Divine guidance

Discussion in 'Test Server Forum' started by knine, Apr 15, 2015.

  1. Atan Well-Known Member

    I get you don't like pulse damage, but the number of hits pulse damage triggers is very insignificant and DG still procs for every single pulse hit today just like it did for every single pulse hit before.

    The issue was really in cases where you could have 20+ mobs hitting the same targets multiple times a second.
    Mermut likes this.
  2. Malleria Well-Known Member

    Instead of recognizing that those scenarios shouldn't exist and changing them, they change the tool people use to deal with them and who cares that the scenario still exists?

    Troubleshooting 101: It's ALWAYS the other guys fault. Personally I get enough of that from my ISP, I don't need it from Daybreak too.
    Avirodar likes this.
  3. Atan Well-Known Member

    Those scenarios are pretty much just player driven, not developer.
  4. Avirodar Well-Known Member

    Since the introduction of DG in Sentinels Fate, I have never noticed any tangible addition to lag, or server crashes, resulting from my use of DG.

    In Dungeon Maker, I have gone Link Dead from doing some crazy pulls. However, the LD's would occur at random, usually when I was dual boxing, and usually only one of my characters would LD and the other people in the zone would be fine (stay connected etc). Additionally, the LD's would occur regardless of whether or not I was using DG. I even tried swapping out to different healer class types, the results were the same. Lag from mega pulls in Dungeon Maker is a design issue, the fault falls squarely at the feet of the Developers for not only creating the system that enables such, but failing to fix it. Most of the entries at the top of the Dungeon Maker leader boards were not there for their artistic flair.

    As mentioned previously, I have never noticed the use of DG resulting in additional lag. I have not heard any other cleric that I grouped or raided with, comment that they think using DG adds lag. I have not seen any posts on guild forums or EQ2 forums saying they think using DG can lag/crash servers. That is until one day, out of the blue, a couple of the SOE staff claim it is one of the worst offenders, but refuse to say where/when. Sounds totally legit...
  5. knine Well-Known Member


    Name me a mob before tov that had constant pulse damage. You may get one but that's about it. It is a developer issue and in order to minimize the fix to it they change the spell vice changing all the code for every single mob after tov. I would like a dev to tell me I'm wrong lol. Lag is inherently worse than ever, but this was supposed to be the LARGEST contributor to the lag we were seeing. Not true, its still not fixed. Those of you that want to continue to argue then do so, but the bottom line is that it is a nerf and didn't fix lag at like they said it would lol!
    FriggaWitch likes this.
  6. Mermut Well-Known Member

    The constant pulse damage isn't going to cause anybody to be hit more then 5 times in the same second..
  7. knine Well-Known Member

    It was thus giving it an outrageous number of procs. Reactives do only react to the incoming damage, maybe damage is pulsing more than it should be, but then again mob encounters are never broken so you could possibly be right.
  8. Mermut Well-Known Member

    Why do you think it's the pulse damage that was causing the huge number of procs and not some other issue... like hordes of mobs? Or was there a specific fight that DG was doing something it wasn't supposed to?
  9. Malleria Well-Known Member

    This, exactly. I started playing during SF and not once, ever, has DG caused any kind of lag for me. It has, on occasion, in a mass dungeon maker pull kicked one of my toons to character select while I was 3-4 boxing. But none of my other toons, nor anyone who was in the zone with me, experienced any lag whatsoever.
    It's already been explained earlier in the thread that a very specific fight interacting with DG was producing problems. It was DG effectively countering a fail condition with thousands of triggers every second. That scenario has not and can not be reproduced in any other fight. An adjustment to that single fight would have solved the issue.
    As for pulse damage - maybe it is causing lag, maybe it isnt. The point is that when you're troubleshooting a problem you look at any recent changes first. DG has been in the game for years with no issue. Berzerker heals have been in the game for years with no issue. Yet magically they're suddenly the source of major lag problems that only cropped up in the last 6-12 months.
  10. knine Well-Known Member


    Have you ever run SS pulling an entire side lol, or the dread cutter heroic zone pulling almost entire zone in a pull. DG never caused lag then and I'm sure there are many other zones or mass pulls that can be named. Lag didn't really get bad until pulse damage was introduced, plain and simple. There was an instance where elemental eruption caused tons of lag but they did fix that and guess what.....it fixed the lag lol.
  11. Mermut Well-Known Member

    I misunderstood your posts. My impression was that you were saying that DG was laggying because of pulse damage and/or the change to DG would make it totally useless against pulse damage. The first statement is dubious, the second is clearly incorrect.
    We have had a few fights with constant pulse damage w/o lag in the past.. just not an entire expansion based around it as a primary mechanic.
  12. Atan Well-Known Member

    I'm not sure you are understanding how little pulse actually causes a proc of DG or any other reactive as compared to the levels that were actually causing stability issues.

