As a Hunter, lag is inconvenient. I might need to wait an extra second before an arrow fires, and I will occasionally mess up my rotation because a lag spike lasted longer than an activation/animation time. Meh, I sometimes shoot people in the face a slightly different way than expected.
As a Warden, lag is fairly horrible. Gambits key off combinations of three skills, so you could be in trouble if thrown-off timing leads to your getting the wrong skills, the wrong order, or a gambit firing before it is complete. If I need my area effect morale leech (312-4), I may really need that health, and 31-4, 32-4, 12-4, or 312-“why isn’t this firing” are not going to cut it. Those are all other gambits, one of which has a small HoT, but they are not the one I need.
Server-side lag has been problematic since the last update. Every fight or two, everything freezes for 0.5 to 2 seconds. It feels absurd to whine about 1 second delays, but that is very frequent, relatively large, and annoyance builds up. Gameplay has a rhythm, and you do not want skips several times a song. I find myself paying more attention to the UI so that lag befouls fewer gambits.
: Zubon
I’ve “heard” (whatever that’s worth) that they’re working on hardware updates to the live servers while keeping them online but it’s causing the server lag we’re seeing. I thought it was bad last week but this week was even worse.
I don’t have a problem with gambit builders I’m doing manually as I can see when the lag hits and nothing is happening so I can just back off and re-press the next builder key so it’s queued rather than whatever I quickly spammed. It’s the gambit masteries that get completely destroyed by the lag — there’s no way to go back and re-key one so the server automatically fires off the *last* mastery you hit not the first one, which ruins the entire gambit.
It’s already frustrating grouping with people who have no clue how to play with a warden in the group (hell, most people don’t know how to play in a group at all) but throw the lag on top of things ruining most of your gambits and it’s not pretty.
I have noticed more lag in recent months, not sure if it has anything to do with more people playing since F2P came out. I have seen lag in remote parts of the shire & also in solo skirmishes.
They fixed it. Probably due to your bringing the issue to national attention. ;-} http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?384980-Three-cheers-for-the-Turbine-staff! (that’s a possibly unnecessarily lurvey thread, but anyway reports are it’s fixed).