Guild Wars 2

The “big background project” is probably like Mr. Tur Tur, the illusionary giant from Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver, who only appears as a giant when seen from afar. But if you get near him, he is as tall as anyone of us.

May be you put the graphics card into the wrong slot. Most motherboards have 2 or even 3 x16 pci-express slots for sli/crossfire, but if you use only one graphics card, this card must be put into one specific slot and you cannot choose one of them. Often it is the slot closest to the CPU.

Regarding the Airship Pass: yes, you’re 100% right. It’s what I miss as well. The double loading screen if you relog to a character that was previously on the airship is very annoying, especially if this character has the unlimited pass. More cannot be said about this matter, though.

It isn’t possible to choose what skin a crafted armor has. The skin for crafted armor is hardcoded. For example, if you want to craft an exotic heavy armor piece with berserker stats, you always create a piece with the Draconic skin. There is no armor smith in GW2 who is able to craft this piece with a different skin.
If you craft armor of a different rarity or level, your armor has a different skin. Crafted rare heavy armor for example always has the Gladiator skin. Crafted heavy armor of lower level and lower quality also has some different skin, but for one given piece, you can never choose the skin.

If you want to craft your armor but with a different skin than the hardcoded one, you have to unlock the skin you want in your wardrobe and use a transmutation charge to put the skin on the Draconic armor piece.

At the top right of the forum there is a menu. Click Community→Leaderboards.

dominik.9721:

Well, actually he is true and you shouldn’t deny this.
You guys make beliefe of that the acting he described is only cummon in lfg PuG groups and that’s just not true. Meanwhile many players have become those “elitists” which you always make fun of. They exactly act like this, beeing arrogant, acting like they would be superior and looking down to other people.

I do make fun of elitists? Nooo… no… well, but if I do, then only a little, and only in my german posts perhaps, and only of people who look down on me.

But you did not understand the point of the OP and why he made this thread. The intention is a honest one, and he isn’t looking down on how I usually play, he simply don’t want to play this way (which is absolutely fine with me). I am also not being looked down upon entirely, since I realize way more details about the combat mechanics than the pro’s (or jerks) think I do.

It’s only that I am too lazy to take heed of all the details. It’s to stressing. And it would divide me from my guild, who isn’t made of very good players for the most part. The combat system is not bad, because it is unbalanced, or “broken”, which it isn’t, it is bad because it is so complicated that only very few people are actually able to fully understand it and use it in full. For example, only so few people are able to solo legendary dungeon bosses. And it’s not some brainless invincibuild like in GW1, it’s really their skill and comprehension of the combat system and the boss mechanics. I feel this is the real flaw in the combat system. Here, min/maxing went too far, in my opinion. I don’t want to equalize all players, but the difference between the capabilities of an elitist player should not be so ridiculously higher than the capabilities of a player with an ordinary skill level.

Don’t reinstall the game. Since your media is probably older than the game files on your hard disk, you would download even more after reinstalling.
The percent display may not relate to the download time. It’s the percent of the number of files, but not the volume to transfer. I recommend you sit it out.

Although I play a few hours almost every day since release, I still call myself casual when in comes to combat tactics. I simply want to kill the enemy, but don’t want to perform some kind of rain dance (might stacking) or something equally strange to achieve this. I just hit the enemy, and it goes down sooner or later. Mission accomplished.

I know that there are elitists and speedrunners and read about their demand of builds and tactics, and I even adopt some of their builds and tactics, because they work good. But I don’t demand from others to do the same. I can only recommend, but never demand. The elitists I met from time to time, on the other hand, force their tactics upon me and get rude if I don’t heed them. And they look down upon me. You wrote a different thing, but elitists I met acted like I described it. Perhaps they were just jerks and no real elitists, but it is very hard to distinguish between them.

So I stay away from elitists (and people acting like them) in the game, and they stay away from me. This works very good for both of us, and I hope it will stay this way. We are from totally different worlds. I simply play for fun and recreation, while they seem to play for… well.. don’t know, they aim to be someone and to achieve something that doesn’t exist for me.

I logon to my GW1 accounts once a month perhaps, one is connected to my GW2 account and the other is standalone, and I never had the slightest problem with logging on.

I assume people simply forget their account data, especially the character name of one of their GW1 characters, which is necessary to login to GW1. And some players may not be aware that if they connected their GW1 and GW2 accounts, the login username+password of their GW1 account became the username+password of their GW2 account.

