As I said, I haven't updated in a while due to a script not working correctly which shrinks my screenshots down. Now that it is updated, I'm going to try to get caught up.... The following screenshots and stuff are all from late last year.

I spent some time finishing my Caladbold weapons collection. This involved getting even more of my characters through HoT missions. Here I am with Seven By Seven, my Soulbeast:

(It's funny, if you look in this screenshot, you see I encountered some weird error trying to get into the instance for the final battle... I don't recall what happened here, I assume I originally took this screenshot for support purposes and reported the bug to anet...)

I realize that there is an easier collection you can do which doesn't require repeating the missions, but that collection merely gets you the skins. I wanted the full fledged ascended weapons and the skins. That was more complicated, and required repeating the entire expansion on multiple characters.

Here I am about to enter the final battle:

And here I am fighting the last boss (not for HoT, but for the weapon):

Continuing my catching up, we now get to Wintersday 2017.

Wintersday is a pretty fun yearly event. It has several activities that I greatly enjoy doing.

One of them is this tower-defense style game where you help defend these dolyaks in the middle of the area from waves of increasingly difficult toys. The entire arena takes place in this miniaturized version of Tyria, complete with all of the nations represented. It's great fun. For the tower defense, you need to build a number of different types of obstructions to defend the dolyaks. Many are heavily inspired by siege in WvW. There's a limited number of siege you can place in a given location (just like WvW), so you need to be strategic and judicious in your placement.

You have arrow carts which rain down arrows on the enemies in arcing paths and snowmen who act as snipers tossing snowballs at targeted enemies. There are ballistas which target individual enemies with high damage assaults, and there are catapults which lob large ordinance at enemies or groups of enemies.

Then you have walls. Walls can be built up to slow or impede enemy units. They can also serve as elevated bases which you can place other sieges onto. This allows you to have both a barrier as well as a weapon in one spot. They are pretty handy.

The only key to a wall is placement. You want them to be on the path to the dolyaks. You want them to be at choke points which require enemies to deal with them and not go around them. You want them peppered along the way to the central area.

Where you don't want them is randomly placed where enemies wont be. For example, you don't want them placed along the outer edge of the arena, as some fucking idiot did here:

You also don't want to place the walls both outside the arena and between things like catapults so that their projectiles get blocked by the wall, like some other idiot did here:

I swear, some people are so fucking stupid....

More catching up...

There's a very fun bug in GW2 where they put in data for some armor which isn't entirely implemented. Usually when that happens, if you somehow get ahold of the chat code for it (generally done through data-mining) you can try to preview it, which will remove your amor and make your character nakey. Except, not really nakey because you lack certain things that, generally, naked bodies have. Still, pretty funny to get people to preview these when they aren't expecting them.

I've mentioned this before, but I love finding random places where mounts break the game and allow you to leave (or almost leave) the maps:

Finding map glitches were some of my favorite things back in FFXI (example, this awesome one where you can break into the water in the dunes), and I still love it today in GW2.

Argh... Fine... I did it.

I bought some mount skins...

Last year between the outcry over how expensive the mount skins were and the completely justified outcry over their mount skin lootbox bullshit, I vowed I'd never buy fucking mount skins.

...or I kind of vowed it. The exact vow was that I wouldn't buy any mount skins unless those mount skins I could buy were Super Adventure Box themed.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Super Adventure Box (SAB) is my favorite event in GW2. Hell, it may be my favorite game-mode, if you exclude WvW. And I'd pay top dollar for SAB mount skins with pixel-y goodness.

Well, they didn't bring out SAB mount skins. But they did bring out exo-suit mount skins, which look pretty damned SAB-y. In fact, they look SAB-y enough that I went ahead and got them. Fuck me...

So fine... here's my Griffon with the skin on my Under Neon Skys weaver ele:

Here she is with the bunny:

And here's the glorious puppy:

I should note that these weren't lootbox bullshits. These were straight up bought. I still won't do lootbox mount skin bullshit. Even so, they were over priced. Whereas the glider skins felt reasonable enough that I've bought several, the mount skins are way too expensive for that. I doubt I'll buy many more (if I ever buy any again) simply because they are probably twice what they should be.

Well, anyway, back to Under Neon Lights, my Weaver Ele... she does some monster damage. Check these numbers on teq! I have her set up for fractals, where her big deeps can be best used.