A question about attack speed and final items. Mostly.

[owlish]

I've got two toons, [I have others as well, a couple finished and farming] one Nature/Warfare, one Spirit/Defender. Playing the fan patch, legendary difficulty, not XMax or any such thing. They both happen to be at the beginning of the legendary third act, and holy crud, the Nature/Warfare guy is so much easier and more fun. Both are high strength, melee types. They both have decent resists, but N/W probably has better items [using a decent Sabretooth and a thorny maul, S/D has a rancor of alacrity].

So, part of the question is, even trying to boost attack speed on my melee toons, I'm getting nowhere near the limit. Do people end up focusing on attack speed exclusively, to the point of losing max resistances? Does that only happen on certain classes with increasing speed skills? And/or, is Spirit/Defender just one of the harder combinations?

[LMunhoz]

Hm, spellbinder isn't the fastest attacker out there. With a Warfare toon you can easily hit the AS cap (Weapon training and Ardor), but with the spellbinder you do that via items, you might wanna hit the cap as shield passives have chance to proc based on AS.

[owlish]

Well, yes. All else being equal, my spellbinder would like to be able to attack faster. But currently, he's at about +60, mostly from the weapon. So maybe the question is, for similar characters, how high is their attack and total speeds, and for the ones nearing the cap, how are they doing it? 3-4 MIs with Alacrity? Search for some specific unique items?

[LittleJoeRambler]

Legendary Stonebinder's Cuffs with the Alacrity suffix are generally a good way to get attack speed up; SBCs add +3 all skills, +25% elemental resistance, and can come with other resistances as well. It'll probably take a while to farm for something like that, but it'd be worth it. Using a weapon with Alacrity or Veteran's also helps, and there are amulets that boost total speed (I have an Amulet of the Tiger that gives +22% total speed), and Legendary Mechanical Parts also grants +15% total speed. In addition, I have a Jade Idol that gives +42% attack speed total (native +17% and +25% AS completion bonus), so that might be something you'd want to look into acquiring. Then of course there is stuff like Valor of Achilles that grants AS bonuses both from the relic and sometimes the completion bonus. Adding all this together grants something like +150% Attack Speed, which should get you well on your way to reaching the cap. Also note that the only pieces of actual gear I mentioned were for the Arm and Neck areas (and the weapon, but that probably won't help your resistances anyway), so you can still stack resistances on the rest of your armor, and getting good green armor means you can socket specific relics to compensate for a weakness in one area.

Hope this helps.

[Dream]

Note: You can also look for charms that have %Attack Speed as bonus, like Achilles Valor if I recall right, has amongst the best AS bonuses. You need a Green-weapon for that to snuck in though.

[McGyverForTehWin]

You go find a legendary Sabretooth of Alacrity and no more worries