Guild Wars 2

Ryouzanpaku.1273:

What kind of kitten is this….
I guess you would like to have precursor reward track too?
Or maybe legendary reward track to make it easy?
And on the top of that “I finished the game” title reward track to make all care bears happy.

• Precursor reward track is called “Collection”
• Legendary reward track’s are in finishing your 3 gifts with added:
  - Legendary weapon,
  - Legendary armor and
  - Legendary Backpack collections/tracks
  - (Twice Told Legend)
• I finished the Game track: “Been There Done That” and Mastery level 169

I’ll just say this…

I’m not into raids. I am also not pro ‘nerfing’ the level of difficulty.

When this game came out we had dungeons.

Dungeons were pretty difficult at start (so about 3,5 years ago), noone knew mechanics, and most people had acces to masterwork or rare gear.
Since we had exotic be common, meta builds and the ways how it should be ran completely figured out… most dungeons are 2 fingers in the nose easy by now and generally people do not fail dungeons.
Prestige items from dungeons : Exotics, dungeon skins, some cash and recipe’s

Then there was fractals

Fractals were easy to get into, but not to hard to understand, they were gated and above a certain level they becazem pretty difficult, you were in need of AR. and so on.
being lvl 50 fractals was a prestige thing and had value. people worked to get ascneded gear and to get gud.
People complained and fractals were nerfed. present lvl 50 is easy mode. present lvl 100 is still easy mde but just takes a bit longer. beiung lvl 50 is no longer prestige, even being lvl 100 isn’t prestige anymore. most somewhat more fanatic casuals are lvl 100, have Ad-infinitum and the value of the content is watered down.
Prestige Items from fractals: Ad-infinitum (lol, I know people who -bought- all paths and the achievs and still are below lvl 50), and other fractal backs, fractal weapon skins, ascneded gear, specialized mini’s.

We got RAIDs… While I’m not into this content, (mostly because being 41 yrs old, habving 2 small children and compromized health I am not fit enough to endure 2-3 hours of practice runs for each raid boss.. I killed VG, pretty easily even, I have the gear, just not the wish.
This is now the new end level content
Prestige Items from RAIDS: special amulet/rings/ trinkets (likely to be available in LS s3, cause their otherwise not available status in other gamemodes), specialized skins and mini’s and a reward track for legendary armor. Still the Eternal title has no value anymore since I saw path being sold, LI’s are no value for me singe GW2Ninja posted ways to fake all codes and tbh I do not find the prestige level to be that high, just the elitism and a good part of the playerbase behaving pretty bad. I see ppl running Eternal in Fractals and dungeons and see ’m wipe again and again. I know they are fakers.

IMHO the only things I still find having value nowadays is WVW ranks as they show you put in your time and the new legendaries as they cannot be bought. I remember a person running around in queendale on his lvl 15 character with 370 AP wielding Eternity… prestige lol…

So in the end. leave it. it is good.

As long as this armor is the same in workings and mechanics kitten other armor NOONE should feel to bad about this. legendary armor is just ascneded armor with a prstige skin. changing stats is only useful if you run the same setup in both wvw and PvE (regarding runes) and the armor willbe practical for classes running 2 main builds which are close in resemblance ( duid DPS/ druid heal, Ele celestial /zerk, commander or Asassin Mesmer) anyways.

The fact people are complaining soo much doens’t mean you are forced to do content. NOONE Forces raids upon you. You force yourself to have legendary everything I guess. And if so you are forcing a problem upon yourself, but this should be something with prestige. not something available to anyone.

I did lvl 35-40+ fractals for quite some while before fractals was changes and earned my fractal skins and I was proud of them. Nowaways I can buy a skin every 2 days. the value is gone. even gold skins are valueless and ugly at that. dungeons have no more prestige, the skill level required is still too much for some, buit in general I can run paths faster then the speedrunnerrs of the days past… mostly due to powercreep and a huge change in builds.

I suggest we keep legendary armro to be prestige for now. And have a feeling of accomplishment when we kill a raid boss.

stephanie wise.7841:

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

@ Stephani Wise: (and others)

---

Direct x 12 =/= performance for older applications, DX 12 is completely the wrong thing to ask for. You need a new game engine. And it will (most likely) NOT be made.

This game’s engine was written with CPU speed in mind: This is also why at present this game can run faster on a 4.6-5.0 Ghz OC-ed Pentium G3258 with 2 cores then on a i7 3930K hexcore at stock (3.2ghz). The engine doesn’t need the threads just pure core speed. And as it is developed for DirectX 9 all videocards for DX 10(+ ) tend to be OP.

Lastly upgrading the engine w-/could force players to a new computer if the present set isn’t up to spec.

---

Guild wars 2 consists of many parts.

But in general you have 3 main parts of this game
1) being the program itself: gw2.exe the use of the objects ingame, the interaction, movies, database, security, and 2d flats, like the character select and the character build screens, I/O for map placement, and gamecontrols, like volume and so on.
You are interacting with this part, this part also needs to process all network data and provide the engine data to build the screen.

2) the 3D engine ( whcih is creating your landscape from mesh/ or other graphicshapes, placing 2d and 3d elements, placing objects & characters) being an old modified engine being an extremely customized version of the Unreal Engine whcih was dx 7.0/8.0 but modified to dx 9.0c, it uses an Havok add on to create physics effects (waves, wind, knockbacks, and so on, waving of armor and gear)
You are looking at this part. It builds your screen…

3) I/O with the databases and synchronisation of the game. (network services)
The servers regulate your placement and interaction with others in the game, this requires network communications. You only make use of the small bits of data you need to be able to interact with others, but this info is used by the Game executable.
This is neccesary to make your RPG into a MMO-RPG

Then there is the OS with directX which have nothing to do with the game

1) The OS makes the computer run and provides you with an interface to use it.
2) DirectX will allow programmers to write code which is universal and makes sure different components will function with the game… This is mostly hardware support.

---

Problem with the GW2 engine is

The game has problems to construct enough character models and effects in crowded area’s mostly because the engine was originally used to be used for up to 10-16 people. GW2 as a game is now cramming 100 people in a map and in WVW 200 even, this overstresses the game and communication to the servers. Which in turn bottlenecks the game executable, which bottlenecks the engine. The GPU and the CPU have no real problems and still have additional power, as seen by the fact the game uses only 2 cores (likely 1 for the excutablke and the handling of I/O and 1 for the Graphics) and a few added support apps (network services)

Problem is the old graphics engine of the game CANNOT HANDLE "MULTI"THREADED operation and/or communications as it was never a problem when the engine was developed. (We are talking a few days ago here)

---

Timeline:

---

1998 (Unreal v1.0 optimized for 3dfx., various versions of Direct3d 6.0+)
2000 (directx 8.0)
2001 32 bit single core CPU’s @ ~1-2 Ghz, 256Mb-1Gb Ram just so you know
2002 (directx 9.0)
2002 (Unreal v 2.0 @ dx9)
2003 (64 bit CPU’s) (AMD)
2004 (dual cores)
2004 (directx 9.0c)
2004 (unreal v3.0 @ dx9.0c)
2005 (release of GW1) I have no clue which engine they use but my best guess would bea derivative of Unreal v2.0 modified, though talk was heard they changed a lot to fit a nwer engine whcih could have been the unreal 3.0, whcih was modded.
2006 (quad cores)
2007 (release of EotN)
2007 (windows vista,directx10)
2008 (windows 7, directx 11)
2008 (windows vista SP1, directx 10.1)
2011 (windows 8, directx 11.1)
2012 (release of GW2)
2012 (Unreal v 4.0, Dx 11&12) <- you need an engine availalble to create your game, as the game has had a development track Unreal 4.0 was to late. Actually gw2 was pretty late itself… and thus the previously used gw1 engine was stripped and upgraded.
2013 (windows 8.1, directx 11.2)
2015 (announced: directx 11.3)
2015 (windows 10, directx 12)
2015 (release of GW2:HoT) Problem is an engine upgrade would have been nice, but extremely costly… we should feel lucky as the sales of HoT were lower then expected and it could have been a deathblow for the game….
2015 Unreal 4.0 engine made avaialable for free…. so no initial buy, but use is costly… I do not want to pay a monthly fee to be able to use DX 12. Would you?

---

As Multithreading isn’r an option and upgrading is not possible to allow for directx and multithreads and thus the game is only able to deliver 1 thread.
The question if a upgrade from directx9 to directx 12 is worthwhile is eaily handled:

1) It’s useless and a waste of time and development at this time to allow the use of DX 12.
2) The first change which should be made is a rebuild of a newer UNREAL engine to a new Guild Wars 2 engine to allow allow for multithreaded CPU rendering use and multithreaded GPU calls this asks a complete rebuild of the heart of the guild wars 2 program which might be worthwhile in a long run, but would be extremely costly due to the changes being horrendously timeconsuing and the neccesity to reverse engineer the old engine and rebuild the new engine to allow for multithreaded use and DX 12. 1 remark: the cost of using a new engine like Unreal 4.0 is free (since 2015), however a percentage of all PROFIT needs to be paid when using it! For a company completly reliant of gamestore purchases this could be a bit much…. And when they are modding it, it isn’t instantly a MMO as GW2… It is a FPS engine…

Investments to make a new game engine will run into multiple, likely even dozens of, millions of dollars, even if the engine itself has no cost. For this game it is a bit over the top… And how much you may want this change, it is most likely not happening. Devs already stated it isn’t that easy and you should consider the fact DX 12 is NO PART OF ANY GAME. It allows for easier use of available hardware, but in the case of GW2 all hardware it needs is accessed already by directx 9. The old engine cannot make use of more.

DirectX is used by programmers to allow a program to work on different build computers, but using directx12 on a PC doesn’t allow a directX 9 program to work miracles. In effect the new features directx12 provides isn’t compatible and/or neccesary and therefore not used and only the legacy directx 9 components will be used.

SO:
We have the game in 32 and 64 bit which accesses a game engine to create graphics
We have a really old game engine, updated, but still LEGACY! running on directx 9.0c
We will not have an updated game-engine anywhere soon (well likely, as devs said so) and thus we will be locked into directx 9.

We might have acces to directx 12 compatibility on computers 2-4 years old, allowing for partial directx 12 support but not by default
We might have acces to directx 12 True on computers 1 -2 year old for full directx 12 support, but not by default
We have acces to directx 12 software when running Windows 10, by default.
Direct X 12 only helps with the acces and ways to acces hardware, but if the program doesn’t use the features, any investments into allowing DX12 compatibility is/are useless…
Even if we have DX12 in all previous 3 questrions the game still is DX9 due to its game engine and it will stay directx 9.0….for now.

The End. At least for now.

Would utilizing a VM to create 2 virtual cores (from the 6 physcial or 12 virtual ones in my PC) work to improve performance? and have a virtual machine handle the datastreams?

You say that this game was made for speed in mind in the ghz of the processor.
I do not agree with that.

Since multithreading and multiple core DUAL CORE was out when the game was released. Yes, for gw1 dual cores were just the new thing, many players still played on single core, single thread machines, The engine developed for gw1 was reused in gw2, the game itself now uses 1 thread, and the rendering queue uses 1 thread, for a total of 2 cores, with some services delegated to other cores when available. this also makes the game compatible with i3 (laptop)processors, whcih are still dual core in nature

cpu heat problem was all ready know before that. Well yes, limits of corespeed were kown in the time devs made gw2…, unfortunatly the ancient engine is mostly limited to 1 core

I can understand that they said the new dual core as communication issue and does not solve the speed issue. and they have continue to build it single core. Yes as at the time of release of Gw1 quadcores would likely be introduced and machines were at 2Ghz… ,but were not available at the time, most people still ran windows 32bit on single core machines.

