Guild Wars 2

Avelos.6798:

Come to think of it I doubt more there are a lot of people who even play Guild Wars 2 with a DX9 graphics chip anymore. DX 10 for Nvidia started at the gaming line of GeForce 8 series and Radeon HD 2000 series for ATI. Anything beyond those two lines are extremely dated and probably way too slow to run the game adequately anymore unless you had/have like two 7800 GT or two HD 2900 in SLI/Crossfire. Though multi card setups of those generations would probably be more problems than solutions. Crossfire and SLI was still rickety and performance gains were eeehhhh.

Also I went and seeked out information that confirmed your information as positive, TinkTinkPOOF that DX11 games will play on DX9 hardware. That the games will have some sort of DX9 fallback mode. I find that actually interesting.

Indeed it is, but then it makes you stop and think….WTF devs, why are there so few games on new DX when MS has made it a point to be backward compatible? And the only real answer is consoles, which is why when new ones come out, I could careless about the HW in it, I want to know what DX it will be based off of, and most of the time they are to cheap or lazy to do a PC version and what we get is a chopped together port that runs like crap.

Behellagh.1468:

No we are not. The XBox 360 architecture isn’t x86. Not the same instructions at all. They aren’t even the same endian.

You were the one who suggested that maybe the 3 core-ish cap in performance was related to the XBox 360 and that maybe ArenaNet was considering a version on that platform as well. You can’t be saying they were targeting the XBone because the game was in development from 2007-12.

The suggestion for the console was the reason for the lack luster performance and API choice, it had nothing to do with comparing raw power of PC vs consoles. I also don’t understand what the development time has to do with anything?

Avelos.6798:

When it comes down to it if I were one of the developers of the game I would have opted for DX9 as well over 10 or 11 so more people could play the game. Even with the game how it is you can get reasonable acceptable performance with most hardware configurations since the game’s graphics are scalable.

Just another case of the pros outweighing the cons.

DX11 games will play on older HW, however if the HW only supports DX9 and there are DX11 only related gfx etc etc they will not be shown/rendered on the DX9 HW.

Behellagh.1468:

@Avelos

But HT simply lets the cores run more efficiently by presenting the instruction scheduler with a second set of code that doesn’t interact with the first, allowing a higher IPC.

And since the ARM cores in the 360 and the x86 cores in the XBone are single thread, thought to use the i5 in comparison so HT doesn’t get in the way.

@Tink
GW2 isn’t GPU bound, but CPU bound. It doesn’t matter if the consoles were running 1280×720 or not. Either of us can run the game at that resolution and boss events and zergs will still drive the frame rate to it’s knees.

If a modern let older CPU like an i5-2600 has problems, what would it be like on something with considerably less performance? Conversely if they had gotten a design to run well on such a slow (to today standards) set up, we wouldn’t be having all these threads about frame rate issues.

If we were talking about another PC CPU vs another, like talking about AMD vs Intel builds in a generalized manner, I would agree. But we are not, setting up for a system like in a closed ecosystem such as an xbox/PS you can get FAR more out of the HW because you know exactly what you are working with in every case and are not dealing with mangled 3rd party HW and drivers etc etc.

As a PC gamer I am sure you have played many bad ports, that from a HW stand point should run amazing on PC, but doesn’t, yet still plays just fine on a wholly underpowered console, this, in a nutshell, is the problem I am speaking of.

Whats wrong is the computer cant play the game, you have a laptop with an integrated GPU, those FPS seem about right to me, you are right at the minimal system requirements for this game, and as you can see, it plays the game…Just not well.

Please post your proof that it is anets servers.

Behellagh.1468:

TinkTinkPOOF.9201:

The 360 was a triple core, which would have been the target if the game ever had consoles in mind, as well as the API choice. Consoles have always and will always be behind PC, more so now that they have taken on more PC like builds, they will always be cheaper PC’s. The only reason they play the games as well as they do is because of no HW variation and as such much higher optimization than ports to PC have.

You don’t get what I’m saying. Each of the 3 cores in the XBox 360 is less powerful than each of the cores in the XBone which each are less than half as powerful as a core in an i5-2600. If the game was written at one time to try to run on an XBox 360 it would run fantastic on a PC because of all of the additional performance, 3 to 4 times per core at least.

