Lagcrown Citadel

Sooo I was chucked an invite to ICC25 today, for the first time ever. Originally I was asked to go healy on my druid, which sort of surprised me because my dear little Tree is still sporting at least two blues, but then we realized that we hardly had any hunters in the raid (for once) and I got to go on my hunter instead. (Five minutes after I logged onto my hunter, about three other hunters joined the raid group anyway, and we eventually wound up with a total of six. As opposed to two druids. Go figure.)

Now.

I’d like to sit here and tell you how awesome this raid was. I’d like to tell you that I was blown away by the fights and by the scenery and by the atmosphere. I’d like to give you all sorts of details on my thoughts on the fights from a huntery perspective. You know, the whole shebang. Unfortunately, I cannot.

Because from the moment I stepped into that raid until the moment I teleported out, I was never over 2fps.

…aaaand I frankly have no idea why.

I shut down all my other programs. I tried sans-Vent. I turned all my video effects down to zero (which meant that I could no longer see stuff on the ground). No dice. The second either a.) A boss or b.) more than one trash mob showed up on screen, I was essentially out of commission.

Now I know some of you guys are used to playing with poor computer setups and have learned to compensate for having a downright atrocious FPS, but I’m quite spoiled and I, well… haven’t. So at the end of every boss fight I’d pull up Recount, look at how absolutely horrific my performance was, and beg my guild to let me leave so they could replace me with someone who could actually contribute.

And my guild, bless their hearts, insisted that I come “see the new stuff” so they kept dragging my sorry butt all over the place.

We only did the first wing, for which I was grateful, because by that point I wanted to curl up in the fetal position somewhere and cry. Though, the Saurfang boss wasn’t too bad. Mostly because it was a Patchwerk-esque fight since I had a viable excuse to Not-Shoot-The-Adds (when you’re sitting at SUB-1-FRAME-PER-SECOND, you’re excused from shooting adds, I think.) So I was able to concentrate on my rotation, as much as I could for having, well, SUB-1-FRAME-PER-SECOND.

I gotta hand props to Wash here for picking up the slack. Lucky guy lives in the game world and doesn’t have to worry about this stuff. *mutters*

Needless to say I don’t think 25man ICC is gonna happen for me. It’s something in that dungeon, I’m quite sure, since I did an Ony25 just the other day with absolutely no issues.

Let’s hope 10-man is at least playable…

OH!

I got a new bow.

I haven’t used a bow since Valanos’ Longbow. Dead serious. The bow animation kind of weirds me out…

28 thoughts on “Lagcrown Citadel”

  1. /sympathy 🙁

    I had the same problem for about three months (it was odd; it was there one night and gone the next). I did all the same things as you, and similarly ended up still having sub-1-fps.

    Eventually, after reinstalling pretty much everything, turning down everything, etc, the only thing able to fix it in the end was a (rather expensive :S) new processor. Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that for you. 😛

  2. Last couple of days have been insane for lag. Problem was that character actions, esp. looting lagged like hell but NPC’s didn’t. I was trying to level a new Alt and got killed twenty times in twenty minutes before finally logging off and reading a book instead.

  3. Back when I was Raiding (kind of a long story why I’m not these days), I would always have atrocious lag and framerate issues right as I entered the Instance. We’re talking slideshow levels; after spending a good two minutes making friends with the loading screen.

    Oddly enough, though, after a few minutes of putting up with that, my computer would catch up and run at its standard 15-20 FPS. That’s probably low for most people, but it’s the best I can get, and I don’t generally have any problems with it.

    Of course, sometimes it’d hiccup for some of the more graphics-intensive fights, but I got to be one of the few people in my old Guild that could survive the Heigan dance, so it must have been good enough. 🙂

    Good luck in your future Raiding, and congratulations on the bow. 😀

  4. I’ve noticed a problem for the last couple of days with recount in icc causing lag. Other than that my other addons are not causing noticeable icc lag (dbm, decursive, livestock, clique, grid). Only solution I found is to turn off recount all together. Hope this helps or your lag sorts itself out.

  5. Yay, it’s a bow! There were never enough bows, I felt. Guns were okay, but so very loud.

    Mm, my sub-par fps was a large factor in me not enjoying raiding any more. It just wasn’t very fun. Rotating the camera meant the screen going chug-chug-chug. Then, “oh, I over-rotated!”, chug-chug, “oh I need to switch targets”, chug-chug, “oops wrong target”, chug…

  6. Zod’s on my second attempt and my co-hunter got it the week after!

    I get weird ICC lag during Marrowgar, from the moment I start the fight with a MD to the end of it my FPS drop like crazy. Everything after that is totally fine. I can’t figure it out except that the coldflame must have a ridiculous amount of graphics usage or something.

