Guild Wars 2

Just as a follow up, I was planning to research new systems, but I changed my mind since I found a promising video card for a good price so I figured I wouldn’t be out much money if it didn’t improve things in the older system too much. The old system could only take a single-slot video card, so after researching some options I picked up a Gigabyte card based on the NVidia GT 730, 2Gb GDDR5. I’m happy to say it made a huge difference. My Windows Experience Index for both gaming and desktop graphics went up by 2 points each, and now on the older system I’m running at all GW2 graphics settings on “medium” and getting between 50fps and 60fps. (Probably could even go to some high settings except for zerg events.)

Anyway, just wanted to pass along that follow up info in case anyone is making a similar decision. If you’re looking for an entry level single-slot video card, the one I got was the “Gigabyte Ultra Durable 2 GV-N730D5-2GI GeForce GT 730 Graphic Card – 902 MHz Core – 2 GB GDDR5 SDRAM – PCI Express 2.0 x8”

For the sake of telling a story, I thought the implementation was well-done and quite fun. This type of thing should likely be used sparingly, but in the context of storytelling I think changing up the narrative voice from time to time is a good idea.

My primary system is newer (Intel Core i7, 8 core) with 12Gb memory, an SSD, and an NVidia video card with a 750 Ti and DDR5. It runs GW2 very nicely with all settings on high. I’d love to buy an even better system and move this system down the line to be my new secondary, but unfortunately the budget isn’t there for that particular option right now. Per the discussion above upgrading my existing secondary system doesn’t sound wise, so I’m probably looking at replacing it with a better budget system.

Thanks to all for the feedback and advice.

Excellent advice and feedback – thank you! I think I’ll plan to follow that advice and start looking at options for a new system. I hadn’t seen that pcpartpicker site before either – I’ll be adding that to my favorites list.

Thanks Abomally. Here are the specs, although I was hoping for a more general test or determination I could run to see where the bottleneck is. I’ve read on the forums in various places that GW2 places more burden on the CPU, so that’s why I was cautious to spend the money on a new video card since that may not be my bottleneck here.

OS: Windows 7 32-bit
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core 5000+
RAM: 3Gb
Video: NVidia GeForce 310
HDD: Western Digital WD74

I’ve got an older computer that runs GW2 with barely enough fidelity to be playable. We’ve got all settings on “Low” and the game is playable, however in certain situations like jumping puzzles, it isn’t quite good enough and the sluggishness causes a jumping puzzle failure and much player frustration.

I wanted to get your tips on the best way to determine if the system is primarily CPU-bound or GPU-bound when GW2 gets sluggish. If it is CPU-bound, I’ll probably get a new system since this one is pretty old and options for a better CPU will be limited and probably not worth it. If it is GPU-bound though there are a few options out there to get a better video card for not much money that will work with this system.

I don’t want to spend the money on a new video card though if we’re CPU-bound. What’s the best way to tell where my GW2 bottleneck is?

Ever since the Silverwastes map was released, I’ve been trying to get up to the airship dock near the Camp Resolve waypoint. With the release of this jumping puzzle, I’ve been able to get tantalizingly close to getting up there from the southern approach, but as of yet I’ve not figured out a way up there.

Anyway, kudos to the team on this great JP – it was well-done and a lot of fun. And if anyone figures out a way up onto the airship dock, let me know the way!

I thought the stealth mission was a lot of fun. And if it’s not your style, you had the freedom to break out of stealth and just fight your way through. I thought it was a well-crafted mission.

Have you observed if the generic models are seen when other people’s clones appear? As long as it is only you seeing your own clones as the generic model for a second or two it’s just a visual annoyance. But if other people see the generic model briefly too, then that’s a problem. It gives away which is a clone and which is the player.

I was taking a few screen shots in the Far Silverwastes when I noticed that near the Far Silverwastes Vista there’s a large area where the sky textures are not meshing well creating this very evident line across the sky. With all the beautiful artwork in the Silverwastes, this texture line in the sky stood out like a sore thumb. I just wanted to report it in hopes that it might be tuned up a bit in a future patch. Screen shot is attached.

Lishtenbird.2814:

This is a list of commonly discussed topics of the GW2 forum

Don’t forget the topic of whether WvW should be part of world completion or not. I’d say that is one of the more common discussion topics.

Maybe this story isn’t a funny one, but it was a good Silverwastes battle story. A friend and I were attempting to defend Blue Oasis on our own. Tactician Mansell was down and we were having a tough time reviving her because of all the mobs. (Especially the Taragriffs.) The timer before the Pact retreated was getting low and I was reviving Mansell while I was being attacked. I knew if I kept reviving her I would not survive, but if I dodge rolled away to save myself, the event would fail. I stuck with the revive and got Mansell back on her feet with 1 second left – a second later I got mobbed by a group of Taragriffs and went pretty much instantly into defeated state. Because Mansell was revived though, we ended up succeeding at the event.

