by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Welcome back to BlizzPro. I’m Dannie “Irate” Ray, and today we will get to feel the need for speed (or something like that).

Edit: Version en español

A Bit of History

Back when D3 launched, we didn’t have a lot of stats to choose from. Along with your Base Stat, there were three stats that quickly positioned themselves as the top 3. Critical Hit Chance, Critical Hit Damage, and Increased Attack Speed were was everyone was looking for. That’s how the ever so popular “Trifecta”, was born.

A lot of time has passed since launch, and with it many patches have gone live. The patches have brought us tons of skill revisions, they have fixed many broken mechanics, and they have even added new stats into the game.

Specifically, Patch 1.0.3 had a huge impact on attack speed; it did something so drastic, that it is very likely that to this day it will still be remembered. But since not everyone has been playing since day one and some us have extremely fragile memories, I’m gonna show you the great nerf of patch 1.0.3.

Diablo III Patch 1.0.3 – v.1.0.3.10057

6/19/2012

Items

• General
  • Attack Speed bonus values on weapons and armor have been reduced by 50%

Yep, nerfed all the way to half. June, 19, 2012 was a sad day for Diablo players everywhere.

In retrospect, Attack Speed wasn’t really the root of the problem. Increased Attack Speed looked like a problem mainly because of how it interacted with some other problematic things, such as certain crowd control procs and other effects. IAS was also a problem because we didn’t have many stats that promoted build diversity. The best builds were likely to be those that took the most advantage of Increased Attack Speed.

Attack Speed’s Current State

Trifecta Items are still highly sought after

Patch 1.0.3 was released almost 2 years ago. Nowadays most of the things that were the root of pre-1.0.3 problems, have long been fixed.

So we have been left with a gimped Increased Attack Speed stat. If you bother to do the math you will realize that when Cooldown Reduction and Resource Cost Reduction are utilized on the right build, they blow Increased Attack Speed out of the water.

With the prevalence of Resource Cost Reduction and Resource Regeneration mechanics, Increased Attack Speed becomes less and less important. When you consider to rise of +Skill% and +Element%, the damage gap betweeen spenders and generators is bigger than ever. Increasing your spender/generator ratio has become one of the most important parts of maximizing DPS. Sadly for attack speed fans everywhere, IAS does exactly the opposite. While a boosted attack speed will speed up both your active resource generation and expenditure, it will cannibalize your passive resource generation.

Imagine you use a Witch Doctor that likes to spam Zombie Bears, you have stacked a lot of +Zombie Charger % and +Poison%, to make your bears hit super hard. You will quickly realize that albeit hitting hard, they are heavily constrained by their mana cost. Attack speed has no effect on damage/mana, so while your bear stampede may trample people over faster, in the long run the total damage done by your bears is going to be the same. Sure, attack speed will get you extra casts of your favorite signature spells in between bear maulings. Still, that wouldn’t be as significative as getting extra casts of Zombie Bears thanks to RCR. The thing is, attack speed might help your resource generation if you use mana drain signatures. But attack speed never helps your resource generation when you are moving from pack to pack, or when you are kiting those mobs. The frail nature of spellcasters, coupled with their innate passive resource generation, makes them really appreciate a slower weapon that really maximizes their damage/resource. Too bad Off-Hands totally outclass Two-Handers.

Attack speed has remained prevalent because of its “star power”, just like famous past-their-prime fighters can still get a payday and be hyped up like a big deal because of their past glories. IAS has clung to hearts of many players in a way that to this day, they are still proud of their “Trifecta” items.

Mainly thanks to CDR and RCR totally invigorating the game. Now more than ever, people are starting to realize the downfalls of high attack speeds. A part of the player base is even starting to call for buffs to attack speed, requests for Increased Attack Speed to return to its pre 1.0.3 glory have been made. If you’ve seen the latest episode of Westmarch Workshop, #TeamTravis should explain it all.

Myself, I believe that buffing Increased Attack Speed would be a COLOSSAL mistake.

How to fix it

Fixing Increased Attack Speed is an interesting exercise on design and balance. If you were to buff the numbers on attack speed, you would make it compete with Resource Cost Reduction and Cooldown Reduction on all builds. You shouldn’t need Increased Attack Speed on builds that are heavily cooldown based, nor you should need it on those that provide passive resource regeneration or straight-up cost reductions.

Increasing the numbers on IAS could artificially make attack speed optimal for builds where intuition tells you that attack speed wouldn’t help. Moreso, it would continue to shift gearing from an intuitive process into a heavy math excercise. Increasing IAS numbers on items would also make it super OP for some builds, I’m talking about some of the builds that actually make good use of attack speed like:  Pet Builds, DoT builds, and [d3item name= “The Furnace”] builds.

Remember that IAS increases the Damage per Hit of both pets and DoTs. Since both of those are fire-and-forget skills, casting them faster won’t have a negative impact on your resource game. For both of them, IAS is a great complement to Critical Hit and Cooldown Reduction.

