Can we please do something about the Seismic Shot bug already?

abell39 · December 2013

Look at this.

This is Instance #87 in the Winter Festival, to which I had to transfer because Instance #69 was unplayable due to being even more cluttered with these bugged green fountains. Please view the full-size image and observe the frames per second in the upper-right corner. Yes, that's just under 6 fps. And this is before I've done anything more graphics-intensive than walking. The instant I start a fight, my fps drops to 3 fps if I'm lucky or 1 fps if I'm not.

My laptop used to be able to run NW at max graphics, flawlessly, at about 25 fps -- not optimal fps, but high enough that I noticed no lag and the environment was fluid. Now I have to struggle through a 2-frames-per-second slideshow every time I fight a skeleton or a rimefire golem in the Winter Festival. This is not fun. It's beyond frustrating. And I can trace it back to the release of the HR because of the Seismic Shot bug that has been known about since the class went into public testing on the preview shard.

I cannot duplicate this bug on my level 5 female human HR. All I know is that sometimes, when an HR uses Seismic Shot, something goes wrong and it leaves a persistent fountain of green rocks flying everywhere. My laptop can handle the extra rendering when there's just one fountain. But when more than one of these things sprouts up, my laptop cannot handle all the extra rendering it has to do for all the rocks and lights of these superfluous fountains, and suddenly I'm playing a slideshow. The game is not playable like this. I complained very loudly in the Zone before taking this screenshot, which led to several other players saying that the same also happened for them (along with a rare couple of players who said they had no problems, unsure why). It's not just me, and I don't understand why there has been no fix for this yet.

Lowering all my graphics settings to absolute minimum gained me only ~2 fps, and then the graphics are so undetailed that I can't even see anything so I turned them back up. Defragging my computer (despite only 2% fragmentation) gained me ~7 fps, but it still drops to almost nothing because of this bug. Considering I was able to play NW just fine before the HR was released and that I'm not the only player affected by the fps drop caused by this bug, I conclude that my laptop, while not state-of-the-art, is not the problem and that the problem would be solved for all affected players if this bug were fixed so that these green fountains would no longer appear. I cannot play the game properly as long as this bug exists and will not be able to play at all if it gets any worse.

These are my system specs in case it helps:

OS - Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
System Type - x64-based PC
Processor - AMD A8-3500 M APU with AMD Radeon HD Graphics, 1500 MHz, 4 Cores, 4 Logical Processors
Switchable Graphics -

AMD Radeon HD 6750M

AMD Radeon HD 6620G (NW seems to run using this one)
Total Installed Physical Memory - 6 GB (3.78 GB available)
Total Virtual Memory - 11 GB (8.73 GB available)

Can this please be fixed once and for all?

charononus · December 2013

Pretty sure it's only drow rangers that can cause it now. So until it gets fixed try to stop those you know from playing drow rangers.

beckylunatic · December 2013

charononus wrote: »

Pretty sure it's only drow rangers that can cause it now. So until it gets fixed try to stop those you know from playing drow rangers.

Nope, my husband managed to create his first fountain the other day with a wood elf, but he did it while soloing in Cloak Tower so it didn't have any long-term negative effects. Sadly, he has no idea what he did differently that one time.

"Oh look, ranger poo."

jacksoon · December 2013

simply remove that stupid FX effect and change it whit something different. Like the lurker assault of the TR, on beta was the full screen to change color and smoke, now is only the TR body that have this smoke effect

abell39 · December 2013

I've heard that some people have reproduced it by firing off Seismic Shot while aiming it directly at the ground under their feet, but I haven't managed to do it myself.

There aren't any racials that wood elves and drow have in common, are there? If so it might be an elf thing, some racial ability of theirs interacting strangely with SS and breaking it. If not then that's out.

rhoric · December 2013

Not sure how they are able to point it at their feet. When selecting the daily you can move the camera around but that doesn't change where the daily is. I tried recreating it using my drow ranger with the camera angle looking down from overhead, nothing. daily went off without a issue.

abell39 · December 2013

Well it's not that, then. I don't think it occurs because of hitting obstructions in the landscape, otherwise it wouldn't happen on the smooth ice in the festival. When you tested it, rhoric, you tested it without hitting any enemies with it, right? If so then it's not occurring because of missing. Maybe it occurs when too many targets are hit at once? Or when a target is hit at the very outer end of its range?

