Guild Wars 2

I wouldn’t call azurite crystals, sentinel’s inscriptions, food recipes and the like prestige gear.

If it’s a cosmetic item/memorabilia then sure. I can understand not bringing them back (personally I think all these sorts of items should be bound anyway and have the sort of prestige you can’t buy with gold but that’s another topic for another time) but it’d be nice to have the more generic items and consumables be brought back seeing as they can actually affect the game and the like.

It’s as if people haven’t been living in this world up till now.

The issue with vanilla beans being rare compared to some other ingredients is that they’re needed in many recipes either as the ingredient itself or as a component. Chief among these is Bowl of Baker’s Wet ingredients (often goes hand in hand with Bowl of Baker’s Dry Ingredients which can be made entirely through ingredients bought from a nearby NPC) and Bowl of White Frosting has a handful of uses too.

At the very least, the balance just isn’t there.

The i5-3570k is fine. The main difference between the i5 and the i7 is that the i7 comes with hyperthreading which isn’t really utilised by GW2 (or any other game, that and beyond this point you get rapidly diminishing returns for your money) so you’d be paying extra for no real improvement. The game does appear to be fairly CPU dependant (my older 6950s in crossfire run with ample breathing room against my i5-2500k which has been OCed a little to 4.3GHz) but it’s not anything getting the i7 would fix.

As for the GPU, get whatever meets your pricepoint. nVidia has come under a bit of fire lately for failing to meet certain price points (and for tacking on subpar memory with kepler [and for limiting OCing potential]) but look around and see what you like/want and meets your price. tomshardware.com is a good starting point with their monthly buying guides (though they don’t go out and look for good prices, you’ll have to do that yourself). It seems to be popular opinion though that the 7870 or 7950 represent better value than the 660Ti.

Provided you don’t fully max out settings (supersampling tends to punish any system) you should be able to meet your target reasonably well. The game scales nicely so with the sort of system you described you should be able to get decent quality graphics and the high frame rates you want. Note that some areas are far more taxing than others. The Shiverpeaks lean toward high framerates while some places like Orr will beat the frame rates down (oh and don’t forget WvW :p).

I’ve had the occasional crash here and there since the game went live (compared to a stress test where running the game at all would crash near instantly upon entering the game world) but it was so rare I paid it little mind and expected the problem to be eventually ironed out.

So imagine my displeasure when the launcher patches my client with the new build and the game proves highly volatile once again. Often I can’t stay in the game world for even a minute before the screen turns to lines and the speakers buzz repetitively (very rarely I’ll get a blue screen).

I’ve checked drivers old and new, I’ve stress tested my hardware in stock and custom configurations, temperatures are normal, other 3D applications don’t cause issues, it’s only GW2 that’s incredibly volatile and only since the latest build implementation.

Not that hardware ought to be relevant (given that it’s otherwise been mostly running fine till now) but:
i5-2500k
Sapphire Radeon 6950 Toxic x2 (yes I’ve tried multiple things with the cards too)
Geil Black Dragon DDR3 16GB
Samsung 830 256GB SSD
Gigabyte P67X-UD3 mobo
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit