Official AT Guild Wars 2 Guild Thread

[Fallen Kell]

Also, don't worry about getting the deluxe edition. You can upgrade to it in game essentially for free by converting gold to gems (just costs you play time to get the gold, but once you hit level 80 aside from grinding for legendary weapons you really don't have a lot to use the gold on anyway once you have the gear you want).

 

[power_hour]

Decided to try this over the weekend. My goal is to try and level my character by crafting and PVP mostly. Never played it before either. Anyone else do that their first time around? Any tips/suggestions or am I nuts? Would love to get some feedback.

BTW, do you have a noob section in your guild?

 

[KMFJD]

Decided to try this over the weekend. My goal is to try and level my character by crafting and PVP mostly. Never played it before either. Anyone else do that their first time around? Any tips/suggestions or am I nuts? Would love to get some feedback.

BTW, do you have a noob section in your guild?

Get all your weapon skills first through pve

 

[shurato]

Everyone is welcome into the guild new and old. Leave your in game name and one of us will add you

 

[I4AT]

So I just spent about 2.5 gold on influence to make a personal guild stash, which it turns out was a waste of money cause they don't let you deposit soulbound or account bound items, like 90% of your inventory. Would've been nice if that was mentioned in the description ArenaNet, you tards. Someone should be fired between all the typos, or sometimes just outright wrong skill tooltips, and general lack of descriptive information in places that could really use it.

 

[zinfamous]

So I just spent about 2.5 gold on influence to make a personal guild stash, which it turns out was a waste of money cause they don't let you deposit soulbound or account bound items, like 90% of your inventory. Would've been nice if that was mentioned in the description ArenaNet, you tards. Someone should be fired between all the typos, or sometimes just outright wrong skill tooltips, and general lack of descriptive information in places that could really use it.

why should soulbound or account bound items be depositable in a guild stash? It's a public stash. You can put them in your personal stash and move the other junk to a guild stash, I guess.

you can't even pick up soulbound items from other characters in your account

 

[Genx87]

Dinged 80 in my warrior. What an enjoyable and easy grind. Now I am working on grinding out armorsmithing to 400. Then what, dungeons\PVP? I re-fired up my guardian last night. Ran the 4 part group event in Harathi a few times. The staff is a perfect weapon to get a lot of loot due to it being an AOE spamfest.

Otherwise I had been running around with a shield\mace and Sceptar\torch. She is definately not a warrior when it comes to tanking or damage dealing.

 

[zinfamous]

I wouldn't worry so much about armorsmithing--took me forever to get that to 400--actually, 2 days ago, I think, well after that warrior was past 80 and geared to the shoulders. ...unless you have specific motivation for it. It's one of the slowest and least rewarding to level, imo

Your'e better off crafting some decent rare 80 stuff (assuming you are into the mithril stage), or just buying it off the TP. Then, farm AC like a madman, which is really easy. The gear you get from there is relatively cheap compared to how easy it is to obtain, and just armor yourself that way. daily farm of just 3 runs in about 45-60 minutes will give you one piece of exotic. You can keep doing the paths, but get severe DR on tears and loot.

 

[Genx87]

Heh so I am wasting my time or more importantly right now gold then? I was doing it to get a quality lvl 80 set. I need to read up on the dungeons and armor available out there. Does the leveling in armorsmithing slow down as you approach 400? Seemed like up to ~300 went well enough. Got a little costly for the insignias for discovery at the end. But that was because I am only down to Timberline Falls level on zoning and lacked the mats for them.

 

[Molondo]

Molondo.2567 Please

 

[zinfamous]

Heh so I am wasting my time or more importantly right now gold then? I was doing it to get a quality lvl 80 set. I need to read up on the dungeons and armor available out there. Does the leveling in armorsmithing slow down as you approach 400? Seemed like up to ~300 went well enough. Got a little costly for the insignias for discovery at the end. But that was because I am only down to Timberline Falls level on zoning and lacked the mats for them.

rare sets cost 15 of the fine materials for each piece, as opposed to 8 fine mats for the same-tiered master craft piece.

