TL;DR version: Healing is strongly implicated in causing significant "input lag" in 25 man raids. Temerity tested a number of theories this week and the data supports this conclusion and discredits DPSing, addons, RPPM, and even Stampede as causes. It seems to be correlated to the peak US raid times as well (presumably when many raids and LFRs are occurring).
Background:
As many 25 man raiders know, particularly those raiding Heroic content, there are times when the game client becomes very unresponsive. Abilities take far longer than they should to register as used, causing very frustrating gameplay for most classes and specs (particularly those who are riding each GCD rather than having longer spell casts). This happens primarily on the pull of many fights, but it occurs at other times as well.
It does not occur in 10 man raids. It occurs less in 25 Normal raids.
Here is a video emphasizing the issue. The perspective is of a Brewmaster Monk and a Beast Master Hunter. The video is slowed down to one third normal speed, and demonstrates some of the worst lag we've experienced lately. It also shows what a lag-free experience is like. Note the delays between the game client pressing a button (gold outline) and the game acting on it (resource consumption, cooldown trigger). It can be upwards of 1 second, and this is the source of our pain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff56_vfZ5sw
The Experiment:
We had many theories (RPPM being most people's prime culprit, followed by Stampede, and Addons) but we constructed an experiment to definitely prove what the cause is. We spent nearly two hours testing this in ToT this week, primarily on the training dummies before Jin'rokh, trying many variations:
1) No addons
2) No RPPM trinkets, set bonuses, meta, or enchants
3) No pets
4) No healing
5) Hunters (Stampede)
We did multiple pulls of each theory and privately recorded our own ratings of each pull, on a scale of 1-10 (1 being no lag, 10 being unplayable). Our goal was to see if patterns emerged without any communication tainting the results. After several experiments, we tallied our results and it was clear:
Healing causes the input lag.
Once we had this theory, we tested further. We tried different healers. We tried different numbers of healing cooldowns. We tried more or fewer temporary pets (such as Stampede). We tried pulls with healers doing nothing for the first minute, then going nuts. We even did a pull where only two players DPSd and healers went nuts. The clear result was healing of any kind, made worse by the number of healers red lining it. It had nothing to do with what DPS did, nothing to do with Addons people were running.
Other guilds have seen the same thing; in fact, every Heroic raiding guild probably sees it, perhaps depending slightly upon their healing composition. Cooldowns and smart heals seem to exacerbate the issue.
Our spreadsheet of results:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArK4-MdVBzk5dHAyTkVNOXJpRnhmWG43MFhubjlWZXc
The Second Experiment:
Our initial testing was conducted at the beginning of our normal raid week (Wednesday from 8pm-10pm PST for these tests). Late Sunday night (~11pm PST) we attempted to reproduce the problem and were much less successful. We were able to see it during Heroism, but it was not as pronounced as on Wednesday, and the game was smooth at other times during healing. From this, we theorize that it is heavily impacted either by the load on the servers themselves and/or network connectivity at the Blizzard data centers.
This means the lag likely occurs at peak raiding times (and probably most noticeably during the overlap of the East and West US coasts).
Conclusion:
Healing in 25s is very strongly implicated in causing the maligned "input lag" across the entire raid, made much worse during peak US raiding hours. While other factors may contribute in minor ways (composition, hybrid healing, etc), in our tests, healing or its absence dwarfed any other cause, and its absence left us with the silky smooth gameplay from previous expansions. We don't know what is happening inside the game client or on the WoW servers or on the network in between, but this is a huge, huge issue when it comes to player enjoyment. We expect it to get significantly worse in 5.4 when healers get their legendary cloaks and as gear scales.
What You Can Do:
Repeat our tests, see if you encounter the same problem. The easiest test is to simply do two fake raid pulls on the training dummies before Jin'rokh: one without healing, and one with healing. Take 10-15 minutes from your raid week, note the time and day and battlegroup, and see if you get the same result. The more data we gather, hopefully the more easily Blizzard can fix the problem.
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I've been doing a lot of work recently when it comes to disc priest stats, fueled primarily by the change to crit and the different ways we heal in Firelands. Some of the conclusions (in this forum and on other sites) are interesting. After many simcraft runs, and much spreadsheet analysis, the results are clear: disc priest stats are very peculiar and counterintuitive. In particular, Mastery is just a bad stat for us right now.
The root of the issue is this -- our Mastery affects our spells in very different ways. It affects PW:S the most, obviously, and that is why many disc priests historically have chosen to stack mastery -- bigger shields. It then affects PoH decently since we have the guaranteed Divine Aegis proc (and, when it crits, it double dips). Finally it affects our other spells, but to a much smaller degree since it only comes into play on a crit. This leads to some interesting stat weights. Mastery is better than even Int when it comes to shield strength (though Int is better overall because of mana concerns). However, for every other spell, even PoH, Mastery is our worst stat -- often by significant margins. This is a product of the requirement to crit as well as how well PoH and other spells scale with Haste. The result is our best, most defining spell (PW:S) scales basically with only one stat, Mastery. Haste helps it somewhat (more shields per second), but not remotely as much as Mastery. Crit only helps the Glyph, so basically crit is worthless for PW:S. Every other spell we have, however, scales much better through every other stat. I think the core issue is our Mastery doesn't really work well. In particular, Divine Aegis requiring a crit is just not a great mechanic. It makes gearing for Disc tricky and just leads to player confusion. I would not presume to suggest what our mastery should be, but I do look at Holy Paladins with a jealous eye at times -- if almost every heal were affected by Divine Aegis, then our Mastery would be more appropriate. Regardless, it would be very nice to have our stats be more consistent... when stat weights from one secondary stat to another vary by as much as 4x for some spells, it makes gearing difficult. Lowering the impact of Mastery on PW:S and making it apply more evenly to our other spells would be outstanding. It also would be even more outstanding if crit somehow affected PW:S; I know that's tricky but that, too, would go a long way to improving our stat balance. Overall Disc is actually in a really good place right now; it is fun to play with a lot of interesting tools. It's just the gearing and mastery side of things that make it a bit tricky and counterintuitive. |