One of the more recent changes to how AoE works is with the sorcerers’ chain lightning and how often it arcs, but I hate to tell you that isn’t even close to causing the sheer spikes in latency that the rogues’ AoE is causing. Two rogues on the world boss, all by themselves, caused the latency to jump to nearly 2000ms. The rest of us were just rubber banding back and forth. I saw the boss stagger, and the latency was so bad that the stagger actually appeared visually to last almost a full minute. Players other than the rogues were dying left and right because what appeared onscreen didn’t match what the server was saying happened. The only respite we had was during the travel phase when Avarice teleported and we had to move because the rogues weren’t firing off their AoE during movement. Once Avarice came out of the portal, instant spike in latency and all we could see were a massive flurry of what appeared to be poison dagger AoE.
Something really needs to be done with how awful it is in groups or shared shards when it comes to the servers’ inability to handle these constant streams of attacks. I don’t want rogues nerfed, but performance is abysmal right now. It sucks when the DPS phase shows >500ms, then drops to normal latency (about 40-60ms for me) when we’re moving about, then right back up to >500ms the moment the AoE starts flowing again.
What I really don’t get is how we’re doing less overall damage than in D3, yet have far worse performance in groups/shared shards. At this point I’d almost rather solo world bosses and take my chances with that than deal with having latency so high I can’t feasibly maintain control of my character.