Fix Global Generic Stats with Attributes

Made a thread with an earlier concept of this, took some time to think about it and flesh it out a bit more.

I am suggesting this with the idea that post Act 3 (And much of Act 3) will be HEAVILY adjusted to be more in-line with the more complete Acts 1-3 as I think these reflect more of the game that GGG wants to build for us. Notably for movespeed, I think that the scale of zones in Act 3 and maps and the general POE1-ness of end game enemies will be reduced based on other community feedback and historical comments from GGG on the vision for POE2.

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Global generic stats are things like movement speed and rarity that are functionally must-haves for every character. They don't really contribute to your character's power level but if you are building your character with some knowledge of how the game works you will try your hardest to get as much of them as possible. They eat valuable affix slots from your items and, in the case of movespeed, are necessary (disregarding QotF) affixes on gear.

Rarity stacking is inherently bad, as opting out slows down character progression in both trade and SSF leagues. This eventually kills build diversity as people gravitate to builds that can afford to easily stack rarity. Rarity being present in trade league eventually smothers out those without it. It's fun in concept to maximize your build for MF, but the macro-consequences feel really bad for most players. It begins to feel like only a handful of playstyles are even worth taking to end game.

This is not good.

Attributes feel very stale and have little build impact beyond equipping gear unless you are stacking one specific attribute. There isn't much reason to spread your attributes out beyond gear and gem requirements unless you are stacking. There is little innate attribute expression related to your character fantasy.

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Suggestion:
Remove explicit modifiers for rarity and movement speed.

Give incremental bonuses to global generic stats, up to a cap, for the three attributes.

Dex = Movespeed
Int = Item Rarity
Str = Physical Damage Reduction
(Or +all res, depending on how they fix armor. Heck it could even be reduced damage from all hits to give the chonk some real fangs)

Some example values, here you would cap all bonuses at 200 of each specific attribute.

Every 10 Dex = 1% Movespeed (+20% at 200 Dex)
Every 5 Int = 1% Item Rarity (+50% at 200 Int)
Every 16 Str = 1% Physical Damage Reduction (+12.5% at 200 Str)

In addition to this, add movespeed to non-unique boots as a guaranteed implicit which scales with quality. What I mean by this is that all boots give +5% movespeed at 0% quality and +15% at 20% quality.

This would give us a movespeed bonus of +35% at 200 dex with +20% quality boots.

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Oh no! But this means my int stacking archmage MoM spark stormweaver is going to be slower than those darn deadeyes!!

Yeah. Of course your full mage character in the int sphere moves slower than a deadeye in the dex sphere. But you innately get to the magic find cap as a tradeoff, and still have the option to build in some dex to compensate. Same thing in reverse for the pathfinder- they want to get some magic find, they need to dip into int. Mind you the magic find cap is not super high. Likewise for the melee bonkers, you get some very valuable and needed tankiness but may want to find a way to compensate your other stats.

The +15% movespeed on quality boots is meant to give some baseline upgrade to your boots across all characters, independent of how those boots roll, and to add some extra corruption spiciness with +/-qual. The benefit of this is that you get a VASTLY increased pool of viable boots dropping. So many good boots drop right now and are just 1 regal shard at best due to not having +30/35% movespeed.

+15% may sound slow but it is a perfectly fine baseline for playing the currently most-finished content of early access. As I said at the beginning, I think the rest of the game will eventually play more like the early acts. That is, more POE2 pace than POE1 pace.

If you want to cap out on an off-stat, it is easier in the current passive tree than ever before. Travel nodes can easily be swapped to compensate for the attribute you desire. Every +rarity affix you have on your current gear could be replaced by a +attribute stat that you will immediately appreciate.

In general, players will consider their stat distribution more. You get more build choice and player agency.

A well-rounded character would have benefits for not opting into some of the harder-scaling attribute stacking tech, like Archmage.

Item rarity could still be found on some uniques such as Ventor's, Greed's Embrace, Goldrim, etc., but it should NOT be on rares. This could be a way to keep some MF strategies around without having the stat utterly dominate as it does now.

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The biggest flaw in this system would be that it adds three more numbers that some player would feel a need to cap in addition to resistances. Well, I think that would be worth it to fix the itemization issues we currently see.

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Anyway, this has been my TED talk. Tell me how wrong I am.

I like the idea of movement speed scaling on boot quality rather than being an affix. Boots having speed as an implicit is another idea people have floated out, but I honestly like your idea more since it doesn't choke out the option of having different base-type implicits completely.

As for the attribute ideas... I don't think that is a good idea since it creates more band-aid mechanics and scalings instead of addressing the core shortcomings that the game has.

Having rarity and speed tied to dex and int would simply shift the meta to people playing dex/int hybrid for every high end build.

Having physical damage reduction being tied to strength would force armour builds to be even more restricted in their skill usage. I would honestly prefer if armour was just fixed instead since it is the real issue with more tank oriented builds right now. I have a post on that:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3667538

While baseline attributes aren't amazing in their current PoE2 EA states I don't think they are actually terrible since they have more direct scaling options on the skill tree than they did in PoE1 and already feel more impactful without needing to be a pure attribute stacking build. It would be nice if they were slightly more impactful overall, but they don't need a major boost.

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The biggest flaw in this system would be that it adds three more numbers that some player would feel a need to cap in addition to resistances. Well, I think that would be worth it to fix the itemization issues we currently see.

Having borderline mandatory stats with hard-caps is actually far more damaging for a game like this than one would see or expect at first glance. I made an entire post about resistances alone that emphasizes the negative symptoms and recommends a clean way to remove them:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3629096