Maybe I can test that last part on a target dummy in the Trade of Blades....

rhoric · December 2013

Yeah I tested it without using it against any enemies, and it was tested with it going against a side of a hill plus with some brush and a tree in the way

abell39 · December 2013

I was messing with it just now doing daily quests in the festival, couldn't reproduce it by hitting up inclines, missing enemies, or hitting obstacles, either, so between the two of us we've established it's none of those things. I think I hit a rimefire golem somewhere in there but it was hard to tell, so I'm not counting out CC-immunity as a factor that might create the bug somehow. When I get more time later I'll poke around some more and head to the Trade of Blades. I'll also see if I can get into a quiet instance of the festival to hit the golems again in case that's it.

imsmithy · December 2013

I have been suggesting that they just remove the entire gfx and replace it for a week or two now because it is plainly obvious that the entire problem is beyond the graphics guys who work on Neverwinter and quite frankly it is embarrassing but they seem determined to try to fix it , all the while making parts of the event that only takes place once per year unplayable...

Edit - Just did the MoI event and the bug seems to be worse than ever ... If the developers ignore this and do nothing then after the event ends griefers who know how to make the Gfx stay put are going to have a field day spamming Seismic shock all over Protectors enclave , that'll make the entire game nigh on unplayable if it happens.

nwnghost · January 2014

I think hitting a target (or maybe having a target that moves out of the AoE before it is hit?) is a prerequisite, hence why you don't see any in PE but a lot on Monsters on Ice and also none on the Twillight Race. Haven't seen any at Ice Fishing either, but may be wrong.

The amounts in Sharandar and Dread Ring are also much fewer, and I haven't really seen any in low level areas while levelling my HR (even though it is the only daily until level 20 more or less).

That leads me to believe that you need a mobile target (and probably more than 1) and because I haven't been able to reproduce it (and haven't seen it in a low level area) you seem to need to combine it with another power/effect for it to occur.

abell39 · January 2014

Here's a thought: What levels are ya'll's HRs, and do they have any boons (if so which ones)? Maybe there's an upper-level feat, passive ability, or boon that combines with Seismic Shot to make it mess up like this. That would explain why my baby HR can't reproduce it.

If only we had free respecs on the preview shard again, we could test it properly using different combinations of feats/boons, but as far as I know that's still out of the question....

ladysylvia · January 2014

Oh we post the bugscreens?

So a fail graphic development:

Fps between 5-16...

rhoric · January 2014

I used my seismic shot in FC yesterday a couple times. I had moving targets and I know some moved before it hit but it didn't bug out on me. It might have something to do with certain mob attacks cause in monsters on ice. It is always in the same areas and that is where the Rimfire Golems always spawn.

arkadian9 · January 2014

I replicated it on my wood elf by being interrupted by a knock back while I was in the process of firing it.

I can't believe this bug is still around. It was around from the first week that the ranger went on the test server. It was widely reported and yet 3 months later the bug is still there.

rhoric · January 2014

That makes sense now in the screenshots where the spots are, rimefire golems are there and they have their knockbacks

chocobofarmer · January 2014

bendalek · January 2014

I think the problem is that not enough people are reporting it IN GAME when it happens ... The Devs have said they have tried (and thought they had succeeded) to fix it several times, but it keeps recurring ... IF people make a bug report when it happens, they may be able to find, or at least narrow down, the common denominator ...

That, or it's just such a huge fix, that they would need to remove the power and/or animation altogether to fix it ... Ain't no-one got time for 'dat!

arimis5226 · January 2014

As I type this message, A friend and I have been bouncing back and forth between instances. We are in the Chasm, instance #8, and we are at the very back end of the map. Our frame rates drop tremendously when we are on instance 8. It has nothing to do with population, because there is only 2 people on #8. You could also go to #6 and see the EXACT same drop in frame rate. Instances 1 and 2 are good smooth rendering, one is high population the other is low.

So in a nutshell it's become apparent to me that there is something wrong with this specific instance, or instances. Take the same concept and apply it to dungeons like SP or FH. FH has a lot of bad instances. Frame rates become unmanageable and unplayable. The problem with a dungeon is, you don't have the option to "change" instances. You have to re-Q and hope you don't wind up in the same spot again.

Could someone please explain to me how this is suppose to be conductive to good social gaming? We get in groups and fail at dungeons and so many people think it's lag or their GPU or their internet connection....BUT IT ISNT!! It IS in fact the instances and the servers that house the problems. So many people are getting discouraged from playing this game because they experience frustrating and random drops in FPS, that has nothing to do with the processing of their GPU. It's on the server side! I'm really having a hard time keeping a guild going in this game encouraging new players and trying to teach them the mechanics of the game when half of them are experiencing lag that is unmanageable on many occasions.

