Since the server transfer I’ve been getting much higher latency – Terenas always seemed stable for me at 170ms, but my ISP apaprently doesn’t like Chromaggus and 280-300ms seems the norm now. Maybe I’m being paranoid but in over 230+ games I’ve only had one situation where I’ve sapped a rogue at the same time as they’ve sapped me – something I used to get quite frequently.
Not wanting to sound like I’m plugging a product or anything, but…. yesterday I went back to using SmoothPing. My latency is now down to 80ms in arenas/bgs and the delay between pressing Fan of Knives and seeing the animation seems barely noticable.
It comes at a price though, $6 a month or $16 for 6 months. It works by connecting you to the Blizz server via one of SmoothPings proxy servers. The data is sent encrpyted, so your ISP automatically flags this as high priority traffic, giving you a much faster connection to the WoW servers.
If you’re struggling with bad ping times, or having disconnection issues, it could be a good idea giving it a try. You can get a free account that will DC you every 20mins, but that’s long enough to see what sort of difference this will make.
Alternatively (see, I’m not on commission! 
), if you’re technically minded and have root access to a decent server, you can make your own. The software needed is free and not too tricky to setup. I’ve done this before on a Linux server (to get around the Firewall at my last job) – you could install Antinat (or any other SOCKS proxy) on the server then setup Freecap and Putty on your PC to route the WoW traffic through your proxy server. Great results are not guarenteed, but hey it’s worth a try if you’re into that sort of thing 
Registry Settings
Tamatar has pointed out that you can also adjust registry settings to improve your connection. There’s a lot of information about this, searching for “TCP ACK Frequency” should give you the information you need. There’s a fair bit about the technique, including testing/results, here at the http://whirlpool.net.au forums.
Both in XP and Win7 I’ve found useful to apply a couple of hacks to the registry to lessen the latency. I don’t have the link on this pc, but if you google for TCP ACK Frequency you should find both. Do a backup of the registry just in case and be prepared to revert it back in case your connections gets unstable. Personally, I’m fine with that and lowered my ping from around 250-300ms to 100-150ms
Thanks I’ll get the reg hacks added onto the page
I signed up lowerping few days ago. Because I’m from aust, the latency from here to US is roughly in the 200s. I usually get 240ms-300ms.
Using lower ping has brought me down to about 170ms which I’m fairly happy about. Like you said I can notice a big difference in delay when hitting the FoK bind.
Both smoothping and lowerping worked great, though I chose lowerping because it doesn’t use any thing other than putty and freecap, whereas smoothping uses some sort of java app install.
Thanks for the link on antinat, I’ve been looking for something like this as I’m a linux admin myself. Will test it out sometime in the future maybe after my sub runs out with lowerping.
Registry hack was also great before I got lowerping. Before hack = 350ms, after hack = 250ms
All in all, if you’re serious about PvP, and you’re in another country other than US, I’ll highly recommend the aboves as this will immensely help your latency.
Ahh I haven’t come across Lowerping before, sounds interesting though, and looks like it’s worked a treat with your connection speed.
Good luck with Antinat, though it’s piece of cake so you should have no problems
I used to port map remote:3128 to localhost:3128 with SSH and point freecap at that, sure used to beat playing WoW at lunchtime over VNC 
Another paid service is lowerping.com which I have written a review on.
http://pwnwear.com/2009/11/03/review-lowerping-com/
Im on WoW EU but i found that WTFast works very well droped my latency from 180 to 50 on darksorrow, It is $6 a month (think it US based so may work even better for you guys) but its absolutly worth it and during the few times i have to not use it as its crashed for a short while i dont know how i lived without it