(To be clear, I don’t personally care whether they speed the spear up or slow it down or remove it from the game entirely, I’m just trying to add some information.)
a) @den (the lead dev for the game - I forget his exact title) has directly stated that there are intentional reasons for slowing down the spear - see here and here for his direct statements (and the rest of that thread for considerably more detail on what he is talking about).
b) one thing I can say is that, before the spear ‘nerf’, there were at least as many complaints from PVPers that spears were ‘overpowered’ and needed to be nerfed.
Whether or not you agree with Den’s statements, or the calls from other PVPers, is of course a different matter. But these are factors that the devs are clearly taking into account.
One element of support I would like to make for what you guys are arguing in this thread - none of you are calling for other weapons to be nerfed, all of you are calling for spear to be brought back up to its former level. Believe me, that choice of calling for improvement rather than simply calling for nerfs is much appreciated.
That said - I disagree strongly with the following statement -
This is a variant of the ‘oldest lie’ in the game - after every single patch since the game began, no matter what is done, someone (or several someones) from the PVP community makes the claim that ‘there is nothing for PVP’ ‘PVP is ignored again’ etc. No matter how much work has been done for PVP, no matter how much has been stripped away from other game modes to try to fix some issue in PVP, this same claim gets made every single time. The truth is that you may not have got the specific fixes/changes that you wanted (guess what - they also didn’t give me any of the fixes I actually care about), but it is not true that PVP was ignored. This false claim really needs to stop.
@Kikigirl - this is exactly the thing that I was commenting about the other day - this is why it’s virtually impossible for us to have conversations between players of different modes that don’t just devolve into arguments and accusations. And this is why players of other modes are less and less willing to compromise with PVP - no matter what we give up, we are told we gave up nothing, and the insistence contiunes that PVP received nothing until finally it receives everything. I know there are some (many?) PVPers who recognise a need to compromise (and spear speed is not an issue where there is much need for compromise - that’s not the point), but this statement (and its variants) is the biggest obstacle to any chance of it.
(Edited for typos)