You know, two years ago the amount of transfered/recieved data in our in-game perfomance window was 10-12 k (bites?) during a raid fight, if I'm not mistaken. Right now it's 35-40k. We have almost the same abilities, we have almost the same procs. The real difference is numbers we and mobs have: stats, hp, dps.
Is it proccing over 100 times in a single frame because you added X different AOE effects that effect everyone member of the raid and do damage or something else all the time ? Before this xpac Divine Guidance procs were not a problem. As a person who has done a little bit of programming I wont buy your explanation. Most likely programmers didnt anticipate their "leet new aoe ticks" and other new stuff in the next xpac as demading on servers as they were. Also after release of your zombie-game that lag got worse... Again I don't see this as an EQ2 problem. Buy new servers.
I bet it wouldn't be a problem even further, if someone didn't exploit events in fights using it, for example on Karana avatar encounter. 2 procs/sec is enough for that ability to be cool.
Kneejerk reaction if i ever saw one, oh wait our design means that DG will be able to proc ... so Instead of fixing the mechanics of the fights w a buckton of ticking damage from a metricton of adds and mobs we nerf A Class defining abillty thats been there for YEARS AND is like one of THE few ways inqs/temps can do what other classes do with hots/wards because our reactives are ... dare i say it CRAPTASTIC on that kind of damage. How about we fix the fights or the mechanics surrounding these instead of stomping yet another plate healer ability and making it useless for the fights like that (which is like bloody most boss fights, be it heroic or raid) .. or at least good enough so we dont all end up w tendonitis. and need 3 other healers to hold our hand. Seriosly..
I was actualy wrong about 40k bites during a fight. It's more like 70-100k. The highest I had today was 108k. From 10 to 100 k in two years, no wonder we are lagging.
Increasing the magnitude of a number doesn't lead to lag or more data packets being transmitted. As long as the process is running it doesn't matter if your transmitting any number in the range the process is able to handle. If the numbers increase its the exact same processing power and memory usage as smaller numbers. The only way an increase in the numbers would matter is if you go beyond the range it is designed for. And in that case...a new process would need to be written. Simply put, if you hit a range boundary for a number at most it will hit max and there is no way to exceed that number. What Caith said is by bounding DG to 2 procs per second your eliminating the worst case scenario where your getting 100 procs in a single frame. Ideally you'd have 26 or more frames per second but in a really bad case you could have 1 frame every few seconds. The devs are trying to limit how many processes are called by introducing a hard cap on major offenders. There will probably have to be quality checks made and further adjustments to DG after dev looks at the metrics. If they don't get the kind of results they were looking for, I'd even hope for a reversion. Calling for smaller numbers isn't going to help at all. The steps dev is trying to take might be painful but the method they are choosing and the reason behind it should have an impact. I think it would be a lot more constructive to actually test the changes and then make some observations on what content you can't handle after DG has been changed. That might actually lead to DG getting an improvement as well as a nerf.
Heals that scale infinitely to the number of mobs/hits engaged are bad, I'm sort of surprised this went so long without a change, not just from a server performance issue, but from a scaling issue as well.
This is the way reactives work.. you get hit.. you get healed.. before TOV there was no pulsing damage per say.. once pulsing damage was implemented the reactives at first did not work, then they made a change and they worked, but now lag takes place. Again, why change something that wasn't broken, when in fact what you now placed as a new damage into the game is the cause of the issue. Druid hots used to not be so good, so they increased the value of STA where now tanks have 3 million HP plus, making it useful. Shaman wards not getting full effect of CB was changed and made them "overpowered" again. Now you say the pulsing damage that has been introduced on almost every single mob, is making DG proc too much basically so you want to limit an AA ability that wasn't broken in the first place.. boggles my mind.
It wouldn't be 100 procs per frame again if damage wasn't pulsing on everyone making reactives proc. how about on beta you take out the pulsing damage and humor us.. see if lag goes down a bit.. no harm no foul if you try, but like always I'm sure your mind is made up
Gotta agree. Pulsing damage is a lame enough mechanic to begin with, but if it's contributing to lag issues (which the timeline strongly suggests) that's a good reason to reconsider it's use.
