• Falk

For the record, there's about ~10 Oceanic guilds who have Illidan both down and on more or less farm status. Shear, while harder with a 1/2 second delay, isn't impossible. Heigan and Thaddius weren't impossible (the latter with the correct amendments to the positioning strategem). Stance-dancing fears aren't impossible (although tricky, and you do have to be extra-careful with GCD's playing those kind of pings)

In fact, I'd say the only PVE mechanic which was impossible with an Oceanic latency would have been to react to Reliquary's concurrent shield+shock combo, before it was modified to share a small cooldown. A 0.8sec cast, with the requirement of dispelling a shield plus the issue of interrupts on the tail ends of casts, would have been impossible with anything above 400ms.

Other than that? We've coped with it.

 

Xarcos

PvE was almost never an issue with an Oceanic ping. I've played since the beginning and have seen everything, and I have to agree with Falk that the only real troublesome issue that can arise is RoS when interrupting the last spirit shock before deaden, but that still can be circumvented by only getting one person to interrupt (and in turn runs the 1% risk of having a resist). Old Archimonde and Nightbane's 1-second fear was also an issue, but thankfully they have since been 'fixed' to be Oceanic-friendly.

PvP however is the complete opposite. Most of the 2v2s I lose post-2K are completely due to ping, and some of the 3v3s too.

Use of stopcasting, and instant casts taking longer than 1.5s to apply have been minor issues, but the changes on the PTR regarding latency is interesting and I believe is still being developed to work out a few bugs. I did do some testing a few builds back and was disappointed to see that 1.5s casts and global cooldowns were still suffering latency delays. It'd make me very happy if Blizzard somehow fix it.

An idea I've been running through my mind for a bit was to increase melee and spell range, windows of interruption, and even global cooldown by {ping - 100} milliseconds to players from a .au, .nz, .sg et al address. Or better yet, flag a value that when a player's ping reaches over 100, it'll apply the effect. Consider it as a sort of 'anti-handicap' rather than a 'fix' to at least make competative PvP more fair to us latency-handicapped players.

 

lenvik

Raiding on the same realm as you in an Oceanic guild I haven't really seen tanking being much of an issue with Oceanic tanks...it's more likely that we run into issues with people dying to AoE effects based on lag spikes etc. [e.g. Al'ar Flame patch on oceanic mages with low hp >>]

What ISP are you running on? I was having issues with latency of that calibre on Exetel recently and I was wondering if you were also with them.

 

Ruby Moon

I play WoW with 400-500 latency from Brazil and it's playable, the problem is at peak hours when latency can reach 1200. It's bad to have a bigger GCD, but it's playable.

 

Alpx

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but I recently did some testing and found that Blizzard has servers in 4 Datacenters in the US. This post lists the IP addresses of all the realms. I thought it was a bit odd that they'd post this information, but I suppose anyone could get it if they wanted to connect to every realm.

If I looked them up correctly, the list goes like this

206.* - Boston
12.* - Los Angeles
63.* - Dallas
72.* - Seattle

If you are willing to transfer to improve your ping, it would be worth using the link I posted, and trying a realm at each location. In my case, I live in Alberta, and I play on a Dallas realm most of the time, and my ping is ~200. LA realms my ping is ~<100. Seattle for some reason is ~200 aswell, bad routing I guess. Hope this helps.

 

Drunkmunky

Actually I'm with Netspace and I live in Tas so I get double jipped when it comes to internet also I'm locked in contract and it'll cost me $500 to disconnect and change ISP friend of mine just churned from Netspace (was having huge probs like me) to iinet and he hasn't had a single problem. I could write a book on the problems I've had with my isp.

 

Old Wolf

With 500ms ping in Arena, you *cannot* hit someone who is moving at normal run speed.

As a Rogue, to do any damage on somebody I have to wait until they're charitable enough to stop so I can Shiv them or stun them. And any fight against Druid-x is an inevitable loss, as the druid will abolish the crippling poison, and then all the X has to do is run away from me and I cannot land any more blows. (DT the only slight saving grace, and Sprint only once every 5 minutes).

