Thanks a bunch for this!
I had to update Lutris, then I changed to ge-proton as my runner and was able to download the update just fine. Afterward, I closed Bnet, swapped back to wine-ge-8-26-x86_64, and launched again. Was able to boot the game up just fine.
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For all of those who have switch back and forth between ge-proton and wine-ge-8-26-x86_64 and are still having issues… just know that you are not alone.
I am still having this issue as well.
Going to leave this here in case there are others like me who have been having trouble getting Proton to work through Lutris and getting frustrated with GE-Wine not finishing the update.
Seems like since the last Lutris update there have been a not insignificant number of people who have had issues running Proton through Lutris. I for one was not able to get it to run at all so WoW was not updating on my Steam Deck. After some digging on Lutris’ forms it seem like Lutris uses a tool call UMU to use Proton.
Typically Proton itself does not work outside of Steam and this allows other tools like Lutris to run those compatibility layers outside of a Steam context. It seems like the last Lutris update may have messed up UMU for some people. After renaming/deleting my ~/.local/share/umu folder and relaunching Lutris it rebuilt the UMU folder and that got Proton runners working again. After that was able to launch Battle.net using GE-Proton and the update installed and finished.
Thanks man. In my case I didn’t even installed the version you use, I just changed the runner to “GE-Proton9-11” and it worked.
I finally got it to work. I am on Ubuntu using Lutris without having Steam installed. For me to get this to work, I had to install Steam then search “Proton” in my library (not in the Store). It showed up under the “Tools” section in which I decided to install Proton 9.0
Doing so gave Lutris the option to use Proton 9.0 (Beta) as a runner. From here, I followed the instruction of other posters - install game with Proton 9.0 as the runner, close and open with wine-ge-8-26 as the runner, and start up WoW Classic.
To anyone who might be interested there is that neat tool called ProtonUP-QT (get your linux’s approved Tambourine to appraise the machine spirit to install it). It can help you install most versions of proton into Lutris
Same issue and this fixed it for me, too. I tried switching to UMU-Latest and that didn’t fix it.
I’ve been using the latest Lutris update for awhile now with no issues launching B.net until today
Me and the wife both play on steam decks, mine updatd fine but hers didnt. I just got it working by copying my over to hers and then having to use wow.exe instead of battle net loader. I tried all the things everyone here suggested and no workie. I got a workaround for now at least.
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Just an update, as I gave up last night and went to bed early.
I DO have Steam installed, I am not sure if that even matters, but I read somewhere up top someone said something about needing steam for GE-Proton, but again, this may be irrelevant.
I tried switching my runner to GE-Proton (i think), by right clicking the Battle.net icon in my Lutris window, clicking configure, then selecting the runner tab at the top, and then changing Wine Version to GE-Proton.
I will update when it/if finishes downloading and update on how it runs.
Since I only use flatpak steam I had to install Lutris, I used the flatpak version and just installed it from gnome software via flathub repository,
I created a new app using the “Add locally installed game” option, put in a name, selected the Runner “Wine”, in Game options tab added the location of the Battle.net Launcher.exe from my installed location, in the Runner options tab changed Wine version to Proton - Experimental
The launcher was able to update and launch retail wow for me. I was not able to launch the bnet launcher through steam even after using lutris to update it.
Trying to use bnet launcher as a non-steam game has been working since shadowlands season 1, but this past Tues no version of proton worked. I had tried Proton hotfix, experimental, ge-proton9-22, 9.0-4, 8.0-5. I even updated it on a windows VM and moved the files over and the bnet launcher still wants to try and update. For whatever reason launching the bnet launcher via steam no matter the proton version seems to have stopped being able to update or install game files.
Just here to chime in that, swapping to GE-Proton on my Lutris works for me too.
Swapping wine versions resolved my issue.
Thank you for the assistance 
Same deal for me. I am running Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS (Nvidia) and changing the wine runner to ge-proton in Lutris allowed the update to work. Changed back to the default runner (wine-ge-8-26-x86-64) after the update and the game runs fine.
Thank you to Dukhat for the great advice!
This happened to me too. I run battle.net via steam and do not currently have lutris installed at all. I was running it using 8-05 or whatever 8 version it currently has. Reading others’ posts I uninstalled and reinstalled under 8-05 again, and it worked. I was trying different things, so I might have done something else that helped, but this was the gist of what fixed it for me.