Speedylord.2798

Greetings fellow ranger players! I have been messing around with condition and Hybrid soulbeast builds lately and I'm very interested to see what your takes on these build ideas are(and suggestions on how to make them more fun)! To start things off, I have a condition build based off off popular condition builds on Metabattle/Snow Crows and I tweaked it a bit so that it has two main goals: 1) Being able to put out quite a lot of damage, making it perform decent in fractals, rather difficult encounters but also general open world. 2) Having access to quite some reactionary defensive capabilities, e.g. being able to use some evades/mobility, which can reward you with quite a bit of survivability. My idea was to have a build which rewards good timing for defense. The build I'm talking about is this one: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POwAgiVlRwkYfMImJWaP3P3SmyRA-zRJYmR3fZEXW1RpK+A-e It uses a dagger/dagger + shortbow setup which I think feels rather nice:), although shortbow potentially could be replaced by an axe setup, I have seen builds run dagger/axe + axe/dagger which could work great here as well I think! This build has access through evades with the shortbow #3 skill, offhand dagger #4 skill, the griffon stance utility skill as well as a general increase in endurance regeneration through "Natural Vigor" in the Wilderness Survival traitline:)! The equipment is entirely dps-focused, having all Viper's stats and Mad King runes. I'm however still looking for a good combo rotation on this build, I like it when a build has quite a high skillceiling, when it's rewarding good knowledge/mastery of the build! If someone has some advice to perhaps create a bigger sense of depth to this build, I would love to hear it! Currently I'm thinking of something along the lines off "One Wolf Pack" ->"Vulture Stance" and "Sharpening Stone" -> shortbow #2 & #4 (keeping #3 for the evade and #5 for breakbars) -> weapon swap -> Dagger #5 -> Dagger #3 -> Dagger #2 -> autoattacks untill #2 is available again, while using #3 for quickness off cooldown. Disenganging could be done with dagger #5 then weapon swap and shortbow #3. For the Soulbeast skills I think the F2 skill of Boar is a good (re)engage skill, and F1 and F3 can generally be used off off cooldown or in between dagger #2 cooldowns! The other build is a hybrid soulbeast build from Mukluk/Snow Crows which I would love to make a tad more survivable in general PvE, perhaps by the integration of something like Griffon Stance or an offhand dagger setup, although I'm a bit lost on how exactly to do it without sacrficing too much dps/offensive skills or the rotation of the build. Perhaps the Sharpening Stone or Vulture Stance skill could be replaced for a more defensive option? Perhaps the Axe/Torch can be switched to Axe/Dagger? http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POABged/lRwAZfMJmJW6X/P3Se2RA-zRJYmxfZEXG0RJI+A-e I'm curious what your opinions are (or what your preferred hybrid/condi builds for PvE are)! Thank you in advance and cheers, Speedylord

If you're really into gaming (as the term Mac gamer implies), I would stronly recommend just getting a Windows (or linux perhaps) gaming desktop/laptop, the performance difference and overall game experience is pretty big :)! I might've misinterpreted your wording though.

Agreed, my point is buyers should be aware they are not the same thing and they should not expect same performance. If we can agree on that i don't see any need to keep discussing this point. Yes that's exactly it! They are different beasts and each got their own usecases, buyers should decide which solution is best for their usecase:)!

A gaming laptop is an accessory for your existing gaming rig, not a replacement. Well yes, a laptop and a desktop, gaming or not, are just different things. Desktops are stationary, laptops are more compact and thus mobile, being able to be used when not plugged in. Also please stop putting quotation marks on the "gaming" for gaming laptops, many modern gaming laptops can be faster than most people's gaming desktops so just quit it please. Mini ITX setups are great and compact, but you still cannot get any work done with them when you're in a public place for example. If you're in a business meeting room you're not gonna place a Mini ITX Desktop, keyboard + mouse and monitor on the table. If you're travelling from office to office it can work, but not when you need to do work on the go or when you need to get things done when you simply do not have the space for a setup or do not want to rely on having power sockets and the necessary space available at all times. Although gaming laptops can be bought as a mobile counterpart for their gaming desktop at home, most people actually buy gaming laptops to have the benefit of a regular laptop (mobility and portability/lightweight, off the wall use) while also having a good gaming experience when you're not travelling, which would not be possible on a regular ultrabook but would be on a (gaming) desktop.Gaming laptops are for people who can benefit from the mobile aspect of it, and would need a good laptop anyway but either 1) cannot afford both a good laptop and desktop 2) do not have the space for a desktop setup 3) simply want to have one solution. There are many more reasons why one would want to look into gaming laptops as a solution but these are just to list a few.

