Guild Wars 2

Vampirate.7054:

Mmm the bootcamp. Are they same as fps ?

well, I rarely use that anymore. I left it cause I didn’t need the extra space. I do remember that there was no noticeable difference when I switched from bootcamp to mac beta (when mac beta originally came out). I have a feeling that would no longer be the case. I’ll give it a try – FOR SCIENCE!

Anen.1742:

What is the point of that thread?

Who says threads need a point? sometimes people are just curious.

apparently they don’t consider it a bug :P

my favorite part about them is that they replace your land helmet. you know what else is in your land helmet? your 6th rune. you need to put a 7th on your aquabreather to keep that 6th bonus.

they did the same thing with a portal item.
it seems obvious that the price of giving 100 people 1.5 hours of maintenance oil should be more than 10 times the price of giving it to 1 person. however, I believe it currently takes around 250 times the price to give it to 1 person to make the 100-person one :P

There was a post a couple months ago when the wallet was introduced, asking how to separate the gold and stuff between two characters as they were sharing the account with their child. A dev told them that splitting the wallet is not possible and sharing an account was against the rules. it did not seem like they were anywhere near getting banned – it’s just not supported.

FatalIllusion.3142:

I have bought gw2 some days ago and I’d like to play with my brother.

you will not be able to both log on at the same time on the same account. That kinda takes the fun out it. They have sales fairly often – the last one was like 30% off the digital deluxe version. I recommend your friend just getting a copy of the game.

they’ll still need to download a small file that is stored elsewhere on your computer (unless you found and copied that as well – can you do this?), but that’s fairly small.

one thing to note: when transferring soulbound to another character, you will ALWAYS lose the stats of the item. you can only transfer the item’s skin.

DebraKadabra.5278:

Or you could randomly gift the shards to other players who intend to create the back piece, through map chat.

I do not think you can do what you think you can do…

just wait ’till you want to craft :P those are not at the keep

runes are typically selected for that 6th stat, so that should help.
rangers can be very good in wvw. bow rangers are certainly awesome in zerg battles, as they have the longest range. Some ranger builds could even be considered immortal (meaning health regen and damage reduction is so insane that you just can’t kill them – they don’t deal much damage, but it will take several people to take them down)
try looking over at the ranger forums for build ideas: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger

actually, I hear it’s slightly better than royal terrace: it has a daily activity person.

mid-2010 Mac Pro
-3.33GHz hexa-core, 8GB L3 cache
-16GB RAM (2 × 8GB) 1333 MHz
-ATI Radeon HD 5870
-27" mac LED cinema display 2560 × 1440
-240GB PCIe SSD: OWC Mercury Accelsior ~750MB/s read and write, 100k IOPS (used for OS and applications)
-3 × 256GB OCZ Agility 4 with software RAID 0: should be 1260MB/s and 255k IOPS, but mac pro only has SATA 2 which maxes at 300 MB/s total (used for photos, videos, older OS, storage)
-1 × 256GB OCZ Agility 4 with bootcamp Windows XP (I did this to play GW2 before this beta came out)
-external 2 × 2TB HDD for backups

It could be said I made several impulse buys :P

don’t worry; eventually thep rie of leather and steel will come up to meet the 202g. maybe even the damask will come down a bit and meet them midway at 190g. that’s what happens in a free market – people will use the cheapest path, resulting in that path becoming more expensive and eventually all paths will be the same.
I expect they will do similar special items like this in the future to further equalize the ascended materials.

Thaddeus.4891:

Relax.

I wasn’t exactly expecting it to make sense, I’m just glad I wasn’t missing anything. Confirms for me that I should sell my leftover steel and iron because it will drop soon.

O.o
50 iron ingot to go from blueprint to blue
50 steel ingot to go from blue to green
50 mithril ingot to go from green to yellow
25 ori ingot to go from yellow to orange
15 elonian leather to go from orange to fuscia
I count 300 iron ore needed.
that’s 3% as much as I used last sunday in my weekly crafting.

did I miss something? what uses vast amounts of iron?

They keep adding minor sinks for bloodstone dust… I have more stacks of non-bloodstone dust than individual bloodstone dusts! Why no empyreal or dragonite or dark matter sinks!?!?

but we elected Kiel!

