Guild Wars 2

lilypop.7819:

Careful what you wish for.

I know there are many people that will use whatever aid they can to progress their gameplay, but please understand there are also many who prefer to always remain in game.

IMO, it is very bad practice to provide no clue within the game and frankly this ruins the end of season 3 for some.

I would also add that it provides an opportunity for some players to create mischief.

I’ll be honest with you, I just followed the story and found where to cook the elixir without any problem in-game. You get told what to look for in the text, and it’s not super-hard to explore until you find it. I mean, it’s not like it’s hidden away and all, it’s right there in the open if you wander around the Quaggan area.

So … I feel like what you are really asking is more in-game hand holding, not “clues”, which is legitimate, but another thing entirely.

I kinda liked that I was less lead by the leash to this part of the whole deal. (…and that I had to do a little thinking to figure out where to get what I needed for the other ingredients, not just told “go right here, there they are.” Not much, but not zero either.)

eh, if you really want to race through, gw2timer.com has a click-to-show-me-where fastest completion option for all the dalies. JPs are mostly mesmer-ific so you can get a port to the end. It’s usually the short walk to harvest ore / plants that’s the delay.

You can even optimise that by getting enough nodes of each type in your home instance, then using that and/or the guild hall to complete them. Almost every region can be covered that way.

…but if that is all you do, just don’t play. It’s not fun any more to you.

That sounds very much like a hardware fault, rather than a general problem. It’s also … well, GW2 is not exactly the only DX9 game out there, and all, so it’s unlikely to be the only one that would experience this.

(Especially as, relatively speaking, it’s not the most GPU demanding game of the era either.)

It’s worth noting that this is definitely not the universal experience; I comfortably see 30-60 FPS in various situations, including many with lots of people.

So, it is probably worth considering that this could be some local problem, before assuming it’s an unsolvable issue with the game.

My only “ugh, nooo” was female charr ranger; the shout of “might makes right” had me hating the character, and I generated too much might. so sad.

TBH, I’d recommend “not human or norn” as the general choice. Non-human races get more interesting story and role in the lore, and it really doesn’t make much difference beyond that…

Cufufalating.8479:

This has been a well known fact since forever. The underlying truth is that the game is balanced around 5v5, and although WvW does get some specific balancing at it’s core the game is still a 5v5 game. And pets (and any other minions) scale badly beyond that.

We can still roam. We can still duel. Hell you can still zerg, be of some use and have a ton of fun while you’re at it. But the core problem will never ever go away.

I also noted that most of the pet recommendations tend to be the highest single target pets, rather than, say, the lizards with their nice cleave and aoe attacks. It’s not amazing — the three or five targets that, eg, melee weapons get — but it’s certainly more than nothing.

Have I missed something there, where preferring cleave in large group fights isn’t as useful as I think?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm

also, look for threads with a red icon to the left here, where the PvP developers actually respond.

ultimately, though, it works because GW2 tries hard to provide good matches with equal MMR, but will allow greater degrees of difference if needed to keep the queue “fast enough”.

Which it sounds like you are in — though the good news is that if you are ranked below the team, you are probably not expected to win, so consequently won’t lose a great deal of MMR from an expected loss…

Rev Hammer: 0.95 coefficient / 1.25 second (base AA)
Ranger Longbow: 0.9, 0.8, or 0.7 coefficient / 1.00 seconds (base AA)

That puts hammer at 0.76 coefficient per second damage output, vs 0.9, ranger wins the AA battle at long range, but the rev (barely) wins at point-blank range.

You should also consider:
rapid fire: 10 × 0.375 coefficient / 2.5 seconds (no aftercast info available), 10 second cd
which is 1.5 coefficient per second output, lets say ~ 1.36 in practice with aftercast

barrage: 10 × 0.4 / 2.75 seconds, 30 second cd
which is 1.45 coefficient per second output for fixed-in-place aoe effect

vs

Coalescence of Ruin: 1.25, 1.75, 2.25 coefficent / .75 seconds (no aftercast), 4 second cd
which with aftercast is approximately the same.

Drop the Hammer: 1.5 coefficient / 1.75 seconds (no aftercast), 15 second cd
which means around 0.8 coefficient per second or so.

On that front, absent traits or whatevs, the output of Coalescence of Ruin makes up a lot of the difference that the weaker AA brings to the table.

Lots of things, and nothing at all, have changed: all the things are still useful and viable, and I don’t recall a single instance of being alone for any world boss other than the triple worm, or being stuck on an overflow map.

