Guild Wars 2

Haven’t we always been forced heavily into Arcana/Water?

At least now we can take more “Grand master” traits to offset it.

Best I can determine is there is upset about being forced to rep a guild even if none of them are wanting to play with dragonfell at the time.

The other part I’m not sure. Seems like a request to add a “take me to the action” instant-action type button. And that escort events should be removed.

Just a ranger being able to use a staff, and being able to cast ‘nature’ spells with it, you can see it in the video.

I would not expect it to be anything more dramatic than using a different weapon to get a different set of skills, but there might be more to it. So we basically know nothing other than that.

New race was the main thing I was hoping for out of the expansion, specifically Tengu.

Its a bit surprising to see a new class first as I do recall a number of interviews where it was repeatedly stated they did not have interest in adding new classes due to it complicating balance issues. But new races were on the list instead.

No Tengu will derail my personal hype train.

Though I’m already expecting it anyway.

If no Charr, Tengu since they were going to be in their place. If no Tengu then Sylvari. . Maybe.
Otherwise not at all.

For anyone who doesn’t know, those of us who have had these tools for a while and have them soulbound: Go to a Black Lion Weapons Specialist. Unequip your soulbound tools to inventory. Talk to the Specialist and select the option to upgrade your soulbound gathering tools.

Using Tengu as an april fools joke should be a crime.

I sure hope so. I’ve been waiting and hoping for Tengu to be playable since the game came out.
At the least, it might be the first step to it.
But I fear Scarlet might need to unleash more than her regular minions to get the Tengu to respond.. granted, I hope I’m wrong with that..

I sincerely hope they do add Tengu in 2014. I would play the hell out of them.

However I think it would be awkward to put breasts on them. I’m glad they did not for the charr. The design decisions regarding the charr male and female differences, as well as the female armor remaining as functional as the male armor, is the main reason I chose charr as my race.

Living story is fun and all, I really do like it, it’s a great idea, and GW2 really nails it.

But I’m starting to get a bit bored with the game, same zones, same things. I’d really like some new, solid, hard content.

How about adding a new race? Tengu? something? Some new zones? Tengu + New zones? Maybe a new continent? Please?

Ah.. Conjures disappear on people when the timer runs out now, thats sad, Tequatl was the only instance I ever found conjures to be useful, other than the elite one in WvW.

Charr footprints still show up backwards when you are moving forward, but correctly when you are moving backwards, its been doing this since the late beta.

I find it hard to believe fixing issues like this will take even a slightly noticeable amount of valuable development time.

I have both a Mesmer and Elementalist at level 80 and fully geared in exotics. Ele was my frist. I WvW a lot also.

In large groups in WvW I really prefer my elementalist over my mesmer a lot, if only for how many direct damage aoe abilities eles have and crowd control on staff. Healing abilities come in handy for classes without much healing.

If I’m wandering solo to get to the group, and I get attacked, forget it, I just cannot kill anything with my ele since so many boon stealing abilities became unblockable, unless they are upleveled or new. But maybe I’m just bad at solomentalist. I start off well, burst the target down to 50, and I’m down after blowing all my heals every time. Sunk 50 gold into my ele trying different builds. I must just be bad at D/D and S/(anything).

PvE wise, I enjoy my Ele above all else, and nothing will change that.

Trait wise, you are going to be stuck with a lot in Arcane and Water no mater what.
———-
My Mesmer experience would be this:

In large groups the “awesome” mesmer utility abilities are good for one shot, then its a long cool down if you messed up, or the maneuver failed. Mesmers do not have a lot of the ‘direct damage’ abilities Ele gets, especially AOE-damage. Also mesmers do not have as much access to healing and condition removers as elementalists do, you must be very careful or all the AOE’s will flatten you.

Running solo with my mesmer results in the target either dying, or trying to run away, if you are capable of confusing them or tying them up long enough to get frustrated.

PvE wise Mesmer is awful in my opinion, many of mesmers abilities seem obviously built to engage players, or something that will put up a fight for more than 5 seconds (Like a veteran or such.). As stated earlier, mesmer does not have as much ‘point-and-shoot’ damage as ele does, causing you to repeat your long sequence of abilities for every single enemy, to the point it becomes annoying and tedious after a while.

Trait wise, it seems like you can setup almost every way you want and be effective.
—-
TL;DR: Ele for large group WvW and PvE. Mesmer for medium and small group WvW.
Ultimately despite the down sides I prefer my Elementalist more.. I just wish I stood a chance when I’m forced to defend myself in any form of 1v1.

During the beta the setting was added I believe, and some developers wanted those of us with performance issues to experiment using that argument by testing locations of bad FPS with it on and off.

