Quote Originally Posted by JadeCurtiss View Post
I don't know what goes in to alleviating something like this. Would this need new servers or is it something that can be retrofitted?
A lot of things, really:
  • Designing animations to coincide with the completion of the cast, rather than the animation beginning after the cast completes (since cast completion is when it snapshots).
  • The tick rate improvement wouldn't make you more successful at doing the mechanics, in my opinion, but rather display the information to you quicker. Currently, it snapshots your death, then displays it to you what feels like a second later - but that second feels like an eternity and during that time you can continue running and, if you don't understand the game, you falsely think you escaped the mechanic. The tick rate improvement would mainly just help bring it to a point where, if something kills you, you see that death instantly on your screen instead of being able to continue running for 1 second.
  • Server processing improvements - I don't think it's just tick rate, necessarily. Although a linear combat queue is vitally important to ensure combat events happen in order, the elements around it can be multi-threaded, so if that can be improved it would probably reduce the time it takes the server to process things. Multi-threading basically means multiple events are processed at the same moment and take advantage of the, you know, 100 cores their server probably has.
  • Network processing improvements. I don't experience the packet loss issues some people seem to which causes them to fail mechanics that I don't at 150 ping, but what could help is using UDP and selectively not minding if certain packets get lost if those packets are sent frequently. Beside this, more multi-threading so that it can be processed faster.
  • Client death prediction could work if the client is aware that you stood in the mechanic and aware of how much damage the mechanic does. If the damage dealt is beyond the +/-5% of damage variance and is enough to kill you, then the client could just show you as dead or at least as having 1HP until the server confirms the death.