You have to buy the rare insignia recipes from the crafting vendor NPC--I think it is the 3rd tier in his trade window. They start offering rare insignia recipes for the 3rd level of items for whatever the crafting discipline is (so, for armorsmithing, I think you start using them with steel)

You absolutely need to use these rare insignias to level past 390, as master crafted stuff no longer gives xp--but it is best to craft rare past 375, when mithril rare insignias become available, because you get a bit more than 2x the crafting xp for rare pieces. All in all, while leveling, the cost in materials to create rare is probably a wee bit more efficient than with crafting master, despite material cost, as you get so much more xp per piece (I do think that 1x rare = more xp than 2x master). It does slow down significantly midway through mithril crafting if you don't make rare, and are not farming the orrian mats for mithril and t5 fine mats.


as for what you may be wasting in terms of cash...it's almost a push, really. If you've gone out and farmed the fine materials for the insignias (easier for leveling, as you can use spammy materials. but maybe not best to make the things you actually want to use), then it is much cheaper. Of course, simply going by the absolute value of the materials and cost on TP, it's almost a wash. the rare and exotic insignia recipes cost karma for each one, so you will be losing some karma...but not a whole lot if you are at level 80 and have been eating daily pots and vials from dungeons. Karma is now, simply, too easy to get. Still takes time, though.

If it's about style and getting exactly the stats you want, then go for it. If you want to craft your own exotics--that is expensive, as it's 5 ecto and 5 t6 fine mats per piece. Ecto can be better used elsewhere and you will likely want them for other purposes later (considering that exotic sets are easily obtained from dungeons, and after you get used to farming a dungeon like AC, can net you more than 4g for a ~1hr run and enough tiers to buy boots or gloves, shoulders or helmets, iirc).

To be honest, I used a pile of ecto crafting exotic cloth for my main, and a few weapons on my warrior when I maxed weaponsmithing, and I don't really regret it.

I would advise searching for level 80 rare pieces on TP with the stats that you want, and making up any gaps by crafting the others. Then, farm AC for AC armor, that gives you power/tough/vit--which is almost demanded of warriors in dungeons. only AC and HotW (Honor of the Waves--the Norn Dungeon in frostgorge) give you armor with these stats. These are actually very easy, and popular dungeons to farm. I've honestly only done the first path of HotW, but it is very fast. Can be done in less than 15 minutes. I'm not sure about the others, but it's probably not as efficient as AC in terms of tokens and getting geared, because everyone runs all paths of AC, but apparently not HotW. You are stuck with those armor skins, of course, unless you use fine transmutation stones.

Anyway, that's the cheapest way to gear up and it is quite fast when you get the hand of it. You also get piles of money in the process.

We run these dungeons almost nightly, so be sure to hit the guild chat up if you want to tag along for one of them. There is almost always enough interest for AC or HotW or CoF if people aren't already doing the fractals dungeons.

 

[jcwagers]

I think Zin was typing too fast. He didn't mean 490 or 475......he meant 390 and 375.

 

[zinfamous]

I think Zin was typing too fast. He didn't mean 490 or 475......he meant 390 and 375.

d'oh! :$

no no, I never type too fast...never! my flawless typing in guild chat is evidence of this!

 

[Fallen Kell]

She is definately not a warrior when it comes to tanking or damage dealing.

You are doing it wrong then (at least in terms of tanking). A lot of that has to do with your weapon choices. If you want to tank (and as a guardian, you will want to tank as you really can't do dps), you want to use a 2H hammer, along with a couple specific traits (specifically "symbols last longer"). You will then have something like 80% of the time be under protection (-33% incoming damage) when using your hammer. You can easily get it to 100%+ of the time under protection by using "Superior Runes of Earth" on your armor.

Guardians won't do dps like your warrior does, but you can be the setup guy for others in your group with pulls (greatsword skill 5), or control/barrier lines (2H hammer and 2H staff skill 5). You can also be fairly good at healing other players in the group with skills like "sanctuary", or the "summoned bow", as well as one of the basic healing skills which will produce a cone of healing effect, and then there is the ultimate heal, the elite skill heal which will pretty much fully heal 5 people.

But if you are having problems tanking with your guardian, you are using either the wrong armor, weapons, or skills, or traits (or all of the above). While my guardian only has 21k hp, effectively it has around 28k when you factor in the perma-protection when wielding 2H hammer (then add on the passive heals, "aegis" blocks, healling effects from symbols, and the fact that my normal heal skill gets me about 10k hp, my guardian IS the very definition of the word tank).

 

[Fallen Kell]

Then, farm AC for AC armor, that gives you power/tough/vit--which is almost demanded of warriors in dungeons. only AC and HotW (Honor of the Waves--the Norn Dungeon in frostgorge) give you armor with these stats.

People always forget that SE also has power/tough/vit. But that dungeon is very hard to find groups to run it since it is so brutal. The added bonus though is that you will pretty much never run into someone else using it, so you look pretty unique compared to others. Case in point, I have yet to run into another person using my warrior's helmet.