I’m noticing a lot more randomness in terms of gold/silver/bronze than normal. I saw a pack of dolyaks pas by, so I killed a single mob behind them and got gold credit for defending the dolyaks.
spend 5 minutes killing close to a hundred vets/elites/couple champs to stop some miasma only to get bronze credit.
I wouldn’t doubt it if you didn’t get credit at all when you thought you should.

this isn’t the first time they’ve said something will be there, but the important part of that something turned out to be removed

yeah, the node (and map icon) disappears after you mine it. usually, ore (and logs) takes 3 swings and gives 3 ore (or logs) – possibly more. plants usually take 1 ‘swing’ and gives 1-5 plants (depending on the plant).
I say ‘usually’ because there is a chance that the node will give you another chance. This depends on how well your server is doing in World vs. World. You can read up on that here. There have been times I’ve mined from the same plant 4 times (max 20% chance to gather more; get lucky 3 times).
If you zoom the mini map in all the way (move the mouse over it and mouse-wheel up), you will be able to see all nodes in your area (that is a good approximation for the distance your mini map will show nodes).
Some place don’t have any harvesting nodes. such as Lion’s Arch, Rata Sum, Divinity’s Reach, Hoelbrak, The Grove, Black Citadel. The major cities. also a couple other places. in general, if there are enemies in the area, there are likely harvesting nodes.

crafting can be profitable, but generally isn’t (I make big profits crafting, but I pick and choose what I make carefully). There is almost no way you will be able to find enough materials to make yourself items that you want to use. Even if you gathered 100% of the time, you would still get more experience from gathering and map completion to gain more levels than those materials would let you make at crafting. It’s a little silly, but crafting is mostly end-game stuff, and things you can make for your alts.
You should know about crafting: you can have one character learn all the crafting professions, BUT you can only have 2 of those professions be active at any time. You can switch between them, but it costs coin to do so – relative to that profession’s level. at level 400, I think it costs 40 silver. Not so much for a one-time thing, but expensive if you want to craft once a day. Easier to just have each of your characters have 2 professions, then just have 4 characters.

so many map completions today…

I moved all my crafting alts to rata sum.
one of them didn’t have the wp, so I ran to the vigil keep and straight through the gate.

I have to say; I don’t think it’s fixed.
better, for sure, but not fixed.
a month ago I would get 25-35 fps in wvw zerg battle
a week ago it was 1-4 fps
last night I was getting 10-15 fps in LA zerg
sure, not the same zerg. this living story might has a more dense zerg, which could account for it. Is anyone completely fixed? or did it simply go from unplayable to playable?

to me it seems that they improved it but not fixed it.
before, I was seeing ~30 fps in zerg battles.
last week it was 1-4 fps
last night it was 10-15 fps
all I did last night was LA; could be that that was just more crowded than a typical wvw zerg battle :P

I think it would be easier to sell 10 of each superior rune than 10,000 major runes. They would get more profit from the superiors.
I would say that the amount the increased the price by will be offset by the amount it’s decreased by when they sell. I’m sure they are hoping it’s decreased by less. It’s likely just about the exact same amount.
IMO, buying majors is equivalent to destroying them, because the only good use for them is to destroy them by trying to get superiors out of them.

I found a pretty good screenshot on google to illustrate it:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oYfiOngCSSE/UElDxZ4QUlI/AAAAAAAABgI/c-pQ-VWCHH0/s1600/gw2.png
the red-circled icons are ore nodes. use a mining pick on them. You still have to find them (usually very easy, sometimes behind bushes or up a cliff) If you have the mini map zoomed in and you are not on the same level as them, the map will tell you if they are above or below you.
I found a picture of a node! http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/thumb/a/a3/Copper_Ore_(node).jpg/238px-Copper_Ore_(node).jpg
copper, in this case. They tend to stand out a bit from the background (each type of node will look slightly different)

ah, here’s a better picture: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uYW_r8KHH2Q/UD15_fkkiHI/AAAAAAAABc8/_uSjp1bwp9c/s1600/diablo.png
top left has 6 ore nodes, then one log and 3 plants.
top right has one ore and 2 logs
bottom has 5 logs, 2 ore, 3 plants

some people have a mission to clear-cut everything, “if I see it on the mini-map, it’s as good as harvested”. personally, I tend to gather it only if it’s on the way, or orichalcum or ancient wood or platinum or omnom or truffle (those are worth >2s)

you can also get materials by salvaging things. not everything is salvageable, but most is. If it’s an armor or weapon type you can’t use, it’s not a bad idea to salvage it. For rare/exotic items (level 68+ with a yellow or orange name), I recommend using a better salvaging kit (master or higher). crude kit is good to salvage white, blue, green, and salvageable items.

there are ‘good’ stat masterwork aquabreather?
It seemed to me there were like 4 choices for masterwork aquabreather, and 3 choices for rare aquabreather. I just assumed they were the same choices.

