Guild Wars 2

As a whole I feel the feature update to be well done and that it benefits game’s heath long term.

That said with this section of changes in particular I feel some of the changes were made hastily and with somewhat of a heavy hand.

I’ve a total of 10 geared 80s ( at least one of each profession ), 2 of which in ascended. I play a mix of direct and condition based builds. That all said, I feel say the changes to stacking sigil functionality, ferocity scaling and celestial armor are damaging to the game.

Sigils)

As far as the sigils go, I understand and find it fair that you should have to commit to that sigil slot to maintain the buff. The problem I have with that now is you can no longer switch to an alternate weapon type with the same sigil without losing the boost. This is not a sensible way for it to work.

This is largely an issue in PVE as with the changes to PvP stacking being 5 per player kill universally, its not a huge inconvenience. In dungeons however this is very unfriendly as many professions are more proficient using different weapons on different encounters. If you invest in the same sigil additionally for another weapon type, I see no reason to be penalized for it. I find it fair to limit the min maxing and the attraction of having a second weapon with a different sigil in it previously (ie get 25 bloodlust, switch out for night/force) but in this case, there is no legitimate gameplay reason to have the restriction. I hoping for the time being it is merely a technical limitation that can be overcome in the future.

Ferocity)

Obviously this has been a point of contention for the player base and for good reason. We were given the impression earlier on that the total damage reduction due to the changes would be roughly 10%. There was minimal context to this claim of course so it was hard to really take away much from it at the time. Now that things are live, it is a much different story…

Given ferocity changes effect gear stats, food, traits and runes, the overarching changes it has caused in critical damage reduction is much more significant that previously suggested. Long story short, the result at the end of the day is not very favorable. Sure, high critical damage builds still are superior to most others in PVE as a whole, I feel they’ve been neutered to an unreasonable extent.

It still doesn’t promote build diversity as the other stat and build sets are still where they were. That hasn’t changed. I have a suggestion for damage control (pun intended) while still achieving the initial quoted reduction more accurately.

Critical scaling per point -

The easiest change would be to change the ferocity to crit damage conversion from 15:1 to something closer to 12:1. This would still accomplish to goal of top end damage reduction, still allows the existing stat weighting on gear, food, runes and traits to remain untouched and comes off being less heavy handed as a whole. It also would help with the next issue…

Celestial Stats)

Celestial is obviously a tricky combination to kitten and balance. Clearly its previous ability to maintain critical damage parity with 3 stat gear sets was not appropriate. That said it was a sum of the parts and one of the larger draws to the stat set.

Now it feels much less potent to the point of wanting to question its usefulness. I feel my previous suggestion of ferocity point conversion alone would go a long way here as well. Apart from that change, the overall increase to stats to compensate should be raise another further 2-3% percent.

It would still distance the stat set to other more focused sets but it will still have a more sensible place in the game, one which now I feel has been lost.

Otherwise good changes as a whole. I really would appreciate those involved in the team taking a serious look at these particular changes, namely ferocity scaling.

The current warrior issues seem largely due to the sum of the parts. The combination of cleansing ire, healing signet, adrenal health and dogged march are what creates these scenarios. Lose any of the 4 and sustain drops noticeably. They’ve all been very meta and with things being so condition happy its honestly not a huge surprise. Combined with warrior’s large tool box of CC. movement options and immunities, they can be extremely difficult to stop, especially 1v1.

Add in the runes and food ( namely mango pie or lemongrass ) and bam. The combination of the above really is a strong anti condition meta but as mentioned before, cripple, chill and immobilize, all being condition based CC, are nearly useless against said setups ( again with the correct food / rune combos, of which do seem to be very popular in WvW ) This effects direct damage builds as well which often rely on these conditions for added control.

In the end this leaves warriors such as these only truly vulnerable to knockdowns, dazes, stuns and a lot of damage direct. They require follow through or they’ll scurry away and reset the fight passively with minimal difficulty.

Its a tough thing to balance because its not any one thing alone that would destroy things, it would only handicap it. Personally, I’d be interested to see a short cool down addition to dogged march’s condition component however. Would be nice to see a cripple on a warrior last more than .25 seconds

Yup all you can do is lower shadows and reflections and the character limit. Even then 30fps or less will be the case on any hardware out in densely populated areas.

Upgrading wont help. You will have to lower your clients settings. I know people may not like to hear it but it’s the truth.

Start by lowering and or disabling both shadows and reflections. Also be sure not to use vsync, use a frame limit instead. After those play with your character limit and character quality settings. Highest/highest with shadows will bring any amount of hardware on the planet to a halt. it’s just the way it is.

Test what I’ve suggested and worst case performance should jump noticeably.