    The issue was DG could proc 1000 times in one frame. Pulse hits 6 people every 3 or every 6 seconds depending on the pulse. So in any one ONE SECOND or more clearly a SINGLE FRAME of combat, pulse damage is NEVER hitting more than 6 people from a single DG cast. You can extrapolate that out to a full raid with 4 clerics all casting DG at the same time, again, 4 casts and 24 people getting a proc in one frame. 24 is significantly less than 1000 and isn't the problem here. You can even add 24 pets if you like, you're still no where near the proc rate that was causing an issue.

    I have crashed zones, and I'm not 100% sure it was DG or not that caused it, as I never checked that hard. But if they have crash logs that show as many procs as they stated in a single frame, I believe them as I can think of instances where I have created similar scenarios by engaging a stupid amount of mobs and either lagged clients out or in rare cases brought an entire zone down.

    After this change, it still procs alot, it still procs for every pulse hit for the duration it is up, and that isn't really a significant amount of procs that I believe it has much at all to do with server lag. But I get it, you don't like pulses and would find any scapegoat to stop them from being used going forward.
  13. knine Well-Known Member

    I would like to see said data is all. I could care less about pulse damage as I heal through it just fine. The whole point of the thread is there was no lag, or very minimal, until tov raid guardians edifice and then almost every mob in aom. They say it causes lag but don't support it. They said it's the biggest contributor to lag, but even after the change lag is actually worse. That's the point. They change things on a whim and expect us all to close our eyes and believe. I could care less if pulse damage stays in the game or gets removed, but let's identify the REAL problem for lag, not spells they think are the issue and when changed affects nothing, well except for making it worse. Maybe investigate all the insane amounts of gear procs then. /shrug don't change things on a whim cause you think lol. And sure insanely amount of pulls will allow it to proc that way because you have tons of mobs hitting you. Who is to say coding isn't broken on pulse damage. Again let's find the real reason for lag not just change s***.
    Healious, FriggaWitch and Malleria like this.
  14. Avirodar Well-Known Member

    While you responded to Knine, not me, I do have some comments to make.

    I do not know whether or not SOE said DG combined with pulse damage to cause lag. I think they may have, but unless I can find a quote it is just a suspicion. However, I have previously PM'd Gninja about pulse damage itself lagging, which I first noted on the Villandre fight. He replied back saying it should not, to which I sent back more detailed information demonstrating it was. He did not reply, and the issue was seemingly ignored.



    1000 times in one frame... As I have already detailed, there a poorly designed Avatar encounter that can result in crazy amounts of DG + Equilibrium triggers. There is also a poorly designed Dungeon Maker system that can allow "builders" to stack hundreds of mobs on top of each other, which hit like wet noodles due to an ineffective agnostic system, and base design.

    In both cases, DG is not the cause. It is merely an innocent bystander of bad game design. The Avatar encounter can easily be fixed. Removing the ability to stack NPCs in Dungeon Maker zones, along with fixing the base & agnostic damage application of dungeon maker mobs, will resolve that issue.

    Nice to see you're not sure about it, but you believe them, despite the change having done absolutely nothing to improve lag. Faith means to believe something without proof, you clearly have faith in SOE/DBG.

    Knine is making a decent case to identify possible lag culprits. Based on my experience with Villandre, Pulse Damage scripting is constantly checking the raid, and can lag itself to the point there is 3 seconds delay between the first and last person being hit (with 0 deaths in raid). On Villandre, the pulse damage script is constantly checking to see if someone died and got revived, so it can re-apply on them out of synch with the rest of their group. Thus, Pulse damage is more than just one check every few seconds, it is constantly checking the whole raid. Quite reasonable to suspect this can add to lag, is it not?
    Healious likes this.
  15. Gninja Developer

    Assuming you are talking about the DoT style spells that get put on the raiders during fights these spells are not really pulse spells. At least they were never intended to be anyway. These spells function independently of each other meaning the calculation does happen on the boss it happens on the spell that each player has. A lot of the time you see them hitting at the same time because the spells all got applied to the raid at the same time at the beginning of the fight.That is why you see them hitting at different times especially when someone dies and gets the spell reapplied.

