I'm not sure any MMO can really be played on 'max' settings. They design graphics purposefully to be higher max than machines are even capable of at release, on the assumption technology will magically improve over time.

Pare down the settings until it's comfortable to play. If your machine's top end you'll get more than someone with a weaker machine could.

Hopefully this response will help. While I am not a ZOS person or Developer, I have written Quakestyle 6DoF games AND their world editors, so I know my way around the entire spectrum of performance.

The primary factor in any game like this is _prediction_. This game doesn't operate on the concept of draw it draw it draw, then react because something happened. Instead, it predicts the outcome based on where things are at, and then checks for that in an interrupt driven way. It allows for much more dynamic gaming with far less computation that the old way-- and usually works pretty darn well.

The pitfall- Because of this, everything has to be kept in sync. Synchronization, not the speed of your PC/Console is the pinch-point for your performance. Information is constantly being sent to your system and back from it, to keep things in sync. If the comm pathway between you and the server has any issues (and believe me that is fairly typical unless you have a business class connection), the network becomes the bottleneck for the traffic, and what you see is the 'stuttering', lags, pauses, jumps in performance.

It isn't you, it's either your internet connection, or someone up the chain of your provider is have a bad day with a switch.

On a PC, if you know how, you can open a window and ping a domain. In DOS, that's ping -t <domain>. You want to try to ping things in different places away from you or near where a ZOS server might be that is serving you and see if:

a) any packets are being lost (you want 0%), and
b) how long it's taking packets to travel. You want something < than 35ms

You can also do a 'traceroute' - check whatever appropriate docs for your system. Traceroute to a ZOS server, or any switch/hub near it, will give you an idea of:

a) how many hops (spans between switching equipment) your packets are jumping, and
b) how long each of those hops is taking.

If you do this and see some major switch above your provider is taking 115ms (or some other crazy long value), they are having a problem, and it isn't your provider- the problem is with whomever is providing to your provider.

9 times out 10- if you experience performance issues for _any_ internet connect game, it will be connection-related, not your system, and not necessarily the game-provider's server.

It's getting out of hand for me as well. I've always been able to deal with the bouts of lag and missfires in the past. But this has been on another level. I play a high pressure style in BGs so am so dependent on skills and potions firing exactly when needed. Lately I've had instances where I try to use a potion and it actually make the splash like sound effect like it took, but then never refunds resources, I have had it happen where it's like 3+ tries in a row, I've even stopped moving and using abilities and still nothing. Or in another instance went to use my repentance ability on corpses that are clearly glowing and nothing. So I stop stand right next to it still glowing and try again...nothing at all. Between all of this and abilities not always firing on the first or second attempt of using them it makes it all the harder to stay competitive and climb leaderboards. I've also noticed that time and time again I will burst an enemy down to 99.99 percent and on that last strike there will be like a few second delay, when my skills just blatantly stop working. If people are around kill steals all the time, if no one I get the kill but after seconds of stuttering. I know sometimes it's incredibly situational, and how that is somewhat a thing in BGs, but this is absolutely abnormal. Its like my jabs go from destroying...to absolute wet noodles. Full resources, and abilities won't excute for that slight pause or they will fire but not real damage or damage tics. And then the few times things actually operate as intended everything just melts with absolute ease.

This feeds into problems trying to tweak your build as well, nothing is reliable so it's hard to test things. I've tried all sorts of set ups thinking It was my build at first, only to melt stuff initially after tweeking then right back to were I was to start just with new upgeaded gear and combinations.