I used to use Cursor Lock as a workaround. Works perfectly. It is a universal software for keeping the mouse within game windows – it seems a widespread issue for quite a few games.

Well, there is a german saying, “den Löffel abgeben” (“to hand the spoon”), which means “to pip out”. Now every time I get Tequatl’s spoon, I literally get the proof in my inventory that he pipped out (“Tequatl hat den Löffel abgegeben”).

That’s probably only funny for the german players, but hey, there are so many ingame jokes that only work in english and not in a translation, so it’s a tie

Given your background, I see that your real intention is to get a raise in dungeon difficulty, and the noobs can use your magician to get a buff to overcome.

Having said that, the general idea is very good. In fact, I would used it in the first year of GW2 very much, if it existed. I never understood why there is only one difficulty level for the dungeons where GW1 already provided 2, and why fresh people with lower levels than 80 are invited by the game to all these dungeons – only to fail miserably. I bet many players gave up GW2 frustrated in the first months of GW2 because of that, and there are still plenty of active veteran players who set foot in a dungeon once shortly after release and never returned since due to the then-ridiculous difficulty.

I don’t know if giving a buff is acceptable from a balancing point of view, but it is probably much easier to implement than designing different difficulty levels. If it is possible to lower the difficulty for new players by giving out a buff without spending developers time by designing different difficulty levels, go for it.

However, I doubt that dungeons will ever be redesigned for higher difficulty or for a more polished or simply different experience. They lay in waste for more than a year already. A few encounters have only been made easier in this time, for example AC path 2. Or Arah story mode, which is trivial now even for the most casual player. If Arenanet really wanted to do a major rework of the dungeons, they would have done it by now.

With the megaserver, there is no point in guesting any more. There are no world-specific instances or overflows any more. If people ar lagging, it is not a world-specific issue but a global one, since reports show that people all over the world are experiencing lags. The reports and traceroutes show that it is also vastly independent from the internet provider of the player and from the distance (number of hops) between the player and the data center.

Now you mention it, I remember why I bought a video editing software instead of using a free version of a commercial package.

The limits of all of the free video editing software that comes as free or paid alternatives is that they limit the resolution harshly and/or not offer an encoder for state-of-the-art codecs like h264. This limits the video quality, so it is useless for todays game videos. No one wants VHS-quality these days. Windows Movie Maker is the only one that has an almost-decent video output quality.

As far as I researched this, it is not (always) due to an arbitrary limitation to encourage buying the full version, it is caused by the h264 licensing instead. As long as there exists a commercial (paid) version of an application, the use of a h264 encoder must be licensed and paid – even for free or demo versions. This means, the vendor has to pay for every download of a free version out of his own pocket. Since this costs the vendors money, they remove h264 support from their free versions.

Only fully free software has a fully free license for h264. Because of that, you can use h264 in free video converter software like Handbrake or ffmpeg or OBS, but not in the free versions of Lightworks or Magix.

But there is no decent fully free video editing software out there – with the sole exception of Blender. Blender is not only a 3D modeling software, you can also edit video with it. Unfortunately, its interface is completely unusable and incomprehensible for the hobby user who “just wants to edit a video file”. I wasn’t even able to find the function to open a source video file i wanted to cut and edit.

Wanted to mention this, so people won’t run on a fool’s errand to look for what doesn’t exist.

If you can still move in the world but skills are frozen and other people standing still or running mindless in one direction until they hit a wall, then the connection with the instance is stalled or about to break. Chat, guild and tradepost use additional connections to different servers which may not be affected by this.

In this state, the connection to the instance is completely broken, not only one-way. You can still move around in the world although being disconnected, because this part of the game is running locally on your client. You are moving your character in the world locally on the client, and the client only tells the server its position and movement from time to time.

Because of that, you see other people running mindlessly in a straight line until they hit a wall, because the last thing your client received from them was that they were running in that direction. And the client shows this until it gets an updated position – which will never come, because in fact the connection is already severed.

I am susceptible for motion sickness as well, and I suffered from it very badly in the first months of GW2 after release. After the game FOV and some camera handling was changed in an update, and it got much better.

