Bariel.3562

Please do not introduce the mantra changes, there was never anything fun about precasting them, it was annoying in PVE to do when map swapping but even worse in WvW where forgetting could get you killed or lagging behind the group as you're having to precast before you can mount up. It'll be worse now with mantra of liberation only having 2 charges in WvW and being required so much as a stun break with the amount of CC and reductions in stability uptime.

Aww so kind, thank you for spotting and realising I'm a genius and smarter than you. That's really nice to hear.

Although spawn camping occurs I most commonly see it because solo players take the 1 route over and over again to get farmed. Each spawn has 3 routes out of it so to say 1 team can stop both other teams even capping a sentry they'd have to be cover 2 teams x 4 maps x 3 routes out - 24 locations. It doesn't happen unless you allow it. Admittedly it's frustrating when a group is camping spawns, especially the small groups that rely on their mobility to avoid any equal/outnumbered fights and just gank 5v1, cowards always gonna be cowards and I can just go a different route or group with a few and watch them scatter. For me it's nothing to do with participation, the game makes it easy to transfer worlds and/or create alt accounts so you will get the better/more organised groups transferring to the higher tier servers (not different than any sport with multiple leagues where players transfer teams) and that is ultimately what leads to the population imbalance most of all.

Fairly easily, after a cap SM stays contested for a couple of mins so it's the perfect time to get through the walls/gates as teams will often cap it and head straight out onto another objective. Break that CC-bar and you'll be surprised just how quickly the lord drops, most unorganised groups seem to drop their big damage skills though before the break bar is depleted.

Disagree, things are meta because firstly they kill the fastest and secondly the safest. Reducing ranged damage with a tax would just shift the meta to be melee, balance is achieved when both melee and range are equal in speed to kill and safety in doing so. In my view you need to make melee have more toughness or something to make them just as appealing. With regards to "Not all weapons need to do damage", sadly loot bags dropping from players in WvW is tied to damage and as supports you already get a lot less drops than DPS players even though some of skills damage and some don't. Already hard enough to get enough supports if you cull the drops more nobody will play. Could agree if the way bags dropped in WVW was adjusted.

It's not the same, if it worked liked the Engineers kits then perhaps (Even though I'm not a fan of that). However, Eng kits don't also have a fixed number of uses shared across all kits where using skill 2 in medkit will consume 2 pages/initiative meaning I can't then use Skill Y in bomb kit for another X seconds until my page/initiative timer also ticks more. FB would have 2 different timers (page regen and skill timer), plus traits that then screw with that page regen timer like "swift scholar" using 3 skills in one book will refund a page and renewed justice that reduces recharge of F1 by 20% on kill. It's more than double the complexity of Eng, and trying to juggle that mental arithmetic across the 15 tome skills on top of playing a support role to keep your group alive in WvW just isn't going to be fun!

In PVE perhaps but it won't work in WvW where you have to react to situations and adjust what you use in that moment. One of the reasons I don't play engi to be honest as I never liked it. In PVE sure you can get used to rotations and roughly when to go back into a kit/book as you're playing to more fixed DPS rotations. In WvW though we're already trying to juggle keeping an eye on the subgroup, stability uptime, stun breaking and cleansing with either a signet for revival or a mantra . I don't need to be trying to remember what skill in which book is on what cooldown at any moment too. If Anet proceed with the change then why would any FB want to play WvW with less fun and more painful? (especially since supports get next to no loot bags for our efforts). There's still no viable alternative stability provider so it ultimately just damages the game mode.

FB changes aren't thought through, how are we supposed to know a 25s skill in Tome 3 is still on cooldown without jumping in and out of tomes to check? Might work in PVE where you have set rotations but in WvW where you are reacting to current situations in a fight it makes it become a spammy mess. The problem isn't with the current class design it's with the lack of other classes ability to provide things like stability and it being such a required boon in WvW, this will do nothing to change the need for a FB in every subgroup and will just make it more un-fun for people to play.

