Easy way to fix spell & skill speed before Heavensward!

[Wilbow]

"Easy" means a lot of headache later on. There is never an easy fix to balance changes.

I'm curious, though, as to what headaches later on such a change would induce. In fact, I would argue that NOT allowing Spell Speed/Skill Speed to be a MP/TP neutral stat essentially dooms it to be a dead stat or, in misguided attempts to correct for that, a broken one.

Endgame fights now can last MUCH longer than DPS can sustain a damage rotation, but also have extremely tight DPS checks. Hence, we see BRDs basically being mandatory for these fights, because healers need mana, melee needs TP, BLM laughs at this restriction, and lol2.4SMN. With MP/TP being such a valuable resource, SpS and SkS actually end up almost doing more damage than they're worth in these fights, which is what the gear should really be designed for. And a BRD's resources can only be stretched so thin...

Essentially, as long as this paradigm exists, I can think of no other solution BUT for spell speed/skill speed to compensate for its own weakness. You can't boost the amount of spell speed and skill speed on gear to compensate for its weakness, as that only makes the problem worse, and making it straight up boost MP/TP regen is a problem because PIE is a primary stat that is treated as a secondary stat on gear.

Especially considering that people actively avoid the stat in most cases, fixing the stat alters balance extremely minorly. It simply ends up making SkS/SpS comparable in value to its counterparts, and in so doing, gives every class more viable gear options (except BLM, which is the black sheep in this case).

So what happens with my idea is to simply live up to the adage "a stitch in time saves nine". And while people balk at the word "easy", it is not hard to argue that it indeed is so compared to the nightmarish alternatives. The degree to how easy it is is a function of how robust the game engine is, and given that SE is so paranoid about divulging in-game information that secondary stats consist of a total value and a tooltip, you can forgive me for not knowing the details concerning the inner workings of the game.