Guild Wars 2

Well, like I said. It has been over a month and not a single scrap piece from any type of chest, probably over a hundred map chests. And they used to drop VERY often for me, just like for you guys.

Well obviously I’m talking about being bugged for me…

I deleted enchanted map scrap 3/4 (due to running out of bag space while dungeoning), which was the last I needed to complete the map. Since then I haven’t had a single scrap of any kind to drop, that was over a month ago!

It may be bad luck, but I use to have several repeats of all the other scraps, hell, they dropped so often I thought of them as junk, but now, nothing.

Again, might be random bad luck, but it seems odd that I can’t get any scraps to drop from any jumping puzzle, I did at least 20-30 in the last month and nothing, seems extremely unlikely my luck is that bad. Now I can’t progress.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/LENOVO-Y510p-Gaming-Laptop-Haswell-i7-4700MQ-8GB-1TB-SSD-GT755M-DVDRW-1080p-8-1-/271575008530?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item3f3b21c512

Something like this is a better bang for your buck. I have this laptop with an I5 and dual graphics cards and it whoops up on GW2 with no problem.

use MSI afterburner to limit your FPS to 40.

I did that and it substantially reduced the load on my gpu and in turn brought the temps/fan speed down

Your best bet is to do the following:

Get a recent generation intel quad core (or better), overclock it as close to 5ghz as you can, put the game on a new, fast SSD, and buy a mid-high end graphics card, like a 280x or a GTX 770.

That is the best bottleneck reduction you can hope to accomplish, but maintaining 30fps on ultra in WvW depends entirely on the size of the zerg, the number of spell effects, etc.

Thank you Tura, i can spare 300megs

I really appreciate it

I’m played tethered to my phone, as I’m traveling for work. I can spare a couple of hundred megs, but not gigs worth of data.

There’s no indication of total file size, just number of files to update.

Can someone please tell me how many mb/gb I’m looking at to update?

I’d hate to have to take a break already Just got back into the game, loving it again.

Hi Osi,

I’m coming back to the game after a 8 month break. I’ve not kept up on the state of mesmers, so I’m looking for information on what’s changed, and some optimal builds to get me going again. I have mostly zerker and carrion exotics, but would be fine with farming for whatever is necessary (I play by myself most of the time, and sporadically as I have a baby who monopolizes my time)

Any ideas for a returning player would be greatly appreciated. Where’s a decent place to farm money or crafting materials? Can I do better than exotics gear wise playing alone? Either crafting or whatever?

Thanks in advance to everyone.

SolarNova.1052:

Indeed . i understand.
In ur example of SSD’s i also am constantly having to tell people to NOT get an SSD if they are on a tight budget simply becouse its one of the last things u get. As you know, the money u spend on an SSD could easily be better used for a better GPU ro CPU.

So yea. .i understand

I keep seeing people say this about SSD’s. I understand if you were going to put a hard drive in the system in addition to the SSD anyway, but otherwise, if I had to choose (and we’re talking strictly for a gaming box) the cost difference between a 120gb ssd and a ~500gb HDD is between 40 and 50 dollars depending on price fluctuation. Is a 40-50 dollar upgrade to your cpu or gpu going to be a big step up? Probably not. However, in a game like GW2 where a ton of assets seem to load from the hard disk, I’d venture to say that the SSD is a superior choice. Again, this is on a budget build, where you’re not going to be buying super high dollar CPU’s and GPU’s anyway.

Yeah, the I5 is obviously superior, but for me, it’s a matter of taking the whole picture into account with a prebuilt. The mobo and psu in that prebuilt are likely crap, and to put any kind of a decent video card into the system, at least the psu will need upgrading.

You’re absolutely right that a quad core is the better option. However, since you can’t OC that one, I’m not sure how much better it’ll be.

I’m not trying to be a debbie downer, but until (if ever) there are some optimizations made to the game engine, you just have to invest in more powerful hardware to run this game at settings “I” would consider acceptable.

I didn’t mean to come across flip about the OP’s concerns, and what I probably should have said was something like “take this example from Tom’s Hardware, and then customize the parts involved to optimize for the games you want to play” In the case of GW2, sacrifice a little gpu power for a quad core (get one you can overclock if at all possible)

Anyway, no harm done. Sadly, I can’t get any of my non-hardcore-pc-gamer friends into GW2, simply because it won’t run well on their decent, but aging systems.

