Guild Wars 2

Tomas.5029:

I actually dig the shoulders. They fit well with the rest of my transmutated set for my mesmer.

I really like your combo looks great there on a human male. Shame I can’t change race I’d level again but since some unlocks are character specific.. nope. Unfortunately I have a slightly skewed view from a ‘male charr’ perspective where these things scale strangely and float. They’re literally about 4 times the size on a charr on only 1 side of the body relative to the human scaling.

At least a few like it. I for one like all the designs just not this male light one on charr in particular. As I play a charr/asura primarily even if I change genders with a character recustomization kit I’ll be stuck with the same look.

I simply can not objectively see how or why a male necromancer, mesmer, or elementalist would want to try and fight with that style of arm guard and shoulder guard it completely exits the realm of acceptable plausibility for me. The helm still floats away from the head on a Charr baffles me I guess they do not ‘proof’ designs on all models even the charr tail clips through the tail guard in animations in the preview window!

Constructive feedback:
The design seems to play heavily off a shoulder guard/arm guard design that is prevalent with archery and gladiatorial armor(medium/heavy) which makes it feel out of place for the light armored professions that wear it. If the asymmetrical shoulder was a bit smaller in scaling and the ‘arm guard’ / giant glove was closer to the base model It would look a lot better with those minor adjustments. The texture though on the smaller shoulder piece does not match the shape language in the rest of the design at all with it’s swooping curves vs the largely geometric/rounded angle look through out the rest of it. If it was a draped piece of cloth like what you see in the mid section it would make more sense and provide strong visual contrast without looking as out of place.

I may be ale to make the legs/chest work with some mix and match but the not the luminescent versions unfortunately with how they dye.

The reason asura/charr get the male versions is the female designs all focus on having an exposed or overly prominent chest area to please a certain demographic. There are a few exceptions where the armor or outfit isn’t designed in that way and asura/charr can use the female versions since the design isn’t focused on the chest area(hexed, ancestral).

To make alternatives that would fit and scale on asura and charr properly would require building additional models and texturing which they don’t seem to want to spend the resources on. This is also the reason you don’t see any work on tail/horn clipping on charr or ear clipping issues on asura.

Ethaine.8419:

I can see the set looking pretty good if you hide the shoulders honestly.

Even with the single giant glove on only 1 hand? o.O without the gloves/shoulders/helm(which floats away from the head on a charr) it isn’t to bad once you remove all those pieces but still feels very bland/generic. However if you went for the upgraded set there would be nothing to match those other slots since the luminescent version dyes in a duo-toned manner.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

One man’s fugly is another’s oh-so-cool! If you like the upgrades, can’t you just transmute it, or something? I really don’t know much about it…sorry.

The point to upgrade it would be be for the upgraded look for getting a duo-toned dye effect. So it still uses the same base model. So transmuting wouldn’t be an option obviously as its an aesthetic thing.

Is there anyone that actually likes this? (Charr Bias)

I was really excited to see some new armor with some progression based upgrades available. I main a charr necro and my other active alts are all light armored characters and the charr male version of this armor is the most atrocious thing I’ve ever come across in a modern MMO. It looks like a mix-and-match medium armor set horribly asymmetrical with a oversized shoulder guard and 1 giant glove this is of course accentuated due to Charr scaling(shoulders and helm float) but looks quite acceptable on a male human but still does not seem to reflect armor you would typically expect to see on a Necromancer, Mesmer, or Elementalist. The female version of the armor does looks quite nice however and the heavy and medium armor sets are not bad at all, the female heavy armor is rather nice in particular.

Reference: http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/gw2-carapace-light-armor-set-charr1.jpg

I’d actually enjoy doing the upgrade / gear grind even for aesthetics but I have no options and a huge chunk of content is likely just going to get ignored by me as a result.

I genuinely would like to know what the designer had in mind with the male design of the armor to at least get an idea of what they were thinking. Not in a negative way but just so I can get an idea of the mode of thought for the medium style shoulder/arm guard usage on light armor worn by necromancers, mesmers, and elementalists. I also do realize sometimes you just get handed a style guide and told to ‘make it work’.

