Guild Wars 2

Yes, marks trigger the sigils, it will only proc on one of the enemies due to the cooldown effect. I don’t believe the sigils are affected by minions as they aren’t weapons.

The reason they don’t make them for that specific resolution is because it is 16×9 aspect ratio, meaning that 1920×1080 and 1600×900 scales down properly to that resolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution

Since there are only 6 aspect ratios, they only really need to make 6 different wallpapers at a reasonable max resolution for each and they will scale down properly for those ratios.

Yeah, the lighthouse is so far the only one I need and they are guaranteed to die at the end of the first bridge because humans are so squishy. No amount of healing/speed will save them as they just run through the mobs before we can tag them. Not to mention it’s burning and not just regular damage types so they’ll die anyway.

It would be in your and your friend’s best interests if you didn’t include the settings file, just copy the stuff that’s in the gw2 main folder (gw2.exe and gw2.dat).
Your graphical settings may not be useful (wrong resolution) and you may not want your email/password given to your friend either if you use the checkboxes. That file isn’t downloaded, it’s created on the fly.

Also, you can run gw2 from the flash drive if you want and the drive/interface is usb3. It’s actually faster than a normal hard drive.

Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 are what we consider a partial ‘portable app’. You can run it on any Windows computer from any external rewritable device (hard drive, usb, etc.). It only gets a partial rating because it will still save your settings and screenshots to your user directory.
Original Guild Wars kept everything in one place, Guild Wars 2 partially followed Windows game conventions and placed stuff in your user directory.

Yeah this ‘started’ with the update at the beginning of the month (not that it hasn’t been going on since beta).

Why are all my minions ground type? There are flying monsters in game and they don’t have problems with pathing. Just copy and paste some enemy AI/pathing code into the minions please.

They seem to have an issue with their version control system or at least someone keeps playing around with things that shouldn’t be in the update, forget about it while working on things that should, and then we get an inventory that gets bigger (why were they playing with that?) and minions that can’t find an enemy…

I would rather have flying minions that don’t have a problem with pathing than minions that can’t find an enemy because of an issue that doesn’t affect ANYTHING else in the game.

EULA says no, but there is absolutely no way for them to tell that you let your cat play on the weekends and that it likes the Asura the most…

Native sampling just anti-aliases each frame at it’s exact dimensions 1080p for example. Super sampling doubles the dimensions and anti-aliases it then scales it down to your current resolution providing superior smoothing of edges.
The frame rate drop is negligible, but combined with other negligible effects, it can be noticeable.

Dunno, I would have been more inclined to do a search like this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Wallpapers+by+Hyojin+Ahn
Now you can find his portfolio and all the rest of his digital artwork.

Every time you read that email the attacker knows you read it because it’s bugged with an image or has a notify on read flag set.

Change your password and possibly your email too and do the two factor authentication thing if you have a smartphone.

The single biggest thing that can help you be safe is to NEVER CLICK LINKS IN EMAIL. I know it’s convenient but you can never trust an email link. Copy and paste it if it’s from a legit source or type it out yourself.

These are the ones I’ve purposefully taken, I think they came out nice. Wish we had a /camera feature or first person view.

Aside from a title for utilizing your ‘entropy’ achievement and maxing out your ‘luck’ if you salvage more greens do you still get those luck things? Because that would be annoying.

All things are possible, this is an mmo. When they’ve finally figured out how to handle the living story and do other things at the same time, we’ll get more areas and fun stuff to do.

The huge answer is NO, GW2 bandwidth is normally less than dialup, patching occurs BEFORE you get into the game. However, Windows updates don’t care about your surfing habits and will suck down all your bandwidth at a moments notice. Also torrenting will do that as well if you don’t set the limiters. Streaming HD content, multiple concurrent gaming sessions, and a very cheap router are all causes of poor bandwidth (mostly because it’s actually being used).

But gw2 is by far the least greedy of the bunch. I have a pathetic 2mb/s connection and I can do tons of things simultaneously on 4 different computers at once with no problems but I have a really nice router and am ethernetted to it, the other computers are wireless.

