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We have a change that will be going live in GU39 that we hope will help with the lag everyone is experiencing in raids.
The particular thing we're addressing here is kind of a 'death by 1000 cuts' problem. As the level cap has gone up player's spell books have gotten larger. We've also made the interactions between spells more complex. The result is that the server is now spending a lot of time generating what we call spell examine information. Currently the client has to request this information for every spell in your spell book, and there are a lot of times in raids when we invalidate all your spell examine info because of a buff or debuff landing, which makes the client request your entire spell book _again_. Generating these descriptions is very hard on the server, they can't be cached because they are very dependent on the character's stats, etc. Furthermore there's a lot of text expansion and, on international servers, translation (think spell effect description text), so this is especially costly for non english server (which have some of the worst lag right now). This whole design is bad for server performance, increases network traffic, and affects client framerate as well. So we've changed it pretty substantially in GU39 by adding some more information to the base spell book data sent, so after this update the client will no longer need to request the detailed spell examine information until you either pull up a tool tip or examine the spell.
Hope that clears things up. I understand that it's frustrating to see us say 'we made it better' over and over and not feel the difference much. While I can't promise that this will make it 'all good', from our point of view this is our biggest available improvement right now.
The particular thing we're addressing here is kind of a 'death by 1000 cuts' problem. As the level cap has gone up player's spell books have gotten larger. We've also made the interactions between spells more complex. The result is that the server is now spending a lot of time generating what we call spell examine information. Currently the client has to request this information for every spell in your spell book, and there are a lot of times in raids when we invalidate all your spell examine info because of a buff or debuff landing, which makes the client request your entire spell book _again_. Generating these descriptions is very hard on the server, they can't be cached because they are very dependent on the character's stats, etc. Furthermore there's a lot of text expansion and, on international servers, translation (think spell effect description text), so this is especially costly for non english server (which have some of the worst lag right now). This whole design is bad for server performance, increases network traffic, and affects client framerate as well. So we've changed it pretty substantially in GU39 by adding some more information to the base spell book data sent, so after this update the client will no longer need to request the detailed spell examine information until you either pull up a tool tip or examine the spell.
Hope that clears things up. I understand that it's frustrating to see us say 'we made it better' over and over and not feel the difference much. While I can't promise that this will make it 'all good', from our point of view this is our biggest available improvement right now.