 

[I4AT]

why should soulbound or account bound items be depositable in a guild stash? It's a public stash. You can put them in your personal stash and move the other junk to a guild stash, I guess.

you can't even pick up soulbound items from other characters in your account

Just as extra storage cause that's what banks are for. It's not like any guild ever gives low ranking members withdrawal privileges anyways, so that essentially makes it a way to transfer items to higher ranking members, and that can easily be done through mail.

 

[zinfamous]

Just as extra storage cause that's what banks are for. It's not like any guild ever gives low ranking members withdrawal privileges anyways, so that essentially makes it a way to transfer items to higher ranking members, and that can easily be done through mail.

we do.

also, do any MMO generally allow you to move account/soul bound items into public spaces? that is unusual in my experience.

public is public.

 

[zinfamous]

Molondo.2567 Please

got an error trying to enter that name. says it can't find email.

also, I've had various guild-related bugs in the last week--couldn't add new members because it claimed guild was full (hogwash), getting more access restrictions, randomly, so it could be that.

 

[Molondo]

got an error trying to enter that name. says it can't find email.

also, I've had various guild-related bugs in the last week--couldn't add new members because it claimed guild was full (hogwash), getting more access restrictions, randomly, so it could be that.

Thanks for trying, gonna look into it tomorrow.

 

[Zenoth]

I finally reinstalled GW2 since I recently had to reinstall my OS as well. I got to "test" my newly-purchased GTX 670. Well to my surprise I barely have any performance improvements. Specifically in GW2 that is, in other games it's literally double or even triple the performance I used to get with my previous GTX 285. I looked at the GW2 forums and it's supposedly a common issue, and the devs seem to point at out the game is heavily CPU-bound. I read most of their tech support-related facts (Q&A section) and ultimately it looks like whatever the system you happen to have GW2 just doesn't run "that smoothly". Is that the case for everyone? I mean I DO see some performance improvements here and there but not that much. The one example I can give is in Queensdale by the bridge near the auction house merchant, if from the merchant's position I look towards the bridge I get no more than around 45FPS, and if from that same position I rotate the camera to a 360º rotation the frames suddenly crash down to the low 10's, but within that same rotation if I stop at any angle the frames will pop back up to around 45 or so, or at most within the 50 FPS range. In Lion's Arch just as I spawn in the map after fast traveling to it at the main gates waypoint and just open the menu to look at the FPS from there then I get around 40FPS, and as I move around the map it goes up to no more than 50FPS or so.

I do remember well enough that under the same in-game settings (maxed) and screen resolution (1680x1050) I used to get no more than 25FPS or so with my GTX 285 in the worst case scenarios, and usually maintained a 35FPS average everywhere else. So with my 285 of course I had to reduce in-game settings but I did get 60 to 70FPS if I reduced the resolution, shadow and reflection settings (however I did still just test the maxed-out settings with the 285 out of curiosity for later comparisons for when I would get to test my 670). In one of the low FPS issues-related threads I read at the official GW2 forums one guy replied to the original post with "welcome to the club!". I wonder is that really common? I wouldn't be aware since basically I'm really out of the loop, information-wise and common/known issues-wise with pretty much any games out there recent enough and in relation to recent GPU architectures and generations. Remember I skipped all generations since my 285 until just barely two days ago when I finally received my 670, so I did miss a lot in between and got stock playing older games most of the time (well I did play recently-released games too, I'm just exaggerating a bit, although for most recent games I had to reduce a good bunch of settings to get smooth game-play, and not just the resolution, but shadows and distance LOD settings and so on)...

So basically, I guess that I'm asking here, to anyone running the game on a similar system (compared to mine in my sig), do any of you guys also experience what you'd call "abnormally low" FPS issues in the game when in fact your system does perform as intended for everything else, including other games too?

As a side note I just ran a default settings 3DMark 11 test and I scored 8207, which for all I know so far seems to be within the "expected scores" for similar systems (is it? I'm not even sure). Note, however, that nothing in my system (literally, nothing) is over-clocked (even the CPU/Motherboard frequency boost features are turned off and the CPU always stays at 3.4Ghz no matter what). But I,d guess that even a stock i7 2600K wouldn't exactly be a problem. As a final note, just to mention, I increased the resolution to 1920x1080 out of curiosity (which my current monitor does not officially support, so I am not using that resolution to avoid potential damage to the monitor, especially in relation to refresh rates and "out of frequency" issues when I use that resolution) and the frames at the same locations and in-game settings remained about the same, sliding down to the 10's when rotating the camera, going up again within the 45 to 55 range when standing still.

