For about two months I had to survive playing on a 1000-1200ms latency. During which time I did the 60-70 grind on my shaman, and app'd to the guild I am currently in.

Its definitely something that took some getting used to.

I found it just came down to alot of button mashing. For example to chain cast any spell, I would cast it, and then start button mashing around half of the casting bar, when the spell went off, I would immediately start casting another.

Pvp was a nightmare. Those two months also came down to alot of /wave'ing and /greet'ing. However PVE (I did alot of 5man instances and grinding) isn't that bad at all, and, if anything, simply forcing you to be more aware, and take more premeditative actions in order to remain effective.

That said If I had to make a new character that was going to be playing on this kind of ping permanently, I'd probably make a mage, and I would never step foot in pvp.

Just as a note Havefaith, a mage is a horrible class to play with high latency. It can be worked around through /stopcasting macros and Quartz to some degree but since we are entirely dependant on timed casts to deal damage at all, latency is a very direct loss in dps. Just mashing the next desired spell key won't feel *that* bad but if you parse the results you end up with a little worse than a two-times latency gap between each spellcast and that adds up to a huge hit very quickly. Again, it is indeed partially kludged around but it's not pretty. I find that in PvE my Rogue ends up better in times of high latency just because I can still keep up a decent rotation that doesn't waste energy and most of my damage comes from server-side timing.

MM Hunters are worst off but it is no bed of roses for Mages.

Your 1500ms ping must be on some kind of satellite connection, is that correct? Try dial-up. You should be getting around 300ms ping on dial-up and it's what, $10 a month now?

That's good in theory unless you have a teen sister on the phone 24/7 on Summer Break. I also don't feel like making my parents pay extra money per month so I can play for 3 months every summer when I'm home from college.

You're not going to be doing well with any class with that latency. That being said, warlock is your best option.

Don't even think of doing 25 mans though, even Karazhan would be a stretch with that lag.

if you can swing it and can find a local ISP or even AOL (i still think they offer this), get a 2nd or 3rd landline installed and use modem bonding.

http://www.56k.com/reports/bonding.shtml


and I would go with a lock due to the cruise control dot factor

This thread dies. Now.