I’m lucky enough to be able to keep my rig up to date these days, but I remember the early days of college when we were playing DAOC, and my computer couldn’t handle the RvR zergs. We’re back in the same boat here. Back then, the guys with Alienware boxes with ati 9800’s were the haves, and the guys like me with a dinky little p4 based dell were the have-nots.

I’m all for pushing graphics to the next level in some game types, but in others where the endgame model is “put 100+ players on the screen together”, they’ve got to come up with some better scaling options so you don’t NEED a stupidly high dollar box to run it.

/Rant off

Anyway, Vogue, my offer still stands if you want to build your own (or like I said I’m happy to help). See if you can scrape together a budget of 800 – 1000 and you’ll end up MUCH happier with your investment. The difference between 500 and 800 when building a gaming box is a BIG step up.

Glad you decided I was a pirate out of nowhere. Fortunately all my windows 7 keys came from technet, so you’ve got zero merit there. While I agree, building your own box carries the MS tax, he’ll still be far better off building his own (it’s about as easy as putting legos together these days)

By the way, the hardware I run cost me about two grand, so skimping on a copy of windows? Not likely.

You know what they say about assumptions.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/budget-mini-itx-gaming-pc,3513.html

Tom’s hardware published this today. It’ s a 650 dollar small form factor gaming box.

Find something similar on their site (they do these budget builds once per quarter) and have a tech saavy friend build it for you.

If you can’t find anyone local to do it, PM me and I’ll build it for you (you provide parts and shipping costs obviously)

Neither has an acceptable video card for this game.

The processors at stock speeds will also bottleneck your performance.

The first one has a processor that cannot be overclocked.

Buying a premade from bestbuy isn’t going to get you playable performance in this game.

Sorry mate.

mujtaba.8167:

Will it be able to run Guild Wars 2 PvE at high(no super sampling) with 60 fps and WvW also?(The customised build)

It’s hard to make modern Desktops do that. No shot with a laptop. Settings will have to come down, and even at lower settings, 60fps in zerg wvw just doesn’t happen.

Did you do a fresh install of windows and all your games/programs?

I recently swapped out my motherboard and added a 2nd video card, and although it booted up and seemed to run fine without a fresh windows install, problems starting popping up.

I wiped and went from scratch, and everything is lovely now.

Yes, it’s happened to everyone else. I don’t know if it’s a result of engine changes they’ve implemented in the patches, but it’s definitely noticeable.

It was so annoying, that I bought enough RAM to run the game out of a ramdisk at all times. The info I read indicated that it was a bottleneck of the game engine having to load textures off your game drive (hard drive, SSD, w/e) and so the response time of that was absolutely crucial.

Hence the ramdisk.

It has almost completely eliminated the issue, as all of the game files are stored in memory, and transferring them from the ramdisk to the active game memory is much much faster than transferring across the sata bus from the drives into memory.

hoegarden.4287:

It will run GW2, but it looks like some people here have set the standards to ’ if it doesn’t run the game with high setting at 60fps in WvW then it is garbage’.

You will have to lower some settings, but you will be able to run the game without lag

Don’t tell him he’ll be able to run the game without lag without knowing what type of activities he does in game.

If you took that box out into zerg WvW, or to the dragon events, even at lower settings, it’ll be choppy.

And we’ve never said it’s garbage (I’m one of the one’s you’re referring to in your first line), but most people come here asking “I’d like to buy xxx, and I want to WvW, how will I do?”

We’re trying to help people make informed decisions. WvW in the zergfest that it currently is is incredibly intensive, and you need a system to match.

That said, if you can bump that vid card up to a 660 and OC the processor a bit, you’ll do pretty well in WvW. (not 60 fps, but almost noone gets that in zergs anyway, even with a 2k dollar box)

7950’s are great cards, with a bit of overclocking, they are nearly as powerful as the 7970s OC’d. You won’t do better for ~300 dollars.

50c per GB for an SSD means that if it is a 120gb SSD, you’d want to pay 60 dollars. Those deals seem to be gone these days, but if you can find an SSD (120gb)for between 80 and 90 dollars, I’d jump on that. No reason to spend more for an intel one.

As far as the motherboard goes, the luck of the draw will determine max overclock, but for the most part you can simply raise the multiplier until you need more voltage for stability, and then raise the voltage to match. Repeat until you’re happy with your overclock. Most of the ASUS boards will have the same BIOS, and the same functionality to overclock. The question you need to ask is “will I ever want a 2nd graphics card” if so, make sure the board supports it. How many hard drives/ssd’s do I have (or plan to have) in the tower at the same time? make sure the board you pick has sufficient sata ports to accomodate. Do I need lots of usb 3.0 slots? if so, pick one that has as many as are required.