Yes consoles do have an advantage when talking to it’s peripherals (this includes the GPU) because there is no variation so there’s no need for any abstraction and overhead of API to driver to hardware. But what is the underlying limitation we are seeing, CPU or GPU?

I get what you are saying just fine, and do not understand why you are trying to say that I am saying the per thread power of the CPU in the xbox is the same as a i5? Not really sure where you are coming from with that. Also, you can not compare how a game will play on a PC with far more processing and GPU power that plays on a console, the massive amount of poor ports we have today show this, as well as most consoles are 720, so the pixels they are driving are far less. The point was about how the game was setup, the API choice etc etc point to the fact they wanted to try consoles, and even remember a video a while back talking about this, however why it never made it to console might be because it never reached the minimal FPS needed to be released on the console (something MS requires), or they had a change of direction, who knows.

Recalibar.6482:

I’m surprised you guys have such ease seeing a few particle effects though the zerg, let alone select him through the sheer numbers of other targets.

As already stated, you will see invulnerable pop up and there is also tab targeting. It is really not that hard….At all.

Seera.5916:

ItIsFinished.9462:

All hacked accounts have one thing in common….

Not necessarily.

All it takes is for a datbase on a fan site to get hacked and then emails and passwords possibly are out there. If people used the same password, then chances are they’ll be hacked.

Then there are phishing emails…

Indeed, and most people do use the same password/username for everything, also, hacked accounts/emails are almost never done by the person abusing the account, these are often mass crackings that the data is then mined from and sold in bulk, the buyer then uses that info to get into accounts and sell items/gold for real money.

The 360 was a triple core, which would have been the target if the game ever had consoles in mind, as well as the API choice. Consoles have always and will always be behind PC, more so now that they have taken on more PC like builds, they will always be cheaper PC’s. The only reason they play the games as well as they do is because of no HW variation and as such much higher optimization than ports to PC have.

Consoles are not far off, and some people say why GW2 does as bad as it does, also why it only seems to use 3 cores, why it has the skill and utility count that it does and why it was based off of DX9 as the xbox uses a somewhat modified DX9 setup, so it could very well be they had planed on trying it out there, but never did for some reason if that is the case.

Loosmaster.8263:

They have a pretty blue flame on them when RI is up. Pay attention!!!

Not just that, but the attacks that do that large amount of damage a blind person could see coming a mile away, and should be dodged, if you can’t see that or the fire that engulfs the NPC, I would say you need to take and spend some time outside the zerg and learn how to play.

roguenub.1409:

abomally.2694:

“Servers are routing through China or something..”

This statement shows why most people are blaming A-net for their ISP/network problems – they don’t know how the internet works, much less networks in general.

ArenaNet has NO control over the path the data takes TO or FROM their servers.

So these problems coincidentally happened recently, with multiple people, over multiple ISPs?

The backbone that is used is often used by many if not all of the ISPs, so IPS does not really matter, what matters is the route the ISP you have chose to give you to a given server, if that node is having a problem of some sort all traffic going through it will suffer. This happens all the time, but most people who are not into networking have no idea of how it all works and think the only thing there is for the connection is their modem and the anet servers, and that is just not the case, if this was a server problem everyone would be having this problem, but rather it is a small amount compared to the user base that does.

OGDeadHead.8326:

It would be very interesting to see this game taking advantage of Mantle.

Why?

I mean really, I see so many people drooling over this and its like every problem there is with a game people reply “just wait for mantle” or “if it only supported mantle”, when most people have no idea what it is or the VERY few areas it helps, which tends to be on AMDs APU’s because of having a lopsided setup of a weak CPU and stronger GPU. You are also (as already stated) stuck rewriting for a new and so far unsupported API when you could just write it for DX11 for the higher parallel threading rather than off loading to the GPU. Almost every review of mantle shows the only improvement when you are running a strong CPU like a i5-i7 only comes when you have a powerful GPU and kitten your monitor resolution to place a higher load on the CPU.

I am all for moving ahead, but you have to understand what you are working with and what it was intended for. Most RTS and MMO games are rough on the CPU because many are still based on the DX9 API and much of the CPU power is being wasted on directx calls.

Behellagh.1468:

Game’s not GPU bound.

