Maintenance for the week of April 20:
• NA megaservers for patch maintenance – April 20, 3:00AM EDT (7:00 UTC) - 12:00PM EDT (16:00 UTC)
• EU megaservers for patch maintenance – April 20, 7:00 UTC (3:00AM EDT) - 17:00 UTC (12:00PM EDT)
Depends on the route, but playing EU (England)->NA in various games I add about 100ms simply crossing the Atlantic so if you route via the Americas that'll affect you.
I suspect if you route round the other way (via Europe and points east) it'll be even worse .. I play on FFXI's servers in Japan and my 'ping' time is typically 400 (though the game was designed a long time ago and the client does much more work without having to talk to the server so there's no obvious latency issues per se).
Could probably just make a character and find out? I haven't tried the EU server yet but I assume it would be worse ping than to the US server.
Yes, I've done so, but only leveled to about 10. I'm interested in endgame content, dungeons, etc. And it's hard to tell unless you spend a lot of time in pvp. A level 10 doesn't really stay alive in combat as much, so it's hard to tell.