Guild Wars 2

RoflandRoll.2810:

Its called the “mob has nothing” syndrome. I’ve soloed Vets I’ve duoed champs and there’s still a chance that none of get loot.

You may have misinterpreted what I said. Lots of mobs don’t have loot, but you always get >XP< if you are properly tagged for the mob.

My complaint is that I am not getting loot OR xp when killing vets/champs. This means I’m not getting tagged for the fight, even though I am attacking it from start to finish.

Apparently OP doesn’t understand the concept of ‘Burst DPS’.

Go play League of Legends or similar and get some real perspective.

Yes, I am a hard burst glass cannon Thief with super high mobility. If I catch you in the wrong moment, you’re dead. Don’t get caught.

Too much to ask? Too bad, because Thieves are at danger of getting caught 24/7. As glass cannon we can’t take focus. If you out CC us or catch us, we’re dead.

If OP expects a thief to stick around while your CDs refresh, they’re out of their mind. A good thief knows when to jump in AND when to jump out.

Like I said, study MOBA games if you wanna know how to counter one.

Example: Necro is an easy direct counter to a thief. They have high survivability and sustain, two direct counters to a Thief. If you can outlast our burst we’re pretty much dead.

I’m extremely frustrated having finally reached level 80 and begun farming in Orr only to discover that the ‘no competition, everybody gets loot and rewards’ system is anything but.

Veteran and Champion mobs have insane amounts of HP, and while I could kill a Veteran eventually if I stuck to it long enough, in the massive farming groups in Orr they tend to go down very quickly.

I started noticing that I wasn’t getting XP or Loot rights on some mobs, especially Veteran or Champion mobs. I thought okay, maybe I’m not getting a hit in early enough, or doing enough damage.

I’m glass cannon DPS, if I go dagger/dagger and stick to a single Vet mob in a fight, i STILL don’t get exp and loot rights over 50% of the time. There appears to be some sort of ‘minimum damage requirement’ to get rights.

This is completely unfair and RUINS the entire experience that GW2 has created thus far. It forces people to group up, adding to social tension, and makes people become more competitive. Players use heavy AOE and wipe out masses of mobs getting XP and loot before most of the other players in the area even have a chance to tag the mobs.

I can sit on a Veteran or Champion mob and chain backstab it for the entire fight and STILL not get xp or loot.

It’s incredibly frustrating, and it means I either have to forgo fighting the harder mobs entirely (losing my chance at better loot), instead focusing on waves of AoE mobs, or I have to roll the dice and go hard, hard burst into the mob, from 100% till 0, and keep my fingers crossed that I get the loot/xp tag. It rarely happens.

Please, please, PLEASE address this.

GW2 tends to drive video cards to high temps, even with moderate to low actual GPU usage. This may be causing stability or crash issues for many users.

This is because most modern video cards have very conservative fan profiles to meet manufacturer restrictions on fan noise (nVidia I’m looking at you…). This means that your fan will sometimes only ramp up appropriately at temperatures as high as 80C+. I have noticed that after an extended period of use, many nVidia cards may become unstable even at lower temps such as 74-76C (verified on a 570 and 670).

To resolve this, simply manually set your fan speed or create a custom fan profile using your utility of choice. I use EVGA’s PrecisionX utility, but MSI Afterburner or nVidia Inspector should work fine as well.

For those having stability issues or crashing, set your fan as high as it will go (in the case of my 670, 80%) and try to reproduce the crash.

You may be surprised to find that your card is now stable.

If so, you can then create a custom fan profile (depending on utility used) so that the card will ramp speeds up much higher at lower temperatures. This has the benefit of keeping your card cool when gaming, but still allowing it to idle down when you’re surfing the web and what not.

With a custom profile my 670s never go over 71C, while maintaining a comfortable level of fan noise.

P.S. Protip: To prevent overheating the card, try opening your map when you go AFK. GW2 tends to run the card really hot when the character is idle (since the CPU bottleneck seems to subside temporarily and the card ramps up in framerate). Opening the map will lower the power draw on your card substantially, and give time for the fan to cool down the entire card assembly (not just the GPU itself). If you have a custom fan profile you will even notice the fan dip down after the map is open a few seconds.

Disabling one thread per core makes no performance difference for me (even slightly reduces performance) on my i7-970 6 core (12 thread) CPU.