Pushing that i5 a bit more couldnt hurt but even my previous 2600k tanked at high clock speed (5Ghz on water) My HPTC is running a 2500k (4.6) and GTX670 using the settings I mentioned and it does fairly well at 1080p.

That game just doesn’t scale well with hardware increases past a certain point. Max settings and comfortable frame rates just won’t happen as of today. I wouldn’t spend another dime on that machine unless of course you play games outside of GW2. You could throw multiple Gtx titans and a 3960x it… and it would barely run any faster than what you have now at the same settings/resolution.

I discourage users from running vsync. The game is not running triple buffered and vsync does add substantial input latency in GW2s case so unless you loath tearing… don’t use it. Run with a frame limiter at your displays fresh rate.

If you must run vsync use a tool like d3doverrider to enable triple buffering otherwise performance takes a bath… Even then you still have the added input latency. Many people get used to it and claim not to notice but it is most certainly there there.

To put it more plainly then, the benefits of multiple video cards in GW2 is largely limited to higher resolution output and / or super sampling. It doesn’t help in nearly all of the cases where people encounter low performance.

In Derathore’s case, it’s not an option I’d recommend to pursue.

So this occurred at first a few months ago and its persisted since? Just for the heck of it, try doing a clean uninstall / re install of your Catalyst drivers (read up on how to do this properly if you are unfamiliar) Even try doing so with a different driver version (ie an older one possibly)

Its very strange if this issue has been there for that long.

Outside of that I’d suggest uploading some cfg data to anet support. See if they have anything to say about it.

Also if you have access to either an onboard gpu or another discrete gpu, I’d test that as an option.

The only other thing I’d think to try, failing that, is a clean install of windows. Yes its more involved and time consuming but often with strange things such as this its the only sure fire way to remove all external variables.

Clean install, no 3rd party software added. Just windows updated, most recent gpu drivers and GW2 installed. If it persists at that point its obviously an obscure game bug but i’m more prone to think its something going on with your system. I’d only resort to this after you’ve sent some info Anets way and obviously only comfortable in doing so.

Yes I was going to mention the page file as well… you need to have a functional page file. It doesn’t need to be the absurd default page to ram ratio but certainly something. I’ve found nearly all applications work without issue with at least a 1GB page (ran a 1GB page on a plethora of systems and Windows variant over the last decade and didn’t have any issues). In the cases where you will be loading nearly all your physical memory you will likely need a larger page (multilayer RAW image edits, encoding, rendering etc )

Windows is designed to use it and have access to it at all times regardless of your physical memory pool. Yes its true that you can often get away without one but don’t let anyone fool you that you’ll be without issue in doing so.

Also for those with SSDs, page access frequency with any decent physical memory pool is quite low so don’t buy into " oh no my page file is going to burn out my SSD!" Unless you are doing some very hardcore 24/7 workstation type stuff… you won’t exhaust your NANDs write endurance in the systems life time. The sheer amount of writing required to do this on even mainstream flash chips is extremely high… like over 10GB a day… for over 5 years.

I’m a part time system builder so I’ve had my share opportunities to test / play wink wink GW2 on a wide variety of hardware and it can be interesting. Had a chance to toy with a tri SLI Titan system shortly after they launched and while it was awesome for surround gaming in a lot of titles, as far as GW2 was concerned they may as well been GTX 650s. The ultimate goal would be to take more of the burden off the cpu and get the gpus involved more.

That said DX11 done right increases rendering efficiency a good amount. It allows you to leverage that in it a few ways. You can increase performance substantially at your current scenes budget or you can increase your scenes budget and maintain your current performance target or a healthy balance of both. Generally though most studios just use DX11 as an excuse to throw on excessive tessellation and more advanced forms of SSAO and it eats up the budget fast for a vary subtle visual difference. This may work for shooters and such but in an openworld MMO environment those gains can be better used for increased performance ceiling (aka more zerk less fps turd)

Given MMO design is a moving target with content being added throughout a titles life and player interest and involvement shifting as well (one week an area is disney land busy the next its a ghost town), it would be nice to have that added head room. Its too easy to design a map and you have your budget but then the realization hits you that “Oh crap, I still have to account for the 100s players who are going to occupying this small area as well.” Its hard to not get greedy

Aesthetically GW2 is in a good place, I’ll be the last one to fault the art style or visuals as a whole so the added performance benefits are the way to go without doubt. Which coders do I address my bribes and gifts to :p

EDIT:
@ DJRiful

Same here. I gave up shadows completely in any large world DE and in WvW for that reason now. Now with culling an option I leave them off most of the time. Its cool to see LA full for a change but I’m still getting used to it.

It looks like the full texture assets aren’t even loading. I’d suggest deleting your local.dat file (X:User/My Documents/Guild Wars 2) and restart your machine then reconfigure your client settings again.

