Guild Wars 2

Leveling from 1-60 in pve on a fresh account takes much longer due to the loss of many buffs you can get from your acheive bonuses, and boosters/fireworks etc.

Free account also can’t transfer servers, so if they want to spy/troll on another server they would have to level another account from 1-60

Fastest way would be with leveling crafting 5.5 times to 400 (currently ~100g of mats) with ~2 gifted boosters(~50g), even then that takes quite a bit of time and effort. About 150 gold, ~ 4 hours of crafting/salvaging, 1+ hour of mailing mats, because of the restrictions on TP for free accounts (common items only), 3-4 hours farming for said gold in sw.

So say total of 10 hours and 150+ gold per server for craft leveling. For many players that’s pretty expensive. And the players with dedication to do this probably already have a bunch of $10 accounts.

As to guilds transferring down to carry a server up, that could always happen before. ie war machine and kaineng. The population change + f2p accounts just means that instead of buying gems to move back and forth they will now just make free accounts while keeping their mains on the more populous server.

While this seems advantageous, the time and gold cost is enormously higher as they would have to re-lvl and re-gear 300 gold per account for exotics, 1k+ for ascended. If a guild had the dedication to spend 1k+ gold ($82 at current conversion rate) per character to move to say Eredon Terrace, what would stop them from spending another $50 for the account on top of it?

Kythan Myr.4719:

Astralporing.1957:

moiraine.2753:

Astralporing.1957:

FrizzFreston.5290:

I find it curious that some groups kill him super fast while others are failing miserably.

…since i understood how that exploit works, i’m no longer surprised by those speed kills.

I don’t think it’s an exploit exactly.It was here for atleast 2+years and Anet still hasn’t done anything.I think what they only have to increase the critting spots.

I’m not talking about the crit spot. I am talking about that new guard bug.

can someone explain to me how this is a bug? Not debating here, just trying to understand, doesn’t it just 10% damage to enemies standing in the symbol?

the buff stacks per guardian with the trait, each guard can sustain symbols with hammer quickness. 30 guards with 30 symbols, each guardian is doing 1.1^30 damage which is 17 times damage. thats how you see 40k auto attacks and 100k whirls

guard buffs are not aoe capped atm, making blobbing worse for now

Belexes.4923:

Vayne.8563:

BrotherBelial.3094:

warbignime.4610:

BrotherBelial.3094:

warbignime.4610:

Mods please merge this.

You really want to be a mod don’t you.

OT, yeah the Ninja edit of the FAQ is bad. I’m sure a lot of people saw the sale as a good time to get the game ready for the Xpac, hell I even convinced a friend to get the game as it was so cheap. An I told him there is an xpac coming out. It says you need the base game to play it. So he got it there an then. He was planning on waiting till the Xpac came out to see if there was a deal.on the base game and Xpac.

LOL, I like how you rant over a simple sentence. There’s a mega thread go post there.

Sure like you post in every thread that has nothing to do with that thread you ask a mod to merge it. The mega thread is about price + vets not getting the core game for free as they are paying the same price. This is about the Ninja edit of the FAQ that miss lead people in to getting the core game sooner who thought they where getting the better deal. If you read a thread or two, you might see the difference.

Vayne.8563:

Ardenwolfe.8590:

You know that ‘simple sentence’ is part of their contract agreement, right? You bet people ranted. Ghost editing after someone signs and agrees to buy something tends to kitten people off.

People use words like ghost editing so glibly.

Things in games change. FAQs are changed when they change. That’s how the world works.

Clearly the original plan was to make it two sales. There were probably people in the management for and against the plan and they discussed it. They made a decision. As time went on, one side gathers more backers and they decide to make the change.

When the change is made, the FAQ has to be changed.

You can call that a Ghost Change, but in reality it’s just changing the FAQ to fit the facts.

Anet needs to refund people for the entire period of time since that first fact went up, but editing a fact to make it accurate?

Call it what you want, but it’s done all the time and the only time anyone has a problem with is is when it changes to something they don’t want to hear.

