i play with a wizard friend and i freeze wut the
Thank you man!
Saved this season for me. 
Hey all,
We’re collecting info on this issue and trying to find any commonalities in what is being reported. Thank you for the info that has been shared so far.
Lowering sound channels to 16/32 has seemed to help many, so as a work around in the meantime feel free to try this if you’d like. Hopefully we will know more soon and have an update to share.
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I’ve had major freeze lags since season start. I am a Firebirds wizard aswell.
CoE has to be the main problem(someone else said it in this forum thread). I just removed COE from all my builds in the Armory, and for the first time in 3 days i havent crashed AT ALL for the last 5hours after i removed the COE ring…
Im still using Sound channel 32 aswell, not a singel crash after i removed ring
sound channels didn’t help me, but removing CoE has.
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Heres the “fix”
So I have 0 issues when it comes to the sound. For me, the problem is 100% related to convention of elements and mirror images being used. I have had no freezing issues at all running 16/32/64/128 bit sound for the last 3 hours with CoE unequipped. As soon as I equipped CoE for the first time after that time frame, my first GR froze 5 times for a solid 10ish seconds. Disabling the sound and or setting it to 16bit did not help at all.
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Literally this. I did a bunch of testing today with mirror images. I’ve only tested this in multiplayer, no idea how it behaves in single player
Things I have confirmed:
- This specific break is unrelated to general sound playing issue that D3 has always had.
- This specific break only impacts people on Windows 10 2004 and later. - I have only confirmed this with people running Intel CPUs, but that may be a sample size issue.
- This specific break only happens when you are using Mirror Image AND Convention of the Elements- unconfirmed if using Mirror Image without Firebirds causes issues.
- Lowering sound quality, disabling sound, and poisoning fmodex.dll makes no difference.
- This only happens if the Mirror Image user is wearing Convention of the Elements, but will impact anyone in the game that meets the requirements for the bug - namely Windows version.
- This is unrelated to known issues with Area Damage on specific builds.
Steps to reproduce:
- Grab any Windows 2004 device
- Have a Firebirds Wizard with CoE and Mirror Image
- Do a rift and you will see what looks like stutter where the game plays normally for a few seconds and then hangs. In the worst cases the screen will lock entirely for 10+ seconds. The game accepts no input during this time.
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I found a consistent way to reproduce this:
- go do 4 man bounties
- get Act 3 bounty “Catapult command”
- find the third catapult
- do something (?)
- game freezes
- playing on EU
- couldn’t reproduce this in single player
- happens with both sound enabled and disabled
- here’s a video Diablo 3 S23 lag spike - YouTube
CPU intel i7 7700K, GC nvidia gtx 1060 6gb (driver v461.92), Windows 10 home 2004
Doesnt fix it at all.
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to fix Mirror Image&CoE spikes try this:
- Launch D3
- Open task manager (ctrl+shift+esc)
- Open “details” tab
- find diablo3.exe process
- right click on it
- choose “set affinity”
- uncheck all exept “0” and “1”(may stay cheked only “0” and “1” cores)
- press “ok” and try to play
game may played little slower, but its better than spikes&die
ps: if it helps you must change affinity every time you start D3 untill Blizzard will fix this bug
And sorry about my english
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Also, please take a look at the rubberbanding issue when teleporting around with vyr set in archon mode.
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thanks, this worked for me
16/32 bit work around helps, but after GR 110+, the lag gets more and more insane: even worse with 2 FBs in same game. it’s hard to push when it’s stuttering like this so i hope this can be patched soon. 
did 4 man 118 with 3 fb’s, OMG game breaking lag, wont try that again, 2 is bad enough
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I used this Get Better Performance in Diablo 3 (PC) - YouTube.
Done it 2 days ago, no freezes since then. It prevents game from loading sound, but better play with no sounds than die every freeze
Convention of Elements ring is causing major lag when mirror images are spawned as it applies the elements to them. get about a 50-60fps drop when the ring isn’t used no fps drop or noticeable lag.
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I also get extreme FPS fluctuations when playing Firebird with Mirror Images, as soon as the Mirror images spawn, FPS fluctuate between 100+ and under 10. The fluctuations are actually so fast, the ingame FPS counter does not even pick them up but it is terrible to play.
A few things that I found out:
Reducing sound channels seems to reduce but not eliminate the problem. The FPS drops are just less severe, and with enough monster density just as bad as on 128.
Setting thread affinity as someone suggested does nothing for me
Disabling the sound eliminates the the stuttering completely, but playing without sound is not really a viable option. The same is true with the FMOD64.dll replacement, as it also disables sound it is not really an option.
Changing bit depth or sampling rate for sound does not change anything for me.
The only thing that actually helps is not equipping COE. So the only viable workaround today is playing with Squirts instead of COE (which with > 50% uptime should be more damage anyway)
I also tested the problem on different machines.
Ryzen 5950X with Geforce 2080Ti 32GB RAM: Terrible
MacBookPro M1 16GB: No problem
Notebook with Geforce 1060 + Core i7-8650U 16GB : No problem.
So the faster your computer is, results in more lags?
Was also subjected to wild FPS swings running new FB with MI + CoE, even before s23 started. While it does look like removing CoE solves the problem, for me going from 128 down to 16 sound channels essentially eliminated it, just as well. There is some… momentary FPS drop on MI summoning, but it’s so short that it doesn’t affect gameplay, really (even on HC).
However, my hardware is probably different from the majority here. I use external audio interface, connected via USB, with ASIO support (not sure if it makes difference for the game though, but the drivers themselves are good). The rest of the rig is a bit dated, I assembled it 2.5 years ago, but as far as D3 is concerned it’s still very much overkill.
Seems like it worked for me to!!! thanks