Performance degradation while using Ice Barrage in Monolith maps

While going through Monolith zones performance will degrade continually until the frame rate is in the single digits regardless of graphical settings. I believe it may be tied to the Ice Barrage skill as I respecced my Sorceror for the new patch and I didn’t have these issues on my previous build. I’ve noticed that the projectiles from Ice Barrage will sometimes get stuck on enemies, flying back and forth through them repeatedly but doing no damage. There are also times where I will cast Ice Barrage, kill the enemies, move further into the map and the projectiles from the previous casting will fly in from offscreen doing no damage long after they should have disappeared. It seems like the projectiles are not being deleted/cleared out correctly after their duration has ended.

Detailed description:
What were you doing at the time? See above.
How consistently does this happen? Every Monolith map.
Operating System: Windows 10 LTSC
Diagnostic Files
DxDiag.zip (17.1 KB)
Player-prev.zip (29.9 KB)
le_graphicsmanager.zip (393 Bytes)

1 Like

Hey there, Welcome to the forums…

Using LTSC windows for gaming… You are brave - its not really designed for situations where things change and need to be updated - its more designed for when “something works for a single purpose so dont you dare change anything”

With this in mind, your GPU drivers are over a year old so these need to be updated as they could definitely be impacting on the overall performance of your GTX 970. The 970 is obviously older now so you should be playing with almost every setting on very low - I see you are using low settings but you probably should be trying lower… at least while LE is in beta and has known performance issues.

I have also no idea how the LTSC update cycle works so it could very well be that other components of your system havent been updated and might have an impact on things like DirectX which obviously are very important.

Your player.log is showing some interesting errors that could be linked to Ice projectiles but I am not a unity dev so EHG will have to look into that to be sure. It could very well be that this issue is manifesting on your system because of your combination of os, specs and old gpu drivers and might very well be a bug that others dont notice on faster systems etc.

Monolith maps are generally more intensive (performance wise) so it would be interesting to see if this same thing happens in a less busy normal campaign map?

Thanks for the reply, Vapourfire.

I use LTSC for that very reason. It has a lot of the junk like Cortana, Windows Store ads, and other “consumer experience” stuff removed. I’ve always kept my versions of Windows pretty barebones and it’s the best version of 10 (at least in my opinion) for doing that.

Admittedly I’m pretty bad about keeping up on my graphics drivers and the 970 is definitely getting some years on it at this point but I had Last Epoch on the high preset for graphics (minus AA/VSync) and played through a couple of characters through the campaign, arena, and Monolith maps before this update and had minimal issues with performance, definitely not single digit frame rates. The issue only arose after I switched my sorceror character from an old disintegrate build to the current Ice Barrage build.

Since posting this originally I did a few more test runs through the Monolith with IB completely removed from my hotbar using just the frozen version of Volcanic Orb. There was no gradual reduction in frame rate. I tried a few campaign maps as suggested and the same thing happened. One runthrough with just VO and one just with IB. No problems with VO but the frame rate continually drops as I use IB more and more until it becomes a slideshow. If I teleport to a town and back to reset the map the performance returns to normal until I cast IB enough times.

This is good feedback for the devs to work from… Should be able to replicate things from this… If i were not more interesting in testing all the new goodies I might even test it myself (do I have a life… no)…

Please can you drop a screenshot of your IB skill tree - some skills have had bugs just from a particular node so its important the devs know exactly how you have set it up…

Also… are you using any special uniques - sometimes a specific unique plus a specific skill combination can be the issue.

I’ve run a few tests and such but I’m eager to play around with the new stuff as well. Luckily this isn’t affecting my other characters so I can play around with them. It’s a good excuse to try another class.

Here’s a link to screenshots of my skilltrees and passives: https://imgur.com/a/nU9zcbf

No uniques used on it.

