Rapid Fire: how does it work (light or heavy weapon)? der=0>

[Human]

Great, thanks. So it sounds like what you're saying is that there really is no difference between using a slow or fast weapon. Though faster weapons feel a bit more responsive.

Also, it sounds like dual wielding hand crossbows only gives a 5% attack speed bonus over using a quiver. Which means that the choice is more based on the weapon or quiver additional effects.

Thanks.

[HardRock]

So it sounds like what you're saying is that there really is no difference between using a slow or fast weapon.

To me It didn't feel like there is. After more rigid testing it may turn out, that the resource generation advantage of faster weapons won't counter the increased resource costs exactly. We'll see.

[Human]

Cool, thanks for your impressions and feedback.

[AurelianZ]

Great, thanks. So it sounds like what you're saying is that there really is no difference between using a slow or fast weapon. Though faster weapons feel a bit more responsive.

Also, it sounds like dual wielding hand crossbows only gives a 5% attack speed bonus over using a quiver. Which means that the choice is more based on the weapon or quiver additional effects.

Thanks.

When it comes to rapid fire, it may not sound like it, but there will be great differences in terms of how you manage your battles.

slow weapon: can deliver sustained damage but needs more time to reload.
fast weapon: short bursts of damage but reloads faster.

Also, the fast weapon has the disadvantage that you will have to activate rapid fire 2 times more.

[Karpalo]

RF indeed has the initial cost. It's advantage for the slower weapons. Anyways it's too early to tell. Choice of optimal weapon will hugely depend on how long the fights will actually be.

[etezo]

Every channeled spell works this same now (assumption did not have all skills in beta) - cost is per attack frame not second. If your attack speed is 1.00 its 1s if 2.00 then its 0.5s - yes faster weapons along with %speed bonuses cause your resource to be drained faster.
So yes slower weapons are better as you can maintain channel for longer resulting in higher damage done. On the other hand however slower weapon = slower generation from generator abilities.

What interests me is do those small hits get regular chance to proc effects liek elemental damage on hit , knockback , passives (discipline on crit) or reduced one....

[Scorch Hellfire]

nope, its static 10 hatred per second

Wrong... no channeled skills are per second anymore. It's per cycle based on your attacks per second. It's been that way for a while now... Hence why they removed the "per second" from all the channeled skills' tooltips...

[Jedouard]

Personally, I found the faster weapon far more useful during the beta. This was because when you spun around while channelling, the slower fire rate left too many gaps. With a faster rate, I could often easily take out all the weak enemies in one spin, leaving only the strong ones to take on with my cc, mobility and high-damage skills.

I'm not sure how this will hold up for later in the game, but for the beta I found dual hand crossbows>bows+quiver>crossbows+quiver for rapid fire builds. I am referring to "reasonable" damage for dual hand crossbows.

I'll explain what I mean by "reasonable":

Dual hand crossbows had disproportionately high DPS in the beta. One vendor regularly had available hand crossbows dealing 17.6 DPS. This was significantly higher than the DPS for similarly available crossbows and bows. The highest hand crossbow I had dealt 18.6 DPS and my second hand crossbow was a rare with 17.8 DPS. It wasn't hard to get these (read, I got similar drops frequently enough). On the other hand, the highest bow I saw dealt around 14 DPS and the highest crossbow around 18 DPS, and it wasn't easy to get these (and still worse than the two dual-handers the vendor sold). Even with a quiver, there was no way these could compete with dual wielding hand crossbows.

So, when I wrote the hierarchy above, I based it off a test I did with non-magical hand crossbows, bow and crossbows of equal level and quality. The dual hand crossbows still won for rapid fire.

[Qvardz]

Wrong... no channeled skills are per second anymore. It's per cycle based on your attacks per second. It's been that way for a while now... Hence why they removed the "per second" from all the channeled skills' tooltips...

Thanks for the update, didn't know that. Makes sense in terms of balancing.

[Karpalo]

There is one interesting exception to that rule. If you use rapid fire with fire support rune it says it does fire 3 homing rockets per second as a fixed rate. That would definitely favor slow hard hitting weapon a lot. Also if the rockets proc marked for death mortal enemy then it get's even better and tilts it more towards slow hard hitter.