Yeah, if you have good specs and this amount of lags, I'd also turn them down..
Yea, I suppose its better to keep ultra settings with maxed aa, full shadows and physics in team games and complain about possible issues
My current specs allow me to play without problems on the highest settings (i5, gtx 980ti), but I still would be somewhat afraid of doing team games with that.
CoH is also more CPU then GPU heavy.