Quick MMO Updates
Both GW2 and WoW!
When I was bemoaning the state of my setup in Linux last time out, I was pinning my hopes on the release of Wine 11.12 bringing with it vaunted fractional scaling in games that needed it.
Guild Wars 2
With its older pixel-mapped framework for its UI portions, GW2 is one such game.
So tonight I downloaded the update to Proton, for both Proton-GE and the latest CachyOS versions, and had to go into the Wine prefix for the game and its control panel in there to increase the DPI the prefix uses from the standard 96 to 144, to represent the scaling that the game needs to do to be a more presentable size.
And it works!
I can now, fingers crossed, get back to using Linux for GW2, rather than having to sully myself with Win11.
In other GW2 news, I've now managed to unlock the Springer and Skimmer mounts, and have begun the unlock grind for the Skyscale mount!
That'll take a while, so I'm prepared to buckle in for that one.
In terms of story, I'm well into Path of Fire as a result of getting the aforementioned mounts, so I've decided to play through the PoF story in its entirety, then skip back to Living World Season 1, which follows on directly from the Zhaitan story-line in the core game experience, and work my way forward through all of the released content, which I've now fully purchased, including all Living World seasons (1-4) and expansion packs.
Improving in Guild Wars 2
It's been extremely fun working out how to improve my character over time, mainly in terms of output and performance, as 10 gold will get you 90% of your potential performance by buying Exotic (equal to Wow's Heroic gear) gear from its Auction House. The only ranks of gear above Exotic are Ascended (Mythic) gear and Legendary gear. Both of which have the same stat weights, but Legendary gear can have its stats changed at will, whereas they become baked in on anything "lower". But neither represents a huge jump in power.
It's not particularly a game centred on gear acquisition by any means, it's more about how to improve both your character and your account, and how you can increase your utility and experience. Mastery tracks gained on one character are account wide, so fully unlocking the Raptor mount for example with its increased jump distance, are account wide and can be used on all characters, even low level alts.
I've also used a couple of my boosts I got with the expansion purchases, and now have a Necromancer and a Guardian at level 80 now. It'll take a while learning those, but they both seem like a lot of fun too.
The one bad thing about alts in GW2 is that the map isn't uncovered account wide for alts, so you need to run around unlocking teleport waypoints, but given you have full access to fully unlocked mounts makes it a lot less painful!
World of Warcraft
Couple of updates here, firstly, my season is now complete, as I've now got the mount from Mythic L'ura!
We still have a few runs to do to get everyone their mounts, as this was our 3rd kill, but good news is we're able to get it killed in a single night now, which will be handy going forward!
As for the Linux scaling issues in WoW, it's possible to fix it the same way I did for GW2, so I'll be attempting that at the weekend when I have time to dig into the specific Wine prefix WoW uses. But it shouldn't be too much of an effort to get fixed.
We have no raid on Monday night, which just means more Guild Wars 2 time!