I went about your problem by using the api.
Returns a list of all recipe ID’s: https://api.guildwars2.com/v1/recipes.json
You would then take that list and find detailed info on each recipe ID: https://api.guildwars2.com/v1/recipe_details.json?recipe_id=1275
it tells things like name, output id, how many are produced, what level required, what crafting discipline, how you learn it, ingredients.
only good for crafting disciplines, not mystic forge. of course, mystic forge doesn’t require learned recipes, and the recipes it does have can be generic.

two players in my guild did this recently, let’s call them A and B.
A wanted to pay B to make him a legendary; A would provide all sellables (mystic coin, precursor, crafting materials, etc.), B would supply all account-bound stuff (gift of exploration, gift of battle, karma, etc.) They came to me to ask what the account-bound stuff should be worth (how much A should pay
I told them that legendaries tend to give about 400-800g profit if sold on the TP (after tax), so 600g was fair. note that it shouldn’t depend on which legendary it is (except eternity). the different legendaries only changes what materials player A provides.
Then they started discussing the possibility of hiring B to get A map completion… They came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth it compared to just paying him to make a legendary for him (they were throwing around a 500g figure)

they don’t cater to American players either. I’m an average American; at noon on a weekday I tend to be AT WORK. At least you have the option to stay up late to see the patch when it first comes out. I have never been online when I major patch went live. East coast has it a little better, but still not many people are off work and home at 3. You know who Anet caters to? Greenland. Also Brazil.

I came here expecting a discussion about the wurm holes (tunnels) in edge of the mists

Lalangamena.3694:

also, champs should be able to cleave and AOE everything in its range and not be capped by 5

I do agree with that.
1v1 champ is a pain
2v1 champ is easy
3v1 champ is no brainer
4v1 champ is gimmi
5v1 champ is ‘what champ?’
champs need to scale better. bosses, too. not just more hp – that’s boring. But a boss and a champ should be able to take on 5 players almost as easily as 1.

there is some movement while in the air, but I agree that it’s not as much as you’d expect (once you get below the height you started from)
if you want to see invisible walls while falling, try using the Experimental Teleportation Gun off a cliff. basically you leap about 900 units straight forward, then drop straight down.

If I could throw worthless superior runes into the MF for a random superior rune, I would be soooooo happy.

I tend to look at characters as simple or complex.
simple would be warrior, guardian, ranger, thief. these are the ones that just auto-attack. They tend to be stronger (warrior has the highest sustained dps), but very straight-forward. general battle strategy of ‘cast all the skills’.
complex would be mesmer, engineer, elementalist, necromancer. These guys deal more of indirect damage. summon things that deal damage, distract the enemy, conditions. they tend to spend a battle picking the right skill to cast moment-by-moment.
I would say that what you enjoy playing depends on how you prefer to play. Do you like just charging in there and wiping them out (simple) or strategically surrounding them and picking them off (complex).
Simple will tend to be easy to level, complex is a bit harder as their best skills are gained later in the levels. All are evenly matched after level 40 or so.
I would almost place thief between the two categories, but not every thief build uses pure stealth, and even pure stealth thieves have the strategy of ‘sneak up on stuff and kill in 1 hit’, which fits the straight-forward approach more.

btw: your mac is able to zoom in on the screen in real time. No new pixels are created (it’ll still look blurry), but it can be done. I believe the default is control-mouse wheel. So hold down control and mouse wheel up to zoom in and mouse wheel down to zoom out. If it’s not on by default, then you can turn it on in the System Preferences / Mouse & Keyboard / Mouse.
Actually… I’m not sure if it’ll work while in GW2…

