Guild Wars 2

Ashantara.8731:

Chaos weapons are overrated anyway. They are too bright, it hurts my eyes (liked the GW1 version a lot better). Even though I’ve unlocked several already via Wardrobe Unlock (BLC), I don’t use them.

It’s okay to not like things, but there is no need to tell people who obviously do like them that they are, y’know, wrong about their personal taste.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/New-patch-makes-me-crash/first#post6557600

That’s the nature of memory reading DPS meters: they are hacks, by necessity, and so every single patch has the risk they will crash instead of working as expected.

All the memory reading DPS meters are at risk of crashing after any and all patches to the game — they literally hack into the GW2 client and poke around internal structures to get the data they want.

If you don’t have a post-patch updated version of the meter, but do get a crash, disable or uninstall the meter and see if it reproduces. Odds are, it won’t.

If anyone comes here, but not the updated notes, apparently this didn’t get into the build as expected. (It’s unclear if this is a release notes mistake or a build mistake, but whatever, it’ll land in a later patch.)

So, pro tip: every single game patch has the potential to break memory reading DPS meters. They are not in any way “official” — every single one is effectively hacking the GW2 client to do what they do.

That means that any number of random changes made by the development team, or in some cases even a simple recompile with a different compiler for a new patch, could lead to them crashing.

Always — always — ensure your memory reading meter is disabled if you get crashes after a patch, and a new version isn’t yet available.

It really, really sounds like your GPU and/or drivers are crashing, and then recovering and getting back to work. Given the nature of bugs, it could be that GW2 randomly happens to be the only thing that draws the right stuff in the right order to trigger the problem.

I’d start with ensuring the hardware was properly seated and powered, and that you have reinstalled the most recent video drivers for your hardware.

That’s absolutely not normal. If you have the crash logs, I’d start there: where do they show the crash is happening?

The most common cause of issues with this Windows 10 update have been things like the RivaStatisticsServer and similar tools that show FPS or other performance overlays on top of the application.

Ensure anything like that is disabled, and see if the problem still occurs.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/API:Main has a reference to the API, but….

…gw2efficiency is what calculates the “value” of your account. It’s not something that ANet have defined, it’s just the idea that the authors of that third party website have of the value of it.

(Which is based on things like the cost of all the unlocked skins, etc, that you have on the account, so it’s a reasonably accurate estimate of the gold cost to get another account in the same place, but … it’s still a third parties idea of value.)

theerrantventure.9185:

I’m also a returning player who has a HUGE stack of Tomes Of Knowledge. I think I have enough to boost 2 characters to max level, near instantly, if they still work like they did.

My question is, being that content scales to level, should I just boost to max then run the storylines for rewards/gear/lore? Or should I just level the old fashioned way?

Have any mechanics changed so that my above ideas are complete garbage in today’s day and age? :P

I’d strongly encourage you to spend a bit of time in the 65+ zones before you hit HoT and living story content, just to smooth out the difficulty curve a bit, but … it’s up to you. There is absolutely no problem just boosting up if you have the tomes and all, in terms of what you can do and/or enjoy.

The only real pain point turns out to be folks who come in, boost to 80, jump into HoT, and find that the enemies — which actually play smarter than anything in core, and hit pretty hard, especially in the “glass cannon” meta builds — stomp them.

HoT is not, like, Dark Souls difficulty, but it’s certainly hard enough to be a bit of a shock if you just dive in. So … take that as you will. If you spend a bit of time getting used to skills, dodging, etc, in core tyria high level zones, you should do just fine though.

(and by the time you have the basics down, it’s pretty transferrable to the next character; I didn’t have nearly as much trouble on alts as I did on my first character into HoT, for example.)

Legendary Grenth.3561:

Is there any hope for dungeons? I seems like it has all been forgotten and just shoved into a corner there.

Fractals are dungeons without being tied to personal story. That is where future development is happening.