I somewhat disagree here. The max value for a 4 byte unsigned integer is a little over 4 billion. The integer that is a step down from that is the 2 byte integer that is a max value of 65k. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_(computer_science)) This is somewhat of a low number even if we divided ever number (health, dmg, healing, etc) in the game by 10. I'm fairly certain that even in the past most of the numbers in the EQ2 network packets were 4 bytes and likely still are. We do not have the same abilities from 2004 and we definitely have a ton more procs nowadays (nearly each jewelry procs something). Imho, changing DG was prolly overkill and some of the jewelry should change from procs to static buffs, and pulse damage be changed/removed from mobs
Hi Caith. Can you please tell me what specific conditions were in effect, such as zone name, group composition, mob(s?) pulled etc, when you seen over 100 procs from Divine Guidance in a single frame? And for the sake of clarity, can you please tell me what a single frame is? Also, under what circumstances (specifically - name the actual encounter) do you believe Divine Guidance triggers so many times it impacts server performance, in a raid setting? I would very much like to go and cross reference this with our actual raid data. Thank you.
I seem to remember somewhere from - and Caith please correct me if im wrong (likely am) - that an eq2. frame is like .1 of a second. That would in essence mean that if GD procs 100 times in .1 second that a normal group was being hit with damage 100 times - rahter obvious right ? - which would boil down to each GROUPMEMBER being hit 100/6 = ~16.67 times in a .1second timeframe ... That would boil down to each groupmember being hit with damage 166 Times in a 1 second periode. Think about that for a second (or .1 second) .. is that a matter of DG being to strong or is that a matter of mechanics being WAY WAY off ? If we go with the presumption as someone did earlier, that a frame is a rendering frame then we are talking 16.67 times in a matter of 0.03 SECONDS (going w 30 Frames a Second here) ... doing that math on this IS staggering but seriously it is NOT GD that is the problem, infact you should send thank you notes to your plate healers for exposing silly mechanics. Of course for now this is horrible Theorycrafting, at least till we know exactly what a frame is..
If we're taking damage hundreds of times per frame, and therefor thousands of time per second, then perhaps the mechanics of reactives in general need to be changed to be more effective in game and more efficient on the server. If there was a DG proc, then there was damage. The server does not need to send us multiple packets for that one event. On the other hand, a good short term fix is not to send a thousand damage packets per second, in the first place, which I can only assume is happening all the time, not just when DG happens to be running. Oh, do we still consume triggers on 0 damage, 0 healed?
So...if I'm understanding this correctly. People in groups were being damaged hundreds of times a second. The answer to "lag", I guess, is "let them die" because now, instead of healing them hundreds of times per second, we are going to heal them twice. That plan rocks.
I put my raid main (inquisitor) on the shelf when ToV came out and I saw how useless reactive heals were. Templars were more desired as well as druids. I know some mystics that quit playing altogether. Now shamans are the flavor of the year, and my warden also went back into mothballs. Are inquisitors going to be even more useless than before? Will there be some kind of trade-off to make them at least moderately desirable again? I still group with my inquisitor, and from the looks of things, I won't even be able to do that now. Could you please give the healers some reason to keep playing? Please?
The only scenario where I could see divine guidance triggering 100 times in a single frame is in dungeon makers. Looking back through my logs, I've seen divine guidance trigger up to 13 times on one target in a second without intentionally mass pulling (the final trash encounter in Bosun's private stock), and speaking as an inquisitor, I would not have been able to heal through that scenario with the current change on test/beta. That said, I can understand the need to place a cap on the ability, but 2 times per second per target is too severe. If the intent of this change isn't to nerf clerics, I would recommend increasing the cap to at least 10 times per second per target or else, as others have mentioned, offsetting it in some other way. One possibility would be to add a HoT component to divine guidance.
If what I am reading is correct, then my Inquisitor we become essentially useless on many group and raid encounters. While I can see how having huge amounts of ticks would be a data problem, I have not seen anything said about what will be done to fix this nerf. It is the nature of several zones in AoM that huge amounts of basically trash mobs are pulled, and that is when this became a problem. But what now? Though many of those mobs do little damage to a well geared tank individually, when there are 10-20 of them it starts to add up fast. And since our reactives kind of suck, and the group heals have a very long cast time - what is next - Make a Warden? I am very curious as to how this will actually play out. I have not seen any comments on it in the BETA discussion, perhaps because no or few raids were actually done with Inquisitors?
I'm trying to see where 100 triggers came from. I pulled up an ACT log from last night's Captain kill in the Brokenskull raid. We have one inquisitor in raid so I looked at the logs and found 13 triggers in a single second as the top Divine Guidance hit. Most of the triggers were one or two, with a handful of 6's. How does anything trigger 100 times in a second? I can't even think of a single encounter with that many adds. Even the massive trash pull right before the Crumbling Icon in Zavith'loa didn't have more than 3 triggers per second and Divine Guidance was 60% of the inquisitor's heal parse. What makes DG trigger 100 times a second?
