I've found very early on into kunark swarming the following things:
1) I had to turn off all my particles. having 40 drolvs light up from songs caused my 5 yr old lappy to struggle. It also struggled just looking at a swarm, so turning in the direction some other bard in DL had 50 drolvs would dip my frames, even if they were over a hill and not actually rendered on the screen. EC tunnel also makes it lag, as does having a bunch of corpses around (make some macros for /hidecorpses all, looted, none to help with your swarm's corpses).
2) there's a little lag every time some one zones in. Some of the popular swarm zones are high traffic, and they're the ones most likely for the random-out-of-nowhere lag death. In the second or so the game takes to somehow add a boat/hammer-load of people into your zone the drolvs or cockatrices/cacti will sometimes catch up and ruin you.
So hardware definitely has something to do with it, as does the way the server works. This client is not the same client that ran this game 17 yrs ago, and it won't run on every toaster ( can't wait to build a new desktop with a 980ti, ssd and i7 to play eq on it! :P ). Additionally, your ISP may be made of poop like my current one ( a big middle finger goes out to Time Warner ), and perhaps some massive improvements can still be made to the netcode as well ( I certainly shouldn't be going link dead as frequently as I am, no other multiplayer game does this ). It'll be interesting to play a bard on the new compy, with EQ on the SSD, hooked up to FIOS; maybe I won't have to do the following crazy crap anymore.
Now for the aforementioned crazy crap: to combat these things I've found that circling wasn't really an option. I instead would only use the mouse to turn in/out in small increments (since if someone zones in when i'm turning with the mouse i'll turn right into the swarm in the little stutter i experience) and that I would follow a general circle shape, but only tighten it in to apply one dot then strafe only straight out (no holding the right mouse button down, even if not turning; just let the strafe run build some distance between you and the mobs) while i'd switch instruments before tightening back in for the next dot and so on. This won't prevent random out of nowhere deaths 100% of the time, but it definitely helps. Every zone is different in how you adjust your circling, so you'll probably still get "learning" deaths. This will also increase the time it takes to kill your mobs, but if it keeps you alive, it doesn't matter. You'll eventually get more comfortable with the zone specific deviations from circling, and with blending in your dots (and mebbe throwing in the occasional desperate dirge for big AE nuke ) you'll get rid of your swarms faster.
There's also circle breaking due to pathing things you want nothing to do with (sarnaks, drachnids, dragoons, otters etc), tricksy terrain (avoid trees, walls, running out of beach etc), as well as other players ( there'll be other bards in zone and you should avoid crossing the swarms, no matter how hard the other guy might try to be difficult/penis-headed ). Sometimes you might also want to turn on selo's and kite them away from a bunch of corpses to loot, because rezzes cost plats. Just be sure to keep an eye on your weight, as strafing won't be sufficient to avoid getting hit anymore with a buncha coppers on you. The place I used to swarm in the DL i actually used a figure 8 as well as some wavy circle to avoid wandering spiders, other players, and rage-deaths.
I've been told that turning with the arrow keys might be better than mouse turning, but i've never been able to reconcile wanting to turn with the mouse once the swarming is done (higher mouse sensitivity) and the extremely low sensitivity required for key turning on a reasonable enough radius. I'm sure some tapping of the keys is required, but i was already set in my weird broken circle method by this point. I also found playing with the arrow keys that my strafing would sometimes break, causing me to get consumed by the swarm so i eventually just gave up on it.
|