Just imagine that it was “dungeons of the mists” instead and you should be golden.

shroomduck.7548:

As the title says, I played a bit way back when the game launched but was playing wow too much to really enjoy GW for what it was and only made it to about level 22 or so. I’ve recently come back and can’t believe the amount of stuff to do and content to enjoy in this game. With that said, I do feel like my leveling is going a bit slowly and was wondering the best way to use XP boosters that I have been awarded via packs/birthdays.

Doing hearts / dynamic events / vistas with the booster on is probably the best way to speed through levelling. Doing the story dungeons, when you get to them, is worth in the region of two levels each (from the XP from the content, and the tome at the end.)

Doing the daily event zones, if possible, and other daily completionist achievements is pretty good at boosting you — you get more XP and some boost items there.

Really, though, I’d suggest that if you find you are moving too slow for your taste while you level, you consider two things:

One, you might be able to improve your build — choice of weapons, skills, etc — to get through content faster. You might also be able to do that in a way that feels more fun, or to switch to another profession that you enjoy more, and find that it “feels” faster, even if it isn’t.

Two, even if you run to 80, odds are that you will eventually want to go back and get at least the waypoints, and probably at least a few “world completion” runs, which means you will be doing this same content later anyhow … enjoy it?

PS: if it’s too slow because the enemy are too tough, jump to another racial starting zone, and do hearts and events there for a while until your level goes up. XP rewards are the same everywhere, so fighting things far above your level is just slower, not more efficient.

trixantea.1230:

About Agent of entropy and Hobby Dungeon Explorer achievements:

After completings these two achievemnts (250/250) and (200/200) they keep appearing in the Nearly compleated list without giving additional AP which is really annoying because it takes a place in the list without provinding useful information. Hopefully the team removes them from the nearly completed list after being completed.

Note that at least Agent of Entropy is repeatable forever, so what you are seeing is your progress through the next round of the achievement. It doesn’t award more AP after a while, but it’s still, y’know, an achievement.

BuD.7851:

Still bugged, did events leading up to & after & did not get credit.

Did your map manage to both defend the target location, and kill the boss approaching it before they got there? Seems like the most common reason people fail is they missed one of the two, and if either one fails, the whole thing fails.

The second most common seems to be that it was already taken over by the baddies, and you liberated it, which doesn’t count for the defense achievement. Team “us” have to hold it at the start of the timer.

For a personal response, you need to file a support ticket. The forums mostly support player-to-player help, and while anet CS do read them, they don’t generally respond or take individual action based on posts here.

Also, https://www.pingplotter.com/fix-your-network is a good guide to tracking down network issues. While this may or may not be a network problem, it’s a good start to eliminate that possibility.

You could also try using the `-clientport` argument with 80 or 443 for the client, and see if that helps. Some ISP “smart” filtering for torrents, etc, apparently throttles GW2 connections and causes pain, but is bypassed with that setting.

It’s useful to describe how the event is buggy, even if it’s just “NPC is stuck” or “no enemy spawns but at 17 percent done” or whatever.

It’s also generally better to use the in-game /bug command (or the menu) to report it: that includes a bunch of hidden technical details (like what shard you are connected to, which server, etc) that can help anet track down the issue and fix it.

You can also mark that as “blocking progress” which helps them understand how often this sort of thing is just annoying (eg: stuck event sucks, but whatever) vs actually stopping people getting things done (eg: stuck event prevents completion of achievement, daily, etc.)

If it doesn’t bring you gameplay advantages (eg: you don’t cheat with it) then it’s unlikely to cause you too much grief.

I wouldn’t expect anet to bless it, though, because the next person who does exploit it will point at that as their excuse.

You might be better opening a support ticket directly, since the forums are mostly for player to player support — and while the CS team read them, they rarely respond directly here.

You can also try https://www.pingplotter.com/fix-your-network as a guide to finding and fixing network issues. A disconnect like that can be caused by network problems, and if you track them down that can help.

If that shows trouble on the anet side, a support ticket is the place to get an individual response. (Though they will likely ask you to do roughly what that guide says as a first debugging step, so I’d suggest follow it, and include the details if that shows an anet issue.)

