Guild Wars 2

This is a much better equilibrated build.

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/78sgJV

Balance at its best. Our top DPS is half of the second worse.

WOW ANET, JUST WOW…

The cpu is the bottleneck. Gw2 is a very cpu intensive game.

Also, disable reflections and shadows.

Make sure the gpu runs at pcie x16 speed.

I have a 1080p 24" monitor. When VSR was enabled I tested playing at 1440p downsampled. Haven’t come back to 1080p yet.

If the overclocked gpu crashes in games, then the overclock is not stable. Benchmarks do nothing for overclock stability.

Good buffs to torch and utilities, but the sad truth is that the most annoying aspects of mesmers aren’t adressed.
- Still horrible AA damage across all weapons.
- Still anet fails to acknowledge that the issue with mantras and utility phantasms are cast times, not CD’s.
- Still abandoned weapons like focus and staff.
- Still annoying projectile based phantasms missing hits all over the place.

I’m using SweetFX 2.0 without any issue. Also tried Reshade and didn’t have any problem.

- Make sure the gpu is working at x16 pcie speed.

- Eliminate Gw2 folders from Local and Roaming inside User/AppData. This will reset all ingame settings.

- Uninstall GeForce Experience. Junk of software that creates a lot of issues.

- Try older drivers, because Nvidia has had a lot of issues with Gw2.

Go for the 6600, better than haswell. Dont where you read it, but skylake cpus dont have issues with the game

If you have a good z97 motherboard get a 4790k or a broadwell i5 5675c and overclock it. If not the best thing would be to jump to skylake with a 6600k+new motherboard+fast ddr4 (+3000MHz).

But I doubt you’d see a big improvement, the 4590 is already a quite fast cpu. First I’d try to optimize your computer.
Make sure the gpu is working at pcie 3.0 x16 speed, and disable some ingame settings: Reflections, shadows and put Character Model limit to “low”.

This isn’t needed.

There’s actually 4 settings that affect drastically the performance once you get into heavy situations, and yet they are some of the fewest that improve the image quality.

• Character Model limit. By far, the most taxing setting in the game. It determines the amount of people rendered. In heavy situations it tanks the framerate miserably, but in dungeons, open world or raids the effect is minimal.
  Put "medium if you have a heavily oced Skylake. If you have a haswell i5 or better “low” is your target. For anything below, “lowest” is the only option for you.
• Shadows at ultra. It renders all the shadows you can see. From Low to High what it does is to increase the range from switching between low and high res shadows.
  Ultra should only be used if having an overkill gpu (780, 970, 290, 480…).
• Effect LOD. If enabled, it reduces the amount of effects rendered in actions and skills. If disabled, everything is rendered with so much flashy fights start to become a nightmare.
  There’s no reason to not activate it. If you want heavy situations, disable it. If you want to be competitive, disable it.
• Reflections. It only affects the reflections on the water. In some maps it tanks the performance as it also renders the undersea of the map. And as most maps/instances in gw2 don’t have much water, if any, the benefits of having it enabled are nothing compared to the framerate you lose most of the time.

Basically, maxing this settings isn’t worth regardless how “Light” is the game mode you’re playing.
All other settings won’t affect that much the performance between scenarios. If you have the hardware, max them and enjoy.

Sarrs.4831:

these builds are instantly countered when you run appropriate condi removal builds, you can literally ignore them because they have no pressure

This.

For 1vs1 it might be tricky to get the appropriate to be able to deal with condi bombs, although some professions have ridiculous amount of condi cleansing. But when you start to run in small groups, even in a couple works, condi builds can be shut down very easily.

Also, a big issue against condi builds is not evading condi attacks. People cry about condi mesmer, and yet they eat Confusing Images + clones shattering without blocking/evading, plus attacking normally after the condi bomb.

Once you put a step into wvw, you need to be prepared for everything, and dealing condis is part of it.

@Ares, the best option from those you put is the 6600.