I did notice that disabling CPU Parking helped a little bit, but clearly some processes are not being offloaded to other threads properly. With 6 cores, 12 threads of power, I shouldn’t be seeing throttling at any point (CPU usage never goes above 50%). Unfortunately that isn’t so.

I can also confirm that I am also unable to create a performance profile using CTRL+SHIFT+C, running gw2.exe as an administrator with -perfdebug.

Repeatable bug with Thief animation after shadowstepping with auto-run enabled.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Enable auto run (currently bound at default R key)
2) Activate shadowstep ability using hotkey (currently bound as Shift+W)
3) Click on location in the foreground as a teleport target.
4) Upon arriving at location, without touching any other controls, character will be stuck in a single animation frame (‘combat ready’ pose, same as drawing weapons while standing still, but without idle animation).

Character will continue to maintain stuck animation until either stopping and moving the character again, jumping, or doing any other activity which changes the current animation.

Unfortunately this bug is more of a nuisance and not nearly as funny as /plane :P

NPC got to 50% health within the first 30 seconds of the fight and then went invulnerable, healing to full. He seemed to get bugged mid animation, has fist raised in air and has been invulnerable for over 5 minutes now. We only get 6 minutes to kill him so this seems like a bug.

Edit: Stayed invulnerable the whole time until we failed.

Atrocity.5794:

Wrong some motherboards with SLI/Xfire defualt the other PCIe x16 slots to x1-x4 speeds….

I already mentioned this in my initial reply, and this is exactly what I’m saying. The ‘tech’ should clarify. I know from experience that blanket statements like “maybe you plugged it in the wrong slot” can do a lot of damage in the hands of a basic user without the right context to explain it.

Bounty.7632:

pabloedvardo.3058:

AshleySegovia.3948:

Thanks so much for the reports everyone! Just know that we haven’t forgotten about you all and we’re still looking into this issue. One thing I would like to note, however, is of the many causes for low performance for players with high end graphics cards is that their PCi-Express GPU is plugged into a 1x|4x slot rather than a 16x slot. For players who have recently upgraded their video cards, we recommend ensuring that the GPU is plugged into the proper PCi-Express slot for maximum performance.

This is a joke, right? I do PC hardware support for a living. There is no such thing as a high-end video card that goes in a 1x or 4x slot. You have no idea what you’re talking about.

A PCIx16 video card cannot physically fit into a smaller slot.

Perhaps you meant to say that some users were using a SLI-compatible PCI-e x16 slot which when used alone (without other SLI cards installed) runs at 8x, and therefore the user should consult their motherboard manual to determine the proper slot to use when using a single video card. This is literally the only situation that could be somewhat similar to what you’re describing.

Also, to clarify, even if a user was using it in a PCI-e x16 slot running at 8x, they would not see the level of performance degradation as reported in this thread. Many SLI systems default the ports to 8x on the secondary or third video card slot anyways, with relatively marginal difference.

In addition, new PCI-e 3.0 slots run much faster than their 2.0 counterparts. So an ‘x8’ speed 3.0 slot is at least as fast as an ‘x16’ 2.0 slot.

I don’t intend to be mean, but this is a tech support forum, perhaps someone with basic PC knowledge should be the one communicating with the users.

To bad even with the most basic google search you would have found that this has actually been a resolution for many people as their is a bug in some motherboards that makes the slot run in x1 or some people just flat out put the video card in the wrong slot.

This personally is not the cause of my poor performance but i would suggest everyone to check via GPU-Z.

Pwned.

I gotcher back Ashley lolol.

You do realize ‘Ashley’ made no comment in regards to a PCIe x1 SPEED bug, but instead, and I quote, said, “their PCi-Express GPU is plugged into a 1x|4x slot rather than a 16x slot.”

Notice the key word here: PLUGGED.

This implies physically plugging into a slot. Nothing to do with speed due to a motherboard bug.

I use Google all the time. This is a matter of reading comprehension. Nice try, though.

Edit: P.S. Some video cards reduce link speed when going into low power states. Make sure you’re checking the link speed while the GPU is under load, or you may not get a correct reading (e.g. a false x1 speed due to idle state).