So you think.telling.people.right up till the day after pre drops that they need to buy GW2 to play HoT is fine? Have 2 sales with in a few month of each other to get people.in to the game, who may or may not have waited for HoT to come out before spending there money on GW2. You think this is fine and ANet as a company have done nothing wrong? I know you normally defend ANet, but surely this must even seem a bit off to you.

I never said it was fine. Anet is offering refunds to people who bought it recently though. One guy on reddit got a refund on the core game (or upgrade to HoT for the difference in price) and didn’t lose his progress in the process. Customer service helped him out.

Now if Anet weren’t willing to help people out, you’d definitely have a point. But have you noticed since March, they haven’t offered the $10 sale. That’s probably because they were deciding that to do.

You keep right on drinking the Kool-Aid! No refunds without permanent acct closure.

https://help.guildwars2.com/entries/27697743-Refunds

“Note: The refund process includes permanent closure of the Guild Wars 2 account. If you wish to continue to play Guild Wars 2, or if you desire to play in the future, you will need to purchase a new serial code and create a completely new account. Characters, names, items, and other features from the refunded account cannot be transferred to a new or different account. Not all serial code purchases will be eligible for a refund. No refunds will be given for any account that has been terminated for a breach of the Guild Wars 2 User Agreement.”

This is incorrect, Anet has changed their minds and are providing HoT upgrades for the price difference (recent accounts only), and keeps account progress as well. My alt account was recently upgraded in this manner.

probably a pcie issue from the new driver. Likely stuck at 1x rather than 16. run gpuz with the game running windowed in the background to confirm

It’s a matter of numbers and zerg size. Specifically it’s a matter of how dps and sustain scales with zerg sizes.

Although damage can get spread out over all the players, typically what happens is that most dps lands on only a few that get caught in the bombs due to cc.

So the calculation you have to make is do you have enough AGGREGATE dps in your zerg to bomb down 5-10 players instantly when they are cced caught and focused.

In a large zerg where that much total damage is available from sheer numbers, full healing builds that can include water sigils works.

In smaller 20-30 man guild groups, the loss of dps from a couple full or partial heal builds can mean the difference from just causing cced players to go low, or downing them.

While it can work in those small groups, typically the built in sustain from the front line is enough (and enemy aggregate dps is low enough) with out the need of a real healer in a 25 v 25 fight. Especially if you can get an ele to drop a big water on your push target location.

That said, a full healer in a commander party is awesome.

splitting files is probably the easiest way.

Though you could just take the drive out of the laptop and plug it into your desktop internally with sata and transfer that way

flippers take the “slack” out of the market economy and slows down momentum moves. operates on the same principal as buy and put option orders irl for equities/commodities/currency.

Whether you believe this to be beneficial or detrimental depends on your opinions on how an economy should operate and who should benefit in what manner and to what degree. This transcends mainly into economic ideology, which is an issue where there is little discussion, mainly just soapboxing repetitive talking points.

Personally i think flippers are good for the economy, but i can sympathize those who play a fantasy mmo to get away from economic inequality in their own lives and understand their derision at the wealth flippers accumulate.

the sigil icd is still 9s regardless of traits or runes

Icd is there to prevent abuse from eles/engies

glorious shoulders
carapace chest
priory gloves
carapace legs
phalanx warboots
static spinal blades
dark asuran staff

enameled crimson
enameled sacrifice
cinders
shadow red

the asami sato look

it could be a psu issue, gw2 tends to be a cross load nightmare (particularly with sli setups) which hammers psus on the border (in terms of rails/amps/wattage/age) or with lower quality construction. Other games tend to not hit the cpu as hard at the same time as the gpus and your psu could be using group voltage regulators rather than independent which tends to exacerbate the problem.. The psu could have had a intermittent undervolt (or ripple) at load on the 12v rail due to the cross load which could cause the cards to have vram corruption or other issues when the voltage drops/ripples

Reducing the ocs (and thus power draw) tends to fix this issue as you are no longer on the ragged edge of a particular psu component.

exo 80’s are annoying for levelers already as they do so much damage that you don’t even get credit for kills unless you are in their party. Spamming staff 1 on guard can mean that even people in your party don’t get credit as they havent tagged the mob yet before you killed it lol

the only thing you can’t do that you can do in say wow is power level a lowbie by carrying them through low level dungeons

pdavis.8031:

Gazille.7381:

This game level system is a grind. bring back normal quest.