Indeed, you would think with all the posts about this people would know, or at least research before doing a upgrade for a given game.

Most places charge way more than what is needed for repairing laptops, big time when it comes to the OEM. The noise could be any number of things, from bearing in the fan, or something that slipped into the HS/fan and is rattling around to the HDD. Something like this, the only real way to know would be to open it up and look around.

Overclocking often times does not give a huge boost to FPS, what is helps with are minimal FPS, which is when most people start to notice FPS, when you get into an area that “lags”. Sure, the AMD system might do well in the game, but clash into a wvw zerg and the difference of 15 extra FPS on the minimal side can mean the difference of playable or not, people get far too caught up in max FPS, where it all is at however is minimal. There was a 20 something page review on stuff like this, one GPU got 80FPS in a game, while another only got 60FPS, but everyone who played the systems all picked the one that only played at 60FPS, why you ask? Because while on a benchmark the first GPU seems great on paper, it had bad drops to minimal FPS of 24, while the second never dropped under 50, but because these short drops were so short, the benchmark gave it a higher average rating than the other card.

I say all this because there is allot more to system building than just numbers, asking what games better etc matters on what you plan on doing with it and what you plan on playing with it, as well as what resolutions you plan on gaming at. Most games today are not CPU or GPU limited, most all midrange cards can max most games at nice FPS, the need for highend only comes into play with multi monitor or very high rez screens. Games like GW2 however, are limited by CPU power, we are at a point in time where we have the GPU power to max the game, but not a CPU with the power on a single thread to max the game, we have CPUs far powerful enough to max it, however the game is limited on being able to use all CPU threads at once, and so for the most part goes unused.

The Intel build you have is that much higher than the AMD because you went out of your way to make it so. This is more like midrange AMD based build vs higherend Intel based rig, the $400 extra is not because it is Intel, but because you picked higher end parts everywhere in the Intel build, why not stick with the same part but just get a Intel mobo/cpu?

Number one, you are getting a K line Intel yet say you will not overclock, that is extra cost for no reason. You add in a AIO cooler over highend air cooler, because you think it is better, but it is not, time and time again, every review site has shown highend air to cool better than AIO (all in one) coolers, if you want watercooling and the temps and low noise to go with it, do a custom loop, the 212 will do just fine here as well. You get faster RAM which does nothing for gaming or most computer work, there are very few things done on computers that will bottleneck on RAM bandwidth, the idea of faster RAM is always better has sort of dropped off, on the core2 chips and those before, RAM speed had a HUGE impact on what kind of over clocks you could get because you OCed by changing the front side bus speed and as such the ratio of the RAM, today we OC by unlocked multis and as such the ratio is not changed as the FSB stays the same. Then you give a huge bump in cost to a GPU over the AMD system, then you add on an extra SSD, and not just any, but one of the highest priced SSDs out there that will not ever show its performance in day to day or gaming and for less than the cost of the pro and the 1TB black you could get a 480GB M500.

If you keep everything the same, but get Intel over AMD and as such a pretty good boost in GW2 performance, it will cost you about 60-70 bucks extra, not anywhere close to $400.

This can depend allot on the load of the server or how much bandwidth they have allocated for each connection.

As stated, the aoe cap of 5 from most skills is a big reason for this, being tight reduces the number of hits each person is going to receive, also, combat and “real” warfare is not arrow or line formations, not really sure where you got this idea or why you think that is how real fights happen. Balling up IS a tactic that takes advantage of the current system, it allows for the damage to be spread out, it allows buffs to hit more people, it takes advantage of culling (hiding your true numbers, veil etc etc), it gives an easy team for pugs to follow, it makes it harder to target down a single person, it gives coverage to the commander, if you down a commander in a battle, often times all is lost as the time it takes for someone else to take command the fight is over.

HoD has far more people right now than you will see in the coming weeks. Right now the queues are because half or more of the people in WvW are PvEers and once things get harder they are all going to leave and you will see more of the core WvW players come back in because they will not have the same kind of queues, but the player base will be far more skill oriented then also.

