this is how I’ve set it up in the NPC character blueprint. It relies on that .01 second delay for that NPC to look at me without any jitter/shakiness. I’m kind of reluctant to use this method because I heard Event ticks can be quite costly for performance if there are many of them at the same time. Though delay isn’t really an event tick, I’m worried a bunch of NPCs using .01 delay at the same time can cause same performance issues as multiple event ticks running at the same time. Is there a way to do this (only horizontal axis) without delays or event ticks?
This is premature optimizing what you are trying to do (avoiding Tick).
Tick is perfectly fine unless you try to calculate the last digit of PI. (i.e. don’t do heavy calculations on Tick and move them over to events that need to be fired)
Use Tick and RinterpTo to smoothly rotate your NPC.
thanks for the tip about RinterpTo 
still works nice with the looping delay i have already set up. just wish there was something more optimized i could do since my scene framerate is getting slightly choppy
Delay is not the best solution.
Instead of Tick, use a Timer instead and have it loop at 0.01 intervals 
Why is that? I guess timers are better?