I don’t think that they have not plan a head and say what if we need a multicore engine in the future and made the engine to be able to be upgraded since the industry was moving in that direction when they where building gw .2. and the cpu communication with the gpu is the api. ArenaNet owns it’s own game engine whcih was used for gw1 and gw2, buying a new one or making a neew one would be a gigantic investment.

That is what dx 12 will fix. DX 12 will not fix anything, you’ll need a new engine first since the devs will write smarter code that will not have to stop at the api to be validated since the devs will have validated it before it reach the api. that is the improvement that dx 12 brings. only DX12 will not provide better communication between 1! cpu core , due to an old engine and all gpu core*s*.

Less slow down and cpu bound (problem will still exists as the engine delivering the data is still MAXIMUM 1 core) issue do to less job on the api. right now the api need to validate the code and direct it. same as a cop(api) doing traffic that would have some car stopping to ask him if they are going at the right place. and would need to validate all the info and send them in the right direction. by removing that job from the api there is less slow down and having multiple cpu core (you would still only use 1 as the engine CANNOT make use of more) to multiple core gpu communication (my 2 old 780’s have 2 times 2304 cores, and the game is using them, at 30-50% but still) also help the flow of information. 1 to 4608 or 1 to 4608 doesn’t matter… in te end as long as ther isn’t a new engine

of course the complexity for the devs is higher and the responsibility also will be higher since the api will not validate the code of the devs, the devs will validate is own code before hand. meaning more testing.
Devs will not need to make dx12 , they will need to build a new engine first which can INTERACT WITH DX 12…..

No New Engine: No need for DX 12

If they were to rework the engine, I’m pretty sure they’d add

• DX 9,10,11,12 compatibility.
• And options to use 2,4,6,8,10,12(+) cores.
• And maybe RAM caching for PC’s with more then 8 Gb/16 or 32Gb RAM, or more…
• And improved SLi/X-fire support,
• And options to customize the interface on a 3840*2160/2400 or 5760*1080/1200 and 11520*2160/2400 and VR sets/screens

Well that’s about it….

ShinyDay.5349:

aaaand another bump!
Any news?
We need that optimisation for 60fps at all sicuation
Use more GPU and less CPU.

thanks in advance

Yes it would be nice and until a new engine would be available it will not happen.
And you want more CPU threads for the game executable and the engine so the GPU could be used for max use….

SO: use more CPU and GPU would be wiser…

and until a miracle happens and a new engine is made available and implemented for all area’s of the game nothing will change.

I would like to see improvement, BUT I’d prefer new LS’s, expansions, the blocked legendaries, 4 (,maybe 5,) more dragons, the implementations of wvw and more FIRST.

Content > optimalisation,
no content= no players,
no optimalisation= present situation with players who want content, to be content…

For Boons:
There is already a cap of 10 stacks for boons if I’m right… Elementalist will not be able to blast more then ~1m 20 s of swiftness… even with help, same should be for fury. I have little experience reaching the cap with protection, retaliation, and for Aegis…. ( boon duration, boon copy and concentration will increase thi in duration of course)

Might is still capped at 25 stacks of course.
Damaging conditons are limited by stack caps (being 1500 stacks)…

Stability
The unfortunate nerf to stability which made it as it is now is still hated with passion among most (WvW) players who where familiar with the old stability, which wasn’t stack/ CC based, and thus game you complete protection from CC’s for the whole duration. The change removed the Melee battles for a large part from WvW and gave rise to the pirateship Meta…

As for your suggestions:

Swiftness duration tends to be an PvE/Dungeon/Raid/Fractal thing as well.
Cripple durations and chills are used for Boss kites in PvE/Dungeons/Fractals
Remember your wishes will be affecting other gamemodes as well…

Conditions:
Non damaging conditions are limited by a certain amount of stacks as well, which used to be 10, and for chill this was lowered to 5 stacks. These stacks are cumulative in duration. newer stacks overwriting the oldest…. in case of cripple some classes have cripple on autoattack.

Cripple
10 seconds of cripple wouldn’t do you any good, as some classes can reapply it ever 2nd or 3rd attack, whcih is roughly the same for chill. if you look at sword auto chain for warrior… bleed/bleed/ cripple (with an option to immo on cripple every 10th second)

Chill
Necro has plenty of acces to chill, damage reduction from chill, condtion application on chill and a good acces to keep the enemy contained while hampering recharge.
There is plenty of reason to keep spamming the chills… and thus to keep up durations…..

So to answer your question:

The complete cap/nerf in speed reducing conitions would be bad for the slower proffesions who’d be losing their compensation for the speed.

Capping conditions has been done already and it has been like so since headstart, except the 1500 stacks of conditions which has been ingame since june 23rd 2015 (as I recall)

With present duration buffs available, any hard caps would be defeating:
expertise, concentration, condition duration and boon duration… which were available ingame for PvE and WvW since headstart and for PvP since the release of HoT.

I’m wondering if I could call dibbs on this Title for my charr: “Hairball….”, It’s the name of my dog in reallife and I have good feelings and sentiment asociated with the name…

No, unless you also want to introduce a hard cap on DPS, in which case I’d likely say:

N( )( )( )OOOOO00000ooooo…..!!!!!!.

I personally think durations are fine as is… problem in this game is the PVE/WvW/PvP devides which are non existent…. But my PvE enemy attacks once every 3 seconds and my WVW enemies attack dozens of times a second with PvP somewhere in the middle…. Finding a balance in the midlle tends to be annnoiying….

I would say runes whcih see regular use are a bit wider spread.

For PvE

DPS: Scholar,
PS: Strength
Conditions: Berserker, Nightmare, Krait, Thorns
Heal: Monk, (Dwayna)
(Budget: ranger, fury, ogre, pack,eagle…. Condition and healing are so cheap no alternative is needed)
There are few runes whcih are so powerfull they can push the ultraend runes from it’s place, recent exaamples were chronomancer, berserker and in less circumstances druid…

For WvW

DPS… Scholar, Ogre, Pack
PS: Hoelbrak
Condition control: Trooper
Conditions: Krait, Berserker, Nightmare, Trapper, Perplexity

I’d also say perplexity is one of the few runes able to trigger at times where it is usefull, adding to the build, as is Krait with elites with a 30 second recharge… Improved runes would mean more pressure, compared to perplexity…

there are also runes still in use for specific purpose, ressers (mercy), speed (centaur/swiftness/traveler)

any class you’ve played for a while is easy… at least it was for me, with exception of engineer. Still do not understand it after 4 years.

@ Stephani Wise: (and others)

Direct x 12 =/= performance for older applications, DX 12 is completely the wrong thing to ask for. You need a new game engine. And it will (most likely) NOT be made.

This game’s engine was written with CPU speed in mind: This is also why at present this game can run faster on a 4.6-5.0 Ghz OC-ed Pentium G3258 with 2 cores then on a i7 3930K hexcore at stock (3.2ghz). The engine doesn’t need the threads just pure core speed. And as it is developed for DirectX 9 all videocards for DX 10(+ ) tend to be OP.

Lastly upgrading the engine w-/could force players to a new computer if the present set isn’t up to spec.

Guild wars 2 consists of many parts.

But in general you have 3 main parts of this game
1) being the program itself: gw2.exe the use of the objects ingame, the interaction, movies, database, security, and 2d flats, like the character select and the character build screens, I/O for map placement, and gamecontrols, like volume and so on.
You are interacting with this part, this part also needs to process all network data and provide the engine data to build the screen.

2) the 3D engine ( whcih is creating your landscape from mesh/ or other graphicshapes, placing 2d and 3d elements, placing objects & characters) being an old modified engine being an extremely customized version of the Unreal Engine whcih was dx 7.0/8.0 but modified to dx 9.0c, it uses an Havok add on to create physics effects (waves, wind, knockbacks, and so on, waving of armor and gear)
You are looking at this part. It builds your screen…

3) I/O with the databases and synchronisation of the game. (network services)
The servers regulate your placement and interaction with others in the game, this requires network communications. You only make use of the small bits of data you need to be able to interact with others, but this info is used by the Game executable.
This is neccesary to make your RPG into a MMO-RPG

Then there is the OS with directX which have nothing to do with the game

1) The OS makes the computer run and provides you with an interface to use it.
2) DirectX will allow programmers to write code which is universal and makes sure different components will function with the game… This is mostly hardware support.

Problem with the GW2 engine is

The game has problems to construct enough character models and effects in crowded area’s mostly because the engine was originally used to be used for up to 10-16 people. GW2 as a game is now cramming 100 people in a map and in WVW 200 even, this overstresses the game and communication to the servers. Which in turn bottlenecks the game executable, which bottlenecks the engine. The GPU and the CPU have no real problems and still have additional power, as seen by the fact the game uses only 2 cores (likely 1 for the excutablke and the handling of I/O and 1 for the Graphics) and a few added support apps (network services)

Problem is the old graphics engine of the game CANNOT HANDLE "MULTI"THREADED operation and/or communications as it was never a problem when the engine was developed. (We are talking a few days ago here)

Timeline:

1998 (Unreal v1.0 optimized for 3dfx., various versions of Direct3d 6.0+)
2000 (directx 8.0)
2001 32 bit single core CPU’s @ ~1-2 Ghz, 256Mb-1Gb Ram just so you know
2002 (directx 9.0)
2002 (Unreal v 2.0 @ dx9)
2003 (64 bit CPU’s) (AMD)
2004 (dual cores)
2004 (directx 9.0c)
2004 (unreal v3.0 @ dx9.0c)
2005 (release of GW1) I have no clue which engine they use but my best guess would bea derivative of Unreal v2.0 modified, though talk was heard they changed a lot to fit a nwer engine whcih could have been the unreal 3.0, whcih was modded.
2006 (quad cores)
2007 (release of EotN)
2007 (windows vista,directx10)
2008 (windows 7, directx 11)
2008 (windows vista SP1, directx 10.1)
2011 (windows 8, directx 11.1)
2012 (release of GW2)
2012 (Unreal v 4.0, Dx 11&12) <- you need an engine availalble to create your game, as the game has had a development track Unreal 4.0 was to late. Actually gw2 was pretty late itself… and thus the previously used gw1 engine was stripped and upgraded.
2013 (windows 8.1, directx 11.2)
2015 (announced: directx 11.3)
2015 (windows 10, directx 12)
2015 (release of GW2:HoT) Problem is an engine upgrade would have been nice, but extremely costly… we should feel lucky as the sales of HoT were lower then expected and it could have been a deathblow for the game….
2015 Unreal 4.0 engine made avaialable for free…. so no initial buy, but use is costly… I do not want to pay a monthly fee to be able to use DX 12. Would you?