A major aspect for motion sickness in game for me is the lag between an input device and the game reaction. If I move the mouse and there is significant delay between this movement and the actual movement of my character, this makes me nauseous. This mouse input delay makes the camera sway and my character stagger back and forth in larger fights with fast movement, and this swaying is exceptionally bad.

For myself, I got rid of it when I upgraded my computer. My new machine is able to display GW2 at 60 fps in every area except for big zerg fights. The higher the fps, the lower the input delay, because games check mouse movement once for every frame displayed. The higher the frame rate, the lower the time between mouse position checks, getting a more immediate feel of mouse and camera movements.

So you might want to check the fps of your machine. Turn down the graphics settings to achieve a higher fps. Try to get over 50 fps to minimize motion sickness. It’s more important to get the fps higher than good graphics quality, because the game is useless if you cannot play it.

And turn on vsync. The screen tearing that is happening with vsync off was also a big source of motion sickness for me, because it makes the picture appear to distort, billow and swell in an unnatural way. Vsync reduces fps, but must be on absolutely. Activating triple buffering in the graphics driver settings of your GPU (possible at least for Nvidia cards) remedies this.

In contrast to lsmet, I don’t felt any difference at all by turning on or off depth blur or fxaa. If you deactivate both, the fps gets a little bit higher, which may reduce your sickness because of the fps, not because of the graphical effect.

Turning on supersampling was exceptionally bad, because it significantly lowers the fps and this is what makes me feel even more bad. Instead, I recommend turning on subsampling if your fps is low! This makes the picture a bit blurred, but the fps is much better, thus less input lag, thus much better feeling.

The camera shake setting is very important of course. This must be off.

Experiment with the mouse sensivity setting in GW2. If it is too high, you may produce camera swaying and staggering while turning the camera. If it is too low, you may feel not enough feedback by moving the mouse. Both extremes added to the motion sickness feeling for me.

I use OBS for recording. It’s free. It’s also a streaming software, but local recording is perfectly possible. Previously, I used fraps, but it is aged in comparison to OBS and produces really huge video files and is not free.

For editing, I found no good free software. First, I used avidemux for simply cutting my videos, but it is very limited and crashes often. After cutting, I recorded my comments with Audacity and added the audio track to the video with avidemux. All this was very tedious and didn’t allow much video editing.

Not very long ago, I bought Adobe Premiere Elements for about 100 Euro, which performs very good for my editing tasks. No external audio recording necessary any more. I don’t know if it is the best program for this price, because I don’t have experience with this kind of program. I simply picked it out of a few like-priced similar NLE video editor programs.

Skritt are not as nice or cute as Quaggan, but they are so… vulnerable. Small. Weak. They appear like children. They even have child-like voices. And you never want to kill children, even if children are mean sometimes, too. Just like Skritt who are mean sometimes, too.

I, for myself, try to avoid to kill Skritt. I helped them during my personal story, and they helped me with Zaithan. They are good, not evil. Somewhat chaotic, but good.

Crovax.7854:

Just did 2 breaches and maybe if we could get something official on that matter:

Did you guys over at ANet change the health on the bosses, like scale it WAY down?

Is there any confirmation for this?

I didn’t visit the breach event any more because of the matter with zerging, dying, waypointing and the reward for the ever-failing event not being satisfatory to compensate for the troubles in the fight. I was going to skip the new collection for the new armor handpiece where we have to collect the Mordrem pieces all over again and more, where we are now forced to collect 2000 bandit tokens instead of playing the story 2 more times.

Get real: you have been scammed. Scammer like this act nice and tell a well-thought story to get your money. You can only report him as scammer by creating a support ticket, but I doubt you get your money back.

If you ever give something to someone in an MMO, you must give it up. Think it’s a present. A gift. Getting it back is always nice, but never guarantied.
It does not need to be a scammer – even totally honest people may stop playing the game any time without notice and forget about giving things back.

People you know you can trust are plenty, but they don’t ask strangers for stuff. I would say probably 90% of all players would even send a legendary weapon back if it is clear by the context that it was sent to them in error, but unfortunately you never know if the stranger next to you is one of them.

If this is the case, it should be made more apparent by some ingame mechanics. For me, this isn’t apparent at all.

Are you sure that hitting even one time (1) makes me eligible for the reward? Don’t call me stubborn or ignorant, but the mechanics of other events with a single champion is that you have to do some minimal amount of damage to the boss, and this minimal amount is not always dealt with a single hit. Especially Gold and Silver are somewhat elusive, and not seldom players are stomped on before they even have a chance to deal damage even once.