XP comes more than fast enough that you are likely to wind up gated on mastery points before XP is a pain; make sure you unlock autoloot as soon as possible in the core mastery tree, so that you get that awesome. Otherwise just whatever order, really, is fine.

Everything gives rewards that can be used for getting ascended gear — some bosses drop them directly (hi, Teq), but even without you get salvagable gear and items that you can sell for gold, and use that to purchase what you need. The GW2 economy is gold-mediated and quite liquid, so like real life, you don’t have to do the thing yourself, you do anything, turn that effort into cash, and the cash into the thing.

You can absolutely do just the things you listed, and achieve all those goals. Don’t stress, it’ll happen. Those are all stretch goals, though, so you shouldn’t expect to quickly achieve them no matter how you focus down.

Here are some useful things to know in getting started:

Your race mostly controls voice acting; while the first three episodes of the core personal story are also related to it, that is the end point of race really mattering. So, that is the best make/break point for the decision. (Well, and looks, but … those usually you see up-front.)

All classes in GW2 are viable and effective in all types of content. There are no useless classes, and while the “meta” is a nice tool for people to pretend the game is super-unbalanced, the truth is that you can complete all the content with all the classes without ever looking at the meta at all.

You can’t make “bad” choices that will haunt you forever while levelling. It’s just not an issue.

Being dedicated to CC is probably not that useful, as trash mobs don’t really require it, and most bosses have breakbars instead — which CC eats away, and you do more damage and/or avoid problems if broken, but which don’t actually “stop” them as such.

That said, I’d probably point to Warrior as the source of the richest high-value CC options, with Mesmer in second place.

Sephas.8793:

So the possibility of a whole new map and new events and enemies is filler content?

I guess I don’t know what you are looking for.

Not to mention a new raid wing.

They are looking for the same thing anyone who ever says “filler content” is: something specific that they wanted to do, and which wasn’t part of the game as delivered.

Just do the translation in your head as if they wrote “blah blah is content that I don’t care about blah blah” and it all makes perfect sense.

TheUndeadHatter.1764:

I recently got to level 80 and finished the personal story but now I have no story quest and have no idea how to start the HoT story.

Others explained how to get it started, but to me this is extremely odd: all my characters go directly from core personal story to “LS1 recap” to “trouble in the brisbane wildlands” without pause or interaction.

It might be worth follow up with support, since as far as I know it /should/ just transit like that for everyone. Like, there is no option to avoid that or whatever.

Ayrilana.1396:

Group events

Separate from event scaling, Group Events are different in complexity and/or difficulty from other events of the surrounding area. Group Events are listed in the event assistant with “[Group Event]”, and like other events are marked on the map and compass. As their name implies, they are designed to be done with groups rather than individuals as they are unlikely to be solo-able (though some can be with patience and tactics).

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dynamic_event#Group_events

I agree that the event itself is dull but that’s the nature of most of Anet’s events like this. How would you improve it so that it is more engaging but still a group event?

Scale better, or supply non-player actors to fill in the role if needed. For example, I learned that killing the blighting tree in VB could be done solo, almost at the end of the event, when I finally observed that the NPCs were carrying bombs, and I could focus on defending them, not trying to do both.

Sure, they were slower and way less effective than players at it, but it meant that even if I hadn’t been able to summon help, it would have worked.

In the concrete case, the “have the revive-a-tron do the rez” would work, because the player could focus on defense of that rez, instead of having to do it themselves.

Better scaling up, though, would also be a big thing. The couple of times I came across it (and the champ golem at the end of rata novus event chain) after it was started, it was pretty much impossible to recover. Too many support enemies to be able to keep their attention and live, too fast spawning to gradually push them down.

On the other hand, get there at the start and it’s reasonably easy to keep up. So that’s … inconsistent. Not imperfect, not game breaking, but kinda annoying.

Deathok.2914:

Then why were ppl from anet seen doing ML too?
Just saying they let that be a thing way too long why the nerf now?
They recognized that being a thing and even thought it was a fun farm so why nerf it?

ANet staff playing on the public servers are doing just that: playing the game. They get tagged as staff because of honesty, not because they have some magic powers.

You should also be wary of speaking for them: even if anet employees used this 5x or better return-on-time to obtain in-game resources, that doesn’t necessarily mean that either (a) they thought it was fun, or (b) ANet as a whole has to agree with them.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

Except for raiding, and class balance which gives rise to the BS meta. WoW for all its staleness at least makes every single class and spec viable in the first couple tiers of PVE content.

