I don’t think the defensive benefits of attack speed have been properly accounted for in the game’s balance right now. Attack speed is incredibly strong both offensively and defensively: the attack-speed weapon enchants, the attack speed on Willow Cap Ring, and the boost to action speed from the lightning chest enchant mod.
Attack speed increases damage output, but it also increases safety by letting you exploit enemy attack animations and squeeze damage into smaller windows. And there’s seemingly no meaningful tradeoff compared to alternatives. Slower attack speeds may hit harder per swing, but they also make you more vulnerable to getting hit, which helps balance them out. There’s no comparable balancing pressure on attack speed. In practice, attack speed is better than almost every other enchant or mod in almost every situation, and nearly every build benefits from it disproportionately compared to any other stat.
The only real constraint is stamina—more attack speed means higher stamina consumption—but the cost feels too small. If speed is going to remain this strong, then increased attack speed and action speed should probably drain significantly more stamina to compensate.
In physics of real life, speed gets more expensive the more you push it. Costs don’t scale linearly with speed: at low speeds they can look roughly linear, but as speed rises, the energy cost tends to ramp up much faster. In that sense, NRFTW’s speed scaling feels under-priced.
Either way, I think action speed is currently overpowered and should be rebalanced.