AshleySegovia.3948:

Thanks so much for the reports everyone! Just know that we haven’t forgotten about you all and we’re still looking into this issue. One thing I would like to note, however, is of the many causes for low performance for players with high end graphics cards is that their PCi-Express GPU is plugged into a 1x|4x slot rather than a 16x slot. For players who have recently upgraded their video cards, we recommend ensuring that the GPU is plugged into the proper PCi-Express slot for maximum performance.

This is a joke, right? I do PC hardware support for a living. There is no such thing as a high-end video card that goes in a 1x or 4x slot. You have no idea what you’re talking about.

A PCIx16 video card cannot physically fit into a smaller slot.

Perhaps you meant to say that some users were using a SLI-compatible PCI-e x16 slot which when used alone (without other SLI cards installed) runs at 8x, and therefore the user should consult their motherboard manual to determine the proper slot to use when using a single video card. This is literally the only situation that could be somewhat similar to what you’re describing.

Also, to clarify, even if a user was using it in a PCI-e x16 slot running at 8x, they would not see the level of performance degradation as reported in this thread. Many SLI systems default the ports to 8x on the secondary or third video card slot anyways, with relatively marginal difference.

In addition, new PCI-e 3.0 slots run much faster than their 2.0 counterparts. So an ‘x8’ speed 3.0 slot is at least as fast as an ‘x16’ 2.0 slot.

I don’t intend to be mean, but this is a tech support forum, perhaps someone with basic PC knowledge should be the one communicating with the users.

Ok, I can officially put these CPU bound arguments to rest.

I use an i7-970, original MSRP $885, this is a 6-core 12-thread 12MB L3, LGA1366 multicore beast of Intel’s X58 era. I have never maxed this thing out doing anything other than stress testing for overclocks.

GW2 uses 21-23% CPU under load. However, it appears to only take advantage of 6 cores (each core’s 2nd thread is unused). Still, none of the threads are ever maxed to 100% usage.

I run GW2 on an Intel 520 Series 180GB SSD – no hard disk bottlenecks, whatsoever.

I have my proc OC’d from 3.2 to 3.7GHZ (4GHZ Turbo Boost) on air.

I have 24GB of Mushkin DDR3 memory in triple channel. I see approx 4.74GB total usage when in Lion’s Arch.

I use 2×670′s in SLI. These are 2GB cards (GW2 uses up to 1GB of memory during use). I run at 1440p. With a single card I can approach 90% usage. With 2 cards and SLI enabled I reach only 50-60% usage on each card. This is with FPS consistently dropping below 60.

I see massive stutter (drops to 1-11 fps) upon initial loading and turning around in a new area – seems to be a disk access or Memory to GPU memory bottleneck issue, since once I’ve swiveled around a few times, my response becomes smooth.

However, with all settings maxed (but sampling on native), I regularly drop below 60fps in most areas, especially Lion’s Arch or WvW large battles. Again, this is with 21-23% CPU usage, 50-60% GPU usage, overclocking on both enabled (tested stock @ oc same diff), and with fast disk access and sufficient memory bandwidth.

Turning shadows off completely eliminates a good chunk of slowdown, and gets me solid 60 in many more areas, but at a sacrifice of image quality.

Turning all settings down low gives me over 60 FPS quite easily, but it still dips down to 55 or so when I’m moving around in Lion’s Arch. The main difference is my GPU usage drops from 50-60% to roughly 20%.

Also, running with “prefer max performance” only accomplishes two things: increases heat dissipation and energy use of my video cards, and prevents a slight sluggish response occasionally when going from idle to high power states.

So this all reeks of an optimization issue. GW2 doesn’t seem to be taking advantage of high end hardware as well as it could, and there’s something in the pipeline that’s bottlenecking every system.

I suspect it’s a threading issue and a resource loading issue. With a fast SSD, globs of memory, SLI, and a ridiculous CPU, I should be able to have all settings maxed and have all those high res textures, models, and what not loading seamlessly on separate threads in the background without sacrificing any responsiveness in the primary rendering thread.

As it stands, with none of my components reaching 100% usage, there is a scaling issue whereas GW2 can use and load and implement very high quality resources, but is unable to process them efficiently.

I trust ANet to address it eventually, and here’s to seeing that day come

Edit: Also, driver version as of ATM is 304.79. I was using 306.02 previously with identical performance, however I was crashing occasionally and the ambient occlusion features is buggy at the moment anyways, so I downgraded to .79 for stability.