I am having a similar problem, I was playing fine last night but after patching it today I crash any time I try to log in with a character (tried 3 different characters), I tried DX9 and DX11 clients, I cleaned out my character folders relogged in still crashed. reset all my settings, still crashed.

Thought maybe I had a corrupted update so I did a full uninstall and reinstall of the game (26GB later) still crashing. Updated my video drivers still crashing rolled back video drivers to an older version still crashing.

I literally can not play on my PC right now and its rather frustrating. The game logs in gives me like 10s of slideshow images with the music working perfectly then locks up (and sometimes locks my whole PC up with it). This is only happening with XIV, I tested 12 other games ranging from light indies to heavier titles like witcher 3, Borderlands the pre sequel, and GTAV, all of which worked flawlessly. Not really sure what to do now.