Edit: Made some changes for clarification.

mikeew.8607:

lol nearly a month bravo…

Do keep in mind in the case of the mac client since it runs on cider and is not native it can be difficult tracking down specific bugs it also takes more effort to fix sometimes requiring changes to both the actual client code as well as to cider.

Just saying this from personal experience. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of working with cider on some older AAA titles for their mac versions. It was not a pleasant experience you really pay for that ‘easy solution’ in the long run as oppose to going native. It’s a little to late in the game for them to considering going native unless they have all ready been working on it, people in general(non-developers) really underestimate the kind of horribly monstrous task that is.

I personally love necros and prefer to run mine when I can but it is a fact they lack decent cleave, their AoEs even when traited are on long cooldowns and offer nearly no real group utility/synergy outside of assisting with condition management w/the group which personal removal is more than enough in most cases. In real-world situations their debuff access really isn’t going to help as much as boons from other classes that have also have access to more dps/cleave/aoe dmg. Not to mention the lack of mobility, no vigor access etc..Rangers are usually going to be in a better spot than them in terms of group utility/dps especially on trash, hell even a ranger can slot off hand axe for certain bosses for reflects and stack vulneraility better than a Necro.

morrolan.9608:

Disastro.4086:

The turnout for S2 was quite possibly double or higher the turnout for S1

Based on what?

Based on several statements made through various mediums, particularly the emphasis on much higher turnout during the recent live stream. As well as personal reports from friends that play in the silver/bronze leagues.

T1 obviously isn’t really going to notice much difference than the usual though.

BootyWarrior.5243:

How many of u know that they have not fixed the issue for season 1 yet? Of course ppl r mad, because 6months is longass time. If you cant do it dont do it, stop lying/giving false hope to ppl, it’s getting old. Remember that guy that posted about WvW achievement? He said it will be fixed at the year’s end, well it’s almost a year from that “year’s end” now, nothing’s changed, and I’m sure nothing will for a long time. I did’t get my s1 rewards, I didn’t get my s2 rewards, and I’m sure we won’t get them at all. So just give up hoping it’ll get fixed cuz just like 6months ago, this will be another disappointment.

The turnout for S2 was quite possibly double or higher the turnout for S1 simply due to the fact it impacts more players they’ll probably fix S2 rewards while still ignoring the guys that got screwed in S1 because its not enough people to be worth their time.

I hope the WvW CDI will be something on a completely different level then what has happened with previous CDIs like the ‘lets pretend it didn’t happen Ranger CDI’. As it stands now not much positive has came out of them aside from ANet at least confirming some fears with a ‘nope nope nope, won’t happen’ here and there but hey that F2 responsiveness! ~_~

When the WvW CDI happens be extremely thorough in all your reasoning especially if you shoot down certain player ideas and complaints. Instead of just deleting posts as it’s harmful to the community as it does nothing but breed discontent and create a toxic atmosphere more so than some posts that may be in question.

If the time isn’t available to properly handle responses to questions brought up or to interact with player suggestions it should be avoided all together.

Vol.7601:

Just a note on the ‘hottest’ game comment.

Probably it is a pretty hot game in China, or it could just be because it’s new.

Warhammer Online had something like 3,000,000 million subs in it’s first month, but we all know how that game turned out.

Some of it may be the ‘new’ factor but some friends playing the Chinese release that are new to the game actually love the story, combat mechanics, and wvw. The question is will they get burned out to fast or will enough ‘fresh’ content be released at a pace fast enough to satiate the Chinese gamer appetite, the market there will not tolerate slow release schedules especially when it comes to PvP/WvW updates in regards to balance/bug issues. It’ll get abandoned fast if ANet follows it’s current modus operandi.

I’m still depressed over Warhammer the RvR really needed to be a 3way Ultimately though it turned out most of the bad decision making came from the suits in the long run not allowing resources to be allocated where they needed to be to get things done and matters got even worse after the EA acquisition.

GW2 has been giving me that exact same vibe recently as well.