The biggest issue is psychological, this week there has been a massive infrastructure attack which has slowed down several popular sites, the easiest thing for someone to blame on the consumer side for this is games and you were gaming when they experienced the slowdowns so it must be your fault!

Of course, the only thing you have to do differently is the name. You can make them exactly the same if you want.

Random cheap keyboards are only required to acknowledge 4 keypresses at once to cover ctrl-alt-shift-f5 types of commands. Gaming keyboards can do at least 6.

gw2.exe is just the launcher, the actual game executable is inside the gw2.dat file and that is what is being fetched each time (gw2.exe is 22mb).
That file inside the .dat is corrupt, thus the suggestion to defrag so it’ll move the data around.

Might I suggest a checkdisk on your drive, it might have some faulty sectors (check the image). Right-click on the drive gw2 is on and click properties, then follow the screenshot.
The second check box is for a comprehensive scan and you might need that, it’ll take quite a while and if gw2 is on a system drive you’ll have to restart your computer to do the check.

The 10mb file is the actual binary executable for guild wars 2, yours is corrupt.
Defrag your hard drive, then do a -repair on your shortcut for gw2.

The -repair function does not download the entire gw2.dat file, it verifies the integrity of each and every file and only downloads the corrupted and missing ones, it only looks like it’s downloading them all.

It’s NTFS but that’s not the only file system, you can also format to exFat which will save you a little overhead in the file system and still work on all your computers. This works with Mac and should work with Linux as well so you can have all your gw2 needs on one flash drive. I recommend a usb3 stick and usb3 port as it is just as fast as a normal hard drive if you find a stick with at least 100mb/s read speed.

Southsun would probably have the best overall normal outdoor lighting. Shiverpeaks has a blue hue to it, Ascalon region has kind of an orange tint, maguuma is just odd, and don’t even try Orr.

In the end it depends on what effect you’re trying to achieve. Realistic color representation or emphasis on skin tone or armors. Don’t forget that you can also adjust this with a fire so consider maybe an indoor location.

Yes, you can put it all on a flash drive and play it from any computer on the planet. I have my main copy on a usb3 64gb flash drive (you’ll need a 32gb flash drive for gw2).

Bonus!
If you put gw2 on a flash drive and want to start gw2 when you plug it in to a computer do this:

1) Open your favourite plain text editor such as Notepad.
2) Cut and paste the text below into the plain text editor.

[AutoRun]
shellexecute=example.exe

3) Replace the text 'example.exe' with the file-name you want to AutoRun including appropriate file extension (e.g. index.html, slideshow.ppt, portfolio.pdf etc). If you file name contains spaces e.g. company presentaion.ppt, replace the spaces with underscores: e.g. company_presentaion.ppt.

The file you require to autorun may also be in a folder, in which case you can give the file path. You can therefore also AutoRun to a URL.
[AutoRun]
shellexecute=http://www.YourWebsiteAddress.com

4) Now save and name the file: Autorun.inf
5) Add this file to the root of the USB Flash Drive, with the file you want to AutoRun (and any other data).

So make a text file in the root of you flash drive called autorun.inf and put this in it:

[AutoRun]
shellexecute=gw2.exe

Do this, though I don’t think it’ll do anything:
Start button → type: cmd.exe → right-click and run as administrator
Small window will come up and do the following:
Type these and press enter after each one(there is a space before the /):
ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /renew
netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt
netsh winsock reset

From top to bottom they 1. flush your dns cache, 2. renew your dns cache/ip address, 3. reset the registry entries concerning the networking stack, and 4. reset the winsock settings.

Note: If you use static IP addresses on your network, this will erase them and you’ll have to reconfigure them. If you don’t know if you use static IP addresses then you don’t.

You will need to restart your computer after all that.
If none of that fixes your problem, try this:
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/929833

Open the cmd.exe with administrator
type:
sfc /scannow

This will scan all your system files to see if they’re corrupted and repair them(hopefully). You’ll have to restart your computer if it repaired anything.

Also note that if you have not actually cleaned your computer of any viruses, all of the above will be for nothing.

