Guild Wars 2

Dramatic for me, meant I no longer had delays when moving around. Even in very crowded areas, I don’t have moments when the screen stops and then starts moving again. before I tweaked that, I had that happen quite often, even when the area was relatively open.

I think if you do the PS at level, you should end up with gear that’s better than what you can buy at your level. Some parts you can still buy from the vendor that will be better, but most of them should be better.

I do have Xquartz installed. is that why I had a dramatic change when adjusting the VideoRam setting?

I’ve had a really easy time with ranger, since the pet can tank, and with mesmer, since illusions and phantasms can distract/tank. Even engineer isn’t too bad, since your turrets can ‘tank’. Necromancer has minions, but they tend to be fairly weak, had a harder time with that.

Some of the missions are actually easier for non-tanking classes, I’ve had to help out a friend on a few of them since guardians don’t have much for ranged.

With my ranger, I was able to solo all of the quests fairly well, with my mesmer I only needed help with one.

I found lots of people around when I did it, but had difficulty having it complete that section due to one of the foes being stuck in something. I had to swim around a while to locate that one, once all are dead, it should continue.

I had to get my husband to do this for me, I just don’t have the skill to be able to do 3D jumping puzzles like this one. I need to have time to do stuff. All the jumping puzzles for World Exploration don’t have timers or winds to knock you off, so I was able to complete them eventually. Some took a couple of days as I’d try for a while, then give up to try later. But after 3 days of trying to get past this one, I just asked for his help, he had no trouble. That change where you can appear on the other side will help tremendously

Since I did the Norn one with Ogres, I know I would never choose that one again, it was SO much traveling from point to point, you’d visit 4-5 stars before you’d get a completion. Not difficult, just way too much travel.

Bootcamp definitely gives you better graphics. But if you’re willing to deal with less graphics, the Mac client functions. I do use Bootcamp if I have lots of time where I don’t need to do anything else, but I use the Mac client if I don’t want to make that sort of time commitment. Which is fairly often.

I just did a similar upgrade since memory has become so cheap (bought the 8GB upgrade for $40), but haven’t seen ANY improvement really. I have to open a LOT of programs to make it use more than 4GB. I never use the integrated graphics since I nearly always have Firefox open and unless you tell it not to use video acceleration, it will, and that makes it use the nVidia graphics. Pretty much the only thing I’ve noticed since adding the memory is that it takes longer to reboot (I assume because it’s testing more memory)

Which is why I think the choice of the Order you join should NOT be attached to the quests, as others have mentioned in a different post. Sometimes, the best plan at the time isn’t from the Order you are with.

I thought they all had good ideas, the Pact was the right way to go. I picked methods from all 3 of them in the quests before being forced to join one.

Now that I’ve tried each of the 3 paths, one 3 different characters, I have to say I prefer the Order of Whispers path, simply from the game difficulty. The Vigil path has some insanely difficult quests in it, though a lot of that comes down to making the correct choice. The Priory has a jumping puzzle that I really hated, I had to resort to getting someone else to do that portion for me. I had trouble in some spots with the Whispers path, but overall, I enjoyed it more. I wasn’t stuck with a puzzle that I didn’t have the skill to beat, and I didn’t hit a quest where I came out of it naked because all my gear was destroyed.

All are worth trying once though, I liked Tybalt and Sieran a lot, and Forgal was decent too. All of them better than most of the other NPCs you meet

Signet of Inspiration along with the trait that removes a condition everytime you heal is awesome, I get tons of condition removal as a passive with that

It was very noticeable for me when I did it a while back. Currently, I think I’m getting better performance with this client than I am when I use bootcamp to boot into Windows 7. Though that probably is due to the fact that I can set the video settings to Best Appearance in Windows, so it’s doing more work.

I’ve really enjoyed the stories up to a point, since I like to explore EVERYTHING, I’ve tried out all the races (except Charr, I played GW1 too much ) to see how they differ and how they mesh. All have been quite interesting, not necessarily how I might have played them had I full control, but not horrible.

The main problem is around level 30-40 I think, when it stops being about the choices you made at the beginning. My guess is that ANet had to make decisions about game size and the time involved to create the different branches the story could take, therefore, they took some shortcuts in order to deliver the game when they did.

With my first character, I ended up choosing the plan I thought made the most sense at the time, once it was Whispers, once it was Priory, once it was Vigil. They all had ideas that were workable. By the time I’d done those, I knew I wanted to join the Whispers, but I liked the Priory plan better. Still, I had to go with the Whispers one in order to join the group I liked for that character.

The Pact was formed with the idea that all the groups have useful methods/ideas that work. I didn’t like that the plan was paired with the choice of which group to join either. For me, I knew which group I wanted to join fairly quickly, including subsequent characters. But I don’t think which group you intend to join should determine which plan you go with.

You will need someone with you that has ranged attacks. You can’t do it with melee.

Very glad to see this was worked on. My necromancer was naked by the time I managed to get it done, through repeated attempts and deaths trying to get something dead before I died yet again.

I to also noticed that while all the other NPCs died fast, Eir was unkillable. Made my failure all the more apparent

Tybalt was just really well done and he grew on you.