That’s an “illegal instruction”, which is probably caused by the fact it’s jumped off into random zerod out memory. Something is broken, and since the previous problem was in the kernel, I’d guesstimate it’s around the same area.

antares.5916:

Hello! I’m planning to return to Guild Wars 2 very soon since I have friends who are only playing just now. However they made their characters in one of the EU servers, and all of my characters and progress are in NA. They are asking me to change to their server.

Sadly, NA and EU are separate “universes”, and you can’t transfer from an NA server to an EU server to the best of my knowledge.

Your best bet is to contact support in a ticket and see if there is anything they can possibly do.

mauried.5608:

When this happens its worthwhile trying another way of connecting to the Net.
For emergency purposes, I just use a mobile phone with wifi hotspot enabled.
This usually changes the ISP, and also changes the routing, so if the problem is still there its at Anets end, but if its fixed then the prob lies with your original ISP or one of their upstream providers.

Unfortunately, this is not sufficient to determine if the issue is anet, or not anet — most people are somewhere between 10 and 20 hops away from the server, of which your ISP and ANet control around 5 hops on each end. The middle jumps … they could be a random third party unrelated to either, but they might be the same.

If nothing else, the upstream providers for anet are likely the same.

FWIW, I used a Turtle Beach headset briefly, and it was uncomfortable to wear (for my giant ears), but the real pain was that their microphone was way too omni-directional, and would pick up lots of background noise.

replaced with a Senhauser U320 which has a much nicer mike — no ambient noise, just voice — but still sits a little close for my ears comfort.

I’d also suggest looking at Plantronics headsets, as they have been “the” name in commercial headsets for folks who need them for 8+ hours a day as part of work, and some of that has carried through to their consumer gaming stuff too…

The critical part of the wiki that Ayrilana linked to is:

Condition Duration, like Boon Duration, has a ceiling of 100%.

So… yes, anything over one hundred percent duration is wasted, because of a game mechanics decision. There is nothing other than the naturally diminishing returns of stacking larger and larger buffs that otherwise would make it wasted.

Crinn.7864:

People declare Elites badly designed because players are only judging by the number of possible builds, while never giving a thought to the positives Elite brought in terms of gameplay.

Not just that, but they also judge based on the number of “accepted in theory as part of the meta-game” builds, without paying attention to the fact that there are significantly more builds possible than just what random other players blessed as “the best, for right now”.

(…and by “possible” I mean “suitable for use in completing any and all content the game offers, including raids.”)

https://www.pingplotter.com/fix-your-network is a good guide to figuring out where the problem is, and how to get it fixed. It’ll help track it down regardless of it being a dodgy Intel chipset in your cable modem, through your ISP, some third party transit provider, or all the way to the anet servers.

If it is at the anet end, a support ticket is the best place to start. (or you can just write them directly, and they will ask you to do the same diagnostic steps…)

Serra.5479:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Ah, well you are not likely to get a Dev response here, though it is not unheard of. There may be a bug fix; it may not show up until next year.

Good luck.

Ty man, well, I know Its hard get a dev response, but its the 4th year waiting for the bug fix and Im still waiting for it…

Have you tried reaching out to support through a ticket? It’s the only way you are assured of any direct response, and while it’s not necessarily gonna fix things, it’s unlikely to hurt that much…

As far as I know, it’s 23.5 hours from the last time you harvested them. I’m … unable to source that, though, so maybe that’s just folk “wisdom”…

savacli.8172:

First things first you need to get your AR to 150.

cough AR 150 is required for T4 fractals, so … it’s a goal, but it’s not “must do instantly.” It is entirely possible to gradually work up to that through the tiers, increasing your AR as you naturally get drops from playing the lower level fractals.

Also, check the official list of retailers on the website, and see if any of them are having a sale. At least Amazon and one other have sold it for less than full price at … as far as I can tell, random times.

Aeolus.3615:

CONS:
-In terms of content/mechanics, gw2 is very very weak compared with most mmo’s
(One of the most weakest overall mechanics mmo i haver played.)

WoW! (See what I did there? ) — I’m not sure what you are comparing it to, but GW2 is pretty much mechanically, and content-wise, comparable to most of the other games out there, in my experience.