As Multithreading isn’r an option and upgrading is not possible to allow for directx and multithreads and thus the game is only able to deliver 1 thread.
The question if a upgrade from directx9 to directx 12 is worthwhile is eaily handled:

1) It’s useless and a waste of time and development at this time to allow the use of DX 12.
2) The first change which should be made is a rebuild of a newer UNREAL engine to a new Guild Wars 2 engine to allow allow for multithreaded CPU rendering use and multithreaded GPU calls this asks a complete rebuild of the heart of the guild wars 2 program which might be worthwhile in a long run, but would be extremely costly due to the changes being horrendously timeconsuing and the neccesity to reverse engineer the old engine and rebuild the new engine to allow for multithreaded use and DX 12. 1 remark: the cost of using a new engine like Unreal 4.0 is free (since 2015), however a percentage of all PROFIT needs to be paid when using it! For a company completly reliant of gamestore purchases this could be a bit much…. And when they are modding it, it isn’t instantly a MMO as GW2… It is a FPS engine…

Investments to make a new game engine will run into multiple, likely even dozens of, millions of dollars, even if the engine itself has no cost. For this game it is a bit over the top… And how much you may want this change, it is most likely not happening. Devs already stated it isn’t that easy and you should consider the fact DX 12 is NO PART OF ANY GAME. It allows for easier use of available hardware, but in the case of GW2 all hardware it needs is accessed already by directx 9. The old engine cannot make use of more.

DirectX is used by programmers to allow a program to work on different build computers, but using directx12 on a PC doesn’t allow a directX 9 program to work miracles. In effect the new features directx12 provides isn’t compatible and/or neccesary and therefore not used and only the legacy directx 9 components will be used.

SO:
We have the game in 32 and 64 bit which accesses a game engine to create graphics
We have a really old game engine, updated, but still LEGACY! running on directx 9.0c
We will not have an updated game-engine anywhere soon (well likely, as devs said so) and thus we will be locked into directx 9.

We might have acces to directx 12 compatibility on computers 2-4 years old, allowing for partial directx 12 support but not by default
We might have acces to directx 12 True on computers 1 -2 year old for full directx 12 support, but not by default
We have acces to directx 12 software when running Windows 10, by default.
Direct X 12 only helps with the acces and ways to acces hardware, but if the program doesn’t use the features, any investments into allowing DX12 compatibility is/are useless…
Even if we have DX12 in all previous 3 questrions the game still is DX9 due to its game engine and it will stay directx 9.0….for now.

The End. At least for now.

Would utilizing a VM to create 2 virtual cores (from the 6 physcial or 12 virtual ones in my PC) work to improve performance? and have a virtual machine handle the datastreams?

just give ppl 1 mystic coin/spirit shard/karma thingy for each bar of XP (254k XP) people in endgame could move on to legendaries easier, and acces would be significantly enriched. You would only need 58.6M XP for a legendary? guess that’s more of a way of dealing with it.

as a comparison the whole HoT mastery track is about 50M XP… if I am right

It would encourage doing events over pure farming and reward people no longer getting XP …. think about it.

Sky.8035:

Thanks Gaile.

I only have one question in regards to this change. Why not require every member of the raid group to have at least 2 legendary weapons to progress instead of just ley line gliding?

If you’re gonna go hardcore, you gotta go hardcore to the max. I feel like you guys are being way to generous with this requirement.

Just my 2¢.

Nope 2 legendaries is so 2013, make it “twice told legend” -and- 5 legendaries.

Lolz hard and runs away to hide…

I like moving on mouse when running/roaming, it is not usefull for combat, but iut is really usefull when drinking a cup of coffee, escpecially in area’s where you can fall to your death….

I think sayig only 1 build is usable doesn’t do the system justice…..
For warrior I use an old shout heal build (non berserker), A PS/EA berserker and a Viper Burn Berzerker, Oh and a physical CC build….these builds are modified on the fly to fit encounters…. at least in PvE and WvW…..

In the end I have about -8- different warrior builds not counting armor/rune and weapon/sigil choices which tend to give me the versatility -I- need for content.

Metabattle gives a basic suggestion; but mindless cloning of builds might give you the unbeatable build, but it also dumbs down the game….and the players using it.

the fact you can use synergizing builds is sometimes overlooked in favor of +x% dmg multipliers…

The old PU condi mesmer is a clear example of a deeply rooted synergizing trait choice….
The build using other trait choices would still perform but it would be well below half strength compared to the normal build with max confusion application… using scepter/torch you can apply confusion with almost any skill and shatter…. this is purely because of traits….

I understand there is difference between PvP and WvW, but in WvW many builds hold value…..

The trait system tries to cater for PvE, WvW and PvP in 1 single system.
You cannot approach with a PvP-only set of goggles. This game is more then PvP.

I play only maxed size characters, preferably Norns, though I have 2 maxed sized charr a couple of humans and a tree of sylvari….

BUT I deleted ALL asura…. I prefer being a Bookah then having to deal with the horrid mini Guinea Pigs with attitude… I have a mild tolerance to Taimi, Zojja and some other Asura, but in general I tend to avoid Metrica province AND Rata Sum. (nowadays I ignore the part in the map only unlocking the Thaumanova reactor….)

I love Skirtt I tend to avoid killling them unless absolutely neccesary. I wear Honorary Skritt with Pride and generally love them. Shinies!

HoT didn’t ruin the game…

The extreme negative posts before HoT did deminish the amount of players buying the HoT upgrade… People knew for sure it would be nothing before any beta started. This destroyed the majority of the interested playerbase and thus GW2, not HoT.

It recovered nicely though…. I find many friends return. I really hope this positive change will continue, and GW2 will be reborn at the next updates for LS….

At first when HoT arrived I thought it was as the negative part of the ppl described
only little content, just 4 maps

• Unbalanced, unsoloable
• Way to complicated
• Hard grind
• Mostly boring

mostly because ppl focussed so mutch on this specific point, but I’m still enjoying the maps,

• I have a lot of fun with newer builds, the specialisations are nice, though I find myself still using some “classic builds” as not all builds can be improved upon by elite specialisations.
• I enjoy gliding, and the other newly introduced masteries, they tend to add some new angles.
• I have run raids and I suck at it (mostly due to too little time to be really succesful) But I love the raids the concept and implementation. I find the “leetist attitude around raids” annoying to say the least. I understand ppl want experienced ppl, but the selection process is a farce, with fake pings and all kinds of illusionary trickery which would make most mesmers proud. It is as stupid as the 7.5K AP for AC pings 2 years ago. And noobies even with good gear and plenty of experience have little chance, this makes the HoT raids a major selling point useless as a selling point for Gw2 and HoT… the leetists will destroy a huge part of the fanatic casuals and thus also for the player base. Remember pure casuals and F2P’s will not carry your game.
• I like the new rework of fractals, BUT I tend to find the loot a bit subpar.
• I’m happy certain choices developers made were (partially) reversed (read dungeon reward update and the consequent return of Dungeon Runners though most are fastrunners not the old leet speedgrinders (which also tends to be a positive thing )
• and I’m happy with the return of the icemaps as WvW borders, I would still like a WvW competition/matchup for 3 weeks with the icelands, the EotM and the desert borders and the starting locations changing each week, for wvw credits for the special armors/weapons)
• I like the new dailies

I’m looking forward to the LS S3 and the new expansion I hope it will be of better quantity and comparable quality as HoT in it’s PRESENT form.

I think all changes in balancing have been a pre to HoT.

I think all changes in blancing classes however to support the PvP wannabee E-sports illusion a farce and detrimental to wvw and PvE gameplay…

SO HoT was Ok.
Ppl tend to have been the main problem in selling HoT and some are really making parts (RAIDs in particular) unattractive. This also shows the change from Leet dungeon specs and speedruns towards Leetist Raids and sometimes high tier fractals. Though I need to mention: The most used title by Fractal leetists who fail hard tends to be Eternal… Most Eternals tend to be VERY temporary.

BUT in the end the people playing Gw2 and HoT are the main selling point for gw2 as a whole, and I love the Gw2 community, it’s still open and friendly…. And even in Raids there are more and more people trying to open up raids for people intersted in starting thier journey to full legendary gear. And initiative I applaude.

I’d suggest you do fractals and the night run dungeons for now and continue reading.

1. Join a training guild, work on levelling and just log in every day, and do the night run, and basic fractals upgrading as you go along. They pay ok money,
2. The guild(s) you are member of should provide acces to guild missions and thus allow ascneded accsoires (12 guild commendations and 5 gold/ piece)
3. Fractals should provide rings, pristine relics will buy you a ring in 2-4 days, If you’re lucky you havbe a suitable drop. (10 pristine relcis for one ring with basic stats at ascneded)
4. Logging in should provide 55 laurels/28 days if you really need them 20-25 of which you’ll need fot your amulet, leaving you with ~70-65 laurels after 2 months for 6 recipe’s for armor and 8 more recipes for weapons. You can use the second acneded box for any choice you want to at this time; This takes care of the trinkets….
5. Your (guild/pugged) dungeon runs will provide you with 10 gold/day
   (CoF 1,2; SE1,3; AC S,1,2,3) ~1.5 hours, the dungeon tokens can buy you exotics, for runes, or globs of ecto, and t6 mats.
6. Your (guild/pugged) Fractals will provide you with 3-8 gold/day (more at higher tier), and acces to agony infusions for higher level fractals allowing for possible lucky drops, you could be fractal lvl 75+ when you are done with the 56 days. (t1+(t2), daily) ~45 minutes
7. Your daily will provide you with 2 gold / day
   Daily ~15 minutes

• In 2.5 hours/day you can gain 20 gold easily
• In 56 days this should be ~1120 gold.
• This isn’t counting materials from drops.

• This should be enough to level to 500 armorcraft and a weaponcraft:
  It’ll also pay: -FULL ASCNEDED ARMOR & 2-3 WEAPONS-,

• And you’ll still need to unlock other proffesions for ranged weapons or caster weapons (likely) unless you’re warrior or elementalist….
• You could be ready for t3 maybe low t4 in this -same- time window and have your gear for raids… raising your level will give greeater rewars from fractals, but will take more time at lvl 50(+) you are running noticably slower then t1’s even though your party will likely put out more dmg.
• You should have gotten a vial of mist essence by now allowing you to craft an ascneded backpack as well, this is pretty expensive, or you could start working towards a fractal backpack (and Ad Infinitum….) Your new gear should allow it.
• Salvage of all blue/green and yellow dungeon- and fractal drops will provide good MF as well as a good base set of materials to work with. An additional suggestion would be to mine iron and platinum.

For some fast and effective mining I’d suggest;
Brisban Wildlands close to the gallowfields waypoint for your iron and
Mount Mealstrom close to criterion waypoint for platinum as starting points,
you shouldn’t forget to bring an axe as well…

Good luck.

P.S. You could also hardgrind SW for more cash, but you’ll only be able to press F in the raid, knowing to work in a team will be of greater value. you’ll learn more builds and classst in dungeons and fractals then running mindlessly in SW CF. Doing higher tier of fractals will teach you more then any other content, except maybe duo or solo dungeons. You’ll have a functional & Ascneded PvE geared character…

TL;DR;
If you want to get ascended armor, trinkets & weapons you farm night dungeons and t1 and later t2 (and maybe t3 fractals) for 56 days; 8 weeks and you should accomplish your goals, you should have farmed approx. 1120 gold. and you should have enough resources to buy trinkets and forge full ascneded gear. HF

I’m going to try to say what I think could be usefull:

I already suggested legendary trinkets. legendary armor is in the making, legendary weapons and back already exist.

