Talking specifically about the apparent lag that begins on servers seemingly randomly, most prominently in T4 helltides but can also sometimes plague solo/group instances like NMDs and infernal hordes. My experience playing most of seasons 8 and 9 in torment 4 resulted in repeated frustration, as the lag in helltide zones appeared to get worse as both seasons progressed, with Blizzard doing nothing about it. The rubber-banding, ability delay, and poorly-responsive clickable objects just make for an absolutely piss-poor gaming experience. (I’m not talking about framerate lag here, either, though that is also still an issue when the server you’re connected to is having major problems keeping up, since the client framerate is still tied to the server’s in a 2025 game for some reason.)
When I first hit T4 in this season 10, I wasn’t really seeing much of the lag of the past. I thought “well, maybe they finally made some adjustments, this seems alright”. But now what I really think happened is that I hit T4 too quickly when very few people were there. Here we are a week later and it feels like half of the T4 helltides I visit are experiencing some level of lag which makes playing a high movement-based build (Ball Lightning sorc or Evade spiritborn being the two I currently have) feel awful. It wasn’t even 8 in the morning my local time here just a bit ago and the helltide I was in was borderline unplayable.
The performance simply isn’t getting better, and it feels like the dev team has given up on trying to optimize. It’s disappointing. Diablo 2 and 3 servers performed better than this.