MrFayth did answer it: There's more to performance of a PC than just clock speed, the architecture of the chip, cache and all sorts play a major part to it. Although your clock speed is ~20% higher you have fewer actual cores and although those cores are multi-threaded with parts having their own processing elements they also share some execution resources and you'll have some overhead with the CPU dealing with these "virtual" cores plus you'll be more susceptible to other programs - broswers, OS, discord, firewall, virus, background services, etc also using part of your core that Guild Wars 2 wants to. Most likely the reason you don't see a big difference is because gaming is very maths based (floating point math more specifically) and GW2 seems to do a lot of this on the CPU, couple that with the main drawback between the two microarchitectures is that the FX-6300 shares a floating point unit (FPU) between what you think are 2 cores... there was a lawsuit filed against AMD at one point over their claims of cores regarding this but I don't remember hearing if they won or lost that case (or settled it out of court). Also if you read extremtechs review of bulldozer - https://www.extremetech.com/computing/100583-analyzing-bulldozers-scaling-single-thread-performance/2https://www.extremetech.com/computing/100583-analyzing-bulldozers-scaling-single-thread-performance/2 you will see them say: Now AMD have rectified some of that for Piledriver but it's still not the same as actually having seperate cores so whilst the 6300 is newer and will be faster in some circumstances there will also be others where it is no upgrade at all despite the higher clock speed. It's more of a side-grade as MrFayth already pointed out. Zen is a much better architecture if you're planning to stick with AMD but they are still some way behind Intel in the CPU wars.

I know the feeling spent the last couple of months trying to get to the bottom of this with Victory or Death and losing 30mins a time too. What we know for certain is that it affects only a small portion of the playerbase and therefore it narrows down the possible options. Also, various have reported that it's not always 100% they get disconnected and occasionally trying enough times they can get through which unfortunately can mislead people into thinking they changed something that fixed it when in reality it was not related at all. What has now worked for me is to connect to GW2 via a VPN connection rather than directly as from my tracing it appears to be a problem with the route through the internet taken and unfortunately the game uses TCP rather than UDP which means packet loss can cause resynchs and disconnection issues which clearly GW2 code is not great at recovering from. It's part of the reason UDP is more popular for games, although usually leads to devs implementing their own reliability functionality for data that mustn't be lost. What I did was to the use the chat command /IP in game to get the IP address for the GW2 servers and then lookup where in the world those servers were (Germany in my instance) and I then connect my VPN to a server in Germany that way I have far fewer hops from my connection to the GW2 servers. I have tested this several times now turning the VPN on and off and it consistently fails without it and when switched on I've succeeded every time. Not really a solution for everyone as a lot wouldn't want to pay a subscription to a VPN just to be able to play this game but clearly whatever Are you in the UK using Virgin Media as your Internet Provider by any chance? I know of 4 others who have the issue with the same ISP.

As it doesn't happen for many players, it can be difficult to reproduce reliably. The Devs need to find what particular set-up/connection/variable causes it to happen to just one portion of the playerbase. I'm aware of that thanks, 20+ years as a professional developer and spent my fair share of time tracking down sporadic problems. My statement was somewhat rhetorical since the only people they'll probably be able to track this down with are the ones experiencing the issue, the length of time it's been an outstanding issue though and the lack of communication are what gripes especially given every few days someone is posting about disconnects in story missions.

BUMP - been another week with no update and a month since the last ANet post. Is someone actually still investigating this, can't imagine it takes this long to reproduce since I can make it happen every single day.

Would you mind posting a build, I'd be interested in seeing that as I'm new to the guardian and mostly interested in open world.

Which bit isn't true? It's not listed as a bug/known issue on the 'official' tracker - https://help.guildwars2.com/hc/en-us/articles/231272908-Known-Issue-Tracker and whilst a dev posted in a forum thread a month or two back it didn't say much more than they had been unable to reproduce the problem which isn't the same as acknowledgement that it's a known issue with the game. Nor have they seemingly reached out to any user who is able to consistently reproduce the problem to capture the information they need to provide a resolution. That's also backed up by the fact I've been going back and forth with support on this and their suggestions haven't inspired me at all that they've really delved too deeply into this. They're certainly not asking me to capture any debugging information, wireshark, tcpdumps, etc that I'd expect a developer to want to need to track down root cause of disconnects for various users. I can find threads going back over a year on this, by now it really shouldn't be an issue that all they can say is "we can't reproduce"!!!

Sadly despite it being an issue for quite a few people for a prolonged period of time they don't appear to be doing anything about it, nor have they even acknowledged it as a known issue and after a year I question whether they've really ever bothered to take a look at this at all.