Whew this discussion got somewhere good while I was off playing Shogun 2.
So we can essentially conclude so far:
- To be extremely fast you have to be naked/near naked with a practice dagger.
- To just be plain fast you still have to be naked/near naked with a decently lightweight weapon.
- High STR builds almost everyone can agree is boring, yet it is so much more powerful that we are handicapping ourselves greatly if we don't do it.
- Armor destroys AGI even more than I originally realized with the WPF.
- AGI chars can always be near one-shot. However, they can't even swing fast enough to keep a STR character on their toes so they have zero advantage against them. Even if you are a much better duelist than the STR char you are fighting, you still have to hit them 5+ times to kill them and one slip will get you killed instead.
The grand picture: We are getting bored with doing throwing hybrids. We are getting bored seeing the exact same characters everywhere (with different looking armor, but generally the same). Nobody likes being one-shot, but unless you are one of the players "in the know", then you are probably getting one shot all the time. Fixing AGI brings back specialization characters while also putting a limit on how high STR can go (because they will get spammed; and rightfully should if they have 0 WM). This in turn lowers the number of "one-shots", making combat more interesting. It also makes combat more fast paced so everyone and their grandmother can't manual block like a Jedi (sorry to say, everyone that is a pro manual blocker now is only because combat is so slow paced..sure there are some great ones that would be great even with the faster speed; but there are SUBSTANTIALLY more players that can manual block everything than pre-patch because the combat speed has slowed down).
(Edit: Ok maybe that last comment was a bit harsh, but combat was still more interesting pre-patch with the faster paced non one-shot combat).