The command is meant to turn on or off Umbra 3, a bit of software written by a different company that was included in GW2, the reason why it says it will result in higher CPU usage is because Umbra 3 does not use the GPU at all, it runs entirely on the CPU. In any MMO, the CPU is often already working too hard as it is, due to lots of players on the screen. So if your CPU is already overloaded as it is, putting more onto your CPU will slow the game down even further, probably not much on a high end system, but on a low end or old processor it might be very noticeable.

I don’t know if the setting still does anything post-beta, though.

Most use I’ve gotten out of them is as a true weapon swap, so you can have longer range, unlike attunement swap which is all the same ranges.

But the damage is pretty awful, most people who have picked up my conjures have asked me why it does so little damage, or asked if its bugged when someone else picks it up because of that.

Firey great sword is the only one thats truly good.

Gates of Arah are currently open on Tarnished Coast as of writing this. Enjoy!

Sadly they have been messed up since the games release, at one point one was forward, the other was backward.. now they’re both backwards lol.

Yes I also crash easily up to 10 times during the Claw of Jormag, or any event with lots of people, just like you say, my sound cuts out, starts doing that “Vooom… Vooom.. Vooom.” thing, then the came crashes. Losing patience with it myself.

Sadly anet never seems to have stopped mentioning anything about this issue, considering how bad it is, it’s kinda disappointing. Its plagued many since the game came out including me. I cannot do any large engagement now without the sound cutting out and the game crashing 30s later.

I know what you mean, I’ve played GW1 from the start myself.

The way I look at it the Charr we have right now aren’t really the way they were back then. During the pre-searing and early prophecies era they were being manipulated by demonic servants pretending to be gods, instead carrying out the will of Abaddon, a god who was banished by the others because he kept using mortal races to play “army men”; making them fight eachother constantly for his own amusement.

So, they were being used as tools of destruction by Abbadon at the time, just like the Lost Scrolls were created by him with the intention they be used, and thus destroy Orr which ultimately worked when the Charr made it to Orr itself and Khilbron himself was manipulated by a demonic servant of Abbadon into using them. Its hard to personally hate the charr under those circumstances.

Hey, EVGA released a firmware update for such instabilities in the 500 series cards, depending on how old yours is it may or may not include the new firmware, you’d have to contact EVGA technical support and ask for a BIOS update for the graphics card, as they pulled the public links to them, that may solve the problem.

For reference the most recent 500 series bios number is: 70.24.2e.00.6c
This information can be found easily using EVGA Precision, click the information button in the top right of the main window.

What really kills me about elementalist is the damage disparity, for being so incredibly squishy and having the lowest HP of them all, the damage is about half that of other classes, maybe I could understand this better if elementalists could get a higher crit chance.. But they seem to get the lowest even when fully loaded for getting crits.

My other characters are around level 40-ish and are already doing more damage and surviving multiple enemies than my level 80 ele, even in aoe, its actually very sad. I guess elementalist is intended to be a support class, not damage.

This happened during the last update, should be resolved shortly.. If it follows the same way.

Oh I have the patience, after all this was only my 2nd post on the performance problem, what I don’t like is zero transparency. They haven’t said much on it, or even shown much is happening with it, where as the crashing, sound problems and various graphic artifacts issues (which are very important) its obvious they are aware and working on it. I would just like them to say something once and a while about the performance problem. Keep us updated with a post every week or so, utter silence merely makes it seem like I’ve just wasted my money on a new one. I’ve been building and servicing systems almost as long as you have been working in the industry too, I’m getting just as frustrated as you are.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Another-Frame-Rate-Issue-Thread-please-help/first#post78213

This is the only dev response I’ve seen about it that shows they are even acknowledging a problem. But yeah, feels like we’re being swept under the carpet until we just “quiet down” I built this system pretty much for GW2, it was the one game that made me finally upgrade. Very disappointing.

I’m also stuck loading non stop in Iron Marches.

EDIT: Working now.

CPU: i7-3770k
GPU: EVGA GTX 560 Ti FPB
RAM: 8GB
Mobo: p8z77-v pro

Driver version: 306.02 – I’ve tried others and thoroughly cleaned after each try, none helped.

New system. Performance in Lion’s Arch, Dvinity’s Reach, Rata Sum, The Grove and Black Citadel; as well as a few other areas here and there, drops down to the 30-40 FPS range, gets very jittery, nearly unplayable. No settings make a difference. GPU Usage drops to 50-60% implying a CPU Bottleneck, however CPU usage rarely exceeds 45%.

Note: This was not happening to me prior to the patch released before the SECOND to FINAL stress test.