Gripe of the Week: Custom Lag Tolerance

by on Aug.28, 2011, under Gripe of the Week

  I was trying to troubleshoot my DPS late last night and figure out why it was so much lower then others who were comparably geared.

This led me to the ‘Custom Lag Tolerance’ setting under ‘Interface Options | Combat’.  If you recall, this was supposed to be Blizzard’s “response” to the /stopcasting macros of 3.0.  I had mine set, as the tooltip suggests, to my general lag to the server, which is 50ms.

Once I disabled the custom lag tolerance (which reverts it to 400ms), my DPS went up by over 10% overall.  Custom lag tolerance defines how soon before a GCD expires can you queue the next spell available.  The problem with it being that you can’t “pre-cast” spells, so you have to cast them in real-time as your GCD becomes available.  This would cause DPS losses whenever I would rotate spells (like applying DoTs and starting a cycle after each Eclipse proc).  This also wouldn’t allow me to “pre-cast” Treants during a hardcast, I’d have to wait for the GCD to become available before I could drop them.

I don’t know why it took me so long to finally turn this off, but I’m glad I did.



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4 Comments for this entry

  • Ruarin
    August 28th, 2011 on 3:32 pm

    thank you, after reading this I also turned it off and voila, just felt like my old wow again^^ my moonkin says hi too.

    Reply
  • Louis
    August 29th, 2011 on 9:26 am

    Hi Sunfyre,

    I’ve been reading your blog for a while now, it’s great so thanks for all the information and great tips.

    I tried this but didn’t notice much difference, certainly not 10% increase in dps. I freely admit the problem is likely me! I went to an isolated dummy and battered away on it for a few 3 minute cycles with my Custom Lag Tolerance set at 120ms, 60ms (roughly what my lag was at the time), and disabled. I logged the results on my personal WoL channel. The results I got were within a few hundred dps of each other, which is what I would consider “Louis Error Range” ;-) .

    Since we have similar server lag times in general, I am assuming I am pressing keys bad. I’ve been told my dummy rotation/Patchwerky style is good, so I’m not entirely sure where I could be going wrong. How has this change made such a massive increase to your dps? Is it perhaps because I am a new-ish player of WoW (~end of WotLK and Cata only) and am just used to the casting style of modern WoW?

    Thanks for any input you can offer, and keep up the great work.

    Reply
    • Sunfyre
      August 29th, 2011 on 11:55 am

      Do you pre-queue your spells? If you don’t cast spells before the GCD is up, then you really won’t take advantage of having the custom lag tolerance turned off. If you pre-queue, it ensures your spells land the instant the GCD is up, instead of waiting for your slower, more feeble, inferior human brain to time the GCD!

      Reply
  • Louis
    August 29th, 2011 on 12:44 pm

    If be “pre-queue” you mean “mash buttons repeatedly whilst crying even though my GCD timer is still up” then yes. ;-)

    Reply

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