& here I was thinking folks were going to flame me for trolling... Looks like I was right on the mark in that there's not a whole lot of value outside of legendaries and XP to crafting. Thanks for the input...

Guess I'll put the tools back on the shelf and grind some more.

I've gotten two professions up to 200 (Huntsman and Leatherworking), but I'm having a hard time finding any redeeming quality to the crafting system, other than the XP gains.

As I see it, here are the problems:

1. It costs more to craft an item then you can sell it for.

2. By gathering your own mats (not purchasing them on the TP), you cannot get enough crafting done to be high enough level to make anything for yourself.

3. Dropped items are equal to or better than anything you can craft, and are cheaper to buy on the TP than to produce yourself.

Now I may be missing something here, but it just feels like other than the XP you get from making new items, that there's no real point in crafting. Except for being able to craft legendary stuff @ 400, but still... that's a lot of grind for something you could just purchase later.

Thoughts?

Anyone know of a guide with locations for trainable animals? I've asked in game in some of the starter zones and found an ice drake and an arctdotus, but that's all so far.

Any suggestions on where to go to find new pets is welcome.

Originally posted by Reizla
I heard elsewhere on these forums that AMD CPU's with ATi (AMD) GPU's make a real bad performance.

Anectdotal...

I run a 965 X4 BE oc'd to 3.8 G, 8 gigs of ram, 2 Crossfired 6870's on three 23" monitors (eyefinity FTW) at 5890X1080 (depending on how I have the bezel correction set) and I get 65-70 FPS in starter areas and ~45 FPS in WvW...

If I drop it to standard single monitor res I get 100+ FPS in open areas and 85-90 in WvW.

My rig (except for my video cards which are ~ a year old) is 3+ years old and runs the game perfect. The only thing I have to turn off is reflections, and turn shadows down to medium...  Everything else is maxed.

Silly intel fanbois...

Since Monday...

Blackgate anytime after 5PM Pacific queues range from 4-5 hours until about 11 PM when they're about 1 hour.

Any idea when they're going to rebalance the servers?

 The one I'm on (Black Gate I think - not home to check) basically owns everything in all the battlegrounds.

Queues are rediculous too... waitied 5 hours to get in last night, and only got in @11 PST cause the servers were going down for maintenence...

Not sure what all the fuss is about. I'm running on a quad core 965 BE OC'd to 3.8 gHz with crossfired 6870's OCd to 975 (proc) & 1250 (Memory).

Three monitor Eyefinity setup 5965X1080 and getting ~65-70 FPS in open world and ~ 45 FPS in WvWvW... not the smoothest, but a far cry better performance than I was getting in SW:TOR.

Right now I have everything set to max (except reflections... kills framerates) and am perfectly happy with the performance.

Like Firnwind said, The scaling is all horizontal, so in cutscenes/ char creation, etc... the top and bottom thirds of your screen is cut off. Makes it virtually impossible to customize your character during creation, but the ALT+Enter trick to switch to windowed mode will work.

I've noticed some graphic anomalies like the ability to see beyond walls on secondary monitors if you're right next to them, and then tab targeting being a pain in PvP as you'll cycle through every visible foe (which on eyefinity with 3 23" monitors is basically a 160 degree FoV)

That and the aforementioned UI constraints are an annoyance, but other than that though, the game is totally playable.

Originally posted by gravesworn
I feel bad for those of us that wasted our money on this garbage.

^^This...

Originally posted by Delvie

 

Me and my hubby ignored personal story in the BWEs so I can't comment on that.

Is there any penalty to just ignoring the personal quests? I played enough class/race combos that I didn't get past the 4th or 5th personal quests, but played them anyway because I didn't want to miss out on any skill unlocks or anything like that.

Originally posted by MattVid

I just hope the ass kicking gets worse as you level up.

Agreed.

That's kinda the point, I wanted to know whether the difficulty ramps as you level or if it was cake like the noob areas for the whole game.

Sounds like I just needed to get up a few more levels and some better gear to take on mobs that would actually be a challenge.

Originally posted by Homitu

During the 2nd BWE, myself and 2 friends quested through the human 15-25 zone perpetually 3, 4 or even 5 levels below the content.  It was fun and challenging.  Sometimes we got in over our head, but we often succeeded.  

I wonder if they changed the hit rate % or something. We actually tried to hit the 15-25 area @ lvl 12, but litterally couldn't hit the mobs.

I wonder if anyone else saw this during BWE3, or if there was another reason (gear, skills, class, etc...) 

So,

I've already pre-ordered GW2, played BWE2, and plan on playing once it's released. That said, I enjoy playing PvE stuff with my wife, so I got a beta key for her this weekend so she could check the game out and decide if she wants to play or not.

After playing 5 sets of characters, all to somewhere between lvl 10 and 12, I have to say that low level grouping was kind of a pain in the ass.

With our first set of characters (Norn and Asura) it took forever just to get in the same zone (granted I had no idea about the portals until I started digging through the forums to find out where the hell they were.) and once we did it wasn't too big of a deal since we just ran through the asura story quests together.

The second set, we rolled two humans, and that's where things were rediculously painful. Basically having to go through the same quests twice with slight variations based on what we picked during level creation was irritating.

In addition, the starter areas were just too freaking easy for a two person party. We tried to rush through to get to higher level areas, but found that we could barely hit things that were 3 or more levels higher than us (got to 11 with the Norn/Asura combo). Anything  less than that though was just cake.

Now, I'm a glutton for pain, loved EQ and the actual challenges it posed in terms of gameplay, but it seems artificially difficult that there was an inability to take on mobs that would be challenging due to the constant "missing" and "glancing" blows...

Does this dynamic ease up after a certain level, or is it just that the challenge in GW2 is based on soloing?

I was wondering who else had issues (if at all) with this.

Originally posted by Tayah

Asura rocks, that is all.

Is that some kinda crafting item? 

Yep. Got booted about 30 minutes ago and went to eat. Came back logged in and got booted again...

Friday, July 20, at noon PDT (GMT -7) and ends Sunday, July 22, at 11:59 p.m. PDT (GMT -7).

1.5 hours from now.

Nice Read.

I haven't had a chance yet to play any PvP yet in the BWEs. Definitely looking forward to it now.

Going to try out the sPvP and WvW. Probably also roll one of each class just so I can figure out which I'm going to roll with once the main release hits.

I only got a couple of hours to play in the last weekend beta, so yeah, nothing's going to get done this weekend...

Originally posted by Latronus

 

Ah, you are a young pup, NES LOL! I started on a TI-75 and a Commador and the Apple IIE was cutting edge for my generation. But to the point, I feel games have become easier for a couple reasons: 1. Suites took over and all they care about is making money and quantity became more important than quality. 2. The "every kid gets a trophy" generation is now playing games and god forbid they have to actually work for anything. So, to make money, games are dumbed down so that generation can continue to not have to deal with failure. God help us, we have raised a bunch of pansies that can't deal with having to work for anything in a game; let alone life... Just my 2 CPs.

I couldn't agree more with that statement.

I'm 32, started playing video games on my grandpas commodore 64 (Dragon Wars & Wasteland FTW) and truly miss the difficulty that came with the classics.