I have a feeling the gear progression may be aesthetic upgrades going from:

no shiny->kinda shiny->omg it glows->aurora borealis

Perhaps part of LS2 or new dungeon(s)/paths etc.. hopefully not crafting related I’d rather carve my eyes out than have to deal with crafting it’s entirely not fun nor remotely enjoyable(imho).

Revler.2359:

1) Bring back a proper interrupt system. This was the key to PvP and made it a lot more interesting, as well as PvE bosses.
2) Bring back build freedom

You can interrupt. It isn’t a core of the game but many classes have access to some level of interrupts most speed running groups in pve will use interrupts to some extent as well. The problem is there is little reward in the effort of doing so outside of sPvP (where good players will in fact interrupt) there simply just isn’t a single ‘interrupt’ ability but several abilities that ‘can’ interrupt: Knockdowns, Launch(knock back), Daze, Fear, Stun, Pull, Push, Float(water), Sink(water). Animation or telegraphs indicating the usage of an ability could be accentuated more to make them more obvious but as long as you pay attention you can still accomplish interrupts even in sPvP even against a shortest-height variety of Asura.

You all ready have build freedom. The builds however just may not be viable and GW1 had plenty of builds that were not viable not every imaginable combination worked well by any stretch of the imagination. It was just as cursed with new patch metas as GW2 is, perhaps not as bad but it shared the ‘exact same problem’. You are romanticizing GW1 and nostalgia is embellishing your memory to make it appear better than it was. With that said with out a doubt they need to spend a lot more time working to have more builds that could fit into today’s perceived meta.

It would also be nice if they could make interrupts more rewarding by having bosses use far more dangerous abilities that you ‘could’ survive but not without risking death still so you would be better off interrupting and have it’s usage ‘random’ rather than on some kind of fixed delay/timer and just have it properly telegraph in some way. Possibly even track interrupts used against such bosses and offer a skillful play bonus loot bag or something for the carrot-on-a-stick players.

In regards to lack of viable builds/skill variety I know far to many people, some close friends who stopped playing due to boredom of playing ‘that one build that works and is accepted by the masses’ once they invest time in another MMO they’ll never look back especially in a monthly fee variety as it is literally an investment in their entertainment. I

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Most impressive. Have to admit I’m a bit jealous of their kick-off. Too bad NCSoft didn’t spring for such a grandiose launch.

IIRC they have to get dyes amongst other items in game we take for granted via RL cash only in the Chinese version with no alternative options for acquisition so chances are they’ll be able to cover the costs.

Any clarity on if male TA light armor glows?

knightblaster.7420:

These are two different species of gamers — almost from two completely different planets, different worlds. They have nothing at all in common with each other whatsoever.

Well I’m not so sure I would go as far as to say nothing. I primarily play in sPvP/WvW(wvw being my primary interest coming from a very long DAoC RvR background) and occasionally enjoy other aspects of the game. I personally enjoyed the new Tequatl fight, Wurms, Marionette, and fractals are occasionally enjoyable but not worth mindlessly doing over and over. I also found Living story to be some what entertaining all be it I feel like the majority of Scarlet’s story arc was poorly written or written by someone who specialized in children’s books. People like myself are a minority with in a minority and you simply can’t market to a group that small and expect to be successful.

knightblaster.7420:

It’s a design that, from the get-go, was certainly destined to alienate the hardcore, high skill cap contingent of the MMO community

I know this conversation is primarily directed at PvE content however this is exactly why sPvP became so stagnant to the point where Anet had to essentially PvE-ize it with pve oriented rewards to get people to have interest in it again and it was quite successful in that regard with bringing in more people. The crowd of people they initially tried to target with sPvP/eSports community have no interest in the mindless 1 spamming the other 99.9% the game represents and PvP balancing that is far too influenced by that kind of PvE environment which is why you saw so many top teams/players leave the game. A perfect example of this is the official MLG streams of GW2 Tournaments when during the first part of the NA Tournament you had around 1200-1800 people only viewing. The game simply doesn’t appeal to that crowd despite the time, resources, and money they spend trying to specifically target them.

gesho.9468:

is incendiary powder single target or aoe? its prob single, right?

