Or: Best Practice: How to handle lag spikes? :P

Recently we have been hit with the lag bat, the whole last week we encountered lag spikes during raidings. Untill then, we have only rarely seen such spikes, but tonight was terrible. We needed one whole night just to defeat Faerlina and Meaxxna, which normally are more or less on farm.
I'm especially concerned about the next bosses in Naxxramas. Tomorrow we scheduled Thaddius, whom we barely killed last week (2 seconds untill enrage :D). We are using the diamond strategy, so people not moving in time is not the problem, rather I think it will be lacking DPS due to dead resp. on purpose killed people who otherwise would have wiped the whole raid. Seeing that 2 seconds first kill last week, I fear we won't be able to repeat it this week.

The other alternative boss would be Heigan, yet this one also requires rather good pings. I know you can kill him with about 15 people alive, but that assumes that these 15 people know how to dance AND do not suffer from lag spikes. We haven't tried him yet, and learning the dance will be at least a pain in the ass if not utterly impossible with such bad conditions I fear.

Would Gothik be another alternative, which is possible even with a laggy connection?
We have 2 days left of raiding, and I don't want to waste them with endless wiping due to that about half the guild suffers from such damned conditions.

I know the old american release servers do/did have similar issues, how did you handle this?

buff up and go again. there really isn't another solution. it sucks, but you move on. if the conditions are persistant and not just spikey here and there, don't bother trying those bosses. people will just get frustrated and you won't be accomplishing anything but racking up repair bills. early on, we did thaddius as far outside of prime time as we could manage.

Outside prime time isn't possible for us.
I would say that about 70% of our members are still going to school and have their parents get really angry if they don't stop playing at 10pm or 11pm, especially on work days. :(
On the other hand, the remaining 30% cannot start raiding before 6pm. It's a vicious circle. ;)

What about Gothik? This boss at least doesn't require special movement, just running to the mobs that have spawned. Although I have heard that the whole encounter isn't that easy.

Not being able to kill heigan/Thaddius due to "lag" and moving on too Gothik is quite a waste. You are just switching to a harder encounter with horrible loot.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a raid leader is to let people lose focus on or blame conditions outside their own control for wipes also. Sometimes lag spikes do wipe raids, most of the time idiots wipe raids and you get a spiraling decline into "oh I lagged" anytime someone messes up. Rebuff fast, shrug it off, and go again, if you can't ever seem to beat Thaddius or Heigan legitly due to lag, reschedule raids. You beat Gothik to do the 4H, you don't beat Gothik because you can't beat the other two wings.

Gothik will kick the shit out of you. You can still do Heigan with lag.

Are you talking about long periods of high latency, or those times when everything suddenly stops for 20 seconds and you wake up dead?

For the former, depending on how bad it is, you can compensate. There are people who play in bad conditions every day. Sometimes you just have to play through a night like that. As far as giving up, you have to judge how well you can reasonably expect people to perform, and whether you think you'll get anything done that night.

Switching to a new boss probably wouldn't accopmlish very much.

Buff up and try again. If conditions are really so bad as to make kills untenable, call it a night, or go do some easy content in MC/BWL/AQ40. It's just one of those things you have to work through.

There's nothing left in BWL/AQ40 despite Ouro and Viscidous (which we haven't killed so far as well and are also "new" bosses to us).
Molten Core is also clear if I remember correctly, we don't have it on our raid schedula anymore, but quite a lot of our members have formed up on a random MC group.

Not much you can do, when we hit Thaddius he was practically unkillable due to either a) server lag, or b) raiders computers.

a) will eventually fix itself, b) most likely won't.

You just gotta deal with it until your server is upgraded. It took us a month to kill thaddius, partially due to stupid mistakes, partially due to hardware. After we killed him the first time, we've one shot him 5 times now. Practice, Practice, Practice.