Last night was following a commander and we went up to a keep on EB, about 3-4 AC were setup, HALF if not more of the zerg was downed, almost all zerker uplevels. Even though there were 50 people in the zerg, a good 15 man skill group would have wiped us because only a small amount were in TS or showed any skill. Now, with that said, I have seen some of the guild groups from HoD running around (often times tagless), and they are very good, I also know KOME will be sticking around and they also have lots of skilled players and enough of them to queue a map on their own.

So I think it will even out, HoD wont have the queues and numbers we are showing right now, but that will be offset by the skill players coming back in.

It is not just the AA, but Zealot’s Defense as well does not do dmg to siege, every now and again, i might be standing just right and it will hit for part of the dmg, but it almost always passes right through it without dealing dmg.

Gizmo.9178:

I had the store owner build it for me. He is also the one who suggested using amd instead of the i5. This was my first time and he said that the computer would run better with the amd.

I originally had a list of parts that I wanted(I had help from TomsHardware). The store owner who built it for me explained why I should make the changes that he suggested.

Now it seems like I made a huge mistake. I don’t really have the money for new parts which is why it took alot of explaining from the store guy to convince me to change what was on my list. Now I feel silly.

What suggestions did he give? I would really like to know if you can remember, as the AMD CPU he gave you is low end, even in other games the i5 would destroy it, even in multi threaded apps/games it would not even be close.

I would also take it back and tell them that the suggestions and changes they made to your build were wrong and that the system builder gave bad advice without any thought to its given use.

From what I have seen on HoD is that most of the real WvW people/guilds are not spending allot of time in WvW, as right now it is just to easy, and all I see are karma trains running, blatant ones that that, commanders who are really bad coming onto the map and saying “On me for karma!!” in map. I know my guild would much rather open field fight than knock down doors over and over again and we have just not seen that, every time we find another group in open field, they run back into their keep. As such, I find myself playing WvW even less these past few weeks and when I do it is just roaming for the most part.

So with that said, once we come into some servers with a bit more power you will probably see allot better tactics, because right now the WvW seems to be filled with PvEers and people just karma training along, and seeing how HoD is almost 80k points ahead already you really don’t need that good of players to hold it, as we all know numbers and coverage is all that is needed allot of the time.

The Logitech software is used for key binding etc, it does not matter what software you have or use, even if it supports making macros, as many KB’s and mice have built in hardware based memory for macros, and are 100% legal to use, what is not legal is using the macro functions.

Legionnaire.1586:

Ok to make it more clear, i need a build made for roaming where ill be very hard to kill, and iv’e noticed that i use my skills a lot (condition damage) so i might factor that in also.

Being “hard to kill” has nothing to do with stats in this game, you can have builds that are all over, from zerker, to healing that are hard to kill, wvw is all about active game play and knowing what you are fighting and how to counter it, if you do not know how to do this, no build or stat combo will help you.

Once you learn this you will end up running some sort of DPS build for roaming and another build for zerging.

I think the first few posts from CD members are prime examples of why the guild is moving. Which is sad to me, being a long time CD player (since Beta), but I guess it is just time to move on. It is a shame there has been this hindrance to the server, other wise it could be a great place to grow. But time to move…Good luck to CD and all those that stay.

Most OEM computers are BIOS locked, there are some programs that work with some mobos to change fan speed, however, you can not change the max speed of the fan, if the fan for some reason is not spooling up to 100% and over heating, contact ASUS, if it is, there is nothing you can do, once the fan hits it’s max speed, that’s all there is, and laptops tend to hit that speed pretty easy because of poor cooling in such a cramped space.

itsshortstuff.7148:

Hello,

I was talking to one of my guildies and he mentioned that my boyfriend’s computer’s CPU might be bottlenecking his GPU. Here’s the current build:

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955
GPU: Sapphire Radeon 7850 OC Ed.
PSU: NZXT 550W
MoBo: ASUS M5 A97 R2.0
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2×4GB)

If it is, what would be a good replacement for the graphics card?

I think you are a little confused, the GPU is the graphics card, you need the upgrade the CPU, not the GPU, AMD has far worse single thread performance than Intel right now and GW2 sees the most gains from CPUs with high single thread performance. Save the money and upgrade to a Intel system, if you get a higher end GPU for his system, I assure you that you will be disappointed with the results.

What are the specs of your system?

