Hybrids and raid lag

Discussion in 'Hybrid' started by dwish, Mar 27, 2022.

  1. dwish Augur

    Has any other hybrids, and especially beastlords, noticed a significant drop in DPS when the raid instance is laggy? On longer events, I have noticed a huge discrepancy in my sustained DPS when raid instance lag is present, when everything else such as aDPS is exactly the same. I'm talking like a 300-400k DPS difference on the parse on longer sustained events. Everything is firing such as burn macros and such, so this is not the issue, it's something else. It's also not just me either as I'm seeing much lower numbers from our other beastlords than normal and to some extent rangers as well when the raid instance is laggy.

    My working theory right now is due to spell lag our normally very short casting DDs are suffering from server side lag as well and due to this are not actually casting in the time they should be. Thus, I seem to be not getting a lot of melee swings I would normally be getting due to this lag, essentially .5 second DDs are performing like 1-1.5 second DDs which is killing melee DPS especially with burns going.

    Pure melee and casters don't seem to have this issue nearly as badly (again just going by how people parse on a nightly basis), so it leads me to think that it has something to do with the melee/spell synergy and the constant casting hybrids (especially beastlords) are doing to put out good DPS which due to spell lag is causing less melee swings than normal.

    Anyone else seen this? I may try just ignoring DDs while any type of damage mod is running and possibly just use the instant cast dots, as I wouldn't think they would suffer from the same issue as they don't have any cast time. Essentially lag "shouldn't" affect them the same way as spells with casting time when it comes to melee swings. Anyone else have any other ideas? This is very frustrating to say the least considering how often raid lag hits the severs these days.
  2. Iribabh Augur

    Beastlord here. It's definitely a thing. I can run the same event (Netherbian Swarm Commander in this example) week to week and if we get an exceptionally laggy instance I'll finish at around 450k dps. If we have a clean lag-free instance I'll finish at 1.2mil dps.

    The lag hits us in several ways. You mentioned spell casts since most of our stuff is super fast anyhow, but also we're just outright losing combat rounds, and not a small number of them. Which also means we're missing all our proc damage from those combat rounds, and beastlords are a proc-heavy class.

    Some other classes certainly don't feel it like others. I can't count the number of times I've heard a monk say something like "we didn't have any lag" and I'm sitting there dropping 1/5 combat rounds and 4sec+ recast on insta dots.
  3. Sancus Augur

    There are a handful of components to this that will affect Beastlords.

    First, player melee rounds do slow down in laggy instances for all classes. While I don't have hard data on it, anecdotally this seems to erode the benefit of low delay weapons. Classes/players that use high damage/delay weapons appear to be impacted less than classes using low delay weapons (this may mean that, in laggy situations, high delay 2 handers out perform DW).

    Second, when things lag, there is an interim period between a spell finishing casting and triggering the GCD that can be multiple seconds. This affects all casters, although DoT classes with damage front-loaded into a few DoTs will see a lower change in their DPS. For Hybrids, I do suspect (as you do) that melee rounds can't be processed during that interim lag period, but I don't have hard data to support that either.

    Third, in particularly laggy scenarios pets barely swing. Your pet should (in the absence of lag) be doing a decent amount of DPS nowadays, so nearly entirely cutting that out is going to hurt.

    The culmination of those three factors is yes, hybrids (particularly beastlords) and DD casters are most acutely impacted by lag. Generally pure melee and certain DoT classes see a lower drop, though everyone's DPS absolutely drops, and quite precipitously, in laggy instances.
    MasterMagnus likes this.
  4. dwish Augur

    I appreciate the responses. This is a very frustrating issue as its discouraging to go from one of the top parsers in the guild to often finishing in the middle of the pack on every event on a given night due to every raid instance having lag.

    I was thinking about trying to go heavier on our insta cast dots and less on actual DDs as they do have a short cast time, but if the GCD is the main issue then it might not matter what I'm casting really as GCD refresh will be delayed with lag regardless of what I cast which causes melee swing loss.

