Guild Wars 2

How many successes you get per 30mins also depends on how many other players are in the map. In a full map, I’ve observed the best jumpers max out at 14 or 15, the rest of us “average” farmers only reach 12-13. Rarely 16+. That’s probably because there is a high chance of someone else breaking snowflakes or presents ahead of you, forcing you to wait. I recently increased my record to 15 even with 3 falls… that was on a map with only 3 other players and I could consistently run through the JP without waiting for snowflakes or presents to respawn.

UTC doesn’t have daylight savings. It’s technically not a time zone. It’s a time standard.
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/aboututc.html

It’s always been based off UTC but there’s an option to display your local time instead of UTC.

We can’t tell what will happen to the prices. It always spikes at the beginning of the holiday event because of impatient players buying up initial supplies.

However, where it goes from there depends on supply and demand. E.g trick or treat bags completely collapsed relative to their pre-holiday prices this year because of the lab farm.

Since this is an annual event, you can’t rely on time to diminish supply, say compared to some of the LS1 skins. And remember, there’s always a steady trickle of gifts from the home instance node.

Get the i5 instead of the i3. GW2 is very CPU dependent when there are a lot of characters on screen at once, e.g WvW zergs

Rauderi.8706:

Aggro is pretty much a shot in the dark, most times. Hit it first? Probably got aggro for life.

I’d aggro you if you hit me too :P

There are encounters where toughness is the only determinant of aggro, e.g. some of the raid bosses. It’s more variable elsewhere.

MoarChaos.8320:

Then there’s the added bonus of wasting loading a map because you joined with 2 minutes left in bell choir, or the jumping puzzle, or insert festival game here. Because it happens everywhere.

AFAIK, all instances of a map are on the same timer, so you wouldn’t have found an alternative map with more time anyway. The map doesn’t kick you out when it refreshes, so your best option is to sit tight until reset. You then at least avoid getting the “map is full” issue again.

Adry.7512:

Nowadays guilds are just a means of socializing with other players, and to find an easier method of locating things to do.

What are you talking about? Guilds have always been a social tool. It falls into the category as LFG, map chat, friends/followers. Most of your first paragraph touch on content which isn’t the primary function of the guild system. In fact, with the introduction of guild halls, guilds have actually received some content, and more gets added as decoration are expanded. In the pre-expansion game, guilds were almost non-existant in terms of content, and a purer tool.

Adry.7512:

There is no such thing as having one guild. you will be heavily disappointed if you try to dedicate yourself to one guild.

Why is having just one guild a good thing? You can still dedicate most of your attention to one guild while being part of others.

Adry.7512:

There are small and personal guilds, but for the majority of the time, ITS HARD to find ANYONE willing to help you do anything that you want to do. Whether its fractals, WVW, SPVP, dungeons, you name it. Everyone is doing their own thing or doing guild missions. Maybe in the near future developers will try to make guilds a more personal experience, and more relevant. At the moment many other aspects of the game are being worked on right now….the most latest being SPVP.

That’s a complaint against your guildies, Anet can’t develop to account for that. These people are supposed to be your friends, not be providers of services to fulfill your agenda. That’s a very selfish way to view a friendship. And with most good friendship, it’s a 2-way street… you get what you give.

If I were in your shoes, I’d take a long hard look at myself and ask: Who is the dead weight in this relationship? My guildies or me? If it’s the former, find a guild/players you do get along with (using your ability to join multiple guilds if you don’t want to lose track of your current one). If it’s the latter… well, only you can change that.

Take your complaint about your guild being useless in helping you get your Ad Infinitum collection thread and turn the question around… have you helped any of them when they needed it?

Archlord.4083:

open over 10000 winter gift with 628 Magic Find and the only Rare I got out of it are Linseed oil and Mini. anyone else feel the rng is getting worst?

Do the Wintersday gifts even give you any rare quality equipment (or any equipment at all)? According to the wiki it doesn’t:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wintersday_Gift

As much as this issue is a non-issue for me, I do concede OP’s point that buying TC’s on the gem store is horrible value, whether you use RL money or gold to get your gems.

Only Anet can know, but I can’t imagine TC’s being a large money earner for them, since regular players accumulate them so easily. If they made the TC’s cheaper (say double the number of TC’s per unit of gems), maybe it’ll improve the value for less regular players and actually drive up sales.

For the rest of us, it doesn’t change anything… something we consider worth $0 will always be worth $0 no matter how much it gets discounted/devalued by.

Do you have guild mates who do fractals frequently? Or if you do pug, maybe advertise in the T4 LFG instead of the T1 one, making sure you state it’s for the achievement. At least then you’re getting people who’re experienced in the fight.