This is crafting ascneded jewlery would be at an incomparable price to all other ascneded trinkets. If you look at the price of ascneded trinkets:

• Amulet: 25 laurels or 20+250 wvw tokens (your choice)
  (say: about 2-3 weeks of logging in… and if you want some WvW) in 4 weeks you could get 1+2+3+4+10+15+20 laurels (55) providing you teke the chest of laurels allowing for the buy of 2 amulets….
• Rings: 30 laurels or 10 pristine fractal relics
  (say:1-4 days of fractals or drop from fractals) when looking more direct a person starting at l80 with no fractal level and no masteries woud be able to get 2 rings in 8 days (in 4 weeks you could get 6 rings)
• Accesoires: 40 laurels and 50 ecto’s or 12 guild commendations and 5 gold…) provided the guild has a decent level you can gain 10+ guild commendations a week…. in 4 weeks you could get 2-3 accesoires

In the end a(ny) person, member of a guild doing guild missions can aquire a full set of trinkets in 3-4 weeks by just doing t1(!) only fractals for 4 days, and guild missions 4 times… and just logging in on all other days.

For a total cost of 10 gold and tokens which are free drops from doing the content.
10 gold = ~1 deldrimor steel ingot. I honestly doubt you’ll get a full set of trinkets from 1 deldrimor steel ingot!

I suggest you’d drop the Ascended crafting and move on to Legendary….

This excludes some trinkets only unlockable through story and some stats only availalble through raids…

These stats include
(pre HoT)

• Assassin (accesoires only available through dungeon achievements)
• Sentinel (accesoires only available through dungeon achievements)
• Carrion (accesoires only available through dungeon achievements)
• Valkyrie
• Dire
• Zealot ( * )
• Sinister ( ** )
• Nomads ( ** )
• Magi ( * )(accesoires only available through dungeon achievements)
• Settler ( * )
• Shaman ( * )
  ( * ) only avaialble through RAIDs
  ( ** ) Available trhough RAIDs and LS S2

HoT (only through RAIDs) except for the amulet whcih is avaialble by doing the achievements for the last story steps (including “Migriane” whcih really, really earned it’s name.)

• Minstrel
• Wanderer
• Commanders
• Trailblazer
• Viper
• Crusader
• Vigilant
• Marauder

Many of which are now exclusively and ONLY avaialble to RAID enthousiasts via the trinkets bought from the magnetite shard vendor and as RAID drops. I hope these stats will be unlocked through LS S3. But as we have no confirmation of this ….. (at this time)

I still hope we can get other option to aquire stat-switchable trinkets (legendary trinkets could be very usefull as we would only have to get AR once. (Just think about it)

We have plenty of ascended jewelry, just skip it and make it legendary instead…

I like:

1. Kudzu (own it)
2. Predator
3. Meteorlogicus (own it)
4. Nevermore
5. Bolt (working on it)
6. Astralaria
7. Juggernaut
8. Howler
9. The Flameseeker Phrophecies
10. Frostfang
11. Rodgorts Flame
12. Incinerator
13. Minstrel

Less Legendary: not really a legendary feel (yet?)

1. Chupachup and Chupa-what?… (Chuka and Champawat) (like the pre more then the finished product)
2. Star Wars (H.O.P.E.)

I do not think these are legendary: I’m annoyed seeing people running around and wielding these. Yes, they stand out, however I do not consider them legendary, but generally more of a nuisance….

1. The Screaming Ponybow (Dreamer)
2. The Serpentine Party pistol (Quip)
3. The Discoball (The Moot)
4. The Blur-s (Any GreatSword: Sunrise ,Twilight and Eternity) (like the pres more then the finished product, but all 5 are ugly. )

I like the 3 underwater weapons, but I’d never craft them.

Mains:
3 Warrior/Berserker
3 Necro/Reaper
3 Tempest
2 Ranger/Druid
2 Mesmer/Chronomancer
Also nice, not main though
3 Guards/Dragonhunter
2 Daredevils

Reduced to mules:
1 Scrapper, bought this game for engineer, never liked it much
1 Herald, made one cause it was new and found it shiny, but found it to be uncustomizabl ande boring..

DX 12 is compatible with a lot of cards. compatible means not all features will be usable. but workarounds can be used, most of these cards are direct X 11.0 or 11.1

Only full (true) dx12 cards (dx12.0 and better) will be using all features. These will be nvidia GTX 960,970,980 and 1080 and the last 2 generations of radeons. say the AMD radeon R7 260 and R9’s 2xx ( + ) and the R7 360 ( + ) and R9 3xx

so of all mentioned card you cannot say if the implementation will get as high a result as you do now project. those cards are nowhere near 7 years old.

compatible doesnt’ mean fully capable. It just says it will work in some parts.

recoding the gw2 program is easy.
recoding the engine is not

direct X 12 is available to all of you, just not with GW2.

Unless the engine is completely recoded en rewritten for DX12 and the gw2.exe rewritten to make use of these options when possible, any wish for dx12 is pointless…

A-Net cannot buy a new engine. The engine which is used is a heavily modded engine.
even if they could procure the newest generation of the successor of the original game engine they would still need a huge time to recode the engine…

Lastly if they could aquire this engine and work on it, it is not said the engine woulf be avaialable free of charge… Most companies writing game engines ask for percentages (5-30%..) of the profit of the game which uses the engine’s if it takes off.

Ariurotl.3718:

Drama.7601:

I have a dream
That our four little fire themed swords will one day live in a game where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I do judge Firebringer by the color of its flame though. Its weird pinkish flame that doesn’t match with any freakin’ torch in the game.

It’s not pink it’s orange… compare to wup wup’s torch…

Ity combines with flame with phoenix torch, = perfect match. well at least forthe color of flame

stephanie wise.7841:

sirsquishy.2619:

This game is very single thread locked in regards to performance. There is 1 master thread that controls everything in the game, and that IS the bottleneck and why DX12 will not do anything for the game in regards to performance.

This is not a graphical API issue, its not a worker thread issue, its the main control thread. And this was explained on Reddit some months back by an Anet Game Engine Dev.

yes single thread is dx 9.
NO, the engine uses a single thread to prepare information to be passed on to the GPU by dx9, where it is calcualted by the GPU’s threads

dx 12 is multi core
NO dx12 is a programextension that can help implement I/O and basic OS capabilities for easier integration of 3rd party progrmas on an OS, as such it handles the ways information can be send to CPU core’s, GPU, audio, HID and more.
It works as a library so the game writers can write a progrma which can be played on any PC with sufficient capability, ( when the hardware compatibility is ok).

All core can talk to each other and send the job more fast to the gpu.

• Yes this is called hypertransport, and is an exchange mechanism so 1 processor can use data from another core or CPU. it’s completely dx12 independant and part of the CPU infrastucture(as it is made by the CPU manufacturer and needs to be implemented on motherborads for CPU to CPU communication).
• The speed to GPU will not increase, speed is governed by bandwidth whcih is governed by card bitwidth, bus link speeds and bus width. The datatransfer to the GPU stays the same. as DX 12 doesn’t change the maximum transferrates over the bus. It could however improve multithreaded tasks, and relieve the CPU bottleneck. But only if the game engine allows for this. Which in the case of GW2 isn’t so.

When using dx12 also the dev can have a more and deeper control.
The dev makes a program and is already in full control over the program, He’s allowed more resources; Yes. But this is not really relevant on an older software platform or game engine.

On the part that was control by the api.
Dx 12 will make more fast the game that are single threaded have lots of detail lots of complexity and that are cpu bound or cpu heavy.
NO, -single- threaded engine have no benefit whatsoever from DX12, these engines must be completely rewritten to be able to use multicore for the graphis rendering thread

but the important factor with dx 12 is that it all depends on the gaming devs job the implementation is in their hand to code the game and send the job through all the core to the gpu. handle the memory etc…
Yes and if a program’s engine cannot accept multithreading you can implement dx12 without rebuilding an engine from scratch, but it would not improve the performance. The engine is the communication between the program and the directx components whcih are handling the acces to the hardware responsible for building the frames you see on your PC. If it’s single threaded, it is single threaded, even though dx12 gives it acces to as many threads as the PC has available.

to help you understand if you did not read all the article that talk about cpu heavy game the problem is that there is to much computing on the cpu using 1 thread of a core with over head. (= game engine limit, and not easily changed)

the cpu fill up to quick and gets to 100 percent and the gpu is waiting at about 30 or 40 percent to receive the job. *(Correct, this is the symptom)*

difference with dx 12 use all core all thread on the system.
Problem is: Even if directx 12 could be accessed the game engine is only capable of filling 1 rendering thread. This would make the program run on directx 12 but still only acces the 1 rendering thread, as the programs limitation being the game(-engine)) cannot distribute data to more cores….

over head is remove the api control is given to the game dev for them to implement those interaction the same as when a game dev code for console gaming.
Which is very useful when you are writing a new game engine. but with a 15 years old engine this causes some problems.

right now pc have high end graphic card and multicore and thread cpu a lot more powerful then console but because of the coding it is equivalent with console because console coding is done better they know for what hardware it is use and do not have to let the api run that part of the software for them like in dx 9 dx 10 dx 11. when dev do a good job of coding in dx 12 you will get all those gain.
Again the engine, so the original program isn’t capable of distributing the data to more cores.

even if you come back with the main single thread control over and over it is normal the game is single thread dx 9 api. it is normal in those day it was the cpu ghz that gave the speed to the system and the new graphic card api is the bridge or the cop that handle the trafficic between cpu and gpu and memory allocation. now ghz as reach the limit and pc use multiple core and thread to gain speed it is like splitting a job so that it gets done more fast between the core and thread and they can all talk together and the dev decide where they send the job with coding.
Yes this is the problem now… but 15 years ago when this engine was coded for dx8 originally this wasn’t a problem.

hope this help you. because I have seen that line about the main control thread is master thread is single thread pass by often enuff. it is normal in those time there was only 1 thread. so you would all code the software to go by one main thread. dx 11 support multiple thread but still use only 1 thread. dx 12 use all thread they can talk to each other to do the job and it is all in the hands of the game dev.
You still expect people to remake the whole engine. writing an average engine takes 2-5 years, for a dedicated company

so that single thread can be split by the dev to use different thread. and dx 12 can solve the cpu bound heavy that the game suffer from. that is performance that it bring to the game if the game dev do a good job.
No it cannot, without rewriting the whole game engine

hope it answer that part. that many do not seams to get.

It seems there are many seams, and I hope I have answered the questions which arise

• You have the program, in this case a game Game (gw2.exe) This controls acces to the game engine. security, account acces, acces to the BLTP and so on, and allows for acces to all image, sound and other datalibraries used ingame
• You have the Game engine (Unreal modified engine, with Havok Physics engine) this controls the build up of the world, the placement of objects and the management of objects in the world, this also places the objects and tells the GPU skins and options and how the game world should be build up, You are interacting ingame with the engine. This also places the information in a stream to the GPU, directX 9 does this in order, DX12 does this parallel, while retaining order. problem is if the engine is written for dx9 it cannot send it to different threads. The different processes can be different threads though, (read the program, the engine and I/O’s). The engine is started by the program but is a program in it’s own right. As are the networking services and other I/O’s (including the database(s) with sprites, textures and skins)
• You have the API layer (directX,Vulkan, OpenGL) this allows the input and output to all hardware without so implementation of the game can be simplified. This will take over some hardware control from the OS for direct acces. This transfers data to the hardware and allows communications with the engine. so you type and direct X sends this info to the engine directx allows the use of any keyboard or mouse, or GPU, or CPU audio, I/O and so on.
• You have the OS which handles I/O and runs the software. it is the platform the program runs on which handles the engine and the platform whcih allows for the API to run so this works together with API. This is also why directX versions are often coupled with OS-es nowadays.
• You have the hardware which is the physical limits to the games capabilities. (RAM, GPU type, CPU’s , audio, LAN, HID’s) which are unaccessible without an OS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine

Rezzet.3614:

Loosmaster.8263:

Stiofan.6720:

How does someone get punished twice from confusion?