    The fact that players get hit at different times by the same named spell does not mean the raid is lagging and that is what is causing it to hit at different times it just means that second player to get hit had the spell applied at a different time than the first. These spells are not a concern for lag as they are done very efficiently. I have never seen one of these spells trip our "longframe" logs like a lot of the procing items and fast procing spells do. A longframe is when the server gets behind on processing action being done in a frame. Its a fancy word for button lag :)
  16. Gninja Developer

    You are partially correct... Yes, there are at times poorly designed encounters that contribute to this problem. But that does not in anyway mean that the way Divine Guidance was made was flawless. The very nature of the way that spell acted presented problems that contributed to performance and not just in situations where there was a poorly designed encounter. DG was far from innocent.

    The way these things take place is we get a report that shows what spells AND encounters are causing longframes... or commonly known as button lag. When we (Designers) get these reports from the code/engine folks we investigate them and see if we can get them fixed. In the past we have simply just changed the encounter and left the abilities that were causing problems alone as to not incite the very rage this sort of thread shows. But the fact is that the spells are part of the problem and the problem will persist as long as we allow spells to function in that way. We ALSO changed things with encounters in those cases.

    Now... the intention of the fix for the spell was to help with those situations. This does not mean it was a silver bullet to curing all lag on servers. In fact most players will not even see a difference after the fix. But that doesn't mean it did not help. Simply put the change was needed so it was made. DG is no less powerful/useful than it was before and if there is an encounter out there that is no longer killable by players due to this change let me know and we will take a look. From what we have seen there have been less longframes from this spell and parses show pretty much exactly the same as they did before. In fact we could have made this change and not called it out and I am betting no one would have known. However, we are attempting to be more transparent to you guys who love and play this game just like we do and want to be in the loop with things like this.
    Anghammarad, Mermut, Kryvak and 4 others like this.
  17. Avirodar Well-Known Member

    You should re-check your PMs, for one I sent on the 6th of March. The title of the conversation is "Villandre". Of particular relevance is my 2nd post in that conversation. Your thoughts on why people get hit at different times by an effect such as Villandre's Touch of Malice, is wrong. I provided a thorough example in the PM, and said that I was happy to provide additional information. You never got back to me, so I was left to assume you did not know, or did not care.
  18. Avirodar Well-Known Member

    How did the very nature of the way DG functioned contribute to lag, if players were engaging in normal sized pulls, and not using DG in an attempt to powerheal through fail condition effects that hit squillions of times for minor amounts of damage in a very short span of time?

    And out of curiosity, is Equilibrium going to be getting the same treatment?

    I appreciate the aspiration to reduce lag. While I can not speak for everyone who has posted, my reaction is not rage, it is bafflement. It is my opinion that the change to DG attacks the symptom (DG showing on longframe reports), without curing the cause. If DG gets triggered 1000 times in a single frame, it is because something triggered it to activate 1000 times in a single frame. What ever that something is, needs to be fixed. Nothing should be hitting that often, ever, under any circumstances. Even if I am completely wrong, I hope you can understand my concern.
    Flatline likes this.
  19. Boli Active Member

    I have a feeling the biggest lag producer is autoattack and avoidance and the multiple calculations every swing needs to go through to work this out. (especially when you have procs which continually modify it)

    Everyone remembers how much crusader's faith broke the zone? :)
  20. Thor New Member

    If I would of bet with you, you would of lost. I'll explain.
    Go back to post #109
    Read it.

    Then read post #111
    Caith said :

    So, I felt the ninja-nerf the 1st instance I got into. Then again I am a pro Inquis and will notice the SMALLEST of details like if im missing but ONE piece of gear... I will see the difference, I will FEEL the difference.

    ok ... ok... you then changed it to 5x procs per seconds... bla bla bla yea it doesn't make a difference in raids. For that I do agree. But, it does make a difference when my tank wants to pull a tons of mobs... it does make a difference when I pull a ton of mobs in adv solo. I actualy have to throw in that extra penance here and there to compensate all the hits coming in.

    So please, don't take us players for fools, especially not me, cuz I saw it, reported it and then got your little "oops" post.

    Fix the lag in raids, don't "fix" spells that are not broken.

    Whats next? Your gonna make "Divine Armor" proc x5 / sec next too ? Because that is basicly a permanent DG buff cast on the tank. In fact why don't you just make ALL these types of spells 5x / sec. And if the raids don't lag anymore, well ill st*u.

    But if they do still lag, well... guess us "fools" were right all the long.

    This is my last post about this crap. Im done.