And before you get too far into the backpiece and get frustrated again… this is actually one of the easier achievements. This is what you’ll be faced with later on:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mai_Trin_Timed_Mote (it says 100, but it’s actually 98 as Mai has been “demoted” recently)

Edit: Sorry, I skipped your comment about guilds. Maybe befriend some people you meet in fractals whom you think played well. I’ve met a bunch of really good fractal runners that way.

Btw there’s a thread dedicated to getting old gem store items back. Post there for what you want to be brought back.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestions-Please-Bring-Back-these-Gem-Stores-Items

That sounds like a bug. The spirit should be a 100% drop. Submit a support ticket in the link in the top right of page and CS will be able to help you

Anet doesn’t take souls unfortunately . You’ll have to get a credit card like the rest of us.

Not so much a bug, as a request.

Can we have the salvage kit’s “salvage all” not convert a stack of Flawless Snowflakes to a million stacks of Tiny Snowflakes? Had a small stack of Flawless when I “salvaged all”… ended up with 5-6 full stacks of Tiny’s. Other then the annoyance factor, it seems like a great way to inadvertently exhaust your salvage kit.

You could have the salvage kit’s “salvage all” not affect it, and add a right-click option on the snowflake itself to be able to break it down in bulk.

loseridoit.2756:

they made it easier. the presents path on the end no longer have a time limit.

I think it’s easier too. I seem to remember the exploding presents being less predictable.

If you’re ok with the JP, do that until you go cross-eyed.

My typical successful run takes 1:45 to 2:15 mins, so in the perfect world of no failures, I’d theorectically get about 300 gifts an hour. (So far my best is 12-13 successes in a 30min “match”)

What I’d like to know is if the Extravagent Wintersday Gift is a once only or repeatable reward from A Season of Merriment.

The suggestion on Dulfy is that this contains the Wrapped Weapons. I assume you only get to pick 1 per Gift. (Incidentally there are 5 weapons in the set)

Adry.7512:

Well most of you do have a point and I understand. It’s just dsappointing to me that they did that. Just seems like they had no idea on what to do so they just made the best item for the holidays only available through RNG. At the end of the day it devalues the item cause in a game with such high population, by the end of the month, such an epic item will drop is price drastically cause of how many people obtained it. If it would have been through HARD WORK the item would lose no value and it would be harder to obtain.

What item are you talking about? You mentioned in your original post “holiday only infusion item”, which I assume to be Winter’s Presence. That item has no RNG… it’s a very predictable collection reward. You just need to work your butt off to get the 10,000 drinks.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Winter's_Presence

Edit: Apologies… I missed Winter’s Heart in the title. My contention about the Wrapped Weapons being the “skins you can get from completing achievements” still stands though.

LordEnki.9283:

That’s something completely different and in no way reflects how RNG is bullkitten and something they have had “on the table” to fix for a long time.

How is it a completely different matter? OP’s first statement was that we don’t have any “cool skin you can get from completing achievements”:
Cool skin – check (arguable depending on how OCD you are with your gift wrapping)
Completing an achievement – check

LordEnki.9283:

However, since you brought it up, time gated stuff is just as bad.

Now who’s the one bringing up “completely different matters” then?

@OP, whichever forum you read is wrong/incomplete… you need 3 Balls (as OriOri said: Balls of Dark Energy, not Globs of Dark Matter) in total. 2 in the beginning and 1 at the end.

http://www.theopencommunity.org/topic/203-ad-infinitum-a-comprehensive-guide/

This was written after Unbound but before Ad Infinitum was released, so the final step is incomplete, so I’ll fill it in:

At this point you should have 2 Balls of Dark Energy left over:
+2 salvage 2 ascended items
-2 create Finite Result (1 collection, 1 crafting)
+5 salvaging Finite Result
-4 creating Upper Bound (2 collection, 2 crafting)
+9 salvaging Upper Bound
-8 creating Unbound (3 collection, 5 crafting)

To finally create Ad Infinitum, you need to complete a final collection to get the Gift of Infinity. This requires 3 Balls for one of the collection items, so you need to salvage a 3rd ascended item to get this. Note: in this step you do not salvage Unbound (it’s red-ed out if you try)… it has to go into the MF with the other gifts. And as such, it cannot be a source of Balls.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Legendary_Backpack:_Ad_Infinitum

Djinn.9245:

You can Preview a skin and then add dyes to it? How?