As someone who raided LFR through to heroic (cough sorry, no it’s “mythic” cough) in WoW, and who maintained rotation addons, did theorycrafting, and worked on the simulator, I can tell you that you are absolutely, without a doubt, completely and utterly wrong about the “lack of meta” in WoW.

Surely you remember the great Frost to Unholy push for DKs? The changing roles of monks? FistWeaving vs direct healing for them? Stat preference and mitigation changes for BM? The shield and atonement changes that flipped between holy and disc like a wild wind? The ranger spec changes that moved BM in and out of desirability?

…and that was two raid tiers in a single xpac, and not even all the changes. The GW2 meta is, in fact, exactly familiar: people look at differences in theoretical DPS that are mostly in the realm of “noise”, interpret that to be “god tier” vs “absolute trash” even if it is less than ten percent direct DPS, or where there are cleave vs single target distinctions, or where utility makes all the difference.

No matter how well balanced the classes are — and I assure you that ANet have good, solid metrics on how classes perform in the real world, from their game, which they mine for data on the actual balance — the “meta” will always be there.

Contrast it with, of course, people doing 5-person kills of raid bosses, teams clearing content without needing this exact meta selection, etc. WoW was exactly the same: good teams would be clearing the top two tiers (normal and heroic, in my head, but heroic and mythic now) in dungeon blues in the first week, happily.

The “meta” is a myth, created by players who think that the class is more important than skill. In my experience, this is usually because they play roughly as badly on any class, so for them it is actually true…

Oldirtbeard.9834:

This is why GW2 Raids need to have at least a lower tier if not 4 like Fractals.

This game used to be a place where casuals could come and be welcome, and run things for fun with moderate stress free rewards (no I’m not talking insights, though in a lower tier an insight drop should be as likely as an Ascended chest in T1/T2 Fractals.

It still is. Have any of those places been removed? Have new fractals been introduced? Has more open world content showed up? hint: yes, yes it has.

FWIW, I got that a couple of days ago, not close to a map restart or patch, so it definitely sometimes spawns. Doesn’t directly help you out, but how long did you wait around for it — and did you clear other events in the region? It’s not the most … popular of maps.

Most people do place against teams they are close in skill to. The most common reasons for it not working as expected™ are:

• you are in a duo-queue with someone, where the average MMR of you both is used

• you are playing in a quiet time, so the game sacrifices ideal matches for faster matches

In the first case, there isn’t much you can do other than not duo-queue, or be similar in skill.

In the later case, you can change when you play, but at least it means that both teams are equally likely to get the low-rank players, so it’s not gonna mess up your MMR, just be less fun.

FWIW, I got this on my first kill for it, so IDK, but it’s definitely dropping in some cases.

FWIW, I see everything that will be salvaged, all icons fill in, so this seems to be specific to you. (Modulo the scrolling, but I think you are talking about the missing icons, right, not that you have to scroll to see them?)

I’d try a `-repair` and/or delete gw2.dat and redownload, and if that wasn’t effective (and it’s not just that it is being laggy loading the icon, give it a minute, literally), contact the CS team.

I use it, not because of the bug, but because of exactly as you say, it’s part of the pvp action. Given how publicly it’s been talked about here in the forums, I’m confident enough that if I get in trouble I’m gonna cite my posts and expect to be forgiven.

YMMV, of course.

Gator.5729:

As Inculpatus stated, Anet doesn’t own, operate or control the tier 3 providers that your connection passes through. You ISP has a contract with them to provide service, they (your ISP) is the only one who can help you with it.

Even this isn’t necessarily true: sometimes they ISP and/or ANet have one or two other companies between them and level3 or whatever other backbone transit provider carries that traffic.

It’s a complex world out there, in the network.

You are not likely to see an official response, probably because your idea is untethered from anything resembling reality.

These changes are neither easy, nor would any “easy conversion” make a performance difference. Those performance differences, should they exist, would come from restructuring the engine to take advantage of newer and lower overhead abstractions in DX11, not from “magic”.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Copper and Gold have the same meaning to Danikat We should applaud Danikat for not making a difference between them.

The biggest adjustment coming for WoW and it’s horrible inflation problem was that I literally ignored the silver and copper parts in WoW — they had no meaning. You just used gold as the measure. (…and thanks to addons, you didn’t even need to see those pointless minor denominations.)

