Guild Wars 2

I have a late 2009 27" iMac that I would like to do some upgrades to. Not just for the sake of playing GW2, but that’s definitely a factor. I’m curious if anyone out there reading this plays on max settings on a Mac, and if so what your specs are. (I am not posting at home and don’t remember my own specs off hand, but will put those here later for reference.)

I used to. For the longest time I never crashed. Then, starting around june or so, I started getting crashes during high-action events, and I found that if I went to best performance I would be crash-free. I’ve heard of others being on best visuals and doing just fine, so it might be weirdness with my computer.
specs:
2011 Mac Pro, 6x 3.33 GHz processors, 16 GB RAM, PCIe SSD, ATi Radeon HD 5870

I would first recommend getting kitten. OCZ is my favorite, maybe a Vertex 4. you don’t need a lot of space here; I put the OS and all my applications on my SSD, then store photos, videos, music, etc. on a 2nd 2 TB HDD drive. get the speed where you need it, cheap storage where it doesn’t need speed. getting kitten will cut your time between load screens to about 1/3 what they currently are.

Actually I noticed I get random crashes if I put my settings on max as well – basically exactly what Mystic says. This used to not be an issues for me.

I play on max/close to it settings (but with the options for other character models being low and with native sampling) on a 2011 MBP, Core i7 2.2Ghz, 4GB Ram,AMD Radeon 6750M.

I’m not really sure what upgrades you’re planning to do since as far as I am aware the only thing you can do with the iMacs is upgrade the RAM…

with iMacs, you can upgrade the RAM as easily as changing batteries in a remote. the hard drive can be done fairly easily. on older imacs that have a disk drive, you can replace it disk drive with a 2nd hard drive. I hear it’s possible to upgrade the graphics card on some, but very very very hard.
RAM and SSD are the likely things he’s planning, neither of which will dramatically affect your ability to increase graphics settings (unless you currently have like 2 GB of RAM)

I just realized the filter said I was recommending kitten… what that filtered out was “a Solid State Drive = SSD”, same for later in that paragraph :P