1: For using a skill.
2: It has a DoT whether you use a skill or not.

this is also way worse in WvW

where mesmers can equip perplexity runes and sigils of torment effecively keeping perma 11+ stacks of confusion on target at all times as well as 4+ stacks of torment

altho to be fair that goes for anyone who can interrupt spam so basically all condition builds running perplexity are broken

11stacks of confusion and 4 stacks of torment?

I am pretty sure they could go 20+ confusion, and when you clean ’m they should be able to reapply them as well, provided you survive and try to fight back…. sigil of torment is pretty… meh….earth tends to proc more often and covers nicely.

I have been running after ppl with my non chrono condi mesmer just spamming 1 on scepter to kill’m just because the seemingly tried to run away…. pressing 3 and F2 tends to be fun after about 15-20s or so… most of the time they tend to heal instead of cleanse <evil grin>

Personally I think the conditions passive effect of confusion is a good one… FOR PvE

It was placed to make confusion viable for PvE, as the mobs hit once every 3-10 seconds and you could try your hardest to stack 13 stack of confusion, but you would get no return whatsoever if you times it only a little bit off. This was due to the duration nerf the runes had before going from 45% to 30% duration, to allow them to be more usable in PvP.

In PvP perplexity runes have been removed (if I’m correct) leaving perplexity rtunes only for WvW now where they still find use on
Hammer CC builds of (partially condition) warriors, other melee CC builds,
Necro fear builds (perplexity, terror, chill, and bleeds?)
Interupt Thieves and
Interupt Mesmers.

Which are ALL roaming builds and used for 1vs1 or few vs few as they are USELESS in zergs.

I think perplexity could be reinstated in PvP but with the CONFUSION base effect of x DOT dmg p sec removed and only the CONFUSION spike remaining, which should be returned to it’s old UNNERFED form. it would be good cause it still is a interesting condition, and TBH with most builds running perplexity there is little room for condition management.

The shutdown part shows itself in PvE where most perplexity stacks will fade after 3-7 seconds, and your best option is to wait it out or clean it. In PvP the effect will be mre pronounced and the effects way more dangerous, though confusion should be survivable when “not taking any actions.”

As for torment , the condition is used to keep people fro running and just stnding to fight, you will not get toirment procs on doidge as far as I know so when stationary you should be good.as long as you can defend…

Also a thief trying to headshot can get perplexity procced on himself if you reflect ’m… which should be nice for auramancers, mesmers, guardians

Confusion & perplexity had 3 nerf rounds and the effect is nowhere as agressive as it once was.

1. perplexity was reduced by 15% duration
2. confusion itself was nerfed by 50% for PvP AND WvW
3. when the base lingering effect was introduced the SPIke was nerfed once again.

I think we should be good at this point.

5 confusions stacks proccing used to do 8k dmg at the start in PvP, WvW and PvE, now only 600-3.5k remain. Please do not say it’s impossible. also do not blame everything on perplexity runes.

Thief gets 5 stacks of confusion on stealing, mesmer gets 6 stacks on scepter 3 and loads & loads of stacks on shatters, warrior can get 4 stacks on any daze/stun (interupt even?)

As for torment. Torment is easily cleansed, or send back, torment should provide no real problems.

Thief: (viper)
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAsaVnsMBtNhdmCOmC0PhFZCTbPNFCAebhD1HaeDOCLhA-TxRFQBBb/h+p+T70HAgTBQDV+tvnAwIVCSKg7WWB-e

Mesmer
CONDI (2041 condition dmg, 3128 armor, 1606 vitality, 6% crit chance, 100% condi duration)
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRArf7ansICVohNoB2oBcrhlXDycFDfElVo3BHNA5sJA-TxhbABldSAQb/BAUCKq6Pyq8jsnAgk6HIFwiKrA-e
HYBRID (2121 power, 1861 condi dmg, 32% crit, 100% condi duration)
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRArf7ansICVohNoB2oBcrhlXDycFDfEoBInNpsC9O4A-Txh0wAE2fIwJBwsSQgq/A4JAAV5HM9DkCYRlVA-e

Warrior
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQNApeSnMdA9kitdAmdAkigFiA7t4+cnuHPgGQQzIA8B7ZA-Txh0wAAeCAAV/BqyPfnCAzKBJs/AM9BkCwulVA-e

They are rough sketches, don’t run interupt warrior, but… it should give an idea.

Doesn’t reflect the fact many people are in DR,Grove, BC or Hoelbrak to escape LA loading times, or using airship passes, or the DR whatever thingy, or are completely selfsufficient on their own (having perma contracts, portable MF and so on and never have to return to cities)

The playerbase is now also spread between event maps and the world. a lot of ppl doing instanced content (RAIDS, FRACTALS, DUNGEONS again).

I think an answer could be found in these.

Oh and GW2 sold 5M copies ore so and HoT 400k. but you can play finer on gw2 vanilla.

Besides zerk, thers is plenty of other options IMHO…

• in PvE Viper/Sinister, Zerk/Assassin and Zealot are fine
• in WvW Trailblazer/dire/rabid , Knights/soldiers/cavalier/Valkyrie and Clerics/Minstrel/ Nomad are fine

• in PvP you’ll need to find you own balance.

Outside these basic suggestions there is quite some more if you want.
condition healing builds (trapper druid?)

The “zerk only” is a long past station, mostly forced upon you by Metabattle and old experiences. you can see this in HoT and fractals, dungeons still tend to be DPS oriented, due to the fact they didn’t get a rework, but In most cases this is no real problem as long as you do not have 5 condition only builds

hobotnicax.7918:

I know this will be an unpopular topic for people who run condition builds so bare with me please.
When it comes to conditions in pvp game modes confusion and torment are the two I dislike the most, simply cause they feel cheap and over the top compared to what they actually do in comparison to other conditions.
Basically what bugs me the most about these two is that they still have a DOT on them even though they have super strong active effects. It’s not about being able to cleanse them or not, or how many times it can be applied on certain builds.

Confusion should do one thing and one thing only, if you keep using your skills when you have it, you should get punished.
Torment should do one thing and one thing only, if you keep moving you’ll get punished.
It’s simple. But currently one gets punished twice with these two conditions, while all the other conditions mostly do one thing.

I don’t know, I might be in the wrong, but like I said they feel very cheap compared to other conditions and IMO, need their DOT removed.

COnfusion and torment are a combo meant to shutdown a character.

Confusion should make your choice to use a skill difficult, and severly punished
Torment should make your choice to run difficult, and severly punished

The 2 combined will lock you in a situation where you cannot stay or do anything. so cleanse them or reflect them (tends to be epic)

These 2 conditions I use mostly on mesmer (viper PU condition, Sc/T & Sc/P (using nightmare here) and thief (interrupt viper condi build with perplexity runes) but tend to work very well in WvW.

Only way to counter is cleanse, or be cleansed or send it to another. Self cleans couyld be risky. And If I did it well you should have confusion, poison, torment, bleeding and some more before you notice you are suffering, causing the cleanse to probably remove the wrong conditions. In which case I only need to reup my stealth invisibility and stomp you.

Next time do not run alone. I might be hiding

Powerful counters vs condi thieves & PU mesmers are DUO groups of for example

Generally found in Zergs:

• Shout cleaners: warriors, guardians and other shout cleaners (ele’s/druids))
  Generally found in Havoc Squads
• condi necro’s with suffer and other ways to return conditions, or revenants
• condi builds in general….which outright kill me, cause I do not run any condition removal (do not have the slots).

^perplexity runes are nothing more then a tool, having a ranger trapper with 3 firefields and runes of the krait can be very painful as well. or any other build wich an be execuuted easily and provide a spike of somesorts (still hate DH trap stack when running back to zerg/ havoc team…)

Lastly the recharge on the runes effects is long, so you are not likely to have it dropped on you 2 times in a fight, and if it does happen you have been fighting for quite some time .

Already have 30 permatools,

I might…., Ehm, no….., I’m good for now…. I think…

Watchwork sprocket’s are ~2 silver or so…

Anything…

• JP’s,
• Exploring (mostly on alts, as those with 100% map most have seen a lot),
• Dungeons, slowly working towards dungeoneer no longer having to do arah and CM * HotW will save me a lot of time, others are done regularly
• Fractals, t4 mostly & dailies, already at 100
• organizing guild missions (used to have 8-20 ppl join in past guilds, now I’m having 5 groups in my squad of 5-8 ppl, still trying to get everyone their commendations.)
• being co-leader in my main guild,
• WvW, though I cannot find the times for 2-4 hour WvW raids nowadays… my visits are brief and onften just once a week
• Gearing up, I only have ascended weapons on most characters, just stripped all weapons from my revenant (I do not like it tbh, and my scrapper is standing by to be scrapped)
  getting the skins I find fit for my characters,
• Legendaries: just made ad infinitum, wondring if I should make Bolt, Bolt or Nevermore…
• sometimes a worldboss,
• sometimes a metaevent,
• trying to learn raids other then VG,
• trying to level my guild bank (now lvl 11, still want to become scribe)
• trying to uphold connections with other guilds,

General Health.9678:

Dev: It can’t be done
Forum Person : pages and pages of how I feel I know better than you.

/end

Yup, you’re right…

/end

stephanie wise.7841:

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

Storage solutions can be made incredibly large by using software raid solutions. but I was trying to tell you the adresseble physical limits of files, as the max storage size is not the same as addressible filesize.

ok so for the storage it would use a vr trick. to multiply its basic adressable physical limit of file. since with vr you can multiply the number of virtual pc on the same system. my older pc was using raid 0 with queing. 2 drives that work in parallel at the same time sending each 32 que per turn of disk of data to the processor. the only problem with raid 0 is that it as no back up in case of disk failure. my other pc use a raid hybrid solid state drives with a hard drive for catching. it is about equivalent. since solid state is memory stick similar to ram some process are faster on one and some other process on the other. so I know about raid solution.

but any way the game gw2 most not use over 8tb of adressable physical file memory? yep 32 gb of ram is nice. what is less nice is when the fps drop because there is to much animation for the dx9. you could have a pc with 256 gb of memory with 6 processor quad core. and the same would happen. since it is a dx 9 limit. I understand that they want the game to work on every system old and new. people with old system have lower fps then people with new system so they lag even more then us. but even with new system you experience lag. it is not because the technology is not there it is because the implementation is not done. before dx 9 every gaming company would optimize the game to the newest version. they stopped doing that at dx 10 because of the small benefit it offer compare to the cost and time. but now dx 12 bring over 70% improvement compare to dx 11. and solve the cpu bottle neck. so it would be good to optimize the game. every player would benefit from it in the long run. and people that do not want to upgrade their system can still use the dx 9 version. that way it still work with all the system. any way we are not the one that takes the decision. we will see what they will do.

