Death by rubberbanding - how common?

Died today via legit server lag . I began playing again about a week ago. Was going to have my friends hop on and play with me , drop some money etc. , obviously that is no longer the case.

How do you guys play hardcore at all with rubberbanding?

Will no longer be playing path of exile until this issue no longer exists. Hardcore is , well , hardcore - being killed by phantom monster due to dysync which is server side ... is well , disappointing to say the least. Amateur hour. Im glad it happened a few days into leveling this character actually , i cant imagine having that happen after investing say months etc.

after they introduce lockstep - never happened to me

Rubber banding does not exist, unless you have a really bad ping and are forced into using predictive mode.

Lockstep makes rubberbanding impossible.

As people have pointed out, Lockstep...no rubber banding but a different issue of stuttering caused by unstable latency.

"server lag" maybe...more likely just lag through you or your ISP, something that is impossible for GGG to do anything about, even then you OK a big disclaimer every time you make a HC character because latency happens(show me an online game that has never had lag).

So if you are in predictive sync it's a technical impossibility to fix desync and the means to minimise it are on the players end.

Death by lag does happen - and there is nothing that could prevent this as long as you have to connect to a server hundreds/ thousands of kilometres from your home.
However, real rubberbanding does not happen in PoE when you use lockstep mode.
But if you mean anything related to network latency when you say rubberbanding... well, see above.

Had it 2x yesterday i just warped back into the pack

This problem was completeley gone when they fixed predictive mode (at the same time as they introduced lockstep). Lockstep stutters horribly, so I was super happy about the improvements to predictive mode.

But with the introduction of ascendancy, all that progress was lost again. I keep rubberbanding and desyncing, it's really like some newby programmer accidently based his latest changes on some old netcode and committed that into the latest build. Or maybe GGG are so confident about lockstep that they stopped caring about predictive mode and introduced lots of new mechanics which can cause desync.

At any rate, OP is right: Desync and rubberbanding is really a thing again and it that sucks big time.

Neither lockstep nor predictive has any lag issues if you have a good connection.

If you are getting a lot of stutter (in lockstep) or rubberbanding/desync (in predictive), try using a wired connection instead of wireless. If you are using wired, then try not downloading or uploading other stuff at the same time (eg: don't torrent, don't stream music or video etc...). Or, try unplugging all the computers of your house-mates so they can't use up all your bandwidth. (Probably the last option won't make you very popular though...) ;)

D3 has rubberbanding , PoE doesn't .

Rubberbanding in PoE was a thing back in the day... but since I came back to PoE I never experienced rubberbanding again