10k major runes is nothing. what a lot of people don’t realize is that you can craft major runes. some particularly cheap recipes:
Major Rune of the Krait = 1 Pile of Vile Essence + 1 Mithril Ingot
Major Rune of the Thief = 1 Crystal Core + 1 Thick Leather Square
Major Rune of the Ice = 1 Glacial Core + 1 Thick Leather Square
Basically, all 3 of those can be crafted for less than 4s. That means that it is pretty hard to increase rune prices above 4s and there is a huge supply of runes for less than 4s.
I can easily buy 10,000 of those materials in under a day. and that 10,000 will only make 600 superior runes which is about 12 of each superior. 12 of each superior is not a big impact – those will sell in less than an hour (it would take 6+ hours to MF them).
Even 100,000 would only be a temporary blip.

In their defense, the equation for how much damage to deal is probably really complication. Think about everything that contributes to it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took up a full page. It probably is pretty easy to fix (turn + into – or * into /), but hard to locate what to fix. and if they changed the wrong part, something else would break just as horribly. I imagine the recent mesmer chaos storm buff was caused by such a thing :P (when chaos storm upon taking fall damage delt like 80,000 damage – that 4.2 second lupi kill was HILLARIOUS)

stunned? or immobilized?
they made that distinction several months ago. either that, or they drastically increased the number of things that immobilize (it was when they added that tower to kessex hills).
stunned in when most skills you have go into a cooldown and your character is on the ground and can’t move or dodge. it’s a state of being, and only stun-break can remove it
immobilized is when you can’t move or dodge. it’s a condition and only condition-removing skills can remove it

FUBAR = f***ed up beyond all recognition. I’m not so sure that applies here :P
how about SNAFU? (situation normal: all f***ed up)

you do need to buy windows in order to install it on bootcamp. your mac comes with the software to set up bootcamp, but you need a windows install (disc or flash drive or .iso) to install onto that bootcamp partition. many ways to get it; buy from microsoft, maybe a friend of yours has a copy?, etc. I’m not sure how it’s even available; do they have DRM? I’m too used to macs and how they give away their OS for free.

The last Powerbook was released Nov 6, 2002 with a max processor speed of 1 GHz and 15.2" screen.
I’m going to guess you have a mid-2009 MacBook Pro (MacBookPro5,1)

A new one would run the game better. But a cheap new one wouldn’t be that much better.
I’ve been curious: How much do you need to spend on a laptop PC that can run GW2 very well? It’s seemed to me that laptop PCs are not as good and much more expensive than desktop PCs, I’m just curious how they compare to laptop macs.

I had a thought: saying you test your patches on macs before you release them is just as bad if not worse as not testing them. If you hadn’t tested it, that’s just being careless and ‘oops’. But the fact that you tested it, saw that it was crap, and released it anyways is insulting; “Yeah… we hoped you wouldn’t notice. Oh well, sucks to be you.”

I’m kinda looking forward to this patch. Either the mac bash is fixed, or I may get to make my first YouTube video showing off the new patch… and the astonishing 1 fps and what playing with that actually looks like. Win or win, really.

thunderbolt uses the same connector as the mini display port (their monitor-connector of choice prior to thunderbolt). It’s almost as good, just a bit less bandwidth; and yet it still supports up to 2560×1600 resolution, which is far more than any TV that will be available for at least another decade (blu-ray is 1920×1080)
$1 + $4 S&H mini display port to HDMI converter: http://www.amazon.com/DisplayPort-Thunderbolt-Adapter-Audio-Support/dp/B002HWWDAY
$8 + $0 S&H 25 foot HDMI cable: http://www.amazon.com/CNE02209-25-Feet-HDMI-Cable/dp/B00176NKPS
you could probably find it cheaper elsewhere… I just picked the first thing google spit out.

nekretaal.6485:

When it was announced, buy orders went almost all the way up to 5.5s.

THAT WAS ME! WAHAHAAHA
actually, I only bumped them up to 4s. I stopped trying to buy them when I noticed other people bumped them to 5s within hours. I had calculated the maximum purchase price to still make a profit to be about 8s, but in reality it was closer to 6s (stupid exuberance and perplexity). meaning every rune I purchased made me 2s profit, while every rune people after me purchased made them 1s profit

Lucey.1452:

I got 15 ecto from 10 rares…so I guess I’m getting yours right now.

