Base weapon attack speed

I feel like a lot of weapons should be rebalanced. I am talking about those with slow attack speed. I would say that it is detrimental for a game to have so many weapons which are practically useless just because of their low attack speed.
Now I am an inexperienced player, maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see anyone using a slow (66lv, attacks per second 1.2) Vaal Rapier over a slightly lower level weapon, Spiraled Foil (64lv, a.p.s. 1.7) since the affixes don't scale well with slower weapons.

Nope. You're not missing anything.

There are only two reasons to use a slow APS weapon:
1) While leveling, to reduce your skill use per second (mana cost per second) until you "fix" your mana.
2) You have no other upgrades and something slow drops with some otherwise really stellar mods on it.

Otherwise, the mere fact that attack speed is is composed of three separate multiplicative modifiers, which buff /everything/.. raw dps, on-hit procs per second, crits per second, accuracy over time, etc.. and even defenses, via time-not-spent-rooted-in-attack-animation (aka, capacity to manually dodge while still attacking) makes it the single most IMBA mechanic (IMO) since PoE's conception.

wish GGG would add effectivness to weapons like they did with spells, the slower the weapon the higher the effectivnes.

there are reasons, you can actually mana choke by attacking too fast for your phys leech per hit to sustain, in the case of daggers and claws you will see people intentionally picking slower bases more often than other weapon types.

I think tbh they want lesser options, they want gear dilution to slow gear progression, they want things that are sub optimal in 98% of cases but have a niche use.. I think theres a lot of things they want in the game that is served by having 'bad' base items. Not saying I agree with all their reasoning just throwing it out there as an observation.

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~b/o 200 exa

like this wouldnt exist if there wernt people who specifically wanted it, pvp puncture, any puncture tbh with swords. I would absolutely use that in a sword spec over same stats on a foil because it would just be easier on the mana and crush armour more, even though id probably get less tooltip. So its rare but there are examples to be found of 1.2aps 1 handers being favored, too few and far between though.

Honestly i think the answer is to make some, not all, some of the slower bases have a stronger purpose. Look at the bow meta, Thickets, maybe ull get away with an Imperial but Thickets, Thickets, what else is there? Well, theres harbingers now, and since they came along people are like ok, Im on a budget, I dont mind using a 350 top end phys citadel bow... ok, well that was a turn around.