Just apply the skin without spending the TC’s in your Hero panel wardrobe (it will have that little yellow “cancel” cross in the corner of the icon). Then go to your dye section and dye away. The only annoyance I’ve encountered is that the new dye selection doesn’t “stick” if you decide to then spend the TC’s to make the change permanent.

I think this only works for skins you’ve already unlocked. If you haven’t unlocked the skin, go with what Just a flesh wound said.

What do you mean by “normal Tyrian zones”? If you mean large, flat, pretty maps that aren’t a large meta event… we’ve got Ember Bay and Bitterfrost Frontier in LS3.

If it’s the inadequate supply of spirit shards you’re complaining about, you can already earn 3 per day by doing dailies, with or without HoT. Unless you had the time to grind 3 levels per day beforehand, for most people, that’s more shards than they used to be able to earn.
Or if not getting any rewards for leveling past 80 bothers you… that’s done too. That ability is the reward for completing the masteries (either core Tyrian or HoT).

And technically, we never had the ability to earn shards by leveling… it’s skill points you are thinking of, and those were changed to the shards 6-12 months before HoT released. Probably to prevent players from instantly getting full elite specs without setting foot in HoT.

Ray Koopa.2354:

And then there’s me who has to waste time on christmas with their family and can only finish it at most 2 times >=(

Shame on them.

What about the wrapped weapons?
http://dulfy.net/2016/12/13/gw2-upcoming-items-from-wintersday-patch/
It’s time gated behind doing 5 days of Wintersday dailies, so no one has got it yet. I’m sure you can cope with that.

You don’t need to buy LS2 if it’s only the story you’re interested in. If you’ve got a friend with LS2, you can party with him and he starts the chapter. You miss a few details here and there, but you’ll experience the main parts. You can’t get any of the story rewards though.

There’s also much to be said of the ability to multi class. Less impact in a wvw zerg, but invaluable in pvp and raids. Plus nerfs to a specific class has less impact

Dawdler.8521:

All DX12 games this last year has shown marginal improvements for AMD (like avg 5-10fps) or major performance loss on both AMD and Nvidia (avg 5-25 fps with catastrophic frametime dips compared to DX11). So yeah, a good dose of uncertainty.

I think a good deal of the confusion comes from lazy ports of current gen APIs (e.g. Rise of the Tomb Raider – DX12) vs purely next gen API games (Ashes of Singularity – DX12) or good ports (Doom – Vulkan). We should get a better picture as developers get more experience in making games with the new APIs.

So the potential is there. But currently it’s not something I’d factor strongly into my buying decision.

Dawdler.8521:

If it’s a main PC gaming machine I wouldnt recommend either that or any AMD, I’d say go straight for a GTX 1070. It’ll easily last a year or two extra over the GTX 1060, justifying the higher price.

Unfortunately, the 1070 is above OP’s stated price limit.

cephiroth.6182:

Thx 4 the link. I had the same issue (1070 here, Samsung memory version), updating the bios fixed it for me.

Strange… according to the article, the Samsung chips shouldn’t cause it issue. Maybe there’s more to the fix than just regarding Micron chips.

/age in your chatbox will give you the number of days.

Then just check against the wiki:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Birthday_Gift

Danikat.8537:

I’ve since learned quite a bit about both building and maintaining PCs, that even though graphics cards are expensive they’re still cheaper than an entire machine and that my dad does not actually know as much as he thinks he does about computers.

Lol…
As a dad myself, I believe my knowledge of [Add field of knowledge here] is supreme and irrefutable. Now go do your homework.

Fermi.2409:

Loads of people game at 1440P these days, especially with how affordable 1440P 144Hz is getting

The maths aren’t perfect… but viewed simplistically:

From the most recent Steam Survey, 1.8% use 1440p. Extrapolating from a daily user peak of 12-13M; you’ve got 200K+ steam users on 1440p daily. I can’t find the actual stats, but I believe 1440p was at 1% last year.

Amaimon.7823:

As for the comments that 480 is better than 1060, that´s purely circumstancial.
I doubt many people here play the games that make the difference clear, and tbh, I have much better experiences with nvidia

I would like to point out that up to the point OP mentioned owning a Freesync monitor, the recommendations were all leaning towards the 1060. That included my own. However, as all good recommendations go, you got to weigh up your recommendations against the pros and cons of the alternative option.

In case you missed it, my own statement about AMD’s performance in future DX12/Vulkan games was laced with a good dose uncertainty.

Also the story telling is a step up from vanilla. It’s not as good as it could be, but if your benchmark is the awful personal story, it’s a massive improvement.