Doing quests is a grind. Let us have instant level 80s with full traits and BiS gear from creation.

This is what spvp was. And all the people cried “No Progression!” So…yeah

the real problem of shatter aegis is the super short range (240)

if it was say a 450~600 ranged attack, usefulness ,for wvw at least, could increase greatly

thesacredone.1370:

Here is what I got.

pcie @ 1x 2.0 is your problem, the card is in powersave mode and not recognizing gw2 as a d3d program that needs more power

reseat gpu in closest slot, make sure power setting are on performance, clean install drivers, and maybe reinstall the game?

stab changes made wars less tanky but more powerful. High risk, high reward due to glassy ranged and less stab for them. Requires actual tactics, positioning, timing and skill to pull off a great melee push that destroys the ranged.

Guard gs pulls + war Hammer stuns actully do something now!

But most people like taking the safer choice and go ranged which leads to indecisive engagements

What you can do and what is socially permissible in the wvw community are two different things.

Sure, technically, you can troll claim, follow a zerg and throw paper ballistas, spy for another server, waste keep supply by building paper rams, break up gvg’s, troll duelers, or run golems off a cliff, but should you? The game allows said actions due to a lack of functionality, but there is a modicum of decorum that should be shown between players.

The closed guild raid could have definitely handled the situation better by pointing out the public pug tag.

The content is stale and the wvw community has grown pretty insular (bad), but you will not have a good time if you break “the rules” and become known as a troll by your server. unless you enjoy that kind of thing, in which case you are a terrible person.

you needed to beat her during the second crown pavallion to get the title. If you beat her during the first one for the mini, you still needed to do it again the second time around for the title.

Could have been so many reasons

You called sily from n outer, where they maybe had cats, to deal with the zerg. SO they come but that zerg pulls off. Someone could have told them that theres a second guild inc from garri and they go and intercept. or their cats could have been attacked.

Maybe there was miss communication on who was supposed to hold the choke? All three guilds there made the defenders peel off, so sily thinks they will go block people from running in from garri wp while hazing down n outer seige at the same time. Vp/dead could hold the choke/trebs if the other side wanst willing to push.

Assaulting a t3 keep from 1 way isnt easy, and usually takes multi attempts. Making outer swiss cheese and picking off people from garri isnt a bad call in and of its self.

Or the third server could have shown up with 10 or so at n bay and they just wanted to go fight them in the lull while trebbing.

Honestly unless you were on TS and also in the CC theres no way to really know what communications and expectations happened between them.

A failed T3 assault because of miscommunication isnt that uncommon.

You are trying to analyze the engagement when you don’t know all the pieces; which could be construed as hubris on your part.

no aoe limit

in coordinated groups for wvw or a world boss it works just fine

only problem is the short range and the even shorter range on shattered aegis.

it is a tool for large zergs that is very effective in very very specific situations and wasted if that moment passes.

I’m sure people have spammed you why a guild likes to play as a closed raid so i won’t go over that. Public vs private is not a closed discussion by any means, and many servers are struggling with this issue as well.

They could have handled it differently for sure and told you where the public tag was.

BG has strugled with this as well and as a comprimise we try to have a public float tag up. But unless you are familiar with our servers structure, leadership, and drivers it can be hard to know about where to public tag is an who is driving without map hopping around and asking map chat (which people in ts sometimes ignore as it can be super trollish).

Your server most likely runs a voice comms server and a third party forum (w/ shoutbox). Rather than forcing yourself into a group that wants to be left alone, try getting access to those (usually through a simple verification process with a gatekeeper to check for spies) to see where the action is and where you are welcome to join.

Plus it was a thursday when you posted. Usually the places are already determined by then. So you typically have guild raids plus gvg’s, and a single floating karma train.

It’s not looked down upon, just exasperating from a meta perspective. Because the game mode is stale and the establishment wants variety in engagements with pre-established rules.