Would you care to expand on what you mean by weak “mechanics” in this case? I’m genuinely curious to understand another point of view so different from my own, because it’s a great chance to learn something!

Plok.5873:

ProtoGunner.4953:

There are threads going back more than 2 years about 4k upscaling being kitten in this game and they didn’t change. Like with so many things in this game. No wonder people are going and find other games.

I’ve read about another QoL problem that was handled by a single developer as a side project (can’t find it right now). If that is typical it would explain quite a lot.

I feel no wish to “to vacate these premises”. Let’s hope AN will apprehend the need for some engine modernization and does not force our hands.

You mean, moving some more stuff into materials storage, which was originally not handled that way? It’s a side project for a single developer because they would like it to improve their gameplay, and because they think it’s worth spending their own personal time on.

Let me ask you this: if you want that to be the focus, what would you like to give up in return for that? Would you like to delay the next Living Story episode, or the next expansion for it? How much are you willing to slow that down in return for getting this done?

How about balance changes — think we should delay those for an extra month or two in return for 4K support? Maybe the next legendary should be put off instead?

None of this is free, and anet are (sensibly) focused on spending their time and effort where it has the greatest return on investment in terms of making life better for us, the players. That is, I think, the right decision.

Bado.4823:

i found the “problem”. its like the guy over there descibred. if u close MSI, it runs normally. if u open it again, the game will crash. wich is kinda weird tough. tried several other games, only happened with gw2. hope they fixed it either on a windows update soon or gw update.

Most likely the MSI application is what needs fixing; I understand it puts FPS and other performance graphs into the rendering pipeline as an overlay, and I’m guessing that some change in Windows — either security related, or just randomness — means whatever technique they used to inject their code into third party code isn’t working in the latest update.

For Vipers, it’s more or less a choice of crafting, or the various armor reward boxes you can get through HoT gameplay. Not just VB, since, eg, the leyline gear from the Dragon Stand meta also allows viper stat selection.

Mostly, though, once you have the mastery, you can buy almost all of it for map currency and gold from the Itzel mastery vendors or the Whispers Keeper in Dragon Stand

ArchonWing.9480:

Rauderi.8706:

Justine.6351:

I just select a new one after the huge popup screen says it’s completed and offers the final reward box.

But that’s sensible! Where’s the rage? The angst? The will to remove what others love?

Really though, it doesn’t take that much extra attention to swap to a new track. :\

Because sometimes there is overflow. It is already too late. And in WvW, you can’t always stare at the reward track.

This. When I first found this out and grumbled in /g several of our more dedicated PvP players mentioned they had, eg, collected half a dozen completions of some dungeon reward track because of overflow over the course of playing…

In general, if it’s a dense enough group that it’s hard to target something, I’m using AoE attacks primarily, so target switching doesn’t really matter “where too” other than “something”.

Miku.6297:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

According to the ANet posts on the subject, inattentive play, where you occasionally interact with the computer, and are able to respond to a GM when they talk to you, is just fine.
We can have whatever opinion on that decision we want, but the fact is: ANet have been explicitly clear that this is sufficient to be “not afk” for the definition of actionable afk stuff.

Ahh k, Thanks for the info, that was what I was wondering. I really wasn’t forming an opinion on the matter, or question the validity of A-nets stance, I was simply asking what it was.

What is the time frame a person would have to respond to GM interaction? instantly? 5 mins? 10 mins? 20 mins?

We can only guess, since ANet have not told us, but … I’d expect them to check for the “mechanical” bits first: are they standing still somewhere beneficial, killing things, etc.

So, by the time they get a GM whisper it’s pretty much “is a human watching this at all”, and that’s going to be close to an instant response required sort of thing, I’d guess?

I wonder a little if you have less memory than applications (including GW2) are consuming, and that leads to lots of swapping, and in turn to this poor performance when GW2 isn’t the “active” application winning the fight for limited resources?

Try checking out the amount of swap being done, and disk activity times, in the task manager, and see if anything stands out?

Also, how are you observing that ping time — the value in the options dialog?

