The most irritating thing about this for me is that it makes me (and everyone else who suffers) look like bad players! The "But I *did* dodge it!" excuse sounds terribly lame... but it's true ~_~

Just to add support to Rydin's post - I also played TERA, as an EU customer on US servers, and I had *no* issues there so I really shouldn't here. In fact, I can think of at least two F2P games (TERA and PSO2) that have combat that's even more action-y than FFXIV and give me zero AOE lag issues - and in neither case am I playing in the region the servers are located in.