I think GGG did this to prevent people from being able to use it just for traveling as people did with teleport in Diablo II. They initially did the same thing with Leap Slam but, and here's the key: Leap Slam was later sped up dramatically to the point that it IS useful for traveling and it is also useful for damage. When they made that change to Leap Slam they didn't change anything about Lightning Warp.
No, we did not do the same thing with Leap Slam. It was never based on your movement speed to get locations, it just had a set time that was longer. It's always been a set time for the leap, regardless of distance.
Lightning warp uses your movement speed because that's fundamental to the design of the skill. It is not intended to be some instant speed teleport movement skill. The point of it is that you move to somewhere at the same speed you usually would, but can be casting other things while you move, not that you get there faster. It deals damage around both where you were and where you go, allowing you to wade into enemies, be pulled out to safety while damaging them more, and dealing damage to anything lying in wait for you at the destination. The skill serves its purpose, and is useful in several builds by doing exactly what it's trying to do. A recently introduced example is lightning warping into a fight and using the 'travel time' before the warp to charge up incinerate so it's going at full blast when you get there.
If you want a near-instant teleport that gets you around the map at lightning speed, then you should be asking for such a skill to be made, not trying to get lightning warp turned into something it was never meant to be and making it useless at serving its intended purpose in the process.
For the record, lightning warp will still get you places faster if there's anything in the path that you'd have to walk around, enemies included, as it takes only a direct, straight-line distance.
Man, what a great answer, and the answers that the others are giving you don't seem to be worth of yours. So here it is, +rep to you !
Also to add to the conversation, I would say it feels slow because of the cast time and sometimes it feels like you don't really have time to cast any other spells in between the moment you cast lightning warp and the moment you are actually warped, but this can probably be fixed by having either a quality lightning warp (better cast speed) or having it have a faster casting somehow (faster casting gem, etc.).
They initially did the same thing with Leap Slam but, and here's the key: Leap Slam was later sped up dramatically to the point that it IS useful for traveling and it is also useful for damage.
No, we did not do the same thing with Leap Slam. It was never based on your movement speed to get locations, it just had a set time that was longer. It's always been a set time for the leap, regardless of distance.
maybe he linked leap slam to faster attacks which does improve the travelling time a lot.
don't know if you can do the same thing with lightning warp, which one would apply, faster attacks or faster casting?
