Completely confused by this game

I'm hoping someone can help me. I'm having so many troubles with this game that I've never had with others.

First, everything besides me in this game is incredibly laggy. All of the enemies, allies, and players rubberband around like crazy. I'm playing on a machine that can run Crysis on high, my ping is well below 200 (the dot's green). Is there some way to choose a server closer to me or something? The game's practically unplayable, despite the fact that I just tried other MMOs/multiplayer games on my computer and they're running perfectly fine.

Second, the game seems incredibly unintuitive and hard. I started with an Elementalist since I like playing mages in MMOs. I realize they're glass cannons. I know I start with a spell that makes me regain health whenever I cast spells. I tried going in the Necromancer/Monk catacombs area in the Prophecies intro and I'm getting stomped. I'm facing a group of three enemies, I can't kite them due to the lagginess, and they stomp my face in, despite constantly using Flare and Deathly Swarm. If I try that Necromancer's other quest, I'm killed by skeletons higher level than me while fighting in a swamp. I have no chance.

Finally, the Necromancer challenge seems impossible. It says I'm supposed to animate bone horrors to get past the traps... Only the spell doesn't work on any corpses, even the insect things right before the traps, even when I'm right on top of them. All I can do is die, then respawn and run past it only to get stuck by another trap.

Is there something really big that I'm missing about this game? Some networking option that'll help me? Some user manual that'll tell me how to summon and control minions or anything? I've played dozens of MMOs and this one just makes me feel hopelessly lost.

Well, I'm not an expert about rubberbanding. It happens to me sometimes too, but when I want to avoid it I try going in an explorable zone from different districts in one of the towns. When in town, if you look at your upper left corner, there's a display of districts. I don't know whether you're from America or Europe or some other place, but as far as I'm aware the European and Asian servers are both located in Frankfurt, Germany. That means that if you are from Europe and use those servers, you should be fine. Sometimes however, especially on peak hours, it might be better to switch to the Asian district which is often much less crowded. That means you're less likely to lag ingame. At least, it works for me. If you're from the US, try different US districts. Also, try using click to move instead of running with your mouse keys. Even if you rubberband a bit, you will always reach your destination, as well as taking the most efficient path there.

As for the Necromancer challenge, I'm not quite sure what goes wrong, Note though that not all enemies leave a corpse that you can exploit. I believe the undead in the Catacombs leave corpses that are not exploitable. For the Necromancer Challenge, there's an unexploited corpse right at the spot where the deadly well is you need to traverse. Casting the skill near that well should suffice in order to get you further.

The green water is something you'll have to traverse. Try running through it and stopping in places where there's no green water, so that you can easily kill your enemies and then regenerate your health. It takes a bit of practice to get it right, but that's why I've always found the Catacombs a fun place to play in.

I hope this helps.

If I may,
RU traveling alone, or do you party up with Henchies; GW was designed for a full crew, as opposed to the One Man Army of some games, so your Mage is best off if he has a Fighter or Ranger to Shield him. (I know not everyone will agree about the Ranger) but my experiance with my own R/Elm is that the Ranger Henchie draws less Agro than the over Eager fighters. BB.

For the necro challenge there is a dead body very close to the trap (the trap is between you and it in one instance I think). Just raise it and it will walk into the trap. You can only animate once from a dead body. If you animate a minion and it dies in a fight you can't reanimate the same one again.

I have a similar thing with GW lag. The NPCs now bounce about to the point where the game has become unplayable. Like yourself, my PC can handle other games on high settings without a problem. I'm told that the NPC bouncing thing is due to a corrupt file. I've uninstalled and re-installed without it helping. I'd suggest trying GW on a different PC to see if the problem if PC or server related (I don't have the lag issues with other PCs n the house so changing server districts isn't going to help).

The catacombs are a fairly difficult area in pre-searing (the starting area that you are in). It sounds like you are spreading your attributes. Go to a town (Ascalon or any you like) and hit "k". This will open your skills menu. Try to concentrate on one or two things (like fire and energy storage). It's better to spam Flare at low level. The damage is pretty good and with Aura of Restoration it will also help to keep you alive. When you spread between elementalist and necro, a then split between different attributes you become significantly weaker.

Here's a link to the GW Wiki on playing as an ele:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guide...n_elementalist

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He's in pre-searing. He can only team with one other player.

1. Try some other drivers.

2. This game is made to be played with full teams or henchmen. Henchmen can be added by pressing P, going to the henchmen tab and adding them. You're not supposed to be soloing in this game like ever, though there is plenty of possibility if you make a build specifically for it. But that build will generally have to be adapted to the foes. This is not possible in presearing though so its best to find a partner.