TLDR: a “gaming laptop” is not a gaming pc, its overpriced computer you use when you cant play on a desktop because travelling, so don't expect an amazing performance. Now, yes GW2 is badly optimized and you can not get over 30fps in busy maps even with the latest most powerful hardware.As other said lag is usually because an slow internet connection. I'm sorry but you clearly haven't kept up with the gaming laptop space very well. First of all, many gaming laptops can run their CPU's at their maximum rated clockspeed. Sometimes you will have to tweak them a bit but the general consesus is that there are many devices on the market in this day and age where both the CPU and GPU can be cooled well and perform as intended. The 2.6Ghz he mentioned, is clearly the base clock of the CPU. The all core boost of the CPU (i7 10th gen, so it's either the 6 core i7 10750H or the 8 core i7 10850H) is rated at 4.50Ghz, that's only 200Mhz lower than let's say the standard all core boost clock of a desktop i7-10700K. I'm not saying mobile CPU's perform as well as desktop CPU's, I am saying that mobile CPU's can still be very powerful in its own right, probably being able to outperform many CPU's people on this forum use in their desktop. And yes, the mobile RTX 2060 may be 20% lower in performance compared to its desktop counterpart, that doesn't make it a slow GPU. For 1080P gaming, and especially Guild Wars 2 which would in no way ever saturate a GPU of this calibre, it is more than enough. Here's a YouTube link which shows some benchmarks of the mobile RTX 2060 (and GTX 1660 Ti as well): .Gaming Laptops will always be more expensive than Gaming Desktops, but the big difference is portability. You can use one device to use for work on the go or to travel with, and when you get home you can game on the same device and with that a good gaming experience. 144hz, competent GPU + CPU combos, sometimes even mechanical keyboards, being able to push 120-300fps in competitive FPS titles, being able to run AAA titles on highest settings while maintaining a good framerate on 1080P... Saying that laptops cannot game well or do not offer good performance is a very dated statement.

Threadrippers are not really CPUs meant for gaming, they are targeted towards numbercrunching applications and heavily multithreaded applications/workloads. The absolute fastest CPUs in terms of core speed/single thread performance would be a Ryzen 5000 series processor (btw make sure not to compare clockspeed between intel and AMD, given IPC, "instructions per clock," is different and there are some pretty big architectural differences. 4Ghz on an AMD chip is not the same as 4Ghz on an intel chip). Given that the Ryzen 5000 series is difficult to obtain right now (limited stock), you can also look at something like at Ryzen 5, 7 or 9 3000 CPU's or Intels offerings being the i5 10600K or i7 10700K. You COULD get an i9 10850K but I would say it offers limited value over the i7 10700K. So basically:*Absolute best of the best would be the Ryzen 9 5900X (or the 16 core Ryzen 9 5950X) *More reasonable options for current gen are either the Ryzen 5 5600X or Ryzen 7 5800X, or intel's core i5 10600K and core i7 10700K. *For previous gen options I would look at either the intel core i9 9900K, the Ryzen 5 3600X or Ryzen 7 3700X. I recommend to pick one of these because as newer games release, they will be more multithreaded and I would say a 6 core CPU with multithreading is really something you want to have, as 4 core/8 threads will slowely be a bottleneck as time moves on for games. This is why I do not recommend the intel core i5 9600K or core i7 9700K, because they only have 6 and 8 threads available respectively and for some modern games is already a limiting factor. In Guild Wars 2 you could get away with it but if you're planning on playing newer games and AAA titles, I would strongly recommend the Ryzen 5/7 of either the 3000 or 5000 series, or the Core i5/i7 of the 10th gen. :)

Hello again :)! I've been interested in using the D912pxy addon for a long time now and have recently tried it out for the first time via the Guild Wars 2 Addon Manager (great tool btw!). I must say it's a pretty neat addon! I'm running a competent gaming system (an i7-9750H with 6 cores 12 threads clocked at 4Ghz and a GTX1660 Ti 6GB mobile GPU), and even though I was running the game pretty smoothly already, performance for free is always welcome right:D? From my observations the addon especially helped in 'heavy' areas like Divinity's Reach (especially now that Wintersday is live) etc. My raw FPS increased a bit, but I saw most of the improvement in the perceived smoothness of the game, which I think comes from the fact that this addon made the ingame performance more consistent (more consistent FPS & frametimes,... ). The potential of this addon is amazing, but there is something that bothers me a little bit about it. Before I was playing Guild Wars 2 with the D912pxy addon, I used Windowed Fullscreen/Borderless Windowed to remove any potential screen tearing. After I installed the addon, I noticed that, even though I was running Windowed Fullscreen like before (which the addon recommends as well), there was some screen tearing. At first I thought as long as it is minor, I can look past it, but the screen tearing was quite noticeable and I would like to ask the Guild Wars 2 forums, do you experience the same or does one of you have advice/a tip/a setting or configuration that would solve this problem? Did I overlook something in the setup/settings of the program perhaps? (As a sidenote, all my drivers are up-to-date and every component is working as intended:D) Thanks in advance!

