Other North Americans I know have about that, yes. I'm not sure there's much else you can do to bring it down, but I don't have very strong technical knowledge.

You will do absolutely fine on 120 ping though. My ping is an average of 250 and I don't have much trouble completing content, it feels normal to me.

I'm in northern New England, and 120 ping is pretty average, and as long as both the connection and the server behavior are stable, it's just fine.

Ping only helps with your round-trip data path between your computer and the server. Lag spikes don't happen just because ping times get long. A server-side lag will ruin your day even if you had double- or even single-digit ping times. And ping times that won't settle on any stable average seem to wreak havoc with FPS, too, and then FPS swings sometimes are symptoms that show up when there are problems with control sync... There's a lot of messy stuff going on in the "back end" of the game that we just have to deal with. Allegedly, much may be sorted out with the Clockwork City upgrade and patch.