Single target. 10sec internal cooldown.

rainstorm.7506:

So i’ve seen in a few games that engineer is becoming the new meta.
When u have multiple ones in tournaments they’re just too much to handle.
Most of them run bomb- and toolkits which has alot utility.
Pls tell me what u guys think?

Engineeers are easily countered in organized team play. If you look at all the actual tournaments you’ll see very low numbers especially in EU even in regular team/solo queues are almost no one plays them in teams(EU) you have more people running around with counters for them. The winning EU team in ToL even made a statement regarding this in a recent video.

You see a lot of engis in NA hotjoins/soloqueue because they’re strong 1v1 and most NA players think that good at 1v1 = good at team play, big misconception. It’s also easy to have success on an engineer against bad/average players and is another reason for their popularity.

Don’t confuse my statements for saying engineers are bad it’s far from it. In proper hands they can be amazing but their shortcomings are quite frankly to big in a competitive setting unless the team works hard to make up for those shortcomings which may create holes in defense or issues with rotations. It can work but it’s certainly a far cry from any real meta.

Anti.9156:

Engi got good buffs from the sigils but still lacks the same counter. if you buff it so it got less counter, it will be OP for sure

I agree, don’t get me wrong. I just happen to think it should have other ways to deal with the harsh counters not have less potential counters? If I’m making any sense there it’s just simply ‘to easy’ to counter since there is so few ways to even deal with it. Currently most of the viable configurations require very specific utilities which completely prevent ways to even potentially mitigate the issues. If someone knows there is going to be an engi on the opposing team they just need to counter it 1 way and it’s going to mostly be out of the picture. (Providing the choice is made to even specifically counter it, in cases where that doesn’t happen its not much of an issue but it shouldn’t work across all types of builds)

Making other builds viable that have different types of counters would be the ideal solution. As oppose to having the same kind of counter across the board.

The take away from this video is in high level team play engi’s are useless. Hopefully notes were taken and passed to the balance team on the reasons they stated especially considering the reasons mentioned also effect other modes of gameplay. ~_~

Not to say engi’s can’t be amazing in a lot of cases but they’re to easily countered in team play situations as mentioned in the vid.

doubleomar.2165:

Is it reasonable or within the team’s capabilities to provide an update on this matter?

Sure it is. However, I have doubts that they care enough to do so at this point.

chemiclord.3978:

How do you make them better? You don’t. They are completely immobile on this score. You have one of two options; dumb down everything so they can participate happily, or gate difficult content into its own instance where they won’t be offended by its presence.

As much as I would prefer non-gated / open content. I have to agree with this and given what I’ve seen in recent events especially when people actually cause problems intentionally for personal amusement. I understand a lot better why it’s done so much in other games now.

Something like this could be accomplished through a panel similar to the guild mission system but open and linked to living story content accessible to all players of appropriate level or scaled up where acceptable where one can select varying difficulty modes. You could also accomplish this by having the option appear when attempting to zone into the related content area and could select from the difficulty modes or other related options. This could co-exist with normal open world content and simply spawn an overflow with these settings and place the players in it that selected similar options. Allowing guilds to select specific overflow IDs would be ideal so they could actually play together and land in the same instance/overflow or try to automatically and intelligently place as many from the same guild into the same spawned instance. This could still give you a good mix of players in a semi-open environment without necessarily become a full-blown classic raid.

Engineers can get away with condi setups a lot more in T1 zergs than the other professions due to the speed and frequency at which they can apply/reapply conditions. There is still a finite number of condi removal available not everyone is in the target radius/target limit. It can still have an impact and force people to burn cooldowns just for the condi removal component on abilities they should otherwise be saving for the utility instead. In some cases this causes them to blow their heal early which makes things better for your team mates. I’d suggest going for a CC centric build if you go condi so you still have an impact with chill/immobilize/cripple/knockbacks(there is never enough aoe stab in a zerg so KBs are effective especially when you hit a zerg in the side when they’re circling around to break their lines) while soft cc may be removed quickly in a high-speed zerg vs zerg scenario when movement and positioning is important some well placed soft CC can cause a group of people to be caught that otherwise wouldn’t, even if it only slows them down for a second.