As you can clairly see, GW2 run mainly on 1 CPU core (Dx9). so to get easily more FPS, you have to Overclock your CPU (it's gonna raise its temperature) Thank you for this! So yeah, I would assume this would create more heat problems for a laptop. So best a desktop?A laptop CPU is "locked" (cannot be overclocked, or with the use of a software tool called throttlestop you might be able to get 100mhz more out of it with some trickery) like most desktop CPU's. For overclocking you need to look either at AMD Ryzen chips (all of them are unlocked) or at Intel 'K' processors :)! You should decide between a laptop and a desktop by usage as well as budget; a laptop will generally be more expensive but it has the mobility (after gaming you can use it for example as a mediadevice everywhere in the house) and the peripherals integrated going for it. A desktop will be more cost efficient (more performance per dollar/for the same price) but you lose all the mobility. If your budget and your usage allows it, you can for example opt for a general usage notebook + a gaming desktop. If not, be sure to think about how important mobility is, and then you should go for either a gaming laptop or a gaming desktop:D!

Simply not true. In terms of gfx cards you can get Nvidia Geforce gtx 1660 Ti's & RTX 2060's for 1000-1200 dollars or a little bit more (a secondhand gtx 1060/1070 laptop is also a great choice), which are very competent for modern gaming. Almost all of the gaming laptops that are around that 1000 dollar pricepoint are equipped with an i5-9300H or an i7-9750H(F) processor which can turboboost up to 4Ghz on all (4-6-8) cores (depending on cooling, but same counts for 3000 dollar laptops). Cooling performance is not that much dependent on pricepoint (Alienware's are extremely expensive but also are very hot), and comes down really to specific models and how it is tuned. Eluktronics offers laptops for example between the 1500-1800 dollar range with cooling and performance better than almost every 2000 dollar+ laptop. To get the most out of your CPU, you simply need to finetune it a little bit. Undervolting, adjusting power limits to your liking, most laptops offer different 'fan/power modes' and some even have manual fan control.Laptop GPU's these days are very powerful and so are modern mobile CPU's (have a look at intel 10Th gen mobile and thr Ryzen 4000m series!). Just be sure to tune it a little bit for temperatures (which isn't that difficult to do) and you're good to go.

Oh I see, what a fun way to keep forum chats appropriate hahaha, thanks for informing me!(P.S. Your signature checks out :D!)

Hello:)! I was wondering, why is it that the word "kitten" (as a swear word?) gets used so much on these forums? It's the only community I can think of that always mentions kittens for some reason haha. My only guess is that the Guild Wars 2 forums change real swear words to the word "kitten" in forum posts but I'm not sure if this true xD. Anyways, can someone explain to me why everybody appears to love cats so much in Guild Wars 2:)?

I would think the possibility is 0.00%. it costs a lot, very big engine improvements should be made and given only select people use RTX GPU's it would be a bad investment for them to put money in RTX support when there are already much bigger investments to make...Currently only modern AAA titles (and well, world of warcraft because Blizzard has lots of money) have implemented the tech so far. Guild wars 2, like you say already looks stunning and if you want better lighting, they could upgrade to better lighting engines without RTX, which would be beneficial for the entire playerbase rather than just a few:). Problem being is, the engine needs optimization and most likely a new API to go with it as well.

