by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

How much do you hate Movement Speed on Items?

If your answer is “More than I can put into words” then you are just like me. Luckily, this hate for Movement Speed affixes can be put into numbers. If you are familiar with my work, then you already know I’m just the right man for the job.

Getting to the 25% movement speed cap is super important, your clearing speed will increase, you will avoid death easier, and become overall more efficient. Keeping up with the group key in public games. Movement speed items used to be a huge asset, but when Paragon Points came into play; the landscape for Movement Speed changed drastically. Now you can get the entirety of your 25% Movement Speed bonus just from the Paragon points, all you need to do is reach Paragon 200 or higher.

Sure you could you decide to put those points elsewhere, but what exactly are we giving up for that 25% movement speed? Keep in mind that you can get up to 12% speed on each item, 25% Movement Speed is then worth two Primary Stats.

250 Int/Dex/Str/Vit

This would be akin to a single socket on armor/jewerly. A socket can be a Primary Stat, but a very weak one at that. You will never see top-end Pants or Chests sporting just a single socket. Jewelry, on the other hand, can get only one socket on it; that makes it a much better comparison point.

Your two options are:

Movement speed on jewelry, and base stat on Paragon: you’d get 25% Movement Speed and 250 base stat.

Movement speed on Paragon, and sockets on jewelry: you’d get 25% Movement Speed and 560 base stat.

You already see that Movement speed found on Jewerly is an absurd waste of itemization budget. When you consider that jewelry can have 750 base stat, 10% CHC, 50-100% CHD, 8% CDR, or 8% RCR on it; you will start to understand why Movement Speed means an instant trip to see Myriam.

Max Resource

200 Max Mana, 50 Max Spirit, 50 Max Fury, 50 Max Wrath, 25 Max Hatred, 25 Arcane Power.

What do all of these have in common? They are acquired as secondary stats. How many secondary affixes would it take to get the amount? That’s a hard question to ask because it varies depending on the class.

Witch Doctors can get 300 Max Mana out of two items but Monk can only get 30 Max Spirit. These things aren’t even balanced, shame on whoever implemented them.

The biggest offender is the DH who gets Max Discipline out of items, but Max Hatred with Paragon points.

Fixing It

Any boots can roll movement speed, but only select Legendaries can roll this affix outside the feet slot. As of right now those select Legendaries feel super weak.

By now, it is crystal clear that while Movement Speed is a big waste of a Primary Stat.  Movement speed might make you hate legendaries that roll it now, but movement speed could prove very valuable as a Secondary Stat.

We should also fix this secondary stat disparity while we are at it, make it so a Max Resource Secondary Stat on an item is equal to 25 Paragon Points. Also, you could make more Legendaries that give Max Resource; it is a very underrated stat.

Conclusions

The developers have established that they don’t want secondary start to have much of an effect on character power. They constantly repeat this when people suggest that the lesser primary stats, like Life per Second, be turned into secondaries.

In reality, secondary stats can provide a source of power to our Characters. Whether it is thorns damage, life per kill, specific resistances, or max resource; these stats do in fact provide small improvements to character power. If you are still not convinced, I’ll bring Neinball to tell you how max discipline is one of the most valuable stats for Hardcore DHs.

The distinction between primary and secondary see itself defined more by power and usability, secondary stats tend to be either too situational or too weak to compete with primary stats.

Paragon points have put movement speed on this category, Movement is speed is now too weak to compete with primary stats.

Even if you’d halve movement speed bonus on paragon, you’d still only need your boots to cap it and movement speed legendaries would still be useless.

If you reduce it to a quarter, then using Paragon points to boost our speed becomes useless. Everyone would be forced to have at least one movement speed legendary to keep up, and this would likely cause problems at the public game level.

In all, the best solution seems to be turning movement speed into a secondary stat. This small improvement would make items like Tyrael’s might and The Flavor of Time much more desirable and that would mean happier players everywhere.