Some more thoughts on DS.
- when the blighting towers event starts, immediately fail a running “hold against the mordrem” event in front of the gates and despawn all the mobs associated to it. It’s very annoying if the tower starts during such an event as there is no good way to handle the situation. If you tell the players to kill remaining modrem, some will run into the tower and start attacking the preservers. If you tell everyone to go in, half of the squad will remain outside killing random stuff and everyone that respawns at the waypoint has a potential mordrem army between him and the zerg.
- speed up the escort the pact dolyaks event to reach the next waypoint/hub. Most of all south assault is sooooo slooooow. Instead make them more vulnerable so it can actually fail. I have yet to see the morale depleted before reaching the next hub. Might as well remove that.
- add some random events to the lanes or randomize the order in which these events play. For example, not always a thornheart. Center assault could have the wyvern attack instead. In general, make it less predetermined and add surprises.
- not sure about the blighting towers itself. I find the event boring and exhausting myself (as commander). But having the boss respawn only if all 3 collectors are reactivated would make it a bit too easy. If you nerf something too much, people will stop paying attention and will start feeling invincible. Kinda dislike such a mentality. Best to keep them on their toes.
- remove the timer after completing the map. Just let the explore phase run until the map resets. If you finish the map early, you are rewarded with more time to loot the place. It also gives a better feeling of having accomplished something instead of frantically porting all over the map collecting pods. Currently almost nobody helps at the insane mushroom hero point at the center assault, or any of the other champs because it actually takes some effort to kill them. Since time is limited many just want to loot pods.
- something more general to the map system: it would be nice if everyone in a full squad could be dumped onto the same map after reset if you group together before. Almost every time at least one player in my squad clicks too slow or has a slow computer and cannot join our map because it’s already full. Sometimes they can get in, sometimes they give up. Since wait time for another new map is 2h, some of them are pretty kittened.
- final fight againt mordrem, many seem to be confused how to actually use the mortar shells against Mordremoth. This probably needs clearer targetting. Maybe make it possible to throw anywhere against the body or better yet, don’t make it a ground targetting skill, but instead something that needs the dragon as target. Fly in, target the creature, press #1. I’ve seen phases where virtually no damage came from the bombs so I assume people are confused where to actually throw the thing.
Hm, long post. Hope something of this could be considered. I like the map “ok” Least favorite of the four. I only organize it if I’m in the right mood. Takes a thick fur sometimes.
“who in the name of god would ever have found that place ACCIDENTALLY?!”
Easy
Dark area: check
Torches at the entry: check
Branches everywhere you can climb on: check
Fluorescent grubs on platforms higher above you: check
Conclusion: there must be something up there even if it drives me mad getting there!
A bit older, I know. Thanks for posting this which awakened the adventurer in me. Took an hour to finally get there.
There are torches at the entries to the cave that provide some light. Probably best with two people. One with a permanent torch the other with aoe fields that illuminate distant areas. Whoever put this in the game <3
It’s funny to me that no gliding zones are a thing but no portal zones aren’t. I dunno why that’s not possible.
Whoa, stop right there! Why do you think we’re playing mesmers? To cheat through the puzzles, that is.
Kiza
Sure wished that was enough. But nope. “LumaSharp” actually sharpens the image (highly adjustable). There is no such setting in GW2 (see pic. and the comparison). I’ve intentionally left the settings open for reference.
TBH, I find the right version overly sharpened. To the point it even hurts a bit. The contrast is extremely high, too. Try SMAA low instead of FXAA on the left, but it won’t produce a much clearer image I guess.
Do you wear glasses and are you shortsighted, btw? If yes, they may be too strong/overcorrecting. Human vision is not really perfect, but if you’re used to extremely sharp images it might cause problems with eye strain.
I, too, had such problems. Until my optometrist told me that my doctor always set the lens correction to an almost perfect value. Since I changed the doctor and have glasses that don’t correct 120% I have much less problems. (I’m sorry if things sound awkward, medical terms in english are not really my speciality)
To get rid of most (if not all) of the blur you can also set:
Textures: High
Antialiasing: SMAA Low or None (SMAA High produces more blurry textures)
Render Sampling: Native or Supersample
Best Texture Filtering: On
Depth Blur: Off <- the worst offender
And set the texture filtering options of your graphics card control panel to application controlled or best image quality.
I’m also not a fan of these highly stylized images. They look only cool in a screenshot.
Hotcarl, Rasfalinj, Fogleg, are you playing on EU or NA? If you’re on an EU server I can get you into a full DS map. But only the 18:30 or 20:30 version. Contact me ingame if you’re interested.
I mean, it really only takes an hour at the most to finish the last blighting tower, so time isn’t really a factor at that point.
I’ve seen it use up almost the whole 2 hours. So sadly nobody ever tries with 1:30 left on the timer. Everyone wants to play it safe.
