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I can often have a latency of over 600ms when raiding and I have heard people in-game say that latency can be reduced by using a custom proxy or DNS server (I don't remember which).

Are there any good strategies to reduce latency in WoW, in addition to loading the minimum of addons?

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There are a lot of good points brought up on EpicAdvice.com - Tools for lowering latency

lowerping and smoothping both seem to get decent reviews, as well as a blog on elitistjerks that talks about some registry hacks, addon issues, and many other tips for reducing disconnects (which may also help with pings).

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    +1 I'm torn between voting you up for the EJ link, and voting you down for the EJ link. It's a really nice resource, but it's slightly out of date now. Could you edit the content in, so we can keep it up to date with StackExchange magic? (For example, some buffs have been modified in 3.3.3 to reduce spam.)
    – György Andrasek
    Jul 8, 2010 at 10:42
  • @Jurily - I would, but I think it would be more useful if someone was inspired enough to create their own guide about lowering latency that didn't include mis-information.. I was just including this post as a summary of what the EpicAdvice community had.
    – gnarf
    Jul 8, 2010 at 20:51
  • Dear lord, everything in this entire thread is misinformation. Decreasing ping is not equivalent to decreasing latency, any more than curing a cough is the same curing a cold. Every suggestion on this page, while decreasing ping, will actually increase the latency of packets. Any positive effects this causes are purely psychological.
    – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft
    Dec 15, 2014 at 22:35
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I personally use Leatrix Latency Fix. It dropped my latency from ~250ms to ~60ms on all European realms I tried (currently on Draenor).

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  • Works for me too.
    – pjc50
    Jul 19, 2010 at 13:19
  • Mine went from 300 to 110 using this. :) midwest, running on a west coast server...
    – GalacticCowboy
    Aug 6, 2010 at 12:25
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1) Are you on wireless? If yes, plug it in and get an instant boost.

2) Do you have other things using your connection? My wife and I both play (different computers) and we're at 200 ping. She turns on internet radio, bam we're up to 400 ping. Run a netstat to check for existing connections.

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Well latency is primarly based on your distance to the WoW server and the network connection you have. Are you in US playing on EU servers or vice-versa? Is your Internet connection shared? Are you uploading / downloading or your neighbours sharing your connection while you play?

All this can affect latency.

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  • I used to believe the distance is the primary matter for latency too. but my own experience showed me that this is not true anymore. I still have to research for why, but just read my answer to see what I mean.
    – cregox
    Aug 5, 2010 at 20:39
  • Well you're right. However, by distance I mean network distance. This distance is usually measured in number of hops (routers, switches) between you and the destination server. One can usually find out the number of these hops by doing a treceroute to the target IP. In your case, the number of hops might actually be the same no matter where you moved. It might just be coincidence that in your case the number of hops are the same. Another factor is the bandwidth of these hops. If you have a crap connection somewhere in your route, your ping goes up, even if you would move closer to ze server
    – Trefex
    Aug 6, 2010 at 15:48
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You can use a SSH tunneling service, such as http://lowerping.com, these can help if you are physically far away from the WoW server. They have a free trial to see if it helps in your situation.

Addons are unlikely to affect network latency that much.

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This thread explains how and why the proxy trick works.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=6214123217&sid=1 "This is going to get technical in places; skip the bits you don't understand."

It follows that the non-proxy registry trick (see the answer about leatrix) is going to wreak havoc on non-gaming stuff, like downloads filling your upload capacity.

And I certainly concur about not using wireless - I don't use anything wireless except for my laptops and mobile. Thus I've never had mouse nor keyboard run out of batteries in the middle of a boss fight.

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  • +1 for wireless hate. Your link is broken though.
    – kotekzot
    Aug 18, 2012 at 21:56
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  • If you're playing over a wireless connection, make sure you have a strong signal to your wireless access point. Also make sure your computer and access point are both configured to use the most recent wireless specification available (802.11n is newer than 802.11g is newer than 802.11b).

  • If you're playing over Ethernet, make sure your network adapter is configured to use full duplex on the highest possible speed (10/100/1000 Mbps).

  • Close any programs on your computer that might be using a lot of bandwidth. Common culprits are streaming music and file-sharing (torrents, FTP, etc.).

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A change of DNS server is unlikely to make any difference to your latency, all DNS does is tell your computer the address of the WoW servers, it should only need to do this once per server (per session) at login or zone change, so you really won't notice DNS resolution speed differences.

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Sometimes it helps to turn error correction of Your internet connection off. That is, if the high latency is caused by high traffic, rather than long distance to the server.

Look into the settings possibilities of Your router. However, You don't have the guarantee that the provider is going to respect the router's query to turn error correction off. Some providers offer the possibility to do this explicitly, either for free or a small fee.

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Recently I've went from Brazil to New Zealand and tried playing on same realm... I was amazed at first, my ping in NZ went up from 200 to 1k, but it was understandable due to distance... But I was even more stunned when it actually dropped, in less than 1 hour, back to 200.

When I came back to Brazil, the ping took just few minutes to adjust.

Now, that proves to me WoW itself already do a lot of ping optimization. So, I wouldn't bother trying too much other things as you can most likely disrupt its own system than help your ping.

The best thing to do is definitely tweaking your own machine for optimizations. Things like what people already suggested here, such as the Leatrix (thought it really didn't work in my case, on wifi) and getting a cable if you are on wifi.

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Also give a try to wtfast.com, i personally use it. With wtfast i get ~100ms while without it i'm over 250ms.

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