Surely Blizzard can do a better job of optimizing calculations for players and their interactions so that we can have higher frame rate during raids, and more importantly be able to do world events with relative smoothness. This is an MMO afterall and without the ability to do large world events it feels much smaller.
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I have a horrendous computer, like one that can’t run many games at all, and I don’t lag in raids.
Check your drivers maybe?
Blizzard has shifted the responsibility to players. They have provided “Raid Profiles” for graphics so you can lower the graphics output to make up for the display lag.
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As I understand it the game struggles to calculate, process and share information that it has to do for player to NPC interaction…
Absorbs, multiple class mechanics, crit, parry, dodge, block, mitigation and healing for every player as well as whatever the NPCs are throwing down, some raid bosses may be more mechanically complicated to operate than they appear and the game just can’t keep up with so much math that it has to try and do instantly.
I’m not a server engineer or encounter designer but this game did come out in the early 2000s, they’ve done alot of work to improve on the technology they started with but it’s possible they’re hitting the wall of what the game can do and need to dial it back.
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My settings have nothing to do with the server stuttering because it cannot calculate 40 v 40 open world battles because of the calculation bloat that is going on. Think Nazjatar events. I also have a RTX 3080 nvidia GPU. It isnt my settings lol. Also if you have done Mythic Sylvanas or Heroic Sylvanas with 30 people you should know how crazy that lag and frame drop is.
The point im making is that other games are able to easily handle many more players but for some reason with the way the calculations work in WoW it is very easy to overwhelm the server and often times cause frame drops. I heard someone say once that WoW is CPU intensive and I believe them. I think WoW is very inefficient with its many events and they dont seem to be batched or sequenced properly, because if they were the spikes would not be as intense. Anyone who remembers Mythic Sylvanas before the relatively recent fix knows that the fight was so laggy at the start and some other portions of the fight that it would throw off timings by up to 5 seconds.
People act like they can just snap their fingers and fix issues like this…when the reality is none of us know what causes these issues or what steps they’d have to take to resolve them. Especially given the game’s pretty notorious spaghetti code.
I think the Sylvanas example is a pretty good case-in-point. If it was something they could have resolved with a simple fix, it wouldn’t have taken them as long as they did to address it. Given how important the encounter is.
Even timewalking dungeons exhibit server lag. For tanking its almost useless to que because the delay is too much between attacks.
The reality is they switched to an Amazon cloud service that is much cheaper but can’t handle a shard with 40 players in it.
It’s extremely optimized. When you consider the massive amounts of spells going on, each cast having an animation that’s uniquely calculated for the particle effects, the characters themselves with their varied armor, the flood of combat logging data that is parsed by your add-ons, and the bitcoin miner that’s running in the background of the pornographic tab you have open in Chrome, it’s impressive that the game runs at all.
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If you(atleast me) are lagging inside a raid its your pcs fault most of the time except a few encounters. If you are lagging in SL world areas ask in general chat as most of the times its blizz issue .
I think the game’s glitching. Idk much about computer stuff but I have noticed that some of the quests I’ve done today have glitched out.
I’m playing an alt on a very low pop server, not doing any grouping either and I’m not the only one.
The game simply cannot handle more than 40 active players in a shard. This is less an issue with PvE, because people are playing randomly. But in the case of a warmode shard, everyone is fighting at the same time and your screen comes to a halt.
Yeah thats why i said blizz issue 
. For instance every tuesday morgeth is 
The graphical issue is that the WoW engine is a modified version of the WC3 engine, that was being developed as early as 1999, and has become a wildly inefficient mess of spaghetti code. So you have to apply an overkill of GPU power to play what is basically Playstation 2 quality graphics with HD textures.
To put that in perspective, the new Ashes of Creation build just switched from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, and can handle 1000 player character models on screen in a pvp situation now without too much trouble.
As far as the server keeping up: WoW has trouble with that too, because of how it handles actions, and because exponents are a thing.
Lets say you have 2 guys doing 1 action per GCD. That’s 1 action being sent to the server, and then 2 actions being sent back to each player, so 4 out.
Now lets increase that to 40 players, and thats 40 actions in, and 1600 actions out.
Now lets modify this to a much more realistic 20 actions per player per GCD when you consider pets, procs, passives, movement, npc actions, Energy/rage/mana/CP generations and expendatures, consumables, off-GCD actions etc etc… many of which have to be calculated and which your not even aware of. 20 is probably a hard underestimate.
So that’s 20 actions in per player.
So with 40 players, each of which is performing 20 actions that have to be sent to the server and then rebroadcast to all 40 players, that’s 800 actions coming in to the server to be calculated and processed, and a whopping 32,000 pieces of information going out.
Now that’s a lot for a server to process, and why things like Southshore/Terran Mill just don’t work with the current system because it’s so inneficient.
It’s not a modified wc3 engine, that’s a myth. It just used assets from wc3 as placeholders, but it’s an entirely different code base.
Even then, it’s been over 20 years since development started, and the graphics apis have changed from whatever directx was avaliable in the early 2000s to Directx 12.
I finished rebuilding my pc recently; I was thinking of treating myself to a 240hz monitor:) (current 60 hz) .