I have this exact same issue. Start the monolith zone with 60fps and end the zone with 3-10fps. I tried to do a charge beacon and I got down to 1fps and had to suicide since after 3-4 minutes the charge was only at 30%. I uncapped my FPS and started a zone at 135-140 frames and ended with 25. I cleared out the map and casted into a wall and I was able to bring the frames down even more, from 25 to 10, before I got bored and stopped.

I figured there was an error with homing logic since, like tiki said, I would have random ice projectiles just shoot in from off screen and fly around enemies doing nothing. I tested the node that removes homing but it did not change anything.

After a switching around skill points a bunch I’ve found that the Brittle Fragments node combined with the Ice Burst node causes massive FPS loss. I lose around 3-5 frames each cast that stacks up for the entire zone. The FPS resets when you change instance. I tested just brittle fragments and just ice burst with other various nodes from the tree and didn’t find anything that caused notable performance issues.

I tested this with all graphics settings set to off/very low at 1920x 1080 and even tried 1280x720 in windowed, borderless, and fullscreen with the same results. Also note this was the build I was playing prior to 0.8.3 so Ice Barrage with the Ice Burst and Brittle Fragments nodes worked fine just 3-4 days ago.

My specs are:
3700X CPU
5700XT GPU
16GB Ram

The OP is running Intel + Nvidia so this doesn’t seem to be related to hardware or drivers. It also shouldn’t have anything to do with specs, especially as I’ve tested running lower resolutions.

Luckily it’s just this build that has issues so I’ll just make a new build to check out the new stuff from the patch.

I’m curious to see if this can be replicated by everyone or just under certain circumstances.
I’ve spent a couple hours messing around with this already so I’ll leave it to someone else/the devs to figure out, if it’s not simply the 2 nodes that are bugged.

TLDR - Ice Barrage with Brittle Fragments + Ice Burst skill nodes causes progressive FPS loss per cast. This worked perfectly fine before 0.8.3

Same issue here and it’s definitely Ice Barrage. Played about 20 hrs since the patch on many builds with no framerate issues but this skill tanks me.

Geforce 2070 Super
AMD Ryzen 3700X
16Gb RAM

It does seem to be worse on more ‘open’ maps. Maybe from the shards bouncing crazy distances? Definitely wasn’t an issue prepatch.

Happy to share whatever, but tree is same as the others.’

Edit: Dying on a map that has become low framerate does not fix it.

I have yet to have any fps issues in 40 or so hours until now. Im using hybrid glacier/ice barriage build.
As soon as I use ice barrage fps just tanks to a slide show with high end PC

Did you try unspeccing either the brittle fragments or ice burst node in the ice barrage tree? With just one or the other it works fine for me but obviously loses some damage/clear. Just curious if it’s specifically those nodes.

Tried unspeccing Brittle Fragments (but not Ice Burst) and it did appear to fix it. Like you said though, those nodes are pretty critical for the skill and it’s basically bricked without them.

It would be nice to get acknowledgment from EHG that they have at least seen this.

Thanks for the report! We have this issue tracked internally and we’re looking into it, but for now, leaving the zone should fix the issue until we implement a full fix!

2 Likes

Thanks for acknowledging the issue!

I do want to say that leaving the zone does fix it, but we also can’t COMPLETE any zone/map/monolith so it’s still making the build/skill unplayable.

Yep, we’re aware and are looking into it on our end.

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Hey there…

@Oeller has an Ice Barrage build that apparently doesnt suffer from this same performance degradation… Perhaps a comparison of the Ice Barrage Nodes might help narrow the search for the possible issue…

Maybe I don’t have any performance issues because I specced 100% pierce? It may be related to projectiles stuck at some places and by using pierce they aren’t?

I don’t know the talents you are all using for ice barrage.

That spec doesn’t take any of the 3 nodes that have been identified as potential culprits: Ice Burst, Brittle Fragments, and Wintry Blast.

Hello! This issue should be fixed as of 0.8.3e. Please let us know if you’re still having issues.

Just ran a couple monos and it does appear to be fixed. You guys rock!

1 Like

Ran a few monoliths as well and it’s working again beautifully. Thanks for the fix!

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