If a guild wanted to play “srs mode: anything goes in war” ppt siege wars, they can find it easily by assaulting an objective. No one assaults a T3 keep with the idea it will be siege free. We know that there will be a bazillion acs and trebs.

By engaging open field there is the unspoken assumption between many in “the WvW community” that both sides don’t want siege wars and want fair ZvZ engagements. If a ppt guild is caught in the open and doesn’t want that kind of open field fights, they can easily disengage and move towards a tower or keep. It is exceedingly difficult to force an open field engagement that the other side doesn’t want.

By using open field siege not in support of assaulting an objective, all that says is that you do want open field combat, but with siege as well. The reasons some guilds don’t like playing this style have been iterated by previous comments. At this point the fights guild’s expectations were let down and usually leave unhappily without engaging.

TLDR: when an guild “announces” (by mighting up) that they wish to engage open field, then drop siege (or run towards seige cover of a tower/keep), they make their opponents (who were looking for open field fights) feel like a teenage boy that his hopes raised, got strung along, and then dumped.

My own theory:

SoR imploded because there wasn’t a gradual transition to the current T1 attitude towards WvW. At that time the game was not as stale and people still cared about PPT and sever pride for the most part. BG and JQ could sustain PPT and thus the differences in opinion on PPT vs fights were not forced into focus like they were on SoR and were given more time to adapt.

During and after Season 1, for a variety of reasons, SoR could not compete PPT wise in a T1 matchup and win. They could maybe get second if they tried really hard and had help from another server, but had no real chance at first. Because of this, some on the server decided it was not worth all that effort for trying at PPT and not having a shot at second much less first. So these guilds decided to focus on fights instead. However at the time this was very frowned upon, as ppt is the whole “point” of WvW at that time. Player’s attitudes in T1 towards"fights only" was not as accepting as they are now. Which created drama between PPT vs fight guilds, but also between WvW guilds and PVE guilds + pugs.

Eventually, some fights guilds left to look for green pastures in T2, and their coverage fell even further. As SoR dropped out of T1 various guilds who had preferences for playing in T1, transferred back up. T2 at the time was more of a fights scene so the PPT oriented guilds moved back up to T1. The fights guilds had already left and were not interested in coming back to SoR to sustain T2 as it was still filled with many burnt bridges. Ocx/sea numbers have always been small relative to the total population and mainly concentrates in T1 so that there are people to play with and against; so those players moved back into T1 as well. SoR’s reputation as a dying server spread. Guilds started fleeing and SoR could not get more transfers in to arrest the fall. Once the snowball starts there was little chance of stopping it until they hit rock bottom.

A WvW server community is not a monolith, it is various guilds all with independent goals and agendas, playing for what is perceived to be a common purpose. Once that purpose no longer aligns with your guilds own interests, there is little reason to stay. Usually that perception changes slowly and both sides are allowed time to reexamine their own perspectives and slowly compromise to become more accepting of the other. However the pressures of failing expectations so hard in Season 1 really fractured SoRs WvW community where that gradual transition in attitudes was not possible.

Eulolia.2467:

dodgycookies.4562:

not model quality, model limit. You want that on highest in WvW along with viewing distance. Which drives up cpu requirements a lot.

When you have model limit set on highest, and viewing distance on ultra, the models load quite a bit before the name plates show up. So when you are engaging enemy guild A and then enemy guild B’s group shows up, you have more time to respond and be in a better position. If you have the model limit too low you may get blind sided or you may misjudge the size of the additional enemy force before the nameplates load. Even if you do notice a few seconds later with the name plates, it may be too late and you are stuck completely out of position. Those few seconds of heads up can be critical.

In T1 we have been playing the same people for so long that we know each other by character model, so setting character quality to highest allows us to know who the incoming force is, who is driving, and sometimes snipe the driver as well.

And stock i5 is perfectly fine for running on highest model limit unless you’re in something completely ridiculous like 60v60v60 in the middle of stonemist castle. It’s way, way, way above playing on a laptop. Number of high quality models maxed is not needed. If you can recognise opponents by their models then fine, but it’s hardly a key part of playing WvW. You still have guild tags and ranks anyway.

