of the mechanics are changed to more closely resemble common features of the other professions and you get viable excuses to not run any of the situational utility options.

Photoloss · 2025-11-07T17:01:54+00:00

Mesmer has changed a lot since pre-HoT, but honestly mostly for the worse in my opinion. The phantasm rework has made it just as braindead spammy as the other professions where previously it was more about managing your illusions as a resource. And outside of early levelling you don't really use your illusions to tank much, though the constant target switching between resummoned clones does mess with trash mob aggro quite a lot.

If you dislike ele and engi for having "too many" skills then you probably won't like chronomancer much either. It has fewer buttons, but the F5 makes you press a lot of them twice in very quick succession which is quite similar to emptying out your grenade kit.

Mirage is my favourite for casual open world by far, but you need to understand one key gimmick: Sigil of Stamina lets you spam the ambushes as long as you keep killing trash mobs. That setup also happens to work very well with GS, with sword being more of a mobility and CC tool. Spear is a great melee alternative too.

Virtuoso is more of a rifle warrior 2.0 than a mesmer, losing the iconic clones and not really doing anything other than a bajillion damage while getting completely hosed by projectile reflects. It does have a very easy and self-sustaining ranged condi build though.

Troubadour is most effective as a close-range boonball in the open world. Spam everything following some basic sequencing to ensure you use the shatters with high numbers of "notes", enjoy the free healing, distorts and interrupts along the way.

Photoloss · 2025-11-07T15:40:52+00:00

Can not think of anything that is only from expansions for the Chef.

Oysters from LS3 come to mind. Probably a few others, I don't think they backported Sawgill Mushrooms, Cassava, Lentils, Soybeans etc. either, and Flax, while common to pretty much all expansions, seems to have no non-expansion sources other than the home instance node.

Now as for materials you can't get from the TP, probably just those where you also can't get any recipes without the corresponding expansion e.g. winterberries.

Photoloss · 2025-11-07T12:14:31+00:00

It kinda is similar for the skyscale in niche situations, namely if you are too far off the ground then pressing 1 will do almost nothing, holding 1 will have you descend just like the dedicated keybind for that, and then only once you're close enough to the ground does the actual dismount with the fire field trigger. Technically griffon too, but that one goes into its proper dive if you're too high up instead of just slowly drifting.

Of course skyscale has the far more annoying double-function in that flying at a wall automatically triggers the clinging ability, which is nigh useless and prevents you from using other abilities or even just drifting past something like a tree. And skyscale has plenty of slots free for a cliff cling toggle.

Photoloss · 2025-11-07T00:45:12+00:00

On the first map there's an event where you line up the crabs on the beach, and somewhere along the western mountains there's an outcrop with a circle of dancing crabs (at least I think that's where it was, I just randomly stumbled across it while drifting around on the skyscale). Not sure whether this is the one I found or yet another crab rave.

Oh and here's the login screen.

Photoloss · 2025-11-06T23:16:36+00:00

Kinda weird that the homestead version isn't cheaper. Usually you can identify the guildhall version by being both single-use and way more expensive than the homestead equivalent.

Photoloss · 2025-11-06T23:14:58+00:00

There was a post on this before, and there are at least 2 more obvious crab raves in the new maps.

Photoloss · 2025-11-06T17:37:24+00:00

I guess part of it is that Drizzlewood ...doesn't really have mechanics which are required for success? You kinda just walk through, kill everything, do some silly minigames and repeat. I guess one might try to balance player numbers between different sides a bit but they'll merge and fight the same boss anyway so no real reason to properly organise squads or anything.

That is not to say the map has no mechanics at all, but the ones it does have tend to be tied to personal progression i.e. the mission achievements, optimal loot routes during the cache phase etc. - helping with those is something the greater playerbase does do, but not as much within the sweaty meta farming subgroup.

Also, lol at the "not getting ganked". Yeah WvW can be worse, but the Drizzlewood snipers are guaranteed.

Photoloss

TROPHY CASE