I... am actually fine with this. If it fixes the lag, I don’t mind it, at all. If they make it so the DoTs tick less frequently but things like haste would accumulate the damage and add it into each ticks to reduce the rate the server has to update, I’m really am fine with such a measure. The less RNG the better. I wasn’t a good player and struggled to get even to 1.4K in PvP back in Cata days and even WoD. Recently however, because of the RNG and the itemisation, with a few decent corrupted pieces, those ranks are now piece of cake. In PvE, I don’t even know how to improve anymore since the logs can’t tell me which source of damage I should be focusing on, nor looking at other players is helpful. Vita charge can proc at convenient or inconvenient time, completely out of my control. If I’m lucky, vita proc also combines with infinite stars for stupid amount of damage or infinite stars just stop at 5 or 6 stacks in a 5 minutes fight. It’s unreal.
@@blablub8227 they wont because some corporate executive wants it that way because on paper it'll make the most profits in the shortest amount of time and the devs have to get it done one way or another, or find someone who can.
Thank you so much for this surprisingly educational video! I had no idea how any of this worked and it makes so much more sense now. I'm also glad to hear I'm not the only one effected with bursts of lag (I don't even play with many people)-I seriously thought there was something wrong with my internet. I too, hope this gets fixed in Shadowlands. That said, I love your educational vids like this, I've been playing a long time, but there are still many things, in the systems sense, that I don't understand.
Why should every single piece of gear have a freaking proc... Is there a difference between a trinket and a chest piece other than the slot where you put it anymore? Ofcourse you need a sim for every new drop if every single one has a different effect. Bring it back to something simpler blizz! Armor pieces are statsticks and nothing more, so the player has a clear gear progression (more stats=better item) and keep trinkets, legendaries and some high end weapons for the procs. Whenever you increase the randomness of your sistems the skill level of each player becomes ever so slightly less relevant, to the point where you can't plan ahead for pots or cds and just have to smash the buttons that light up. Give me things I can activate when i need them, give me irrelevant spells that work in super niche cases but when they work it's because of my decision making, make me feel like I made a meaningful decision instead of making me roll a die to see who is better, time and time again.
Remember when they used to tell you the average PPM of your procs in-game? So you could have a trinket that procs 18k damage with 6 PPM and if you got a new trinket you could see that it procced 28k damage but at 2 PPM. Nowadays they won't even give us that information, everything just says "your spells have a chance to do X extra damage."
what if i told you, that's their intention - to reduce player skill level to cater directly and aggressively to the casual majority market, made up of kids casuals and autists, for max profits.
@@whiskizyo2067 I don't think that's the reason, there's alredy plenty for the casuals (LFR-Normal) where you dont really need skill at all to progress. I genuinelly think they want to make cool shit for the players, but they went for the "roll the dice" casino style fun like titanforging and things that have a chance to proc other things, instead of the "reward smart plays and dedication" with more deterministic skills and gear, where you can learn how to use things the right way and have some kind of skill growth. My concern overall is that with the ammount of randomness plus all the rented power we are getting, every expansion is like getting a totally new character, which will eventually sever the connection the player feels from it. I mean, I used to play 2h frost, i liked the flavour of being the closest thing there is in the game to the Lich King, big weapons and edgy as fuck. Now the fantasy for my main and his playstyle are gone. And the same will be for many who may like their class now once blizz will revamp all the classes for the 100th time.
@@teec4p Yeah, because the kids casuals and autists are happy with just LFR and not wanting everything else on top of that, catered to them as well. And you only talked about raiding, you ever wonder why warfronts were an AFK joke? classes simplified? insta cast skills put on GCD? etc. what else could all that be for then? capitalism at its finest (aggressively targeting the majority casual market for biggest profits)
@@whiskizyo2067 yeah they are... How many "I can't do Heroic or Mythic because the game is unfair" arguments do you see around? Because I dont see them. GCD changes come from this wierd concept that every skill should be worth a click, not be smashed in a macro, but being off the GCD doesn't directly mean it's gonna end up in a macro, plus some things need to activate NOW and not in about 1.5sec. Warfronts are shit both for the lag and the laughable balance. The class pruning was a mistake admitted even by the devs, but it has a point. There are limited buttons you can bind, and getting every expansion more and more skills will eventually be too much. That was a problem in MoP where all classes could do everything, everyone had 3-4 cc skills, 3-4 AoEs. And that's not healty for the game. But instead of slowly removing skills, they tried to clear it up in 2 expacs.
Well this is actually a relief because I was wondering if all the lag was my end. Like I only have a modest rig but its not crap either its a reliable machine.
Your rig won't really affect anything but your framerate so if everything's running at high FPS but you're seeing people warping around or running in place then that's almost certainly completely either an issue with your connection or an issue with the server.
Thats one big missconception. All your pc could be responsible for are FPS drops. If you have bad internet you obviously could be lagging, but that only affects you and if that happens only in big groups then it's surely server issue.
It has nothing to do with the reasons he stated.. get a bunch of people in one area its gonna lag like crazy. You get the same crap each week at the weekly mythic chest... do u see azerite power, essences and trinkets procing there? nope...
Amazing. You perfectly managed to explain, and visually SHOW, just HOW MUCH RNG is in the game. And amazingly, You still didn't have enough die. That moment when you had two die next to 10+ die, was a BIG eye opener on just how fucked some of this stuff is.
To be honest, flat earthers will find cool ways of showing their theories are true and that doesn't make them true at all. This sounds like an easy fallacy because he groups 2 things that people dislike together so they WANT it to be true. Server lag based on RNG would be really easy to be tracked and even easier to be dealt with (the person designing stuff would just be called out to avoid it). As much as I think Blizzard have terrible people on their higher ups, this one is basically calling every programmer and designer in the game a bunch of idiots who have no idea what they are doing. Also the calculations can be even easier without snapping since you can have a single 'source' instead of needing to store how much of each stat the player had when he casted for every single dot. Also classic servers lag too.
marcos vinicios If you want people to come around to your way of thinking, it’s probably a good idea not to insult them by saying they are akin to flat earthers.
"now we got lag" he said. "and now i have to clean this whole mess up" he thought. that aside, there's definitely a lot more to the lag problem than just spell procs. i can't stand in boralus crafting the 200 pots a guildmate just handed me his herbs for cause i rolled prosperity without the server having a heart attack.
never had any problem with stuff like that, ok granted im horde and i do my crafting in dazar alor/orgrimmar, but still. might depend on your system, i dont know. but large scale raids are definetly where the big problem is
@@Gryphuk i know i basically said the exact opposite but crafting isn't the issue, it's just one of the things that makes it very obvious; boralus is almost always at least somewhat laggy. the entire city. sometimes it's other zones too, mostly drustvar, from the alliance perspective. recently it was all of visions of orgrimmar. the best way to put it is, this conversation will probably sound very familiar to most players: posting in guild or general: is it me or is anyone else getting massive lag in [zone] multiple answers along the lines of: nah, i'm getting it too.
@@Gryphuk Boralus is always bugged. Can't tell you how many times I spawn into an empty town with nothing but shadows to tell me there's actual players and NPCs around.
It must be a lot more than spell procs., there is no reason why moonfire would check all those procs, it would just check your current haste, crit, spellpower etc values. I think the issue is all the azerite garbage that check distance with other players and stuff, that requires millisecond precise location and movement updating, much more than updating haste values every few milliseconds.
The other night, I was in a heroic raid with like 15 total people. I'm on my shadow priest, so I have two dots to maintain. The thing is, both of those dots are applied at the start of a fight, and are extended by my standard rotation. I noticed, roughly 1 minute into the fight, that my dots fall off (with multiple seconds still remaining, I happened to be looking at them at that moment) one after the other. Remember, they didn't EXPIRE, since they had time left. Remember how in classic there is a debuff cap on a target? Well turns out that they increased that a few times over various expansions, and eventually settled on 256. No, it is not unlimited. There are 256 debuff slots on a target, and my raid of 15 people hit it (we were on xanesh, who never goes immune or cleanses, so I have no other explanation). Prior to this raid, I'd only ever seen that happen on a world boss in Naz'jatar a handful of times; never before then. We wonder about the lag, but I do think Preach is right on this. There are too many things going on at a time, if a raid of 15 people can hit the debuff cap on BfA servers. Imagine that, but 40 (or more) people on a world boss in one phase, times however many phases there are. Plus, there are people swarming the zone anyway for daily/weekly stuff. Every one of those players causing dozens of calculations per second. That is a lot of data going in and out of the servers, and I imagine that is causing most of the issues.
“Let alone enemy if we’re in PvP” *Big Bang: Part 2* The dice analogy was really clever. It really shows the contrast between not just Classic and Retail, but also Level 10 and level 120.
as well as the system that scales damage based on character level ( timewalking and level sync become difficult for stuff like this, less so in level sync but still true)
Procs become meaningless when they're ubiquitous and nearly every piece of gear has them. The old system of having them purely on hard earned/rare trinkets, weps or as a unique set bonus is what made them special.