I get plenty of ori, very little gossamer, and next to zero ancient wood. Recently sold another stack of ecto while sitting on 11 ancient wood and around 17 gossamer. As an artificer, this salvage rate is pathetic, it takes me nearly 6 months just to salvage enough stuff for one staff while in that amount of time I can sell 2 stacks of ecto just from the same salvages. Gossamer… yeah about the same as that stupid wood.

If you activate a mark/well skill with your mouse (click on the skill, not use the number with your finger) the skill will make you turn around due to the center of the target (you in this case) being slightly behind your visual character. This makes you stop attacking the target that’s in front of you.

This has been happening for a very long time, nearly a year now I believe.

The ground targeting trait will cause this to happen with well skills, if you do not use this trait, the wells fire off properly in front of you (your orientation doesn’t change 180 degrees by clicking the skill).
All staff marks are affected by this bug and it’s very annoying.

If you place this mark on the ground and an enemy walks/runs into it the chill part of the skill NEVER affects the enemy. If you place this mark ON an enemy the chill part of the skill ALWAYS affects the enemy.

I can repeat this infinitely and it has been this way for a very long time (over a year now at least).

Time is the only thing you’ll lose if you have to reinstall, everything but your graphics and keymapping settings are saved on the servers.

HijackThis is a system analysis tool made by Trend Micro (antivirus maker).
http://esupport.trendmicro.com/solution/en-us/1037994.aspx
Support wants the log file because it will tell them if any spyware/malware has changed any of your networking settings.

Delete all the TP cache files; these are the web cache files like your browser.
This is the location of the TP cache files:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Temp\gw2cache-{F0A827A1-EDC6-1682-A227-A8F0C6ED8216}\

replace USERNAME with yours or type:
AppData (put percentage marks on both sides of this, the forum strips them out)
into your file explorer, this will bring you to AppData/roaming, just navigate to the local directory and down to the temp directory, then just delete the gw2 cache directory. Your client will rebuild it but it may not work the first time you use it. You may have to restart the client after it rebuilds it to get it to work again.

If you use CCleaner, it will delete the contents of this Temp directory every time you use it, you need to put the gw2cache-{} directory in the exclusions list in the options section.

Screenshot 1
The proper format for gw2 shortcut changes are with a dash as it has always been.

Firewall stuff is in additional pictures

Windows 7/8
Start – type in search box: Windows Firewall
click on the windows firewall item.

Screenshot 2
Interface comes up, left side has an item for turning firewall on/off, click that.

Screenshot 3
Checkboxes for turning the firewall on/off

Turn it off, may need to restart, check your client. If it works after turning it off then your firewall is blocking it. If it still doesn’t work after turning off the firewall then there is an underlying issue.

Test this:
open your browser of choice, copy&paste this:
https://tradingpost-live.ncplatform.net/authenticate

If the TP shows up your firewall is blocking it or the root certificates are invalid (support sent that to you already so they’re fine).

Do the stuff in the image. And also defrag the drive that gw/gw2 is on.
Defragging is the single biggest texture type boost you can do for a game drive. I just wish they would defrag with directories contiguous instead of most frequently used, that is worthless for a game drive.

It was to bring it more inline with the air elemental monsters that had legs.

They don’t say client side performance issues. It most likely has to do with server performance since the servers have to do all of the calculations for them as well. It’s to relieve one form of lag from the system.

Yeah, it counts up from 50% to 100% and then when it reaches 100% it then goes back down to 50% instead of 0%. It also counts up very quickly, according to the short amount of time I’ve played today I could have leveled up 10 times but in reality it wouldn’t have been a single time.

put gw2 on a flash drive (32gb or higher, usb3 preferable) and bring it to a store that has them on display and play it to find out which would be best.

I’ve been playing since beta and it has never had a chest. And the karma merchant thing is a bug that they should fix.