Have had a lot of good times in this map.

Korossive.7085:

Are you kidding? I went with a 5 mesmer multi dungeon run and between the 20 of us we breezed the places. Bosses were shocked. Mobs awed. We were running through, and a platoon of “us” went after us. It was a mess.

Not kidding at all – my point was that multiple mesmers are effective and a lot of fun too. It sounds like you had a similar experience.

You’re asking about open world PvE correct? If so, I’d say give Mesmer + Mesmer a shot. It’s a lot of fun with the two players and six illusions going you’ll have a pretty big “party” attacking the mobs.

Firelysm.4967:

It’s very hard to find enjoyable PVE content, and since Silver came out, i was excited, i actually did some stuff out there.. TO:
a) have fun
b) earn some decent gold

So if you hypothetically had unlimited gold and could buy anything for yourself you wanted, then would you say you could finally sit back and enjoy the game and have fun? I’d propose that you can do that already.

The other side of that coin is that if you aren’t having fun just playing the game now when you’re not making fast money, it’s probably safe to say that you still won’t be having fun playing the game later on if you earn lots of gold.

I wouldn’t call it “dead” yet, although it does seem a bit quieter. Despite the changes to the Amber farm, it is pretty normal for any new content to eventually quiet down after the initial rush is over and the novelty wears off. That being said, I’m really hoping that event scaling (down) will work well for this zone. That may be a misplaced hope though based on a recent experience where a handful of us were able to take a fort but then when The Breach happened, there was no way that same small group had a chance at the boss. We barely chipped away 25% of its health before the time was up.

The point is that any new content will eventually become old content with fewer players. Hopefully a small coordinated skilled group would have a chance to be successful with that content when scaling is working. It doesn’t seem right that content would only be winnable with a large zerg present.

Looks like today’s patch notes are regarding this topic:

“Fixed a bug in which Lost Bandit Chests near Amber Sandfall spawned too fast and too numerously.”

I wouldn’t want to see chests become personalized. But I’d agree that the current distribution of chests on the map encourages folks toward Amber which isn’t good. I’d suggest:

1. Redistribute the chest spots to either make them random, or else make them equally distributed in front of all forts and not just Amber

2. Possibly consider making map chest density on the map be dynamic based on forts held – if few forts are held by the Pact, fewer chests are available and shovels won’t reveal anything if the few chests available have already been dug up (allow a shovel to be re-stowed if not used). However if more forts are held, then more chests will show up on the map.

Underscoring what the folks above had said. This update is good stuff. I wish the story/lore pieces could have been longer. I felt like I was just getting into a good novel only to find out it was a short story. But that’s not a complaint – I know more is coming. Just don’t want to wait!

I found the challenge level to be just right. I wouldn’t have wanted them to tone it down at all. It required some thinking and trial and error to figure out the various mechanics, and when I figured it out and won the fight it felt rewarding to have done so.

On my ranger I like to have one melee set and one ranged set, put sigils on at least one weapon in each set that give me a benefit for swapping, and then swap back and forth between melee and ranged. It makes for a very active and mobile play style I enjoy on the ranger. Usually when I’m using sword, right when the weapon swap timer is about to be ready to activate I hit Hornet’s Sting to jump out of melee range and then swap to my ranged set.

The force would be confusing for the new players.

As others have said, there’s often a situation where you have a certain amount of gems you want to convert to gold. With the interface as it exists today, you need to guess the amount of gold and keep guessing until you get close to the amount of gems you had in mind to convert, and you’re often not able to get to the exact amount since you have to use 1 gold increments.

I’m sure there are also scenarios where you have a certain amount of gold you want, and you just want to know how many gems that will cost you.

It seems that the interface probably still needs a bit of tweaking to satisfy both scenarios.

It would be nice if the New Player Experience truly only applied to new Players and not to new Characters created by existing Players. The NPE should only happen once per account. Subsequent characters should at least have an option to remove the training wheels faster.

Sounds like a good idea. If implemented it would need to include some kind of template feature so that you could switch a build with a click and not need to fiddle with stats on every gear piece one by one.

This does appear to be fixed now. When I enter combat the arrows above the skills disappear as expected. When I exit combat, the arrows reappear.

wasted.6817:

They could potentially fix this to some degree by making stats on gear switchable (similar to legendary weps functionality) and adding build/gear manager with templates and all.

Would love to see that implemented. I know tons of people have asked for build template ability on the forums, but I’d agree that gear stats should be modifiable and that if templates are ever enabled, they should include the gear stats.