It’s not that the cost, value, effort, or time of anything changed, just that you would pay 1g in wow where you would pay 1c in GW2. It was interesting adjusting to that, but that’s a human problem.

Burtnik.5218:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Burtnik.5218:

Im still waiting for added dx11/12 support. Its 2017 for f sake. AAA title but it feels more like its runned up by some indie studio.

I keep seeing people say that, and … what do you think that DirectX 11 or 12 support will actually do for GW2?

Improve performance, add multithreading support and maybe remove.. all the ugly as f textures from 1990.

Dx9 is ridiculous old technology.

I see. So, useful facts for you:

DX11 or DX12 are not substantially more efficient, except in the case of multi-threaded engines being able to concurrently construct frames without hitting some of the internal locks in the graphics engine on the submission path.

Multi-threading is actually limited by the GW2 parts of the stack, not the DirectX parts, and while it might improve performance, it’s probably better to focus on the actual change (better multi-threading in the GW2 client) than something unrelated (change DirectX version) if you want to advocate for it.

…and, eh, “remove the ugly textures”?!?!? I’m really not sure what you imagine DirectX is, but … I just want you to know that regardless of what version of DirectX the engine of your game uses, Microsoft don’t send magical texture pixies in to replace the assets supplied by the game developer.

(Unless you are theorising that the textures are unable to be changed because of some limitation in older versions of DirectX, rather than because those are the textures the game has, or something?)

So, the short version is: none of the things you imagine would be improved by this have anything to do with the DirectX version.

Lyger.5429:

Ayrilana.1396:

How are spirit shards progression?

It’s not just the shards it’s the fact that you’re gaining experience from doing something but it goes no where. It’s just something you don’t see in an MMO and makes no sense. Even when you reach level cap in other games, you can always gain progression in some sense.

Not WoW. Not BDO, in any significant way, given that the lvl 68 to 69 gap is so big that it’s unbridged — and 70 is approximately infinity xp from 69.

Also, in many, many other MMOs the “gain progression in some sense” is “work on masteries until completed”, at which point you just … stop getting XP.

eg: your thesis is incorrect, and other MMOs do not all aware either XP, or alternate progression, at cap.

Probably a bug, but I don’t believe there has been a concrete answer yet. It’s been known for some time now.

Oh! I honestly figured that “rarer material” was, eg, getting a gemstone drop when mining ore. The “iron ore” or “orichalcum ore” was the basic stuff. The gem (or firefox cluster, or whatever) was the rarer thing, which you got more frequently.

cough A quick check says this is hostile adware, which injects advertising into your browser. You probably want to go beyond just that little step of removing all this.

Stormcrow.7513:

Farming Flats.5370:

Probably just a marketing stunt.

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/windows-10-game-mode-tested-does-not-offer-any-performance-boost-in-its-current-state/

Reading that article kind of justified my gut feeling about it. Hopefully they will attempt to improve it and hopefully it will make a difference in GW2.

It is pretty much impossible to do anything that will make a significant difference, as there are relatively few huge performance-killing things between the application and the hardware.

The most recent one was the DirectX 12 and other bare-metal multi-core-friendly GPU interfaces, but those allow the developers to rework the engines to improve stuff, not anything the “kernel” could do alone.

So, yeah, game mode, not really gonna be a thing.

…uh, ok. I’m … I’m sure I did that, but I believe you and the help page, and I was wrong. Sorry.

Short answer is “whichever is in a laptop with better cooling”, followed by “smallest number of CPU cores”.

Long answer:

Cooling matters a great deal in laptops, to avoid thermal throttling, since they have lower overall TDP and necessarily have worse cooling than desktop or server systems. Obviously, this can be pretty hard to measure the difference, but a reasonable rule of thumb is “pretty usually means worse cooling”, with the exception of Apple laptops and their nice all-metal all-radiator design.

To the second, GW2 is mostly single-threaded, so it benefits most from better single core performance. While all Intel CPUs scale up core speed as they shut down other cores, the general rule is “more cores == slower cores”, so 4 cores >>> 6 >>> 8 cores for this.

(and while they do use less cores and run faster when your 8 core thing is under single core load, imperfect heat distribution means there is a limit to how much it can do.)

Stick a timer into map servers, so that after some amount of uptime they will trigger a “move to another map”, and then shut down gracefully once everyone has left. This will help work around stuck or buggy events.