About broadwell, I have an i7 5775c.
The Iris pro will only work if playing at 720p at low, and even there the performance is far from desirable.
As a cpu + dgpu, it is a beast, and I use the igpu as the recorder: 1-2 fps drop recording at 1440p 60fps 25000kbps.
However, the 5675c is still as good and quite more cheaper.

You think that higher clock makes Haswell better, but the thing is the differences are just 100MHz in favor of Haswell, but it is negated by the higher IPC from Skylake.

But there’s a much more impactful thing: Skylake cache outperforms Haswell no matter what, and memory is a key factor in cpu intensive games.
That’s why both Broadwell and Skylake don’t need to be clocked as high as Haswell to get the same performance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMUPZn3z5h4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9XndYYHYlA

To OP, the best cpu out of your option is either the i5 6400 or 6500. The second is about 10% and if the extra price is less than that choose it, if not then the 6400 will be quite good.
Despite having higher single core performance, the i3 6100 has only 2 cores which are short for a game such cpu intensive as gw2.
About the gpu, a GTX 950 is more than enough for Gw2 at 1080p.

Julius Seizure.4985:

I am going to let you in on a little secret. A Haswell CPU with higher single core clock speed will outperform most current Skylake models for this game.

Is it a better CPU overall for gaming? No.

Is such a Haswell product better for GW2 specifically? Yes.

Sorry but that’s nonsense. There is not a single theoretical reason to say Haswel is better than Skylake.

Skylake has better IPC, faster cache and access to ddr4 which brings higher bandwidth.

And it has been proven Skylake is quite better than Haswell at gaming in cpu intensive scenarios.

Condi mesmer is a no go for zerguing. Most groups now ask for boonshare mesmer. Then you can go for ranged dps/cc, quite fun but less effective and demanded

Yes. The 1070 is about the same as the 980ti, but stock. The thing is Maxwell can overclock much more than Pascal from stock.

Another reason is the 1070 has the stock cooler, which ia louder, while that ichill is a beast.

The only thing is that the 1070 will be better at VR.

Nice video!!!

PD: Skins intro, such memories

Gw2 has always used Crossfire/SLI. But the thing is a mid level gpu (R9 270x, GTX 950, GTX 660ti) is enough to max the game at 1080p, and at this level of gpu compute, only more cpu performance will increase the framerate.
Crossfire/SLI will only be needed if you go with very high resolutions or multiple monitor setups.

To OP, if you want to get better performance you’ll need to town down some settings: Character Model Limit (this is the most important one), Reflections and Shadows.

And if you haven’t overclock that cpu do it.

TheHeretic.3529:

Your CPU is NOT a bottleneck here. The game simply isn’t made for modern hardware. People will preach the single-thread argument, but my 6700k never maxes any thread, even in wvw fights with frames dropped into the 20s.

So no, upgrades will not increase your performance. Best option is to lower your settings.

Thread usage =/= core usage.
Disable HT in your 6700k and monitor cpu usage, you’ll see cores being used at 80-95%.

And yes, Gw2 is limited by single core performance.

pico.6402:

Ps. It will be great if we can get some on interupt boon remove.

It already exists, Sigil of Absorption. Only it is not available in sPvP.

It’s been a while since my last roaming build (old pre-specializations condi shatter, you’re truly missed), but I’m back. This time, with a completely different concept I’ve been theorycrafting for a lot of time.
HoT has brought a ridiculous amount of boon duration and, after looking at some traits and skills here and there, I found something unique, something never seen, I could manage to perma several boons while being offensive as hell (muahahahaha).
Starting with Staff-Sw/Sh, I quickly found the burst was missing. Then, the idea of the old double ranged mesmer came, and kitten ! the synergy is exquisite and I’m having a lot of fun with it.

Hope you enjoy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUi1uuNCc2I

I think mesmer already covers most of the roles in the game, though some of them have been nerfed so hard they aren’t that valid.

