Speed stats: Please improve them

I held off making this thread for a long time, but after essentially four expansions (Stormblood to Dawntrail) this has been around for a long time, with no fixes or improvements aside from better scaling.

Skillspeed and Spellspeed have the following issues that should be addressed:

1.) Weaponskill and Spell GCD actions at 1.5s recast (capped) should receive bonus damage/healing from speed stats

This is to make up for the inability to further speed up recast times on GCD actions. This change is in line with the additions in Endwalker to give a bonus damage % if an attack had guaranteed critical hit / direct hit rate and received additional rate through group buffs or stat points to make the extra rate not a dead gain.

The following actions would be affected by this change (sorted by jobs):

• Sage - Eukrasian Dosis I-III, Eukrasian Dyskrasia, Eukrasian Diagnosis, Eukrasian Prognosis I-II
• Reaper - Void Reaping, Cross Reaping, Grim Reaping (all Enshroud 1.5s GCDs)
• Machinist - Heat Blast / Blazing Shot, Auto Crossbow
• Dancer - Standard Finish / Finishing Move, Technical Finish
• Summoner - Gemshine + Precious Brillliance with Wind Attunement (Garuda, Emerald Carbuncle)
• Red Mage* - Enchanted Riposte, Enchanted Zwerchau, Enchanted Moulinet, Enchanted Moulinet Deux, Enchanted Moulinet Trois
  
  (*) This will make more sense with the next change

2.) To accomodate jobs with weaponskills and spells in the same toolkit, Skillspeed and Spellspeed should be reworked

This can be achieved in one of two ways without changing the action type (Weaponskill to Spell and vice versa):

Option 1: Give jobs with both action types a trait (Lv1 or when first opposite action type is learned) that will give additional speed stat of the opposite type natively provided by equipment equal to the current Skillspeed / Spellspeed obtained through equipment.

Example 1: Paladin has +800 Skillspeed and gets +800 Spellspeed
Example 2: Red Mage has +1000 Spellspeed and gets +1000 Skillspeed

Option 2: Quick and dirty - merge both stats into one and call it Haste.

The following actions would be affected by this change (sorted by jobs):

• Paladin - Clemency, Holy Spirit, Holy Circle, Confiteor, Blade of Faith, Truth & Valor
• Dark Knight - Unleash, Stalwart Soul, Unmend
• Reaper - Harpe, Soul Sow, Harvest Moon, Communio
• Red Mage - All standard & Enchanted weaponskills (Riposte, Zwerchau, Redoublement, Moulinet, Moulinet Duex, Moulinet Trois, Reprise)

Closing points

I am aware that many jobs will still prefer to be close to 2.50s GCD regardless due to Critical Hit & Direct Hit being stronger and because of rotational alignment for how jobs are currently designed (meaning a lot of potency being behind Abilities or other methods, unaffected by either speed stat).

The goal of these changes is to make speed less of a dead or even detrimental stat and to streamline & futureproof the stat for current and further jobs and job actions, similar to how Critical Hit and Direct Hit were streamlined in 6.3(?).

lol we have no stats.. it is just numbers appear in character profile

I never seen such a broken system in any RPG before like this

but I will give you my feedback..

1- I think 1.5 spell + weaponskill speed is important for the game but as I think the game have technical limitations.

2- spell and skill speed is there to just add one extra stat (it should be merged)

3- we can summarize all stats as follows: Haste / Crit .. that's it every thing else doesn't matter with the current design ( not even the stats all together at this point )

Haste would probably be the easier implementation since it's already a thing on some Field Operation gear, though only active in Eureka/Save the Queen.

For starters to improve them, they should just combine Skill Speed and Spell Speed into one stat, as you do have some classes that use both.

I think speed being brought up to par a little bit would be a good thing, considering stats are often little more than a trap in a game that usually bends over backwards in its design to make things approachable for new players.

Another reason speed stats suck is most of the jobs in game have an 'Ability' that deals damage, i.e. an oGCD action that does not receive any benefit from speed whatsoever. This of course aligns with their current design centering on predictable damage windows every 2 minutes; ability recasts being reduced by speed stats would cause them to become desynchronized from these windows and potentially make them less powerful if not used properly (see how PLD's EW version of Goring Blade or current GNB's Double Down work). And it's often at odds with the way bosses will leave the field for long periods in many higher end raid encounters, especially Ultimates. There's scarcely any opportunity to even eke out more than 1 extra GCD within the times you may actually attack the boss, let alone a recent boss design more comfortable with challenging players to maintain uptime instead of almost guaranteeing it.

BLM remains notable for being the only job that does not have damaging oGCDs, and likewise has much more often had periods where spellspeed was preferable or at the very least not detrimental compared to other stats.

Putting aside how a faster GCD makes oGCD weaving more difficult, speed's effect on the GCD could be greater. It was already changed to make DoTs tic harder, but so many of those were removed I wouldn't be surprised if speed is weaker than intended currently.