I really want to contribute to the fight. I don’t want to leech. I hate leechers. I don’t want to lay around defeated. Just because I want to contribute, I stay. And I hate it. But I really see it as only chance to being able to contribute to this particular event again. Returning to the event minutes later for some remaining seconds (if at all) after running the long way from the waypoint isn’t particular what I call contributing.

You don’t use the mouse for movement directly, but only with the mouse you are able to rotate your character to a direction where you want to move in zero time.

With the keyboard, you are somewhat limited in the direction you can let your character move. You can move forward (fast), strafe left or right (slow) or go backwards (even slower), but that’s it. If you need to turn your character a bit and run in that direction, you need to rotate your character, and this is slow with the keyboard. With the mouse you only need to jerk your mouse a bit while pressing and holding the right mouse button, and you face the direction you need in an instant. Nothing is as fast as this.

About the problem with moving and activating skills at the same time: well, it’s possible. I do it. I don’t know how it happens, but sometimes I watch myself moving with one finger of my left hand and activate skills with another finger of the same hand.

You should also be aware that for non-channeling skills you need to only tap a skill key to activate it, you don’t need to hold it during the activation time. You can continue to move immediately after tapping the key with almost no interruption of your movement. Only for channeling skills, you need to hold the activation key and are not able to move while channeling. Since you cannot move anyway during channeling, no conflict between movement keys and skill activation keys occur.

However, I changed the key bindings, so I don’t need to reach any keys beyond the line of ’5, t, g, b". My movement keys are ESDF, skills are 1..5, r, t, g, b, mouse button 3. F1..F4 is also on the mouse (I have a mouse with 4 thumb buttons).

Crovax.7854:

You get the reward regardless of where you are as long as it’s in the same zone.

Even if this were the case (which isn’t widespread knowledge), I never know if I participated enough before I died to be eligible for the reward. If I go to the waypoint, I am removed from the event area and am definitely not working towards the reward any more, because I am not able to reach the event area again before the event is over.

On the other hand, if I stay in spite of being defeated, I have a chance of contributing again. Small chance, but better than no chance. We also don’t know if it counts to our event contribution or not if we are simply present while being defeated after being hit by an event enemy.

So I will stay and will not go to the waypoint, and that’s simply a logical decision.

If there is any fault here (I don’t know, the whole thing may be intended by the devs) it is the whole environment and the game mechanics. Not how players react.

It’s a pity, because the whole Silverwastes zone is real fun – with the only exception of not being able to return to the major zone event after being defeated. It’s not that I die often – I really don’t remember when I last died in an event in the open world while being in a group.

Other set than berserker? No. For sure, I will not buy a new armor and retrait myself only for a single new zone. It would be too tedious to reskill/change armor every time I enter or leave the new zone. If it were necessary to do this, I simply would not enter that zone.

If it were possible to do this with a simple mouse click, for example with skill/build/armor templates, this would be a totally different thing and I would do this. In fact, I would like it having different play styles. But changing everything manually on zone change is a no-go. Weapons, armor, accessories, skill points, traits… no.

Dead players are never a problem in the open world events – with the exception of the new Silverwastes, because there is only one waypoint in the whole area.

In all of the bigger events in the open world, either it is not relevant if some dead players are around, or the players are kindly asked to use a waypoint (Tequatl, Golem II). Here we don’t need any fix, because nothing is broken.

But in the Silverwastes, you are not able to reach the legendary boss or The Breach event back in time if you use a waypoint. Even if you were, you have only seconds back into the fight before the event is over. Whenever I died in the Breach, I simply waited dead and hoped for either being resurrected or getting the event reward in case no one was able to resurrect. Staying dead usually means “personal fail, no reward”, but using a waypoint is just the same. So there is no point in using a waypoint. If I were resurrected, I get a second chance on the reward and would be of more help than I would be if I run 2 minutes through half of the map from the waypoint. So I simply wait.

After getting the bosses Silver and Gold in 2 different events with numerous fails in between, you can be sure that I will not try Indigo any more. Never.

Elementalists… don’t… walk:

There are 19 different weapons. Even if you get a fractal weapon drop, which is rare by itself, the probability that you get the one skin you desire is 1/19 = 0.052. That’s 5.2 percent.