Just be aware the spool of Elonian cord is time gated. Only one can be made each day no matter how many thick leather squares you have. I.e. If you need 50, it’ll take a single player 50 days to make. These are account bound, but the Elonian leather that is produced from them isn’t.

Some players give the mats to several friends to speed up the process.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spool_of_Thick_Elonian_Cord

No need to double post… forum mods will eventually move it if it’s in the wrong section.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Mastery-points-in-HoT-storyline-pls-help/6427362

You can only get the story chapter MP once per account e.g. if you do Establishing a Foothold the first time, you get 1 MP. Then if you run it again (either on same character or a different one) you don’t.

However, each chapter also has achievements that award MP’s. These cannot be earned on the first run. So you have to run the chapter a 2nd time (on main or alt, doesn’t matter) to get these. This is the reason you can get 2 MPs.

Have a look below and cross-check it with your Hero panel’s achievement menu. Achievements with a green star means a HoT MP that has not yet been earned (Red star for core Tyrian MP). Unfortunately when you do earn the MP, that star disappears and the only way to double check is manually look through and total up your numbers.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mastery_point_unlocks

Wow, that GPU is ancient (in PC terms) :P

Some other info that’ll be useful to know for us to help:
What CPU? And is it overclocked?
What is the CPU and GPU temps? Both idle and in-game. (Use HWmonitor or similar)
Drivers up-to-date?

The RX 480 comes in 2 flavors, 4Gb and 8Gb. Unlike the Nvidia 1060, this card uses the same GPU for both and the only difference is VRAM. The gaming reviews don’t show a significant increase in performance in most games (I don’t think there’s any difference in Witcher 3, and you’ll have to research other games in a case by case basis) so you’ll likely be ok with the 4Gb version.

As a side note, rumor is the RX 490 (or whatever the name’s gonna be) will debut in January 2017. Probably doesn’t affect you though. Best case scenario is that it drives down Nvidia’s 1070 into your price range, but there will be an early-adopter tax and initial supplies will be limited… so I doubt it.

You can get around that by creating an account on gw2efficiency.

What other games have you tried it on? Do they include games where quick movements are necessary, e.g FPS?

How often do you use TC’s? To me it’s just one of those things that accumulate when I’m doing other things; e.g. map completing for a gift of exploration or BL chest keys. So far I’m approaching 200. Granted, I don’t change appearances often, maybe a complete overhaul once a year for each of my 3 mains and sporadic minor changes on my alts.

The only time I bought them was when I bought Transmution Crystals because that was the only way to change the appearance of level 80 items.

Also remember, some skins have a single use that doesn’t require a TC. I think all the gem store skins fall in that category.
Edit: Forgot to include the Zenith weapons skins. They are unlimited use without TC’s. I put them on weapons I don’t particularly care about, yet don’t want to look like complete crap.

How often are these events stalling? I’ve done both several times in the last couple weeks and none had any issues.

These are the time using the in game bug reporting would be useful as it should give Anet more info regarding the specific map instance you encountered these bugs.

This may be the reason for some of you getting glitches:

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gtx-1070-memory-issue/

I’ve actually kept my +7 simple infusions for use with alts.

There is no way to buy the new AR infusions with relics, so the only reason to convert the old +7 simples to relics is if you needed relics for some other reason. The +7’s have also been removed from the vendors, so you can’t reverse your decision later. I’ve got too many relics, so the choice was easy.

For your budget, I think the 1060 6Gb is probably the best balance between current performance and future-proofing. The 3Gb version has a cut-down GPU (despite the name implying the difference is just the VRAM) so it’s better in the long term to spend a bit more for the 6Gb

RX 480 is the AMD alternative. AMD’s cards are potentially better than their Nvidia counterparts for future DX12/Vulkan games, but that is still far from certain. Nvidia’s cards are still better for most current and past games.

The main reason to get AMD right now is if you want a variable refresh rate monitor… a Freesync monitor is USD100-200 less than an equivalent G-sync one, plus the resolutions and price options are more varied.

Amaimon.7823:

They might skip the aquatic weapons, though

They are not doing underwater weapons. The initial announcement specifically mentioned 16 2nd gen legendaries (there are 18 weapon types in game).

Technically they are available in-game, just earn gold and covert to gems. Most other games let you convert bought currency (gems) to game currency (gold) but not the other way around.

And regarding the transmutation charges, you shouldn’t ever need to buy any. Map completing a capital city always rewards them, and other maps have a high chance.

MoarChaos.8320:

Also 3rd gen legendaries are only an assumption by the community. They could go back to making wonderful looking exotic skins.

That’s true. The only confirmed news we know about the next expansion is that there is a team working on it.