Ridiculous Attack Speed numbers

[Doppel]

Sure, from a purely DPS perspective you'd be doing less damage per resource gained with a fast attack. But that's the point, slower attacks should have drastically increased DPS to counter the many pro's of a fast attack, since:
- there are resource spending skills where weapon damage is less important/irrelevant
- there are skills that benefit from amount of crits
- there are cc item mods that trigger based on hit
- there are (skill) procs that trigger based on hit
Anyways, it's true that relatively speaking one would gain less benefit from for example Sharpshooter when already attacking very fast, but generally speaking a faster attack is preferable to a slower attack, hence my statement that as a rule of thumb slower attacks should have more DPS.
So, i don't really understand what you're disagreeing with.

[Karth]

I'm disagreeing with how you're ignoring or marginalizing the skills in which weapon damage per hit is more important than even DPS.

Some abilities get better with faster attack speed and less damage per hit.

Some abilities get better with slower attack speed and more damage per hit.

You're ignoring the second category. Slow attack speed weapons don't need more DPS if the abilities that are advantageous to low attack speed, high damage per hit weapons are balanced with the abilities that are advantageous to high attack speed, low damage per hit weapons.

[Doppel]

I'm not really ignoring them, i'm just treating them as exceptions. I'm not seeing that many abilities that truly benefit from increased weapon damage per hit. All the abilities i've listed that directly benefit from fast attack speed vastly outweight those few exceptions i feel.
But ask yourself the question, if DPS would be a constant, then how many times would you prefer a faster attack speed and less damage per hit over a slower attack speed and more damage per hit. I'm sure it would be akin towards 90%.

[Karth]

It would depend on overkill damage, how whatever relevant abilities I'm using work, dodge, whether I'm using life leech to stay alive, and a host of other things I could think of if I sat here long enough.

[galzohar]

Slow (but equal DPS) weapons have plenty of advantages too, maybe even advantages that beat out those of fast weapons (and maybe not):

1. Resources are spent more efficiently. While resources gained from generators are unaffected (since they get generated and spent equally slower), resources gained elsewhere are very much affected. Wizard's arcane power is most obvious as it generates very quickly and you get very little (or even 0) arcane power from signature spells. Witch doctor, at least in the beta, is in a similar position, though we can't tell how he'll be later in the game since mana seems to scale differently than most other resources. Demon hunters are somewhere in the middle, getting a mediocre amount of resources from natural regeneration. Barbs, at least in the beta, get very little resource generation from damage taken which again is used more efficiently with slower weapons. Monks are the only ones that get nothing here that I can remember.

2. Damage abilities with a cooldown favor slower weapons. If you have a powerful attack (think revenge, overpower, earthquake, wave of force, rain of vengeance, fan of knives, seven sided strike) that cannot be used more than once every X seconds, regardless of resource cost it will be better with a higher damage per hit weapon, and gain almost nothing from increased attack speed. The longer the cooldown, the more significant the effect.


Of course, there are quite a few things that favor faster weapons, though some more than others:

1. Flat +damage modifiers (from weapon or jewelry) add more DPS to faster weapons. I think this is by far the most significant one that Blizzard is relying on to make faster weapons viable. While spenders gain mostly from weapon damage rather than DPS, every class will use quite a bit of generators too, and generators benefit only from DPS, not weapon damage, so eventually enough DPS can make up for lower weapon damage, and which one is more important really depends on your class, and also somewhat depends on your build.

2. Procs might work more often with faster weapons, of course unless normalized. Some procs definitely aren't normalized, though, such as frenzy of bash with their stun rune, weapon master might weapon effect, bola shot with 15% chance to restore 2 discipline rune, and overall anything that slows the target.

3. For some classes, faster weapons are also class-specific and can spawn modifiers that may or may not be enough to justify using them.

4. Costs of abilities that are not dependent on weapon damage is effectively reduced. Since you generate more and spend more, the cost of those abilities becomes less significant (as in, you lose less damage for using them than you would lose with a slower weapon). Examples for such abilities are wave of light, sprint and teleport. I think DH doesn't have any such abilities, by the way, as all of the DH's utility skills cost discipline.

5. Slightly less overkill. Easier to spread the damage rather than deal more damage than the target has in remaining hit points. Especially useful for monsters that die quickly, but overall I doubt it'll be anywhere near as significant as the other factors.

6. Less time spent locked into attack animation. Again probably not very significant, but you have slightly more chances to decide to stop attacking and run away with a faster attack. Of course this is mostly relevant for when you start a swing and then change your mind and want to run, and probably much less important for generic kiting or chasing, since you can just as well run further back/up and then use the slower swing.


At least those are all the advantages/disadvantages I can think of right now.

Of course, attack speed bonuses don't reduce the advantages of slower weapons, but they might not be as useful as they might seem (compared to, say, an overall % damage increase) due to the advantages of slower weapons, or again might be even more useful due to (at least some of) the advantage of faster weapons.