Given a probability of 9 percent of a skin drop (according to the research sheet, doing mostly 40+ and doing a lower occasionally) you have a probability of 0.052*0.09=0.0047 or 0.47 percent of a desired skin drop every fractal run.

If you do more math and compute the combined probability with multiple runs combined, you get this table:
(I computed the probability for dropping one or more desired items after n runs that in itself has a probability of 0.0047. The formula is p = 1 – (1-0.0047)^n

tries / probability with n tries
1 0,47%
5 2,35%
10 4,64%
15 6,87%
20 9,06%
25 11,19%
30 13,28%
35 15,31%
40 17,30%
45 19,24%
50 21,13%
55 22,98%
60 24,79%
65 26,55%
70 28,28%
75 29,96%
80 31,60%
85 33,21%
90 34,78%
95 36,31%
100 37,80%
105 39,26%
110 40,68%
115 42,08%
120 43,43%
125 44,76%
130 46,06%
135 47,32%
140 48,56%
145 49,77%
150 50,94%
155 52,10%
160 53,22%
165 54,32%

That means, you have to do 150 fractal runs at about level 40+ to get a fair chance of about 50:50 that you got your desired fractal skin somewhere within these 150 runs. Only 150 fractal full runs! In these 150 runs, you accumulate about 0.09*150 = 13.5 skins in total. And remember that’s only one half. Only half of all people that do 150 runs get the desired skin. At 150 is only the 50% mark, not a 100% mark, which doesn’t exist. And it tells only about the number of runs since Oct 21 2014 – with the broken probability of about 4% since the “fractured” update, your expected runs were more than doubled (about 330 for >50%)

I tried to compute the expected number of runs to get all 19 different skins with a probability of about 50%, but my school and university math is unfortunately too long ago to remember which formulas could be used for this. It’s so difficult to pick the correct one – even in school I often picked the wrong ones and forfeit the better marks.

A group of friends to do dungeons or fractals together helps tremendously. But a legendary starts with the precursor. Without precursor, it is out of reach. Don’t depend on the luck with the mystic forge. Get gold and buy it from the TP instead.

I did such a “casual acquisition” of my Bifrost. Perhaps it could help if you read my story. It was not straight and up to the point, as you will see…

I am a packrat. If I have an item of uncertain value, I keep it. For example an exotic that I could either sell for only a few gold or keep it for myself for the skin. I even made a mule guild to store these items.

With material, it is the same. I never sell material until the storage is full. I bought a stack expansion with Euro (no ingame gold). 500 is a must, because for many materials you need more than 1 stack.

One year ago, with 800 gold in cash and a bank account filled with items and material, I felt I could get a legendary weapon. I wanted The Predator for my Engineer, since the other precursors were either too expensive or a weapon I didn’t play. My T6 trophies were about 50-100 per stack, so I thought I need not much to complete the stacks. T6 material was full.

So I ordered The Hunter in the TP. At that time you could buy it for 500 gold, highest order was 430, and I ordered it for 380. 10 offers were above mine. A week later I got it.

Then I started to order the remaining T6 trophies. Unfortunately, at this time all the T6 material took a huge jump because ascended equipment was intruduced an and everyone started to level crafting to 500. I didn’t get many of my T6 orders. For re-ordering at the new price I didn’t had the money.

I pondered what to do, and a week later I decided to sell The Hunter with a 50 gold profit and forget about legendary weapons.

I still took care and saved certain material. For example, I saved a stack of unidentified dye that was needed for The Bifrost.

With my guild, we played higher leveled fractals up to 49 and a lot of dungeons. One fractal or dungon almost every day, and more. I used event timers to visit mega boss events. Salvaged all blue and green loot, salvaged rare armor and sold rare weapons. Salvaged or sold exotic drops depending on price, skin and runes. Often the salvaged parts together are more valuable than the exotic piece alone. I stopped throwing rares into the mystic forge, because I saw this a waste of material.

We never did speed runs, just casual runs with a group of about 10 guild members who took part in the runs. Someone came up with “Hey, let’s do Crucible. Or whatever you want. Anyone?”, and there we went. We had no plan, we just did what popped up.

6 months ago, with about 1400 gold in cash, I tried to explain in our guild TS how to buy and sell drops smart on the TP. I said: “You alway buy from the lowest seller or sell to the highest offer. Don’t do this. Always order at the highest offer or a bit below. Always sell at the lowest seller or a bit higher. The prices float. You will get your trade”.