If someone uses the melee tactic of diving in and out while striking, and circling me, then they kill me while I cannot land a blow, if Blind is on cooldown.

Well, you don't see the cast bar for the first 0.5 seconds, and you have to hit your interrupt before 0.5 seconds before the end. This only leaves you an 0.5 second window. Human reaction time is 0.21 seconds. The only way you're going to interrupt a 0.5 second cast is if you're only auto-attacking, and are lucky enough not to get a lag spike at the moment of cast (A mean latency of 500 often has a high standard deviation).

I think you'll find his latency is sub-400 , in that zone you CAN hit someone who is moving at normal speed, and you can Sap people who move past you while you are stealthed if you are extremely precise (which I've no doubt your friend is).

Also, I'm no arena expert, but I'm guessing that with more players in the team, you will find it easier to establish control of a fight, as the other players will have stopped to engage one of the others on your team, enabling you to land an opener.

 

• Falk

I believe this may be incorrect. Your window isn't casttime - (ping x 2). Your window is casttime - ping. 1.5 sec cast, 500ms ping = 1 second window.

You HAVE to hit your interrupt 0.5secs before the end, but when the castbar pops up (albeit delayed) it's going to run for the full 1.5 secs. It's not going to magically appear with 0.5secs already cast.

 

Xantcha

500 ms "ping" is the round trip time, i.e. how long the packet takes to get there and then come back.

When trying to interrupt a hostile spell, there are two delays involved.

The time it takes for Blizzard to send you the spell notification, and the time it takes you to send the kick notification to blizzard.

The 500ms does not actually stack twice but only once in this situation.

 

Xantcha

Illidan killing oceanic guild here (4-5 kills I think).

Every Illidan kill our tank has taken shear (multiple times), maybe he's bad, but we just accept it as impossible to completely negate and power on.

EDIT: Oh Tsunami =), didn't notice.

 

• Falk

Aye, that's what I meant to say, though I described the effect rather than the cause. 500ms is the total time it takes for your command to reach the server PLUS the notification from the preceding event (the hostile spell).

And Tiny gets sheared once in a while too... so don't fret it. :P

 

• Intermission

Safari (from Avast) never gets shears! /flex on his behalf (without his knowledge )


But on topic:

A lot of people are talking about the loss of half a second reaction time. Obviously its frustrating to know that all unexpected actions are half a second late (almost all actions are unexpected these days with bosses with 'cooldowns' instead of 'timers', along with spike healing).

Aside from this though, I always find it a little sad knowing that we have a disadvantage when it comes to simple DPS/TPS/HPS values. These can really add up on those more 'stat' dependent fights, eg "dps races" or "gear check" type fights.

Hopefully the new spell system will help boost our casters dps and chain-casting heals output, but im not sure how it will work for global cooldowns, ie, tank threat. Is increased latency a big thing for threat? I'm still not 100% sure how much it effects tanks, but I would assume with the very broken Global Cooldown system, it hurts them a lot.

 

• squiffy

A tanking TPS site I looked at a while ago gave me about a 200TPS drop going from a 100ms ping to 600ms.

That may have changed a little in recent times, but latency does have an effect on threat generation yes.

 

• Falk

I can see how some of the warrior reactionary abilities could be hampered by threat especially when intersecting with their cooldowns, etc.

For druid, where it's more towards mashing three buttons, I haven't seen any discernible impact from a latency perspective, since everything is GCD limited. As long as I'm not getting GCD slapback (like, 2nd GCD starts client side, server says you're still on the first GCD and cancels your action, you're locked out till 2nd client GCD ends) there's no drop.

 

◊ Greenexile

I find as a druid lag makes a massive difference. I hear druids speak of keeping rolling lifeblooms on three tanks and still have an extra GCD to raid heal with, but for me I am absolutely pressed to keep those three hots ticking. In pvp, the fact that my defensive abilities rely on my reacting to someone else (ie. shifting out of mana burn, shifting out of a snare) means that I'm *always* going to take more damage than another equally skilled druid with a lesser ping.