The two areas where we lack the most are sustained damage and our input in big scale fights. But it’s not like we lack the sources to achieve that, the issue is these sources are very underpowering compared to what other professions have.
Take wells and compare it to necro’s. Calamity small hits are utterly trash, and this is the most offensive well we have…
Sustained damage: GS AA is a joke. Sword AA is a joke outside pve where there’s a boonfest all over the place. Clones directly deal no damage…

There’s more need for a rework of some mechanics and an improvement across core specializations rather than a new elite.

If drop at the precise moment and location, Feedback is, by far, the most powerful utility of the game.

https://youtu.be/bTvC5aMHrSM?t=440

stephanie wise.7841:

…

Again, forget about the miracles and possibilities of an ideal workaround and focus more on what we have and which are the plans for the future.

- Devs say there are no plans to upgrade to a newer API.
-Devs have said solving the issues of the game engine is a non-trivial task.
- Since the game was launched some of these optimizations have been done.

So here we are. Optimizing is possible, but there’s no will to do it because the efforts and resources needed to achieve that aren’t worth the result they would get.

Btw, there’s no need to post walls of copied text nobody reads or understands.

stephanie wise.7841:

…

You still need to learn a few things, and please, do it before you answer with a new fantasy false theory.

• Multi-threading an existing single-threaded game engine isn’t as easy as making one from the ground or adding just 2 or 3 missing software components.
  Words of an anet dev:
  “Software engineers are forced to properly design their applications to work well in parallel. Doing this after the fact is usually on the range of non-trivial to very hard.”
  “There are conscious efforts in moving things off the main thread and onto other threads, but due to how multi-threading works it’s a non-trivial thing that take a lot of effort to do.”
• GHz has everything to do. Bottleneck comes from the massive amount of calculations needed to do on the run.
• Why do you relate the API with the storage bandwidth bottleneck? Don’t you realize how bad and noobish you sound?
  One thing is the draw call overhead from the API and another completely different is the bandwidth bottleneck from the main storage.
• Gw2 engine won’t be multithreaded because the real world is not Tyria. Magic doesn’t exist in the real world and a game engine cannot become multi-threaded with an ABRACADABRA. It requires a lot of time (probably months if not over a year), stopping the delivering of content, an entire big team dedicated to it and, essentially, a lot of money at the start and the willing to lose a lot of it in the mid-long term.
  Chances to happen are very low to non-existent.

So instead of such amount of: “If the game engine was multithreaded…”, enjoy the game as it is, and if you have performance issues, upgrade the potato specs you have and play with lowered settings.

stephanie wise.7841:

sirsquishy.2619:

This game is very single thread locked in regards to performance. There is 1 master thread that controls everything in the game, and that IS the bottleneck and why DX12 will not do anything for the game in regards to performance.

This is not a graphical API issue, its not a worker thread issue, its the main control thread. And this was explained on Reddit some months back by an Anet Game Engine Dev.

yes single thread is dx 9. dx 12 is multi core all core can talk to each other and send the job more fast to the gpu. also the dev can have a more and deeper control. on the part that was control by the api. dx 12 will make more fast the game that are single threaded have lots of detail lots of complexity and that are cpu bound or cpu heavy. but the important factor with dx 12 is that it all depends on the gaming devs job the implementation is in their hand to code the game and send the job through all the core to the gpu. handle the memory etc…
to help you understand if you did not read all the article that talk about cpu heavy game the problem is that there is to much computing on the cpu using 1 thread of a core with over head. the cpu fill up to quick and gets to 100 percent and the gpu is waiting at about 30 or 40 percent to receive the job. difference with dx 12 use all core all thread on the system. over head is remove the api control is given to the game dev for them to implement those interaction the same as when a game dev code for console gaming. right now pc have high end graphic card and multicore and thread cpu a lot more powerful then console but because of the coding it is equivalent with console because console coding is done better they know for what hardware it is use and do not have to let the api run that part of the software for them like in dx 9 dx 10 dx 11. when dev do a good job of coding in dx 12 you will get all those gain.
even if you come back with the main single thread control over and over it is normal the game is single thread dx 9 api. it is normal in those day it was the cpu ghz that gave the speed to the system and the new graphic card api is the bridge or the cop that handle the trafficic between cpu and gpu and memory allocation. now ghz as reach the limit and pc use multiple core and thread to gain speed it is like splitting a job so that it gets done more fast between the core and thread and they can all talk together and the dev decide where they send the job with coding.
hope this help you. because I have seen that line about the main control thread is master thread is single thread pass by often enuff. it is normal in those time there was only 1 thread. so you would all code the software to go by one main thread. dx 11 support multiple thread but still use only 1 thread. dx 12 use all thread they can talk to each other to do the job and it is all in the hands of the game dev.

