No matter how much the cookie crumbles, the eventual feedback will be "this game moves too slow for the fast combat, please increase speed " like we had for 3-4 years till zos caved to give us Swift with all those snare changes.
Just leave it and force zos to fix the lag/buggy hitboxes that's the actual problem.
Emma - Correct. The speed cap is currently 100%. And yes. I feel your pain. I have dozens of golded out gear that are stored away because they don't perform like they used to either because of re-balancing.
ALeoCat - Multiplicative meaning that the percentage gain is only giving a percentage of the remaining percentage of speed cap. The more percentage you add, the less useful each percentage becomes. If you have 50% speed boost, then you have half the speed cap left of 50%. So if you add another 10% speed boost, you won't get an extra 10%, you'll only get 10% of the remaining 50%, which is 5%, for a total of 55%. This way, there are diminishing returns, and gives stacking speed a hard choice between speed (form of mitigation) and something else like damage potential and/or sustain.
Class Rep Note
"We think it’s great some players want to play like a glass cannon, but those builds should have tradeoffs in reduced survivability. "
I agree with this philosophy. I like the idea of tradeoffs. No matter the form of damage mitigation (heals, shields, cloak, block, dodge, speed), they should all require hard choices between maximizing defense or offense. You either choose high defense, low offense OR low defense, high offense OR somewhere in between where you can sustain for a longer period of time with medium defense, medium offense.
For example, ZOS, for many patches have tried to re-work Block (the formula has been changed around, can't regen stam while blocking anymore, etc.). They tried to rework Speed (added a speed cap, reduced immobilization and snare duration, introduced Swift, etc.). They tried to rework Cloak (can't critical hit heals while in cloak, etc.). They tried to rework Heals (decreased defile duration, battle spirit, nerf to healing skills). They tried to rework Cloak (attempted to add cast time, allowed it to be critically hit, etc.). They tried to rework Dodge (needs to be purposeful and actively executed to work, etc.).
I think ZOS should continue to tweak the game to make people make hard decisions between different tradeoffs.
People currently are able to run around at 100% speed nearly all the time, Dawn Breaker, followed up with Spin-to-Win, wiping out 5-6 people, using this combo every 30 seconds. That playstyle is fine, but when you finally lock them down or trap them in a corner due to bad positioning, they need to be squishy at the same time. That's not the case at the moment. People pair that up with other powerful forms of mitigation (cloak, healing, etc.). Where's the tradeoff?
I think toning down Speed by making it multiplicative is fair.