Island expeditions are completely different and unique from one another technically speaking and yet they all feel the same and become boring because of it. The same is true for all of these procs - at any one time I might have somewhere between 4 and 12 random secondary stat or additional damage buffs within a single pull but the reality is that I just see it as an amount of dps/hps increase averaged out over time. I can't really plan for them and classes aren't built around reacting to them for the most part either. So they end up feeling lacklustre and just fade into the background.
Exactly. There are so many you cannot possibly take advantage of any one. You’d have to take advantage of several at the same time. But then, since there are so many, you would think that the number of proc buffs on you would even out over time.
I just want simple gear again ilvl, stats, and class abilities should be King, not some ultimate omg insane stars giving others uber DPS on a lower ilvl piece.
One thing you failed to mention is that, with power creep, the integers those die are working with, are so big they require a larger amount of space in memory. For instance, they might be 32 bit integers instead of 16 bit integers. Because instead of hitting enemies for thousands, like in Classic, you're hitting them for hundreds of thousands, and sometime even millions, which is why they need to do a stat squish every expansion.
Mob health was calculated with 32 bit integers, that is what caused the need for the stat squish. 2^31 = 2,147,483,648, which is incredibly close to Heroic Lei Shen's pre-Squish HP, and why Garrosh needed to heal multiple times over the encounter instead of just having the total HP he needed.
@@SycosenMerihem Come to think of it, if you used unsigned integers (since, in practice, health should never be negative), then that gets you 2^32 integers, for 4,294,967,296 HP.
I think by the virtue that you can go into an epic BG and have the servers freeze up multiple times and have actual seconds of input delay there is a huge problem here. Ashran is an example - I didn't play WoD but surely the BG didn't behave that way during the time? Wintergrasp is another one... I DID play in WotLK and it played really well even back then. Did servers get worse or did the game just get ridiculous? You raise another point in your video about procs and I think a LOT of classes now look at their damage meters and they see their actual buttons they press so LOW on the meters I feel sad that there is little to no feeling of agency in the damage you do anymore... It's all just procs now or melee auto attacking. If blizz really want to save the feeling of DPS satisfaction they need to turn the dials up on the buttons we press and drastically turn them down on the things we don't.
@@bobjohnson5062 There was SOME lag by the end of the expansion, but only when people used the Agility Melee AoE Trinket + Rings and both sides were condensed fighting at either base, and it only lasted for a couple of seconds as the damage effects went off.
WOTLK wintergrasp did lag as well, but thats with computers and servers from a decade ago! They haven't really reworked the engine since then and they are adding a hell of a lot of math for your PC to crunch, it explains why we have huge fps drops in raids but it doesn't completely explain the rubberbanding in world pvp (But it could very well be the same issue). This is my understanding of how the engine works with raids. To make it flow well and not delay players, all calculations of dmg / procs / health etc are done on your PC first and then checked against the servers. If something is wrong, it will be backtracked to the correct state. That is why we sometimes get things like guardian spirit being put on a tank on the priests screen but on the other raiders it did not and the tank dies. This is effective and is a huge part of why raiding is so great, you can actually perform with minimum delay on your character, but coordination with others is a bit more delayed. This delay is easy to see if you are able to see two games at once, a move on one computer will result in a delayed movement on the other. This creates a great environment to play as well as possible, but it does put a heavy load on your personal computer as it now has to run the game and do all the calculations itself before it checks with the server, with rising number crunching the CPU's of today aren't strong enough. Wow is now semi-multicore based, most CPUs today are 4,6 or 8 cores and if you look at utilization of them when you are in a raid you can see that one core is always fully utilized and then it trickles down on the other cores. The cealing will always be that one core, however fast that one core is thats how many numbers it can crank out and it will in return deliver the highest fps possible (as long as your GPU and rest of your system manages to generate it as well, but wow raids are almost always cpu bottlenecked). Most new releases where CPU is a big part of the performance are actually multicore games but wow was created in the early 2000s and from what I've read the wow team decided that one-core was ok as it provided a good way of stopping cheaters, as multicore games are able to use phantom-cores (intrude the communication between cores) to add their own information and thereby cheat. My hope is that they update the engine and make it mutlicore, however I don't think blizzard would put the resources into it as it would probably cost in the same range as developing a whole new AAA-title. This does explain lag in raids but it doesn't explain the lag in world scenarios, but it could be the same issue at the bottom. I dont know why I wrote a bible, I am passionate.
And now we're in the middle of Dragonflight with its new major feature, Time Rifts, which are pretty much unplayable because they still haven't fixed this.
You say you know this is going away in shadowlands, but do you really believe that blizzard are going to change their philosophy on gear design next xpac? I have a feeling it's going to be similarly proc based, but I guess we can hope
I'm feeling optimistic because a lot of shadowlands content that they've talked about seems to he very not-RNG. Like TF/WF is gone and corruptions are likely going away when the prepatch hits and none of the systems in shadowlands from what I remember had any RNG to them. Sure the contents of the tower are random because that's the point but the rewards were completely in the player's control.
@@Murzac And then you realize it's ActiGreedzard and they've already concocted up something even more depressing. WoW died over a decade ago, stop giving these scamartists your money. Shadowlands will be worse, I will promise you this. Please stop buying into fancy CGIs, Trailers and empty promises.
Some RNG is okay to keep the game dynamic. Stuff like ice lance procs making your rotation more reactionary, but random dmg procs that you have no controll over, things like corruptions, insane trinkets that you cant play around etc need to go. All they do is give random boring power, taking away the fun of seeing high dps because you did good on a boss.
@@Murzac They stated something about reducing how to acquire gear will be less RNG; nothing about how the actual gear will work, given the covenants will likely have some RNG procs, something that replaces corruptions. Idk if Azerite armour is getting replaced, but we can only hope. Also the start of Shadowlands will likely be better as a large chunk of the effects come from compiling more and more effects as the expansion progressed.
REALLY happy to see this called out. Honestly I had been wondering if it was my server which didn't really make sense given that most hardware these days run on virtual machines and can be scaled as needed, but I kept thinking this can't be like this for everyone right??? If it was, wouldn't there be WAY more noise? But yeah particularly after the initial launch of 8.3 , or when people were actually doing the assaults after they were introduced, or the new zones added in 8.2.... In those cases I would have 5-10 seconds periods where everything stopped. FPS still great, but everyone running in place. What is interesting is while that is terrible and frustrating, what is almost worse is when it's only off by a "little" (compared to 5-10sec). Maybe 200-500ms. When it sits at that, classes that are relatively fast start to feel really clunky. At least when the whole server lags, I just sit and wait for it to catch up. When it's just kind of off....I just think about how terrible it feels to play and want to go play something else. The constant calculations make sense. Which then leaves me sitting here going WHY does it have to bee this complicated? Does ANYONE enjoy this random mega slot machine? Honestly, to me, the gear complexity felt about right in Wrath to Cata ish. And really, what drives me a little crazy is how they kept simplifying it because they believed we wanted it simplified, that gems were bad, socket bonuses were bad, that lots of enchants were bad, Glyphs were bad, that reforging trash gear into being less trash was bad.... That all of this was just way to complicated and not fun according to Blizzard (and I SOOO disagree). And look where we are now. Gems are MUCH more boring than they were. Enchants are INCREDIBLY boring. Two slots that I enchant with the same damn thing over and over and over again. Part of the reason professions are so terrible now is because of all of this. Enchants, gems, glyphs....they all had professions built around them. ...Ended up on a rant but my holy crap do I hate what they have done to a game that should be way better than it currently is at this point.
It’s even when you log in. The game has to do these calculations in the cities. When I log in. It takes sometimes 30sec for all of my UI to be visible. Now interestingly. When I have a character in WM. The lag is virtually zero. Likely because there are just less people in that phase.
Coming back to this. It just astounds me how grossly incompetent the current WoW Devs are. They basically broke solved problems and made gameplay so much worse for people on older machines and shakier connections. It's impressively bad.
Finally someone put my thoughts into words - the first time I dropped the ball on BfA, in mid/late-8.1.5 (and almost permanently so) was this very issue, the game is beyond playable on a machine on which I can crank up any other game, including other MMOs to the max and it takes 100+ people to notice some choking in those environments. WoW says nope even doing assaults in War Mode. I lost count of the number of bugs reported since the 8.0 launch, and in hindsight, many of them may have this very issue you describe here as the underlying culprit. Sad, because I want to love the game, but I simply cannot. It's not playable in the current state, at least not up to 2020 standards.
I'm suspecting the same problem PoE has. When the game has to constantly calculate effects on mobs each game tick suddenly you have longer and longer delay between the client and the server. Untill it finally shits itself. The difference being in Path your private instance crashes. Here the whole world instance hangs itself.
Preach: "Hey mate, you alright? Do you have any dice I could borrow by any chance?" Dave (from down the road): "Ye sure mate, how many you need?" Preach: "78 312 should be enough" Dave (from down the road): "Say no mo' I got ya!"
After some thought, I think the predictable and deterministic nature of classic is what brought me back. What I decide matters. There are actual finish lines. There are items I have reason to be content with.
Very well said, Mike. My son did a +15 last night. We looked through the logs and tallied nearly 40% of the damage done in the dungeon had nothing to do with a key press. That total is probably higher since there is damage inflation to the key presses from non-key presses (azerite gear, passive essences, etc.). I think that is ridiculous. I feel like 85%+ of all healing and damage should come a key press directly (I consider dot damage a key press so long as an active ability is what triggered the dot... go away deep wounds).