Try starting the game with the -image command, that will download all the files onto your computer, which might be causing some lag with drawing other characters. You can choose another location from the drop down list in the top left corner.

Try doing some of the other general quests before heading into the catacombs, or kill some mobs just outside Ascalon until you level up. Summoning minions is a simple as hitting the skill button when there is an exploitable corpse (non-fleshy creatures, like skeletons don't leave exploitable corpses) in range.

Edit : Crom makes a good point regarding attribute points. Make sure you've got points in the attribute you're using skills from. As an ele in pre-searing, that's probably fire magic.

The OP is in Pre Searing, that means Henchmen are not an option.

If things are lagging and rubber banding around you then you might concider turning down the games graphics. As well you can try moving to another server by going to a town and switching districts to international or something else other then what your currently on.

Try leveling up your character by killing creatures around your level or even 1-3 levels below you. You should also make certain that you have spent your Attribute points in the correct way, ie. place as many as you can in your primary attack, don't spread them out.

If you like you can whisper me in game, Crom The Pale, and I will give you some more hints to help you along.

If you're using SLI or equivalent, try disabling it.

By any chance, when you press F11 and click on the Graphics tab, is "Wait for vertical sync" checked? If it's not, check it. I've seen someone who had graphical issues similar to the ones you mentioned who fixed it that way.

While you're in town, type /bonus. Depending on what version of the game you have, you might get an Igneous Summoning Stone. That'll create an imp who should help to make some areas easier. It stops working once you reach level 20, though.

LMAO

Rubberbanding is caused by a lot of things. I had a buddy i ran around pve with in 2008. He would load slow and all of us in the party would rubberband like crazy when he finally loaded and only when he was around. Figure that one out. As far as the missions go, they are beginner and thats that.

For rubberbanding issues: don't play in windowed mode, don't alt+tab out of or minimize the game. It is known to cause issues. You might also want to update/change your drivers and/or take a look at how many cpu cores are assigned to GW.

More specifically: If you have a reasonably recent and capable ATI card (I don't know about NVidia), and if you play GW in windowed mode, the drivers will decide that the game isn't sufficiently challenging to render and will downclock the card. Unfortunately they're too aggressive with the downclocking.

I've always had nVidia and it caused a hell lot of rubberbanding (although no lag, only graphical issues), but only after alt-tabing out of (or minimizing) the game for longer, and then coming back, or alt-tabing several times in a short time. Usually, it fixed itself after 10-15 minutes of playing, though sometimes i did restart the whole game. I never had issues when only playing windowed, but i heard of people who did, especially if the GW window was running in the background - not minimized, but overlayed by something else.
Shillo's explanation sounds plausible, although i also had those rubberbanding troubles on five other machines (including a low-end laptop that barely ran GW), four of which had considerably less powerful GPUs.

In regards to rezing the corpses of the insects, DON'T STEP ON THE SIGILS!

The whole point is that they explode anything that steps on them. To complete the quest, get within range only of the corpse of the insect, NOT the glowing sigil and then cast animate bone minion.

Once it's animated, it will automatically run towards the sigil, which will blow it up and disable the sigil so that you can proceed further through the quest.

Easy Peasy

The starting area's in Prophecies are pretty much designed to be solo'ed.


Haven't had rubberbanding in a long time, but perhaps they changed servers, again. It does point at lag in the connection, besides the current ping, check the maximum ping time.
It should pass, then the Catacombs are playable again, though they are intended as an early challenge.

I sometimes get issues with the graphics in fullscreen mode when i tab out of the game and then in again. Everything will just seems to pop around on the screen. Not quite rubber banding but rather the game updates position for enemies and other characters once every second or so. Quite annoying.

I don't know if this is the problem you have but if it is and you are new to the game, this problem can occur for example if you tab out to check the wiki or other things on the Internet and then tab back into the game.

I can usually solve mine by going into an outpost, tabbing in and out of the game a few times more, changing into windowed mode and tabbing in and out there a few times. Or just restart the game.
I try to hit the windowed mode button anytime i want to tab to avoid this problem.

My bad, I did not grok Catacombs=PreSearing,

So I was assuming the trouble was a little further into the game.

Actually, the Catacombs have a lot of corpses lying around, mostly devourers, presumably for the benefit of necromancers, since most of the critters in the Catacombs don't leave useful corpses.

As already explained, you can animate minions from a corpse quite a bit away. You need not select it first, just activate the skill and it will exploit the nearest available corpse.

And if there are no enemies in sight, minions will make a beeline for their master, which makes them useful for springing traps, not only in the catacombs.