As for view distance, there’s no explicit option for that. There’s LOD distance, but that affects the shift in texture quality, and is one of the options that hits the graphics card more than the cpu. You can max all that anyway, if you have a half-decent system.

Yes I mean LOD setting to ultra is important.

60 (20+20) vs 60 (30+30) vs 60(40+20) is pretty common in T1 (as OPis from JQ) especially garri fights, though most engagements are open field 40 v 40 in various groups with a third 40 joining in later (drivers chase ojs). A stock clock 2500k would find it very hard to sustain a playable 30-40 fps min. Maybe a stock 4690k haswell, though i doubt it without a mild OC to at least 4 ghz.

You sometimes needs max quality because half the people you want to pick out play char guards and are often similar ranks. its harder to find the silver legend in the group of silver footmen/invaders, than it is to find the char with the right blue hair red t3 armor and juggernaut/bifrost.

not model quality, model limit. You want that on highest in WvW along with viewing distance. Which drives up cpu requirements a lot.

When you have model limit set on highest, and viewing distance on ultra, the models load quite a bit before the name plates show up. So when you are engaging enemy guild A and then enemy guild B’s group shows up, you have more time to respond and be in a better position. If you have the model limit too low you may get blind sided or you may misjudge the size of the additional enemy force before the nameplates load. Even if you do notice a few seconds later with the name plates, it may be too late and you are stuck completely out of position. Those few seconds of heads up can be critical.

In T1 we have been playing the same people for so long that we know each other by character model, so setting character quality to highest allows us to know who the incoming force is, who is driving, and sometimes snipe the driver as well.

i5’s are fine but a stock sandy bridge i5 will not get sustained 40 fps in large WvW zerg fights which is what op is asking about. Especially with high/highest character model counts and ultra viewing distances (which is important for discerning enemy positions,numbers,reinforcements,tactics)

Sandy bridge is very marginal and OC is necessary even with the newest Haswells for large scale WvW. Which necessitates the need for a decent cooler, as the stock one will throttle at even a moderate voltage bump.

600 is cutting it close, 800 is more reasonable for all new parts
if you want 40+ in WvW:

get the latest i5 or i7 haswell k series cpu with a z97 mobo
then get a decent air/aio water cooler for 70-100 (important)
and overclock as much as possible.

get a gpu based on the resolution of your monitor
GW2 has easy to run graphics so gpu isnt as important
mainly depends on your resolution

1080p: $150 – 200 range
1440p: $250-$330

Dont cheap out on psu. 500W bronze+ cert from a good company
buy ram (2 dimms for dual channel) + hard drive(7200 rpm)
pricing will change so use pcpartpicker

iv tried both parallels and mac client and performance is similar with mac client being better (like 5 fps) in zergs on my late 2013 15" rmbp w/750m . So which ever you like best. Boot camp is still the best performance though (20-30% more), if you have the storage space and want to deal with dual booting a windows partition for gaming I highly recommend it.

boot camp for best performance. vmware and the mac client has similar performance, i think parallels has an edge in directx vm but havent tried recently with 10

All current macbooks are soldered

apple has not made a laptop with a socketed cpu in 20 years, back to the powerbook/ibook days.

I think the last one was the G3

I am assuming you are using a thunderbolt chassis of some sort with an external monitor? Unless you are doing a thunderbolt to expresscard to pcie adapter chain in which case more gpu power could help.

for the most part you are limited by the 4308U as the 960 is plenty fast for an older game like gw2.

a better gpu will only really help if you are running at super high resolutions or multi monitor setups.

If you really want to increase performance in with an egpu, you will have to upgrade to a 15" rmbp with an actual quadcore rather than the dual core 13’s

try disabling hyperthreading

your cpu usage is pretty high on the non gw2 threads as well.

when i run chrome + gw2 on a 4820k with ht off my readings are 70 70 45 40 ish, with ht on its 70 15 70 20 35 10 40 5

a D500 is a rebranded W8000 that was cut down from 1792 to 1525 steaming processors to get that lower price point.

