smsarasin.3468

I want to throw my name in the "me too" list... Ever since the Windows update to 1803, GW2 will drop to desktop on any map loading screens. Game plays fine other than that, but it's like clockwork on any loading screens, drops to desktop for 10 seconds or so, then back to the game.

Necro axe #2 is not a siphon. That is dagger. True, I meant that it siphons life from the target, not the actual skill name. Sorry for that. Ghastly Claws is the actual name, but it steals life from the target with each strike. Ghastly Claws does not have any sort of life steal unless you are using the traits, consumables or upgrades but in that case all of your skills have life steal. It does generate life force but that is not the same as life steal.Ah, my mistake then. It must be due to me using the Blood Magic trait line. But I was certain that the description for Ghastly Claws explicitly stated that it gave life force per strike. I was going by This. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ghastly_Claws So maybe I was just confused in how it worked.

Necro axe #2 is not a siphon. That is dagger. True, I meant that it siphons life from the target, not the actual skill name. Sorry for that. Ghastly Claws is the actual name, but it steals life from the target with each strike.

I just saw an article at the Register that says that there are some design flaws in Intel CPUs that can be used to circumvent security. In order to mitigate this, they have been working on a patch, which unfortunately will incour up to a 30% hit in performance. This not only effects personal PCs, but also server farms such as Amazon's cloud servers. Quote from the article: "There is presently an embargoed security bug impacting apparently all contemporary [intel] CPU architectures that implement virtual memory, requiring hardware changes to fully resolve. Urgent development of a software mitigation is being done in the open and recently landed in the Linux kernel, and a similar mitigation began appearing in NT kernels in November. In the worst case the software fix causes huge slowdowns in typical workloads. There are hints the attack impacts common virtualisation environments including Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine... I wonder if this could be part of the reason of the lag that we have been experiencing. They have been working on the patch to the flaw since November. Which coincides with when we started getting the lagginess...

I'm a little biased, but I say for a really good PvE experience, go with a Necro Minion Master build. The minions will steal health from the mobs they battle and send it to you. And if you use an Axe, it is used as ranged weapon, but is not treated as such. So you can stand out of harms way, use the 2nd skill which siphons health, and not worry about any reflects since the axe is technically a melee weapon, but is in actuality a mid-range weapon. And in addition to the minions giving you a constant stream of health, they work great as your own personal bodyguards. They will take the aggro, leaving you free to move around and select your targets. And with the right traits, each minion you have summoned will increase your stacks of toughness. If you want to actually go into melee range, a good dagger/dagger combo can really take down many mobs quickly. I went with the Elite spec of Reaper, but I kept the minion master build. I may not have all the nifty new toys the elite spec offers, but I find that I can solo many of the maps without much worry. And with shroud, you basically have a built-in extra health bar for those tough situations when you need just a little extra oomph.

Not quite. If you go into Options, and then Controls. Scroll down and you will find a section for the mounts. Look for the section for Mount Skill 1 and Mount Skill 2. By default, I think they are something like V and Z or something. I replaced mine with Q and E (which are normally bound to strafe left and right, which I don't use). Now, when you are using the griffon, the Space will still Flap, the actual key 1 (on the number bar) will be the attack skill, but now Q and E will be dive and climb. You can still use the 1 key to dive, and if you are high enough, it will just do a dive bomb and then level out after a certain time, and the S key will still climb, but it will use up all of your momentum. The Q and E will allow you to do small (or longer if you press it longer) dives and climbs, but you won't use up all of your momentum when doing so.

I found that I seem to have pretty good luck by remapping the dive (mount skill 1) and the climb (mount skill 2) to Q and E respectively. You can then tap Q to make small quick dives instead of the full out dive bomb move by pressing 1. And on the flip side, once you get enough speed, you can tap E to climb without using up all of your momentum. It makes the Griffon races (where you fly through the hoops) MUCH easier to complete.

I don't think it is entirely a nVidia-related issue. I have an MSI R9 390X in my machine, and my son has an R9 270X in his. Both of us are running Windows 10 Pro, 16GB RAM (I have a 500GB SSD for boot and 1TB for storage, his is only a 128GB SSD boot drive, with 1TB storage drive), both using i7 CPUs. We both have experienced the freeze. Mine more often than his, but for both of us we have to do a restart to recover. No other games or apps seem to have issues. We can play other games for hours with no issues, but GW2 gives us freezes. (We can still alt+tab out, but can't kill the game from Task Manager. We have to do a restart to get back into the game...)

I already posted a lengthy response in another thread, so I'll summarize here...When shopping in the gem store, you have certain expectations. You are shopping for something specific. For instance, you find a cool new outfit, or a weapon skin, glider skin, tool, gizmo, or whatever and you purchase that item. And you're happy with your purchase. You are not at a county fair, plunking down some cash on a rigged game of chance. Financially I am not able to afford a never ending supply of gems. I am lucky to afford maybe one or two gem cards a year, so i am very choosy about what I spend my money on. I would love to have some of these new mount skins, but I absolutely refuse to play a game of luck for the outside chance I might get the one I want. I don't gamble with my money. I would happily spend 400-500 gems on a mount of my choosing, but I will never spend my money on a lootbox chance. So, if this is how outfits and mount skins are going to be handled in the future, I'm afraid that I will no longer be spending any of my limited disposable income in the game. I am very disappointed that ANET is taking this path. There is no reason why they can't allow you to pick and choose the skins that you want to buy. All they would have to do is use a system like with the miniatures. You buy a claim ticket, and upon use you can select from a list of available mounts. You could even have multiple tiers. 400 gems for the basic skins, 550 for middle tier, and 750 for top tier. I would happily spend my gems on this... But not on RNG...

Well, I would love to see a Blizzard Jackal for the winter festival... Riding around on a little snow storm instead of a sand storm would be kinda cool.. :)

He's always been called "Steve" in any groups I've run Laby with for the past two years. So, I naturally thought it has always been this way. He'll always be "Steve" to me... :)

It may be totally unrelated, but I ran into a similar issue. Guild Wars 2 (and only that game, others ran fine) would lock up. Luckily the machine itself didn't power off, but it would freeze and I needed to kill the program. This was consistently happening, but only in GW2. I tried updating drivers, checked voltages on the PSU, re-seated hardware and cables. I even did a re-install of the game. I was just getting ready to reinstall the OS when I stumbled upon a fix. I had a little TSR program called "Core Temp" running in the background from when I was troubleshooting heat related issues from before I swapped my hardware to a new case. I no longer had the heat issues, but I had gotten used to having the temp information displayed on my Logitech keyboard's LCD display. I had closed the TSR for some reason and had forgotten to re-start it. I launched GW2 to try and play a little bit and lo and behold the game ran fine. No issues for several hours of play. But the next time I went to play I had the TSR running and just like clockwork the game locked solid. This may not be related at all to your problem, but if you are running any kind of monitoring software, try disabling it and running the game again. See if that makes any difference. It is worth a shot. I know it made a big difference in my lockup issues.