Posts Tagged ‘Guides & Tips’

How often when starting a new zone do you ask yourself, “Ok, what gathering tools do I need?” I looked around and really couldn’t find a good guide; even the official wiki is incomplete on what resource nodes are in what zones.

We decided to create one for the site – I gathered the data and Wolf reformatted and made it easy to understand. There are two different tables in pdf format, both with a printer-friendly version. The detailed view includes all tools required for a particular zone’s resource nodes, while the simple view shows the highest-level tool which will harvest all the nodes for that zone. Hopefully, they will be helpful to you in your gathering endeavors.

Download below, please do not redistribute.

• Detailed view, printer-friendly
• Simple view, printer-friendly

In Guild Wars 2, secondary attributes work a little differently than primary attributes. First off, while available to all professions, they do not increase as you level up. You are also less likely to see them modified by armor, weapons, or consumables: they are increased mainly by adding points to their respective trait lines. And as with primary attributes, secondaries also have alternate names, but they are used much more in trait and skill descriptions.

Let’s start off with boon duration. Boon duration increases the length of all boons applied by your character; it does not affect any boons applied by other players. Boons are positive effects applied to a character, also commonly referred to as buffs or (in Guild Wars) enchantments. Boons are almost exclusively limited in time and this is where boon duration comes in. It increases the length of all boons with the exception of aegis, which doesn’t stack, and might, which stacks in intensity not duration. The secondary name of boon duration is “concentration.”

The next attribute is condition damage: it increases all damage done by conditions. Conditions are negative effects that can be added to a character and are the opposite of boons. There are only four conditions that do actual damage. The primary attribute power increases damage but does not increase or interact with condition damage. Condition damage is sometimes called “malice.”

The third attribute I am covering is condition duration. It is really straight forward: whenever there is condition damage being applied, it increases the time that damage is applied. It is referred to as “expertise” in some places in-game.

Next up, we have critical damage. Where precision increases the base multiplier for critical damage to happen, the critical damage attribute increases the resulting damage. Critical damage, also called “prowess,” is easy to calculate compared to most of the other attributes. For each point in critical damage, you add one to the base critical damage modifier. The base modifier is 150 percent.

The final attribute is healing power. This is a big one as it can significantly change how effective your healing skills are. How healing power is calculated is quite complicated: different healing skills are affected by healing power by different amounts. Each skill has a coefficient that it multiplies healing power by to determine how much it affects healing. Healing power also affects regeneration. It’s alternate name is “compassion.”

Secondary attributes are often forgotten when players are planning out their character. They add more depth to the system, allowing for build types and, in some cases, can become the main focus of the build.

Since the release of Guild Wars 2, we have been playing a ton of it. It’s a fun game and has lived up to my expectations, but I will talk about what I think of it another time. Today, and in future posts, I want to discuss Guild Wars 2 mechanics. I’m not talking about the unique special abilities that each profession has like virtues for the guardian, but things like damage, healing and defense.

At some point, likely early in development, ArenaNet decided that they wanted to have unique terms for their mechanics. I’m guessing that they wanted to keep people from getting confused with similar terms seen in other RPGs. Most people know that in games if you increase your strength, you do more damage when you hit things with pointy sticks. Guild Wars 2 has a simplified attribute system: one example is that power increases both melee and spell damage.

With power, the renaming of attributes isn’t as confusing, but with other attributes it gets much more complicated. The next major attribute is called “precision,” which from the name alone, you wouldn’t necessarily guess that it’s an increase of critical hit chance. The issue with this and other multiple-named attributes is that they don’t stick with one name. As you look through the traits of many of the professions, you will see where they refer to both precision and critical hit chance separately.

The third primary attribute, toughness, while a little easier to understand, has not one but two alternate names. Toughness, defense and armor are all the same thing: one toughness is the same as one armor or one defense. Really, the only difference they try to make is that toughness is the attribute and when, for example, a trait says it increases your toughness by ten percent, it isn’t taking into account any defense you may be getting from armor. The in-game tooltip says that toughness plus defense equals your armor, but they are all the same.

The final primary attribute is thankfully straightforward. Vitality directly adds to health: for every point in vitality added, you gain ten points of health. But don’t confuse this with vigor, which has nothing to do with your health.

As this post is running on much longer than I wanted it to, I will stop here, but next time I will go over secondary attributes, which are even more confusing than the primary ones.

I’ve finally gotten around to playing AssBro, something I’ve been looking forward to since completing Assassin’s Creed 2. There are more things to do in this game, one of them being achieving full synchronization of memory sequences (completing a bonus objective of missions).

“Castello Crasher” is the first memory of Sequence 4: Den of Thieves, and since I’ve attempted it so many times, I decided to record a successful run. The first time through, thinking this was Metal Gear Solid, I spent over an hour sneaking around, hiding bodies, and avoiding line-of-sight – over time I’ve discovered that all Ezio needs to do is kill guards before their social status indicator (head arrow) turns fully red. The crossbow is extremely efficient at this.

Enjoy all the jumping and climbing with shiny, colorful armor in full HD.

For at least a year, we’ve been trying to figure out how to get Minecraft to show up in Steam’s friend list. The problem was that adding the exe normally as a non-Steam game resulted in a green “now playing” for a few seconds before returning the user’s status back to the blue “Online”. We have finally discovered a method, using both the Minecraft exe and the jar file, and have documented it below.