Using a Condi/CC oriented build with perplexity runes can work out ‘ok’ KBs will be interrupting regularly for the confusion proc along with dropping supply crate on peoples heads for another viable interrupt/aoe stun and not to forget static shield/throw shield especially considering throw shield pierces in a line for a daze on each target hit both directions with no target cap for another potential interrupt. I wouldn’t worry about individual targets unless you want to focus on people being caught in your CC after you drop it if they fall behind their group or if you plan on just focusing their back lines specifically.

In Z vs Z scenarios you’re still bringing some things to the group though so not all is lost and you’ll be surprised how much condi dmg isn’t removed as your average group/pug zerg will blow most if not all of their cooldowns on initial engagement.

With that said power is far easier to get predictable results from. In small scale havoc teams / roaming conditions will definitely shine more.

Seamus McPlatofart.7269:

Sure would be nice if a Dev. would humor us with a more recent response, to at least make it seem like they care.

You have my +1

It would certainly be great if we they would post something especially if they’ve abandoned the idea of doing anything. ~_~

NeXeD.3042:

Yes! But what about the taking damage to real hp while in ds…..

I’ve had this happen a few times recently. Not pleasant. Activate DS and continue to damage to both LF and Health at the same time.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Soo the new patch comes out tomorrow and OS X players are probably going to have a lot of trouble playing it? Unless the issues are fixed and will be rolled out with that patch, but I feel like someone would have said something about that already.

Well they’ve never really been known for great levels of communication with us. Hopefully there is a fix in there.

Yifang.8260:

Well I still don’t agree it’s just a Mac issue in that there are Windows users also with problems even on high end tech.

I don’t think anyone said anywhere that it’s a mac only issue or that we’re the only ones with problems.

However the majority of the Mac player base with 1 patch saw up to an 80% (in my case specifically 40-to-8) drop in frame rate. More or less depending on the hardware/os configuration. Something like this would’ve never gone live for the windows players and if it did it would be fixed with haste or they would’ve pulled the patch completely until it was working. A lot of us are just getting sick that no real quality assurance testing seems to be going on at all for mac specifically. People on 10.8 and 10.9 do seem to be more effected more than people on older versions of OS X it seems though.

The problem most certainly is the ‘client’ itself and changes that were made in an attempt to optimize frame rates by adjusting texture loading/redraws and shaders on a number of cards / situations for windows users that were getting much lower frame rates than they should have considering their hardware is ultimately what initiated our problem. It fixed it for that group of windows users and we since have inherited a far worse version of the problem they were having.

Yifang.8260:

Oh regarding frames, I have a theory perhaps the client’s readings may be wrong, they’re certainly erratic at times too (Not that I have super perception that I can see all dozens of frames each second) but if my game truly was running at 10 or less fps it would look very choppy yet it doesn’t.

The frame rates are being reported accurately. You can use 3rd party tools including ciders built in meter that and can be enabled in the config file as an overlay. 10 doesn’t necessarily have the typical “jerky” look people think about w/lower frame rates until they’re in high load high action situations and “moving” instead of standing still.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

epborden.7492:

I really think it would have just been easier to create a native client. I’m pretty sure the only reason they didn’t create one is because they don’t have any programmers with experience on OS X, or not enough to do anything on this scale.

Because the game runs in DirectX on Windows. It’s not as simple as making an OpenGL client – because every single time they made new content it would have to be done for both DirectX and OpenGL – which would mean having twice as many staff and it would be a massive pain for existing staff because it’s something they would have to be mindful of every time they made something new or planned something.

Of course then you might say they could just switch the entire game over to OpenGL since it runs on Windows as well as OSX – but if their current staff have be trained in DirectX and are proficient in it then what? Do you expect them to fire all those people JUST so that you can have a native OSX client? Then there’s the fact that the games engine is based off the original GW1 engine – once again in DirectX.

I know that it would be really nice to have an OpenGL client, but you have to understand that it quite possible isn’t feasible from a monetary or staffing sense.

I agree with you here.