I haven’t done the research on ASUS boards, mostly because for the feature set I needed, the asus boards were overpriced.

Just match up your needs for the build to the feature list on the ASUS website and you should be good to go.

While in most cases, SSD’s are only useful for load times, this is a huge gameworld, and it’s mostly seamless, so loading all of the textures for the world into ram is not doable.

Because of this, as you move around, the game engine has to go back to the hard drive (or SSD) to request the data for the area you’re moving towards.

Loading this data from an SSD is much quicker than doing it from a hard drive.

A ramdisk is faster still, but seems to be beyond the scope.

Intel SSD isn’t necessary, just look for a deal as close to 50c per gb as you can get. 120gb is plenty for windows, gw2, and your primary programs.

As far as motherboards, the big differences are support for multiple gfx cards, OC functionality, number of sata and usb connections.

Make sure whatever you’re looking at meets all of those needs, and then buy the cheapest one I’m a big fan of MSI motherboards, but most people will tell you to only buy asus or gb.

The problem is that people come here saying “I want to max GW2 in WvW on a $xxx budget”

That isn’t happening with the way the game is coded right now. Even guys with top tier machines don’t maintain framerates we’d like to.

If you just want to world clear solo, or do dungeons, or play scenario pvp, then sure, a sub $800 box will work just fine on lower settings.

If you want to play with all the eye candy, and do the endgame of WvW, you need a high dollar box to make it happen.

I’m sorry that’s the case, but this is PC gaming, and the best of the best costs serious money.

I3 is not a bad little gaming processor for most games. The 7850 is a very respectable card for 1080p gaming. The rest of the parts look like they support the 2 primaries well.

However, that is not a box that will run the game at max settings in WvW at more than 20 frames. You can’t OC the I3 processor, and this game is largely dependent on clock speed in the big events/WvW.

So while you’ll be ok for small skirmishes/solo pve, you’re not going to be zerg fighting with a box like that.

I have a i5-3570k @ 4.4ghz, 32gb of ram, and a 7970.

I played with all settings maxed, except for supersampling, reflections, and DoF.

I get anywhere between 130fps in solo-ish pve, and 15-20fps in 50 on 50 zerg fights in wvw.

Sadly it’s all about how many figures the game has to process. Solo wvw roaming I’m at 100 fps most of the time.

GW2 is not a game you can play (at anything resembling reasonable settings) on a machine with a 250 dollar/quid/whatever budget.

Sorry.

Nice Video.

It really shows the power of confusion when you have a high pressure damage class to force the opponent to react. Solo the good players just wait out your confusion stacks, but in your 2 man, if they do that, they die to the thief, and if they don’t, they die to your confusion.

Nice job.

Can you list your build/stats/etc?

In what environment? PVE, WVW?

You don’t want anything with the Intel HD graphics, you need a dedicated gfx card for gaming (any real games, not FB games) on a laptop.

Integrated graphics are mediocre at best and not designed to run intensive games like this.

In WvW with a big zerg on either side, you’d be lucky to get 10 fps.

If you just want to pve and clear zones, then everything but the dragon event would probably be ok @ 20-30fps on low/med settings.

When I had this issue (periodically for the last few months) I just reboot my pc and it seems to fix it… very odd.

Solar knows his stuff, but I will say that an SSD isn’t something I’d wait on.

This game loads a ton of its texture files off the hard drive, and it gets very irritating getting bottleneck lag from a hard drive when you fast turn the camera, or a new area is loaded.

I run the game completely from RAM (as I have 32gb in my system, and dedicate 16gb of it to whatever game I’m playing at the time) and it MOSTLY eliminates this bottleneck. I’ve run the game from HDD, and it’s just nowhere near as good as a decent SSD or a RAMDISK.

All your other choices are proper though.

Good luck.

It’s totally dependent on how many other players/npc’s are around.

WvW zergs, I wouldn’t expect more than 15-20fps.

The 260 is an old card by current standards, and if your I7 is at 3.1 I’m going to guess it’s a 1366 socket, which is also several generations old at this point.

This game seems to respond mostly to cpu clock speed, and at 4.4ghz on Intels (2nd newest) platform, I still struggle to stay above 30fps in big zerg action.

Just be aware.

I really feel like ANET should warn prospective buyers:

You will NOT get 60fps playing our endgame PVP model.

