Before prepatch, I’ve had a buttery smooth game. I play on maxed settings, 1080p hard-limited to 60fps, V-Sync on.
After prepatch dropped, I’ve started experiencing micro-stutters in certain situations. Walking around an area with a lot of players was causing very short fps drops, but it wasn’t that severe. It was mostly jarring because of the sudden 60fps → 58fps → 60fps jump. It seemed to be connected to the camera movement - stutters were more severe when moving the camera, especially after an action or a change of state (combat → out of combat transition, jumping). The more assets had to load suddenly, the more severe stutter. But it wasn’t that severe, most likely due to my monster rig. It almost exclusively happened in Orgrimmar and Oribos. Combat outside of those places caused no stutter.
The prepatch is also the time when I started seeing issues with assets loading in-game. NPCs, environmental assets (trees, benches, random stuff on tables, ya know) and gathering nodes (both models in-game and minimap blips) started appearing much later. Previously they were loaded from a much greater distance. Now it looks as if the distance was roughly halved. It’s especially visible when entering a city/town area with a lot of small models on tables and whatnot. It also very negatively impacts gathering - often models and minimap blips load AFTER the character has already moved past their spot. They visibly pop in at half the usual distance. It’s very jarring.
Now, the main issue is that I’ve experienced the same amount of stutter during the whole prepatch. But in Dragon Isles… it’s severely worse! The micro-stutter there is just regular stutter, it happens much more often, even entering an area with a different name (that title that appears on screen and above the minimap) triggers a stutter. FPS can now drop by up to 30, in my case, and a 1-second jump 60 → 30 → 60 feels like a micro freeze at times. The drops are slightly longer. They’re the most severe in heavily populated areas, when entering new areas, when exiting combat. Especially when exiting combat and in Valdrakken.
The combat is weird, because entering combat and during combat it’s fine. But the moment combat ends or a mob dies mid-combat during a pack pull, the game stutters heavily for up to 2 seconds. Looting a corpse also triggers a stutter, especially if it’s being done right after combat ends or during combat. Camera work triggers stutter, NPC gossip options triggering /say dialogue also can stutter.
The asset load is worse as well. What’s strange is that it happens the same no matter my settings, no matter my graphics drivers. I’ve went through a few already and all run the same, performance doesn’t change. Dragonriding doesn’t seem to make it worse, it’s just bad all the time.
Here’s my rig, it clearly shouldn’t cause any issues aside from regular Intel/AMD/NVidia nuances: Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3080, a bunch of SSDs (system and WoW on M2 NVMe), 32GB RAM 3200 CL16. No custom OC, everything uses stock presets with enabled boosting on Ryzen and stock XMP profile with slight voltage changes for system stability.
The stutter is so severe that I’d probably quit the game if I were a PvPer. It seems unplayable in high-reaction scenarios like that. I find this a very major game-breaking issue that should be top priority to fix.