    Anyone have any other ideas I could try? Possibly not casting anything with heavy burns going as to lose as few of melee swings as possible? I could probably try to DOT multiple mobs more as well with all 3 of our main DOTS instead of using our DDs, at least DOT damage ticking won't be triggering the GCD.

    I was fine with dealing with the constant raid lag, but now realizing it's actually a giant nerf to a few select classes as well is really a bummer.
  5. Caisy Master

    I'd like to throw my Ranger hat into this ring as well.
  6. Orienn TreeHugger

    I agree there is a big drop in dps on lagged out events, especially AHR.
  7. dwish Augur

    Agreed. What I'm seeing though is the drop is not all that severe for a lot of the classes.

    I parse every event, and our pure melee and casters seem to be parsing fairly close to their normal level with lagged out events, with probably a 5-10% drop. However, I am at times seeing nearly a 30-40% drop in DPS as a beastlord, and our rangers seem to be getting hit pretty hard as well. This has to be something with the melee/spell combo nature of hybrids and the spell/GCD lag affecting our melee.

    So in essence, even though it hits everyone to a degree, it seems to be a massive nerf to a few select classes and it's very frustrating when you do everything right and still parse like garbage. Especially considering how often the raid instances are lagged these days.
    Orienn likes this.
  8. Sancus Augur

    For whatever it's worth, I aggregated a lot of parses in ToV. I basically took every parse (excluding some outliers) from each event, and calculated my best, my average, and the standard deviation of those parses. This is the histogram of the z-scores of those parses plotted against a normal distribution:
    [IMG]

    You can see the data is somewhat skewed, with a concentration at or within one standard deviation below the mean. The standard deviations were also quite large; one standard deviation was about 19% of my average DPS. On average, my best parse was about 53% higher than my mean, and necessarily there was a larger gap between that and my median due to the skewed distribution.

    The bottom line of all of that is, on our median runs, I was doing somewhere between 50 and 65% of my best DPS (and a number of runs where I did less than that). Obviously there are a number of variables that factor in, but we're fairly consistent in RoI. By far the most impactful variable was lag. Anecdotally my experience corroborates that. I would expect +/- 5-10% without lag, and I'd expect to be about 40-50% below with fairly significant lag (which is the norm). In extreme cases like CoV Zlandicar burns, I literally finished at less than a fifth of what I was able to do (my best Zlandicar was somewhere north of 2 million, and on our worst runs with full ADPS I'd actually do about 400k, and the highest player would drop from say 4 million to below 2 million).

    I suspect Beastlords see similar (or perhaps worse) scaling to the above. Lag definitely does affect casters, though some more than others.
    MasterMagnus likes this.
  9. Elyssanda Bardbrain

    another thing to factor in, lag GREATLY affects songs too, so you are getting less bard ADPS for your group with major lag.. i've seen times where my lag was 7-9 seconds per song cast vs the base 3 seconds
  10. dwish Augur

    You have obviously looked into this issue way more then I have and actually have data to back up your assertions, so I'm definitely not saying you are wrong. I'm mainly just going by what I see people do on a normal basis DPS wise, and then comparing that against what I'm doing when the instance is very laggy. In ToL at least, other classes don't seem to be nearly as affected as our beastlords are at the moment and to a lesser extent rangers, with pure casters and melee lower but definitely not seeing the 50% drop you were seeing in ToV.

    I'm not sure the reasoning behind this, but on a very laggy night I will often drop from regular top 5 to somewhere in the 15-18 range on the parse. The rest of the parse order seems to be fairly normal (outside of the 2 classes I mentioned) with most melee/pure casters a little bit lower due to lag. The lag was definitely pretty bad during ToV/CoV, so perhaps the raid instances were even more laggy back then which was causing the numbers you were seeing. Are you still seeing that ~50% drop in DPS in ToL instances with the current lag?
  11. Sancus Augur

    Yes.
    Orienn, Elyssanda and Szilent like this.