Blocking or avoiding bad hops

I've been having issues with my internet. 

Online gaming is laggy and my ping just spikes through the roof over and over.

When reporting this issue to cox, I'm suggested to schedule a technician, and Typically,  everything looks perfectly fine. 

But when gaming, I'm unable to be competitive. 

I ran a few ping plotter routes to Twitter.com, google.com, and pingplotter.com.

They all have something in common in which 1 or 2 hops on the route are spiking high latency from time to time...reaching up to 400ms.

While there is no packet loss reported, even if packets are "reordered" and still all arrive at destination, it will still feel like packet loss in gaming because gaming is a real time application just like video calls or VOIP.

I've been fighting with this issue and cox tech support for years.

What do I do about this?

And is it possible to avoid or block those bad hops?