Guild Wars 2

Was doing the ‘captive villagers’ event in Fields of Ruin when wham! got hit by 2 harpies lvl 80 and 81. On a lvl 40 map.

Since this event is generally bugged anyway, perhaps whoever is in charge of debugging it might like to concentrate a bit?

My game objective is a simple one – to try to get a character to lvl 80 in PvE without dying – ever.

I’ve tried several builds – thief and mesmer are good because of stealth and evasive techniques, but ultimately they have proven too squishy. The thing is that if you’re set on living forever, this makes you a bad team player so either you had better get used to leaving your comrades in the lurch, or you have to go it alone. So the best combo of abilities and armor for my particular challenge is ranger.

There’s a reason beginners like the bearbow ranger – you can stay alive and kill stuff. Used intelligently there’s a lot going for the survivalist with this combo. I’ve used it to take down the champion boar in Queensdale all by myself late one night after the train went to bed, and I was only lvl 32 at the time.

With the bow I go with signets and one trap skill, with my bow sigils keyed to the trap – venom with poison, agony with bleeding and so on – generally I keep a rack of bows but at the lower levels its cheaper to burn through sigils as you swap depending on the opposition. Also you need to swap signets according to the situation +25% movement is no use if you are escorting pack bulls and have to handle mobs, but its essential if you’re doing runs.

With pets the situation is likewise. Brown bear is a great meatshield, and I like pig because, well, its a pig and also it has a great knockdown. But sometimes you want cats for kill power, spiders for a venom ranger (with poison bows and viper trap) and so on. Shark has the best combo for aquatic, because a survivalist fights near the shore to keep the option of jumping out of trouble by going onland.

Pets can have a lot of conditions transferred to them, so when dealing with a boss that hits like hell, transfer conditions and hit points to your pet via traits and then use signet of stone to keep the pet alive while you swap fluffy for his backup (don’t let the pet die as regen takes ages)

The Greatsword is useful both because it delivers mean hits on its own (use with feline pet) but because of swoop. This is a great speed boost when not focused on a target – you just do a huge leap forward, and can catch up with or escape from almost anything.

Talking of escape, if you want to live forever, you need to get good at that. So, in a sticky situation, be prepared and act fast. Have your sigil for 25% speed loaded, and LB and GS. In traits make sure that rolls and dodges give health. Then when the proverbial hits the fan, you hit ‘protect me’, and fire hunter’s arrow. With your pet taking the strain and you stealthed, dodge in the appropriate direction, immediately switch to GS, make sure you’ve not auto selected a target and swoop out of trouble. Evade on landing, drop spike trap, switch pets and run like hell. If you’ve done it right you’ve left the boss with a few conditions to keep his health low until you return to the attack.

Do the same with mobs as bosses, but use more AOE skills. Try staggered traps – spike, vipers and muddy terrain in that order, while you hit with barrage + agony on the LB, venom spray on SB and then switch to owl pet while mud slows down the opposition. Then retreat picking off the remnants as they stagger toward you.

The trick is not to get fixed on a build – between action, I’m constantly switching weapons and skills, and now traits as well. Carefully check out each situation, switch builds to match, and be prepared to run like hell. It’s fun!

PS – my best shot so far got to 72 before being ambushed by Dredge. The communist swine.

So I logged in to GW2 hoping to carry on with a dungeon I’m working slowly through. But no, it’s time for another of ArenaNets 150mb downloads for a game-in-a-game that I could care less about.

It’s getting painful. At least once a week I have to wait while yet another megadownload chugs through. At least pace it a bit. Right now I get the ‘enough already’ feeling.

This might not be a popular sentiment with the hard-core players who frequent this forum, but I wonder how many casual players just can’t be bothered with download after massive download and find other games.

Put off the newbies enough and you end up with a gaming ghetto.

I take your point, Jam. I too have had that issue in GW1. But the trouble is that Anet has not solved the problem but moved it. That was the point of my rant. I’d planned to meet up with some guys and finish a zone – but by the time my trusty cable connection had clanked its way through the dragon bash download and I could log in, they were long gone.

At least in GW1 if you were doing a dungeon, you didn’t have to worry about a bash in LA till you got there. Now everyone has to wait through the downloads, so you can’t schedule ANYTHING.

I don’t plan on going to LA for a bit. But I still have to download the event files, and suffer through a further download when they put everything back again afterward. So yup, unnecessary it is.

Dragon bash is here.

Oh great. But I’m busy trying to complete a different zone, and as with southsun, I don’t really give a a standing poop.

But I have to wait 30 min for my computer to chug through a totally unnecessary download (and some of us still have bandwidth caps you know) before I can play.

How about doing as GW1 did and loading in the background while you play? And if you must enter a zone before its updatded, then and only then do you have to wait. Let’s see … I’ve still got at least five min before I can play. Should I keep ranting, or get a beer?

Stoopid, Anet. Stoopid.

abomally.2694 -

In my case, I suspect it’s not just the Athlon 64 dual core but the fact that this runs Win XP with just 2 gig of memory, so my rig is a borderline case anyway.

The ‘memory at xxxx could not be read’ error seems to have a wide variety of causes, but they come down to either faulty software/hardware or lack of resources. That’s why sometimes – for example – disabling sound works. It either frees up resources or there was an issue with the sound card.

In my case, setting affinity slows up the game – occasionally to below the minimum fps so in frantic firefights I drop frames. But it seems to allow my geriatric rig to cope. Previously switching between cores ended up with something getting ahead of itself and crashing the game.

In my case I’m running a dual core Athlon 64 processor. That ‘memory could not be read’ error almost made me abandon the game.

In the end – and after trying and failing with the other solutions – this work-around seems to do it. Run in a window, and quickly minimize and resize whenever mem usage hits over 500k (this flushes some buffer – otherwise if you have low memory as I do, the memory leaks and eventually causes a crash).

Then it became clear that even with settings on ‘best performance’ the comp was struggling. Oddly enough the solution was to set the program’s affinity to CPU 0. (You do this by task manager by right-clicking on the process.) Obviously there’s a bug somewhere that can’t cope with dual-core athlon 64s. Not had a crash since.

Good luck!