We’ll assume that this particular player has 33% haste giving 1.50 second cast times. "Hard lockout" still on the left in red, with the "queue zone" on the right in green. The grey area in the middle is the period during which the client will let you press buttons and then ask the server if it can queue a spell yet. Now, because lag fluctuates – especially in a raid environment where all the four sources we talked about previous combine to do their worst – the precise moment at which a spell queue action becomes possible will vary from cast to cast. Stepping back a bit, let’s think about our arsenal of spells. Elementals, we have Lightning Bolt, Lava Burst, Chain Lightning, and a bunch of instant-casts. Our longest cast time is Lightning Bolt at 2 seconds base, and our shortest are all at 1.5 second effective cast times (either they take 1.5s to cast, or they trigger the 1.5s global cooldown). With Icecrown haste levels the average elemental shaman could be casting one spell about once every 1.2 seconds or so.Īs we saw in part two, in a worst case scenario, our full network lag plus reaction time can be applied to every single spell cast. Which for an ICC elemental with 200ms latency and a 150ms reaction time could mean (in a worst case) that you’re experiencing 350ms of “dead time” between every cast – which we said are occurring once every 1.2 seconds – which means that nearly 30% of your time would be spent “doing nothing” instead of casting.
Why do I mention this? Because, with our array of very quick casting spells, we suffer from this type of “cast bar” lag very severely. If our spells took 3 seconds to cast using the same parameters above, we’d only be spending 10% of our time “doing nothing” and lag would only be applied to our spells once every 3 seconds instead of nearly once a second.
So lag management is very important to elemental because it can make the difference between, say, 30% of your fight time spent doing literally no damage or 100% of your time doing as much damage as possible.
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