You will NOT likely get 30fps playing our engame PVP model without a high end gaming pc built within the last 2 years.

If you’re zergfighting in WvW, it’s currently nigh impossible to build a box that will keep you above 30fps.

My machine is pretty beastly and I still drop into the 20’s and lower depending on what’s going on.

I have: I-5 3570k @4.4, 32gb of RAM (I run GW out of a ramdisk at all times) and a 7970.

Even with this setup, my FPS drops down in bigger fights.

Open world on my own I get between 60 and 130fps (I have a 120hz monitor)

I run with reflections and a few other bits and bobs dropped down from max because they just don’t make a difference in visual quality to me.

You need to be prepared to overclock to as close to 4.5ghz as you can (whatever processor you get), an SSD or a ramdisk like me, and a video card in the ~250-400 dollar range to get near what you’re looking to do.

All told I’d say you’re in the neighborhood of about a grand, maybe a little more as a baseline. You could easily reach 1300-1500 depending on parts.

Had a chat with 7 the other night… One of the nicest and most helpful folks I’ve ever met in an online game.

Props to him, now to watch the video

If only I had the playtime you guys are looking for. I have a guard, I’m on HoD, and I used to run DAOC 8 man

Sadly my new baby boy is due any day now, and I can’t dedicate time to the game like I did back in the days of DAOC

I wish you the best of luck…. Post more videos please

So in all other MMO’s i’ve played (and I know this one is different), when you initiate a fight with a stealth class, you typically open with the big stealth opener (backstab, or whatever).

However, unless I’m missing something, you need to already be in melee range to use C&D to gain stealth, unless you want to blow your heal skill to start out that way?

Granted my thief is only level 4 and i’m still learning, but that seemed odd to me.

Am I missing something that will allow me to approach my target (even if the approach is only 3 seconds) and open with the big stealth burst?

thanks.

Hi Gang,

Decided to make my 5th 80 a thief, and I’m hoping you guys can help me out as far as a weapon focus and traitlines to concentrate on for quickly tearing through hearts/story/zone completion.

My early experience with the thief is that she’s squishy, and my last 80 was a guardian, so it was a totally different playstyle.

Any tips or things I should think about are greatly appreciated. Bear in mind I can afford very decent gear as I go, so hopefully with your guidance I can find a proper build for fast progression.

One last question, how do you typically open up combat? leading with pistol stun + duelist then swapping for swordsman, or leading with swordsman?

Ok, so the final value displayed on the volley (3k or whatever) is what was done overall. I didn’t do 500 + 1000 + 1500+ 2000 etc.

Thanks for that. Easier just to look at the final number.

And yeah, so far the combat log isn’t showing me anything, so I haven’t a clue where I’m at actually.

Thank you Pyro

I’da sat here all day trying to work it out.

So my critical damage is 90%, so in theory I should be seeing swordsman crits of 4kish?

Also, is the number that shows up on the Duelist volley a separate damage figure per pop-up, or is it summing the damage total and displaying the total amount done over the course of the volley?

Decided to try this out, my swordsman doesnt seem to crit at all on the practice dummies…. I’ve had 3 swordsmen hitting the dummies for a few minutes, zero crits…. this is with 48% innate crit and the trait for fury on phants. They’re hitting for 2200ish per go… that’s not crit damage, right?

Hey guys,

I was cleaning out my gaming machine this morning, and came across a process that I didn’t authorize. I did a bit of research, and found out that this is a virus that’s used to mine bitcoins remotely by using your graphics card at 100% utilization. It comes from a java exploit, and wasn’t detected by my AV.

I first noticed it when I opened MSCONFIG to disable some other programs that were running on windows startup.

The file is iehighutil.exe and it runs from the C:\Temporary folder (at least it did on my Windows 7 box).

To get rid of this nasty little kitten, open up your Task Manager and find the process and kill it from there. Then open the C:\Temporary Folder and delete the file completely.

From MSCONFIG, be sure to disable the startup action for the file.

Finally, open your registry with regedit, do a search for the full file name, and delete the folder and the keys for iehighutil.exe.

(Warning: Do not play with your registry if you don’t know what you’re doing, I take no responsibility if you delete something you shouldn’t and brick your system.)

Hope this helps out anyone afflicted by this nasty little piece of code.

Happy Monday!

-Limey

Check to make sure you don’t have a process called iehighutil.exe running on your system.

It’s a virus that’s undetectable by most AV’s, and it pushes your GPU to full utilization at all times. It could definitely be playing havoc with your system.

