Summoner lag (not a troll)

[curby]

Summoner lag (not a troll)

I've been having a great deal of fun playing my Fishymancer, but the problem of video lag is getting to me even now, before I spend some of my final pts towards maxing Mages.

I seem to get two kinds of lag when playing my Nec. The first is a kind of catchup, where I would move at some speed then suddenly speed up as if my client were rushing to catch up to where the server thought my avatar was. This happens in town, on the stairs between Shenk and Eldritch, etc.

The second type is just video slowdown in general, with my client dropping framerate and eventually dropping frames altogether in the /fps data.

I usually have my merc and 12 skellies up (i'm not currently using mages), and I've been experimenting with always walking around to keep block up.

I play fullscreen with perspective and all the graphical tricks turned on, but my machine should be more than enough to run d2: 3GHz P4, WD Raptors in striped RAID, Gig of Dual Channel memory, Geforce 6, etc. I defrag regularly, and make sure that other active processes are very low-req.

So I guess my questions are twofold:

First of all, what causes this perceived lag?

Secondly, how can I mitigate it? Will Mages make it much worse? Is walking better than running? Windowed better than fullscreen? I notice when I teleport with skellies and revives, they all stay clumped together. Should the lag improve when my minions aren't running about on their own? Is this just something that comes with the territory and can't be changed?

Thanks!

--Curby

 

[Mad Mantis]

Online I've had the occasional slowdown when having a large contingent of Skellies. I've also had slowdowns when I was just waiting in camp. It can be your connection that causes the slow down. Do these problems still exist if you don't summon any Skellies?

 

[Muzzy Roberto]

I've noticed that if I get my army a-rollin' on B.net, the lag tide soon comes in. Granted, the lag tide is never really far away on B.net, but my summonmancer seems to get more lag than not. I just made an SP necro though, and no lag thus far.

 

[Cdnexpat]

I find lag is almost always caused by my internet connection, my summon/nova mancer is my worst offender for lag. That said I've had huge lag when only my barb and nith are on the screen. I try to make sure that i don't run internet demanding programs at the same time as I play d2, sometimes that helps, sometimes not.

 

[curby]

Thanks, perhaps it is due to my connection. Unfortunate that a dodgy connection would impact framerate. =)

I've got a tip for teleporting summoners that I briefly mentioned above: if you want your Skellies to stick together after teleporting, revive some melee enemies. For some reason when you have melee revives, all your minions (incl golem and merc) just stand still after a teleport. Sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad. It does seem to reduce lag though, which is especially important while teleporting around. Hope it helps someone out there!

--Curby

 

[rickcarson]

Diablo II connects at about 1-1.5KB/sec

I've noticed that sometimes I'll get a game that is glacially slow, even though my network connection is easily capable of handling up to 50KB/sec.

Exiting that game, and creating a new one typically solves that problem.
Which makes me suspect that the problem is at the other end.

Curse those WoW bandwidth hugging hippies! ;-)

I've also noticed that I tend to get disconnected and booted from the game a lot now, typically when taking a Town Portal or moving between acts. Again, my hardware setup hasn't changed so the problem is more likely at the other end (Blizzard's Servers).

 

[shadownecros]

I get the "unrecoverable error" message alot, and I couldn't even begin to tell you how many times I haev reinstalled, it seems to solve the problem for a couple days, but then it's back again. On the subject of summoner lag, I love going into a nm game with lvl 40-50's raise my army, get into a cow lvl, then when they complain, unsummon my army, and laugh as they all get slaughtered. Altho that tactic normally gets alot of cat calls, but the proof that they needed me was there.

 

[munchkins]

i have a summoner with a complete army that totals 46 minion (14 skeles/14 mages/16 revives/gumby/merc) and the lag isnt usually too bad... granted i dont usually have all 16 revives out, but still a bare minimum of 30 minions.

there is different types of lag... summoners will always have some lag due to the video not being able to cope with all the summons, this is normal and probably wont cause problems other then slower gameplay

if you are losing connection, long pauses of no movement in the game, etc. its probably the connection

 

[curby]

Thanks, folks. I thankfully seldomly get dropped from a game. Sometimes I fail to create/join, but that doesn't have to do with existing summons as I'm just in a chatroom.

I'll just live to learn with a bit of lag, and try to remember to revive a few melee critters when I'm doing a lot of teleporting. Thanks again!

--Curby