When you expect AN EXPANSION to fix problems with the current EXPANSION, then you've got a FAAAAAR bigger problem on your hands. Don't get me wrong, I agree with Preach.
Deff could add to the problem but, the issue existed for multiple expansions. Specifically it started in WoD, that it became noticeable. At that time, it would take a multiboxxer vs a raid to cause it to happen. We can look back at things like, Wintergrasp when there was very few shudders or server lock up even tho there were MASSIVE amounts of players. Outside of a q'able instance. In normal bgs, never had a problem with lag but, seen epic BGS lock up so bad, you couldn't move for 5 mins. Aka "isle of conquest." AV can have the same problem but, requires a big fight at the beginning in the middle.
Thanks for making this problem so comprehensible. I stoped playing BfA because of lag. Some people tell me to buy a new PC, and they are partially right, but on the other side BfA worked for me until 8.3 and now I simply can't play anymore =(
I'll say I've definitely noticed the server side lag myself as well, but I think it goes a bit deeper than just Blizzard adding a bunch of RNG dice rolls to everything. While that is definitely a problem, there is another one that I think most people either completely forget about, or just don't know about because it's a problem rooted in enterprise server infrastructure. Let's think back one expansion to Legion. The effective system lifetime was between August 30th 2016 through July 17th 2018. It did go until August, but remember a lot of Legions core systems got neutered or disabled when prepatch hit in July, and the Legion prepatch itself didn't have the core systems yet since a lot of them stemmed from legendaries and artifact weapons. Legion was also pre squish 2.0 so numbers were larger to deal with as well. From what I remember, server side lag was still present, but nowhere near the level it is right now in many scenarios. Next, on the server infrastructure side, lets consider where Blizzards servers are in their lifecycle. Let's say they use a 5 year lifecycle for their infrastructure and they are in year 3 or whatever, there's a very high chance the servers are running an Intel Xeon platform one or two generations old. That being the case, there's nothing inherently wrong with it, this isn't a segway into some kind of LOL AMD nonsense, but there is something to consider with it. In early 2018, the tech world got hit by Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. This presented a massive problem for Intel, as it was determined these vulnerabilities were primarily hardware bound, meaning any fix would have to be done with software on any silicon not redesigned to mitigate these issues. Since these initial vulnerabilities, we have also seen more variations of Spectre crop up throughout 2018 and into 2019 and Intel mostly has had to patch these vulnerabilities through software fixes which are known to cause measurable loss in performance across pretty well everything in their product stack. Now going back to server lifecycles. If Blizzard is in the middle of the server lifecycles (I would actually imagine lifecycles would be staggered between clusters so they aren't replacing an entire server farm every 5 years), chances are they weren't going to bite the bullet and replace every bit of silicon in their datacentres when Intel released hardware fixed CPUs. They were most likely rolling through software fixes and continuing lifecycle replacements as normal. This introduces an issue where a good deal of server nodes could be affected by the overhead of the software patches, which could in turn be further crippled when the servers are trying to process large amounts of data from large groupings in whatever instance or shard. Being that the biggest chunk of these vulnerabilities surfaced in 2018, they likely would have been rolling patches into them throughout the year. All this being said, what we could be looking at is actually a two way problem caused both by the insane amount of dice rolls and data calculation PLUS Intel's security fix overhead across many server nodes. You might notice sometimes the server lag isn't as bad some days compared to other days, this could be a result of aforementioned server lifecycles where Blizzard likely has replaced some nodes with newer silicon with hardware mitigation, or more likely, they could have newer silicon that has some mitigation, but not all of them since these vulnerabilities have been seemingly coming at a steady pace over the last two years. So depending on how exactly Blizzard handles spawning instances across their datacentre, you could end up on a node that's running an older Kaby Lake or Skylake Xeon, or a recently replaced node running newer Cascade lake Xeons or AMD EPYC Naples or Rome depending on if they drank team red's magical elixir or not. Food for thought. I really wish Blizzard did Q&A about their infrastructure because I find it fascinating.
hahahahahahaa bloody brilliant ! Thats the best explanation I have seen yet. I suspect that in conjunction with the extra load phasing has put on it is the biggest contributor. I really notice lag during Assaults in particular zones to the point were I just leave the zone because its become unplayable. However, its not always during an assault and my FPS and other world connection speeds are good, I still get horrendous lag. Uldum and Pandaria - often I will just do the lesser vision and leave cause the lag is so bad
Thank you for pointing this out! I have been experiencing lag so much in PVP zones when full on battles are going. I really hope Blizz can fix this in Shadowlands!
100% agree. I remember during the first few months of BFA I was in Dazar'alor and the Alliance were attacking and literally no one could even move to try and do anything about it
EPIC MONSTER SPAWN: LAG Primary skill: Bonecrushing Latency, has chance to drop framerates. Secondary skill: May cause CPU overheat with slim chance of crash. Passive: Git Gud.
thank you for talking about snapshotting, finally someone gets it, and it's not just a lag issue or stripping the game down of all the random nonsense. those are great side effects but the bigger bonus to this is that snapshotting would add back in game complexity, because your dots take the values when you press them you are able to use this to your advantage as you become better at the game. snapshotting was removed at the end of MoP for most dots/abilities, i think a few stuck around but it was mostly gone, and then we got WoD, and while WoD class design was decent and the raids were good we still saw a lot of players not having fun and many of them couldn't put their finger on it... it was snapshotting. your characters started playing themselves and you didn't need to think about refreshing a dot, you just did it when it got below 4 seconds like every other dot in the game. snapshotting will not only fix what you talked about here, but i would choose snapshotting over not having it even if it was the laggier option, because it adds a skill gap and a learning curve into the game that never goes away. it allows players to experience a moment at max level where they go "ohhhh, i get it" and then they start working to get better at it. and then, when they finally do it right they are rewarded with a feeling of accomplishment as well as seeing their name higher on the damage meter. all of this, is due to snapshotting, so yes the lag issue would be gone which is great, but you stumbled onto something here that would be so much better for the game in terms of how it feels to play our characters, and since that's how we interact with the game world, i think it's a worthy cause to fix. amazing video, even if you weren't thinking about how this would fix class/game design at the same time, you still stumbled into the right direction which is more than i can say for other content creators who are still asking for silly shit like player housing. thank you preach, now please keep hammering this home and spreading the word, you're our only hope.
THANK YOU - I feel like I've been losing my mind because there doesn't seem to be nearly enough discussion around the lagfest that is world of warcraft lately. I'm so glad people are shedding light on this situation because I agree that it is absolutely unacceptable that my MMO lags when other people show up!
In my experience, Ashran is the most laggy area. I wish we have back the meaning of crits and dmg back like in bc and wrath. i find it best to influence the values via sockets. to put magical power into all sockets was just great
Tried to do an organized PvP event with about 20 people per side. Lag was so bad in new Uldum that we moved the event to old AQ do there wouldn’t be any mobs or other people in the zone. This helped, but it was still incredibly noticeable, and that’s just 40-50 characters total. I come from a server that used to do lots of large scale PvP, but the lag is so bad, it’s like watching a slideshow.
there has been massive spell lag whenever large amounts of players are fighting since wod atleast. ashran definately lagged back then and kazzak had spell lag on pull
I’m hate the amount of rng that where I can’t consistently go for good logs, and the lag is enough to make me close the game and unsubscribe and go play something else.
@@SullenJazzhands exactly this^ I don't have infinite stars yet so I use 2x mind flay corruptions. One week I have 95+ log, the other week 50% log. and am playing exactly the same. Infinite stars just feels abit more consistent with the procs, while my mind fly can go on for 2 minutes without a proc. Sometimes I get an entire boss without procs, and others my mind flay is doing 6-7 mil damage. Its not up to me anymore how I perform. Was doing Dog on mythic and I was top dps, next pull 5th dps, next pull last dps, next pull 2nd dps. ofc on kill I had 500k mindflay dmg and got a 20% log, but who knows maybe next week I will get a 95+% log. Its not up to me
couldn't agree more, and what's worse is most the lag tends to happen at the rare epic moments where we get some large scale combat (whether that's world pvp, or just huge aoe pulls in pve) less rng > less lag > happy days.
@Zerebrat Eightyseven Class-Rereworks. Bring back Support-Classes like TBC. Give classes a reason to be in a raid. Less ARPG-Elements and stop smashing-button contest. I want to have impact what my class can do and not be impacted by a system that uses D&D-Role-System on every buff.
I thought it might just be my pc, I never even thought of how poor the performance has got since SoO and how that might be the result of the removal of snapshotting, and not my PC - my outlaw rogue will experience the lag like you showed in Nazjatar, but also in half second delays in combat. With essences making energy regen non-predictable, and the possibility of getting an rng multistrike granting me two combo points, this half second leads to resource capping and delayed button presses in a high apm spec. It makes me want to quit the spec.
There's zero incentive for blizzard to make shadowlands good. Classic has a higher raiding player base than any mmo on the market (confirmed by the creator of Warcraft logs). Bobby Kotick can milk classic, bc, and wrath servers for years. I have zero hope for shadowlands.
