DX9 client Freeze/Crash

[Oniji]

My client over the last 5 hours has crashed over 7-8 times now.
It starts with the client stuttering for 1-2 seconds every 10 seconds or so, then it progressively becomes worse as the freezes start to become longer and more frequent. Each time when the game recovers from a freeze for a brief moment a disconnected symbol appears above my character. Eventually the entire game freezes and an error is thrown and the game client closes. From the time it starts stuttering to when it eventually crashes is usually around 1-2 minutes.

I have been running the client in DX9 since if I run the game in DX11 I do not have combat sounds.

It appears to happen most often when I am near/approach a large group of players that are viewing cutscenes. This has happened across three of the new zones that I have visited so far. I can usually get 20-30 minutes of unaffected gameplay before it starts to occur again.

There does not appear to be any noticable spike in utilisation by either my GPU or CPU when this occurs.

The troubleshooting steps I have taken, in both attempting to address this issue and to attempt to address my audio issues are as follows:
- Restarted my computer
- Reinstalled the game
- Updated Graphics drivers
- Updated Windows
- Updated Audio drivers
- Ran game client in DX9 instead of DX11
- I tried lowering the number of players to Medium. Same issue