RNG is RNG is RNG. You just are having a bad streak, it will break eventually.

why do people always say it 3 times instead of 2? that sentence makes no sense: random number generation is random number generation is random number generation.

probable reasons why you have been getting less ectos:
1) you’re salvaging things that don’t give ectos, such as level 65 rare dungeon armor.
2) low sample size. salvaging 10 level 68+ rares will give 0.875 ectos ON AVERAGE, but there’s still a pretty high percent chance to get 7, 6, 5, or even 4 or lower. As someone else said; you need much higher sample size to make that claim (3 digits minimum to suggest it, 4 would be compelling, 5 would be convincing, 6 would be proof)
3) RNG
4) you forgot to sacrifice the quaggan to the ecto gods.

mac saves screenshots as png (probably because of the reasons people said above)
if you want a jpg instead, open the png in preview, then ‘Save As…’ to jpg

As to why the quality isn’t that great: you need higher resolution and/or graphics settings. check the graphics options in GW2 to see if they can be increased (it’s limited by your computer). If they can’t, the only way you can get higher quality screen shots is with a better computer.
‘better computer’ may not necessarily mean a whole new computer. upgrading the graphics card and/or a higher resolution monitor would likely work well enough (on ultra-high graphics settings, you would likely get very low fps around 5-10, but since you only want good still screen shots, that’s ok).

agreed. do not do it every night. it’s even more mind-numbing than champ farming, if you can believe that.
sometimes I wish you could put, for example, 4 stacks of 250 runes in the MF and get 250 random runes out (same chance of superior, so ~50 superior and 200 major). But then I remember that if that were the case, everyone would be MFing runes and sigils to the point it’s anti-profitable (not just not profitable, but actually cheaper to buy the superior you want than make it with majors)

Behellagh.1468:

Gibson.4036:

Minos.5168:

Gold-to-Gem conversions do not make ArenaNet any money.

More people buy gems with gold, the price of gems goes up.

The price of gems goes up, more people buy gems to trade for gold.

ArenaNet makes money.

Yes, that’s the theory. Not sure how true it is yet.

well, there are 4 scenarios:
gold -> gem price drops, meaning more people are buying gems with $$ and selling them for gold
gold -> gem price stays the same, meaning as many people are buying gems with gold as selling gems bought with $$ for gold
gold -> gem price stays the same, meaning no one is trading
gold -> gem price increases, meaning more people are buying gems with gold than people buying gems with $$ and selling for gold

the 3rd one is likely not the case, but it is a possible scenario.
basically, gold -> gem price increases because more people are buying gems with gold. gold-> gem price decreases because more people are buying gems with $$ and selling for gold.
in general, there has been a steady going up in the trend. so that would mean more gems have been purchased with gold than $$ (and sold for gold)
however: http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem
you’ll notice that that price is jumping up and down constantly. every time it goes down, lots of people have bought gems with $$ and sold for gold. every time it goes up, lots of gems were bought with gold. Going up clearly causes it to go down soon after.

I keep specifying “bought with $$ and sold for gold” because gems bought with $$ and made a purchase on the gem store never enter into circulation, and never affect the gem -> gold price. I’m sure the vast majority of gems purchased with $$ are used in the gem store and not traded for gold. So you can probably take the amount you expect they make every time that graph goes down and multiply it by something to get how many gems they sold during that time.

One thing I’ll mention is that buying 800 gems with gold vs. selling 800 gems for gold might not change the graph the same amount. I’m not sure what their formula is, but it might be that for every gem sold for gold affects the graph more than gems bought with gold.

out of 2000 major runes, re-forging all the majors that come out, you get about 124 superior runes. there’s about 60 superior runes on the TP, but about 10 of those you can’t get from the forge (4 of which are the nearly the most valuable), and there are about 8 that you can get that are not on the TP because they are account bound (the dungeon runes).
due to randomness, you would probably end up with about 2-8 of 40 of those and 0 of the last ~20.
I’ve definitely had a time where the first 1500 runes yielded no superior traveler or divinity and I was starting to suspect they were removed or something. then I got 2 in a row. by the end of that batch I had 5 traveler and 3 divinity. point being that you need huge sample sizes when dealing with low drop rate things, because there will be dry spells you have to push through.