One of the core values of guild wars 2 is the absence of a subscription, and I think that most (casual) players like myself would like it to remain that way. Guild Wars 2 is built around a consumerfriendly business model and for a more casual audience. WvW not required - Idk, legendaries are such QoL items I thinks it's fair to say you need to do more than one mode for creating one. 'Mastering the game'/ legendaries as a reward for 'mastering' more than one mode is not that unreasonable in my opinion. Gliding and mounts in dungeons and sPvP - I'm not really a PvP player so I wouldn't know the impact of them on that (although it would speed up/make the mode more chaotic I think), but for dungeons mounts would only be used to speedrun them and that kinda ruins the whole atmosphere around them. You are supposed to fight your way through and all that (or puzzle with teleports/stealth or something to bypass some stuff), it would make the dungeons less enjoyable. Dungeons weren't designed with mounts in mind, they are just too small to really utilize them, no? PvP duels in open world - Could be a nice addition but only if both players need to accept the duel, not like some other games where you can just fight players without them wanting to. I'm not sure if this addition would really be something players want. Account-wide waypoints - Eh, would be handy for veterans but would not be that good for the whole experience about world exploration when people are making their first alt-characters I believe. Lots of players really like exploration and having the entire map already 'unlocked' so to say would make exploration less enjoyable. Besides it's nice to have that extra xp when leveling ;D! The real fix should be a greater focus on engine optimization; would make for higher fps, the possibility for better vsiuals and would make it easier to implement new updates without the amount of bugs/crashes we currently experience sometimes in bigger patches. But that's just my take on it:).

My Chrome has been the fastest of the bunch so far and the ads-issue can easily be fixed by Ublock Origin (+ Ublock extra). I myself have never seen RAM usage been ridiculous to be honest but that's probably because I never use more than 7 or so tabs at a time, I don't like having unneccessary tabs open:).The google account integration is something really good in Chrome I think, and in terms of security/UI I find both to be really close to each other. Between Firefox and Chrome I really think it's more of a preference thing, no :)? Anyways to answer OP's question: install the free version of Malwarebytes and Adwarecleaner from the official malwarebytes site and do a manual scan on both. They should detect the adware/malware your computer seems to be infected with. Afterwards, an adblocker can be handy to prevent this from happening again in the future:)!

What ingame settings do you use?How's your cpu clockspeed whilst playing Guild Wars 2?Also; are you using the egpu on the macbook display or an external monitor? (Connecting the egpu to the laptop but the video output of the egpu to an external monitor is very beneficial for bandwith.)

I think RTX is maybe a bit too much - given a LOT of work should be done to implement it (Only Blizzard has done RTX in their mmorpg, but that's blizzard they are swimming in money) and a completely new engine (for example Unreal like you mentioned) would mean the game would have to be written entirely from scratch again (8 years of developement needs to be written again in that case) would require an incredible amount of work and money probably. I think just updating to more modern standards of rendering techniques should be plenty and within their budget :D! I too would like to see a remastered version, I think with upgrading rendering techniques and more engine optimization Guild Wars 2's potential could really be unfolded. I would like to see more maps with as much visual eyecandy as Grothmar Valley for example but with the same performance as core Tyria maps:)! With optimization I really do believe a lot more content/systems could come to Guild Wars 2 because developers will have an easier time implementing them without having worries about crashes and gamebreaking bugs. A remastered version with world polishing and some big engine overhauls would make for an even more outstanding game than Guild Wars 2 already is, I fully agree with your statement:D! Thank you for the interesting post!

yeap, the Character Model Limit is the biggest killer of FPS, which I don't think Anet will ever fix because of the spaghetti code from the old GW engine. Its the same in every game, because of having to model after living things (Humans and animals), and realistic movement ,etc. need to contain thousands of polygons, often one character has the same polygons as the entire background scene. Most terrain and objects in the world are blocky, and easy to model with little to no performance impact. Character Model Quality is number of polygons per character (Highest is usually ~1000 in games, Lowest usually ~100).Character Model Limit is the total number of character models displayed.(So the two quality settings are multiplicative, putting both on higher settings goes up exponentially.)Yes, but I think especially given Guild Wars 2's engine is more of a bottleneck than more modern engines (on modern hardware) the performance impact is especially large in this case, like @crepuscular.9047 mentioned:)A good trick to have both good fps and no characters on your screen with no personalized appearance (you know, the grey hoodie everybody seems to like xD) is setting the character model quality one value above your character model limit. I recommend putting character model limit on low, but character model quality on medium, this way all models that are being rendered do have their respective appearances and you still have a big fps improvement because the character model quantity is reduced by quite a margin which means more "bandwidth" gained on the render thread for more fps :D! You can try medium/medium as well but I think Low/medium is really worth it. Character models just create such a performance hit because of all of their movement has to be individually calculated like @Hannelore.8153 said so that setting should never be set to high if you want decent fps in most areas:)!

I think it really is worth getting the cable option, it gives a lot of flexibility for network configurations. From what I've heard about satellite, isn't it more expensive than cable (at least in the long run)? If you really do not want to invest in cable, a good LTE connection is your best bet on having the best possible connection.It could also be a serverside issue given it's been really busy and there might be server disconnect issues/crashes that need to be patched:).