As a joke, I added: “Look, The Legend costs 1000 gold if you buy it. Order it instead, and you pay 200 less. I show you.”
Then I ordered it at about 780 (don’t know if these were the exact figures, but you get the point). There were about 10 offers above mine.

I didn’t expect to see this succeed, but the very next day I was the proud owner of The Legend. I were able to flip it back with no loss, but I decided to make The Bifrost for my ele, which was the only legendary weapon I wanted to make at that time, if ever.

I detected that I secretly saved much of the required material. Not consciously, but somewhat secretly. You know, I am a packrat. I just had to order some missing things. I had enough karma, I had enough dye vials, I had enough WvW tokens, I had explored the world map and so on.

At the time some T6 trophies were still missing, while I still had a some full stacks from my first try. I sold my surplus stacks of T5 and some of my duplicate exotic weapons. I did not need any ectos, because I got enough from salvaging (about 4 stacks).

A week later all my T6 orders were fulfilled and I had all the individual material to craft every gift. Then I started crafting them and in the end made The Bifrost.

As far as I remember, the permanent airship pass was available only once for a week during Lion’s Arch invasion or shortly after it.

If you are looking for fractal skins, the drop rates seem to have been repaired as mentioned in recent update notes. I can confirm this, I got not a single fractal weapon since the “fractured” update (3 previously, from where 2 were duplicates unfortunately), but I got 3 weapons after the recent update (again 2 duplicates).

In total, in about 1.5 years of advanced fractal runs I got 6 fractal weapons, but only 4 different skins. Did fractals about 4-5 times a week for the whole time (I can show you a stack a stack of pristine fractal relics). From all 4 skins, I have use for 2 skins. The other skins are rotting in my wardrobe.

2 skins to show after 1.5 years.

One big problem with submitting something, be it a bug or bot report, is the realtime nature of the game. You don’t have the time to enter required information. Depending on the nature of the incident, it may be in the middle of a battle where you don’t even have one second of spare time.
If there were a mechanism to to remember or record things, so I can report what happened 5 minutes ago, I could and would report much more bugs for example. If I could report more griefers or other malicious players, I don’t know, however.

Of course refining saves space, but while leveling your crafting, you get XP by refining bloodstone dust to bricks from level 450 to 475. Same with the other 2 ascended materials. It’s effectively doing 25 levels at zero cost, since you have to refine anyway. I saved my stacks of unrefined material for this purpose.

Is it possible to mute the chatter from the backpiece, as well as the voice from the Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic? It really gets on my nerves after hearing the Salvage-o-Matic over and over again, and now I am haunted by talking backpieces from other players as well. The chatter from the players is already thick enough – all these calls that I am mighty, the shouts, etc. All this is really, really enough even without these additional sources of unwanted noise.
I only found out that I can mute all dialogs, but this would include every voice-acting in the game. If you could move the backpiece and Salvage-o-Matic chatter to the instruments category, I could mute them and would only loose audio of minor interest with it.

I was so glad when the Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic was muted some recent update ago, but unfortunately this was classified as a bug and reversed.

The missing parts of the story line are still a bleeding wound in the personal story. This weekend I played a new character, and there is an almost immediate jump from Lion’s Arch (recapturing Claw Island) way south to Fort Trinity with a very short stop at the strangely deformed Fort Concordia.

It felt very, very strange. There is certainly something missing. Whatever it is, there is a huge gap. Around Claw Island, we had the idea of the pact, and only 1 or 2 story instances later it is fully alive, has a full-fledged fort, troops, organization and all. This is just not right. How has it grown? How did we and Trahearne grew into it?

While the story arc that was cut out was not the best, it was way better than the hole that there is now.

As long as I keep 22 stacks of bloodstone dust, 22 stacks of dragonite ore and 22 stacks of empyrial fragments in anticipation for leveling the remaining 2 professions, they will not be raised to 500. Never.
I bet: as soon as I refine all of them, cook and jeweler will be raised to 500. But not one day earlier.

On the other hand, I see no urgent need in raising these professions to 500. There is already too much different and powerful enough buff-food around, and there are already several different ways to get ascended accessories. If I think of it, the line from Chef Robertus is probably a broad hint about this – there will be probably no ascended cooking any time soon, if ever.

