Attack Speed + Cooldown Skills

[Rylocke]

I have two questions regarding attack speed.

Firstly, I'm really trying to make a Brutal Stompers (removes the cost/cooldown of Leap) build, so increasing the frequency of my Leap skill will increase my damage output quite a bit. However, I've tested changing my attack speed and didn't notice much, if any, of a change in Leap speed. Specifically, I counted Leaps in 10s with 94% attack speed (~19.5) and 159% (~21). If we round/simplify that, I get about 20 Leaps in 10s with 100%AS, so the 159% should be closer to 31-32 Leaps, I would think. Does attack speed increase all skill "cast" speeds? Is there a global cooldown that I simply cannot reduce no matter what? Specifically, how can I Leap more often?

Secondly, even with maximum cooldown reduction (CDR), all skills except for the first one in any skill tree will still have *some* cooldown. Is there any benefit in adding attack speed (which from what I've read is more or less synonymous with cast speed) for a skill that ends up having a cooldown? For example, if I'm using Poison Nova on my Warlock with max CDR, I still have a .7s cooldown. Regardless of how quickly I can cast it, it would seem to me that the time between casts would not change, meaning that over 7 seconds I would only get 10 casts with maximum *or* minimum attack speed, right? Even using a Warden with Eye of the Storm to cut all cooldowns in half on top of the 90% CDR can't get any of them down to 0s, so it seems like attack speed wouldn't do much. Does attack speed increase hit frequency or DoT tick rate maybe? I thought I read somewhere that it used to but no longer does.

I suppose there were more than two questions in there, but do any players or bits (of the square variety) more knowledgeable than I know something that could help me?

[NullPointer]

I asked Squarebit about movement skills seeming to not scale at all with attack speed, and he confirmed that currently they do not because of some implementation problems. It should get addressed at some point, but it might not be soon because they pretty much need to get their implementations reworked to sort out the issues.


As far as I can tell, all skills have a base animation length of 0.5 seconds. Skills that can get their cooldown reduced to less than that need some amount of increased attack speed to take full advantage of the lowered cooldown. At 90% cooldown reduction, Templar can get 0.25s on the 5s base skills, Warden can get 0.25s and 0.35s on the 5s and 10s lightning skills, and Warlock can get 0.3 and 0.4s on the skills with 3s and 4s base.

The skills that go all the way down to 0.25 would require 200% total attack speed to reach peak DPS, though none of the builds I've actually tried with those skills ended up doing very well. Warden with Storm Orbs at 203% attack speed did manage to clear anomaly 1.2k at 600 mastery, but the pace was rather slow due to the limited area coverage of the skill. Notable skills with <0.5s cooldowns that I did find to do well include Nimbus/Lightning Arrow and Hell Pit, requiring 143% and 167% attack speed respectively to maximize DPS.

Attack speed can also improve the overall DPS of the Magnetic Orbs + Alacrity Templar setup due to Alacrity's use effect resetting the cooldown of every other cast of Magnetic Orbs, which means that the cooldown is effectively the time that it takes for the animations to finish. Making the animations faster gives a small boost to the DPS of doing optimal skill rotations, though it's probably not worth it to invest too much into attack speed for this since it only affects a 1 second portion of a rotation that lasts 2.5 seconds at base attack speed.

[Kazaf]

Why only view it as a DPS thing? Attack speed make the gameplay smoother, I do not want to wait forever to cast or attack. You don't want to be caught in the act.

[Rylocke]

Originally posted by NullPointer:

<words>

Thanks a ton for the detailed info; that will help a ton with theorycrafting across multiple builds. You are a master buildsmith!

If I understand correctly, other than movement skills, the attack speed goal of a character would be the percentage that would modify 0.5s to the actual cooldown of the primary damage skill itself below that value--0.5/1.67 to get to 0.3--but any skill with a modified cooldown of over 0.5 seconds would be able to avoid attack speed altogether.

I suppose I'll remove attack speed stats on my Leap Berserker and simply replace them with other DPS enhancements. While I hope the issue gets resolved some time down the line, it honestly doesn't seem like too much of a concern now that I know how it works and can merely boost other stats on this build without worrying that I've missed something.

Originally posted by Kazaf:

Why only view it as a DPS thing? Attack speed make the gameplay smoother, I do not want to wait forever to cast or attack. You don't want to be caught in the act.

Well, since the base attack speed is relatively fast, that particular thing doesn't bother me nearly as much as the DPS consideration. This game is very fast-paced as it is (once you've accumulated a few levels), so I can't say I ever really feel like I'm "waiting forever" for anything.

Just watch any YouTube video with the words "lightning," "Templar," and "anomaly" if you have doubts.

[Kazaf]

Originally posted by Squarebit:

I would say it's especially useful for no cooldown skills and utility/movement skills (because it speeds up all cast animations) - but once you stack up enough cooldown reduction it's good all around.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/375480/discussions/0/135509823666324175/

Well this is how I feel, it just makes game play smoother for me

[Rylocke]

I'm more interested in raw DPS figures. Personally, I don't mind if I can only cast an ability every 0.5s as long as it hits sufficiently hard, as that's still pretty darn fast. However, as it stands, we can both be happy since attack speed will make the rotation smoother/faster *and* it'll increase DPS in most cases, as long as there's enough CDR in [and we remove Leap from] the equation.

I'm sure Squarebit will fix the movement skill attack speed thing at some point, but until then I can't say that I've ever felt like I've had to "wait forever" to cast something with the exception of high cooldown skills (in that case, CDR is what you'd want instead of attack speed anyway). Twice per second is nothing to sneeze at.

[Kazaf]

I should have wrote "wait forever".

[Squarebit]

Leap and other similar movement skills are in a weird place as they aren't affected by either movement speed or attack speed currently. I am thinking they should get a little bit of both in the future.

As for attack speed and having very low cooldowns, no it won't do anything in terms of DPS from the skill itself but it may allow for an additional skill to be cast in the very low cooldown window. There's also the faster animation allowing movement sooner. I am however thinking about ways to make attack speed a bit more rounded and useful, by having it affect tick rates and whatnot. We'll see where it ends up, I don't want to make it *too* useful either!

[Hoh_Formosus]

Originally posted by Squarebit:

Leap and other similar movement skills are in a weird place as they aren't affected by either movement speed or attack speed currently. I am thinking they should get a little bit of both in the future.

As for attack speed and having very low cooldowns, no it won't do anything in terms of DPS from the skill itself but it may allow for an additional skill to be cast in the very low cooldown window. There's also the faster animation allowing movement sooner. I am however thinking about ways to make attack speed a bit more rounded and useful, by having it affect tick rates and whatnot. We'll see where it ends up, I don't want to make it *too* useful either!

Is this still applicable or have there been any updates to atk spd and/or leap ECT? Currently building a brutal stomper and I want to make sure i dont need atk spd.

[Squarebit]

It hasn't changed since but it may change sometime soon :)

[ChinaMonster123]

Originally posted by Squarebit:

It hasn't changed since but it may change sometime soon :)

Any chance that there have been updates recently/in the making? :D