I sense rage in this post, especially in the poll. Although this may not be the way to get attention to the issue, I do agree. With the increase of skill, which has been huge over the past year, this game has become a blockfest.
While longer than 10 sec fights were rarely seen a year ago, they are the norm now. Everyone can block, the average player can almost block me indefinitely when he focuses on defending. This is indirectly a great buff to ranged and cavalry, and a great nerf to shielders.
Buff to cavalry and ranged, because the melee take up way more of eachothers times and have more time to shoot and kill unaware infantry. A nerf to shielder cause having autoblock isn´t all that useful anymore.
Still, the devs persist in making this game slower in every patch. Now they even make the game slower to prevent one of the few things that could break up a blocking match, the hiltslash. It wasn´t actually that easy to do and was a nice thing to learn after you learn to block to make you have the edge over the average player. The percentage of people that could actually confidently do it in battle was very small, and they deserved it.
The whole nerf mentality should stop now. If something is overpowered, buff the rest, or just speed up the game as a whole. There is too high average skill for this speed.
Maybe instead of saying no to speeding up, the potential gamebreakers if the speed gets increased should get fixed. Slow down the 1h leftslash and speed up the other directions. The current leftslashspam is dumb and unnecesarry, as the devs seem to be able to modify every animation´s speed individually. And then speed up the whole game.