Having insanely high attack speeds would not only impact the balance of those builds, but it would also heavily constrain the inclusion of new mechanics into the game.

Numerically, I feel like attack speed is in a really good place right now. What we are missing on are more Primary Stats and new mechanics that really take advantage of high attack speeds (without breaking the game). Right now the things that benefit greatly from attack speed are super specific, and tremendously gimmicky.

To summarize:

Attack Speed shouldn’t compete with Cooldown Reduction or Resource Cost Reduction, instead it should provide a completely different alternative. Attack Speed doesn’t need to rise numerically as much as it needs more skills and item stats that support IAS-based builds.

Attack Speed’s Friends

I can’t list all of the things that work well with high attack speeds, but I’m gonna highlight some of my favorites.

Average Damage: Jewelry can have up to 120 average damage, for a dual wielding class using Daggers that’s an 8.5% damage increase. That can be pretty comparable to 50% CHD. The problem is that the number goes way down when you consider off-hands. I’d raise the value of min-max damage in jewelry by at least 30% and would create Legendaries a few Legendaries that offer average damage in other slots.

It is important to note that while Average Damage scales better with high BASE speed weapons, it doesn’t specifically care about IAS. It scales with IAS the same that it would with your critical factor. Still, better average damage would help fast attacking builds which benefit more from IAS that they would from CDR or RCR which is exactly what we want.

Life on Hit: Life on Hit is a flat amount, which means that it scales with your IAS and loves fast base speed weapons.

Crowd Control Procs: High attack speed + Crowd Control Procs = Good Survability.

Bleeds: If I understand them correctly, Bleeds are a bit lackluster right now. Since they do damage based on Weapon Damage% they should work better with slower weapons, the problem is that slower weapon usually gravitate towards resource cost reduction and resource regen. They like spamming high Weapon Damage% abilities, so the Bleed Damage isn’t very considerable when compared against that. Bleeds would work best supplementing build that spam low cost spenders and generators at a high rate. The problem then is that the bleed damage would still be super low and it would constantly be replacing itself.

To fix this problem, all you have to do is allow the bleeds to stack independently with each other (like Gruesome Feast, were each stack has its own timer). It makes sense if you’ve made some bleed and you cut him again then he’s bleeding worse; his original wound shouldn’t magically heal. This might make bleeds to strong, do the math on them and balance their damage accordingly.

Other Damage procs:  A slower base speed weapon will usually result on less, bigger procs; a fast weapon base will have more, smaller procs. The Average Damage on the procs will balance itself out, this Weapon % damage procs like Thunderfury’s don’t care much about base speed. Still, this kind of procs prefer Attack Speed to RCR or CDR. Flat damage procs or health based damage procs like [d3item name= “Hack”]’s or [d3item name= “The Furnace”]’s love both IAS and base speed.

Crushing Blow: We can’t talk about The Furnace without talking about Crushing Blow.  Crushing Blow is basically the special ability of  [d3item name= “The Furnace”]. Crushing blow was tested during beta but was eventually removed as it was found too strong. Its return would be perfect to provide an alternative to CHD, which was exactly why they wanted to bring it to D3 on the first place. Crushing blow is a super simple mechanic and its effectiveness is a simple math problem. You have to make it powerful enough to replace critical wtih the right build, even if the stat appears to be truly underwhelming for everyone else.

If you fix Crushing Blow damage at 8% enemy health and then add Crushing blow Chance to jewelry and gloves at a rate of 2-3% per item and switch [d3item name= “The Furnace”]’s special ability to actually show its proc chance. You might have a stat that will enable support builds without being a must have.

Conclusions:

Attack speed seems to be in a good and manageable place right now. The big issue seems to be making the player base understand that attack speed does have his places. Maybe creating or modifying a few skills and stats here and there could help drive the point home.

Now this next paragraph might sound a bit harsh, but I don’t have another way to put it.

When it comes to mathematically balance the game, the problem with Crushing Blow balance might show a dangerous developmment flaw. If you listen to Dev interviews, you’ll notice that it might be just a philosophy discordance. They will always mention that they don’t want D3 to be about the math. But to relieve the actual Diablo 3 players of doing the math, it is super important that the dev team worries about the math themselves. It should be their job to make sure that everything is balanced towards a point where choices are intuitive for the players.

Game design is a job that is much harder than you would think, and so far the Reaper of Souls team has done a pretty good job with this game. This doesn’t mean they are perfect, just like it doesn’t mean that they are useless.  It’s easy to forget that at their core, a lot of games are just a chain of math equations buried under a thick layer of pretty graphics and compelling gameplay. But math is super strong, and it usually finds a way to leak into the surface; it is very important to keep an eye on it.

Please don’t take offense to this, it is meant as pure constructive criticism.

Hope to see you again soon, be sure to check Diablo.BlizzPro.com regularly for the best daily Diablo 3 content.