Didn't think I'd be making this post but I kind of have to vent somewhere, figured the gaming community would understand my frustration.
I'm currently travelling but my world of warcraft characters are all on European servers. Unfortunately they don't make transferring easy, not just that it's expensive to transfer characters from one realm to another (something like 70 Hive currently just to transfer 1) but you can't even transfer cross-continents. To make matters worse your WoW subscription doesn't even transfer to other continent servers.
Now you may be wondering why I didn't just cancel the subscription and level up a new character on another continent subscription, but from some googling I heard that people in this country will have to manage with 190-ish ping (even using tools such as exitlag) no matter which servers they play on, so compared to what I was already dealing with (280-330) it wasn't that much of an improvement. At home I usually sit at 20-40 ping. The difference in about 100 ms and having to start all over on different account, basically, didn't seem that appetizing so I figured I'd make due with my main account and see how it goes.
Dragonflight came along, the new expansion, and things were going great early on. In battlegrounds and dungeons you don't really mind the extra latency that much, especially in PvE you could gear up to mythic 12's easily by having learned the tactics and reacting quick but still getting out of stuff in time. When it comes to competitive arena, though, it was a completely different ball-game.
Doesn't help that early on in the expansion DPS classes are so buffed that they manage to pump out a ton of damage. It also doesn't help that healing being my favorite thing to do in PvP requires you to have fast reaction times as well, things like they swapped dps focus to another target, you can't really "juke" or fake cast spells in hopes they use their interrupts in vain. Things like getting in range to crowd control someone only realizing they were already moving further away from you.
If you've ever played first person shooters, you may understand how much ping matters. the average reaction time of human's is about 200 ms, meaning 0.2 seconds, so with an extra 0.3 seconds on top of that you really start to feel the difference quite a lot. You're basically 2.5 people's reaction times behind or 1.5 behind everyone else. I kind of understand that one competitive WoW player that moved to France just to be closer to Blizzards servers to play on 1 digit ping, lol.
Either way, today I decided to give arena's a proper go, and holy hell. It was just depressing really. Now I admit I'm not in shape, it's been years if not a decade since I've competitively healed with a resto druid, and a lot has changed, but I think having played with it quite a bit beforehand it's not the main thing to blame cause I didn't really feel like it was my lack of understanding or knowing the class and all his abilities properly that was the issue. It was definitely the ping. And yes, I know, lag is the most common excuse for newbies to blame things on when they don't go the way you want, but in my case I have consistent delay no matter what I do.
I wanted to record some videos of some Arena PvP'ing, seeing the beauty of the game that many never understand because they either don't play WoW or just do PvE and never get past keybinding their abilities and learning to cast things freely while running/jumping. But matter of the fact is that today's session made me wanna delete all footage real quick rather than creating a montage of it, it almost made me wanna delete my laptop altogether.
So I guess for the time being I'm going to stick to some newb-friendly gameplay's like leveling up characters, doing some casual battlegrounds and possibly dungeons and raids as that's still somewhat reasonable to play with with the hard delay playing from the other side of the planet.
Have you ever had to deal with high latency in gaming?
Screenshots from some footage I recorded I may post later doing some higher mythics on my tank.