The rage I get when PvP'ing due to latency ('yep, makes sense that he just charged me *around* that pillar') has motivated me to reroll a warlock on another server. I'm just not skilled enough to overcome the handicap that is a 500ms ping. I'm sure there are other aussies out there that manage it and my hat is off to them

 

• Falk

Hahahah, a minor perk about latency on a druid against melee is that when being stunned/intercepted, your client is notified about said event a little later, and the net effect is that on other people's screens, you appear to move for a fraction of a second after being stunned (complete with the stun graphic above your head) . I can't count the number of times Warriors have gotten entangled with Nature's Grasp after charging, with me sitting stunned like 10yd away.

On the flip side, the reverse when feral charging is also true, and annoying.

 

RunsWithScissors

I am from New Zealand and play a feral druid. Trying to shred a target in arena is, to put it lightly, bloody hindering awkward. Range bug + 500ms ping minimum = seriously bad times

Would be prepared to pay several times more for servers in Australia :/

 

surrender

My ISP sucked a bit the last weeks so I unfortunately got to know how maintanking feels with ~400ms.

Compared with my usual 150ish ping I lost about 300 TPS due to high latency.

 

Larisroth

I'm from NZ too, and yeah arena as a feral druid is very frustrating.

One of the main issues I have is trying to work out when to trust my UI. Which bits of the system are actually calculated client-side, and which bits server-side.

A few feral specific questions would be:
When does mangle fade, presumably it's 12 seconds after the attack is processed on the server, rather than 12 seconds after your client gets the message that the aura goes up, thus with 500 latency you're going to have to hit that last shred 500 ms before the timer fades on your debuff monitor.

When should you powershift? Is energy kept track of seperately on the server and client? This will be less of an issue as you should always hit it immediately after using an ability, but if you need to wait for the client to get the tick before you can do it, it's going to cost you 250 ms of energy (so that's what, 2.5 energy).

Doing dps the biggest problem is that your next action can be dependent on whether your last attack hits or misses, especially if that was a mangle or rip.

The feral druid is a different beast altogether.

 

Dave Lister

I play from New Zealand on a US server so already I have [and would expect] a few hundred ms latency to contend with. As far as I remember when first playing in 2005 it wasn't too bad. Lately, however, I am often getting between 900-1200ms latency during 'peak' hours locally. Most of this I'm looking to attribute to my ISP [Xtra], however, I suspect over time latency has slightly risen as the game has developed. Could anyone confirm or deny this?

Now, getting to my point. We've made a start on SSC/TK [Lurker, Void Reaver killed] and I'm a little concerned that as the progressive encounters require more work, latency could hamper this progress. I guess I'd like to know if there are other tanks out there that deal with high latency regularly and are involved in the high-end content. If so, do you find it a problem and do you have any tips to deal with it [other than getting the ISP to pull finger and sort out their infrastructure]?

I had this typed up in notepad and then I found this thread. I'd just like to respond to a few things I've read here;
Not just Australia, we get it here also

I think I'm getting something similar here; I'm noticing I get a problem whereby I effectively have to double or triple-click a button such as shield slam or revenge before the ability is actually performed. This annoys me no end when I'm trying to maintain a rotation and play whack-a-mole with my minor cool-downs.

 

◊ pewsey

@DaveLister: One of our DPS warriors (and I think Thelyna our new BB approved pally recruit) are both on Xtra, and their connections go to shit in prime time as well.

I can say that on Dragonblight the server oriented "lag" has actually gone down since TBC released and where I was getting a constant 450+ ms ping, I'm now at a 350+ ms ping.

I've heard that adding a /stopcasting to the end of instant cast spells gets around the GCD delay problem for what it's worth. However, you've only got 5 more days to worry about that until 2.3 (please, please)

Pewsey has heard about tact and discretion, but tends to regard them much as children view vegetables.

 

◊ Binkenstein

I'm on Xtra too (go large even) and obviously Dragonblight as well, and I get around 450-600ms ping, which is playable.

Windwall totem, we will miss you.

Not.

 

◊ Greenexile

What exactly is happening in 2.3 to change the GCD lag problem? Whenever I do ZA runs on the current PTR, I still have trouble keeping 3x lifebloom rotations up due to GCD not actually being ready when it says it should be?