Anyway... maybe it's also related to the drivers though? I'm using the latest (and remember, my OS is freshly reinstalled, all latest official Microsoft updates are in, including the service pack of course), latest chipset and sound drivers, etc (all the basic "optimizations and configurations" have been completed prior to installing the game itself). And, I guess I should mention that the NVIDIA Control Panel's options (3D options, PhysX) are all set at default, except for the GPU's performance which is set to "Prefer maximum performance" instead of "Adaptive", but that's it, no other options are forced to override anything in other applications.

So... I guess I should just ask for a drink now that I'm at the bar with everyone else on this matter?

EDIT & UPDATE: Well it looks like leaving the "Reflections" (in-game graphics settings) to either simply "None" or "Terrain & Sky" as well as leaving the "Shadows" setting to anything but "Ultra" (I left mine to "High") greatly helped my case. Doing just that (and absolutely nothing else, leaving all other settings maxed-out) completely removed the sudden FPS drops-to-a-slide-show effect I was getting when rotating the camera fast enough. Now, when moving around and turning the camera everything remains smooth enough. Additionally, doing that increased my overall FPS performance by approximately 10+ FPS depending on my location (and the number of players on-screen, of course).

I think that ultimately, however, overall performance in Guild Wars 2 is (to my personal surprise) not quite good almost regardless of your system. And I do believe that specifically the Reflection's "All" setting, as well as the "Ultra" Shadows setting both need to be tested further by the developers, since I think that those two settings alone will cause most of the performance-related issues that a lot of people seem to be describing on the official forums. I'm still happy nonetheless that I've finally been able to remove that annoying sudden FPS drop issue I had and overall got my extra performance compared to how the game was running previously on my GTX 285 (now I can truly say that it's just overall faster, albeit I did expect more, but since the game itself isn't well optimized there's not much else I can do).

 

[Fallen Kell]

I will have to check what my reflections and shadows are set to, but I believe I have everything set to ultra but with only 2xAA (however I run at 1920x1200 resolution).

My computer is:
Intel i7-3777k @ Stock
EVGA GTX 670 FTW 2GB @ Stock
Memory: G.Skill 16GB @1600

There is a spot in LA (if you travel up towards where you need to go to get in the jump puzzle which you have to fall into the sewers from a bridge... it is above the crafting areas), that is the only place I get a consistent slowdown. Typically I see around 40+ FPS (off the top of my head). As I said, that is the only spot I consistently see a noticeable frame rate drop, but if I spin the camera around for a second or two and the rates will climb back up.

Again, I will let you know more tonight.

 

[jcwagers]

I know that my system is pretty ancient by normal standards but it still easily outpaces the "requirements" for GW2. I have a Athlon X2 5400+(with a massive 200mhz oc to 3ghz), 4gb ram, and an relatively old Radeon 4870 512mb card. My monitor is Samsung 22 inch 1680x1050. I end up playing at native resolution but with every setting turned down. I would guess that I stay at no more than 30 fps most of the time. I would guess that my average fps is probably 15-20. I've done a few dragon fights where I saw my fps hit 2 and go no higher than 4-5. I'm still trying to figure out how somebody with the minimum requirements can actually play the game. I've gotten used to having low fps and it's not a deal breaker for me. I don't have the cash for upgrading right now so I'm hanging with what I have. If I remember correctly, even the benchmark from Tom's Hardware only placed the highest end cards averaging around 70-80 fps and that was I think on a 2500k. Even with a 1ghz overclock it made very little difference. I feel your pain on this but I don't know that there is much that can be done about it right now.

 

[NoSoup4You]

The game is plenty well optimized, I blame nvidia's drivers more than Arenanet. I run at 1080 resolution with maxed in-game settings but with reflections at Terrain & Sky. This was the only way to stop the frames from dropping to 10fps in the Black Citadel. I have since changed drivers but haven't bothered testing out maxing the reflections settings, it doesn't do much anyway.

 

[FirewolfX]

Finished Eternal Battleground puzzle, not too bad. Crap from chest though.

Should have a decent group of people to join you though as the baddies will be nice (truce) at first then gank you without warning.

This one asura necro kept pestering me over and over, and I obliged by knocking him off the platforms several times forcing him to retrace his steps (which can be a bitch on that one)

 

[zinfamous]

Thanks for trying, gonna look into it tomorrow.

can you check this again: Molondo.2567 ?

Still not recognized. You can also use a character name.