Honestly though I am of the opposite opinion. So much negative PR was done with the player base with BFA that it really is their last chance ever with modern wow.
Oh hey it's Preach, What's up man Haven't seen you in a while. Hey Dave what's up? Listen I have a question, do you sell dice? Of course, how many do you need? ALL OF THEM
“It would be really good if I could play it” - this has been my problem since legion. I’ve done less and less group content because even in dungeons I often had bad lag. Some computer updates seem to have helped but still it’s one of the biggest barriers to me trying to actually raid. It’s hard not to stand in the fire when I can’t even SEE the fire until I’m dead. Seeing my character freeze mid cast is also fun when I just have to push buttons in what I hope is the proper timing while I wait for the game to catch up.
I believe during legion they also took away the ability to just have the circular blob shadows under players and made it entirely dynamic meaning shadows were being rendered for everything, EVEN ON ITS LOWEST SETTING. Because WoW is so CPU heavy, even at full load you'll see the game near maxing out your processor but hardly touching more than 40% GPU which is not normal for any properly optimized game. This leads me to believe your GPU is pretty much just responsible for resolution and output meanwhile your CPU struggles to manage not just game logic but effects, particles and most importantly, that damn new lighting system. Software rendered shadows are very taxing and you can see a massive difference between how classic handled it vs BFA. Esp on lower end systems that meet WoWs requirements, the game with out a doubt would run an additional 25+ fps if they just allowed us to have circular blob shadows again.
My build has an i9 9900k and a 2080ti. It's an absolute unit. 2k 144hz I frequently drop to sub 100 framerates. This doesn't even happen in far more graphical titles like COD MW, or Battlefield V. Totally ridiculous.
@@jotunn30 I don't know what you're implying, but I am not defending Blizzard. I am stating, in your words, an objective fact: the game has always lagged. People just forget that and tend to only pay attention to what's happening in the "now". WoD had some of the worst lag I have ever seen and I've been playing since 2005.
@@ruggie.74 It comes across as you defending blizz because your main point is " the game has always lagged". That is true but that isn't relevant, blizzard should have optimized by now, stop misdirecting.
Agree - I used to love doing WG and BGs in general but once Cata dropped lag arrived and now its just brain melting. I did a 25 man normal raid a few days ago and mid boss fight everything froze for about 5 secs and it was a complete shit show. PS guys used to freak out when they found out they had had their ass handed to them in PVP by a 47 yr old mother of two...lol
The one lag spot I can think of was dalaran. That is when I bought my first video card upgrade for my computer. I was literally stuck there, because every time I'd try to log in my computer would have a heart attack. It was client side of course, because after I upgraded my computer it was smooth.
I loved what you did with the dice, that was really good! Also for Shadowlands, one lesson Blizz might take from Classic is to make the stats on gear matter again. Right now the Stamina + Primary stat on everything might as well not exist, it's that universal. How about we make gear interesting again by having some pieces have way less (or no) stamina at all, what if we had a piece with abnormally high stamina but low primary stat? What if we had gear again with Strength and Agility, how worth is it for different classes, or hybrids like Druids/Paladins? Imagine having Strength + Intellect gear again for the hybrid crusaders! This way you can make more risk/reward decisions in gear rather than only looking at your secondaries and talents for character custimazation.
Hybrids aren't really a thing any more. With 36 specs, you effectively have 36 separate classes nowadays...and the former hybrids can outshine the pure DPS classes.
@@HiddenEvilStudios Well they already mentioned that they're toning down spec identity and increasing class identity. But I meant more in the sense that a Ret paladin could get more int gear for a larger mana pool so he could do some more healing before he oomed or a feral druid could get more stamina gear to off-tank in high M+ dungeons for example. because right now that's all super streamlined and kinda sad.
I'm sick of all these passive damage effects we got. I want to be in control again, I want my character's power to be based on my performance and my gear again and not just be a vehicle for damage procs!
Also add for AoE each mobs armor/talents/procs/shields and so forth, it's even larger than just a calculation on your end but ever targets end as well.
Let's not forget - due to the action/arcade nature of the combat system nowadays, the netcode has to deal with a lot more click-per-minute events than ever before, even if the playerbase is a fraction of what it was when the game was traditional MMORPG
Except for all these rolls causing lag they also cause me apathy to my damage. I've got a friend in my guild who also plays the same spec as me and we theorycraft together and discuss rotations, talent setups and essences. It's quite fun. He's like 6 ilvls higher so I should expect him to top me in dps. However, some fights we are 2% apart in damage, others 20%. And we play the same. Rng (corruptions) are so strong that it really lessens my enjoyment in dps. Imagine if we could get consistent results, then we could look at the damage meter at the end of the fight, click compare and go "I cast this spell 10 more times than you, maybe you should prioritize it, or maybe cleave more" etc. Now it's all meaningless.
Same. I believe that might have been Blizzard's intent, to make you unable to filter out "bad" players. Except if you could tell who performed badly and who didn't, you could gently pull them aside and teach them.
Amazon: Why would someone order 5000 dices?
Preach: My goals are beyond your understanding
Kenzo 117, dice is the plural bro. No need to add an “s”. The singular is die. Every day’s a school day.
nah m8, he called a regular die a D6. He's a D&D player for sure, and that's a normal amount of die for a D&D player.
Blizzard watching this:
"He's right! We need to remove DoTs from the game!"
@hadoukenrewrite lore again to add some new shiny mounts^__^
Me, an Affliction Warlock main:
;_;
I... am actually fine with this. If it fixes the lag, I don’t mind it, at all. If they make it so the DoTs tick less frequently but things like haste would accumulate the damage and add it into each ticks to reduce the rate the server has to update, I’m really am fine with such a measure. The less RNG the better. I wasn’t a good player and struggled to get even to 1.4K in PvP back in Cata days and even WoD. Recently however, because of the RNG and the itemisation, with a few decent corrupted pieces, those ranks are now piece of cake. In PvE, I don’t even know how to improve anymore since the logs can’t tell me which source of damage I should be focusing on, nor looking at other players is helpful. Vita charge can proc at convenient or inconvenient time, completely out of my control. If I’m lucky, vita proc also combines with infinite stars for stupid amount of damage or infinite stars just stop at 5 or 6 stacks in a 5 minutes fight. It’s unreal.
@@lc9245 it was a joke
The game itself is literally telling the devs to stop with the heavy rng hahaha
lets hope they listen
i hope they do listen and fix it, but who know...
Nah, I think it's figuratively telling them.
Devs talking to the game code: "YoU tHiNk We ShOuLd BuT wE sHoUlDn'T"
@@blablub8227 they wont because some corporate executive wants it that way because on paper it'll make the most profits in the shortest amount of time and the devs have to get it done one way or another, or find someone who can.
Thank you so much for this surprisingly educational video! I had no idea how any of this worked and it makes so much more sense now. I'm also glad to hear I'm not the only one effected with bursts of lag (I don't even play with many people)-I seriously thought there was something wrong with my internet. I too, hope this gets fixed in Shadowlands.
That said, I love your educational vids like this, I've been playing a long time, but there are still many things, in the systems sense, that I don't understand.
Ever Rogue player sees all the dices..
"Ohhw shit, here we go again..."
Lol!
"YO I GOT A 20 ROLL, PULL MOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!"
Why should every single piece of gear have a freaking proc... Is there a difference between a trinket and a chest piece other than the slot where you put it anymore? Ofcourse you need a sim for every new drop if every single one has a different effect. Bring it back to something simpler blizz! Armor pieces are statsticks and nothing more, so the player has a clear gear progression (more stats=better item) and keep trinkets, legendaries and some high end weapons for the procs. Whenever you increase the randomness of your sistems the skill level of each player becomes ever so slightly less relevant, to the point where you can't plan ahead for pots or cds and just have to smash the buttons that light up. Give me things I can activate when i need them, give me irrelevant spells that work in super niche cases but when they work it's because of my decision making, make me feel like I made a meaningful decision instead of making me roll a die to see who is better, time and time again.
Remember when they used to tell you the average PPM of your procs in-game? So you could have a trinket that procs 18k damage with 6 PPM and if you got a new trinket you could see that it procced 28k damage but at 2 PPM. Nowadays they won't even give us that information, everything just says "your spells have a chance to do X extra damage."
what if i told you, that's their intention - to reduce player skill level to cater directly and aggressively to the casual majority market, made up of kids casuals and autists, for max profits.
@@whiskizyo2067 I don't think that's the reason, there's alredy plenty for the casuals (LFR-Normal) where you dont really need skill at all to progress. I genuinelly think they want to make cool shit for the players, but they went for the "roll the dice" casino style fun like titanforging and things that have a chance to proc other things, instead of the "reward smart plays and dedication" with more deterministic skills and gear, where you can learn how to use things the right way and have some kind of skill growth. My concern overall is that with the ammount of randomness plus all the rented power we are getting, every expansion is like getting a totally new character, which will eventually sever the connection the player feels from it.
I mean, I used to play 2h frost, i liked the flavour of being the closest thing there is in the game to the Lich King, big weapons and edgy as fuck. Now the fantasy for my main and his playstyle are gone. And the same will be for many who may like their class now once blizz will revamp all the classes for the 100th time.