I do however hope some of their team has some serious GL chops because cider maps all dx9 to OGL and often transgaming has to tweak that ogl rendering on a per game basis depending on how the texture loading and redraws are being handled since the translation of such things from dx9 to ogl rendering as done by cider/wine is far from perfect and both of these issues seem to be exactly whats causing the current problem. From what I’ve gathered ANET is doing this all in-house and does not have an active support contract with Transgaming for development and has simply licensed it for usage.

Aveneo.2068:

Now you have experienced what most Rangers have been going through all this time.

Hope you like poetic justice… :P

Rangers have never really been as bad as the “public perception” of the class is. It’s just really easy to be terrible on a ranger if you don’t know how to build or what to do as a result most people just assume they’re awful at everything because the bad ones are everywhere. Like the bow bears in clerics that ONLY auto attack and sometimes remember to heal themselves ~_~

Billionaire.5607:

Ok thought it might of been just me, but having coming across this post I can safely assume it isn’t my ISP. I had to log due the terrible latency. Adding my post to bump this thread and hopefully increase the priority if it isn’t already high.

ANet has no real control over this situation. It has to do with one of their providers and some of the hosts their provider routes through. The only thing that could be done outside of standard methods used to mitigate a ddos is if NCSoft/ANet uproots where it co-locates it’s servers which is extremely unlikely.

In WvW 20k yeah. If you do the math its quite possible with all the boons/buffs/sigils/gear +signets/moment of clarity combo it’s just extremely unlikely all the stars will be aligned for such a scenario which is why it’s rarely seen but indeed does happen. The vast majority of rangers don’t even run the build this is possible with which makes it even less likely to be encountered.

There is a buff you can get for an additional +10% dmg from the forge I believe. If you combine that with the signet of the hunt/wild combo(if built to have signet’s effect you) in power/zerker gear it’s very possible I’ve seen it break 20k. Do keep in mind you can be lvl 79 in decent gear and still be upscaled.. more than likely the person that hit ya was 60-70s with that figure

It’s pathetic I will often kill both players and mobs long before minions even start attacking right now. Mostly useless at the moment.

Lets not forget to go Asura for Radiation Field racial for AoE poison too :P

Flamethrower is best used for it’s utility primarily. The knockback, the aoe blind, fire field, on demand burning proc from the toolbelt skill. Flame blast cant hit decently hard if full zerker. The damage isn’t complete garbage in a zerker build but it’s still far from grenades and even further still from bombs. With full might stacks and if you can maintain 100% burning uptime for the increased FT damage the damage would be passable if thats just your preferred play style but it will still be a lot less than using your other options in similar circumstance.

IMHO it’s in need of a damage boost to bring it closer in line with the above. With that said it is still a reliable conical aoe for when you need to chase something/tag which can be more reliable than grenades w/some moving targets and doesn’t require you to quite be as on-top of mobs/players as bombs.

The primary hit through obstacles usage would be in WvW on gates. You can hit players/rams through them with the flamethrower at a greater range(on the other side) than you could if you were dropping bombs on the opposite side of the gate and tossing ’nades on it. You can face hug the gate and use your knockback and aoe blind through it as well. So it can work well as a complimentary kit to the others.

tinymurder.5791:

NeroGuilt.4720:

Then they are complete idiots. They won’t accomplish anything. They aren’t going to make money off of it. So then why waste resources doing something like this, unless of course, they are all basic script kiddies who can’t actually accomplish something worth while. Which is more of what i’m thinking. People are on payroll to deal with this, and they are getting ran around by some wanna be group. Hilarious.

Unfortunately, they aren’t doing it for the money, they’re doing it for the “lulz” and the hell of it. The other thing is, they only have so be successful once to make waves, the cyber security folks have to be successful every time or they’re considered failures.

Also, these guys aren’t “script kiddies” they are some of the better hackers and programmers out there. After all, they found a vulnerability in the Network Time Protocol and have exploited it ruthlessly to generate the largest DDOS attack in the history of the Internet. I’d say that proves a certain amount of skill and will to succeed. Shame all that potential is being wasted in the cyberspace equivalent of egging your neighbor’s car, or mailbox baseball.

