5+ sec lag for 1 min on initial encounter of 1st 24 man raid of session.

I've been having a recurring issue which I believe started around the release of patch 5.5.

Whenever I join a 24 man raid shortly after logging into FFXIV, I experience 5+ second lag for approximately 1 minute on the very first combat encounter the raid initiates.

To be clear: this only happens on the very first combat encounter, only lasts for approximately a minute, and only on the first 24 man raid I've joined after logging into FFXIV. It does not happen on subsequent encounters in the raid, nor does the lag occur on the first combat encounter when I participate in additional 24 man raids during that session.

To summarize, it's 5+ seconds of lag for approximately 1 minute only if all the following conditions have been met:

- First 24 man encounter of my current FFXIV session
- First fight of the 24 man encounter
- First minute of said encounter

Anything outside of that, the issue doesn't occur.

A friend of mine has this exact issue - different ISP, different part of the country.

It does not feel like network latency. It feels like the game is struggling to work something out or buffer something for roughly the first minute of a large-scale combat encounter. But then I'm fine for the rest of the session. The frame-rate is fine the entire time, so it doesn't feel like a performance issue. Rather, my character's abilities do not respond for approximately 5 seconds after I use them, which makes stringing combos together challenging. After approximately a minute of this, everything works normally for the rest of the FFXIV session. I can rerun that raid as many times as I want during that session and not experience the issue again.

Is anyone else running into this issue and possibly have a fix that worked for them?

I'm still having this issue. I also wanted to add that I do notice a similar problem in the first 8 man (trial) encounter of my current FFXIV session, but it is not as severe, nor does it last as long. I assume this is related to the presence of fewer players/characters.

Greetings Gyson,

I'm sorry to hear that this issue is still occurring. Are you getting any error messages or systemp prompts when this issue occurs? Aside from the 5.5 patch, were there any other major changes or updates to your system? If you have yet to try some of these troubleshooting steps, I would recommend giving them a try to see if they might help with these lag issues:

- Perform a clean boot by opening the Task Manager and selecting the 'Start up' Tab. Once there, please disable everything listed, and restart the PC.
- Make sure that the Windows OS is fully updated (including any optional updates, as they are not usually automatically installed).
- Turn off Fullscreen Optimizations. Find the executable file for the game (normally found in the install folder), right-click it and select 'Properties'. Under the 'Compatibility' tab, check the box labeled 'Disable Fullscreen optimizations'
and then click 'Apply'.
- Make sure your anti-virus software & firewall has the appropriate exceptions for FINAL FANTASY XIV (or you can temporarily disable/turn off the program for testing purposes).

I do hope this helps and thank you for posting in the FINAL FANTASY XIV Technical Support Forums.

I tried these suggestions before a 24-man run last night and unfortunately the same issue was still present. Is there a debug/performance log available from my client that can be looked at?