@@teec4p Yeah, because the kids casuals and autists are happy with just LFR and not wanting everything else on top of that, catered to them as well. And you only talked about raiding, you ever wonder why warfronts were an AFK joke? classes simplified? insta cast skills put on GCD? etc. what else could all that be for then? capitalism at its finest (aggressively targeting the majority casual market for biggest profits)
@@whiskizyo2067 yeah they are... How many "I can't do Heroic or Mythic because the game is unfair" arguments do you see around? Because I dont see them. GCD changes come from this wierd concept that every skill should be worth a click, not be smashed in a macro, but being off the GCD doesn't directly mean it's gonna end up in a macro, plus some things need to activate NOW and not in about 1.5sec. Warfronts are shit both for the lag and the laughable balance. The class pruning was a mistake admitted even by the devs, but it has a point. There are limited buttons you can bind, and getting every expansion more and more skills will eventually be too much. That was a problem in MoP where all classes could do everything, everyone had 3-4 cc skills, 3-4 AoEs. And that's not healty for the game. But instead of slowly removing skills, they tried to clear it up in 2 expacs.
Dear god, Preach has single handedly caused a dice shortage in his neighborhood!
My outlaw rogue is useless now.
Dude he has kids, no way those are eve all dice in his house
HAH, you should see my dice collection... Warhammer 40k player here 🤣🤣
@Tad Oleson no D&D player would ever use such amount of such ugly d6
I need some of those lol
A few months back I was participating in a world PvP raid group. Our RL said, "kill the boomkins first, they cause the most lag."
Oh, now I see why most of pvp-multiboxers playing by moonkin druid.
you shoulda added lag effect when you poured them dices on table xD
A freeze frame, then skip a frame. Then just show the die on the table.
YES!
"Now we have lag!" > Black Screen > BfA intro screen with music
@@AsprosOfAzeroth "You have been disconnected from the video. [OK]"
"...and now we got lag."
Perfect comedic moment right there.
"... and now I have to clean this up."
Well this is actually a relief because I was wondering if all the lag was my end. Like I only have a modest rig but its not crap either its a reliable machine.
Yeah me too honestly
Your rig won't really affect anything but your framerate so if everything's running at high FPS but you're seeing people warping around or running in place then that's almost certainly completely either an issue with your connection or an issue with the server.
Thats one big missconception. All your pc could be responsible for are FPS drops. If you have bad internet you obviously could be lagging, but that only affects you and if that happens only in big groups then it's surely server issue.
Pan love ❤
It has nothing to do with the reasons he stated.. get a bunch of people in one area its gonna lag like crazy. You get the same crap each week at the weekly mythic chest... do u see azerite power, essences and trinkets procing there? nope...
Thank you SO much for addressing this. I thought it was just my PC crapping out but it's good to know others were having the same issue as of 8.3.
Amazing. You perfectly managed to explain, and visually SHOW, just HOW MUCH RNG is in the game. And amazingly, You still didn't have enough die. That moment when you had two die next to 10+ die, was a BIG eye opener on just how fucked some of this stuff is.
And that set of 10+ dice has to be re-rolled every time a DoT ticks since snapshotting is gone.
Add rng item levels, gear drops, mechanics and all that shit on top of this pile of shit rng.
To be honest, flat earthers will find cool ways of showing their theories are true and that doesn't make them true at all.
This sounds like an easy fallacy because he groups 2 things that people dislike together so they WANT it to be true. Server lag based on RNG would be really easy to be tracked and even easier to be dealt with (the person designing stuff would just be called out to avoid it). As much as I think Blizzard have terrible people on their higher ups, this one is basically calling every programmer and designer in the game a bunch of idiots who have no idea what they are doing. Also the calculations can be even easier without snapping since you can have a single 'source' instead of needing to store how much of each stat the player had when he casted for every single dot.
Also classic servers lag too.
marcos vinicios If you want people to come around to your way of thinking, it’s probably a good idea not to insult them by saying they are akin to flat earthers.
Hes not even counting azerite gear and neck powers
The snapshotting run through made me realise just how much I miss MoP affliction :(
class design in MoP was the best the game has ever had imo.
"now we got lag" he said.
"and now i have to clean this whole mess up" he thought.
that aside, there's definitely a lot more to the lag problem than just spell procs. i can't stand in boralus crafting the 200 pots a guildmate just handed me his herbs for cause i rolled prosperity without the server having a heart attack.
never had any problem with stuff like that, ok granted im horde and i do my crafting in dazar alor/orgrimmar, but still. might depend on your system, i dont know. but large scale raids are definetly where the big problem is
@@Gryphuk i know i basically said the exact opposite but crafting isn't the issue, it's just one of the things that makes it very obvious; boralus is almost always at least somewhat laggy. the entire city. sometimes it's other zones too, mostly drustvar, from the alliance perspective. recently it was all of visions of orgrimmar.
the best way to put it is, this conversation will probably sound very familiar to most players:
posting in guild or general: is it me or is anyone else getting massive lag in [zone]
multiple answers along the lines of: nah, i'm getting it too.
@@Gryphuk Boralus is always bugged. Can't tell you how many times I spawn into an empty town with nothing but shadows to tell me there's actual players and NPCs around.
Crafting in places like Boralus is an absolute lagfiesta.
It must be a lot more than spell procs., there is no reason why moonfire would check all those procs, it would just check your current haste, crit, spellpower etc values. I think the issue is all the azerite garbage that check distance with other players and stuff, that requires millisecond precise location and movement updating, much more than updating haste values every few milliseconds.
The other night, I was in a heroic raid with like 15 total people. I'm on my shadow priest, so I have two dots to maintain. The thing is, both of those dots are applied at the start of a fight, and are extended by my standard rotation. I noticed, roughly 1 minute into the fight, that my dots fall off (with multiple seconds still remaining, I happened to be looking at them at that moment) one after the other. Remember, they didn't EXPIRE, since they had time left. Remember how in classic there is a debuff cap on a target? Well turns out that they increased that a few times over various expansions, and eventually settled on 256. No, it is not unlimited. There are 256 debuff slots on a target, and my raid of 15 people hit it (we were on xanesh, who never goes immune or cleanses, so I have no other explanation). Prior to this raid, I'd only ever seen that happen on a world boss in Naz'jatar a handful of times; never before then.
We wonder about the lag, but I do think Preach is right on this. There are too many things going on at a time, if a raid of 15 people can hit the debuff cap on BfA servers. Imagine that, but 40 (or more) people on a world boss in one phase, times however many phases there are. Plus, there are people swarming the zone anyway for daily/weekly stuff. Every one of those players causing dozens of calculations per second. That is a lot of data going in and out of the servers, and I imagine that is causing most of the issues.
“Let alone enemy if we’re in PvP”
*Big Bang: Part 2*
The dice analogy was really clever. It really shows the contrast between not just Classic and Retail, but also Level 10 and level 120.
You also forgot to add damage scaling based on your and your enemies' item level into the calculation when it comes to PvP.
as well as the system that scales damage based on character level ( timewalking and level sync become difficult for stuff like this, less so in level sync but still true)
Dice drop killed me dead. 10/10
I want the clip of preach saying “now we got lag” after dumping the die all over the table without any context
Yes, so much yes!
Meme it please xD
Procs become meaningless when they're ubiquitous and nearly every piece of gear has them. The old system of having them purely on hard earned/rare trinkets, weps or as a unique set bonus is what made them special.
Island expeditions are completely different and unique from one another technically speaking and yet they all feel the same and become boring because of it.
The same is true for all of these procs - at any one time I might have somewhere between 4 and 12 random secondary stat or additional damage buffs within a single pull but the reality is that I just see it as an amount of dps/hps increase averaged out over time. I can't really plan for them and classes aren't built around reacting to them for the most part either. So they end up feeling lacklustre and just fade into the background.
Exactly. There are so many you cannot possibly take advantage of any one. You’d have to take advantage of several at the same time. But then, since there are so many, you would think that the number of proc buffs on you would even out over time.
This might be my fav video. I love the classroom style explaination. Preach is killing it.
I just want simple gear again ilvl, stats, and class abilities should be King, not some ultimate omg insane stars giving others uber DPS on a lower ilvl piece.
I still show the Lag explenation to friends to this day. Even if they have no clue of WoW - it is just hillarious
One thing you failed to mention is that, with power creep, the integers those die are working with, are so big they require a larger amount of space in memory. For instance, they might be 32 bit integers instead of 16 bit integers. Because instead of hitting enemies for thousands, like in Classic, you're hitting them for hundreds of thousands, and sometime even millions, which is why they need to do a stat squish every expansion.
Mob health was calculated with 32 bit integers, that is what caused the need for the stat squish. 2^31 = 2,147,483,648, which is incredibly close to Heroic Lei Shen's pre-Squish HP, and why Garrosh needed to heal multiple times over the encounter instead of just having the total HP he needed.
@@SycosenMerihem Come to think of it, if you used unsigned integers (since, in practice, health should never be negative), then that gets you 2^32 integers, for 4,294,967,296 HP.