Yrs truly, someone who has a legendary collection requiring event completion on an event that usually sticks. (Yes, it’s horrible, but it keeps things moving at least somewhat, rather than waiting for the next patch !!! to find the event working.)

Ashen.2907:

Do an event once…get the rewards for that event once. Want to get the rewards again? Do the event again. Seems like a pretty straightforward system.

Doesn’t that make sense, though? …and yet, people complain, though, that they no longer get 5x to 50x the intended reward for the content, and simultaneously complain about how boring it is to only have one sort of content they ever do…

Do world completion, or start a new character and let that guide you through.

Ultimately, though, just do whatever the heck seems interesting. If your character is 80, you can do anything. (and, unlike other MMOs, low level zones will not be super-trivial, though they will be easy, because you scale down to match.)

Try running `gw2.exe -repair`

Try taking your armor off before doing it. (Sounds dumb. Apparently works for some people.)

You can also move the boost item out of that slot, into a bag or bank, any time you want. Don’t have to keep it hanging out there.

They are both equal. Play the one you enjoy more.

lilypop.7819:

BTW: Wiki doesn’t help in this problem area as it doesn’t indicate where either.

You can create a wiki account, and edit the text, at no charge. Please do exactly that, since you know what you were looking for, and so can put the directions you would have expected in the place you would have looked.

A bushel of apples to the developer who reduced the respawn timer of the ley line anomaly events by 15 minutes, or increases them by the same.

circuitnerd.5863:

Tekoneiric.6817:

“Nothing breaks immersion quite like…”

Invisible walls…

This I can totally agree with. If I can jump to or fly to some place, then I should be able to. If you want players not to go there, instead put large rocks or some sort of terrain. Not just a solid invisible wall.

Blame gliding being added later: it’s less expensive to wall things like that, than to fix all the terrain to actually support “physical” restrictions as implied by gliding.

At least they didn’t do a WoW and just turn off gliding in older zones entirely…

I’d strongly suggest aiming for US peak times — EST 5PM through to PST midnight — and being on the map around ten or fifteen minutes before the previous round closes and new maps open.

That is the best time to find a “taxi” squad which will bring people together for the next round of the meta events, and optimal for getting through it.

US weekends are also pretty solid, often having events through the day.

Honestly, the game mode is mostly two things: some enhancements to the “game” bar which does recording and screenshots, and marketing.

It’s highly unlikely to make any real difference in performance to more or less anything, even on relatively low end and thermally constrained systems like gaming laptops or Intel built-in graphics.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Remember, bugs go on a priority list, and work their way up. This particular bug may be very low priority, or…it may be more complicated than the playerbase’s idea of ‘just flip a switch’-type of simple fix.

Yah, this. It is always worth remembering that devs love closing these little annoying things off. So, if it really was that simple they would totally have done it. (Plus, solving lots of little things is good for the heart, and the performance review.)

The timing is shrug, but yeah, it’s about trying to work around the bugs so that players are not held up forever, even if nothing “manually” triggers the failover. I’m reminded that I have a collection that requires a Kodan claw event, which is one of the reported buggy ones, to finish…

Yah, I’d assume that it means that you get “rare chance * 1.25” when using it, so the actual change is less than 25 percent because of the magic of diminishing returns.

FWIW, this is the same approach used by the gw2timer.com overlay, and that works quite well.

TL;DR on this is: it depends way too much on you for anyone else to tell you what to play.
I can tell you that every class in GW2 is absolutely, positively capable of completing all content in the game, including getting into the highest tiers of PvP, completing raids, fractal 100, etc.
It sounds like you are focusing more on the “meta” builds, which are the “theoretically optimal” builds — which means approximately nothing compared to player skill for almost all the content.
It is only if you are fighting for the #1 place in PvP, or trying to do a five-person raid clear in record time, that you have to play one of those. In most cases, too, switching to the “meta” build from something you know well will reduce your overall effectiveness.
In this game, as most others, player skill is much more significant than gear or build in getting things done.
So … play what you like.

I’m pretty sure that ANet have metrics measuring what it is set to across the playerbase, and can much, much better make a judgment about what the best default is than any player is able to.

Burtnik.5218:

Im still waiting for added dx11/12 support. Its 2017 for f sake. AAA title but it feels more like its runned up by some indie studio.

I keep seeing people say that, and … what do you think that DirectX 11 or 12 support will actually do for GW2?