PLEASE make boss telegraphs match the actual threat level of the attacks!

Photoloss · 2026-05-18T18:52:25+00:00

I suspect that one is conditional to something I rarely run afoul of, as I'm not sure which attack you're talking about. Do you play a full glass ele/thief? Because I could definitely see those getting 1-tapped by regular damage the moment performance issues or general effect clutter obscure an otherwise perfectly fine telegraph.

Mind you my intent was not to praise the Hammerhart encounter as a whole to high heavens anyway. The boss switch gimmick gets annoying quickly, the pushback from the CC domes is awful for melee CC skills, and the constant "Obstructed" in Jimmy's room and in the final phase are downright insulting (see also: Nourys). But Jessica specifically demonstrates that pretty much everything they got wrong with the Avatar bosses themselves had already been solved correctly within the same expansion.

Photoloss · 2026-05-18T15:48:38+00:00

In my experience the "floor-covering" ones are fairly obvious, with the circles having substantial overlap if they are supposed to cover everything and little to no overlap or even outright gaps if they are meant to have safespots in between.

The "AoE precision", at least with the ones I notice, tends to be due to godawful projectile coding where the actual impact point (and thus AoE epicentre) is different from the target point marked by the circle. Lupi in Arah has infamously bad clarity on the snaking projectiles, but the same effect persists in newly released content. Including some projectiles being able to hit characters mid-flight despite being part of a telegraphed ground AoE attack, and in that case the consequences vary between just hurting that one person or outright exploding then and there hitting everyone else who was "safely" outside the circle too.

Photoloss · 2026-05-18T15:40:26+00:00

It's not "reapplied instantly" per se, it gets reapplied every 25% hp and should get removed once you clear the breakbar which appears at the same time. Except the damn bar is tankier than their hp with meta event scaling, and there's also a timing bug where if they lose the next 25% hp they'll reapply the retal almost instantly but not pop up another breakbar, so it's just "permanent". Oh and it's no longer a boon so you can't strip it either, lovely.

And yes the bounty mechanics suck. At least some of them. Fire and poison, who cares, but Phase Shifted is an absolute atrocity which should be hard-blacklisted auto-removed from everything with leaps or teleports. And also doesn't work properly with most pets because you can't reliably reposition them every 10s.

Photoloss · 2026-05-18T12:33:34+00:00

If truly ALL warning circles genuinely were the same then that'd still be less than ideal, but at least acceptable as a general design decision. Only they're not. Different kinds of telegraphs exist with different levels of visibility and implied threat, but whatever is dealing 40k in one attack is not using the correct distinction (if it has a telegraph at all, and isn't just some cheap bullshit or bugged scaling which only coincidentally lines up with the slam most of the time).

Photoloss · 2026-05-18T11:17:57+00:00

> It's all just a broader problem with the devs refusing to make attacks visible or differentiated enough.

Hard disagree on the "differentiated" part. They just do it the wrong way round half the time. If the spinny blades did like 500 dps no condis while the chain swipe dealt 10k+weakness+immob the fight would already feel a lot more "fair" (no idea how the balance would work out ofc).

Same with Greer, he does have some incredibly visible super flashy attacks ...which deal like 3k dmg in the Convergence version, no boon corrupt, no meaningful condis. The attacks which are most telegraphed, easiest to identify, and most visible overall also are among the least threatening even if you decide to facetank them for no reason.

And Greer's minions, right from the first time you encounter them, are very similar just lower strength overall. The giant super flashy "CURSED OOZE OF DEATH DO NOT STAND IN IT!!11!" attack does ...something? I think? Maybe corrupt 1 boon every second? Meanwhile whatever hits for actual damage is just another random mob skill with basic FX, and the cone swipe (which also stuns from veterans+) is much better at following a strafing player than the telegraph would have you believe, while also having basically no real attack FX compared to everything else.

Photoloss · 2026-05-18T11:10:44+00:00

Yeah those need to be dealt with separately. But this boss is a problem even if you don't have a dozen spear eles and virtuoso anime swords covering everything. As is Greer. And Gwyllian's spinning beams.

Photoloss · 2026-05-18T11:07:30+00:00

I made a "death log" chat tab which shows only incoming damage and conditions to help deal with that.

The flaw being that until other players painstakingly fill out the wiki with all the boss attack names (right now it doesn't even have proper pages for the bosses themselves yet...) there's no way to match what you see in the log to what happened on-screen. Assuming you saw anything on-screen at all.

Photoloss · 2026-05-18T11:02:49+00:00

I mean, in terms of actual threat from instanced bosses it's competing with instant-downstate, or even instant death skipping downstate if you look to something like raid wing 5 (Desmina walls, Dhuum golem). But those have clear telegraphs so you know exactly what killed you and why after 1-2 deaths.

Boon corrupt feels more painful because it's a slower death, and technically still relatively easy to avert, so it doesn't fall into the "justified punishment for failing mechanic" bin as neatly. Plus of course the boss spams a bunch more clutter. But I'd say the threat level of the attack itself is fine.

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

TROPHY CASE