It should start but it would be more akin to Guild Wars 2: A PowerPoint Presentation.

All but the newest 4000 series intel gpus, which are only found in their higher end mobile processors, are very slow.

Multi gpu scaling is pretty poor in GW2. Also with entry level gpus it’s usually better to just get a stronger discrete for a bit more instead of going multi gpu with something weaker. Crossfire also still has frame pacing issues with DX9 code paths (AMDs recent frame pacing beta driver only effects DX10/11 so Gw2 still has pacing issues with crossfire)

If you end up feeling like you want to throw more hardware at the problem later on look out for a cheap Gtx 650 or hd 77xx. Either option would be significantly faster than the A10s gpu. Anything much more than that would be a waste as the cpu would bottle neck anything much faster by a noticeable amount.

Sadly it won’t. Realistically a machine capable of that is more in the 599-799 range. That particular model is running a entry level Intel cpu and integrated gpu and it wouldn’t be up to the task. If you go Intel anything less than an i3 is a waste of time and even then the onboard video on the newest i3s is still quiet weak.

If money allows I’d look for at least a mid ranged Amd apu as their imbeded graphics are passable. They should be able to achieve playable performance at lowest settings. Keep an eye on sales for the next few weeks. Back to school sales often go on well into September.

Yes I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot on a machine to solely play this game.

Outside of what I mentioned if you are familiar / comfortable with the prospect of over clocking, it’s also an option if you know what you are doing.

Yeah I was going to suggest starting with a clean install of the client and going from there. Just for testings sake could you disable the descrete video card and try launching with just the Intel igp?

As far as UAC goes and compatibility mode you shouldn’t have to touch those. I have the game running on Vista 7 and 8 systems and personally haven’t had to toy with it.

Do you have much running in the way of 3rd party software? (anti virus, driver suites etc) I’d try disabling these as well to eliminate them as possible culprits.

Optimism is all I have left. Trying to keep up morale. Anet has an amazing art team and I’d love to see what they could do with the right canvas.

Setting the character limit to medium will bring it back to pre patch performance for the most part. You can lower it even further for better performance as well if you don’t mind seeing the nameplates.

Also I highly highly recommend not running shadows in high player count areas. It’s a huge drain no matter the hardware.

The Pavillion has a very high polygon count due to the large amount of geometry and coupled with the highplayer counts it’s likely the most demanding pve area at the moment. Shadows increase that load even more so.

Can you clarify what you mean by shuts down? I’m assuming it’s an outright power loss correct, not a formal shutdown?

If you can provide us with more details on your system that would be a good start. It’s quite odd that the trial ran and now it won’t.

Shadows, reflections, shaders then resolution in that order are the most demanding options for what it’s worth. This isn’t a game you can realistically run ‘maxed out’ and expect good performance throughout on even the best hardware out right now. It’s a cold hard truth where GW2 is concerned as of this moment.

You mentioned a 4770. It would help to some extent but it to takes both strong single threaded performance and a decent mid-range gpu to get this game to play remotely nice, not just one or the other. The A10 doesn’t have the strongest single threaded performance so it will be a limiting factor.

That said, Try with no vsync (it will kill performance) no shadows and reflections and set the character limit to medium (this is comparable to the default culling before the recent pve changes to it) The game will still retain it’s look for the most part and performance will improve. Auto Detect always sets things optimistically high… If performance is still too low for your liking play with the shader option (this has the biggest effect on visual fidelity so it’s a last resort) Failing that try running at a lower resolution than 1600×900. 1280×720 will work but the image will be scaled and much softer. Also medium textures might be wise. The 7660D is uses system ram so even though it has access to a large pool of memory it’s much lower bandwidth than dedicated gpu memory you’d find on most discrete video cards.

Beyond that the other settings will do a bit for performance but not as much as the ones I already suggested playing with. Depth of field and post processing are more a preference and don’t hurt performance too much.

The system I threw together for my girl runs things at 1280×720 all low settings on an i3 2120 and hd6850 for what it’s worth and performance is still pretty bad at times so don’t expect any miracles.

The engine would need some pretty heavy reworking to have any noticeable improvement. Easier said than done but it severely limits the direction they’ve been steering things (mass wvw and DE pve) It doesn’t scale past 2 logical cores and being only a DX9 renderer it has its limits where that’s concerned.