Thank you so much for your explanation! I had no idea that's how the calculations were working in the background (tech-dumb). You're amazing Mike!! :D
"We're gonna get rid of snapshotting then"
*Confused Feral Druid Noises*
*Confused Unholy Death Knight Noises*
@@teec4p UH doesn't have snapshotting tho
@@Lindyn773 We used to in MoP
@@teec4p The point OP is trying to make is that feral druids still use snapshotting in modern WoW, even after it was removed from most other classes
@@ryometh sure, and I'm joining his pain because snapshotting gave UH a completelly different way of playing the class so i can empathize
Thanks for bringing this up! Hope it gets more attention
I think by the virtue that you can go into an epic BG and have the servers freeze up multiple times and have actual seconds of input delay there is a huge problem here. Ashran is an example - I didn't play WoD but surely the BG didn't behave that way during the time? Wintergrasp is another one... I DID play in WotLK and it played really well even back then. Did servers get worse or did the game just get ridiculous?
You raise another point in your video about procs and I think a LOT of classes now look at their damage meters and they see their actual buttons they press so LOW on the meters I feel sad that there is little to no feeling of agency in the damage you do anymore... It's all just procs now or melee auto attacking. If blizz really want to save the feeling of DPS satisfaction they need to turn the dials up on the buttons we press and drastically turn them down on the things we don't.
Good point actually. I played a ton of Ashran in WoD with these massive premade vs premade groups and come to think of it I don't remember ANY lag...
@@bobjohnson5062 There was SOME lag by the end of the expansion, but only when people used the Agility Melee AoE Trinket + Rings and both sides were condensed fighting at either base, and it only lasted for a couple of seconds as the damage effects went off.
Both were laggy
I had a shit laptop back then, and I had lag, but it's definitely worse now.
WOTLK wintergrasp did lag as well, but thats with computers and servers from a decade ago!
They haven't really reworked the engine since then and they are adding a hell of a lot of math for your PC to crunch, it explains why we have huge fps drops in raids but it doesn't completely explain the rubberbanding in world pvp (But it could very well be the same issue).
This is my understanding of how the engine works with raids. To make it flow well and not delay players, all calculations of dmg / procs / health etc are done on your PC first and then checked against the servers. If something is wrong, it will be backtracked to the correct state. That is why we sometimes get things like guardian spirit being put on a tank on the priests screen but on the other raiders it did not and the tank dies. This is effective and is a huge part of why raiding is so great, you can actually perform with minimum delay on your character, but coordination with others is a bit more delayed. This delay is easy to see if you are able to see two games at once, a move on one computer will result in a delayed movement on the other. This creates a great environment to play as well as possible, but it does put a heavy load on your personal computer as it now has to run the game and do all the calculations itself before it checks with the server, with rising number crunching the CPU's of today aren't strong enough.
Wow is now semi-multicore based, most CPUs today are 4,6 or 8 cores and if you look at utilization of them when you are in a raid you can see that one core is always fully utilized and then it trickles down on the other cores. The cealing will always be that one core, however fast that one core is thats how many numbers it can crank out and it will in return deliver the highest fps possible (as long as your GPU and rest of your system manages to generate it as well, but wow raids are almost always cpu bottlenecked). Most new releases where CPU is a big part of the performance are actually multicore games but wow was created in the early 2000s and from what I've read the wow team decided that one-core was ok as it provided a good way of stopping cheaters, as multicore games are able to use phantom-cores (intrude the communication between cores) to add their own information and thereby cheat.
My hope is that they update the engine and make it mutlicore, however I don't think blizzard would put the resources into it as it would probably cost in the same range as developing a whole new AAA-title. This does explain lag in raids but it doesn't explain the lag in world scenarios, but it could be the same issue at the bottom.
I dont know why I wrote a bible, I am passionate.
And now we're in the middle of Dragonflight with its new major feature, Time Rifts, which are pretty much unplayable because they still haven't fixed this.
You say you know this is going away in shadowlands, but do you really believe that blizzard are going to change their philosophy on gear design next xpac? I have a feeling it's going to be similarly proc based, but I guess we can hope
I'm feeling optimistic because a lot of shadowlands content that they've talked about seems to he very not-RNG. Like TF/WF is gone and corruptions are likely going away when the prepatch hits and none of the systems in shadowlands from what I remember had any RNG to them. Sure the contents of the tower are random because that's the point but the rewards were completely in the player's control.
@@Murzac And then you realize it's ActiGreedzard and they've already concocted up something even more depressing. WoW died over a decade ago, stop giving these scamartists your money. Shadowlands will be worse, I will promise you this. Please stop buying into fancy CGIs, Trailers and empty promises.
Some RNG is okay to keep the game dynamic. Stuff like ice lance procs making your rotation more reactionary, but random dmg procs that you have no controll over, things like corruptions, insane trinkets that you cant play around etc need to go. All they do is give random boring power, taking away the fun of seeing high dps because you did good on a boss.
@@Murzac They stated something about reducing how to acquire gear will be less RNG; nothing about how the actual gear will work, given the covenants will likely have some RNG procs, something that replaces corruptions. Idk if Azerite armour is getting replaced, but we can only hope.
Also the start of Shadowlands will likely be better as a large chunk of the effects come from compiling more and more effects as the expansion progressed.
@@MaisuBirb Always gotta be one with the 'activision' scapegoat isn't there
REALLY happy to see this called out. Honestly I had been wondering if it was my server which didn't really make sense given that most hardware these days run on virtual machines and can be scaled as needed, but I kept thinking this can't be like this for everyone right??? If it was, wouldn't there be WAY more noise?
But yeah particularly after the initial launch of 8.3 , or when people were actually doing the assaults after they were introduced, or the new zones added in 8.2.... In those cases I would have 5-10 seconds periods where everything stopped. FPS still great, but everyone running in place. What is interesting is while that is terrible and frustrating, what is almost worse is when it's only off by a "little" (compared to 5-10sec). Maybe 200-500ms. When it sits at that, classes that are relatively fast start to feel really clunky. At least when the whole server lags, I just sit and wait for it to catch up. When it's just kind of off....I just think about how terrible it feels to play and want to go play something else.
The constant calculations make sense. Which then leaves me sitting here going WHY does it have to bee this complicated? Does ANYONE enjoy this random mega slot machine? Honestly, to me, the gear complexity felt about right in Wrath to Cata ish. And really, what drives me a little crazy is how they kept simplifying it because they believed we wanted it simplified, that gems were bad, socket bonuses were bad, that lots of enchants were bad, Glyphs were bad, that reforging trash gear into being less trash was bad.... That all of this was just way to complicated and not fun according to Blizzard (and I SOOO disagree). And look where we are now. Gems are MUCH more boring than they were. Enchants are INCREDIBLY boring. Two slots that I enchant with the same damn thing over and over and over again. Part of the reason professions are so terrible now is because of all of this. Enchants, gems, glyphs....they all had professions built around them.
...Ended up on a rant but my holy crap do I hate what they have done to a game that should be way better than it currently is at this point.
It’s even when you log in. The game has to do these calculations in the cities.
When I log in. It takes sometimes 30sec for all of my UI to be visible.
Now interestingly. When I have a character in WM. The lag is virtually zero.
Likely because there are just less people in that phase.
Between this and the video explaining how gear works in BFA. You are literally a genius at explaining things.
Blizz learned nothing and the 9.1 world boss completely lags out the new zone every time its being fought
That was legit, one of the best explanations of anything I have ever watched.
Coming back to this. It just astounds me how grossly incompetent the current WoW Devs are. They basically broke solved problems and made gameplay so much worse for people on older machines and shakier connections. It's impressively bad.
Love the outlaw rogue guide
Finally someone put my thoughts into words - the first time I dropped the ball on BfA, in mid/late-8.1.5 (and almost permanently so) was this very issue, the game is beyond playable on a machine on which I can crank up any other game, including other MMOs to the max and it takes 100+ people to notice some choking in those environments. WoW says nope even doing assaults in War Mode. I lost count of the number of bugs reported since the 8.0 launch, and in hindsight, many of them may have this very issue you describe here as the underlying culprit. Sad, because I want to love the game, but I simply cannot. It's not playable in the current state, at least not up to 2020 standards.
I really like the way you explained snapshotting. I already knew, but still it was a good way to explain this possibly complex concept
I'm suspecting the same problem PoE has. When the game has to constantly calculate effects on mobs each game tick suddenly you have longer and longer delay between the client and the server. Untill it finally shits itself.
The difference being in Path your private instance crashes. Here the whole world instance hangs itself.
It's so nice to see someone talk about this! Thank you x.x
Preach: "Hey mate, you alright? Do you have any dice I could borrow by any chance?"
Dave (from down the road): "Ye sure mate, how many you need?"
Preach: "78 312 should be enough"
Dave (from down the road): "Say no mo' I got ya!"
as an outlaw rogue i feel the pain of rolling the dice...
After some thought, I think the predictable and deterministic nature of classic is what brought me back. What I decide matters. There are actual finish lines. There are items I have reason to be content with.
Very well said, Mike. My son did a +15 last night. We looked through the logs and tallied nearly 40% of the damage done in the dungeon had nothing to do with a key press. That total is probably higher since there is damage inflation to the key presses from non-key presses (azerite gear, passive essences, etc.). I think that is ridiculous. I feel like 85%+ of all healing and damage should come a key press directly (I consider dot damage a key press so long as an active ability is what triggered the dot... go away deep wounds).
