First off, I run D2 on Windows and I'd imagine most people here do as well. I have used -ns for awhile to improve game performance back when I was grailing in SP, but never in speedrunning since I wanted sound in that situation. -ns never eliminated the S&E delay I experienced in certain situations, but it did shorten the delay. This delay is worse when S&E immediately after exploring a significant amount of the map, such as waypoint hopping for shrines or teleporting through multiple map levels.

The only person I know that doesn't get this S&E delay is someone running D2 1.14b on Mac hardware (with sound). I'm not sure why that is, so I'd like to ask if anyone here can test D2 game performance on Mac version?

From what I understand, the latest macOS 10.15, Catalina, no longer supports 32-bit applications. I'm not sure if this was ever resolved, meaning D2 would need to be installed on macOS 10.14 or lower. Also not sure if a VM would change things.