Well like I had said, all you have to do is make sure all tanks put a non-dmg weapon in their primary and wait for the 7 mobs to all spawn before you start balancing them down. The event is buggy, but it is not lag thats causing you to fail. Since you thought you could call me out, instead of just taking my advice, here is the twitch feed from TONIGHT. Fast forward to 3:06:30. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/299870185
We had surprisingly stable raids this weekend and were able to kick a lot of . Our new app from Crimson Tempest mentioned that they have players put on /afk and hide the other afk players. All we would then see are weapons floating around similar to a chanter pet or shadow man. I'd never heard of that trick before, thanks CT. Whether that contributed to our lack of lag issues or not I cannot be sure. I do however think that its pretty ridiculous that such a drastic effort should be required to hopefully reduce lag. I do not play the game to raid with a bunch of disembodied weapons floating around.
We use this in MS on some of the laggier raids but after last months patch you now get a ton of Doug’s running around instead of shadowmen
Last night we tried the auto-hide AFK trick. It didn't do anything to help our server-side lag, which makes sense. Scripts still fired slowly, mobs still spent an inordinate amount of time rubberbanding, etc. The lag last night, overall, was slightly better than it was the previous week, but still completely terrible that makes raiding on FV frustrating as hell. We also tried banning swarm pets on Cactus. This actually did seem to help - the first add wave on Cactus spawned in the mid-70's instead of sub-50%, but the script still fired late. Spell bar lag was also reduced a tiny bit, but was still present. I collected some data during the attempt that I'll be sending off Soon (TM) that ... probably won't give any useful information, but hey, here's hoping. I honestly think the lag issue we (and others) experience is a combination of swarm pets, procs, and stacking abilities used in conjunction with each other. Regardless, "ban all swarm pets from your raid!" is not an OK workaround for server-side lag. Neither is "just don't burn!" "turn on AFK!" or any other player implemented hotfix.
My spell bar lags and I see mechanics broken but I never get the video lag like some people seem to have. So, server/network side seems like the bigger issue to me for sure. Although, it can make some things rather trivial.
ST3 seems to have more instance lag than any other RoS event. As a Wizard, it's really damn annoying when your nuke has finished casting but the game just won't let you use a Force AA for another second or two because the server thinks you are still casting. I don't know what's wrong with this event. It's doesn't have any complex mechanics, and this casting lag is consistent all the way through the event, from start to finish, regardless of Drusella (so it's not her bugged pathing), even when there is nothing but Venril up. There is no lag before the event starts (when we just clear the room trash). The lag starts when the event starts and ends when it's beaten. ST1 and ST2 in the same instance don't have this lag. Network latency is the same as in any other place too. Would be nice if a dev checked what's causing so much server-side lag there.
I find this interesting. If you don't mind me asking, do you guys slow DPS at all on ST1 for clue purposes or something? Or do you just go balls to the wall from the start (which we do)? On both servers that I raid on that are currently doing ST1/3, either both are laggy or neither are. Perhaps one is slightly more laggy than the other, but in general it's pretty comparable. ST2 is generally not bad, but it's a very different event. People generally aren't using (many) swarm pets, there isn't a unanimous burn time, there isn't a single boss, etc. But again it's interesting to me that ST1 doesn't lag (in the same way) for you, so I was curious if there was any clear difference.
Crypt Robbers is the second laggiest event in the expansion after Fell Foliage for us. Any time we do even a moderate burn it is a constant fear that we will dps passed the next clue point while still trying to get the first clue. We had a 3:39 time on Crypt Robbers early in the expansion before the lag monster hit, but now we have to slow way down out of caution. The Sathir Line lag is far less severe for us. It definitely does exist to a degree, though never puts us into any fear of failing the event due to lag.
For those with video lag, not looking at other peoples heroes forge stuff can help a lot. With my old machine I had to keep that turned off.
In ST1 we treat the clue emote as 'take it easy for a few sec' so that we don't overdps and miss any clues. In ST3 we just burn the entire time. I suppose it's possible that 54 people burning one boss can cause the server to lag. But this is not the only burn raid, and this lag doesn't happen in Skyfire, Cactus or Hoshkar events. It seems to be specific to ST3.
I honestly thought it seemed a bit better this passed weekend, but need more sample size to confirm. I had cautioned players to not use swarm pets, except Mages. We run a ton of beasts and mages right now so they should still have plenty of pets on the bosses for Volleys. We also turned off heroes forge and set people to "hide afk". Either it helps or was just a coincidence.
This may be server or even raid composition specific then, because Skyfire, Cactus, Hoshkar, Talendor, ST1, and ST3 all have server-side lag for us and others. Povar seems to have a lower average population than Xegony, CT, or FV (three servers with reports of the massive lag seen in earlier linked videos), so that could be a factor. Having an abundance of specific classes may also cause issues. Can't really say for sure what's causing it; it's likely a combination of factors, and trying to isolate what components are contributing to the problem is incredibly difficult. That being said, it's definitely not limited to ST3.
For us on Bristlebane... Fell Foliage sometimes, but not always lags at the beginning. We don't usually burn immediately, but sometimes things just slow to an epic crawl. Then it just starts working normally. The burn immediately thing + the lag just led to too many problems so we went back to burning around 60%. It didn't add a whole lot of time to it. End of Empire almost never lags Balance of Power never lags Crypt Robbers almost never lags. We're careful around the clue points, just burn through the exploding sperm waves. Drusella's Vault almost never lags The Sathir Line... terrible as it starts. Stays laggy until Drusella appears for the first time. Once we move, things are generally ok until the end. Hoshkar can be laggy at the beginning when we start to burn, we burn him down right at the start. Silverwing and Xygoz, thankfully is not laggy at all. Talendor is never laggy.
Would the development team consider revamping "swarm" pets for each class and clicky to just be 1 pet? I think this would make at least a small dent in the lag as it is a clearly an obvious partial cause.
