Guild Wars 2

So this database you’ve created has all the human armor skins…I’ve been waiting for the wiki to complete it’s list so I can choose what armor to get. You sir/madam, are a hero!

If I may make a suggestion, I really loved the way the original GW1 wiki displayed armor. That is, multiple pictures of a character wearing half the set of armor to show each individual piece if one wanted to mix and match sets for a really custom appearance:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Gallery_of_female_elementalist_Luxon_armor

Uhhh, just for GW2, I’d give it an 8.5. If you overclock that CPU, 9.5. The only reason I don’t give it a 10 is because its a sandy bridge CPU, not an ivy bridge CPU.

I’m a monitor freak too, do you watch your upload and download rates to make sure they are within the norms for what you are doing on your computer?

Recycle.5493:

The highest movement speed you can achieve in game is 33% which is only provided through the boon swiftness. All other movement speed buffs will not stack and only the highest you have will be taken into account for your current movement speed, which, without swiftness, can only be a 25% increase.

This is currently true for most classes. Thieves top out at 50% in stealth when traited. I also believe there is a rune that gives player’s under the boon swiftness an additional 7% speed increase, bringing the max most of the classes can get to 40% (with the rune and under swiftness). However, I believe that rune is currently not functioning properly.

Lets say strength is on your main-hand and frailty is on your off-hand. When you critically hit, the system checks to see if your RNG is good on your main-hand (30% of the time it is). In this case the strength will proc. Then, both sigils go on CD, therefore frailty will not be checked or triggered. If strength does not proc, it checks your off-hand, if it procs, both go on CD. If neither strength or frailty proc, then the next time you crit, the same process repeats. While sigils are on their invisible CD, they will not be checked for proccing.

I believe the math comes out to be 51% that one or the other will proc when they are not on CD.

I want to see the bonus mission pack (GW1) missions as fractals. I’m all in for bring back old lore and playing it in the new GW2 system.

PhyZiX.3802:

hey guys

i bought the game yesterday and of course there are was many many updates after the launch
1-so the game cant be playable without some of the updates ?
2-and icant know how many GB still to download how can i know
because i got a really bad connection .
3-if the PC turned off while downloading it will restart again ?

thank you for reading and i hope to get an answer

Correct, the game cannot be played without being fully updated.

See Kyllaa’s post about how much left you have to download.

This last question can go down one of two ways. If the PC turns off from a power outage or some other interruption that is unexpected, then you might have to start the download all over again because of corrupted data. If your PC turned off in a controlled manner, than the launcher will likely just have to check all your existing files you have downloaded already and then the launcher will continue downloading the rest of the updates.

Al Capwn.2058:

Right now I am playing GW2 on its lowest settings with my amd athlon 64 x2 dual core 5000+, and Geforce 8400 GS, and 4 GB of ram. From what I understand (using http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ as a reference), my graphics card is below the official “minimum requirements”. The game is playable, but sometimes lags and takes a while to load.

I am looking to upgrade my computer, but saving funds for this endeavor is a slow process. I have enough to get a new mobo, and the intel celeron g1610 processor. Unfortunately, the new mobo doesn’t have the right slot for my video card. The processor, from what I understand, runs Intel HD 2500 graphics, which is also below the requirements. But I have heard is better than my current graphics card.

What I am wondering, is does anyone have experience running the game with Intel HD 2500 graphics? I want to know if I should upgrade a few parts now to improve my gaming experience, or wait until I can save enough to get a new video card along with the other parts.

I’m puzzled how you even played on your graphics card. I wouldn’t expect anything to run that doesn’t meet the minimum requirements. I would also like to take the time to point out that the processor you plan to get is more of a side-grade component, you’ll get less than twice the performance of your current processor likely. Twice of a little is still a little. If you’re tight on budget than you should still consider AMD and not Intel.

I would wait and save for a computer worth getting. Something like the FX-4300 on an AM3+ motherboard is something you should shoot for for low budget gaming systems. Then, you can hop on a GTX 650Ti Boost or something similar.

Perhaps its because you don’t have enough RAM in your system and the PageFile is being constantly accessed. How much RAM is in your system?

cringes Alright, since DDR2 RAM, from what I’ve seen, is extremely expensive compared to DDR3, I would avoid upgrading RAM. Another reason to avoid upgrading RAM right now, is that if you were to upgrade everything, the RAM would not transfer over.

If I were you, I would purchase a mediocre graphics card if you aren’t looking to play at amazing frames and highest settings. I know you said 80 bucks is your limit, but personally I wouldn’t get anything under a GTX 650Ti. I recently (in the past month) purchased one for 110 bucks for a sibling’s build and it was much better than the 9800GT that they had that was a hand-me-down from me.

If you’re willing to go the extra mile and wait for a deal, the GTX 650Ti/AMD equivalent won’t disappoint. With that said, you’d probably be fine with a normal GTX 650 or GTX 550Ti or their AMD equivalents.