Actually the problem with the NTP amp and DNS reflection/syn reflection attacks have been known long before these guys came into existence. They’re simply exploiting it. I have no doubt they’re just above average script kiddies. There are publicly available proof of concepts out there that can be easily modified to do exactly what they’re doing. I remember a few reflection/amp exploits from 96-98 that exploited things in a similar fashion to what is going on still now(in one cases exactly the same) people just don’t update their networks/computers or want to deal with how much it would cost to pay someone to update everything to avoid this crap and in some cases the problem is just with the protocol itself and there is no real easy way to fix something like that with such wide adoption.

I can some what comprehend their attack on CloudFlare .. CloudFlare makes ludicrous bullkitten claims of being nigh-invulnerable and can shrug off any DDoS. They’re practically a con-artist that formed when “cloud” was all the buzz and so many large companies ate their bull crap and asked for seconds.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Disastro.4086:

Gaile Gray.6029:

• We don’t have a “PC Team” and a “Mac Team.”

That certainly explains the absurdly low priority level we’re given. I mean we all knew it but seeing it stated in an official capacity stings a bit. It also explains why the mac client isn’t tested after each patch/build independently, if it was this current bug that dropped people from 40fps down to 8fps wouldn’t have gone live I’d hope.

Either way I’m still happy to know that the devs recognize we still exist at least in some capacity and things are being done to right this wrong.

Please don’t read that the wrong way. That means we don’t have a team for each discipline, but that anyone on our team may work on either. This is a good thing, as far as I can see.

I really don’t think I am reading this the wrong way at all. Not necessarily better in most cases but certainly there are some situations where I can see it’s very good especially in the context of cider.

There are some things so radically different between the platforms it generally requires one be specialized in such differences even more so when you’re dealing with a system like cider as it has it’s own issues and limitations on top of it and to my knowledge has not been updated to take advantage of some of the major OGL changes in 10.9. It’s also extremely evident in the current problem we’re facing right now and very noticeable every time a new problem is introduced and never addressed or placed on extremely low priority because the developers for the primary system have other things they need to be focusing on instead of mac only issues and it has a negative impact on us. Having them come back to mac issues takes time away from other issues that effect the majority of the player base which is why we’ve to date only seen fixes for the absolutely most game breaking problems and nothing else.

While I have no doubt there is an effort being made on the mac front now and that the developers are a very passionate lot of folks, actions always speak louder than words even more so when there is a lack of.

Gaile Gray.6029:

• We don’t have a “PC Team” and a “Mac Team.”

That certainly explains the absurdly low priority level we’re given. I mean we all knew it but seeing it stated in an official capacity stings a bit. It also explains why the mac client isn’t tested after each patch/build independently, if it was this current bug that dropped people from 40fps down to 8fps wouldn’t have gone live I’d hope.

Either way I’m still happy to know that the devs recognize we still exist at least in some capacity and things are being done to right this wrong.

Penguin.5197:

Disastro.4086:

I have a hard time understanding all the engi posts they singularly feel like the most well-rounded right now. Their primary issue I’d say is how garbage turret builds are and aesthetically the Hobosack… pls no more hobosack. Outside of that I’d say it’s a l2p issue and people wanting things to be what they dream up in their heads instead.

I was actually surprised too but I’m assuming they mean buffs to gadgets,flamethrower etc…skills that aren’t used. Playing with nades, bombs is only fun for so long, more diversity is always great

No doubt I feel you there, more variety is always good (nades/bombs/elixir/decap bunker and tri-kit builds are still very functional though)it was just my understanding this was for those who had the most severe problems across the board. Engis at least have multiple builds that work well across multiple game modes. I’d of course like more options for engis but I think there is some other stuff that should take priority for other classes right now despite my love for Engi.

I have a hard time understanding all the engi posts they singularly feel like the most well-rounded right now. Their primary issue I’d say is how garbage turret builds are and aesthetically the Hobosack… pls no more hobosack. Outside of that I’d say it’s a l2p issue and people wanting things to be what they dream up in their heads instead.

1. Ranger
2. Elementalist
3. Necromancer

experiencing the same problem as well, may be a routing issue some where?

