Glitch Sootpaw

Originally named Cortana, the unpredictability of her designs quickly earned her the nickname Glitch among her warband. While they always performed their primary function properly and effectively, they also consistently managed to somehow manifest an unexpected feature or flaw, depending on your point of view. Her Ghostbore musket's effectiveness against ghosts actually originated from the discovery of one such quirk, and its success helped her to finally accept her new name, as it proved not all glitches are necessarily bad. It also motivated her to finally start working toward her dream: an actual autonomous weapon. While her initial prototype turrets did work in that fashion, they were immobile, and usually of a singular focus, which was far from ideal. The sacrifices needed to allow quick deployment also shortened their lifespan, though at least the components could be collected and reused afterwards.

This led her to look into the study of golemancy, which turned out to be a dead end initially. Despite her Priory connections, she was seldom able to get a look at an actual intact, working Asura golem, but applying a few tricks from them allowed her to cobble together what would later be called gyros. A first step, but like the turrets, they were each built for a single purpose, and had an even shorter operational lifespan.

Finally, once Cantha's technology became available she was able to make another breakthrough. Rather than the reliable and well-known steam-ley machinery she had been utilizing before, she instead leveraged the concentrated power output of a dragonjade reactor in a miniaturized housing to create a true mechanical warrior: her Jade Sentry. Unfortunately, due to its reliance on dragonjade, it proved unable to be mass produced by the Iron Legion, given the supply problems following Soo-Won's passing. Regardless, her mech has proved useful to her both on and off the battlefield, much like Zojja's Mr Sparkles. Her software skills proved less polished than she'd hoped, however, and occasionally the simple intelligence in the machine would live up to her name and select subpar targets. To combat this, she linked it to her headset so she can quickly override its judgement subroutines when needed.

Her new understanding of jadetech also allowed her to reconfigure her armor's steam-ley enhancements with dragonjade-powered superchargers, increasing her natural strength and aim sevenfold. Her experiments with jetpacks proved unsatisfactory on the other paw, so she returned to her old reliable assault glider design, which with the new enhancers proved much less unwieldly to carry around. After all that time in Maguuma Jungle, it felt safer to have it available, than not.

When I first started playing Guild Wars 2 and looked at the options, I saw an option that had a "giant" robot with a ROCKET PUNCH! and immediately had to make that my first character. It also helped that the steampunk-ish charr lend themselves well to the engineering profession... especially considering that the Iron Legion, the faction focused most on engineering, is the one that controls the base game charr areas. I started with a rifle, as a gun felt fitting, and the first thing you do in the personal story is build a special rifle, but eventually I switched to my pistols as my primary weapon setup. Rifle is strong, and I still pull it out for fights where it's more fitting, but pistols have so many neat little gimmicks built into them for engineers that it feels more appropriate for a tinkerer to use those instead.

I do pull out other characters for special roles in group content sometimes, such as my deadeye Athena, but Glitch is still my main to this day, with 3/4 of my total playtime last I looked. She also remains my canon Commander among my characters, or at least the closest thing to it. My paragon Rhea may be more fitting for a leadership role, but Glitch is the only one I've taken through every story, from the Ghostbore Musket, to Castora and beyond.