Guild Wars 2

So I came back for Living World Season 2 to see whether the 2 issues that made me stop playing at the end of Season 1 got somehow addressed …

My main (well I have a level 80 char in every profession) is a Necromancer. A Minion Master to be more precise. Because this is what I (would) like to play the most.
Minion AI had its ups and downs but to me it seems its at an all time low at the moment. My flesh golem obviously chose “gardener” as his new primary profession
while I was away.

Also, I was hoping for at least SOME game optimizations now that GW2 is close to its 2nd anniversary. Nope, didn’t happen. GPU still doesn’t matter. Number of CPU cores still doesn’t matter. Just single core performance affects game play and in crowded areas with a lot of spell effects FPS is just poor regardless of what computer you have.

Don’t get me wrong here. I don’t want to bash the game and/or the developers.
I loved playing GW1, I’m playing GW2 since open beta and I want this game to be good. That’s why I am so disappointed.

Fyi this was the last ‘kittened minion’ complaint thread. It’s just not worth playing MM at this point in time because you never know when your minions will participate in combat and when it won’t.

First off, if you want to complain about optimization do it correctly. I upgraded my GPU and went from 20 FPS on a good day at medium settings to over 60 FPS in all non-zerg content at just below ultra (reduced shadows), and still get 20 FPS in huge zergs while loading in a ton of character models at high quality. Their optimization might not be perfect, but if you have a good computer it makes a difference.

And of course there are plans to fix AI. It doesn’t mean it will happen tomorrow, next week, or in 2 years, but of course they would try to when it affects so many professions.

I must be lucky because GW2 runs great for me and the only time I notice a dip in performance is when 3 large zergs are fighting together. Other than that its pretty steady and my rig isn’t bad but it isn’t great either. 2gb 560Ti, i7 2.8ghz and 6gb DDR3 and bar the graphics card the rest was bought 4 year ago and in computer terms thats a long time to go without an upgrade.

Dont get me wrong i have turned down a few options in order to try and help more in WvW like shadows but I don’t need ultra shadows. The engine may not perform great in large scale combat but it’s far better than you think when you compare it against other games.

Just take a look at TOR they had to scrap their version of open world combat because of the limitation of their engine (couldn’t get it to work). Tera’s alliance v alliance is just a complete lag fest and thats without as many players on screen as GW2 can handle before bottling out. Then there is TSW which is even worse, it stutters really bad again when a cluster is together and sometimes it stutters even when there is just a few players on screen.

Altho ESO may run better thats because the animations look like your character is trying to hold in a fart and run at the same time. Then the armour is very basic so they designed things for the large scale combat but in turn it doesnt look as pretty. You can even go back to Warhammer Online and even in that the lag got horrendous when there was alot of enemy all clustered up in the tiny Tier 2 castle area.

Dont get me wrong there are a few tweaks that need done and all is not rosy but it’s not that bad compared against other games i’ve played.

I’m playing on a Alienware Laptop with a i7-4700MQ CPU and a GeForce GTX 770M GPU at 1920×1080 on Windows 8.1 with almost everything set to medium and shadows disabled entirely.

If it’s not too crowded and/or too much spell effects I easily get those 60FPS,
but the game makes terrible use of the available resources.

CPU goes to turbo mode (3.2 GHz), because mainly a single core is doing work, the fans start spinning due to increased CPU temperature while the GPU is almost idle.

This “heavy on the CPU” behavior is well known and hasn’t changed for 2 years now.
I don’t care, if other games run worse. I was just hoping that aNet could do better.

Just watch the CPU usage on the login screen (where you enter the password) to see how little the developers seem to care about wasting CPU cycles …

About the minion AI. I play a ranger, too. Ranger pets work pretty good across the board both melee, e. g. bears, cats, …, as well as ranged, e.g. devourer.

And I used to play GW1 with 7 heroes. So I know that aNet is capable of coming up with pretty good AI for NPCs.