so that single thread can be split by the dev to use different thread. and dx 12 can solve the cpu bound heavy that the game suffer from. that is performance that it bring to the game if the game dev do a good job.

hope it answer that part. that many do not seams to get.

One thing are the threads of the API and another are the ones related to the game engine. In Gw2, both are single threaded, but the game engine ones are the source of performance issues. They are independent and a separated junk of software.
While it is true dx12 would bring multithreading, ONLY FOR THE API, it wouldn’t solve the performance issues as the game engine thread is still single-threaded and the multithreading of dx12 has no effect on the behaviour of the game engine.

Hope this helps to finally make your brain to understand why dx12 wouldn’t solve the performance issues in Gw2.

Gw2 runs more than fine in an at least Haswell i3 with a gtx 750ti and cpu intensive settings toned down.
There are no excuses, but bad hardware.

General Health.9678:

Dev: It can’t be done
Forum Person : pages and pages of how I feel I know better than you.

/end

It’s not about if it can be done or not.

It is more about anet and devs don’t have plans to do it because it is quite a difficult, long and resource-taking path, which results are not worth for all what it takes to do it.

But here there are some people that are stubborn to not to understand that, bringing walls of posts based on false premises and not-so-well understood concepts.

Cake.4920:

Ansau.7326:

Then we have the coefficient of people playing. As at off-times there are less people playing their, their efforts are counted less.

Quite the opposite. Because less people are playing, your efforts matter much more, not just in war score, but in flipping/upgrading objectives. Even with these changes Oceanic players will be more valuable than NA players.

I was referring to the proposed new change of the value of skirmishes based on population, not what we have now.

Nightcapping and off time map flips are already fixed in two ways: Leveling the value of the win with the introduction of skirmishes and the tweak based on population playing.
A third way to nerf it more, regardless the way, is too much.

Then there’s the fact that now the clock is set to 5 min, another way to harm the pvd flipping.

Anet has already done some brutal nerfs in builds by touching a mechanic in more ways than necessary, and it has ended with that build becoming rubbish.
Let’s not make the same mistake with such an important thing like the worthiness of people not playing at primetime.

Staff doesn’t need reinvented skills, but small tweaks.
AA with more direct damage and longer burn, fixed iWarlock projectile failure rate, Chaos Armor needs slightly lower CD and Chaos Storm needs slightly longer boon/condi base duration.

Stephanie wise you are wrong.

• Multithreading is not one or two lines of codes, but a general way to code an entire program. That’s why they generally recommend to code the program in multithreading from the start, because patches can be more harmful than helpful.
  With a game like Gw2 that includes millions of codes of lines multithreading is not an easy task.

• In heavy situations the API is not an issue, but the main thread in the cpu.

From here you can repeat yourself as much as you can, but know you’re repeating lies and fooling yourself.

Jiminy.8340:

Just to throw fuel on the flames – some old dev quotes. How times have changed.

Matt Witter.6982:

We feel that everyone should have the ability to contribute no matter what time of the day it is. How we’ve came to this conclusion is that no player’s time is more valuable than another. Everyone has different off peak hours for whatever reason. Players should not be punished or unable to experience and view the same content as everyone else because they play at a different time. They too are paying customers.