Agree with the above posts about stats on gear. It is frustrating to have the tease of being able to change builds dynamically only to have so many of the stats tied to gear that is either annoying to swap out, or too expensive to maintain multiple sets.

Guhracie.3419:

I agree with you on a gut level, but it’s been speculated on before. My sense is that their economist would have made this argument if it would, in fact, be more profitable.

I’m sure you’re right. At the end of the day, their goal is to make the most money possible. If they feel fewer high margin sales are better than more low margin sales, I guess that is their call to make. My opinion is to the contrary of course, but I’m no economist.

On a related note, my armchair economist opinion is that things are skewed with the BL weapon skins. Since you can’t buy them outright but need to go through the BL ticket RNG filter first, the true cost of a BL weapon skin is variable. It’s not uncommon though to spend $20 to get enough keys to get 10 scraps. Paying $20 for a single weapon skin makes it a thought-provoking decision and not a casual or impulse purchase. Then to have the older skins go up in price rather than down seems backwards to me. Usually a retailer discounts the older items since the novelty has worn off.

Just me personally, if we could outright buy the BL weapon skins for say $1 each, I’d buy a lot more of them and probably try to complete some of those collections. But at around $20 a piece plus suffering through the RNG filter with the scraps, that won’t be happening.

I don’t have data to back this up, so I’m being up front that this is just my opinion. But what I’m thinking is that the gem store would do a lot better with revenues overall if they lowered the prices on most items. With many items being multiple hundreds of gems, a person has to carefully weigh if they want to spend $10 or more for a shiny cosmetic upgrade or a convenience item. Sure there are folks with a lot of disposable income where $10 here, $20 there, is no big deal. But for me and probably lots of others that’s not the case.

When I look at the example of things like the Google Play store where many apps are 99 cents, that doesn’t seem like a lot of income for the developer, but they can make up for it in volume because the threshold is low enough that many more people will impulse buy that app or figure 99 cents isn’t a major loss if the app stinks.

I believe the same thing would apply with the GW2 gem store. If convenience items like the unlimited picks were the equivalent of 99 cents, I’d get them for my characters. If outfits were 99 cents, I’d likely have purchased all of them by now.

TLDR: A higher amount of micro transactions could bring in more revenue over time than a smaller amount of higher margin transactions.

It’s not just the Claw of Jormag fight where you see a lot of AFKers. I see them a lot too at Taidha Covington. They stand up on the hill and let everyone else run kegs and fight cannoneers. Then when the boss finally spawns, they hop down off the hill and join the fight.

Am I the only one missing the rank points?

I remember last year there was a competitive aspect to the Clocktower jumping puzzle, and the person that scored highest in their instance at the end of the round received rank points.

I noticed this year that the scoring is still there, but the winner doesn’t receive any rank points. I was curious if that was intentional or an oversight?

If it’s intentional, is there really any reason to keep score anymore? The scoreboard serves no purpose if there’s no intended competition.

If it’s an oversight, hopefully it will be fixed quickly. Personally I liked receiving the rank points last year.

One option might be to have the default gold/gems conversion page be the new “basic” interface more friendly for the new player. Have a button off to the side that enables the “advanced” interface which includes the freedom to convert any amount and show the history chart. Make it a user’s choice which interface they prefer.

aerial.7021:

As someone pointed out in the previous thread it even breaks lore, WvW is not part of the world at all its in the mists.

Indeed. It sounds like you’ve also read through the gazillion other threads about this topic on the forums. Anyone know if there’s ever been a red response on any of those threads? I’d be curious to hear some of the thought process behind why WvW is part of world completion. If it was simply a means to incent people to give WvW a try, I can’t help but think there could have been better ways.

DarkWasp.7291:

It’s not that complicated.

Say you like chocolate bars and you like pizza. WvW is pizza and PvE is a chocolate bar. 100% map completion is like a chocolate bar with a pizza mashed at the end of it.

For most people, they’d prefer to have them separately.

The two just feel so unrelated that adding one to the other just doesn’t sit well.

I like your analogy. I’m just curious to see a dev response as to why they opted to make this chocolate pizza.

If I had to list the top 5 topics that keep reappearing in the forums, I’d say this topic of whether WvW should be part of world completion or not would be in that list somewhere.

My own two cents: I think it is a poor setup and I wish WvW wasn’t part of world completion. There could have been better ways to incent people to give WvW a try. I’ve done world completion on three characters so I know it is possible – but that doesn’t mean I think it was an optimal implementation.

Similar experience here. Six level 80 characters with map completion on three of them, and have spent many hours playing (and enjoying) this game. I’ve not had a precursor drop. My opinion is that if they must be RNG (and not earned through skilled gameplay) then they should be renamed to “Lucky Weapons”. There’s really nothing legendary or skillful about getting a lucky drop.

