This is the biggest problem, and it is the result of us playing builds that should otherwise be unattainable. This whole level 35 business is ridiculous. I understand that you and a few other players in the community went well past level 31 before the Destiny patch, but that was a big problem that I think was really poorly addressed. Instead of bringing everyone up to those levels, they should have knocked everyone down. There should have been a level cap put at 33, a level I think is worth going for to have an advantage while not being incredibly unbalanced.
Yeah I was level 35 pre-patch, and my build had barely changed since level 33 (or 34? I forget now...) since all I added was shield skill. A level 33 cap, or at absolute MOST level 34 would have been the best thing for this game since those are both great levels to have a little bit of a higher level build where you can't quite have a fully fleshed out super OP one like at 36+. But nope, they took things in the opposite direction, and that had engine-breaking effects. At the very least it would be great if they introduced an attribute level cap of sorts. For example if everyone is, let's say 21-24 at level 34/35 nowadays, then make it so that 45 (21+24) is the maximum amount of attribute points a player can ever have. Or maybe just stop giving players attribute points after level 34/35. Getting 1 skill point per every few hundred million xp (or whatever the crazy amount it takes to level up is nowadays) is hardly worth it to all except the biggest tryhards, who would no doubt still chase that apparent advantage til the end of time. I was never a true min-maxer since I prefer to use my high level advantage to have more skillpoints assigned to allow for several playstyles, i.e. hoplite, as opposed to being a pure pole hero which would be very easy to do at my level, yet no doubt some people are, and those are the ones that swing their weapons faster than an aging pc can register.
Instead, we now have more points than we know what to do with. The balanced build is 21/21, which means sacrificing points for more agility keeps you well above the the average difficulty required for long weapons, and players are swinging at speeds that, at least in my personal opinion, the game engine can't even handle. There are instances where cRPG can't keep up with how fast players are moving. Have you ever had a player walk through you in the middle of a fight? He very likely just walked around you on his screen.
Honestly while 21-21 may be the lower balanced build, anyone who isn't cav or ranged is still 21-21 in this day and age is screwing themselves over in some way. There are countless 24-21's and vice versa. Anyone with a level 36 or 37 build can easily get a 24-24 balanced build if they are pure melee, which is completely nuts compared to my level 35 pre-patch build of 18-24. For the same super speed that I had they now have 6 more strength. Needless to say that shit is absolutely gamebreaking when they've got a long maul/great maul/GLB or something comparable in their hands.
What we're saying is that players have the athletics to move away from swings they would otherwise be in reach of before players had this much access to faster builds. I'm not saying people didn't agi-whore before the Destiny patch, but when they did, they significantly sacrificed their ability to do damage. Now players can do a reasonable amount of damage and move incredibly fast with weapons they shouldn't even have access to.
People agi whored an awful lot right after the wpf patch, which of course came before the destiny patch. Crpg became a lot less fun and "arcadey" right after the wpf patch as 80% of the server had more agi than strength nowadays. Directly after the destiny patch were some of the worst days of crpg ever, as literally everyone now went from being agi-based to uber-agi-based, running around NA1 with their light armor and doing nothing but backstabbing and dueling people. There were no clusterfucks, no teamfighting at all for months. I barely played during that time (if I did it was probably in DTV), and when I came back to NA1 I was quite pleased to see that people finally ditched their gimmicky agi builds in favor of a little more strength across the board. Not everyone did this (I sure as heck didn't, I'm cancer I know), but at least it was a trend headed in the right direction as people rediscovered how strong strength can be. The only issue is that instead of reverting to the pure str builds with no more than ~9 agi tops, they now all have at least 15 or so. But hey, it's still better than before.
Also, I'd like to correct you in saying that agi whores couldn't do damage before the high level patch. Agi builds
could very easily deal high amounts of damage after the wpf patch, since we all got an unnecessarily large amount of wpf from that, and wpf provides an ever so slight, but definitely noticeable, buff to damage. Prior to the wpf patch were my personal favorite crpg days (and many other peoples' as well, no doubt) since for me it was a very challenging experience, which I loved. As one of the only agi builds around, it was a difficult thing to deal damage to all the plated up str whores that ruled the day, yet nothing was more satisfying than being able to dance around them and in between several of them in a huge clusterfuck as if they were stationary turrets. One misstep though, and you were pretty much guaranteed to be oneshot... which was the best "adrenaline rush" you could get from a videogame.
I would also recommend for a reduction of weapon proficiency. There were some patches by Tydeus in 2013 that played with how much weapon proficiency we get from Weapon Master that should be looked into. I really like the idea of one WPF helping another (between the three melee skills), but I don't like how the average player has something around 170 WPF.
If you want this game to play faster, maybe look at the Combat Speed that is still set to Medium. Giving players the ability to run at Mach 5 is really problematic for the actual functionality of the melee.
Yes pls. Having faster combat speed in general would be far better than having a some people with fast swings in addition to everyone running at "Mach 5." However, this has been a long-debated issue. Any veteran with 30 ping or less always seems to be in favor of "making the combat faster, and therefore more skill based to keep up with the rising skill level of the servers." Yet there aren't only veterans with sub-30 ping here. You've got some people whose pcs can barely keep up with the current pace of the game, and you've also got your few noobs that come and go who have yet to reach that crpg skill ceiling. As someone with a rapidly aging pc, I suffer from fps drops/frameskips/etc all the time. Luckily I tend to have an average ping in the low 40s-50s, so at least that makes my experience playable. Yet there are also people who play with 80+ ping and have no fps issues, or maybe people with both high ping and a shitty pc. Would we really want to alienate close to half, if not more, of our population by continuously increasing the speed of the game just for the low ping/high fps hero's benefit?
/rant