[zakaluka]

It would depend on overkill damage, how whatever relevant abilities I'm using work, dodge, whether I'm using life leech to stay alive, and a host of other things I could think of if I sat here long enough.

I recall a CM post recently, explaining that as long as blizzard kept fast weapons and slow weapons "balanced" for DPS in-house, they kept running into situations where fast weapons out-performed slow weapons. I think the link I saw hinted at the raw damage of slower weapons being balanced upwards to compensate.

With the dot/pet haste scaling, there are many fewer abilities that gain a great deal from finding the weapon with the highest raw damage.

I can count them on one hand for the wizard:
Explosive Blast
Wave of Force

While every other skill imaginable gains more from haste, thanks to crit/AP on crit.

Although, there are a few specific runes that benefit more from slower attacks:
Explosive Bolts (charged bolt)
Cascade (arcane torrent)
Chaos Nexus (disintegrate)
Mocking Demise/Mirror Mimics (mirror images)
Arcane Destruction (archon)

And we don't know a whole hell of a lot about Archon. It'd need to include a CD AoE nuke to be balanced for both fast and slow weapons.

[Karth]

See posts #20 and #22 on the subject for my arguments. I'm not really interested in rewording them just to try to get my point across.

[zakaluka]

But I've acknowledged what you said (some abilities gain more from slower attacks) and mapped it out for my class. How did I miss your point?

My class, at least, only includes 2 abilities that favor slow weapons. No idea about any other class.
(edit: I'll concede that meteor fits that criteria too, so now 3)

Only one very small counter-balance to the fast attacks thing: faster attacks shrink your cycle time. You get less time-based resource regen per cycle - which is irrelevant for monk (if I understand?) and has interesting results for barb. So it actually forces your cycle to include more sigs. That might be significant when you get into the high haste levels.

[galzohar]

Wizard includes a LOT of abilities that favor slower weapons. Anything that costs arcane power and can be spammed favors slower weapons. Not just abilities with a cooldown! Remember that most/all of your resource regeneration is over time rather than from attacking.

Let's say you use arcane orb and electrocute with no passives or items for the sake of simplicity. If you attack twice as fast, you will still cast the same amount of arcane orbs per minute, but they will do 1/2 the damage (since weapon DPS is assumed equal, so double attack speed means 1/2 damage per hit). Sure, for each arcane orb you'll also cast an additional electrocute. However, since arcane orb deals more damage than electrocute in just about any situation with just about any rune choices (as it should, being a spender), a single full damage arcane orb is better than a 1/2 damage arcane orb plus a 1/2 damage electrocute. Obviously, this comparison gives same results for any 2 weapons of equal DPS and different speed.

The only way for the faster weapon to win here is via other bonuses, most likely via simply having higher DPS due to flat damage affixes, though other bonuses are also possible to help here. Without those bonuses, though, the slow weapon is flat out better for any reasonably-specced wizard. How much damage per hit you're willing to give up in order to gain DPS (if you actually end up having such an option) is a tough call, as it strongly depends on the ratio between your signature spell damage and spender damage.


The only class that seems to have most of its abilities either unaffected or benefit from fast weapons is the monk, but even he has the seven-sided strike which benefits from slower weapons due to its cooldown.

Barbarian is affected by this but the effect is very small if you don't use high-damage abilities with a cooldown, since fury regeneration from damage taken seems small (though it might change later on in the game). Abilities like revenge, overpower and earthquake, though, become quite more powerful with a slower weapon, but again, since most of your damage comes from your primary/generator and secondary/spender, it won't be *that* big of a deal to have a faster weapon, at least compared to DH/wizard/wd.

DH has relatively small passive regen, so again is less affected than wizard/wd, but is still very much affected, quite a bit more than barbs and monks.

[HardRock]

The Wizard can close the gap between slow and fast weapons by using the Prodigy passive and/or by turning the signature skills into generators with their respective runes. The price you'll pay in this case is of course that you lose one of your passive and/or rune slots, but it may be worth it, we'll see.

It's also worth noting, that spammable DoTs (Rend, Haunt, Exploding Palm, etc.) don't scale with DPS in their damage, but with higher APS you'll be able to spam them faster.

With Haunt this will mean that to keep up with 2H weapons in damage you'll have to use it on more targets with a faster weapon, which may not be what you want or even possible. If the damage boost of Mojos is good enough, then this won't be a problem of course.

I don't think Exploding Palm will suffer too much because of this, because primarily you'll use it for the explosion, which doesn't depend on your weapon's damage. Also, the explosion will be often triggered by other skills I imagine.

Rend is almost completely worthless with a fast weapon though, unless you're facing really weak enemies. Since it's an AoE DoT and it can't stack with itself spreading it more than with a two-hander will be really tricky.

All these problems of course come on top of the fact, that you'll have to spend more resources to do similar damage to slower weapons. This really hurts the viability of Rend with fast weapons, since it's a fairly costly ability.