World of Warcraft lag and latency: causes and fixes

World of Warcraft shows you two latency figures, not one, and players often watch the wrong one. Here's what each means, why WoW lags as freezes rather than jitter, and what lowers the figure that matters for combat.

Home and world latency

Hover over the network meter (the small bars beside the menu buttons) and WoW shows two numbers:

• Home: your connection to the services behind chat, guilds, item tooltips and the auction house.
• World: your connection to the game world itself: spells, abilities, movement, combat.

They're separate connections, and they can even go to different places. That's why it's possible to chat normally while you can't cast or see anyone move. For raids, dungeons and PvP, the world figure is the one to watch.

Why WoW lags as freezes

WoW sends its game traffic over TCP, which delivers everything in order and sends again whatever got lost. So a lost packet doesn't make a player skip a little, as in a shooter. Instead everything behind it waits until the lost piece has been sent again. You feel it as a freeze, then a burst: casts that hang, then three go off at once, and you're standing somewhere else.

That makes packet loss and sudden queueing worse in WoW than the average latency suggests. A steady 40 ms plays better than a 25 ms that drops a packet every few seconds.

Not every freeze is yours, either. In big raids and busy cities the world server has a lot to work out, and when it falls behind, everyone there lags together.

Find which kind you have

• World latency high all the time: distance, or a long road from your provider to Blizzard.
• World latency fine, then frozen for a moment: loss or queueing on the way. Most often on your own line or Wi-Fi; sometimes your provider in the evening. What causes ping spikes shows how to tell.
• Everyone in the raid lagging at the same time: the server, not your connection.
• Low frame rate in cities and raids with calm latency: your PC.

What helps

1. Use a cable. Wi-Fi drops packets, and in WoW each lost packet holds up everything behind it. Wi-Fi or Ethernet explains more.
2. Keep the line quiet during raids: uploads and downloads elsewhere in the home add queueing.
3. Fix the router's queue (SQM, or QoS that's configured) if the connection is shared.
4. Change the route when your world latency is higher than your distance to Blizzard's European servers explains, or climbs every evening.

Where NoSpike fits

NoSpike's World of Warcraft entry is verified: NoSpike knows which traffic is WoW's from Blizzard's own data and moves only that, for both retail and Classic. It measures your own route and the routes through its relays in Europe, and routes the game only when a relay is faster.

It checks again every minute and won't change the route in the middle of an encounter unless the one you're on is failing, because a moved connection is a disconnect. When your own route is already best, the app says so and leaves it alone.