Ceit.1869

Another datapoint for using Steam with Proton version GE-Proton7-26 and an Nvidia gpu. No crashes, decent performance, the only glitches I've noticed are the lighting-related thing that's been reported on Windows. I'm not using any launch options, all I did to make it work was update my system (current openSUSE Tumbleweed) and install everything that looked Vulkan/dxvk-related. If it'd help I can dig up the installed versions of all the related packages. The system version of dxvk is 1.10.2-1, but I believe that's not relevant with Proton?

I got it to work by installing wine_gw2_1.6.3_nvidia.tar.xz and _not_ copying bink2w64.dll GW2.exe from the old prefix when I copied data/drive_c/GW2/. I've seen one weird graphics glitch and it seems to have jerky moments that are getting fewer, performance with settings cranked up high is 40fps for me. Edit: I'm seeing some flickering of character textures in bright light.

Theory: one of the new specs will be a minion master for a different profession and they're hoping that necromancer players will be so desperate for a fix that we'll buy the expansion just to be able to play something kind of, sort of, a tiny bit like minion master.

Once again my optimism about the code betrays me. I'm not sure why, I'm a programmer myself and generally really cynical about everyone's code. Apparently I just assume too much because GW2 is less blatantly buggy than WoW used to be.

Perhaps we need a minion spec that uses new minions as slower, seeking attacks and AoE. You don't need much better AI if they just have to track a target or make their way to a location. Suicide attacks by the undead are already in the necromancer lore and you could easily do something like a shade that has a 100% movement bonus and curses anyone they pass through (i.e. piercing, but maybe with a different effect) while chasing their target. Slower than most abilities and dependent on target selection, but if they're dangerous enough it could put a lot of pressure on their target to use active defenses. Such a minion master could be the ranged equivalent of the reaper's base slow hits that take skill to land and hurt when they do. Make our enemies have to choose between using active defenses or running from fear! (Literally, that hypothetical shade inflicting fear and chill would be absolutely classic for ghosts.) Give us a partially-ranged playstyle that's highly positional and requires some skill, but gets a mechanic that makes us more mobile in bursts and really rewards timing & situational awareness. I want minions that feel consequential, as if demons & the dead are actually something to be feared instead a weak DoT you cleanse with damage.

Congratulations on your ability to ignore everything else in the discussion for the sake of your desire for more nerfs of a class that's already under-represented in many/most modes. I'll sympathize more when you're not cherry-picking things in hopes that we'll all convert to your hate and switch to playing thieves with better stealth, burst, and CC.

Most likely because they concentrate on raiding and thus feel it's the only important part of the game. That kind of narrow view is pretty natural, it's a big game and most people don't do all of fractals, regular dungeons, raids, open world bosses, solo pve, wvw, spvp, and speedrunning. For that matter Anet themselves seem to forget anything but spvp, wvw, and a bit of raiding exists.

It works so well for the haters, no wonder they stick with it. As far as build diversity for PvE goes they seem to have decided we should be required to use run speed runes or go chrono with the loss of most of our Cripple sources. I'm sort of scared to pop into HoT areas, but limiting cripple to an ability that requires you stand still to use it is pretty painful. It's like they're in mourning for pre-nerf pocket raptors and feel like someone has to suffer old-school. With the whole non-functional glass cannon thing they're going for someone with better skills than I needs to do a video of us getting roflstomped to the tune of Crystal Method's "Broken Glass".

Yep, the only thing making up for our serious DPS issues with this patch had to be nerfed immediately. A functional class wasn't important enough for a massive patch in development for a long time, but taking back our one compensation demanded a hotfix.

Part of the problem with this patch is that for the sake of nerfing everything in sight (not actual balance, that's explicitly some vague future thing) Anet has lost track of the fun aspect of play. Excessively nerfing stability on Necromancers and other classes means that they'll spend more time watching the screen and waiting to be allowed to do anything. This is notoriously frustrating across all games, but instead of trying to find a way to work around it they've come down on the side of not letting players play. Ignoring Mirages entirely slashing cripple on Mesmer greatsword means that a class who's good at mixing kiting with burst damage in PvE is suddenly looking at standing in slugging range of monsters half the time. Boon stripping is far more of a PvP thing, but somehow they've decided that something that's irrelevant half the time in PvE is more fun. Instead of nerfing the strongest aspects Soulbeast's pet swapping they just decided to take the option away entirely, hurting tactical precision & just plain slowing down play. Most likely they couldn't be bothered, much like with the hammer that hit Mirages. I feel like the twin themes of this patch are "too much effort to balance, no more fun for you" and "eh, sitting and waiting while you die is almost like fun". Nothing kills enjoyment like stunlock and nothing discourages enthusiastic players like taking away their tools instead of fixing them. Theoretically this is a game where you hit buttons, move around, and have things happen, but apparently that's only for the current dev darling classes. As usual core professions take it on the chin, but this time it's worse and hitting them harder than most of the elite specs.

As someone who mainly plays solo PvE and open world bosses/events I'm looking at the massive nerf to cripple on greatsword and can't seen anything but a world of pain for kiting with no compensation in survivability. The 2.5s traited cripple is lost on Mirror Blade, Mind Stab, Illusionary Berserker, and Illusionary Wave. Mind Stab gains 5s (currently?) cripple on a 10s time, but doesn't have the bounce range for crippling spread out groups or knockback to get some breathing room. With perfect timing and some willingness to sacrifice DPS & positioning you could get 70%+ cripple on a small set of mobs in an encounter (not players!), now you're not going to hit 50% even if you stand still & spam it. To get close you're going to have to prioritize an ability that either requires very careful aim or using snap targeting over our actual damage-dealing abilities. Was the rationale that it wasn't easy enough to catch mesmers in WvW and they needed to nerf us or is being able to run away and stealth less than a thief somehow the overpowered new meta for PvE?

The ability to return to where you used it is really nice if you're one of those people who likes to run low level characters around in places they absolutely shouldn't be because any time you can make it to a small island of safety you can port off to Mistlock and access all those services. It's even more useful when there are places that are safe except during certain events since you can just sidestep them instead of having to leave the character logged out. If you're more patient than I am and one of those people who parks a mesmer on the steam ogre's platform for the really common times no-one has a key it works there as well to wait out the platform collapse. You can also use it to farm with bank alts if that's your thing.

So people down on traits like Escape Artist & Desperate Decoy, but I don't think they're giving enough credit to the careful design work that went into these choices. They're both perfect for builds that spend most of their time getting knocked off mounts in PvE and desperately spamming stealth & clones for daze & distraction while they run screaming. Naturalists studying Pocket Raptors who hate to use weapon or mobility skills can benefit from it even more. Rending Shatter combines two synonyms which makes it twice as cool. Phantasmal Fury is great if you're running the very large set of traits that only trigger on your illusions' crits, not your own. "Method of Madness" is a huge buff over "Descent into Madness". Descent was very situational since you only got the light show when you hit, but Method can actually look like a disco before you die from the falling damage! Really I think that as a community we're not looking at the upside of things. We have plenty of time for contemplation while we're hitting downed and desperately hitting heal, let's take advantage of it.

You might want to try the cpupower command for tinkering with frequency scaling instead of mucking around in /sys, it's a bit more straightforward to run under sudo and gives more info. The Arch Linux wiki has a good explanation as well as a lot on the different governors: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CPU_Frequency_Scaling#Scaling_governors

I'm not sure if I should be glad it's not a linux problem, but I guess we just have to live with it until they clean up this release a bit more.