how's the lag in northrend?

[Nicbennett]

For most of you, did it get better or worse from outland? I'm kinda worried, I don't really have good enough hardware to be boxing, though it's playable at least. Sometimes in the Outlands though my FPS will drop to about 10, which sucks, but I can usually live with or avoid it for a while. am I just going to die in NR? I've heard Dalaran is impossible even for people with much better hardware than I have, but that can be worked around. don't need to spend much time in a major city anyway. If it's going to be terrible just questing though, I may not bother buying WotLK and just level a few more teams to 70 until I can upgrade my hardware significantly.

Thoughts?

[Maxion]

It is worse in northrend than in BC by my experience, though its a lot better inside instances. (than outdoors at least) and dalaran is just about out of bounds for more than a couple characters at a time, this depends on how much ram you have though.

[welwyn]

with the lag me and my entire server has been experiencing sudden spikes server wide of around 4k ms this happens maybe 2-3 times a day and normally everyone fighting a mob dies because of it causing massive headaches. anyone else getting the same thing on their server?

[Ozbert]

You'll probably find the massive lag spikes every few hours coincide with new Wintergrasp battles kicking off.

I see it a lot on Outland EU.

[Ticks]

I am playing on two servers: a low population and a high pop and I never experience lag on the low pop and frequently encounter lag on the high pop.

[emesis]

You'll probably find the massive lag spikes every few hours coincide with new Wintergrasp battles kicking off.

Aye. Wintergrasp brings all of Northrend to its knees on our server.

I propose a new buff to show up to reduce the confusion and encourage people to go to Kalimdor or EK. This buff would show up while Wintergrasp is in contention:

Essence of Winterlag
Instant
Slows all actions of the user by 95%. Increases frustration level by 200%. Breaks follow immediately.

[Spook]

For most of you, did it get better or worse from outland? I'm kinda worried, I don't really have good enough hardware to be boxing, though it's playable at least. Sometimes in the Outlands though my FPS will drop to about 10, which sucks, but I can usually live with or avoid it for a while. am I just going to die in NR? I've heard Dalaran is impossible even for people with much better hardware than I have, but that can be worked around. don't need to spend much time in a major city anyway. If it's going to be terrible just questing though, I may not bother buying WotLK and just level a few more teams to 70 until I can upgrade my hardware significantly.

Thoughts?

I hardware mostly box, but I do run two instances of Wow on one machine, but its a quad core 8GB Vista-64 machine, so it handles Northend very well, even Dalaran. However, I finally had to retire my oldest machine, an early XP machine that I had to add memory before I could even get it to run wow. It couldn't even handle a single toon in Dalaran, running in slideshow mode, and /follow was impossible. However, that old macihne did pretty well in most of Northend.

Plan on Northend using about 50% more memory than Outland, and you should be OK, except for Dalaran. If you're using XP, you'll likely need 4MB memory, even though XP won't use it all, and a really good video card. If you're running five toons, and using Vista, I'd recommend V-64, and no less than 8MB memory.

I have mixed feelings about the Lich King expansion. I find it mostly very nice eye candy, but find it boring to play. I mix in some outland leveling with some of my other groups, and find that I can slowly work my way though Northend in two to three hour sessions that way. I feel that I MUST play some characters in the latest expansion, as level 80 characters are MUCH stronger than level 70 toons, but I'm sure in no hurry to reach 80. I have discovered that leveling up to level 72+ is possible in outland as long as you have the Lich King expansnion installed, although it is somewhat slower than doing it in Northend, and of course you miss the Northend starter gear doing it that way.

[unseen]

Yeah, Dalaran is definitely the worst.

I have a P4 3.2ghz with 1 gig of ram machine running two instances of wow in windowed mode with low graphics, etc. They were a slideshow and made trying to walk down the street a struggle. My beefier machine was having serious issues too (it runs 3 clients and is a quad core machine).

Over the weekend I doubled the RAM in both my machines (went from 1 to 2 gigs of ram in my p4 and from 2 to 4 in my quad core), this helped tremendously but it's still laggy and I have to watch carefully so they don't fall off of follow in town.

In the wild, prior to my RAM upgrade, things were relatively smooth. There were areas where things would chop (flight path rides and the such), but overall it was "OK". It was definitely more laggy than BC content, however - that much I'm sure of. Once I got used to it I didn't notice as much. Since the RAM upgrade I haven't had any problems outside of Dalaran.

[Nicbennett]

Plan on Northend using about 50% more memory than Outland, and you should be OK, except for Dalaran. If you're using XP, you'll likely need 4MB memory, even though XP won't use it all, and a really good video card. If you're running five toons, and using Vista, I'd recommend V-64, and no less than 8MB memory.

I suspected that to be true, and it makes me really sad. My motherboard only supoorts 2gb of RAM, so it would basically involve building a new computer to upgrade it. I guess I'll just make the most of my RaF by leveling a few more teams to 60 or 70 for a couple months until I can gather some cash for an upgrade, or better yet, go hardware. Thanks for the input though everyone.