Mystic.5934:

I’ve heard people say that GW2 only uses one processor core, is this true?
I ask because I see this wineserver application that runs whenever GW2 is open and it uses 300% cpu (meaning 3 cores). Am I reading this wrong?

It uses multiple cores in the cider port version. Standard wine and crossover require the -dx9single option to run where that single core misconception comes from.

I haven’t touched ranger since last August or early Sept. I’m curious how WvW frontline/zergbreaker/cc builds are holding up these days if there are folks that still run that type of build anymore where you are chaining CC and blocking ranged attacks w/axe off hand on top of enemy ranged etc..etc..

From a PvE standpoint have power melee builds changed much? Still viable?

Any other significant changes since then?

As an addendum to my previous post. Since this most recent patch performance in P9 also dropped significantly too. Wouldn’t surprise me if some windows users are having issues as well but haven’t looked into that yet.

It plays rather well, is quite stable and has higher frame rates playing it in parallels desktop 9 than via the mac cider port(for me). However that’ll still require you to have Parallels 9 and Windows to install in the VM. Other than that I wouldn’t rely on the mac version if it’s that important as to influence the type of laptop you purchase for maximum game performance running it natively in windows is your best bet.

First and foremost make sure you have enough free hard drive space available. It is my understanding that this error can pop up when you do not have sufficient space available on the hard drive.

Another potential problem could be a logical file system error or file system permissions problem. The easiest way to identify this would be to run Disk Utility and run “Verify Disk” which should identify any common problems then followed by “Repair Disk” also run “Repair Disk Permissions”.

The following link has a couple other options you can try if none of the above helps:
Basic Mac Beta Client Troubleshooting

I’ve ran it in Parallels on a Macbook Pro 2012, iMac(late 2012 version), Mac Pro (2012 update) before this post to make sure I was remembering properly. (I am using the maximum ram configuration on all machines) Running OS X 10.9.1.

Consistently across the board it showed higher frame rates and visual fidelity. The last couple of versions of Parallels have really increased it’s 3D acceleration/directx support quite a bit and it really shows. It maps the GPU acceleration on a per instruction level and the performance impact isn’t that bad as a result. Also keep in mind there is on CPU Hardware Assisted Virtualization on both modern Intel & AMD CPUs which has significantly lowered a lot of overhead people associate with VMs this started as far back as 2005 and has improved since then unfortunately a lot of people keep repeating incorrect and very old information and have misconceptions about how modern VMs function.

The only area I saw any kind of performance impact was load times between zones and stepping into a highly populated area and the ensuing texture loads happen and it may choke for a few seconds(wvw massive battles) but it was essentially on par with the Cider client in the majority of cases and once it was all loaded performance exceeded the Cider client. The slow load cases were mainly due to the file system being stored with in a single disk image. The load times were almost non-existant on the solidstate hd I have in the Mac Pro.

It’s worth keeping in mind Cider is poorly coded, very inefficient especially when dealing with memory handling. It still carries with it a lot of very old code from some early versions of WINE. Where the official WINE project has since deprecated a lot of functionality/old code/malloc garbage that Cider still carries with it from when it was forked. There are other areas where Cider performs badly due to the integration of some ‘necessary’ 3rd party licensed tools that let them run some protected games which adds a lot more overhead than you would think. There are a lot more areas where these performance issues can be real-world measured with proper tools but I doubt the average end user would want to get into measuring things at the process level, let alone deciphering the output.

I suggest you try it yourself your mileage may vary depending on your hardware configuration, in my case it runs quite well. The Cider implementation for GW2 is just that bad that Parallels actually outperforms it despite the virtual machine overhead.

To be fair to the folks at transgaming they have a good product. In some games it performs exceedingly well in others it requires a lot more effort to be tolerable. Cider does have newer code from WINE folded into it as well they also have projects out there with a more recently updated code base but unfortunately do to the way business works they can’t always back-port performance updates into other projects for a variety of reasons sometimes simply due to technical reasons as different games have different needs and each have their own custom code/performance tunes in place that conflict with each other. Most of the issues we experience could just be the result of ANet having no budget to pay the folks at transgaming to get things up to par for this title.