Problem is if you would want to upgrade to DirectX 12 Compatible, you would have to rewrite the games 3d engine (e.g. the 3D engine embedded in gw2.exe and gw2-64.exe) from scratch to allow multithreading for CPU’s and multithread communication with GPU’s when a computer is capable of supporting DX12…

It should provide the same capabilities to directx12 users as other engines provide to legacy (below dx12) capable users, while maintaining support and upgrading both parts until the legacy part has deminshed so far you can remove it altogether. Without unfair advantages for PvP-ers for the League games….

this would create
gw2.exe (32bit OS, any dx9+ GPU)
gw2-64.exe (64 bit CPU & OS, any dx9+ GPU)
gw2-dx12.exe (32bit OS, and a dx12 compatible GPU)
gw2-64-dx12.exe (64 bit CPU & OS, a dx12 compatible GPU)

All these files are platforms the whole game needs to run on…..all these files need maintainance…..

This seems easy, but the original Guid Wars 3D-engine is an old extremely heavily modified dx8 Unreal engine (w. Havok Physics) 3D engine (if i’m correct, which im pretty sure now about regarding the name) which has seen 2 major rebuilds and transition to dx9 and is fully owned by A-Net….A-Net would have to develop a DX 12 version with full backwards capability which is a plan which would likely take more time, then you and I would like to see removed from a developer time….

It is not a case of running to a 3D engine company and saying: “pls I need the next version…..” and then an easy recompile… (easy… lolz)

And I’d be all for an upgrade, as long as I can play gw2 with updates. expansions…. I’ve just seen a tiny bit of action in PvE land and there is still so much to do on other parts which are being adressed soon™ , I doubt forcing A-net into making dx12 would be my first priority at this time or at all…..

I would like to explain the idea of your twice as fast 64 bit as will but with smaller numbers

you have a 4 bit and an 8 bit machine.

you need to do something with data:

you need to add 1 and 1…..
for 4 bit the values would be 0001 for 8 bit 0000 0001

4 bit adds 0001 + 0001= 0010 (1clock)

8 bit adds 0000 0001 + 0000 0001 =0000 0010 (1 clock)

both get the same answer being 10 -> being the binary for 2

if the 64 bit machine would enter 0001 0001 this would be 17 for the 64 bit CPU and your system would fall apart.

With merging and decode:

1. shift value 0000 0001 -> 0001 0000 (1 clock)
2. and add new value 0000 0001 to value 0001 0000+ 0000 0001 = 0001 0001 (1 clock)
3. 0001 0001 + 0001 0001 = 0010 0010 BEING 34….. (1 clock)
4. extract the last 4 bits value -> (0000) 0010 leaving 0010 0000 (1clock?)
5. shift valueback 0000 0010 (1 clock?) now you have 2 values both being 10…

It would seem handy to merge and decode the difference but this decode takes more clocks then actually making a second calculation. And in the end decoding this woud result in a speed loss. as you could make 2 seperate calculations in 2 clock and you would need at least 3 (provided the step 1 and 2, shift and add could be done in 1 clock, and 4 and 5 could be done in 1 clock) and likely 5 clocks to merge the info and decode it again…. 3 clocks would be 33% speed loss 5 clocks would be a 60% speed loss over just making 2 basic calculations….

so: No 2 connected 32 instructions….

Storage solutions can be made incredibly large by using software raid solutions. but I was trying to tell you the adresseble physical limits of files, as the max storage size is not the same as addressible filesize.

stephanie wise.7841:

I agree with you 64 bit fix those problem also. but the game with the hot expansion use more memory. I have seen some one in game having issue. I asked is your system and os 64 bit and did you try the 64 bit client? the answer was yes problem still there. I asked how much memory do you have on your system? the answer was 4gb. told the person to put more memory in the system since 64 bit use more then 4 gb of memory.

so if the 64 bit client with 4 gb of memory does not solve the issue it means that the game use more then 4 gb of memory. or need the extra memory to solve that fragmentation problem that you get with 32 bit. in one case or the other you need more then 4 gb of memory.

Well not true, as the system can rely on HDD swap space to make additional virtual RAM, your performance will drop, considerably as HDD acces and data read and write is significant slower, but in theory this should be no problem.

Behellagh.1468:

Here’s an analogy. Think of memory as pages in a book and program data words on a page. Going from 32-bit to 64-bit is like having a book printed using a larger font. Same number of words but needs more pages to hold it.

The “get more than 4GB” is due to how an OS handles a limited resource like system memory and how it’s shared among all the software that is currently running, assuming we aren’t also talking about shifting from a 32-bit to a 64-bit version of an OS, that the OS could always handle more than 4 GB of system memory.

An Operating System’s (OS) primary purpose is to let one program think it has access to the entire resources the PC has. But since other programs are also running, the OS supervises, to the best of it’s ability, the sharing of common resources. Like which thread gets a chance to run, sharing of I/O (keyboard, graphics, disk) and memory.

Now what happens when the programs you have running wanting more memory than you actually have in the system, the OS juggles what data is actually in system memory (those are the sticks of RAM by the way) and what data is temporarily stored on disk based on how frequently that data is accessed and if needed again will read it off the drive. It does this anyways even if you have plenty of memory but it gets very aggressive if you are close to filling all of the system memory all the time. All this reading and writing of data onto the drive will significantly slow software down, to a virtual standstill in extreme cases. All that said, adding more system memory means this worse case is less likely to happen. And since the 64-bit client will use more memory, cause “bigger font analogy”, you would encounter that worse case sooner than in the 32-bit client. It’s just the 32-bit client has that OOM issue that, yes, crops up more frequently on HoT maps.

stephanie wise.7841:

ok just found the quoting system. will make this more easy. yes I know about 64 bit. if you have a 64 bits processor and not a 64 bit os you run in legacy taking chunk of 64 bit and process it 32/32 makes your system 150% faster then a 32 bit system if you have 64 bit processor and 64 bit os process is 64 bit you run 200 % faster then a 32 bit system. 64 bit provide more memory and speed over 4gb of memory and over 3 gb for speed that are the limit of 32 bit system.
And yes, system usely go to ram (random access memory) for data that is in use.
That data stay in ram as long as you do not reboot the system.
As for data temporarily on the disk it is rather permanently on the disk on less that you are talking about the virtual disc space when you do not have enough ram on your system and the pc create ram memory on the virtual disc space.

Totally agree with you more memory is better faster hard drives is also better, since the slowest component in system is always the hard drives and the system always run at the speed of the slowest component. that is why fast system usely use the fastest rpm hard drives or raid 0(hard drive x2) with queing(x32). or ssd (solid state drives) or hybrid raid ssd with hard drive to do the caching maximize mode.

Was just saying that some one was having the issue with the 64 bit client but is system add only 4 gb of memory. so basically he need more memory that was is problem for the game with the 64 bit client you need more then 4 gb of memory I would say at least 8gb as a minimum. since the system as always some process running in the back ground apart from the game. and since using a 64 bit system and 64 program it will use more then 4 gb of ram. 64 bit can use up to 128 gb of ram or more depending on your os and system limit. sorry again for the quoting system I add not seen it.

The 64 bit client was used to fix OutOfMemory errors due to the gw2 32 bit app trying to adress more then it’s max 4 GB of adressible RAM. being compiled for a 64 bit processor, it will not work on a 32 bit machine, or a 64 bit machine with a 32 bit OS.

Why 64 bits:

64 bit’s memory codes could adress up to 16 ExaByte of data, which when thinking about it would be a bit overkill, so 64 bit machines use lower amounts of bits to adress memory space, 48 bit to be exact as specified in the AMD64 instruction set, which is standard nowadays on both AMD and Intel which allow machines to adress 256 TB of memory. Until windows 8.1 this wasn’t even supported by Microsoft and the used adresses microsoft implemented were 42bit (if I’m correct) limiting the user of the OS to 8Tb of adressable space.

So XP 64, Vista 64, Windows 7-64 and Windows 8 64bit were all limited to 8 Tb of actual adressable space. This comes with a problem:

But this was fast becoming a problem due to HDD’s growing bigger and bigger, with 6 TB HDD’s being on the market, whcih is likely a reason for Microsoft to push Windows 10. problems would arize when files being bigger then 8TB would be stored on a Drive. Now consider how often you use this size of files, 8 Tb…. this is a number only relevant for 4K video editing. In most other contecxt it’s beyond huge. imagine formatting a stripe set of 8 6Tb HDD’s… 48 Tb…. well this might actually work, but the filesize would gain be limited…

Speedgain?

No there is none…..
for 32 bit instructions on 64: Instead of a 64 bit instruction being proccessed 1 32 bit is entered, and if you look at it deeply you’ll gain nothing from 64 bit except some calculation precision, and the ability to work with bigger numbers. In effect it could be slower as the adresses & datapackets are longer causing a need for more data to be moved through all I/O’s ,pipelines and so on. But on a full 64 bit machine tis is mostly unnoticable.

using 64 bit -data- on a 32 bit computer is also possible, but will be slower (about 3 clocks for a 64 bit argument, instead of 1 for a 32 bit), but the 32 bit computer cannot handle direct 64 bit adressing,, in the end the same precision could be aquired only at a timeloss due to inefficient workaround needed to use the for 32 bit long data values.
This would be the same when computing 128bit strings on a 64 bit PC.

Speedgain comes from raising transferrates, Speed, or adding more of components, Parallel computing, Multitasking, or pooling resources.

2 CPU’s would be faster when the multithreading of a program allows it. 4 better still 8 or 16 better as well. Problem becomes the size of needeed components
2 Harddisk when used in tandem will allow them can both to add speed (so raid 0 is speed advantage when reading and writing, raid 1 only when reading, as both disks store the same (mirrored data)
2 networkcables when you can combine the datarate

But 32 and 64 bit: no difference in speed.
They do differ in the maximum size of numbers and calculating precision.

Any actual difference is based upon physical numbers, clockspeed and cores and to a lesser extent the CPU’s efficiency in using those clocks (only the last would include threads)

@Stephanie Wise:

What has the UEFI vs BIOS to do with DirectX capability??

I do not understand? UEFI was an addition to the capabilities of motherboards and allows for future compatability of many things…but I do not really see it’s relevance in conjunction of DirectX.

My 9 year old 8 core PC :

(tyan 2927-E A2NRF Thunder 3600B, w.:
2 quad core Opteron 2376’s @ 2,3Ghz and
16 Gb of DDR 2 ECC/REG
Nvidia 9600 GT Passive cooled GPU (1 Gb, Directx 9)
(originally bought with 3,5 TB of HDD space 2x 750GB (RAID 0) and 2x 1 TB (RAID 1), now has 1 128 GB SSD (sata2) and 2 500 GB HDD’s in Raid 0). Was fully direct x 9 capable and I played GW2 on it on medium settings (@ 25-30 FPS, 3-7 FPS in zergs)

Cost me about 2520 euro’s (now ~ 9 years old, 280euro/year) and is still functional, My wife and I use it to test software It is now a simple DB/GIS server for testing purposes, I sold the upgraded GPU (Radeon 6790 something)and replaced it with the Nvidia 9600 GT it came with.
It can still multitask perfectly, is a bit slower then my other PC in GPU and Datatransfer but I cannot get more then 2×1 Gbps over my home network anyways It would be useless if I’d invest in more as well, the few times I could actually get more then 176 MB/sec is a waste anyways as most transactions over out home network will not need that amount of bandwith, unless I’m copying huge loads of data

My 3 year old new PC cost me a comparable amount of money (now 900 euro/year).
Build:
ASUS Rampage IV extreme, with
a i7 3930K, with
32 Gb of DDR3 and
2 Nvidia 780’s in SLi (DX 11, DX 12 compatible), has
a 256 GB SSD (sata 3),
250 GB 10k RPM drive for swaps and
2 1 TB HDD’s 7200rpm (Raid0) for storage.