I agree it’s not the best solution. But right now it’s the only thing we can do. And there are ways to at least make the best out of it. Map is still fun, imo.
This has been answered but I am curious why people put this into the general LFG section. There is no indication of which P1 when they do this, is it just a hit or miss thing to get people to party with you?
By mistake I guess.
Also people who put nothing in the description just have a profession sitting there with no indication of where in the game you are. Why do this?
I’ve done this, too, the first time I tried the LFG tool. Click and see what actually happens. I see many new players in the game, probably just trying to figure something out.
Thanks Kiza. So the map they’re pulling everyone to may actually be an empty map at the start…it’s just that he’s ferrying people in!
In case of Dragon’s Stand it’s most likely an empty map where a commander ended up after the map reset. These will fill quite fast, only because there is a commander tag on the map.
Only wondered as I’ve often ended up on empty maps trying to defeat a Boss that was just not gonna go down… there’s no way of getting to a busier map though…not like GW1 where you could retry entering a different district. :-)
It certainly would be nice to have a list of running map instances with population numbers that allows you to pick one. But that probably would cause too much map hopping for resources and busier maps so that information is hidden from us.
If you want to do the meta event, best way to catch a busy map is to have a look at the LFG tool when it starts/resets. https://fiddle.jshell.net/dulfy/q2wfdbnn/show/light/
Verdant Brink: ~15 mins before nightfall
Auric Basin: When the challenges start
Tangled Depths: ~10 mins before the prep phase
Dragon’s Stand: at reset
Outside the meta events there are rarely taxis, so no real way to hop to a busier map. Short of organizing things yourself of course.
(edited by Kiza.5630)
It’s the same problem as with vinetooth prime. The break bar mechanics are somewhat badly explained. Mostly not at all and players just keep hitting the thing. All you can do is explain what the blue bar is before the fight, how to deplete it and when to go wild. I’ve seen the shatterer bar go down almost to 30% yesterday and it was a last-minute map.
I think it’s fine for now. If it’s still not working in roughly in half of the fights after a month, it could be looked at again. But fights like these are good at teaching players the game mechanics. Many will look at the achievement panels, think “I want that” and ask themselves “hm, how can I do that”. And learn about break bars. Hopefully.
Against bosses and very large mobs, though, glass-cannons become an exploit. The GC charges in, deals a large amount of damage, dies, and then waypoints and runs back to combat to repeat the process.
Why would anyone want to do this on purpose? Graveyard zergs existed in ARPGs like forever. Most players of Diablo like games have probably done it at least once in the game. But it was never very efficient to do this.
It’s boring and rather mindless. Jump it, pop all cooldowns, die and on the new HoT maps maybe face a minute long walk to get back into the fray. The only spot I can see this work in Verdant Brink at night defending the main rally pts where the waypoint is uncontested.
It’s more of a desperate “die already you stupid mob” thing. If I died almost every time I jumped into the boss zerg I certainly would change my play style. I can’t see how anyone would enjoy this. I bet most of these players are rather frustrated, kind of last resort tactics.
The OS doesn’t tie each thread of the game to a specific core, they will be switched around. That’s why they can be ~40% all the time. My i5 usually has 3 cores at almost 100% and 1 at 50%.
I’m not using AMD cards, so I can give no advice here. Though the GTX 970 is probably the fastest (Nvidia) card that makes sense for GW2. You can test by lowering features that almost purely rely on the GPU. Like resolution, post processing, etc. If it ends up significantly faster, new GPU will probably be worth it.
But 30fps in huge zergs is fine I’d say. For 60fps you’ll probably need liquid nitrogen cooling and 6GHz.
4
-You shouldn’t perceive random creatures as suitable mates or having attractive features, and if you do then the way your brain handles information is broken. Sorry to tell you this, but your pet goldfish is not people.
Frogs are people too! Have you never played Talos Principle? You probably should!
They really should make Rytlock and Logan a couple, just to make everyone freak out.
If you don’t like it, why would you even care? Also the Charr are quite far from mere animals. They have a complex society and built whole cities.
It’s high above the gate. Go to the northern western entrance of Tarir and take the right (west) corridor. There should be a hall and jumping mushrooms that lead upwards.
Edited: yeah, wrong starting point and I didn’t even notice. corrected text above. thanks Ironstones.
(edited by Kiza.5630)
I know that my mention of malloc was overly simplistic. I was going into more detail but deleted these paragraphs again as probably nobody would understand or even care about that or call me grampa. It’s a game forum after all.
But I’d like to comment on:
And unfortunately now they simply cannot abandon 32-bit version for the sake of business itself. Basically you cannot change the requirements after you sell your product. The HoT expansion should have been made 64-bit mandatory – now it’s kinda stuck – and as I said fixing the situation will not be easy – time and money is needed (or as you said “development resources”).
It was done before and probably should be done over the course of a long running game to avoid too much cruft piling up. WoW has subsequently dropped support for various OS X versions over the years. Making people force to upgrade their OS and in same cases their computer.