Looking at the thumbnail, I thought for a second that preach threw wow away, and started playing 40k xD
It reminded me of my orks in the dakka phase
DICE FOR THE DICE GOD 😉
@@tyrsjmy86 ROLLS FOR THE ROLL THRONE?
Very good illustration of how many calculations goes into spells, procs and effects. :)
And keep in mind the “dice” that are being rolled are way more than 6-sided lol
That was actually a brilliant explanation of what is probably a pretty complex concept. Very easy to follow along
When you expect AN EXPANSION to fix problems with the current EXPANSION, then you've got a FAAAAAR bigger problem on your hands. Don't get me wrong, I agree with Preach.
Deff could add to the problem but, the issue existed for multiple expansions. Specifically it started in WoD, that it became noticeable. At that time, it would take a multiboxxer vs a raid to cause it to happen. We can look back at things like, Wintergrasp when there was very few shudders or server lock up even tho there were MASSIVE amounts of players. Outside of a q'able instance. In normal bgs, never had a problem with lag but, seen epic BGS lock up so bad, you couldn't move for 5 mins. Aka "isle of conquest." AV can have the same problem but, requires a big fight at the beginning in the middle.
"Nothing pulls me out of a game more than when I can't play it." Preach preaching that wisdom. He's not wrong..
Thanks for making this problem so comprehensible. I stoped playing BfA because of lag. Some people tell me to buy a new PC, and they are partially right, but on the other side BfA worked for me until 8.3 and now I simply can't play anymore =(
I'll say I've definitely noticed the server side lag myself as well, but I think it goes a bit deeper than just Blizzard adding a bunch of RNG dice rolls to everything. While that is definitely a problem, there is another one that I think most people either completely forget about, or just don't know about because it's a problem rooted in enterprise server infrastructure.
Let's think back one expansion to Legion. The effective system lifetime was between August 30th 2016 through July 17th 2018. It did go until August, but remember a lot of Legions core systems got neutered or disabled when prepatch hit in July, and the Legion prepatch itself didn't have the core systems yet since a lot of them stemmed from legendaries and artifact weapons. Legion was also pre squish 2.0 so numbers were larger to deal with as well. From what I remember, server side lag was still present, but nowhere near the level it is right now in many scenarios.
Next, on the server infrastructure side, lets consider where Blizzards servers are in their lifecycle. Let's say they use a 5 year lifecycle for their infrastructure and they are in year 3 or whatever, there's a very high chance the servers are running an Intel Xeon platform one or two generations old. That being the case, there's nothing inherently wrong with it, this isn't a segway into some kind of LOL AMD nonsense, but there is something to consider with it.
In early 2018, the tech world got hit by Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. This presented a massive problem for Intel, as it was determined these vulnerabilities were primarily hardware bound, meaning any fix would have to be done with software on any silicon not redesigned to mitigate these issues. Since these initial vulnerabilities, we have also seen more variations of Spectre crop up throughout 2018 and into 2019 and Intel mostly has had to patch these vulnerabilities through software fixes which are known to cause measurable loss in performance across pretty well everything in their product stack.
Now going back to server lifecycles. If Blizzard is in the middle of the server lifecycles (I would actually imagine lifecycles would be staggered between clusters so they aren't replacing an entire server farm every 5 years), chances are they weren't going to bite the bullet and replace every bit of silicon in their datacentres when Intel released hardware fixed CPUs. They were most likely rolling through software fixes and continuing lifecycle replacements as normal. This introduces an issue where a good deal of server nodes could be affected by the overhead of the software patches, which could in turn be further crippled when the servers are trying to process large amounts of data from large groupings in whatever instance or shard. Being that the biggest chunk of these vulnerabilities surfaced in 2018, they likely would have been rolling patches into them throughout the year.
All this being said, what we could be looking at is actually a two way problem caused both by the insane amount of dice rolls and data calculation PLUS Intel's security fix overhead across many server nodes. You might notice sometimes the server lag isn't as bad some days compared to other days, this could be a result of aforementioned server lifecycles where Blizzard likely has replaced some nodes with newer silicon with hardware mitigation, or more likely, they could have newer silicon that has some mitigation, but not all of them since these vulnerabilities have been seemingly coming at a steady pace over the last two years. So depending on how exactly Blizzard handles spawning instances across their datacentre, you could end up on a node that's running an older Kaby Lake or Skylake Xeon, or a recently replaced node running newer Cascade lake Xeons or AMD EPYC Naples or Rome depending on if they drank team red's magical elixir or not.
Food for thought. I really wish Blizzard did Q&A about their infrastructure because I find it fascinating.
One of the worst feelings is when you get off a flight path and your character is stuck running in place for 5 minutes.
so this is where my monopoly dice went..
hahahahahahaa bloody brilliant ! Thats the best explanation I have seen yet. I suspect that in conjunction with the extra load phasing has put on it is the biggest contributor. I really notice lag during Assaults in particular zones to the point were I just leave the zone because its become unplayable. However, its not always during an assault and my FPS and other world connection speeds are good, I still get horrendous lag. Uldum and Pandaria - often I will just do the lesser vision and leave cause the lag is so bad
"now we've got lag" trololol :D
meanwhile me playing in a potato pc with 20 fps at best
Thank you for pointing this out! I have been experiencing lag so much in PVP zones when full on battles are going.
I really hope Blizz can fix this in Shadowlands!
Epic BG's is a huge issue! ... 10 second delay between abilities and 20fps on a moddern machine, I feel sorry for the people on older machines.
naywils 20 FPS is what I run on a regular day lol
even i had lag on 1080 Ti 6700k 24 gb ram 2x SSD 1tb each xDD
100% agree. I remember during the first few months of BFA I was in Dazar'alor and the Alliance were attacking and literally no one could even move to try and do anything about it
EPIC MONSTER SPAWN: LAG
Primary skill: Bonecrushing Latency, has chance to drop framerates.
Secondary skill: May cause CPU overheat with slim chance of crash.
Passive: Git Gud.
this style of content was great, I don't play this game anymore but this really gave me something to think about.
thank you for talking about snapshotting, finally someone gets it, and it's not just a lag issue or stripping the game down of all the random nonsense. those are great side effects but the bigger bonus to this is that snapshotting would add back in game complexity, because your dots take the values when you press them you are able to use this to your advantage as you become better at the game.
snapshotting was removed at the end of MoP for most dots/abilities, i think a few stuck around but it was mostly gone, and then we got WoD, and while WoD class design was decent and the raids were good we still saw a lot of players not having fun and many of them couldn't put their finger on it... it was snapshotting. your characters started playing themselves and you didn't need to think about refreshing a dot, you just did it when it got below 4 seconds like every other dot in the game.
snapshotting will not only fix what you talked about here, but i would choose snapshotting over not having it even if it was the laggier option, because it adds a skill gap and a learning curve into the game that never goes away. it allows players to experience a moment at max level where they go "ohhhh, i get it" and then they start working to get better at it. and then, when they finally do it right they are rewarded with a feeling of accomplishment as well as seeing their name higher on the damage meter.
all of this, is due to snapshotting, so yes the lag issue would be gone which is great, but you stumbled onto something here that would be so much better for the game in terms of how it feels to play our characters, and since that's how we interact with the game world, i think it's a worthy cause to fix.
amazing video, even if you weren't thinking about how this would fix class/game design at the same time, you still stumbled into the right direction which is more than i can say for other content creators who are still asking for silly shit like player housing. thank you preach, now please keep hammering this home and spreading the word, you're our only hope.
THANK YOU - I feel like I've been losing my mind because there doesn't seem to be nearly enough discussion around the lagfest that is world of warcraft lately. I'm so glad people are shedding light on this situation because I agree that it is absolutely unacceptable that my MMO lags when other people show up!
In my experience, Ashran is the most laggy area. I wish we have back the meaning of crits and dmg back like in bc and wrath. i find it best to influence the values via sockets. to put magical power into all sockets was just great
I wish back the Cata Fire mages:(
Tried to do an organized PvP event with about 20 people per side. Lag was so bad in new Uldum that we moved the event to old AQ do there wouldn’t be any mobs or other people in the zone. This helped, but it was still incredibly noticeable, and that’s just 40-50 characters total. I come from a server that used to do lots of large scale PvP, but the lag is so bad, it’s like watching a slideshow.
there has been massive spell lag whenever large amounts of players are fighting since wod atleast. ashran definately lagged back then and kazzak had spell lag on pull
WoD was the first expansion without snap shotting. So you're basically agreeing with him.
@@shinon748 yeah i am just saying this has been going on for years now and I haven't seen blizz say anything about it
Great idea to show it with the dice, really hit home how crazy it's gotten!
I’m hate the amount of rng that where I can’t consistently go for good logs, and the lag is enough to make me close the game and unsubscribe and go play something else.
