I live in New Zealand. Now, I'm assuming the servers are in America. I don't usually get such horrible latency with American servers, but I can't get off of 1 red bar. My brother (who lives nearby) can manage to get 2 orange making the game more playable for him than me. We both have trouble shielding attacks however (our main issue to be honest... we've gotten up to tier 3 regardless, but it's cost too much energy to pull off)

I've set myself in to a DMZ, I've added the ports to my router, I've set it so there are no firewall issues at all. I've done everything I can think of and I still can't get up to even 2 orange bars...

Any suggestions?