Several of the movement speed increasing boons, traits, skills, and signets have felt off. This lead me to run some tests to quantify exactly what felt wrong with them (see the end of this post for exact testing methodology). These are my findings:
1) Movement speed bonuses are only being applied to forward/backward movement and NOT being applied to side to side (strafing) movement. This can easily be verified by gaining the swiftness boon and strafing (without ANY forward movement).
2) Absolutely no movement speed bonuses stack, only the strongest movement speed bonus applies. Thus two characters with the swiftness boon (the biggest run speed boost available) run EXACTLY the same speed. This is true even if one of the characters is using any combination of movement skills or traits and the other is not using any. If this is WAI, please add a note to all movement speed increasing effects that indicates they do not stack so players are not running misinformed builds. Note that I did not test this with the runes that supposedly increase the movement speed gained from swiftness nor did I have access to quickness for my testing.
3) The elementalist’s Master Arcana Major trait “Windborne Dagger” does not work at all.
4) The elementalist’s Adept Air Major trait “One with Air” is functionally unpredictable. After traiting into it, its effect is not gained until the elementalist changes attunements and/or weapons. Additionally, after traiting out of it (via a trait reset) its effect continues to apply at least until the elementalist changes out of air attunement and possibly even longer. As a side note (that may not be bug related), it seems strangely placed from a game balance perspective because it is directly after the minor trait “Zephyr’s Speed” yet takes a full 30 seconds of air attunement before granting any effect due to movement speed boosts not stacking.
Testing Methodology
A friend and I raced around the heart of the mists as elementalists.
Elementalist was chosen as the test class because it has the largest selection of movement speed boosting traits and skills. We tested in the heart of the mists because free trait resets are available there. Note that we did not use any equipment that modifies movement speed nor did we use the quickness boon (That boon is typically very short, may not apply to movement speed at all, and is much more useful for boosting skill speed than movement speed)
We alternated through each of the trait and skill combinations while running several races to determine the approximate relative speed gain from each of them. More specifically, we setup our trait combination and used “R” to begin running in the same direction at the same time (we the players were physically in the same room so synchronization was easy). If a gap appeared during our running we knew one character had a total speed boosting effect that was larger than the other character and compared this result to the “computationally” expected difference in our trait / skill spec.