An Ex-Gnome Tank's World

Unexpected Benefits

January 22nd, 2009 Posted in Dungeons, General

3.0.8, the patch that was supposed to be the saviour of us all, has arrived. And as many people will tell you, it hasn’t lived up to what was promised.

The big thing, as far as I was concerned, would be that the lag in Naxxramas (and other raids) was going to be fixed. Unfortunately last night’s raid proved that to if anything the lag was worse – before we even set foot inside, members of one guild were complaining that they’d given up for the night because they’d been wiping on trash in Obsidian Sanctum, the lag had been so bad for them.

And, on starting pulls in the Spider wing, it was revealed that the lag was there. Bearable, but there. And so it continued for a few minutes, right up until the moment that I pulled Anub’Rekhan. Things were just about bearable until it came to the point of moving him around the room during the Locust Swarm. I moved through the usual semi-circular kiting path, waiting for him to follow. He didn’t. The server was struggling so much that it averaged my movement over about twenty seconds, and he ploughed through the middle of the room, killing half the raid. Not that it mattered too much, the lag had hit a point where nothing was happening anyway. I stood there for fully sixty seconds before he killed me, with no healing on me at all. Hurray for the lag.

Somehow, and I’m not at all sure how, we gave it one more go. Things were more bearable this time, and he was downed in short order. The only explanation I can think of is that almost every other guild had given up by that time so we had the instance server to ourselves.

So, unexpected benefit #1: Terrible lag makes everyone else give up and go away, leaving us lag-free for a night.

As for unexpected benefit #2: The change to Glyph of Bloodrage means that warriors no longer take a health penalty for generating rage using Bloodrage. This means that if healers put a load of heal over time spells on you, they don’t immediately take aggro in the first second of the pull (overhealing generates no threat). It’s not a big change, it’s a subtle one, and it wasn’t a big problem to begin with, but it was a pleasant surprise.

And that’s it. Expect more posts complaining about the lag in the near future, as I don’t expect it to be fixed uickly and it’s rapidly turning from a slight hump in the road to an enormous bloody menace.

  1. 2 Responses to “Unexpected Benefits”

  2. By Sheldreyn on Jan 22, 2009

    I totally agree with you on the lag, we went to Naxx also and on our first try on Anub’Rekhan, we had a huge lag spike that resulted on our raid to have to deal with so many small spiders that we were instantly killed. A few minuets later, this seems to have lessen a bit (to the point of being bearable).

    However lag went back as we were working on Noth, that killed our MT and 1st second tank before the 3rd tank could pick it up and survive the lag spike. We managed to one shot it anyways, but it was ugly. It would have been flawless if it were of that lag.

    As far as the bloodrage change goes, this is an awesome change, I’m an Arms DPS, so I don’t rally take priority in my healer’s list, so it was kind of frustrating to never start fights à 100 % hp :s

  3. By Tankette on Jan 22, 2009

    We somehow got 7 bosses down on Tuesday despite the horrid lag. Every boss fight was just barely a win. Lag was so bad in Northrend that we had to Lock summon most of the raid directly into Naxx from Ironforge.

    I don’t know if it was better last night because my internet connection was down. Comcast FTL.

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