More and more everyday I realise how ridiculous agiwhores' movement speed looks. It's so absurd for me that someone can sprint while holding a big weapon horizontally for a while, for example.
I used to use balanced build with at least 7 athletics, and I realised that I used backpedalling and footwork too much instead of blocking, and such high athletics make people look like Flash when fighting. Now my build has a lot more strength and, with 5 athletics, my character's movement seems more realistic and I have to block a lot more instead of just dodge.
That's what I think of agi builds: they don't look realistic, and they encourage lame gameplay.
Oh! And the wpf patch wasn't really necessary (except for hybrids) in my opinion. Swing speed shouldn't be SO different from one build to another.
I forgot where I read it, but the average game's movement speed for a human player is 40mph (~64 km/hr for u EU scrubs). This was made popular especially in FPS games like quake, doom, cod, etc etc. However even looking at warband, a player with 0 athletics while INCREDIBLY SLOW (to a point where the game is downright boring) is still moving wickedly fast. If you look around at the scenery, and try and imagine the actual size of a lot of the objects, and then realize that you are whizzing past them... well, you get the idea. A human walking at actual walking speed would be almost standing still in this game. Sure, you could argue that the avatars are in a jogging animation all the time, but they are still super fast. Not nearly as bad as in FPS games, perhaps, but still impossibly fast, especially considering the armor they adorn.
Lastly, I previously said that a player with no athletics could still be considered fast. Well, this game tries to keep the average at 5 or 6. When you've got 5 or 6 athletics, and very light armor (lets say, a shirt, leather gloves, simple leather boots, and no helmet) you can literally fly in this game. The shirt, leather gloves and boots would probably be about equal to our day-to-day clothes nowadays. Now tell me, can you run 40 MPH in your clothes, even at a sprint? Now just remember, these characters are doing nothing more than jogging...
TL;DR All videogames are insanely unrealistic when it comes to a human player's speed. Players that look like the flash in crpg are still probably slower than players in cod or quake. It is just a feature that shows no signs of dying off since games would be shit boring to play without it.