I'd like to speak my concerns about the new weapon RTs and hopefully get some clarification. First, a little background:

I'm a high strength character; at 108th circle I have 85 strength and 70 stamina. My main goal in specializing my TDPs this was was simple, DPS (damage per second); I want to be able to swing the largest, most damaging weapon tirelessly to make lots of money fast. An old forged greatsword use to be around 105 stones, had awesome damage, and I could get it to min RT with (best that I can remember) about 72 ranks of strength. Then came the new forging system and the new king weapon in my eyes was a haralun greatsword, capped out at 135 stones. 85 strength got this weapon to min and at 70 stamina I didn't have to worry about fatigue. In the test instance I'm getting RTs between 5 and 9 seconds vs. the old 2-3.

My fear of the new system is:
-At the upper end, I feel its really kinda cruel to need more than 85 strength to get an RT to min. At this point its around 250 TDPs per rank to increase the stat and this makes it hard to do much else. Where does it stop?
-Myself (and others I'm sure) have spent a lot of time specializing in DPS, which as far as I'm aware was dominated by 2HE. Now I understand wanting to level things out across the weapon classes, that makes sense, but it really sucks if you have 500 ranks in 2HE and now something else entirely is the new best DPS. Say LE becomes the new best damage per second, that's hundreds upon hundreds of hours of training wasted and hundreds and hundreds more towards specializing in a new weapon to get me where I already was before; I might as well just cancel my subscription that's so frustrating.

I'd like to remain positive about 3.0, but I don't feel we've been given enough information to make heads or tails of the new combat system. Some of us enjoy optimizing our characters against game mechanics and these changes blow up all of that.

I think Kodius mentioned somewhere that he redesigned the RT calcs because they broke the 99 cap on stats. Plus the new forging system probably was designed around more modular weapons (that is, lighter at lower stats instead of one weapon fits all for 300 ranks).

And I think he increased the RT for 2 handed weapons across the board as well. I don't think they're supposed to ever swing as fast as the daggers anymore.

I'm not looking forward to massive RT increases either myself.

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Adding nothing to the conversation since 1834.

I know they won't get that low again, but my concern is that DPS wise the new RTs are going to dramatically shift which weapon skills are most favorable, thus throwing off the original strategy used in creating a character a certain way. That and more than 85 str to get min is redic. Where does it end?

>>I know they won't get that low again, but my concern is that DPS wise the new RTs are going to dramatically shift which weapon skills are most favorable, thus throwing off the original strategy used in creating a character a certain way. That and more than 85 str to get min is redic. Where does it end?<<

Use lighter weapons. I've not had any real issues with 80 strength and my RTs are pretty minimal, maybe 1 second more than on live. It's not the end of the world considering stats go up to 150.

Your body tightens as you draw your arms together in a sinuous, flowing motion, mimicking the form you were trained to adopt for this roar of warning.
Kodius fled to the west in terror!
Roundtime: 2 sec.

Couldn't the new damage potential per strike on 2HEs make up for it , if not already ?