+1

Nightcapping and off-time capping are already nerfed with the new mechanic of Skirmishes. Pointing 695 will be as much value as pointing 240 (while other servers do 230 and 225).
Then we have the coefficient of people playing. As at off-times there are less people playing their, their efforts are counted less.

There’s no point to triple nerf it with a minor coefficient based on timezone. This will only disincentive people to play during those timezones, making the situation even worse.
It is also a discrimination over players and labeling them as first, second and third class, depending on where you were born or live or the culture you have.

Let’s never forget WvW is a 24h matchup.

stephanie wise.7841:

. but to say there is nothing to be done does not help. when they started to talk about making game multi thread I was there also. to do this it is only some line of code that needs to be added to the end of the existing code. why not put a dev on it? after why not optimize the game to dx 12 and solve the dx 9 limitation?

Devs have said it, in heavy situations the API is not the bottleneck. It is the main cpu thread that renders all the calculations. It has nothing to do with the graphics.

And here nobody says there’s nothing that can do. The problem is to solve it you need money, time and devs. You are completely wrong if you think multithreading a code just takes some line here and there…

It amazes me how many people find so hard to understand the meaning of proportion.

3.500 and 5.000 out of 20.000 are proportional, but 4.000 and 10.000 out of 20.000 aren’t.
And yet 5.000 is still quite higher than 3.500…

This has nothing to do with perception, skill, class knowledge… They are just numbers, cmon!!!

And people keep assuming things and making mistakes.

Since when I asked all professions should deal the same damage? Since when I asked all professions should have the same survivability?

All Im showing is there should be a better proportion over professions. Someone that puts a build able to deal an enemies bursts so it hits only for20-25% shouldnt be able to take 80-90% of enemies health with one of his many bursts.
Or said it in another way, someone who takes the risk to be oneshoted or taken down in few hits should deal more than just a 20-25% of enemies health with a burst.

Riku.4821:

Ansau.7326:

You don’t get it. The issue is not with the builds, get over it.
Snip~
The funny thing is I only referred to the unreasonable damage coefficients and damage boosts disparity between bursts across professions, and you are the only ones who keep bringing overall build design, survivability, skill, knowledge of profession mechanics, which I didn’t even mentioned at all.

Maybe this is the point. It is true mechanically classes have “strong skills” while others don’t. You’re the only one arguing something is wrong here. In my opinion it is about the builds, nomad warrior won’t hit that high I’m sure. (That is a Joke.)

I never said an offensive warrior shouldn’t hit hard. But the truth is with such damage combos they dont need to be squishy to still hit hard.
Some professions have this option, be it with several damage modifiers or perma 20 stacks of might, they can afford to push for both passive and active defenses, making then unkillable if they are skilled unless heavy outnumbered.

If I choose Chaos specialization I know I wont hit as hard as with Domination. But I sacrifice offense to be able to deal with this kind of power insane.

You don’t get it. The issue is not with the builds, get over it.

The thing is some professions have skills with very high coefficients that can be boisted a lot with stackable damage modifiers and might stacking, making these skills completely out of reason.
The photo takes warrior skills because it shows mine and his bursts at the same time. But the issue is still there with backstab, coalesence of ruins, death shroud AA, heartseeker, and some other skills.
It is an issue involving all professions.

Stop assuming things because you fail miserably. Ive been playing mesmer for over 2500 hours, with the same build (staff s/sh boonfest with durability runes) Ive won several duels and even outnunbered fights, neither of us ran foods or sigil stacks, and my server had all 3 ruins (so you have to add 60 to all my stats). My burst was Phase retreat+mind wrack (I know you already knew these skills can be comboed to make MW more effective with the staff).
I also have GS and torch to change when needed. Ascended weapons and trinkets and half ascended armor, so theres little stats to squeeze.