I’m sure the cook didn’t hear from Molecular gastronomy yet, so I expect some other recipe suggestions from other more advanced cooks real soon now™.

Really, what do you expect from a cook who has his kitchen in the crypt of a university and uses open fire from wood logs for cooking?

Since mapping of keys to mouse buttons is a standard function of every mouse driver software, for example Logitech Gaming Software for Logitech mice, it is unlikely that using your program will get you a ban.

Verboten are certain actions, not software. Verboten is assigning multiple actions to one mouse click or key. For example a sequence of pressing 3 skills one after another automatically, and this holds true for any software that remaps clicks or keys.

Microsoft Security Essentials does nothing to GW2. I am running MSE on my machine, and it never interfered with GW2 in any way. You also don’t need to put any exceptions for GW2 into MSE or into the Windows firewall – it just works out of the box.

Your problem is not related to MSE, as long as GW2 was not infected by a virus. To view files quarantined by MSE, open MSE by clicking its icon in the task bar and choose the tab right to the “Update” tab (cannot tell how it is called in the English version, probably “History”). There is the history of quarantined files.

I assume Gwynefyrdd is not a good example of RNG mechanics relation to the topic of this thread. This is because it is so extremely rare and account bound. Gwynefyrdd is a random gift to some random players, not an item to put into the economy. Not something someone can reasonably acquire. It must be gifted.

I have an example, don’t know if it is understandable in English – it originates in the German carnival (Fastnacht). We have carnival processions, and the public is literally showered with sweeties (Kamelle) from the parade float. Imagine there are barrels over barels of sweeties, and someone mixes a tiny bag with 10 pices of praline into the barrels of sweeties. After the procession, you can be sure that 10 people got a praline. But you cannot tell who this is. And nobody in the crowd was able to influence the probability of getting a praline.

This is what happened with Gwynefyrdd. Not an item to collect, but simply a gift that is given to you or not.
Of course, you could go to the procession and spread a bed sheet to collect more sweeties, but usually you don’t do this, and you cannot be sure to get a praline even with a bed sheet.

It was mentioned that the camera height and field of vision is not as in other games. The player is put into the center of the screen, and the lower half of the screen is a bit wasted with a view of the ground behind him, while most of the action takes place in front of him. If you fight huge bosses like Tequatl, even as a ranged character, you see his paw and up to his body, but his head is cut off.

Some time ago, I installed a keyboard and mouse statistics software (Whatpulse) and this has a very nice feature of creating a heatmap of my mouse clicks. I found out that the action doesn’t take place in the middle of the screen, but slightly above it. I assume I click into the combat action to select enemies, so I actually marked where the focus of the combat is.

This supports the idea that the player character could be placed a bit lower on the screen, so the actual action takes place in the middle of the screen.
Remark: I’m playing a ranged character that is between 300-900 away from his target, and I’m only playing PvE.

I always see screen tearing, as long as the vsync setting in GW2 isn’t enabled. With activating vsync within GW2, screen tearing is gone completely.

There are 2 GW2 settings that deal with the refresh rate: the frame limiter (drop down list on top of the configuration sheet) and the vsync setting (checkbox on the bottom of the configuration setting). I think (not sure, but I think) the frame rate suffers if I activate vsync and frame limiter at the same time, so I turn the frame limiter off, since with vsync activated the frame rate is limited to the monitor refresh rate anyway.

The optimal solution on my system is:
- GW2: frame limiter disabled
- GW2: vsync enabled
- Nvidia control panel: triple buffer enabled for gw2.exe

Enabling triple buffering while vsync is active pushes the frame rate a few fps higher. Where I get 45 to 55 fps with triple buffer disabled, I get 55-60 fps with triple buffer enabled.

By the way, the adaptive vsync setting in Nvidia control panel does nothing to prevent screen tearing, so it is useless to activate.

The possibility of changing the account email address in the account options was present for a short time 2 years ago, and in this time many hackers changed the email addresses of hijacked accounts, which probably created a mess for these users and support. It’s very good that this is now a manual procedure that explicitly requires involving game support.

It’s not at Arenanet’s side, but not exactly at your side as well. Your whole network path shows that there are many sources of latency. No lags, since there is no packet loss with the packets that arrive at the game servers.

