Guild Wars 2

Hello!

I have just started downloading GW2 for my Macbook Pro (Early 2011 version). Specs are below. I was wondering what kind of performance I should expect given my machine specs? I am completely new to GW2, by the way. Assuming I would have to play at completely low settings, how bad will the game look? The client will take another 5,000 years to complete (7 hours into the download and I am at 14% (nearly 4GB, Around 180-220 kb/s, ~245,000 files remaining).

CPU: 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory: 16GB 1333 MHz DDR3 (recently upgraded from 4GB standard)
Hard Drive: 1TB Crucial M550 SSD
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 3000 (512 MB), and AMD Radeon HD 6750M (1GB/1024MB)

I have the same MBP as you and the performance is decent. If you put everything to max you’d end up fluctuating around 15-35fps, it really depends on the area. But if you put everything at mid (the game still looks great) it should run really well.

Honestly, if you can install Windows via bootcamp and run GW2 through there I would suggest doing so. It’s what I do and the fps is much much higher at max settings, since it is actually a decent laptop.

Ok cool! Great to hear! Two more questions.

What about PvP? WvW? I understand that any content involving tons of people at once shooting skills and everything WILL slow things down. Also, PvP will be a very long way off for me (though I understand that you can do PvP and be scaled to lvl 80).

Do you use the Mac Beta client at all? I don’t think I’ll be doing bootcamp (I can’t justify the purchase of Windows OS at the moment).

Another quick question. To actually do season 2 living story content, I need to buy it? Or do I need to buy it only for rewards?

Living Story season 2 is done in episodes, if you log in during an episode you unlock it forever for free. So logging in now will unlock episode 3 – but if you want to play 1&2 you would need to pay for them. They don’t have any huge rewards or anything, so I would only pay for them if you want to play through those story arcs.

PvP can be played pretty much instantly, when you switch to PvP your level, skills and traits are all scaled up to level 80. WvW is a different story, your level is scaled up but your skills and gear are not, so you might want to wait till you level up a bit.

You’ll probably need to lower the settings for PvP and WvW, but the visual quality should still be ok, just not insanely pretty. WvW zergs pretty much kill your FPS regardless unfortunately :S

I personally don’t use the mac beta client, bootcamp is just soo much faster, but if it isn’t an option for you then the mac beta should work out just fine

You can buy Living Story updates that you have missed with the in game currency “Gems”. You can also buy gems with real life money. Or you can buy gems with Gold that you have earned while playing the game, depending on your financial situation I suppose.

There is an additional skill and some more goodies (rewards? nothing OP though) for the digital deluxe edition but here as well, you will be able to upgrade this with gems.

http://buy.guildwars2.com/store/gw2/en_IE/html/pbPage.buyguildwars2

fox said the rest

have fun with gw2!

So I should expect the performance fox mentioned on the beta client? Thanks!

Also, I am now at 75% O.o. Download jumped a ton overnight.

Sammael.2430:

So I should expect the performance fox mentioned on the beta client? Thanks!

Also, I am now at 75% O.o. Download jumped a ton overnight.

It’s probably worth pointing out that the download percentage relates to the percentage of files downloaded, rather than the size. So the first few files the client downloaded were probably much larger files (hence the progress going slowly). This applies to patches/updates as well. Not a great system as it isn’t very indicative of how much time is left :S