Rezz.8019:

What if you have a stack of each and just want to make 7 rams? How would you make that work? Only thing that comes to my mind would be a “craft all” button. So you either craft one or all of the things you want (it would work for anything).

Yes, it could work just like that, however, in crafting, the “1” can be changed to anything from 1 to whatever is shown under “craft all”. This is the one major pain I have for making siege.

Did you only change the mobo? Did you swap it out for the same model or get something else? Did you reinstall the OS or any drivers? What are the CPU temps at load?

Define “can’t use the internet”. What sites are they trying to access or what are they doing? While you are playing, have them run a speed test, most online games use very little bandwidth, at least for a connection like that, it should be no problem.

I think we should treat this CDI like they did our last suggestions, that being, just ignore it, because we all know they are going to do whatever they want to anyway.

So, unless you are already inside the tower etc, this means that just about no one would show up to defend a location unless it is a large blob, because the smaller or solo people will know they will not be able to get inside to man the siege there, so why try? Sounds like a poor idea. Also, dropping and manning siege is a part of WvW, we need things that make people want to defend places, not more reasons to turn people off from it.

SolarNova.1052:

If dust isn’t the issue and replacing the TIM doesn’t help….. RMA.

This.

Over heating is always going to be a HW issue assuming no OCing involved or really high ambient temps. Also, as stated Evga is very good about mods, all they care about is that the part be returned for RMA as it was sold. When I first started watercooling my cards I called their support and asked them if I were to remove the HS and put a waterblock on the card would it void the warranty, they said no, it would not, so long as the card was returned with the OEM HS, there would be no issue.

Do you know what kind of infection you had? There are many that can mess with other files or programs or connection/port settings. I would uninstall and reinstall the game after running combofix to be sure you are clear of infections.

I have mained a guard since beta and not really cared to level anything else. However as of late, with all the talk of how OPed warriors are, I thought I would try one out, as I never really had trouble with them 1vs1. So I made one, and I can say from what I have had the chance to play, the comments of why guard are close to warriors in survivability even with far less HP because of mechanics is utter BS. I started out with a full zerker warrior, still getting 20k HP, I do that on my guard and am lucky to have 11k and the damage output is no where near the same. The mobility is also crazy, staying on a target is easy, and then the warrior has so much access to control on top of it. I ran into a few of the same people I do roaming most nights in the BL and wanted to give it ago with them….tested a few builds out in 1vs1 and I could win without even trying, taking down 2 people who on their own were a bit of a challenge on my guard, were easy prey for 2vs1 with the warrior.

I will agree with people who say warrior has just as high a skill cap as any other class, I can see it has allot to offer, it just does it so easy, joining into zergs I was staying alive longer on the zerker warrior than I was on some of my more “tanky” guard builds. I love my guard, don’t get me wrong, but the few days I have had with my warrior, has shown me what I have been missing.

You would first need to set up a line monitor to see how your latency is on the network, and then figure out what is the cause of it. Seeing as it is a wirless ISP, you have room for all kinds of trouble, green lights also mean nothing. That means it is “connected” and even if it has a signal strength on it, that also means nothing. It is the same as any wireless transceiver, not only does it have to have a good signal from the tower, but your AP also has to be able to transmit back, which is the most common problem with these kinds of networks. Does the AP you have allow any kind of access? That is can you log into it and see any signal strengths etc? If it is a common wifi type of AP, it might, but if it’s working in one of the other bands it might be proprietary HW and not allow access.

Because given AV’s and the like don’t find anything does not mean the computer is clean or that the infection you had before did not damage the system in some way.

I would DL and run combofix, then run the system file checker to check for missing or corrupt files.

After that DL programs such as coretemp and OCCT, so we can see what kind of temps your computer is running at load and if loading up the CPU/GPU can reproduce the crash. Also check your minidump folder to see if there are any crash logs, just because you don’t see BSOD’s now does not mean there will not be helpful files in it.

I have done this first hand. The player in question seemed to be lagging as they were running to the gate and I used JI to get to them as they were almost dead and I ported to the door and then POOF I am inside the tower. However, I have never been able to do it again.

borrok.9267:

azurerogue.9240:

borrok.9267:

Eloquence.5207:

Clearly, this is a L2P issue.

- HerpsADerPs, Oneofthe12DerPs

I would probably agree if it wasn’t a matter of numbers. The best player in the world will get hit the same with the same set up and variables on both ends.