I highly doubt a non-64bit CPU could even run GW2. And I think the eula also states that system requirements will change over time so I think they could.
I guess most if not all of these threads will just vanish if they default to the 64bit client one day.
There should be checks and safeguards against over-allocating of memory resources.
They are reaching limits of 32bit architecture. Pick up a random C source code on the internet and see if there are checks for malloc return values. Also, in many situations you can’t do anything else anyway than just let it crash. Memory exhausted = game over. It might not even be in their code, but some library the game uses. The only real solution is to forget about 32bit. It’s not that 64bit is new.
Or find a way to drastically reduce the memory usage. But I’m not sure such a huge change will make sense. All it does is cost developer resources. But they should probably push the new client instead of calling it beta for too long.
But the OP didn’t answer yet, so we don’t even know if it’s an oom problem.
Imagine a company released a car, that has this malfunction causing the engine to explode sometimes, if it goes over 4000 rpm and/or 140 km/h.
Well, the client crashes and burns for sure, but I think comparing the outcome with an exploding car is a bit too much.
The options screen show the fps. You can try http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html I believe the later versions show load percentage of (most) graphics cards, too. It does on my 660Ti. Not sure how accurate it can be calculated, though. If the graphics processor is waiting for more input it might still be wasting clock cycles and counting as 100% load. But you can give it a try.
You can try with a lower resolution and/or lower settings. If it doesn’t get any faster, a faster card probably won’t do anything.
All you can do is most likely make an educated guess. IMO a 980Ti is wasted money if you don’t play other current high end games. GW2 was release at the same year as the GF 600 series.
Geforce 1000 series is supposed to be relased 2016. Not sure if Q1 or end of year. They could be again much faster with the new stacked memory. I only mention this in case you get annoyed easily if your 500€ gfx card is outdated after 3 months.
Only problem I’m always having is people running to the Stavemaster/Axemaster/Blademaster before killing the Thornheart during escort phases :P
What happens, btw, if it is not killed? I’ve seen it almost completely ignored sometimes, with like 5 people hitting it, the other 30 attacking the Blademasters or lying scattered on the ground. It marches to the base and more or less stays at the entry and spews stuff. Morale depletes very slowly so the time to kill it seems to be an eternity. Does the assault fail instantly if it reaches the base?
Also fun every time: boss at blighting towers stays not on the middle island but wanders around on the outside. Complete chaos, but somehow the group always manages to kill it eventually. Commanders mostly give up in that situation, but it’s so much fun.
The funny part is, when you ASK people to stop and listen, or to join the squad, you sometimes get such a backlash that you feel like throwing your PC out of the windom.
The solution is not to care about such players. They won’t listen to anything you say anyway. Sadly the part about the DS towers can’t be more true. It’s rarely the commander’s fault if the circle zerg is too slow, outputs no DPS at all or the people on the boss can’t keep it in the middle and it starts around where it shouldn’t be. If that happens you’re in for some real verbal abuse sometimes.
Same with Tarir. Sometimes you can’t stop people from killing the east octovine even with half of the map yelling at them. It just happens.
So in return, thank you all the players who actively try to help and follow the commander’s advice. You are making it worthwile!
I know, no desktops. Maybe “middle ground”? http://www.cooltek.de/en/cubes/coolcube-mini/14/coolcube-mini You can pair mini-ITX boards with quite powerful graphics cards. Probably sounds like a turbine during a hot summer, but at least they won’t overheat so quickly.
As for laptops, I have made good experiences with MSI gaming laptops or if price is less of a problem Schenker gaming laptops. You are in the 2000€ range with the later though. Whatever laptop it will be, specs should probably be along the following area: intel i7-something HQ at around 2.7 GHz base. i5 are mostly dual cores which do make a difference in modern games. Probably not that much in gw2. Geforce GTX960M and SSD, but you can hardly buy high-prices laptops without SSD anymore. Display should probably be HD “only” instead of 3200×1800 variants.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Category:Screenshots
TL;DR: edit gw2 shortcut in your start menu and add parameter -bmp after gw2.exe. No more 15% quality jpeg
I think that happens if at some point over the 2h lifetime of the map the “move to a more populated version” pops up, but the map still get’s going a bit later. Only happened to me in Verdant Brink once. The “move to another map” popup appeared, I ignored it, and it disappeared a while later. Still, all of a sudden, loading screen and the map apparently closed, because I was in another instance.
As for DS, it really only works via taxis. I’m not thrilled about the way it works, too, but it’s the way it is. After the maps reset, just open LFG and join a taxi to get to a map that starts right away. I have never had one of these maps close prematurely and, to be honest, it’s a lot of fun to join one of the “taxi maps” since they are always full once the fun starts.
Yes, there is a bit of time planning involved. But it’s still rather casual, no further obligations.