Realize this though, your CPU would be what is bottlenecking your performance if you upgrade your graphics card. To fix that you’d prolly have to do a full rebuild (new mobo/CPU/RAM). If/When you do this, you’d already have the nicer graphics card to port over, which is why I recommend going the GPU route rather than RAM/CPU/ect.

Over Christmas break I was able to see the performance increase in my sibling’s rig which is a E6320 C2D @ 2.4Ghz and a GTX 650Ti (was a 9800GT) and the game went from unplayable on lowest settings (5 FPS) to playable 15-25 FPS in LA and 30+ in Gendarran Fields on medium-high settings. It went from the graphics card being the bottleneck to the CPU being the bottleneck.

If you look at my post history, I ranted about how I tested the graphics card in my system before gifting it to check performance. I got better results in my rig because I run a i7 930 @ 4.1Ghz which is less of a CPU bottleneck than the E6320 @ 2.4 Ghz.

If I were you, it’s time to build an entire new system rather than upgrading what you currently have to outdated parts.

If you’re not on a budget, I would go with an i7 3770K or an i5 3570K. If you just game and do other menial tasks like surfing the web and word processing, then I would just go with the i5. If you do video/audio encoding as well as everything else under the sun, I would get the i7. If you are on a budget and don’t want to make your significant other mad because of the price of the new machine, I would get the AMD FX 8350. Personally, I go with Intel partially because there is a Microcenter within a reasonable distance of my home. Microcenter sells processors at a much lower price than other outlets, like Newegg and TigerDirect.

As for RAM, if you are on a budget, get 8GB of DDR3 1600Mhz. If you are not on a budget, then I would get whatever your heart desires. There is some pretty neat stuff you can do with an absurd amount of RAM. Fancycahce allows you to cache some or all of GW2 or other programs into RAM to allow for faster access to the files. You can also make a RAM Disk with loads of RAM. What a RAM Disk does is make a very fast hard drive out of your RAM. I have a RAM Disk for GW2 which eats up 16GB of RAM, then I have 8GB left over for Windows.

As for a graphics card, I wouldn’t get anything less than a GTX 650Ti. The GTX 650Ti will allow you to play the game on medium settings on a 1080p resolution. If you have money to blow you won’t see any improvement beyond a GTX 670 unless you run a crazy setup with 3 monitors and/or inject a custom AA like SweetFX instead of using the terrible AA the GW2 options lets us use. Personally, I run a GTX 560Ti 448 Edition, I play on highest settings (besides supersampling) on a 1080p resolution and never have a problem with dipping below 25 fps in LA.

If you’re really tight on cash you can upgrade just your graphics card for now since a graphics card will port over to your next computer. Then, wait until Haswell comes out in June and upgrade the rest of your PC. My siblings have a GTX 650Ti on a worse processor than yours (a C2D @ 2.4Ghz) and get just playable fps in LA (25ish) on medium settings on a 1600×900 resolution with 2GB of RAM.

Someone else will have to give the perspective of the AMD side. My knowledge of AMD products severely lacks so hopefully Rampage, Jazhara, or someone else will come give some insight.

Your CPU temperatures are kinda close to their maximum, 6C away, so I would make sure your heat sink is cleaned, proper airflow is present, the heat sink is fully attached, and the thermal paste hasn’t gone bad over the years.
http://products.amd.com/pages/desktopcpudetail.aspx?id=586&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
As people have said above, I would suggest something similar, just in this order:

1) If you feel confident in learning how to overclock your CPU and don’t mind purchasing an aftermarket CPU cooler, I would overclock it. The primary reason being that your CPU is old and not giving you the desired performance in higher end gaming anymore. If you burn it out due to overclocking, no harm no foul, since the aftermarket cooler can likely be ported to a new computer system. Just make sure its compatible with socket AM3/AM3+ (AMD processors) and socket 1155/1150 (Intel processors).

2) The same can be said about your GPU, its so old that if you overclock it and it dies, its time to purchase a new one anyways. Just don’t buy an after market cooler for your GPU, it doesn’t need it since its maximum temperature is 100C or so, so you have plenty of headroom on your GPU temperature.

3) If you choose not to overclock or the overclocking has not given you desired results, then you need to purchase a new computer. I’m not sure if you’re the DIY kind of person or one who is willing to spend extra money to have it prebuilt and might not have the desired components. If you’re the DIY kind of person, the first order of business is upgrading your graphics card. A new graphics card will be compatible with your current system and a new system. So for now, we’ll only upgrade the graphics card and see what you think with the performance of the new card with the old processor. A few things that should be known before I can suggest something is what resolution do you game at? What level of graphic settings do you want to play at? What FPS do you expect to get with the graphic settings?

In addition, we’ll need to know what power supply you have so we can figure out if you’ll need a bigger/better one for a new graphics card.