Not just a Hardcore excuse anymore.
Patch 2.3 went live we’ve seen constant reports from players who can not party with a pet-using Witch Doctor since the lag is immediately overwhelming. (The WDs themselves don’t seem to be affected, especially not playing solo.) While the problem is worst with WDs, it’s not *just* WDs and various combinations of skills/gear/LGems are making the game unplayable for many fans.Blizzard Investigating Crippling Multiplayer Lag:
DoomBringer: We were in a party of 3 — 2 Helltooth WD and 1 DH. Every time there was a medium size pack, the game would lag. Against a huge pack, I could probably take a nap before the game goes back to normal with either all of us dead or all enemies dead.
LudoBN:
Kobrakai: Every time there’s more than 15 monsters on the screen the whole game stops for 3-4 seconds and then everybody is dead. We actually left a game on a great map with great density after only a couple of minutes because it was unplayable.
Boozor: It is not just WD’s, HOTA barbs using pain enhancer have the same effect. Even just 1 pain enhancer will lag the game out.
Tyvalir: As you may have heard last week, finding the combinations of skills and situations that cause lag is an ongoing process that requires us to be very thorough. The more details we have, the faster we can drill down to what’s causing it, so this is great info to have.
For those adding their reports to the above, if you could share what skills were being used when the lag occurred, whether you were on a particular map or facing a particular enemy, and any other details you’re able to include, that would help.
I’ll go ahead and forward this thread. Many thanks, everyone!
Edit: Also wanted to link to John Yang’s comments about the Helltooth Set specifically. In short, we’ve fixed some problems with it, and we’re continuing to optimize it.
The OP, top Wizard player and B.net MVP Jaetch, offered up a video showing the sort of slow motion lag players are complaining about ruining their efforts in a GR75. Click through for that visual accompaniment.
Talking to some players lately, I’ve heard a lot of complaints that while Patch 2.3 was brilliant on content, it’s the most bug-filled patch yet in Diablo 3 or Reaper of Souls. I guess it’s not a real surprise that there are some new issues, given the nearly infinite combination of special properties Kanai’s Cube has created, but it’s unfortunate that this sort of thing is ruining the great content of the new patch and season, for so many players.
I've been playing a HC Helltooth WD in season 4. I've had some group mates complain about lag a couple times (and thankfully no deaths as a result), but have never experienced it myself, whether in group or solo. Although I'm running ZB instead of AC, and AC may be a bigger issue.At the same time, I'm not pushing GRifts to near this level, with 4 guys hitting 30+ mobs at once with everything they have for 30 seconds or more.
I’m glad to find out this is game issue and not me. I’ve asked several of my friends if they have experienced any lag and they’ve all said no. But I’ve been getting some slow sluggish lag and 1-3 sec freezes for several days now playing as a Wizard and a Barb.
The game is just super laggy period. I run it on an SSD, my computer is beast and shouldn’t drop below 60FPS ever, but load times are long and I’m frequently getting spikes of dropped frames. Oh, my internet is also 170mbps and stable. The game just doesn’t run smooth consistently…
Same here. The game is just laggy since the patch in all cases. Getting rubber^banded into dodged hit and dying is pretty common. No way I would play HC right now.
Pretty obvious something server side cannot compute all the actions onscreen, it's always when there is too much going on at once, not class/skill based. There is similary major lag when you kill the little blue goblins all at once, as if the client is waiting for to know what loot dropped before moving on.
It is also class/skill based… Some of the skills will make it worse.For instance, having a WD with 5 zombie dogs (base skill + 2 extra's from passive skills), gurgantium and 15 fetishes (from passive skill) engaging a large group of monsters (worst are the lightning enchanted or arcane, for the extra dynamic graphics) using skills with lots of extra graphics (piranha, grasp of the dead with dropping bodies, wall of zombies) results even when playing solo in LAG (in capitals!).It is the reason for me too to stay in SC right now. I only died once, but that would have been enough to reset me during this season if I played HC, like I did in S3. And with only about an hour per day to play, having to start over and over again is no fun if it is not caused by your own overconfidence.
FPS always slowed down when there are a lot of particles on-screen, and there are more and more spells and effects with every patch, but the lag people are complaining about is choppiness and freezes, which happens when there is too much happening simultaneously to a lot of monsters, which also increased drastically since release. So, yeah, some skills make it worst, but only because they hit a lot of monsters at once, the best example of that being exploding palm, when a pack blows up, they all explode at once and now you have let's say 20 explosions hitting 19 other monsters than the one triggering it, the game freeze for about a second there waiting for the server to process all that and then it speeds back up to realtime.
I'm not sure if it's processing power that's the issue here or if the connection is being throttled down to having only a set amount of data coming to the client per tick. I also wonder if part of the issue is about how it's loading certain game files – if it only keeps your skill set to hand and so when the Monk/Barb/WD kicks off 8 or 9 different class specific / legendary effects the client doesn't have it panics and has to frantically pull them up. That should be testable on the client end but I'm not really motivated to drill down that far for it.
I'm getting it solo on my WD but the worse is my angry chicken , it even lags for a split second just turning into the chicken , so much so sometimes you think you misclicked or something , press again and explode , then have to wait on the CD . Not only that but welcome back rubber banding and I have met the edge of the screen on a number of occasions too with the chicken build .
Ever since the game was released I have complained about this stuttering behavior that is uncorrelated to one’s computer’s specifications. It’s infuriating, especially if you are pushing competitively in GR or playing in Hardcore mode. Blizzard is a small indie without resources to fix or they are simply terrible at customer support.
Once I had a spike of lag. Looking at the windows resource monitor, I notice the battle net loader was occupying the whole network bandwidth. The lag stopped when I suspended the Agent.exe process.
I was playing GR63 last night with 3 others and with 2 PE gems active the ping went over 1000ms, once we swapped out the PE gems the high latency returned to normal.
It’s like the server needs more bandwidth per client than it’s allowed or the server needs more processing power or maybe a combination of both bandwidth and more processing power.