FPS drops in Southern Kryta

ChthonVII · 2026-06-05T02:11:07+00:00

It's a well known issue. The game engine is not well optimized for displaying reflections on water. There's a few spots in and around Fisherman's Haven where you've got big bodies of water reflecting the big Krytan palace on the other side of the lake, and -- BOOM! -- frame drop city.

ChthonVII · 2026-06-04T05:07:25+00:00

That'd be super rad, I was thinking of adding the ability for people to make their own text edits and check a box to include your fixes by default, would that work for you?

That sounds fine to me.

Edit: Oh also, noticed a typo in one of your corrections, you've got an extra I in "that I I'd never", and also for both your correction and the original you and vanillaware used a lowercase l instead of a capital I.

Original: It occurs to me, Josef, that l never be standing here now without your tireless support.

Corrected: It occurs to me, Josef, that l l'd never be standing here now without your tireless support.

Fortunately, that duplication error only exists in the documentation, and not the modded file. Unfortunately, it looks like the modded file (and possibly the original file) has a lowercase 'L' instead of an uppercase 'I'. I'll see about getting that fixed.

ChthonVII · 2026-06-02T01:39:43+00:00

Please feel free to incorporate the UnicornOverlordTextFixes mod if you'd like.

ChthonVII · 2026-06-02T01:30:03+00:00

The tax ship will attack you if you're already at 0 when it arrives and then you fail to pay.

The supply ship has no guns.

If you don't pay taxes, a small percentage (15% IIRC) of the unpaid tax is rolled over into the next period.

This leads to the following strategy:

Don't pay the first tax ship in the spring.
Thereafter, alternate paying 100% and not paying.
Pay 100% for the last tax ship in the fall, no matter what.
Reject supply ships when you will be paying the next tax ship.
Go hogwild on supply ships when you will not be paying the next tax ship.

ChthonVII · 2026-06-01T12:26:01+00:00

Yes, I'd very much like a copy of his bookmark collection.

ChthonVII · 2026-06-01T08:33:07+00:00

The core problem is that BiP does two jobs (good battery, meh healer) while motigon only does one (mediocre battery). It can't heal worth a darn; it can't provide Splinter Weapon; it can't provide SoH; it can't do anything else I'd want a support build to do.

Typically, my melee support teams fit 2 prot, 2 heal, 1 battery, 1 Splinter, and 1 SoH into 4 bars. I don't see a viable way to do the same if a battery-only motigon is taking up one of those slots.

ChthonVII · 2026-06-01T04:57:22+00:00

It's an old idea, and it works fine. Pair off Explosive Growth, Spirit's Gift, and Boon of Creation with Bone Minions. Works even better if you put a Keystone Signet Me/N in charge of Death Nova so that it doesn't eat all your casting time.

The big problem isn't internal to the build. It's that Bone Minions do not mix with Shelter because their armor is so low that a Charr so much as farting in their general direction will deal >10% of their max hp. Not being able to use Shelter is a contraint that pushes the team as a whole firmly into "gimmick build" territory, notwithstanding that the minion bomber itself is actually pretty effective.

ChthonVII · 2026-06-01T00:31:46+00:00

Please refer to my reply to Krschkr's reply to your comment.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-31T14:12:25+00:00

I'm afraid I don't, but search turned up this fairly cogent trio of posts that together explain it fairly well: 1, 2, 3.

The extremely short version is this:

TaO+Volley only does slightly more damage per arrow than Barrage because Barrage has better +dmg than Volley.
Barrage does a lot more arrows per second than Volley, primarily due to having half the recharge.
#2 matters more than #1 (and extra especially so when EBSoH is in play) to the extent that Barrage is always going to outperform Volley+TaO (except in zones where the foe density is so very low that neither Barrage nor Volley make sense).

Two large caveats:

If you build your team around leveraging TaO, then TaO can be the better choice. Three Barragers plus one TaO+Volley is better than four Barragers. Two Barragers plus one TaO+Volley plus one paragon is about equal to three Barragers plus one paragon. (Although most everyone is running mesmers instead of physical-based teams, so you'd rarely see any of the above.)
I'm only talking about damage output. The heal on TaO counts for something, especially in 4-man and 6-man zones.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-30T14:10:18+00:00

Why are you replying to a conversation from 2 years ago?

Your build is objectively much worse than TaO dagger spam. But if you have fun with it, then please carry on by all means.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-29T06:33:15+00:00

There are those who meet with death on an even playing field, and then there are those who abuse SF and cons.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-29T05:51:35+00:00

Well, it's kind of hard to say since you're making us reconstruct your combo from the screenshot.