OriOri.8724:

I really don’t understand why people are so obsessed with using spears

It puzzled me. Every time I poke at it, the answer is more or less “I want different weapon skills on land, please”, plus a bit of “look and feel”. Both of which are also landing with the elite specs, just … not with spears.

I’m sympathetic to the polearm desires, though, after hunting through all the staves to find one that look “hit with it” enough for my DD thief.

Eirinn.4250:

Well, there are two reasons…
First of all, I always try to find a way to obtain materials I need by myself. Especially materials I’ll need for a longer period of time.
And secondly, and this is strictly from my personal view, I don’t agree with the price on the Trading post. The difference between pre-Cadalbog price and today’s price is just too big.

You can always place a buy order at whatever price you consider appropriate?

Anyway, BloomHunger has the lodestone in their loot table, if you run the fractal, and https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Evergreen_Sliver gives you the locations and enemies to kill.

Good luck.

OriOri.8724:

Because its fairly easy to see what the traits in each traitline do.

Having watched a new player struggle with the game … it’s really, really not.

We just already know that stuff.

Buro.3576:

AFK necrofarms are objectively toxic. […]

Meanwhile I will keep reporting AFK necrofarmers as botters if they consistently do damage to monsters and won’t respond after 30 seconds, because the in-game report feature, under botting, doesn’t mention that a 3rd party program has to be involved.

My pedantry refuses to let this past: your opinions are not in any way more objective than any other opinions, and any argument that requires accepting otherwise is weak, at best.

At the end of the day, though:

One, there is absolutely no obligation for a player to do anything other than ignore you, and I certainly have a policy that if someone whispers me asking “are you a bot” while I’m playing the game, I just ignore them — nothing productive is going to come out of any answer.

(Also, this happens when I’m actively running around farming stuff. I guess … I’m a bit mechanical or something? Feels bad, yo, and that is with the most neutral “are you botting?” question, let alone when it comes with frothing insults.)

Two, you are absolutely, positively correct to keep reporting these using the in-game tools. ANet will investigate and take action as appropriate.

Three, there is nothing of value going to come out of posting this thread. People who agree with you already agree with you. People who don’t, already don’t. It’s not going to change hearts or minds. Just … report that stuff and move on.

(and if it’s too annoying that anet don’t take the action you want taken, consider if “move on” should apply to the entire game, in favor of something that does have the rules you want?)

Miku.6297:

My question is; what’s the take on inattentive play?

Being 100% afk literally away from the keyboard, asleep, what ever. Vs being inattentive present, but not really paying attention, playing something else at the same time, working on another screen etc.

According to the ANet posts on the subject, inattentive play, where you occasionally interact with the computer, and are able to respond to a GM when they talk to you, is just fine.

(note: this does not mean that a player needs to respond to you, another player, in any way, if you decide to whisper them or whatever yourself, to “see if they are AFK” or something.)

We can have whatever opinion on that decision we want, but the fact is: ANet have been explicitly clear that this is sufficient to be “not afk” for the definition of actionable afk stuff.

Nah, never too soon for the xpac following. Mostly just … it seems like suggestions for the next xpac are on an upswing right now, and I fear people are gonna be super disappointed because they are asking for core changes when it’s polish time.

xpac three, that’s likely already story-complete at this point, at a high level, I’d guess, and starting to flesh out the detail story, figure out what voicing will be needed, etc. That’s certainly the general way these things go — kind of like a series of overlapping stages, where the “get it out the door” and “very earliest design and build” work end up overlapping somewhat.

What a clever hack around the annoyance, Stitch!

Also useful: running around capturing ruins one after the next is usually pretty quiet (unless it’s a daily), and will give you max participation. It’s the least interactive way to do WvW reward tracks, but it works. Do it on your own borderlands for minimum pain.

What a great bug report!

HappilyInsane.5840:

Alright thanks for filling me in. Is there anything else I can do to up the performance?

No, not really. The hard disk or SSD, and the RAM, are usually the only upgradable components in a laptop. You already have 8GB of RAM, so that should be enough that adding extra will not significantly improve performance.

Yeah, that’s good enough for T4 fractals.