It starts with your first hop from 1 to 2. 25ms added latency is probably the path from your home to a network hub of your provider.
Then the packets travel accross australia (hop 6 to 11), where the network equipment of your provider adds about 60ms. Then from 11 to 12 the packets cross the ocean via cable. This always adds much latency – 146ms in this case. From there an additional 46ms is added on the way within the US.

That’s quite along way for the packets, but you cannot do anything about that. The only thing you can influence is the very first hop from you to your provider by choosing your Internet provider.

Being so far away from the US data center, you are unfortunately out of luck. The packets travel around half of the world, and this takes its time.

To show something like a best case in contrast: I’m in the EU, my first hop to my provider is only about 10ms. An additional 10ms is added on the way to Arenanet’s EU data center, so my complete latency is less than your first hop from your home to your provider. The whole distance the packets travel is probably less than 1000 km.

Even if I play on the US data center, my latency would be about 130 ms, where the jump through the ocean cable only adds about 83ms. On the way across the US, about 40 ms is added – about the same as in your path.

TL;DR:
It’s the internet as a whole that gives you the latency. Not your provider, it’s the sheer distance between you and the major servers.

The reason why the RNG experience in GW2 isn’t the best feeling, is perhaps due to having so many different items in the game. Older games have a more limited set of items: if there are 5 different valuable items available for a drop, you have a probability of 20% that the one you are looking for is dropping for you.

In GW2, you have 19 different weapons and ~10 attribute combinations. So if something rare or exotic drops, which is seldom enough, the probability of the one item you want is even lower – it is 1/19 * 1/10 = 0.5%. That means even if you get an exotic drop, the probability that it is the correct weapon with the correct attribute combination is 0.05%.

So in fact, you are selling almost all your drops to the TP and have to buy or craft the items you really want. The drop system feeds the TP instead of your inventory, and you buy your stuff from the TP. If instead of items money drops directly into my inventory and I would buy stuff from a NPC vendor, my experience would not change very much. It would be even somewhat better, because the constant disappointment about a rare drop not having the correct type/attributes would not be there.

The ascended weapon and armor chests somewhat address this problem: they reduce the number of combinations per drop, but remove it not completely. This is probably done due to the chess being account-bound. But I’m still mostly disappointed and many unopened chests fill my bank account.

It still happens for me as well. The inventory shrinks occasionally by 1 column from 10 (my standard) to 9 as it always did.

It flickers as well if the fullscreen resolution of GW2 is not the same as your Windows desktop resolution. For example, if you have Windows on 1920×1080 and GW2 fullscreen on 1280×720 instead of 1920×1080 as well, the monitor will flicker when GW2 activates the different resolution.

zallis.2138:

That is how Dry Top was meant to be played, but players just don’t see that.

That’s an interesting insight, because until now, I really thought that for T6 drytop it is simply necessary to fill up the instance with enough players and everyone is doing events instead of just standing around and waiting for the sand storm or killing random creatues. “Doing events” means for me: just rush to and do whatever event pops up. If players are spread out randomly enough, I thought enough events are visited. I never was in a T6 drytop.

But organize that? I never thought that organization was required or asked from the game. I always saw myself as a member of a random zerg that does random events and that scatters after one event ended. Yes, I saw that there were organizations for “T6 drytop”, but I always thought they were only there to provide taxis to make the map fill up with active players that were willing to do events.

This is certainly a thing to improve – making it more visible to the players how this map could be played in a large scale. Ingame mechanics helping to organize the players and distributing them over the events. Making sure that there are enough players on the map and displaying if there are enough players. For example every event could be displayed on the map, and display if there are players active in an event or if a an event is left alone.

As far as I saw it on my machine, this could happen if you force a certain refresh rate in the game options instead of using the default setting. In the corresponding drop down list in the game options, I can choose between 59 Hz, 60 Hz and Standard. Not using Standard causes this flickering.

I never found any jumping puzzle not counting towards the monthly achievement and I never found jumping puzzle chests already open if left alone for at least 24h.

Remember that every jumping puzzle is counted only once for the monthly achievement, so you cannot do Urmaugs puzzle in LA every day for 12 days and expect that this makes the monthly achievement. You have to do 12 different jumping puzzles.

Sorry to be somewhat off-topic, but: what a great picture quality! Look at the wall and arc in the background where the banner is hanging from the ceiling. The details, the lighting. Extraordinary. Terrific.