False. The best player in the world knows how to mitigate damage from key attacks.

The best player in the world will get hit the same with the same set up and variables on both ends

His point was that the better player would not get hit in the first place from a burst, meaning that he would not take the same damage. Many classes can do more dmg than siege, it’s not hard, and just like siege, the dmg from another player can be mitigated, GW2 is not about number stats, it is about active play and mitigating damage rather than tanking or out DPSing the other player, what matters is player skill.

The old AMD HS’s use to be pretty good vs intel and allowed for some pretty good OCing on stock. However, that is not the case with newer HS’s, sure, you can do some OCing with the stock HS, but the fan is going to be maxed and really loud and you will probably be running close to 100C, which is not something I would suggest, when a good HS can be had for 20 bucks or so depending on sales at the time.

Malwarebytes and combofix should be the first things you DL and run. After that, at the very least as stated, change the password on everything, email, banking, games etc etc, best is to make another email account as well. People forget that often times login info is emailed to you, one of the stupidest things websites/games do, because if this single point is cracked, they then have access to all of your accounts, and anytime you reset the PW, they also get the email with the new PW and log back in.

People use the same password almost everywhere, I see it all the time, they also have the habit of using the same login ID, so once they get a hit on a user name and PW, they often run it through a list of sites for extra hits.

Learn to use pass phrases, rather than words, it allows a person to remember long passwords that are unique to each site. “ThisisMyGW2loginPASSWORD!” or something like that, it is a phrase so it is easy to remember, it has some kind of link to the site/game etc in it so you know what it goes to, it has random caps, is 25 characters long, has numbers and special characters in it. To brute force a PW like that, would take trillions of trillions of years to guess because of network throughput, even with a single file mounted to a RAM disk with billions of guesses a second would take trillions of years, the only way someone would get access would be by it being revealed to them, through other means or a unsecured database.

People often think it might not be a good password, because it has words in it, and yes, those words might be in a dictionary attack, but the attacker has no idea what the password looks like, and the chaces of a PW like that being in their databases/dictionaries is moot, and after they fail to get a hit they will move on because the only other choice is a exhaustive password search and the only thing that matters to protect from one of those is padding, that is total password length, as the PW above has a password search space of 28,034,052,602,738,549,436,590,497,089,977,609,984,418,179,126,495. The trick is coming up with your own personal padding, something that you will know/remember, then all you have to do is add something unique to the padding that links to the given site for the PW and you are set, because no one is going to do an exhaustive search on you, because well, you are not worth it and the chances are so low, the attacker goes after low hanging fruit, and unless the person is targeting you for some reason, all other attackers are just going to move on.

Avelos.6798:

RAM doesn’t need to be installed in pairs of 2+2 or 4+4. As long as the two sticks, if 2 GB and 4GB are the same spec and latency, it won’t matter.

If it is not installed in pairs, it will not run in dual channel. Which cuts through put a good bit, however, this computer might be running 2×2 and 1×1 for a total of 6GB.

Skill lag is not the same as render lag, and there is nothing to be done about it in WvW, I can hit a zerg where I still have well over 30fps, but takes minutes to cast anything other than AA. This has to do with the number on people in the area and stress on the server and the fact that the game puts the AA as priority. This has gotten better to some extent, but it still there.

What gives? What gives is you are being hit for 12k, don’t. Learn to counter them, yes, thieves can be powerful, but more often than not, they are just annoying. They are a light class that is meant to deal big damage, sadly, they got some nerfs they did not need, as I did not find their dmg to be a problem, only annoying ability to reset fights.

I see fights all the time, and I love watching, I will see someone fighting a thief, and sure enough, almost never dodging the right attacks if dodging at all. And within a few seconds, they are down, often times not even fighting long enough for a weapon swap. Then I wait, and sure enough aegis pops, dodge, backup/strafe, he comes out of stealth, JI to them, one combo set and hes at less than half heath, he then dodges/ports/SR, never to be seen again, as I stand there with 90%+ HP. The only time I ever have problems with them is when I am in a fight with others and a thief is there picking people off, waiting for someone to get under 50%, but that’s life.