My question is this: Is Perfect World aware of these issues and are they working on addressing the problems? Or are they unaware, and I'm uncovering some sort of keystone here? I can't imagine PW not being aware of consumer complaints. Well, maybe this is the problem.

poisoncloud · January 2014

Another problem with Rimefist golems there is Disruptive Shot only disrupt their animation, the aoe + knockback still get cast, only without the red circle...

wentris · January 2014

You probably run to instance where some bugs happened. Its like with rangers daily, that used to leave green rifts on the ground that last forever and caused severe fps drop in instance. Dungeons, however, are recreated each time you start a new one, so problem you mentioned does not apply to them. If you have run into dungeon where you had fps problems which you did not have before in it that probably was your party that could cause it (skills they used, amounts of mobs they fought at once etc.) I know there is a CW daily that makes my fps drop very low, one that explodes with ice and then leaves snow on the gorund.

inthefade462 · January 2014

There was a change made with module 2 where certain instances either do not load textures or have graphics memory leaks. It happens in certain instances of mc, fh, and sp. Have ran multiple runs of these dungeons with the same party using the same abilities and it happens only in some instances not others.

arimis5226 · January 2014

Why wouldn't the problem apply to dungeons? The servers that run those dungeons could just as likely be hosed up as the machines that run the world map instances. I think there is either a networking problem going on, or more likely, there are some "bad" computers down there that need to be serviced or upgraded. What I'm saying is which ever machine is creating the instances needs to be fixed. Something is broken and/or not working as it should.

arimis5226 · January 2014

and yes inthefade462 is absolutely right. Ever since Mod two was implemented we have had these problems. Something tells me that there is a bottleneck somewhere in this system that is causing problems.

angrymanagement · January 2014

This looks like the same bug that was on the test shard when mod 2 was first rolled to it. It killed FPS so badly that the game was pretty much unplayable unless you found a zone HRs hadn't been running around in. It doesn't seem to be as frequent as it was then, but still seems to kill FPS. Not sure why this was re-introduced in Mod 2...

arimis5226 · January 2014

wow so let me get this straight, its this HR power that is being left on the ground causing the servers to get overloaded with "omg" and the server processing the instance starts to slow down in fps. Wow. Just wow. Yeah I think you guys need to fix this mess asap. It quite literally makes the game unplayable after so long in some instances. These servers are getting taxed to the max because of a bug that leaves behind rendering of complex lights and shadows. LOL THIS ALL MAKES PERFECT SINCE. So, you guys know about the problem, seeing as you merged these two threads. But the maintenance going down right now doesn't have a patch...which means the problem will keep happening until you guys figure out what to do about it. nice. NICE.

wedalti · January 2014

I play a HR fairly regularly, and have stopped using Seismic Shot completely. Not because it's causing gfx issues, or server-side problems, or because I don't want to inadvertently grief anyone, but because the daily power itself is underwhelming compared to the rest of the daily powers available by the time you have reached level 60.

While I would certainly NOT condone or endorse ANYONE doing so, but sadly, it might actually require that the HR community actually make a point to create these effects in massive numbers in the generally high traffic areas on all available instances, simply to force the development team to make addressing the issue its top priority.

Guerrilla tactics do tend to have positive results, even if it makes our own time playing less enjoyable.

We are PWE/Cryptic's customers, paying or not, we deserve to have a game that does not have this level of problem.

beckylunatic · January 2014

rhoric wrote: »

That makes sense now in the screenshots where the spots are, rimefire golems are there and they have their knockbacks

Ok, thinking about it, the ones I see in Sharandar are near Giantsoul/Thorn spawn points, and my husband had this happen while fighting the second boss in Cloak Tower, which involves knockbacks as well.

Are we on to something?

sigwald01 · January 2014

I have a pretty solid PC with substantial ram & graphics card and the game has always looked and played really well. I went up to Ice Spire the other day and up on the higher ice plane I started having a really bad slow down/freeze as soon as monsters engaged me.I could hear the audio of my guy taking it on the chin while the video was going super slow fps and even froze for several seconds until I managed to escape the area. I happened to notice one of those "gushers" in the area (or whatever the graphic is called: neon green lights jetting out of the ground). Later in another instance in the chasm the same thing happened near these jets and I'm thinking they could be the cause. I don't believe I need to be fitted for a tin foil hat but is anyone else experiencing this, it's quite a bummer......

charononus · January 2014

yes the bugged seismic shot graphics slow down almost everyone.

sigwald01 · January 2014

Ah OK, thanks Charononus. Now that I know what they are I googled it and got up to speed. Thanks for the info!!!

Can we please do something about the Seismic Shot bug already?

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