I feel like the answer is yes, but thought I'd come here and ask first. It stops a ton of connections and warns me that it's worried about trojans, riskware and ransomware. I don't really know how any of this works and was concerned that maybe I ought to just let malwarebytes do its thing, but my download speeds are pretty slow (like....sometimes just a few kilobytes in speed).
I would not advise connecting without a VPN, for obvious reasons. The slow down is expected and the magnitude of it will be dependent on the server you're connecting to.
What I'd recommend is configuring the torrent client specifically to use the VPN, assuming it supports it (I personally use transmission inside a docker container so I don't know how you'll want to set it up with qbittottent)