Are devs happy with how + Attack Speed buffs are currently working?

Zheg

I've been curious for a while now as to where the attack speed mechanic sits on the devs' radar. Currently, you can improve your attack speed from:

• Weighted weapon trait
• NB assassination ability Haste (and both its morphs)
• 5 piece medium armor passive Agility
• DW skill Rapid Strikes (morph of Flurry)

Currently, due to animation cancelling, increasing your attack speed is pretty close to useless. I know that I, and many others, initially assumed that increasing your attack speed meant you would increase how fast your attack occurs. For those that are unaware, this isn't the case. Right now, the attack speed buff only reduces the global cooldown time between weapon swings; the actual attack itself has a static animation time.

I've more or less given up on seeing any changes to this mechanic in 2014, but I'm really curious if the devs even think this is a problem at all. They've said they will eventually put in a fix for animation cancelling, and that it's not 'intential', but my guess is that this is low priority for them as it's been a quiet topic and everyone and their mother uses it in game - especially for trials and pvp. Whether or not animation cancelling remains is a tangent topic, but since it's still in game and will be for the foreseeable future, I can't come up with any legitimate arguments to use attack speed buffs given the current mechanics when you can just animation cancel. Furthermore, even if animation cancelling is eliminated by the devs, we're still back to an almost unnoticeable change in the speed that you attack when looking at the attack speed mechanic.

I've seen this brought up before multiple times on the forums, on Reddit, and during guild feedback sessions. It would be wonderful if we could get a simple - "working as intended and we have no plans to make changes", "it's certainly a problem and the devs are currently working on it", or "it's on the devs radar but they're still exploring initial ideas for changes".

If the answer to the previous paragraph is a 'working as intended', I'm going to make a shameless plug that additional effects are added to the NB Haste ability and the 5 piece medium armor passive Agility. As the apex skill in the assassination line, Haste should feel as such; as the 5 piece bonus to wearing medium armor, you should actually be able to notice the effect.

KarlosTheGrouch

Yeah i just learned the haste buff of nightblade (NB assassination ability Haste (and both its morphs)... and it pretty much sucks... i dont feel like its like a buff of faster shooting.. i think attack speed buffs in genereal are useless, cuz of the same animation time wihout the buff

Zheg

Agreed. I feel like it could open the door to many new builds if it were actual attack speed increases, though they might need to tone the numbers down a little for balance purposes.

AssaultLemming

It's ridiculous that it even made it into the game in this state. I was quite interested in a build focused around using the primary weapons to cause damage and using the class and weapon abilities to make my attacks stronger faster etc. At the moment it is completely useless.

Zheg

Well, many things made their way into the game in horrid state (looking at you stamina builds and werewolf), but they're starting to finally put a focus on heavy impact items and putting effort into balance, so I keep hoping they look at this mechanic and rethink things to make it actually have it's own flavor instead of just being so bad no one uses it.

duncan_cougarpreeb18_ESO

Zheg wrote: »

... but they're starting to finally put a focus on heavy impact items and putting effort into balance...

I am sorry to say, if what they are currently doing is their idea of balancing, whoever "they" are, those "they" are clueless and/or incompetent.

The rant aside. If ZOS (or some dev) finally realized that animation canceling is not something they can change with their current resources (and yes that means we will probably see that *** by the time it goes free to play or bust) the current "change" with the update 1.4.3 made agility even worse ... hard to believe but there you are.

If you really had to change this skill - supposedly the defining top of the line 5 pieces of medium armor required skill for medium armor - why not have a look at the actual active skill of that line or just do a little research and have a look where and why in history medium armor was actually used and what school of fighting styles came off that.

Here is a hint: Dodge, i.e. getting out of harms way while still getting some protection.

Right now in the game dodge is pretty much a "Are you feeling really lucky today" skill, with no way to boost it up past 22% for elude (max morph and full set of medium armor) and 20% (for only 3 out 6 second) with 5 pieces from the Hist bark set.

If the top medium armor skill would add to the chance dodge, medium armor and this passive skill might actually be worth considering as it then would provide a decent chance of not being hit by weapon or spell even as passive.
When using it together with the active skill and the set it could become a viable alternative to light armor, which improve spell resistance (i.e. the highest damage source right now) and its other improvements (magicka recovery and spell damage) for spell slingers or heavy armor with its good spell and weapon damage reduction and health recovery for melee and tanks .

So what about 3% / 6% of dodge chance per piece of medium armor equipped with Agility 1 / 2 or 15%, respectively 30% for 5 pieces or more.

This way you get a passive chance of dodging an attack (including CCs), which is on par with the other skills in terms of protection efficiency, but still very different in flavor.

Zheg

While dodge chance could be nifty, they'd need to be careful with the actual numbers. You rip on them for balance at the beginning of your post, but your idea would be horribly imbalanced if implemented exactly as you say. My NB uses double take (30 % dodge for 3.5 seconds, and 15% for 27 seconds), elude (22% dodge for 23 seconds), and wears the spectre's armor set (20% dodge every 3 seconds with 3 second CD). I'm aware that the numbers don't just add up directly, but if you tacked on your suggestion with your numbers, it would end up being a troll build in pvp where a majority of attacks never even land on you.

Again, it would be nifty, but they'd need to be careful with the actual numbers. I'd rather see actual attack speed increases (reducing the global cooldown of the animation), and maybe a slight boost to the current dodge/miss chance skills.

duncan_cougarpreeb18_ESO

ok granted this one did not account for blur / double take

Although looking at the numbers Vampire's Elusive mist with 75% is already there, especially if stacking works with that (no idea not being a vampire) ...

So yes, there needs to be some mechanism in place for diminishing returns (aka soft cap) in case of stacking all possible skills towards one goal

But given the number of already available troll builds ... but I digress.

So yes, fully agreed. (and it would be nice to see that sort of cap in place for all the other troll builds out there while we are at it)

In any case, while such a passive would be nice and in line with what one would expect from the name and the type of armor, the possibility of pushing it to or even beyond 100% is not in anyone's interest, even if that would require to fully build everything around it, being dead on time with every skill, sacrificing 3 slots for just that and so on. However, with macro-ing that would still be a troll able build - at least for a few seconds - and therefore a no go.

Therefore, maybe just the CC countering part could already be very nice for PvP, though for PvE that would make this skill sort of 'blah'

But as stated already, the best way would be to leave it as before as crappy as it was for most and just wait until attack speed will have an actual meaning beyond being able to animation cancel some abilities for instant multi skill damage on the receiving end.

But since that is not going to happen anytime soon (if ever), the lesson here is probably the whole game with all its skills needs to be re-balanced and that again is not going to happen in the foreseeable future given the messing around in the last months by ZOS.

smeeprocketnub19_ESO

this is the only game I've been in where haste and slow are worthless.

I play a shaman in EQ so haste and slow are our bread and butter. How excited was I to learn that my NB could do both of these? Then I found out thjey are useless anyway. So sad.