Wiping during those stupid server lockups sucks, but the one time it doesnt lock up, and you wipe to someone messing up, you'll be pissed you didnt practice more.

what do you expect to do when it happens? You die, rez, rebuff and go again. If it keeps lagging you wait a while. This isn't rocket science

Then rather call it a night then collect a long repairbill. People will be not quite a motivated as if they have taken a break. We did it when we were suffering from lag while doing patchwerk. Since this is quite an expensive fight if you haven't killed him yet, we called it a day and returned one week later, successfully killing him. We had instances where we couldn't even kill anub due to about 50 disconnects within one fight. If the servers are really running that badly, you cannot force a kill.

The problem is... everything was fine until about 1-2 weeks ago.
Then it suddenly began to lag.
Also, we are one of two guilds in reach of Thaddius (the other, horde guild hasn't beaten him yet), so I doubt the boss itself is causing the lag issues.

I'm in an Australian Horde guild that's killed Thaddius twice, so I feel your pain. Our first 2-3 attempts were getting the movement down, the next 10 were isolating who has lag problems and who doesn't, and subbing them in/out.

So basically, my guild made sure to keep a strong roster on that night and just have people available to sub in for those who suffer from the lag especially bad.

We've had lag make heigan unkillable also.

Basically you have to pace your entire night and schedule around lag - ESPECIALLY when it comes to thaddius. Although lately this has changed and he's killable on prime-time on our server... in fact i'd dare say he's borderline trivial now that he has no lag... 4 minute kills at 8pm are pretty straightforward now - its amazing what hardware does for some fights. Thaddius is about lag more than executing once you've written your mod - or kick the tards.

If lag is an issue, shuffle your raid schedule around so that you keep things like Thaddius and Heigan until the very end of the evening, when hopefully most guilds have left the instance. For example, we tried Patch/Grob/Gluth/Noth/Thaddius, and it worked brilliantly. It might seem slightly bizarre, but after Gluth we went to Thaddius and everyone had horrific delay (no dc's, but sticky buttons and "another action is in progress" bullshit), so we went and did Noth. Went back to Thaddius afterwards right at the end of the night and it was silky smooth.

If the lag is dominating you, and morale is shot to hell because none of the encounters you want to do are playable, then I can personally testify to taking the whole raid down to STV and having them beat the crap out of each other works wonders. In times like those you need to relieve the stress and frustration, and nothing does it like a good old fashioned 40 man battle royale. A happy raid is always more _fun_ than a frustrated one.

Yeah our schedule looks like a kid with ADD took a crayon on a naxx map and drew crazy lines all over the place - in order to have everything dead in a couple nights its a major issue of maximizing encounter difficulty to lag - and that means massive zigzags. We actually suicide after every gluth - ITS FUN KIDS.

Oh well.
Yesterday 2 hours wipe and lag fest before we decided that it was just waste of time.
Today only 33 people out of 75 online.
And tomorrow a 36 hour maintenance until thurday 5pm which will hopefully resolve the lag problems. >.<

Log it and check the time of day. Before we got retrofitted we had constistently occurring lockups during specific time-frames. Didn't take long to figure out the pattern. Also, send your log to blizzard after a while if it doesn't let up.

You WILL notice the difference when/if you get a hardware upgrade. I'm actually extremely pleased about Blizzard's handling of that (although in a perfect world, it would never have been an issue to begin with).

15 sec lag spikes server-wide? Happened about once a week or more about 3 months ago.

Now? I haven't experienced one in at LEAST a month, and probably more.

It won't - its not until the third maintenance that this gets "Fixed"... in fact it was worse for us each time they upgraded until the third and final maintenance... I think the 36 hour one is the 2nd set.

IIRC this would be our second 36-hours-maintenance. Going from <150 ms ping and no spikes to >1k ms ping and constant disconnects surely makes for some exceedingly more "interesting" raiding. Let's hope for the best. ;)

I think they're handling the upgrades somewhat differently in Europe. I'm playing on one of the servers that's had two of those upgrade maintenances now, and since then it's been running as smooth as it can be.