I’m running a 4770 @ 4.5, SLI Gtx 780s @ 2560 × 1440 with super sampling. No vsync. I run with no reflections/shadows as they are very cpu limited and can even tank this system in pretty calm circumstances (forget any kind of high player count with shadows… pre pve culling change, maw could still drop me into the mid teens even with effect lod) I also run animation on low to disable the smoke particle effects on fire in some areas (notably COF/Fire shaman world event) In these areas Animation medium+ instantly halves the framerate (from 60 constant to sub 30) The particle system scales with resolution but not with gpu power so it can be stupidly taxing on higher resolutions The dredge fractal at the gate bomb section is the worst I’ve seen performance, single digit frame rates when all the dredge are spaming their particle heavy attacks.

Even with these settings 25-30fps is a common occurrance in pve and wvw zergs. The engine so cpu bottlenecked that super sampling has ‘0’ effect on performance with this hardware (ie anywhere with subpar performance performs the same with or without supersampled output) , it just renders at double the resolution with reduced aliasing… The gpus are just bored.. they normally are around 20-35@ usage. The majority of the resource demanding settings don’t put much load on gpus in the first place. I was running 680s and a 2600k prior to this and performance didn’t change (granted the 780 upgrade wasn’t at all directed at this game))

Sadly throwing more/faster hardware at the game has little benefit. After a certain point you get hit with serious diminishing returns. It’s really unfortunate. I remember when my 5870 wakitten with a solid performance increase when blizzard added the updated DX11 renderer in Wow. That was awesome to see out of an old engine.

The game is still young and I’d be shocked if they didn’t have something in the pipe regarding the engines inadequacies. Like anything though it takes time and in this case a lot of testing. The game is really solid all around and personally for me the engine performance is its biggest limitation for real growth where game play is concerned. They have some great ideas and they’d shine even more brightly if they weren’t so hindered by technical limitations that effect everyone involved from us players to asset and game designers.

Anet owe it to themselves to makes this the best MMO it can be and I’m sure they’ll deliver… all in good time.

Same thing here. Played for while on my girls modest machine (i3 2120, HD6850 @ 1280 × 1024 low settings, no vsync) and it’s brutal in the pavilion. During events single digit frame rates are the norm.

Even at home with a 4.6ghz 4770 and SLI Gtx 780s I see sub 30fps often (and I play with no reflections or shadows) That pretty much speaks for itself… too much of the engine is severely bottlenecked and regardless of the hardware you throw at it performance nose dives in any scenario with many players be it wvwvw zergs, world events or the pavilion events. The rest of the game is much more agreeable but it’s still very frustrating. Shadows in particular take a stupidly high toll and are very cpu limited ( I normally play with high shadows but not in wvw and now the pavilion content)

Not much can be done by the user sadly at this point.. it’s merely limitations of the engine.

Working towards a more smp friendly design and a dx11 renderer could do a lot to improve the status quo so hopefully those are long term considerations the engine coders have for the game. Easier than done I appreciate but I’ve seen the gains to be had with other engines / renderer and it’s nothing to sneeze at…

I’m all for constructive discussion on how to counter stealth and or revise its use.

That said I could care less about the opinions of people who’ve only played the aforementioned stealth spamming builds and no other class / spec. They see a mechanic of high reward / low risk and exploit it. It’s hard not to be bias when you play 1 character and nothing else. I can understand how people get invested in their character(s) and of course any changes for the better or worse will get their attention but when there are obvious balance issues don’t kid yourselves.

Don’t take it as people think they should be able to deal with all classes without effort. RPGs are always about rock paper scissors elements and in general due to the numbers in WvW this doesn’t matter nearly as much as sPvP for example. As it stands though these P/D builds have a considerable advantage over the majority of things in the game where WvW is concerned.

Many thieves I respect and who play other professions as well often agree stealth needs re balancing. I WvW with 6 professions, including thief so i’m not talking without experience here…

Although they’ve tried to an extent, I’d like to see WvW balanced separate from both PVE and sPVP. This way structured players can be left be, as can PVE players.

@Bogy

Fact is backstab / heart seeker rotations have the highest burst potential for direct damage in the game, now out performing Warrior GS by a good bit since the recent warrior balance changes. I’ve been burnt down from 22000hp and 3400 armor as if i were a berserker staff ele… So be careful with the assumptions there and add something intelligent to the conversion while your at it.

I get the same drops on both my systems (i5 4.8Ghz GTX670 @ 1920×1080 / i7 5Ghz SLI GTX 680 @ 2560×1440) I’ve found lowering animation quality from high to low had the biggest impact all around in the game, be it large events and areas with a lot of sprite based effects. Super sampling is less demanding even… These sprites scale with resolution output so higher resolutions will see bigger drops. Although lowering animation quality does reduce these drops in some instances, they still occur in others. For now I’ve found it to be the best compromise. COF Is one of the worst offenders for this drop. It can go from a steady 60fps to 30 at the drop of a hat. Also in areas with a lot of player models the reduction in cloth simulation quality by using low animation helps a lot.