Hey guys,

I built my guardian around Chris’s Healway setup. Full cleric’s gear (sword/focus and Greatsword) also have an exotic cleric hammer.

I’m wondering what other builds people run with a full cleric’s gear setup. I heard about the consecration builds, but don’t have any experience with them.

What else have you found successful with a full healy getup?

WvW and PVE please, I don’t do spvp or tpvp.

Thanks in advance.

Guild Wars is the only MMO series I’ve ever seen with that I’d call a “caster rogue” in the mesmer, rather than the more traditional leather wearing stabby stabby rogue.

This is a great concept, I wish the “illusionist” concept was more popular in games.

After trying out tons of different options (first 80 was my mesmer at release), I’m now playing a CD confuse build with scepter/torch and staff. 0/20/20/0/30. Confuse bombing a single target to 15ish stacks is just way too much fun. Thieves and eles tend to insta-kill themselves, warriors too.

Only heavy condition removal builds are painful, but I’m so mobile and tanky that I can usually last long enough for another round of heavy confusion.

Contemplating another run at a phantasm build, which I ran in wvw when I first got to 80, but it’s been a while and I forget how to build it

Anyway, I’m a clothie addict, 80 mesmer, 80 ele, 80 necro, and the only thing heavier is my 80 guardian. <3 the squishies!

I just made the transfer off of SoR. I liked the server, but playing against 100 man JQ zergs every time I got on was just not a ton of fun.

Looking for a new guild home here on HoD.

80 Mesmer, 80 Guard, 80 Necro, max crafter…

Any guilds recruiting a casual (mostly WvW) player who transplanted to Henge?

Hi everyone,

I recently got my necro to 80 through crafting only. He’s never left Rata Sum, and he’d desperately love to put a build/gearset together and go out WvWing by himself.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to a setup that works well in solo/small man pickup wvw?

I have about 50g to spend on gear, so I really only get 1 crack at this Want to pick something good the first time.

Should I go for a burst build, a tank build, conditions, or some kind of hybrid?

Opinions please!

Thanks very much.

Chris,

I finished my gear and found my survivability much improved. The build is wonderful and I find myself so durable it’s amazing. I did run into a couple of issues though.

I fought a thief who kited me around for about 5 minutes total, eventually I chased him down and finished him off, but being so kiteable is rough.

Second I fought an Engi who seemed able to keep regeneration up essentially all the time, and then he’d kite me through his net guns and whatnot and I couldn’t ever do enough damage to finish him off. I had him close a few times, but he’d always seem to have the tools to escape and get another heal off or let regen tick and keep him up.

Any suggestions for maintaining proximity to the target, or ways to get that extra little bit of damage to finish off another “bunkery” type of player?

Am I best to just leave the super regenerating players (like me) alone? and focus on squishier less sustainable targets?

Thanks

Oh that’s good to know about the boon duration… I’ll work on finishing up my gear to full exotic… See if that helps.

Thanks mate. When is the new video going to be available?

MW is masterwork(green). And I managed to afford 1 superior sigil of energy for the GS, but could only get a major for the 1h/focus. Perhaps I just got unlucky with my opponents first time out, kite necro and perma stealth thief were in pretty much every fight. Any time I’d come across someone else, one of those 2 would add on me and I couldn’t stay up.

I seemed to get a little panicky and blow 2 shouts at once, rather than letting the prot/regen wear off before using SY. With food buffs i was right at 15.5k hp, but I felt really squishy against that thief. I haven’t played a thief yet so I don’t know all their mechanics… when I was a mesmer at release, I just kited them, so having to take their abuse is a different game for me now.

I’m running full clerics, but not all of it is exotic yet. Will the ~60 toughness/HP make that big of a difference over the green stuff I’m wearing now?

Chris,

I’ve attempted to emulate your setup here. I’ve got full exotic Cleric’s Armor and GS, only MW jewelry/Sword/Focus so far.

I’ve watched your videos numerous times, but I still got rocked by 1 or 2 opponents the other night when I tried it. I can’t seem to stay on top of anything that wants to kite me. A necro I ran into just kept aoe snaring me and I couldn’t get on top of him (didn’t help he kept trying to kite me into NPCs)

I fought a thief for about 2 minutes, but couldn’t kill her fast enough because she just kept restealthing and opening on me again.

Any tips? Should I focus on farming the rest of my exotic gear before I keep trying in wvw?

Thanks mate.

I’ve built 5 systems in the last 6 years, all MSI boards, zero failures.

Take it as you will.