Replacing the SLi-ed 780’s could be done, but I’m inclined to replace the coolant paste and see when they burn out they are still very capable graphics solutions My present system is no longer upgradable (socket 2011 w DDR3 is now obsolete, and replaced by 2011v3 and DDR4) and I would require a full memory, CPU, Memory and GPU upgrade if I needed to upgrade my computer, and tbh my 3930K is still ok, and a 6930K is a huge investment for relatively low benefit. As would replacing my 2 GTX 780’s with 2 980Ti’s or 1080Ti’s be…. cause the end result would be I’d go from 60+ frames on my Full HD screen to 60+ on my Full HD screen… which is in the end just a destruction of my resources, as the difference would only show on the newest of FPS’s which I cannot play anyways due to photosensitive Epilepsy, I play (and tend to be limited to) MMO’s, RPG’s, RTS’s and tactic games…

In 2 years I’ll buy a new PC (likely) and I might get a VR set. I’ll see, I’m not gonna worry about it now…. Maybe I cannot handle it, I’ll test before and if so I might actually invest in 1 or 2 4k screens at that time…

I’ll likely have a full directX 12 capable Machine at that time….. Maybe an i7 7930 with 64Gb of Ram and 2 GTX 1180’s but it’s a guess at this time….. We’ll see.

And my oldest daughter will get my current rig, until she needs a laptop/tablet for school. She’ll be 8 maybe 9 at that time…. about the same age as I was when I started gaming on my father’s Tandy TRS 80 Model 4,and the Atari’s, MSX’s and Commodores @ friends.

Swagger.1459:

It’s always interesting to read computer tech stuff because I’m a complete noob about it.

All I know is that the devs designed the game to put many players in one space, so stronger steps need to be taken to make improvements because it’s far from smooth playing at times.

I run a 3.5k machine, live in the US and have great internet, but still suffer from performance issues when the masses gather… Just saying that things could be better here and we all know it.

Where there is a will there is a way, so it’s not beyond the scope to make more improvements. Businesses reinvest all the time and it’s just what it is. I’m assuming that making improvements will also give the devs better tools to work with in the end and remove some limitations for themselves.

Players also have to make their own upgrades as well because y’all can’t sit there on 5-10 year old machines and expect miracles.

I just tried to explain and show ppl they might want DX 12, but the hardware is available since 2011-2012 and unless you SPECIFICALLY bought a PC for DX 12 in the 1st 2 years afterwards you can actually have a PC from 2013 or 2014 whcih cannot take advantage of DX 12 at all !!

SO the window could be 2-5 years actually… and not 5-10…. Does this change your view?

stephanie wise.7841:

pax the great one.9472 Will you also give all the ppl running this on “legacy computers” a computer with Directx 12 GPU’s then, or are you and the minority with high end systems going to keep this game going?
-Ehmmm, when compatibility is maintained I’ll keep playing for a while, So I’ll keep supportiung the game, as for the type of DX 9 or 12, I honestly do not care. I started with pong in 1980… I personally see the beauty of this game. even if the engine sometimes struggles-

I have the simple answer for that. in 3 month the majority of pc will be windows 10. so having dx 12 would be nice for the majority. for people that do not have dx 12 the minority they can keep using the dx 9 version. problem solve. windows xp 10.63% if you look at vista 1.42% support is ending also so not many still use vista. and windows 7 47.82% windows 8 3.19% and windows 8.1 9.85% will all upgrade to windows 10 15.34%. what is left linux and mac? also very small number. mac as like 7% for all their os version. and linux 1.65% add all the windows 7 + to 10 together what does it gives for windows 10 66% of the market. I think it is the majority.
-OS isn’t the only thing whcih makes a PC compatable… Hardware is very relevant-

you can find those number here: http://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0

as for gw3 it is not in the plan they still want to keep gw2 and make expension. but if the devs cannot make a single core software in to a multicore software for gw2 they are not able to make a gw 3 software in multicore also. and like I said the difference for that part is some code that needs to be added to the existing software to tell to what core or thread to send that thread of code. that is the difference between a single thread software and multi thread software. some line of code to tell where to send the code. once that is done part 2 is : Developers are now able to implement their own command lists and buffers to the GPU, allowing for more efficient resource utilisation through parallel computation. they test it if it run like it should they realease it.
-yes but it takes (programmer-) time to rewrite the engine, Time is a luxury.-

as for dx 14 in 3 or 4 year will not happen . in 13 year they add 3 dx 10 11 and 12. out of the 3 12 is the major improvement. that is why game company did not continue to implement dx optimization like they use to. because dx 10 improvement was minimal. and the time and cost related they decided it was not worth it. dx 12bring over 70% improvement compare to dx 11. and for vulkan mantle forget that idea they stopped working on it saying dx 12 was much better. also for dx 12 it use 50% less power on the cpu and gpu. and it is backward compatible with the older dx version. so it can run them your old game but you will not get the improvement of dx 12 if you use dx 9 you will be stuck with dx 9 limit.
look I play gw 2 on max setting get between 65 to 105 fps. but if there is big event or big zerg the dx 9 limit bring me down, how down sometime to 19 fps. if the game would be optimize for dx 12 no more bottle neck and dx 9 limit. so I could have a constant fps. also the performance on dx 12 should double the frame rate. so I should get around 130 to 210 fps with no drops. yes this game is cpu heavy because it is single threaded and new processor cannot have more ghz(raw power)because over 4.2ghz the chip start to melt., but they can have more core and more thread. what core and thread do they split the processing job. so if you have 100% job on one core and split that job by 4 core thread and by 4 hyper thread. you divide it by 8. should give around 12.5% per core and thread. a lot less heavy on the cpu would you not say.
-If they can implement it and keep compatability I’m all for it, but the compatibility is a HUGE thing here… will comment on it further below-

I would like to comment:

Windows 10 will support DirectX 12, but the PC running windows 10 DOESN’T need to support directx 12, their actual graphic solutions should be directx 9.0c minimum
You are correct versions will upgrade, problem is hardware requiress investment, not a free download.

Minimum requirements for windows 10:

1 GHz CPU
2 Gb RAM
16 GB for 32-bits OS of 20 GB for 64-bits OS instalation space
-AND-
GPU: DirectX 9 or newer with WDDM 1.0-driver
Monitor resolution: 800×600

This also shows your statistics of ppl owning windows 10 might not be 100% valid to draw the conclusion: “we should move to Directx 12”.

Which hardware will be DX12-COMPATIBLE? is more to the point

AMD said all of its Graphics Core Next-based Radeon GPUs (i.e. Radeon HD 7000 series and newer) will work with the new API. (RAdeon HD 7xxx series was released in 2012)
Nvidia pledged support for all Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell (i.e. GeForce GTX 400 series and newer) parts. The keynote included a demo of Forza 5 running in DirectX 12 mode atop an Nvidia GPU. (GTX 4xx serieswas released in 2011)
Finally, Intel said the integrated graphics in its existing Haswell processors will also have DX12 support. All in all, Microsoft estimates that 100% of new desktop GPUs, 80% of new gaming PCs, and 50% of PC gamers will be able to take advantage of the new API.

^ From old post: march 20th, 2014
(http://techreport.com/news/26199/directx-12-to-support-existing-hardware-first-games-due-in-late-2015)

Compatible cards might be slower due to some instructions having to be broken down and rescripted, by the directx software to allow for the compatibility. AMD uses the 11.1 version and Nvidia the 11.0 version both versions should be compatible, but the 11.1 has more instructions available

Which hardware is native DX12?

Well:

• Nvidia’s GTX 9xx series and the soon to arive GTX 1xxx series are true DirectX 12
  These were released in 2014 and 2015

• AMD’s R285 and up and R360 and up are TRUE directx 12
  These were released in 2013 and 2014

True DX 12 cards were delivered in the last 2 years. differences will be the true cars will be able to take full advantage of the DirectX instruction set, with minimal software interference.

nVidia: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/dx12/supported-gpus
(-no changes-)
AMD: http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/directx12
(-no changes-)

So 2011-2012 is 4-5 years ago so most PC’s will likely be capable of running direct x12?

Well… NO!

Most (prefab)computer suppliers deliver PC’s with a generation older GPU to save money. And in effect the window where most computers delivered with dx 12 compatible or capable GPU’s is more like 2-3 years IMHO, I buy a new High End PC every 5 yrs or so… Have done so for the past 20 years.. So this will mean many ppl using 3+ year old laptops and PC’s, maybe even 2 year old even…, might still have an old GPU solution not capable of supporting DX 12…. EVEN IF THEY DO HAVE WINDOWS 10.

COMPATIBILITY means the GPU’s will work with directx 12, BUT NOT NATIVELY else they would be directx CAPABLE

As for DirectX 9.0:

DirectX 9.0 cards have been available since 2002. We are looking back at Radeon 9xxx series (AGP) and Geforce FX 5xxx series (AGP) doubt ppl are still using 12+ year old PC’s but… this shows ALL present day computers should support directx by default.

My now ancient -former windows vista- 64bit machine I bought 8 years ago runs windows 7,8 and 10 without a problem, but it’s PCI-E 16 v1.0 slot(s) doesn’t really work with a directx12 capable graphics solution even though this 8 year old 2.3Ghz PC has 8 64 bit cores, WITHOUT hyperthreading…. and 16 Gb of ram….

Trust me I have full understanding what the differences would be… I also know we are not all having a big PC budget….

TL;DR:

• DirectX capability is both OS and hardware bound
• First DX 12 COMPATIBLE GPU solutions are 4-5 years old.
• First DX 12 CAPABLE GPU solutions are 1-3 years old
• COMPATIBILITY means the GPU’s will work with directx 12, BUT NOT NATIVELY else they would be directx CAPABLE
• Windows 10 minimum GPU has a directX 9 requirement.
• Having Windows 10 is no guarantee your 3-5 year old PC will be able to run DirectX 12 and have any benefit whatsoever.

Will you also give all the ppl running this on “legacy computers” a computer with Directx 12 GPU’s then, or are you and the minority with high end systems going to keep this game going?

If you cut out 50-70% of the player base due to the shift to directx (10/11/)12, the lost income must be compensated or you’ll end up with a even smaller playerbase. no players to pay for developers/servers = no game. Even with DX 12…

As for starting on GW3 if they start now and get DX 12, in 3-4 years when it’s finished we’ll be at DX 14 or 15 and ppl will be whining as well, or maybe Vulkan takes off and ppl want everything in Vulkan… and are stuck with DX 12… choices must be made. DX 12 didn’t exist 3,5 years ago. understand you cannot program a game on non existant code or guesses.