Turn down character model limit & quality. Low or medium and your fps will be a lot better:)!Also navi GPU usage is important, dx12pxy can help, there's also a guide in this forum category with the use of msi afterburner I believe.

Have you tried using something like msi afterburner to measure temps? That can tell you if your CPU/GPU is overheating, but to be honest I think your system should have great temps given all the cooling capacity in your case. Could very well be a driver issue of some sort.it's normal the GPU will feel hot, but that might not mean it's overheating; gpu's can go up to 80 degrees without issues at all, of course it will feel hot but that doesn't mean the GPU overheats per se (temp limit on modern nvidia gpu's is 105 degrees Celsius or something, at that temp the card will shut down, but you want your gpu to be at 80 degrees or below of course)

Dear Crenshaw,I don't know a lot about Macbooks, but this might help:Always game with your laptop plugged in, set power profiles to something like "prefer performance" and also make sure GW2 is utilizing the dedicated GPU and not the integrated GPU:)! (It's also a good thing to check temperatures and clock speeds to see if you're not throttling)This advice is based on windows laptops but it should be the same for macbooks. Also set character model limit on low because that one can eat FPS;)!I hope this can help :D!

What are your ingame settings and your collission sensitivity setting? Have you set the correct settings in your graphics card control panel?Have you monitored your cpu/gpu usage and have you tried to repair the gameclient:)?

Actually, the core mount you are describing sounds like the Warclaw, the WvW mount, it's a little bit slower than the raptor and also has 2 leaps:)! I myself find the grand availability of waypoints to personally be more of a problem than mounts in the core maps to be honest, I like wp's but they are at every corner of the map xD, but I know many people rely on all these wp's so I think they should make an option to "hide" several waypoints on your map if you want to.The new living world maps only have 2-4 waypoints which I find a good balance for tp'ing and using mounts. But I understand your arguments, especially the raptor and the bunny are quite amazing for map completion, but a bit unfair for free to play players in that regard, they introduced some "no mounts allowed" zones, near jumping puzzles etc. but I don't know if this would solve the problem if they add more due to them being quite interruptive I don't think free to play players will be unmotivated, they might see it as a nice treat to look forward to when they decide to buy the expansions (which honestly doesn't cost much, especially because for the price of one you get two:) ), I leveled to 80 before buying an expansion and I absolutely loved the exploration part of it, sure everything was slower when I'm looking back at the time I didn't have mounts but it was a nice, overwhelming experience nonetheless:)

Hello!I hope I can be of help!First of all, since you're on a laptop make sure th games uses your dedicated gpu instead of your integrated gpu, you can check this by using task manager, and if it doesn't use the correct one I think it's right click on the icon and then there will be something like "run with amd gpu". What settings are you exactly using?Subsampling, although a bit blurry, gives lots of frames. The most important setting is the character model limit setting, set this to low or given your post to lowest. Character model quality is less of a fps hog but set it low to be sure. Collision sensitivity (camera settings, general tab of the settings menu) can affect fps also a lot, slide it completely to the left side. Since you're already using most gfx settings on low, they should be fine. (I recommend Kyosika's settings guide and Tekkit's fps guide on youtube to improve both fps and visual clarity) Be sure to have the right power options enabled and to play gw2 while your laptop is plugged in, as laptops use their full power plugged in and throttle themselves down when they are on battery (battery saver, it's a rule to play games on laptops when they are plugged in, the battery will drain very fast when giving all that power to the system). Make sure you use gw2 in windowed fullscreen (no tearing/unnoticable tearing compared to fullscreen) or fullscreen (if you don't encounter a lot of screen tearing). Close all background programs, and monitor your temperatures, clocks, usage etc. via task manager or a very useful overlay like msi afterburner's rivatuner statistic server (rtss). Make sure nothing overheats:) Driver updates, windows updates... be sure to have the latest. Your computer should definitely have a 40-30 fps on medium/low settings, your computer should be alright with gw2. Hope this will help you achieve better fps:)!

Character model limit --> set to low(est), will be the biggest fps increasing setting out there, character model quality --> set to medium/low Shadows and shaders and postprocessing also affect fps, but on my pc I've set all three of them to "high", for me the most important setting is the character model limit one. Gw2 isn't a vram-intensive game, vram isn't the only thing about gpu's. Make sure you use the correct power options. Check for driver updates as well, although you have to understand the gpu will almost always be held back by the cpu as gw2 is a very cpu-intensive game. Also try Borderless windowed mode:)