Event chests have only come from champs, not ‘dynamic’ events. There are 4 static chests in Wayfarer’s.
South to North:
1. Son’s of Svanir cave Hirbadd’s Camp in Outcast’s Cleft
2. Jotun Potato farm at Haivoissen Kennig
3. Jumping puzzle Shamans Rookery
4. Son’s of Svanir hideout south of Crossroads Haven

Works fine with my AMD stuff. Mine isn’t a laptop though.
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black 3.2ghz +
8gb ram
1gb AMD Radeon HD 5800 graphics

VOLKON.1290:

Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve heard the .DAT file can become too beefy which can slow things down. I recall seeing that deleting the .DAT file can take care of some issues. I’d check with the tech forums before doing this, but it rings familiar.

the .dat file is everything there is to gw2, it contains EVERYTHING. Deleting it will force the updater to download the entire ~19gb again.
-repair is preferable to doing that.

I suppose someone should mention this:
http://steelseries.com/us/products/games/guild-wars-2/guild-wars-2-gaming-mouse
http://steelseries.com/us/products/games/guild-wars-2

Totally slipped my mind

Additional improvements to system performance

System Cache:
Put it on its own hard drive different than your OS and your games, especially your games. Set it to a static number: under 4gb of ram you use 1.5 times the amount of ram you have, above 4gb of ram you use .75 times the amount of ram in your system, it’ll be close to the recommended values. See attached image.
Control Panel / System / Advanced System Settings (link) / Advanced (tab) / Performance Settings (button) / Advanced (tab) / Change (button). Don’t forget once you set it to a different drive to turn off the one on your system drive (it’ll increase the performance of your system too since it isn’t writing the cache to the same drive it’s reading from).
This will prevent significant fragmentation of your drive (restart will be necessary), do this after you have defragged your hard drive with the online options (means while your system is running) after restart your system cache will hopefully be in one piece, but do an Offline defrag and it will put your boot files in an appropriate location and put your system cache in a single file location.

The System cache gets used a lot and it is set to system managed on your boot drive by default. This causes the system to allocate new locations when the need to cache stuff exceeds what it already has allocated and there is a 100% chance that it will fragment to a new location.
Fragmentation is a gamers enemy! It slows down file access, increases the size of the MFT (master file table – it tells the OS where files are, each fragment means another address), and due to slow loading can cause your game to fail to load a texture at least and at most it can cause your game to crash because it can’t load the level data or something more critical.

Start with Windows programs:
The next biggest thing you can do to improve performance without swapping or adding hardware or Nuke&Pave (reformat & reinstall) is to shutdown all those crappy programs near your clock, there are probably very few that you really need.
Most of them should have options to disable loading with windows if you simply right click on them and select Options or Settings. If not then they really aren’t useful and you should just shut them down (ccleaner can help you do that). Do you print so much that you need your printer management software loaded? no, the answer is no.
Leave your IM, graphics, windows stuff, and things like dropbox, steam, and things you really do use, and shut all the other bloatware off.

Start here:
http://www.piriform.com/
Learn how to use CCleaner and use it, you can schedule it to run as well. Check the Tools/Startup section too and uncheck anything you don’t need or use often, and set those stupid programs (in their settings) to stop loading with windows.
If you can’t or dont want to buy PerfectDisk( http://www.raxco.com ) then use Defraggler from Piriform, set it on a schedule and let it do it’s thing while you’re sleeping.

Enhance CCleaner with CCEnhancer here:
http://singularlabs.com/software/ccenhancer/
It is just a simple tool that downloads a small text file with instructions for CCleaner that will allow it to clean thousands of other programs (log, cache, temp files, etc.).
System Ninja from them is also useful!

Grab the Microsoft Security Essentials package, Windows Update probably has it as optional but you can download it here:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security-essentials-download

Get rid of the antivirus you use and pay for (your subscription is probably over anyway). You may have more than one since some programs like to install various other programs you don’t need. Anti-virus programs conflict with each other and will let bad things onto your computer if you use more than one at a time.

Download something like Spybot Search & Destroy and use it (use the inoculation feature as well).
http://www.safer-networking.org/

You can use Spyware Blaster as well for inoculation booster.
http://www.brightfort.com/spywareblaster.html

Clean your computer inside(software) and out(hardware). Literally, take it outside and blow the thing out, it’s probably got years of dust clogging up all the fans and cooling fins.

