We're a guild that's comprised mostly of Oceanic players (Australia, NZ, Singapore) with a sparse sprinkling of late night North Americans (1-2 out of 40).
I have a confession, I'm a high ping loser. My reported latency to the Blizz servers is normally between 250 and 600, with a normal night of about 350-400. Most of the Aus guys and gals get this, and the NZ guys are slightly worse by about 50ms or so.
We've killed the first 5 bosses (Spider wing, Noth, Raz) in Naxx and are looking forward to skewering up some new bosses soon.
I'm looking for advice from any other guilds in our situation. From what I read, even the LPBs have trouble with latency related wipes and issues with Heigan and Thaddius, so what consideration should we have for these rather position intensive encounters.
C'thun is a loot pinata these days, with 1-shots the norm so more static "positioning" fights are ok, but I'm concerned that the Heigan dance and the movement required for Thaddius might be bordering on insanity with our pings.
Any other predominantly Oceanic HPLs that want to dispense comforting words of advice to fellow compatriots ("There there, it will be all over soon") ? Any US/EU guilds that play on dial-up want to offer advice ? ;-)
Thanks all....
Pewsey has heard about tact and discretion, but tends to regard them much as children view vegetables.
There are only two kinds of MMOs: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody plays. (inspired by Bjarne Stroustrup)
i remember reading that some guild killed Thaddius on saturday morning (like 8am server time) to try and minimize any lag. Im not sure if that would help with your situation. But where there is a will, there is a way. you'll figure it out im sure.
i remember reading that some guild killed Thaddius on saturday morning (like 8am server time) to try and minimize any lag. Im not sure if that would help with your situation. But where there is a will, there is a way. you'll figure it out im sure.
Our normal raiding time is 1:30am ST (now 12:30 with DST or something) start. So, it's pretty quiet to start with, and the server is normally very stable at that time (once they stopped the horrible honor calculations batch job that lagged out the server at exactly the same time each night)
Thanks for the positive comments Dee, I'm sure we will, but I'd like to make it as painless as possible !
Pewsey has heard about tact and discretion, but tends to regard them much as children view vegetables.
There are only two kinds of MMOs: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody plays. (inspired by Bjarne Stroustrup)
I'm in the US and play on euro. I play with 490+ ping every day.
If your latency is constant, there should be no issues with Heigan. You will have to adjust for the lag (by running a bit more in front, such that you're graphically standing in the splashes), but there is no reason that a high ping makes the fight undoable.
Thaddius is also fine as long as you use pick your addons intelligently. You need to pick an addon that has latency corrections, and you may have to manually adjust some of the latency max values in the addons. I suggest AMThaddius for this -- PSWarner (last time we tried), has a rather large race condition which causes it occasionally display the wrong arrow in high latency/serverlag situations.
I'm looking for advice from any other guilds in our situation. From what I read, even the LPBs have trouble with latency related wipes and issues with Heigan and Thaddius, so what consideration should we have for these rather position intensive encounters.
Ping in itself has not been a problem for us on either. Our advice on Heigan is to just "lead the pack" - make sure you're doing the dance first on your screen, so it looks like everybody is following your lead. It's somewhat harder but it's a far cry from impossible. Even once I got my dancing down I was able to fit an autoshot between splashes. We downed Heigan on our second night of attempts without much trouble.
With Thaddius, the problem isn't ping so much as disconnects. 600ms ping alone has never stopped me from moving polarity shifts quickly. That said, disconnects are a problem and you will probably want to do the four-corners strategy rather than two corners so you can kill people who disconnect. All you can do is attempt him when nobody is on (we did ours at 1am) and keep a strong roster on that night so you can sub out people with connection issues.
In summary, though, 600ms ping is a minor handicap at worst. I haven't heard of anyone blaming ping in our guild, only excessive lag spikes or FPS (which are deadly).
Majority of my guild is Aussie, with a good share in HK as well. While latency will have some impact on your learning curve, we seemed to have a bigger problem with people just not trying as hard, and blaming it on lag. On the flip side, we had people with 700+ pings, that once they got it figured out, they survived every single time. The fight is definitely doable with higher latency.
It comes down to everyone needing to find exactly where to be, what path to run, that works for their particular latency. This will be slightly different for each person, anywhere from pushing slightly into the next splash before it happens, to being able to wait for it and then move from the middle of the safe zone. Just stress to people that they need to experiment a little, and not follow people. What works for 1 person may not work for another based on differing latency.
A lot of our people who swore up and down that it was impossible due to lag now run it flawlessly. You just need to smash the perception that it is not doable with latency, and people need to figure out the run based on their own network performance. Once you someone stops trying, they will never survive the run.
Maybe it's just me but I never found Heigan to be very ping involved. Sure having a higher ping means you have less room for error when doing the dance, but as long as you anticipate a bit instead of lagging behind, you'll do it np. Heigan is more of a PC power problem, because of the room before which is full of 40trash mobs and stuff. For low end pc, it's good to turn details to a minimum, and to keep the screen toward the ground. This also doubles as a good way to keep track of the lava burst(well slime bursts, whatever it is).
Thaddius... I can't really tell, I didn't have a problem with an euro ping to an US server on thaddius, but I think australian/nz connexions are worse than ours to the US, so it might become a problem. Using the "square" strat where you have to move between each transfer will help greatly if you have connexion issues, don't try to do the more simple "cross thru" strat, it's terrible when someone fails to switch because he lagged out. Not sure I'm very clear on that, but there's pretty much 2 strats, one where everyone moves right or left in a kind of square around thaddius, and another where everyone goes left or right of thaddius, running thru him. You'll probably understand if you watch a few videos, and if you don't like watching videos, well... you'd still better watch some for this one fight if you're having connexion issues.