I played a few more LS episodes with a buddy this weekend and I let him trigger each instance. This time around I did see that prompt you mentioned whether I wanted to “accept” the progress or not. I clicked accept and it appeared to work well. I’m not sure what happened earlier when neither one of us saw that prompt, but at least now it seems to be working. Strange.

Gobble D Goop.4081:

Just hit yes on the “do you want to continue” or whatever it is message and it should let you go on.

Do you remember where in the sequence of things you saw that question? When we did the living story episode together I don’t recall seeing a message like that. When one person triggered the instance we saw the usual prompt about a party member going into an instance and do you want to join, but that’s the only prompt I remember seeing.

A friend and I both have some characters that were progressing in the personal story at about the same rate, and it ended up that we played Arah story mode on those characters together and thought it would be fun if we did the post-Arah Living Stories together on those characters as well. What we discovered was that even though a certain and specific Living Story was the “active story” for both of us, and we played it together, it only gave one of us credit. We’d need to then exit the story and run it through a second time with the other person triggering entry into the instance.

Is that normal “by design” behavior or is something not working right? It seems odd to me that we both wouldn’t receive credit when that particular episode truly is the active and current story for both of us. On the same note for the game to discourage teaming by making us run the same episode twice back to back is odd.

After the recent patch was applied I noticed the target closest behavior was different right away. At first I thought it was actually targeting the closest foe regardless of whether I was looking that direction or not. I thought that might be kind of useful. Better to target the foe immediately behind me as opposed to the one I can see that is far away I thought. But then I started finding myself targeting objects and neutral creatures like the folks above were reporting and I realized the target closest feature had actually been broken (even more than it had been). Not good.

I’ve been checking the game updates page on the wiki daily hoping to read that this bug has been fixed. It seems like a small thing, but it’s really proving to be annoying not to know exactly when I’m in or out of combat. We really need those skill change tabs to disappear when we’re in combat.

Indeed – looks like a number of folks reporting it. Some discussion in the “In Combat bug” thread in this forum. I’m really hoping this one gets fixed quickly.

Seeing the same thing. I would often watch for the change skill tabs to disappear to know I’d entered combat so I could trigger a weapon swap sigil. Having those tabs always visible now is throwing me off a bit.

I was working on the heart “Help Cesseilia defend and research the oasis” in Bloodtide Coast. I noticed that after bringing a potion to Cesseilia to be brewed, I could no longer move my character. I had to logout/login or go to the character select screen and come back in to be able to move again.

I noticed two or three other players nearby also working on the heart saying the same thing that they couldn’t move. For them a logout also resolved the issue.

The 25% movement increase trait would be wonderful. I rather like Deceptive Evasion remaining where it’s at though.

Commander tags really shouldn’t be something purchased with gold. I don’t claim to have the best solution, but I do feel it should be something you get nominated or voted for. One possibility is that “commander” isn’t something you buy, but rather anyone could have the ability to host a squad. If you have a reputation as a solid leader, people will join your squad. Then (and only then) as enough people join your squad you have the ability to display the commander tag on the map. That way bad leaders or griefers couldn’t fill the map with useless commander tags because no one would have joined their squad.

Another option if people don’t like joining squads is simply to have an up-vote and down-vote system. If you see someone exhibiting good leadership on the map, toss them an up-vote. After enough up-votes, someone earns the ability to display a commander tag.

The Chaos weapons have been the first set that had a skin that was a “must have” for me. (Enough to spend some gems to get a few more keys and ticket scraps.) I used a Chaos Axe for years in GW1, and I had to get one for my character in GW2 as well. I think the Chaos Axe looks great. It seems to glow more silver in some areas and more golden in some areas. Nice!

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490

I’ve already had it up to my eyeballs with this map. I HATE JUMPING PUZZLES.

Building an entire map around the whole concept, and making it a part of the story, and then fully ignoring player comment on this issue, is not helping my mood.

I know everyone’s tastes are different and I respect that. But I wanted to add that I’m on the other side of this one. I enjoy the jumping puzzles in GW2, and Dry Top is proving to be one of my favorites areas. I like looking up at the various walls and crags and thinking “I wonder if I can get up there…”

I’m somewhat disappointed when they put a vista up in an obscure area because then we know we are “supposed” to get up there. I prefer the freedom of finding my own vistas.

On the thread topic though, I’d agree that the assisted leap should last longer, although not exactly for the same reasons as the OP. I’d like to see it last longer so we can explore longer and farther.

Just wanted to add some kudos to the dev team for this release as well. The Dry Top zone is beautifully rendered, the events are varied and fun, there are some neat areas to explore, and the story was engaging. Nice work!