The 2012 released W8000 was the same chip as a radeon 7950, and the new D500 is the equivalent of a 7870 XT (4.3 billion transistor Tahati LE vs the 7870 LE’s 2.8 billion transistor Pitcairn XT)

Because the new R9 series were also mainly rebrands, the D500 in terms of silicon is a 20% cut down r9 280 (non-x).

So in essence you are running weaker 280’s in CF, but with workstation drivers that are not optimized for gaming. Which would put the expected performance in the 270s range, which are mid/low end cards. I would never ever expect 270s in CF to run 4k well.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/workstation-graphics-card-gaming,3425-3.html
Notice how the W8000 performs at 65% of the identical gaming chip: the 7950.

Factor in the 20%-30% performance hit from the cider wrapper in the OSX client, your performance is pretty expected.

or you could run a command line with your shortcut:
works for me everytime.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2saub4/how_to_fix_your_updater_temp/

windows now doesnt show bluescreens as a default, you will have to turn that back on in your system settings. This will get you a code on crash, which will point you in the right direction.

If no code shows up then its most likely a hardware problem as components will shut themselves down to prevent further damage.

the expected loss isn’t that bad (i think another thread said something like 10s each) as you are guaranteed that golden ram trophy to sell back + foods/fireworks etc.

Mainly i buy them to list on the tp for obsessive gamblers. they were like 2g on launch, like 1.3 ish now

the mac client is running cider wrapper and has all the performance hits associated with vm’s

as with most pc games, running in windows will get you more a lot more performance. typically 30-50 percent (depending on the port, the wrapper, and the mac hardware).

that said, running bootcamp requires a windows license (which costs a decent amount), and also you lose a lot of the osx benefits like a usable trackpad. If you do choose to go boot camp, get a mouse.

gw2 can do sli but honestly there’s no need as you wont get any fps upgrade unless you are doing triple monitors or 4k, in which case the 2gb frame buffer of the 680 is lacking

for bf4 ultra 1080p, sli 680’s are great as that game has pretty good multi gpu scaling especially if you can get it that cheap

edit; just make sure your mb has sli support and your psu is strong enough to run 2 680’s

Server status changes by the hour so try during a different time. BG is always full during NA prime but people sneak in during early sea.

The WvW guilds on DB will know when the best time to transfer in will be, based on coverage, so hop on ebg/home bl and ask around.

edit: or you could try posting and asking on the DB community forums (again mainly WvW focused as that’s the only reason for transferring):
http://dragonbrand-forums.enjin.com/

maybe you guys are in different zones, the EU and NA servers are separated, and for adding contacts between them you need to know the full account name including the 4 numbers

you have a really old cpu (clarkdale dual core) and this game is dx9 based. which means single threaded performance matters a lot more than in other modern games. your listed performance seems normal for that cpu.

downsampling increases the draw calls significantly (the performance bottleneck in dx9), so running native rather than downscaled will help also

Make sure your gpu is in the slot closest to the cpu. (very important)

run the game in windowed mode and see what gpuz says while the game is running.

Use an oc software like precisionx/afterburner and change the power targets/clock speeds a bit higher

Try older drivers

i would expect the whole package (gw2+hot) to cost $60. So the current $40 heroic edition msrp makes me think $20. Could be more if they discount gw2 further as launch approaches.

probably pcie issue.
1)Make sure you are using the gpu in the slot closest to the cpu,
2)reseat the gpu to check for dirty connections
3)set windows power mode to performance

disc image is outdated and plus you do not need to “install” gw2.

The launcher runs independently so all you need to do is copy your current gw2 folder to a usb drive, assuming it is the same operating system (ie windows pc desktop to bootcamp windows).

if you are switching from a windows pc to osx you will need to download the mac client as windows programs don’t run in osx (unless you use parallels with a 30% performance hit)

(note that gw2 mac client performance is about 20-30% lower in osx due to the cider wrapper)

or allow wars to dual wield 2 handers ie: wow war’s titan grip

also high rez character models

shadows and reflections

Sounds like the pcie bus is stuck at 1x vs 16x (run a gpuz test to find out)

If it is the case then it could be a power setting, or just a dirty connection. Make sure you set windows to performance mode and re-seat your gpu after cleaning the pice connector.