The funny thing is I only referred to the unreasonable damage coefficients and damage boosts disparity between bursts across professions, and you are the only ones who keep bringing overall build design, survivability, skill, knowledge of profession mechanics, which I didn’t even mentioned at all.

Lool people talking like if they knew me. And yet they fail to see a warrior, and some other professions, can be much more tanky than me while being more lethal that I could ever imagine regardless the build or stat combination I run.

Guys stop it.

It is not about how much damage I take with a glassy build.
It is not about how good or bad we both are.
It is not about a l2p issue.
It is not about which builds we play or should play.

It is about both running very offensive builds and him doing 4x times more damage in less hits than me, both using highest damage skills available for each class.
It is about he can kill me with 3 hits and I need to land 12-15 hits to do the same.
It is about the burst disparity between professions is at 300-400%

So well, I was doing a few duels against a warrior (yeah 1vs1, no ganking) in WvW and he totally wipe me out. No matter what I tried I ended running out of my defenses while he was bursting me over an over.
But the last fight… The picture speaks for itself.

I wish coefficient skills were more consistent among all professions, and decided with damage modifiers and might stacking potential in mind…

The funny thing is duelers are usually the most skilled people playing WvW, while the duel breakers are usually the worst.
Don’t know how many times one dude has interfered in a duel and got ashamed by imploding just a few seconds later…

The only restricting thing in WvW are the structures, which it determines around them. GvG, zerg fights in open zones, duels, ganking… are all creations of the players and by so, they’re not a core aspect of WvW and cannot be prohibited from WvW.

So it all comes down to the idea of WvW you have and the respect over other players. If you’re interfering with the way other players have decided to play, they have also the right to put you down.

Well, then it is surely an issue with your setup when having both 270 in crossfire. Neither the game has issues with newer gpus or crossfire.

Without screenshots of stuff like cpu-z, gpu-z temps monitoring and such there’s little we can do.
Try everything you can, both 32/64 bit clients, different drivers (use DDU to uninstall them), try every setting both ingame and in the driver, try all slots, try the gpus in another computer…

Make sure both gpus are working at pcie 2.0 x16. And start disabling reflections, shadows and put Character Model Limit to “lowest” or “Low”.

The cpu is holding you so don’t expect to have decent performance. FX cpus have terrible single performance and Gw2 punishes them a lot.

I have tried it as a condi cleansing and it has so many issues it is not worth to take. But the biggest ones are:

• The cast time is utterly long. 1,5s plus 0,75s of phantasm cast time plus the time of the projectile animation makes it worse than a mantra. By the time it hits a lot of things have happened.
  A 0.25s skill cast time plus a reduction to 0,5s of phantasm attack cast time (which is needed across all phantasms) would solve the problem.
• The projectile mechanic is annoying as hell. The condi cleansing is hided behind the boon ripping, so if it doesn’t hit in the enemy the whole phantasm is useless.
  It needs an AoE pulse effect to end with the misery we have with bouncing projectile based phantasms.

If these 2 are fixed it would be a valid option for more condi cleansing and also boon ripping, which is entirely tided to Domination and with the boon fest it’s less profiting.

Make sure the gpu is working at pcie x16, check it with gpu-z with the game in the background.

It’s one of the best sigils out there if you have some cc and you manage to interrupt enemy skills.
Deals about 1.1k damage regardless you power and enemy’s armor, heals for 1k and has no internal CD (for example, if you are low health and drop Static Field or Hunter’s Ward you get full healed).

Entered to the “new” Alpine and noticed in the minimap you can have 2 keeps, 2 towers and 2 camps.

Never felt Alpine was so small, but GG for the karma train “I need to flip a bl in 10 min” lovers…

If you want an upgrade look at the gtx 970, the r9 390 or wait for the new Pascal/Polaris. Both the gtx 960 or 280 aren’t than big upgrades.

But apart from that, gw2 is not very gpu stressing, and that gtx 760 is more than enough to max the game.
You better look for a cpu upgrade.