Looska's GW2 Blog

if you're making frostfang or astralaria then you might say you've

And a GW2 fact I don’t remember if I’ve shared: the reason that Falling Damage puts you in combat is because, for some reason, direct damage in GW2 can only happen/be applied to characters “in combat”. I’m guessing this may have to do with how combat actually works in GW2 ((You can use most skills/weapon attacks without a target, so I”m assuming that some of the weirdness comes from the ability to swing a weapon/do moves that should create damage w/o actually doing that damage)

Thinking more about this, it’s probably because GW2 is built on a very heavily modified GW1 engine. Guild Wars 1 had no movement verticality: you couldn’t jump at all. The engine was not built or programmed to have “gravity” or “fall damage” because it was unnecessary. Anything you could “jump down” was small enough to be treated by the game as a slope, and anything higher than that you just couldn’t move off of.