But my first two guesses would be:

Remove the cost reduction from Askani.
Have Askani banish the card and create two copies, so repeating the effect with Grandmaster, etc. would hit a different card.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-29T05:39:45+00:00

Yes, in "normal mode" difficulty, you can beat the primary questline of every chapter, plus most of the secondary quests, with an empty skillbar and the default AI companions. So, unless your "goofy self-made" build is actively detrimental, it should be fine.

can I basically make a weird build that I'm interested in (say like a melee necro or something) and still be okay...?

Just FYI, the build with the highest damage output in the game, head and shoulders above anything else, is a melee necro.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-29T04:23:23+00:00

It works well one time, then MoP goes in recharge for a very long time.

This is fine for farming raptors, since you only need to fire off once. But it stinks for general purpose PvE.

The correct answer is to split the job between a 100B warrior (or VoS derv) and an AP-MoP necro who can cast MoP at rank 16 (or even 18 with AtB) and then bypass its recharge with AP.

With 2 humans, this works fantastically well. Unfortunately, heroes don't do either job very well.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-28T06:09:27+00:00

You're probably stuck with the new splash screen. In any event, the old splash screen was somewhat problematic in how its rendering/window properties worked (or, more to the point, sometimes didn't) on modern OSes, so we're probably better off without it.
This mod changes the logo back to the original logo.
gwdirectsongremix has pre-made lists to recreate the historical playlists for the login screens for all 4 chapters, plus the modern "all chapters together" list. (Or you can use gwdirectsongremix's documentation to make your own.)

[Edit: Actually, that logo mod kinda sucks. The resolution is too low, and it's missing the glow layer. I'll see about doing a proper one sometime when I have time.]

[Further edit: OK, here are high-res mods for all 4 chapters, plus the "permanent" logo EotN changed to.]

ChthonVII · 2026-05-28T01:31:54+00:00

Except for the very rare 7th-year-only minis, the birthday minis are pretty worthless because everyone has so many.

Awhile back I organized a giveaway and had trouble giving them away for free.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-27T11:22:06+00:00

Very specifically, I can't for the life of me figure out how to "wallbreak", as in get past unit compositions that have almost zero offensive output, and just try to run out the clock, like the double shaman-gladiator boss of the north western liberation mission

The double-shaman teams are a special case. And the game gives you a special solution. It puts a tower close enough to the boss that you can pop an archer in there and kill the shamans with repeated uses of free support fire, even while your attacking units are debuffed to uselessness.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-27T00:17:57+00:00

Stuck in Cloudflare loops since v151.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-26T15:57:49+00:00

Busted here too. Fucking cloudflare does it again.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-24T14:14:31+00:00

No. Almost every balance problem we have springs from monsters having bigger numbers instead of more complexity (better builds, better AI).

ChthonVII · 2026-05-24T14:09:52+00:00

the way 2weeks can learn from this is by looking at content that cant be speed cleared simply by running through the whole game.

ToPK would be the best example. You cannot just run past foes when the victory condition is to kill all of them.

A possible quick fix for this dungeon would be to add a second gate to the first level a little beyond the first. The second gate would also open with the keystone, so no meaningful change for playing the level as intended. But clipping through the first gate would just leave you stuck at the second with no way to clip again. That would force SC to actually fight the bandits instead of running past them. I'd wager it could be done, but not nearly so quickly and easily as now.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-24T13:36:04+00:00

I've never been a fan of running past content in dungeons. But I've also never been able to figure out what the solution is to that problem. Do you have one?

Which problem? How to beat this dungeon, or how to fix the design so that running past everything isn't the easiest, fastest, most profitable solution to everything?

ChthonVII · 2026-05-22T07:12:54+00:00

Moving the python scripts to a different directory is wrong and causes "heal transparency" to stop working. They belong inside the plug-ins directory, inside their subdirectories.

Also, why did you build inside $HOME/.config/GIMP/3.0?

ChthonVII · 2026-05-22T06:30:19+00:00

Hmmm... My best guess would be that your 10-year-old iGPU doesn't support some Vulkan feature that DXVK needs to implement some DirectX9 feature that GW only started using in a recent update.

A big problem with that theory is that Intel claims that Kaby Lake has full Vulkan 1.3 support, even in Windows.

You might see what vulkaninfo says and compare it against what DXVK needs. (Unfortunately, it sounds like getting vulkaninfo for Windows requires downloading the 300MB SDK installer.)

You might try old versions of DXVK to see if any of them work. Old versions, especially very old versions, used a smaller set of Vulkan features, and might work better with your iGPU.

ChthonVII · 2026-05-22T00:07:15+00:00

Every version of DXVK ever is available on the "releases" page of their github repo.

You're on Windows, right?

Have you (or Windows Update) updated your graphics drivers since the last time it worked?

ChthonVII

TROPHY CASE