Game stuttering/freezing as of 2.0.3

Hello. Long time PoE player here with no issues ever, especially this league until the last patch. When I am entering zones, some are choppy as hell and stuttering every couple of seconds, on and off permanently. Other zones or maps are 100% fine the entire duration of the area. I have tried many things to fix this, and monitored temps, gpu usages, updated windows, DDU my drivers in safe mode and installed new ones, tried different servers in poe, tried lockstep & predictive and nothing has helped. I have 45 latency to teamspeak and ventrilo servers, so it appears my net is not lagging.

I am on windows 8.1 64 bit, running an i5-4690k @ 4.6ghz, 8gb ddr3 1866mhz memory, crucial mx100 512gb SSD, Asus Strix GTX 970. The game has been 100% fine until this patch, and I am definitely stumped. I hope theres a fix soon or something gets changed. Would appreciate if anyone else is having this strange issue and posts here.

Yeah, Have had issues with the game since update. My game will freeze for 2-7 seconds but the wierd thing is the game will speed up when its done being frozen everything happens at once, also it doesnt happen in every zone. (it seems random) its really frustrating. I hope this gets fixed :( (Edit)-->realized this post was made last patch but the new patch gave me this issue ive been forced to play standard to get the golden armor :'(

I have the same issue as others described above. Never had this kind of problems - untill last patch.

Nothing technical on my side, latency spikes also don't seem to correspond with these stutters.

The longest freeze I've experienced lasted for 2-3 seconds. Also frustrating are these "micro-freezes" noticeable when I'm transferring items between tabs in my stash: I picked up the item, but I didn't pick it up.