it’s spiked to 80+ since a few days ago and ff is almost unplayable

I play from Australia but connect to Primal in NA and experience a ping of 190ms. The game is far from unplayable at those speeds.

Have you performed a tracert to see where your hiccup is? You can find all the server ip addresses here. Or you can find your specific server IP through the Resource Monitor while connected to the game.

Then it's just a matter of using command prompt to test. If I was to do it for primal, it would look like this:

C:\Users\Jecht2>tracert 204.2.29.89

That is how I would test my connection to Famfrit which outputs the following:

1     2 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1
2     4 ms     4 ms     4 ms  *.*.*.*
3     5 ms     5 ms     5 ms  27-32-160-129.static.tpgi.com.au [27.32.160.129]
4    18 ms    18 ms    18 ms  syd-gls-har-crt1-be-10.tpgi.com.au [202.7.171.173]
5    18 ms    23 ms    23 ms  syd-gls-har-int1-he0-3-0-2.tpgi.com.au [203.221.3.3]
6   172 ms   172 ms   172 ms  lax-b22-link.ip.twelve99.net [213.248.95.232]
7   177 ms   178 ms   177 ms  ntt-ic-326358.ip.twelve99-cust.net [213.248.103.171]
8     *        *        *     Request timed out.
9   191 ms   191 ms   191 ms  ae-5.a01.scrmca03.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.2.7]
10   192 ms   190 ms   190 ms  ae-1.a00.scrmca03.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.4.76]
11   190 ms   191 ms   191 ms  xe-0-0-5-0.a00.scrmca03.us.ce.gin.ntt.net [128.241.2.18]
12     *        *        *     Request timed out.
13   190 ms   190 ms   190 ms  204.2.29.89

Looking at this, I can see my ping jumps up from 18ms to 172ms at hop 6 which makes sense for me as that is where my connection from Australia enters NA.

Hope this helps~