I like my 3 yr old i7 3930K (@ 4.0Ghz) with my 2 GTX 780’s. Most games will work perfectly. Graphics for gw2?

NP, I’m at 30-45% GPU or maybe 45-50% if everything hit’s the fan…. I’m running 60 FPS cap most of the time cause I tend to want to save the lost computing power, the ambient temperature and the needed Watts. Oh and that’s on Ultra/High with supersampling, on a windowed screen… while watching HD stream/ series/ movie on 2nd HD screen.

My CPU however is at 33-40% max… squeeezing everything through 3-4 threads, the other 8-9 are idling or doing background services and other applications.

I do not mind If they make the game 4 core, NP, I don’t even care if they make it mandatory 6 core. But I do like playing with others, including friends on duo core i5’s with HT (e.g. laptops) and i3’s

And this will be a problem if I ask for 4+ core support. There are limitations. Mostly because the game is limited by the average player base and not build to be only playable on your or my OP 1337 Hyper Fiberoptic Artificially Inteligent System, just because others who want to play as well, and they’ll pay for my new content, and new expansions as well.

I want more content, I like the game, I need thers to play the game as well… for money flow (income for A-net) so more content can be build, and maybe engine improvements if they -have time to spare- . But I highly doubt ppl would pay for dx12 development if they would no longer be able to play the game.

I would like more performance, but in the end for a modified dx 8 engine upscaled to dx9 it does remarkebly well. Maybe we’ll be lucky and a patch comes which allows for many CPU cores and better GPU utilisation, But I do not see the direct need, yet.

Ansau.7326:

Guys stop it.

It is not about how much damage I take with a glassy build.
It is not about how good or bad we both are.
It is not about a l2p issue.
It is not about which builds we play or should play.

It is about both running very offensive builds and him doing 4x times more damage in less hits than me, both using highest damage skills available for each class.
It is about he can kill me with 3 hits and I need to land 12-15 hits to do the same.
It is about the burst disparity between professions is at 300-400%

IMHO:

• In WvW you have to stay at range from warrior…. if he has a CC build you’ll be dead before you know it. Hammer and M/Sh tends to be a bad day…
• phantasms can kill your enemy for you without you having to move in…. or clones can spike and confus….
• Stuns will kill effectively, when you are reaching for the stun button he will use the adrenaline for a HB or Eviscerate…
• The 200 toughness will not save you… Those points are there to make you feel comfortable, not to make an actual difference tbh… the warrior will have the same amount in his armor. For free. Light armor has lower armor values then heavy. I could run 2300 armor a while ago when the meta was a bit more melee then it is now. In 1vs1 PvP higher armor will be a huge advantage, unless facting a condi.
• I do not expect the warrior to be 100 % zerk either… I expect him to be a cavalier build with zerk /assassin trinkets or the other way around or one of the new HoT stats: crusader or commanders with added precision.
• try and check your DPS at the golem and you’ll find out the warrior will be able to squeeze a HUGE amount of DPS out of a semi defensive build, mesmer cannot compete with any build…
• The main advantage of a mesmer in 1 vs 1 is confusing the enmy with clones or invisibility or a combination, or reflects and stuns, but you will need to fight ranged for reflects
• If the warrior HAS a mesmer character of his own, he’ll likely not be confused at all.
• You could have killed him with a condition PU build the classic still holds up… DPS wise… not really
• I agree with 1 thing I’ve found mesmer to be quite underpowered unless I’m fighting new players who are completely confused by the clones or do not dare to close… but:

If I’d be able to run a thieves DPS with all utility I have, plus phantsms? => OP

1. you can pre stack swiftness,
2. you can ride your toy where you want to go using your speedbuff, until it runs out
3. no combat skills, or other skills fot that matter, as it is a toy, not a mount.
4. no perma speed boosts from skills as they are disabled, no weapon modifiers as thay are disabled. Just your toy. I’m wondering where traits would fall in….stilll thinking about it…
5. any perma speed boost on toy = P2W, or at least an unfair advantage. if one person with proffesion A would get a trait based speedbuff fairness woud be lost imho

still have my personal bank guild. I invited 8 ppl from my main guild, payed 100 gold and we unlocked the lost precipice guild hall. My bank guild is now lvl 11, and I have little reason to build it up fast, but I’m allocating resources now and then to build stuff up…
atm working towards the arena and the warroom. As I need cash for ingame progression as well this goes very very slow, but I’m still enjoying it….

At 0 range?

Seems like you are willing to eat any and all damage…

I’m trying to remember most ranges:

180 melee range for most melee(, mostly cleaving weapons)
240 field radius AOE fields (marks/wells/feedback) tend to extend to this range
360 field radius for large area fields: (timewarp/meteor shower (meteors themselves 180))
400 “melee” elementalist dagger auto (Ill try to be between 360 and 400 most of the time. only moving in for combo’s/ special skills)
600 “melee” guardian staff auto, a.k.a. lootstick range
900 scepters and “limited range long range weapons”
1200 classic max long range weapons staves, longbow, rifles
1500 engineer mortars and traited ranger longbows
2000 some attack skills allow 2000 range (e.g. charzooka’s at Claw of Jormag)
5000 max range of mesmer portal

trub.1657:

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

Arcana

Hurling Meteors upon you
Huge Storms of Lightning too
Can cripple, bleed and burn you
And summon elementals true

I will bring you aura’s
bring might and heal you
Give you second life
seemingly out of the blue.

I control the elements
I control the arcane

And with all this power
I still feel mundane.

Aurora The Mystique, Fiery Arcane Venus, Vii Terra Igni Omni -Elementalists-

+1- nice prose
You really don’t want to see the limerick for my Mesmar Charr, and his Asura hat now tho-. . .

Thank you,

I’m not native English speaking and I tend to rewrite it again and again… Glad people approve of my scribbles…

Arcana

Hurling Meteors upon you
Huge Storms of Lightning too
Can cripple, bleed and burn you
And summon elementals true

I will show thy aura’s
bring might and heal -All-
Give you second life
even with this power: I’m still small

I control the elements
I control the arcane

And with all this power
I still feel mundane.

Aurora The Mystique, Fiery Arcane Venus, Vii Terra Igni Omni -Elementalists-

(for original see below…)

After doing t4 for a while…

I think it’s worth getting additional chests. T4 does tend to cost more time… and your party needs to be okay. And some fractals become a bit more annoying… above the 70’s the instabilities become better as well…

This leaves the question:
Does the investment to do t3 and t4 fractals have a(ny) decent return?

Investing in 150 AR tends to cost both time and plenty of money….

2 rings ( do fractals ) , infused ( do fractals ) and attuned ( get fractal mastery ):
2 + 7 infusions
4 + 10 infusions ( ~10 gold )
2 accesoires ( do guild missions, 12 commendations + 5 gold each)
2 + 7 infusions
1 amulet (log in for laurels)
1 + 7 infusion
———————- +
75 AR

1 infused backpack (tends to cost ~300 gold, no cheaper options via fractals)
1 + 7 infusion
1 + 12 infusion
———————- +
19 AR

2 infusions in the equiped ascneded weapon set ( you can only acces 2 infusion slots of those 4 at a time, you’ll also need +7’s for alternate weapon sets/offhands) weapon costs ~ 80-100 gold…, each
2 + 7 infusions
———————— +
+ 14 AR

6 infusions in ascended armor, armor will cost 450-700 gold, can be bought with magnetite shards, drop from WvW, drop from t3/4 fractals
6 + 7 infusions
———————— +
+ 42 AR

these amounts should add up to
75 + 19 + 14 + 42 = 150 AR

“This isn’t the cheapest AR combo”
Actually It is cheaper to use 2 + 11’s in one or 2 rings, but the backpack is easier to swap IMHO, and when achieving a legendary backpack I would advise this + 12 setup though as you could change stats on the backpack and It could fit ALL characters and save a decent amount of money on the infused backpacks…..if you want to use many alts for high level fractals…. in the end 10 gold is just peanuts comparet to the 1000+ gold of all other gear, and when actually making the legendary back you should consider 10 gold to be trivial in the 1200 + gold in total… for your character(s) versatile back item….
(This will stay&hold true until (hopefully) Jeweler’s (likely) lvl 500 changeable ascended or legendary trinkets would arrive (=speculation)….) in whih case this would likely be a wise 10 gold to be saved again, though still trivial….

This amount of AR takes

• 150 fractal relics *14 =2100 relics for the +7’s
• 500 fractal relics for the infused backpack
• 11 vials (10 for infusing rings), 1 for ascneded backpack
• 7 glob of mists essence, (6 for infusing rings), 1 for backpack ascension
• 2 shards of mists essence for rings
• FULL Ascended (except breather and underwater weapons (highest aquatic ruins = lvl 76) asc breathers are -way too expensive- tbh…)

and either

• 4 +10 AR infusions (10 gold each) or 512 +1 infusions, 511 thermocatalytic reagents each.
• 1 +12 AR infusion (40 gold) (2048 +1 infusions, 2047 thermocatalytic reagents)

• 4096 +1 infusions and 4091 themocatalytic reagents (or ~80 gold)

or

• 3 +10 AR infusions (10 gold each)(512 +1 infusions, 511 thermocatalytic reagents)
• 2 +11 AR infusions (20 gold each)(1024 +1 infusions, 1023 thermocatalytic reagents)

• 3584 +1 infusions and 3579 Thermocatalytic reagents (or ~70 gold)

If these costs are worthwhile to do high(er) level PvE content??? I think only you yourself could answer this question….

For me it’s worth it.

I got to personal lvl 100 a couple of days ago
I have 9 characters in full ascended (excluding breathers and water weapons)
I have 1 character with 150 AR,
I have 7 characters (soon to be 8 ) with 115-122 AR (these do not have +7 infusons but +5…)
I own Ad Infinitum and I have a +7 and a +12 on it, and it’s in one of my shared slots, so all characters can use it…
I do not think I’ll ever get the money back from fractals alone but the investment has allowed me to do content which I experience as challenging.

Arms is mostly the sword warriors line… But when dual wielding swords I do not experience the speed increase either, but I should try it at the golems and autoatack for a while and see where bleedscap out… for every 6.6 bleeds I should get an extra…. this should increase stacks by 15% normally bleeds cap at 14-15 to 16-18

But when playing sword/sword I’m not sure I’d take
Dual Wielding ( + 15 % attack speed) over
Furious (critical hit give adrenaline and a stacking bonues on critical hits)
for a temporary max 250 condition dmg stack…. which will also work fine for any S/? combi….

I wouldn’t focuse traitline arms for axes… I think I’d take strength/discipline and beserker…

Warrior also has blademaster with reduces Cooldowns (CD’s) on sword which works on the non auto skills (autoattack ( 1 ) does not have CD’s)
Dual wielding has improved attack speed and increases autoattacks mainly and thus the attacks not bound to CD’s…

Dual wielding should stack with quickness, but blademaster should be affected by alacrity, alacrity will only affect CD’s of skills 2,3,4,5

I bought 1 when it appeared for my personal bank contract, which was a -really- usefull buy, I now use the second so I can put stuff in it and use it without needing to find it back in my inventory (food for example)

I have my 14 bank tabs available to all characters…
so I gave my 20 toons 420+1 (thank you for that 1 free slot A-net ) shared slots now…

I stack anything, not needed in inventory, in bank nowadays.