  7. I have noticed a bit more Lag in there than most other instances. Oh wells!

    Grats on Zod’s, although my guild now calls it “Zod’s Repeating Abyss Crystal” 😀

  8. I raided pretty much the entirety of BC and Wrath up til Ulduar at 2fps (hence the blog name) and after just a single month of playing above 30fps I was spoiled enough to the point where I can never play at 2fps again ever.

  9. As the saying goes, you know something is horribly wrong or you need a new computer when you measure your game fluidity in Seconds Per Frame instead of Frames per Second. :B

  10. How much free space do you have? Having < 10gb or so makes my FPS drop to single digits in raids.

  11. Leatrix latency fix.

    Google this and download it. I raid with a number of people who have trouble with fps and this has pretty much kept them all raiding. There’s a more detailed description on the site but what it basically does is stop your pc queueing TCP packets (which is bad) and send them as they get them instead.

    Thank me later.

  12. @ DKAlbatross – I’ve got at least 300GB free…

    @ Echo – Considering the FAQ says it’s not supported on Mac, I’m not sure how well it’ll work on Linux…

    (Yes, I am raiding on Linux now, as opposed to hopping over to my Windows partition for it. I’ve gotten Vent to halfway work and I have no headphones at the moment anyway.)

  13. hmm other than monitoring your raid groups addons (which we’ve started doing) and getting people to kill any extra programs they don’t really need, or disabling fuctionalities, there’s not much more I can think of other than blizzard maybe getting off their asses and buying some new hamsters for the servers.

    unless, of course, you’re a Linux expert and know how the OS specifically handles TCP packets. I’m no specialist and my technical knowledge just about stops short of knowing where the “On Button” is, however I’ve had to raid on a ancient Pc before and I ended up using lots of different techniques to try and salvage a reasonable fps.

    I’d also hit up the blizz support forums as well as report lag in game to make them aware of it

  14. Grats. Please write a blog about Raptor dps in raids. How does the Raptor attack power scale with Aspect of the Beast? Explain Savage Rend and its benefits. How does the Aspect scale when Savage Rend procs? When 4 piece set bonus from T9 procs? When 2 piece set bonus from T10 procs? Your fellow raptor hunter, ! Guntitan

  15. @ Echo: As far as I know Blizz knows about the lags already. When starting the game I could read their message that they know about this and are working on a solution. This message is gone since this week.
    Concerning Linux experts, I can say, that on my machine Linux has a much better performance concerning connections. Using Linux my pings are about 100ms better in average than using Windows (on the same hardware, same modem, same provider etc). But I can only tell this for my machine, don’t know how this is for others.
    Too bad that I cannot use Linux at the moment because for raiding we are using TeamSpeak and I have problems getting this to run on Linux. The only thing that runs a bit better on Windows is the graphics. But I do not think that Pike forgot to switch graphics to use OpenGL. Using DirectX is not getting the same performance under Linux.

  16. @Marc
    It always helps to report it. I’m hopeful after Love is in the Air and the other festival, shit will chill out abit server side and there won’t be as much pressure.

    Being on a low pop realm its often rare to get the terrible instance lag however we had a terrible spate of it when we were progressing in TOGC ages ago. Particularly frustrating losing attempts through no fault of your own.

  17. @ Guntitan – Eep, but that means theorycrafting and I’m bad at that! =P

    @ Marc – Indeed, I’ve been running WoW on Linux for three years now– I know this one isn’t Linux’s fault *nods*

  18. To help with the fps issue you are having, I’d suggest removing recount. I personally was having sub par fps in ICC25 as well until I removed Recount and switched to Skada. I now have no fps issues during boss fights or heavy AoE. Half my guild has made the switch as well purely based on the increased performance in ICC

  19. @Guntitan

    AotBeast isn’t really used from what I understand as it’s a 2GCDs wasted and you generally have better dps from glyphed, talented AotDragonhawk. It’s use should be considered situational. As such most of your other questions I guess are moot. I would definately aim for 4set t10 asap, however because as BM a 10% increase in sting dmg (t9 2set) won’t hurt us as badly as MM.

    General consensus on Raptor is that it can be prone to RNG. This can be solved somewhat by macroing Savage rend into Killcommand and keeping a CD meter up on your UI to check it. However im not sure how this would play out over the course of a fight.

    I personally understand attachment to certain pets, it took me ages to get rid of my bat from zg (he sat in the stable most of TBC). I’m very much attached to my pink Devilsaur which is fortunate as Devilsaur is currently spreadsheeting as the top BM pet. But I doubt that would change your mind 🙂

    In my double checking I realised I’m bored of my extra surv spec and I’m not running 10s enough to merit it. Given that I’ve read that upwards of 500Arp means arp starts spreadsheeting as better than AP I’m very tempted to just use my MM gear in a BM spec and do some expermental raiding

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