When using an ability, the cast goes off immediately. I am experiencing zero audiovisual input delay, apart from the maybe 5ms inherent to a half decent monitor. However, any feedback from the game it self is severely delayed.
This issue is consistently present across all classes and specs on a fresh install. This includes skyriding abilities, vehicle/playable NPC abilities, and every other instance of a castable ability I’ve found.
It is most noticeable on Outlaw - pressing Pistol Shot with Opportunity up often results in the entire GCD window expiring before the ability is done casting. Pressing Between the Eyes sometimes doesn’t play its audio cue and refund combo points until I’ve already cast my next ability afterwards. Essentially, the game is perpetually behind by an inconsistent amount of time when it comes to resolving my abilities.
Also, the actual GCD timer on my abilities, which should tick down smoothly, usually starts more than halfway complete and often rubberbands back and forth. Under a significant haste bonus like a simultaneous Bloodlust/Heroism and Adrenaline Rush, sometimes the dial never even appears, not only ruining my ability to react to procs but also locking me into pressing my abilities very late over and over for the duration of the buff.
Per PingPlotter, my latency is smooth across my ISP’s end. I’m all the way in TN and the round trip from my ISP’s nearest node to Blizzard’s Los Angeles datacenter is roughly 40ms. However, I’ve identified an aggressively fluctuating spike on the datacenter’s IP that ranges from 80-200ms all the way up to 2003ms at worst.
After reading thread after thread about this and seeing video proof, I now know without a doubt that I am experiencing this issue as well. I just didn’t know what it was or how to explain it, but it’s definitely real.
There are other threads from these forums as well that have reported it and fallen on deaf ears it seems:
Bumping this, glad to see I’m not alone. I play outlaw rogue and we have a GCD of 0.8s for 95-100% of the fight, which is similar to a regular spec with ~90% haste. These issues have made the spec nigh unplayable for me in raid since TWW launched.
I will have random intervals where staring at my bars, I cannot tell what casts will go off or not or where my GCD is. The whole cadence goes away, procs will happen after the gcd has “finished” and the next spell has swung, wasting the proc or resources. Mashing an ability during the “gcd” animation will cause it to fire 2-3 times in a row uncontrollably.
I tried a fresh game install, messing with graphics settings, fresh addon setups/playing with no addons. None of these made any difference.
The only additional info I can give is this issue seems to “build up” over time spent in combat, especially in raid where as few as 3-4 pulls of a prog boss will cause my client to be almost unplayable on high haste classes. Its started cropping up in m+ as well, something I didn’t really notice in s1 meaning its getting worse.
And also of course, I am experiencing no actual lag when these spikes happen. I can move and control my character in real time, my ping is at a steady 60-80 (normal for my connection), my FPS is stable at around 70 fps depending on the fight. Mechanics and dodging abilities all happens in real time, the only delay is my characters GCD.
I never experienced issues like this in dragonflight. I hope someone finds a solution soon.