@@SullenJazzhands exactly this^ I don't have infinite stars yet so I use 2x mind flay corruptions. One week I have 95+ log, the other week 50% log. and am playing exactly the same. Infinite stars just feels abit more consistent with the procs, while my mind fly can go on for 2 minutes without a proc. Sometimes I get an entire boss without procs, and others my mind flay is doing 6-7 mil damage. Its not up to me anymore how I perform. Was doing Dog on mythic and I was top dps, next pull 5th dps, next pull last dps, next pull 2nd dps. ofc on kill I had 500k mindflay dmg and got a 20% log, but who knows maybe next week I will get a 95+% log. Its not up to me
couldn't agree more, and what's worse is most the lag tends to happen at the rare epic moments where we get some large scale combat (whether that's world pvp, or just huge aoe pulls in pve)
less rng > less lag > happy days.
Shadowlands fixing anything, yeah right.
It will fix at least my life because I will stop playing.
@@Vrory77 If you stop playing in the new exp, why not just stop now when the game is in a garbage spot.
Relax
@@FiercedWoW I did stop playing but I didn't stop careing. If the next expansion will be shit it will be the last game I will care from Blizzard.
@Zerebrat Eightyseven Class-Rereworks. Bring back Support-Classes like TBC. Give classes a reason to be in a raid. Less ARPG-Elements and stop smashing-button contest. I want to have impact what my class can do and not be impacted by a system that uses D&D-Role-System on every buff.
Preach, this is one of the best explanations I've ever had of this. I didn't really get it till now, thank you for this
I thought it might just be my pc, I never even thought of how poor the performance has got since SoO and how that might be the result of the removal of snapshotting, and not my PC - my outlaw rogue will experience the lag like you showed in Nazjatar, but also in half second delays in combat. With essences making energy regen non-predictable, and the possibility of getting an rng multistrike granting me two combo points, this half second leads to resource capping and delayed button presses in a high apm spec. It makes me want to quit the spec.
It happens in 5-man, it happens in LFR, it happens in zones with the PvP invasion,
it even happens while just walking around.
Its crazy.
There's zero incentive for blizzard to make shadowlands good. Classic has a higher raiding player base than any mmo on the market (confirmed by the creator of Warcraft logs). Bobby Kotick can milk classic, bc, and wrath servers for years. I have zero hope for shadowlands.
Honestly though I am of the opposite opinion. So much negative PR was done with the player base with BFA that it really is their last chance ever with modern wow.
@@hayescharles45 do u realize WoD killed more than half the active player base? That was 4 expansions ago.
Nice who wants to speed level my hunter in classic or my warrior? (Just kidding) warrior is 21 and hunter is 11. I hate leveling lol
higher raid participants is not higher player count.
Every useless casual is able to clear raids in classic. that feat is not even true to lfr
Really enjoyed this vid. Some people really need those dice shown to see how bad the problem really is. Great job Preach.
Oh hey it's Preach, What's up man Haven't seen you in a while.
Hey Dave what's up? Listen I have a question, do you sell dice?
Of course, how many do you need?
ALL OF THEM
I don't even play wow anymore but i love how you do your videos. keep up the good work!
Oh, do it wasn't just me all expansion. Thought it was my internet just being shit
Thats probably what any GM would have told you too.
Glad he is representing the guild I am in, "Roll the Dice" GG Preach. You can be an honorary member
What's crazy is how applicable that title is to almost everything in BfA
Yeah I don't think anyone clicked on this video and knew what he was about to point out
“It would be really good if I could play it” - this has been my problem since legion. I’ve done less and less group content because even in dungeons I often had bad lag. Some computer updates seem to have helped but still it’s one of the biggest barriers to me trying to actually raid. It’s hard not to stand in the fire when I can’t even SEE the fire until I’m dead. Seeing my character freeze mid cast is also fun when I just have to push buttons in what I hope is the proper timing while I wait for the game to catch up.
I believe during legion they also took away the ability to just have the circular blob shadows under players and made it entirely dynamic meaning shadows were being rendered for everything, EVEN ON ITS LOWEST SETTING.
Because WoW is so CPU heavy, even at full load you'll see the game near maxing out your processor but hardly touching more than 40% GPU which is not normal for any properly optimized game. This leads me to believe your GPU is pretty much just responsible for resolution and output meanwhile your CPU struggles to manage not just game logic but effects, particles and most importantly, that damn new lighting system. Software rendered shadows are very taxing and you can see a massive difference between how classic handled it vs BFA.
Esp on lower end systems that meet WoWs requirements, the game with out a doubt would run an additional 25+ fps if they just allowed us to have circular blob shadows again.
Shadowland's isn't going to fix shit unfortunately :S Lets be honest ..
You are correct. The lag is caused because the game servers nowadays run on virtual machines.
@@PaulaJBean Well if "nowadays" means something like "for the past ~20 years" then you are correct.
In other words, VMs aren't the problem.
It is fun to get some insight into the best players gaming. Thanks, as always.
9:54 scared the living shit out of me lmao.
I usually notice a huge lag spike when a raid fight happens, since everyone casts spells all at once, and gradually cools off.
My build has an i9 9900k and a 2080ti. It's an absolute unit. 2k 144hz I frequently drop to sub 100 framerates. This doesn't even happen in far more graphical titles like COD MW, or Battlefield V. Totally ridiculous.
The game is just poorly optimized. It ALWAYS has been. It is so much better than it used to be.
@@ruggie.74 people need to stop defending Blizzard even on objective stuff like "the game lags"....
@@ruggie.74 the New model and animations suck ass.
@@jotunn30 I don't know what you're implying, but I am not defending Blizzard. I am stating, in your words, an objective fact: the game has always lagged. People just forget that and tend to only pay attention to what's happening in the "now". WoD had some of the worst lag I have ever seen and I've been playing since 2005.
@@ruggie.74 It comes across as you defending blizz because your main point is " the game has always lagged". That is true but that isn't relevant, blizzard should have optimized by now, stop misdirecting.
On top of all the procs from gear/enchants, you also have procs built into specs. So it goes even further.
I remember Wotlk. So damn crisp dude, zero lag. I think in Cata the lag started up in 40 man BGs and only got worse after that.
She says member Wrath. I say marry me!!
Lay down dog
I'm still waiting for a Wotlk classic server, i miss how the classes were so much
Agree - I used to love doing WG and BGs in general but once Cata dropped lag arrived and now its just brain melting. I did a 25 man normal raid a few days ago and mid boss fight everything froze for about 5 secs and it was a complete shit show.
PS guys used to freak out when they found out they had had their ass handed to them in PVP by a 47 yr old mother of two...lol
The one lag spot I can think of was dalaran. That is when I bought my first video card upgrade for my computer. I was literally stuck there, because every time I'd try to log in my computer would have a heart attack. It was client side of course, because after I upgraded my computer it was smooth.
Best example of this is the hangar initial PvP on Island of Conquest battleground
Now I want to see Preach and redlettermedia's Scientist Man do a collab
I loved what you did with the dice, that was really good! Also for Shadowlands, one lesson Blizz might take from Classic is to make the stats on gear matter again. Right now the Stamina + Primary stat on everything might as well not exist, it's that universal. How about we make gear interesting again by having some pieces have way less (or no) stamina at all, what if we had a piece with abnormally high stamina but low primary stat? What if we had gear again with Strength and Agility, how worth is it for different classes, or hybrids like Druids/Paladins? Imagine having Strength + Intellect gear again for the hybrid crusaders! This way you can make more risk/reward decisions in gear rather than only looking at your secondaries and talents for character custimazation.
Hybrids aren't really a thing any more. With 36 specs, you effectively have 36 separate classes nowadays...and the former hybrids can outshine the pure DPS classes.
@@HiddenEvilStudios Well they already mentioned that they're toning down spec identity and increasing class identity. But I meant more in the sense that a Ret paladin could get more int gear for a larger mana pool so he could do some more healing before he oomed or a feral druid could get more stamina gear to off-tank in high M+ dungeons for example. because right now that's all super streamlined and kinda sad.
I'm sick of all these passive damage effects we got. I want to be in control again, I want my character's power to be based on my performance and my gear again and not just be a vehicle for damage procs!
Also add for AoE each mobs armor/talents/procs/shields and so forth, it's even larger than just a calculation on your end but ever targets end as well.
Let's not forget - due to the action/arcade nature of the combat system nowadays, the netcode has to deal with a lot more click-per-minute events than ever before, even if the playerbase is a fraction of what it was when the game was traditional MMORPG
I wish they'd bring back Classic style gear. Simplicity is not a bad thing.
Except for all these rolls causing lag they also cause me apathy to my damage. I've got a friend in my guild who also plays the same spec as me and we theorycraft together and discuss rotations, talent setups and essences. It's quite fun. He's like 6 ilvls higher so I should expect him to top me in dps. However, some fights we are 2% apart in damage, others 20%. And we play the same. Rng (corruptions) are so strong that it really lessens my enjoyment in dps. Imagine if we could get consistent results, then we could look at the damage meter at the end of the fight, click compare and go "I cast this spell 10 more times than you, maybe you should prioritize it, or maybe cleave more" etc. Now it's all meaningless.
Same. I believe that might have been Blizzard's intent, to make you unable to filter out "bad" players.
Except if you could tell who performed badly and who didn't, you could gently pull them aside and teach them.
My favorite part about 8.3 is the fact that I have two static pieces of gear I simply need to upgrade ether on my own or with others.