So I followed several of the steps above, which didn't seem to help as my game still crashed after a while in directx 9 (my cpu usage spiked up to 70% and lagged something fierce, including audio freezes before crashing). I couldn't figure out how to uninstall the game so i simply deleted the contents of my c:/program filesx86/squareenix/ffxiv folder and reacquired them, which seemed to reset all my in game settings but also seemed to fix my crashing issue. I played for several hours with friends today and had zero crashes and still have not crashed as of the time of writing this post, i'm still not sure what the main issue even was but it seems to be working so I believe the issue is fixed and the thread can be closed.