Ridiculous Attack Speed numbers

[Doppel]

Passives and rune effects that give more resources don't change the fact that slower weapons will end up with more damage if given the same DPS and no proc or other special effects that favor faster weapons.

Exactly how do slower weapons end up with more damage if they have equal DPS? And why would i deliberately leave out all relevant factors like procs and special effects? The point is exactly to factor them into the effectiveness of a fast attack versus a slow attack. The point is to quantify how usefull all these factors favoring fast weapons are and then translate them into for example increased bonus DPS for slower weapons (or other effects that favor slow weapons) to make slower attacks equally viable.

[zakaluka]

Exactly how do slower weapons end up with more damage if they have equal DPS?

2 ways.

First off, CD abilities are (justifiably) much larger nukes than spammable abilities. Having a slow weapon doesn't significantly change the cast interval for your CDs, but they become larger.

Second, slower abilities are more resource efficient. If you had a set cycle of generate-spend (monk/barb??) this means nothing, but time affects resource generation for a lot of us (WD/wizard/DH??). For those of us that have a time-resource component, more haste = higher percentage of time forcing active resource regen (spamming sigs for instance).

[StrudelStraddler]

To add a pair of points to this discussion, channeled abilities favor slow 2h weapons because they drain resources slower while doing the same dps, and don't have the drawbacks of overkill because they apply damage on a more continuous basis. The other point is that 2h weapons have a much tighter damage spread across the board compared to 1h, so you are guaranteed good minimum damage.

[zakaluka]

I thought channeled spells behaved like DOTs? That'd mean they tick at a constant rate no matter your haste value, gaining damage per tick instead.

Do I understand this incorrectly?

[HardRock]

They do behave like DoTs, but DoTs deal continuous damage as well (technically they don't, but as players we can safely ignore that technicality), but this damage is represented periodically in ticks to the player every 0.5 second with the damage numbers. The health bars will show the continuous damage however.

First off, CD abilities are (justifiably) much larger nukes than spammable abilities. Having a slow weapon doesn't significantly change the cast interval for your CDs, but they become larger.

That's true only for abilities that do instant damage. Grasp of the Dead for example scales with DPS, so it favors neither slow nor fast weapons.

Second, slower abilities are more resource efficient. If you had a set cycle of generate-spend (monk/barb??) this means nothing, but time affects resource generation for a lot of us (WD/wizard/DH??). For those of us that have a time-resource component, more haste = higher percentage of time forcing active resource regen (spamming sigs for instance).

Actually this won't be such a big issue for the Barb, Monk and DH if you use generators and even the Wizard can turn his or her signatures skills into generators. The class that stands to lose the most in resource efficiency with faster weapons is the WD.

[Doppel]

Channeled abilities do not specifically favor only slow weapons since with fast weapons you have a much shorter channel cycle meaning you can apply many more critical hits/procs/special abilities within any given time AFAIK.
Your second point is important i think since it drastically reduces potential overkill damage which is usually so inherent with big slow weapons. The tight damage ranges is evidence Blizzard actually thought about it, which is good news for those that want to wield something ungodly big but relatively slow.
A problem i see though is that item mods like flat damage and APS will close the gap between fast/low damage weapons and slow/high damage weapons since they scale much better relatively speaking with the former.

Edit: Also FYI, i've looked the least at the WD and the Wizard since they interest me the least, so my view of what will be effective generally speaking is slightly skewed because of that.

[HardRock]

Channeled abilities do not specifically favor only slow weapons since with fast weapons you have a much shorter channel cycle meaning you can apply many more critical hits/procs/special abilities within any given time AFAIK.

How procs work exactly with channeled skills isn't a well tested subject AFAIK, but for consistency reasons it would make sense if these abilities could proc or crit per cycle, in which case you would be correct.

[galzohar]

And why would i deliberately leave out all relevant factors like procs and special effects?

Because if you want to understand how the complex case works with all things factored in (which, btw, we can't factor in yet because we don't know their extent), you must first understand the most basic case. It's like trying to learn power laws when you don't know how to multiply.

Exactly how do slower weapons end up with more damage if they have equal DPS?

Because due to natural resource regeneration, you will cast more spenders and less generators, and thus do more overall damage due to spending a bigger portion of your time using stronger skills and a smaller portion of your time using weaker skills.

In order to make up for using weaker skills more often, faster weapons must make up for it on other ways, with the most common and significant effect most likely being simply having higher DPS due to flat +damage affixes from weapon and jewelry, though there may be some other effects too, as already mentioned, but they aren't likely to be as significant.

Of course, there are more factors (like cooldown abilities), but by far the most significant factor is the resource efficiency. Of course, since resource efficiency is a non-issue for monks and a small issue for a barb, the cooldown abilities become the most significant effect, but since it's not *that* significant it means overall the advantage of slower weapons is not as strong for those classes as it is for DHs, not to mention wizards/WDs. For DH it's somewhere in-between, since they still do a big portion of their damage with their generator, but due to still having some natural regeneration, a slower but equal DPS weapon would still be a bit better with no other "fast-weapon-favoring" factors.