Quote Originally Posted by Soukyuu View Post
If anything, the GPU would have to work harder, not the CPU oO
Well, maybe to a degree, but not really that much. 30fps limit in itself is fine, especially since it gets you more stable fps overall. And the game looks surprisingly good on low settings as well, only things I increased is grass/shadow quality, and the game looks almost the same as on high settings..
I am pretty sure this relates to drawing priority issues, and that is probably managed by the CPU. The drawing priority is seemingly scenery over other players, players over NPC and enemies, and enemies/npc over AOE. So the higher your overall graphics the longer the AOE takes, because it draws after all the fancy effects going on. In other words, the AOE lag is probably partially being caused by the scenery quality, character quality, and battle effects, just because even though the AOE is such a basic on screen item itself, it is being performed after those other things. One solution I found that helps is to disable the battle effects of other players and enemies. Made a huge difference in my ability to handle AOE in zerg-fest. When I can see the enemy at all that is.

I think at some point they are going to need to tweak the client side engine itself in terms of how it prioritizes objects and actions on screen, so that enemy AOE always are higher priority than anything else except your own character.