I played the original Guild Wars for 3 years, I still have quite a lingering hatred for Charr in general. Just from that. But Tybalt made me genuinely like the guy.

Is that the one where you have to cross that bridge? I had SO much trouble with that too, I had to get my husband to do it for me, I couldn’t come close to success.

I was running around on my Sylvari ranger and one of the Risen guys on the shore actually taunted me with saying he would plant me next to Sieran. I was pretty surprised that a non-instanced mob would say that.

I died many times during that fight as well, had to use the pillar and throw stuff, then hide again. It surprised me when I was doing the story line with an alt, and since I was almost always choosing things differently (on purpose) how easy it was when you took the other option, to shut down the food supply. You wouldn’t think there would be such a vast disparity in difficulty, but it really was VERY easy with that option instead of the locate and kill him one.

The Quaggan and the Kodan have a relationship, I would think the Norn would have one with the Quaggan too just through their relationship with the Kodan.

I don’t see the Norn respecting the Quaggan, but since the Kodan protect them, they might also. Still, that could be the reason they aren’t on the Norn list, because they could never get respect from the Norn. The Hylek could.

At least name a new strain of apples after him.

I have to agree here, the different cultures were used in the first part of the storyline, why wasn’t it continued all the way through? For whatever reason, the stuff after Claw Island is the same no matter what race you have.

Unless things have changed, you do NOT have to be the leader to get your story completed. I was not the leader when I did this, but my storyline did complete. It is kind of a shame that the fractals have pulled people away from wanting to do Arah though. When I did Arah the first couple of times, people were asking to do story mode all the time. Doesn’t really happen as much now.

I enjoy the personal story, especially when you have alts of different races and you see how the storylines mesh. Like my ranger talking to the ghost of someone who is an ancestor of my necro.

I also agree with the poster above, you can get 100% world exploration without completing the personal story. I completed the story first, but only because the WvW maps were hard to get completion on. THAT is something I have more of a beef with than the storyline, the need to go into the WvW maps to get 100% world exploration. The storyline IS pretty linear, granted, but for me at least, they were fun.

When I get lag, I test it by booting into Windows 7 and trying it there. Almost always, it’s not an issue with the client, but either my connection or the server. I do think the NVidia graphics might be the key there though, I’ve been seeing a lot of issues with OSX when ATI Radeon is involved.

I imagine it will always be in WINE or whatever. But I find the performance is pretty decent, I DO have Bootcamp partition, it runs a bit better, but not so much that I’d have used it if the Mac client had been out earlier. I’m not sure why it’s still considered beta after all this time though.

(or why they insist on OSX 10.7 when I use 10.6.8 and seem to have fewer problems than most)

I’m running at 1280×800 because my eyes are bad, that could explain why my performance is decent.

Definitely use a cooler fan, it really helps. I also use Fan Control, but that probably doesn’t work in Mountain Lion since it’s not 64-bit. I haven’t had a game use all the CPU, but when the Video Card gets exercised a lot, the heat sky rockets. I only plug in the laptop cooler when playing video intensive games, don’t really need it any other time.

I’ve experienced it both with the Mac client and the Windows client. Exit To Desktop then running the client again always fixes it.

Another thing that might help is to check what the VideoRam value is set to. I discovered that on my Macbook Pro it was registering half what it should, so I changed it to the actual value. (it was probably detecting the Intel graphics, which aren’t used when gaming). I have my MT3D value at 0 because that seemed to help some, but the Videoram=512 (which is the real value) vs Videoram=256 made a HUGE difference.

I love romance in a game, but I think it’s kind of limited if you want it to be with an NPC. I’d rather see something possible between characters, though I’d want to keep the cyber-sex bit to a minimum. I really don’t know how that would work out, it just seems like a fun idea.

There’s still something visceral in me with the charr, due to original GW. I get that the humans took their land and they took it back, it’s just the way the original game ran, it’s really hard to think of them as friends. Still, certain of them have become friends in the storyline, I can’t ignore that.

I do think undead/Risen are not a great foe here, as others have said, they are hardly unique as enemies. Mursaat in the original game, that was unique. Maybe instead of undead they could have gone with some reptilian species that was linked to the dragons?

Possibly. I have to use the 32-bit kernel while letting everything else be 64-bit, there’s just some stuff that requires the 32-bit kernel (Cisco VPN client) so I can’t run in true 64-bit. Might be that which makes it work.

Still, when I finally figured out that all the OSX client is doing is using WINE to run it, I can see why performance is better in Windows. I had tried a few different setups of WINE to get it running before, and didn’t get it to work well.

I always get the message about my system not being supported, but my hardware specs are good enough, I just don’t get why the OS matters that much. Especially since I can boot into Windows on the same system and run it with full graphics.

I switch between using the Mac Beta client and a Bootcamp Windows partition all the time, all the character data is on the server, not your system. So you’re safe when it goes live.

I’m not seeing a HUGE improvement running it in Windows, just a slight one. So I mostly just stay in OSX, even though I am running Snow Leopard and not Lion. Not sure why the insistence on Lion, it runs just fine for me.