• This issue affects users with Java 64-bit installed on their PC.
• Do not use this walkthrough if you are running only Java 32-bit – it will actually give you this issue. Add the exe normally as a non-Steam game, i.e. stop at step 2 below.
• This is not for getting the in-game overlay to work properly. Steam overlay just does not like Minecraft; it will usually not function at all and may even lock up or crash your game.

• Go to the Minecraft download page here.
• Download Minecraft.exe in the “Minecraft for Windows” section.
• Click the small link “Show all platforms” under the “Minecraft for Windows” section.
• Download minecraft.jar in the “Minecraft for Linux / Other” section.
• Move the two files into the folder you want to run Minecraft from.

2. Adding Minecraft to your Steam games library

• Open your Steam library.
• Click “ADD A GAME…” in the bottom left of the window.
• Click “Add a Non-Steam Game…”
• Click “BROWSE…” and locate the folder with the two files.
• Click on Minecraft.exe and press Open. Minecraft should now be checked in the Add a Game window.
• Click “ADD SELECTED PROGRAMS”. Minecraft should now be in your Games list.

3. Using the jar file to launch Minecraft and fixing the icon

• Scroll down the Games list and locate Minecraft.
• Right-click Minecraft and click Properties.
• Click “CHOOSE ICON…” at the top.
• Click Minecraft.exe and press OPEN. The icon should now have a shortcut arrow.
• Under Target, change “…\Minecraft.exe” to “…\minecraft.jar” and click CLOSE.

You can now play Minecraft through Steam and show your friends what awesome game you are enjoying.

• If you get stuck at the white Mojang screen, navigate to “C:\Users\[account name]\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\bin” and delete the jinput.jar file. (AppData is a hidden folder.)
• Double-check the Java version you have installed on your PC. Stop at step 2 if you only have Java 32-bit. Follow the entire walkthrough if you have Java 32 AND 64-bit OR if you have only Java 64-bit installed.
• Use Internet Explorer (bleh) 64-bit to download Java. We have had issues in the past using Javas downloaded with Firefox and Chrome.
• Make sure that you have downloaded the files for the correct platforms.
• Make sure the two files are in the same folder.
• Make sure when adding a non-Steam game, to choose the exe and not the jar file.
• Make sure to choose the icon first before changing the target.

Testing

• Internet Explorer 9, 32 and 64-bit, to download Java.
• Java, Version 6 Update 30, 32 and 64-bit.
• Java 32-bit only, Java 32 and 64-bit concurrently, and Java 64-bit only, with the exe and exe+jar files.
• Windows 7 OS, 64-bit.

Last updated on April 17, 2012.

The Windows key can really be the bane of gamers. Depending on the game’s control scheme, one accidental hit of the windows key and you’re left looking at your desktop. Some games respond well enough to being forced to desktop, others just crash.

Disabling the windows key is an easy answer for this. The only problem is, there is no interface options to do this. Microsoft could not originally fathom that you would want to do this. There still is no easy switch to disable it but they do now provide a solution.

I originally wanted to write up how to disable it in your registry. It’s still possible to do it that way but while researching for updated information, I found that Microsoft now provides a “Fix It” file for disabling and re-enabling the Windows key. Start by navigating to this link to Microsoft Support. Under the “Fix it for me”, click the “Microsoft Fix It” button above the text “Disable the Windows key”. This will download the .msi (Microsoft installer) file. This will be very similar to installing a program with similar prompts. When it’s done, you will have to reboot before it will work.

Keyboards now often come with the option to disable the Windows key. Now if Microsoft would just go ahead and add a UI option to the interface to disable the Windows key, we wouldn’t have to jump through hoops for something so simple.

If you’ve ever had crashing issues, stuttering, low FPS, and/or general video card problems after installing a new driver, one of the causes may be left over files from the old driver. There are many long and detailed instructions for a perfect “clean install” on forums for those who have persistent video card troubles; this one is only recommended when you are having no issues and want to keep it that way.

1. Download and install a driver remover program. There are free ones out there, but I use Driver Cleaner from long habit and because it is updated fairly often.
2. Run the live update for your driver remover program.
3. Download your video card driver.
4. In the Windows Control Panel, use “Programs and Features” or “Add or Remove Programs” to uninstall your card’s associated programs then the old graphics driver last. If you start with the graphics driver, the wizard will force a reboot between each program.
5. Click the Start button > click Run > type “msconfig” > press Enter. This will bring up System Configuration.
6. Click the Boot tab > under Boot options, check Safe boot > press OK > click Restart in the new prompt. Your PC will now boot into Safe Mode.
7. Run the driver remover program for your video card driver. In my case, it is the general nVidia selection.
8. Once done, click the Start button > click Run > type “msconfig” > press Enter. This will bring up System Configuration.
9. Click the Boot tab > under Boot options, uncheck Safe boot > press OK > click Restart in the new prompt. Your PC will now boot into its regular startup.
10. Install your new video card driver, reboot at its prompt and you’re done.

After this is completed and everything is running smoothly, in order to save space and maintain the cleanliness we have going here, you may want to go into your C drive and manually delete the temporary unpacking folder that the driver executable creates during install. Mine is named, appropriately, “NVIDIA” and uses about 500 MB of HD space.

Last updated June 16, 2011.

Below I have compiled some console commands that are standard in most Valve games, the majority of which are useful in multiplayer:

Tilde opens console »