Just test them tho, some people can handle it ok when it's not during prime time even with crappy connexion, and some other people can't. We have some people with crappy configs losing connexion even tho they have 120ping on it because they're getting flooded with info and their ethernet crappy built in connector in their mainboard can't handle it(or well that's what I heard it was but they don't seem to really know why they're getting disconnected I think).
As Maynard (if he spots this thread) can attest, Frostmourne is a predominantly Oceanic server. (Edit: rofl)
Some brief background - a month back, we had four guilds working on Thaddius. All four downed him on the exact same week, with 3 of them being merely hours apart. (Competition does wonderful things)
Two of the guilds had Heigan down on the same week, while Immortal Dream dropped him the week after that.
Latency is, of course, an inconvenience, but certainly not an excuse. I have done both fights with an excess of 700 ping on bad nights... it just takes some extra effort. Of course, the entire raid sporting 700 would be bad, but 400-500 is perfectly doable with zero screwups.
One important thing people with high pings need to understand is there's a difference between a lagspike and a latency. One is an excuse, the other is a retarded cop-out. Of course, there's no denying that people with poorer connections to the server are also more prone to lagspikes.
For Thaddius, it's really really important to use the 4-camp strategy rather than the 2-camp strategy. It's harder to learn, but much more forgiving. I believe there are multiple threads on EJ forums at this point. (many thanks btw guys... really good reading material :D)
Go with the usual advice - go with bare-bones minimum mods and graphics settings. (Yes, memory usage may have no direct connection to lagspikes, but client-side frame lag = delay on client/server communication = higher chance of a delayed flood of packets prompting a disconnect) You typically want to avoid most parsing and synced combat log mods if possible.
For Heigan, people just... well, need to learn to compensate. With a high ping, stage one is learning where the safe spots are according to the cracks, and stage two is learning to time them. When Immortal Dream finally got past the fghdfraaargh suppression room and pulled Heigan for the first time, I was the sole survivor of the first ever dance phase, and I was sporting a ping of 700. (of course, Heigan smash bear for 5k right after that D: )
For thaddius, use the 4 corner strat. Turn video settings to minimum, all UI off except essential. Turn player names off. When you move from 1 position to another, dont just run in a straight line, make at least 1 directional change that will update your position to the server instantly. And this is very important: if you are using a mod to tell you which way to move, do not use the AMThaddius mod. Use bigwigs.
We spent about 4 weeks with ppl getting blasted when moving to the new position using AMT mod. We switched to bigwigs and the arrows come up at least 0.5s faster which made all the difference when combined with our 500ms pings. AMT works fine for US guilds but for oceanic pings it's not quick enough.
Having said that we have never had a Thaddius attempt without at least 1 disconnect. Our kills last 2 weeks have each been with 2-3 disconnects :/
For Thaddius, it really depends how fast your dps goes, but I think most guilds can afford 1-2 people disconnecting at the start, or about 4-5 at the halfway point if Thaddius is at 50%. The key thing is that the disconnects need to not wipe the raid (hence the 4-point strategy, with a few key people assigned to 'dispose' of the offline characters).
Nothing is as frustrating as a perfect attempt where someone disconnects at a bad position at 40%, proceed to nuke 5 people, and then have someone in the raid say "this is over", making people lose focus when it was still doable.
For Thaddius, it really depends how fast your dps goes, but I think most guilds can afford 1-2 people disconnecting at the start, or about 4-5 at the halfway point if Thaddius is at 50%. The key thing is that the disconnects need to not wipe the raid (hence the 4-point strategy, with a few key people assigned to 'dispose' of the offline characters).
Nothing is as frustrating as a perfect attempt where someone disconnects at a bad position at 40%, proceed to nuke 5 people, and then have someone in the raid say "this is over", making people lose focus when it was still doable.
Explain this "dispose" you talk of ?
My guess is that involves a use of the polarities to kill the player before they can do any damage. Close ?
Pewsey has heard about tact and discretion, but tends to regard them much as children view vegetables.
There are only two kinds of MMOs: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody plays. (inspired by Bjarne Stroustrup)
Thank you all very much guys and gals. This has been a truly fantastic thread, and very valuable for us Cruxians.
If you've got a toon on DB, come say G'day.
Much appreciation to everybody.
Pewsey has heard about tact and discretion, but tends to regard them much as children view vegetables.
There are only two kinds of MMOs: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody plays. (inspired by Bjarne Stroustrup)
If you cannot move in time on thaddius an option can be to stand outside of the group if your raid has the dps to lose another 10% dmg buff. We have three people that disconnect every kill/wipe/whatever on thaddius. On some occations they get lucky and don't disc but most of the time they do. We solved this by having them stand at max range away from thaddius and group up with each other whenever they get the same polarity and stay split if not. We manage to kill thaddius despite the loss of these three people. If you feel that you have 2-3 players that can't move on time due to their ping or due to disconnects (high ping can often cause a disconnect on thaddius for some reason) then put them outside of the main group. Four camps helps a lot to take care of discers as well, since the spot where they stand is empty after the next polarity shift and you can send someone there to kill them off.
Do you have a lot of people with highping or is it just a few? For heigan I wouldn't worry too much, if half your raid can survive the dance phases you will kill him. On our first kill we were 12/8/8 players alive on the last three dances. :)
10/30/06, 10:26 PM
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