I really can’t help but agree with the other poster, L2P, watch their tactics, and timing, better yet, make a thief and you will see all the massive holes they have to be attacked as well as their timing. Just knowing basic timing of stealth gives you a huge advantage in dodging a good 80% of their burst.

Allot of classes can kill someone with 3-4 skills, it is the fact you are face tanking their burst, and if you can’t mitigate that burst, then you deserve to die. Because you don’t know how to counter a class/play style does not mean it is unbalanced. I would be willing to bet if you posted screen of the combat log it would show just that.

The team play you are talking about is easy to kill, I have done so many times, any player who knows what they are doing is going to see what is going on and target the DPS (glass cannon easy kill) most times first, and then the tank is the only thing left and it does crappy dmg, so it is not much of a worry, zergs work with this better because of a type of redundancy, and the fact it is not depending on one person to do all the DPS.

As I said, I have seen this combo, guard/whatever tank rolls in then out of no where a thief, but all you have to do is counter for a very short time as in most cases they blow everything at once to try and burst you down and after that, they are nothing but a walking loot bag. People who fall prey to this kind of tactic, were probably easy kills to start with. And these are in cases where it’s 2vs1 in their favor, as for the most part it depends on the other player being clueless, as only one of them is really doing anything while the other is just a distraction.

Installing a new CPU and mobo, will make the windows key deactivate in most cases, as it sees the new HW as a new computer, you will have to reactivate it by phone. The BIOS is stored in the mobo it self. Also, installing this much HW on a current OS might cause allot of problems, I have seen cases where it would not boot or BSOD and cases where nothing was wrong, best suggestion as always is a full fresh install of the OS to avoid future problems.

That type of lag has nothing to do with render lag etc, you are dealing with latency, somewhere along the way, the network has a problem and is causing this. Best way is to monitor your connection response times (ping) to given servers and see at which hop you are getting a spike in latency. If this is on going at all times, it might be local or on your own network, if it is only from time to time, it might be down stream and one of the main hops you go through is over loaded at given times causing latency spikes.

You made a bad choice or got out played or pushed to far past your team, you lost all your HP (aka dead) and as such you should be, remove the downed state from WvW, keep it in PvE since most there like it. If I win a fight I see no reason this person should be able to be given a 2nd chance or enough time for someone else to come and help. Once you reach 0HP, you are dead, 100%.

He suggested it was a HW issue and started with the most common one, so his process of elimination was right, and you have not ruled out a HW issue or software/driver conflict, to your self, yes, but not as a whole.

The features do work with the hardware and drivers, which is proven by the many people who play on NV cards without issue, many probably running the same drivers as you without issue, which again, points to a conflict or HW problem, you might also want to note before calling out GW2 on NV problems, note that I run a NV card….Without issue. If this was a set in stone problem with NV and GW2 many, many more people would be having trouble, including myself. And yes, many people having problems with NV (and other) cards are often HW, conflicting software, or user error.

Setting the CPU to default (assuming you had a OC) also means nothing for ruling out a HW issue.

WoW is a old game, however it was not always DX11, support for that was only added recently, and WoW, unlike other MMO’s has income that dwarfs allot of games and might as well be seen in the FPS realm. While some of them pull more than 300M on release day, after that sales taper off fast, while WoW use to pull that in every month. So for the gross vs what you get, you should be asking why WoW looks like kitten vs a FPS, after all it uses DX11 etc.

Also, most people do not have good hardware, it is easy to make a sweeping statement, however, MMO players are often casual gamers and do not build rigs just for gaming. Heck, even heavy PC gamers don’t have all that highend of HW, just look at steams own HW survey, the most common CPU is a dual core, the highest end card to hold the largest percent is a 560Ti at a whopping 2.5%.

Also, if you are picking games based off of DX version, you should give up on MMO’s altogether and just buy new FPS’s if all you care for is eye candy and nothing for game play or story etc.

There are many reasons for them to not rewrite the whole game for DX11, and use the old engine for DX9, cost being one of them, but it also seems like there were plans for GW2 to be ported to consoles, which is the reason many people think the game only ever uses up about 3 cores worth of clock cycles and DX9 being that the xbox etc used a somewhat modified version of DX9. This is also the same reason many big box PC games were held back long after DX10/11 hit the market, because most were console ports.