Once you’re nice and clean and your filesystem is smooth, make a new gw2 shortcut and add -image to it (see attached image). You can do as I do and name it update and add it to a schedule that runs once a week or daily while you’re sleeping.

If possible, just grab another hard drive and shove it in your computer (properly) and toss gw2 on it, it’ll run from ANYTHING (I use a usb3 64gb flash drive).

Everything in this post with the exception of PerfectDisk and a USB flash drive are free and nearly every gamer should use these or their equivalent to keep their system clean and operating smoothly. This is only the tip of the optimization iceberg but it’s a good start.

Logitech or Razer. Personally I invest in Razer mice because they just look sexier but either brand is awesome for games. As mentioned earlier, Razer makes an MMO mouse with lots of side buttons.
http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-mice/razer-naga

With Razer mice, be careful what you clean the case with, the flat black back turns to goo with some cleaning solutions, just use warm water! There’s nothing like walking away from your desk and the mouse wont let you go LOL

If MMO’s are to ever evolve they need to remove the archaic leveling process entirely. That solves the downleveling, upleveling, part of balance, and alt problems as well as the “you’re not high enough level to play in here” syndrome.

“But it’s easy enough to level” you say, apparently it’s not.

An easier solution would be to remove the level 20 restriction on the experience scrolls and give it 10,000 exp and let us sell them on the TP.

Jotun and Skritt alliance
(see image of borderlands 2 Bad Maw & his minions)

Beat you down while taking your shinies!

New Build is developer speak for New Update

Technically yes. You have to find a .zip program that can do ‘volumes’ and splitting, search for .zip splitting and you’ll find plenty. Then you just tell the program to split the archive into 3.9gb chunks(cause you don’t really have 4gb of space to use) and copy them one at a time to the other computer, then use the program to extract the chunks to the new gw2 folder.

This is exactly why there is a ‘message’ field on the email screen… You don’t have to leave it blank.

I would suggest that gem store skins be added to the achievement locker since we don’t have a pve skin locker yet for some reason, or permanently available from the gem store after purchase.

There are several places to add these skins to: Hall of Monuments locker, achievements locker, or add the PvP locker to PvE so we can all enjoy the skins we get. Especially since some of them are never returning.

Top is my necro’s old clothes, everyone recognizes her in a Wayfarer’s Foothills on Maguuma.
Elementalist old clothes.
Necro current clothes (continued some of my personal story so she’s wearing commando stuff).

I consider them more ‘extended utility’ than elite. There is truly nothing elite about them, they don’t have HOLY COW animations, their effects are mediocre at best, and they do relatively little to sway a battle. It’s just another skill I’ll probably waste on the wrong auto-targeted monster…
But I don’t pvp and honestly think it should be two different games so I don’t have to get screwed by pvp balance and ‘esport’ politics.

For reference I play a Necro most of the time.
Used to solo Frozen Maw all the time before all the loot updates.
Champ at Svanir’s Dome is glitchy if you solo it melee style and can reset but if you dodge the stomp, power slap, and charge moves it can’t kill you, if you get downed by the stomp it’s pretty much over for you. Get asked all the time why I’m not taking any damage from it (staff #2 keeps me healed up nicely). It doesn’t hit for 0 damage, it’s just that its normal attack is super weak compared to its instant down attacks that it does every 30 seconds.

I’ve soloed almost all of the champs except for dragons and the Mt. Maelstrom Krait at the top of the Krait tower, that one is mean with all the conditions and adds it throws out at you.

Well at least Cragstead serves alcohol.

Enemy of my enemy is my friend works in every direction. Now the centaurs have a chance to regroup while the humans are dealing with the corruption and dwindling their own numbers.

I just wish Anet would spend the extra effort to sync the entire zone and adjust all the events to make it more plausible that this stuff is actually happening instead of like Fleaman said, the centaur don’t even notice anything is different. And why do the centaur need a bridge? They have 4 legs don’t they? Never seen a large 4 legged animal that couldn’t get across a stream…

I thought it was perfectly in sync with the toxic atmosphere albeit a little short to make a proper music video. Would be nice to have the full musical score to work with, you know; the intro, solo, repeatable part, and ending. But we only get the intro so good luck!