Run EQ on a Ramdisk. (You can trim down the game directory to under a 1 gb, but you may have to exclude some classic zones to get it that low) My ramdisk copy is around 1.5gbs Which is pretty darn amazing seeing as how my harddrive eq folder is 11gbs
Upgrade your gfx card. (last time I was around 200+ players all casting spells and stuff my gfx card was overclocking and at max core clock. EQ may be an older game but god damn is it not optimized for those situations. I had to turn my spell effects to only myself)
If you hit F11 (I think) it will show your latency. What is your #ms?
As for falling while levitated and running even at sow speed. I notice that I gradually fall, The time it takes me to run across DL for example I'm pretty low by the end. Even with just facing 1 direction and Num lock running.
If you click outside of the game, while levitate running you will drop like a rock. This is because when the game loses focus it drops the fps and idk.. I think wineq has an option to fix this, maybe.
Why ramdisk? Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4wJlg53hlQ
Basically with a ram disk the only thing holding your load speed back is the old client code and the server. SSD probably even falls into this catagory too but meh, ramdisk is faster.