Yes. Is there ever a situation where you'd actually care about this?
Quite a few. Those who are actually progressing in Inferno can tell. Even if you're not, you should know how your class works.
And it also applies for Disintegrate.
Hydra, Blizzard, and Signature Spells all have a 100% benefit from attack speed.
If i understand correctly the Hydra attacks 15% faster if i get a ring with +15% attackspeed?
Same with blizzard, it channels faster, so from 280% damage over 9 seconds to 280% damage over 7,65 seconds?
Stacking poison hydra would get pretty badass.
I'm very glad you asked this. I was told that this was the case: it is not true.
Hydra and Blizzard do not benefit from attack speed at all
I tested this using two 15% attack speed rings. Whether equipped or unequipped, Blizzard dealt 12 ticks over 6 seconds, regardless of attack speed. Hydra also seemed to be ticking twice per second, despite a large difference in attack speed. I confirmed these results by switching to a 2h.
What does this mean?
Equipment with attack speed on it is effectively worthless for Wizards, as it does not equate to a DPS increase on most of our spells. I am as of yet unsure whether the damage done by a Blizzard or Hydra stems from the DPS of a weapon, or if its own attack speed is irrelevant, but I do know that the "damage" stat on the character screen is extremely misleading.
EDIT: I'm super late didnt see that there were 5 pages here. But some extra calculations to look over none the less since some people are not fully understanding.
I must confess the way you are calculating this is a bit strange because you are using two different constants for two different variables. But if we look at this this way:
Weapon A: 100 DMG, 1.0 A/S
Casting ray of frost (unmodified) for 10 seconds [100+(10xT)-(20xT)=0 where T=time (in seconds)=10] you run out of mana and get
1(100x2.15)x10=2150 damage in 10 seconds
A(DxM)xT=Total
A = Number of attacks a second
D = Base damage of weapon
M = Damage modifier on spell
T = Time spent attacking
Weapon B: 50 DMG, 2.0 A/S
Casting ray of frost (unmodified) for 3.33 seconds (rounding to 3 though) [100+(10xT)-(40xT)=0 where T=time (in seconds)=3.33] you will run out of mana and get
2(50x2.15)x3=645 damage in 3 seconds
BUT!
With 7 seconds left over you can cast magic missle 14 times at 115% modifier for 14(50x1.15)=805 extra damage brining the total to 1450 damage and have 70 mana at the end.
Then we can see your point.
In the end Weapon A will do more damage because players have more time to use a spell with a higher damage modifier. When we calculate spells like disintegrate with the rune that causes mobs to have a chance to explode at 315% (I believe) weapon damage we can see an even bigger overall DPS increase. However, should you ever have a choice between two weapons with the same damage but one that attacks faster, you should choose the faster one because over a period of 10 seconds you will still end up with more damage even with using lower damage modifer spells.
(I bolded text to help people read what I was saying to avoid confusion.)
Now since we have arrived at this conclusion, it was the OPs original point that by modifing the ray of frost with lower mana cost/second you can successfully cast it for longer over that 10 seconds and thus raise your total DPS over 10 seconds with a faster swinging weapon.
At this point however, since you were equipping runes to be optimal, he presumed that the person not having AP management problems would equip a rune to increase the spell damage modifier on ray of frost brining you to his original calculations.
From there he then expanded into the idea that using a higher delay, slightly lower DPS, weapon would be more beneficial for most players since they commonly use spells like disintegrate and hydra.
The only problem is the OP seems to have skipped sharing some of that in his first post.
However, should you ever have a choice between two weapons with the same damage but one that attacks faster, you should choose the faster one because over a period of 10 seconds you will still end up with more damage even with using lower damage modifer spells.
I'd just like to point out that if two weapons have the same damage and one attacks faster it obviously is a higher dps weapon. Using a slow weapon with less dps over a fast weapon with more dps will only work if the difference is small (less than 20-30% difference, rough math) and, of course, we're talking about a long period of time.
In fact i have used a fast weapon combo during most of my inferno progress because i got a high damage one -hand and an awesome off-hand. The difference was just too big. Even using Astral Presence and Cold Blooded i was still running out of ap during long casts, like during Azmodan and Belial. It was still a dps gain using the 1h because the damage was just much higher. When i got a slow weapon that could match that damage i started using Disintegrate (not viable before, getting out of ap in 4secs) and the 280% damage rune for Ray of Frost and that's a dps gain.
I heard a rumor about a bug, that Ray of Frost was never criting (i think other spells aswell) and in fact i haven't seen it crit like...ever, even with 10+ % crit chance. Can anyone confirm this?
It could be that blizzard uses the DPS of your weapon instead of the raw damage, meaning that IASP would have an effect after all. Did anyone test the actual damage of blizzard with different values of IASP or was only the duration of the effect tested?
My proposal for a hydra test would be to find some very large HP mob, prefferably in a lower difficulty and see the amount of shots a hydra takes at it over it's duration (assuming that doesn't change with IASP). I'll try this myself when I have time, which is probably gonna be wednesday evening, but a second test to confirm/deny results would be nice.
Time to find some IASP rings/amulets and go back to normal for some testing I suppose...
I could be wrong, but based on observational testing when switching between my current weapon (a .9 speed 2 handed mace) and my previous weapon (a 1.5 speed dagger), which considering my other gear made a fairly substantial change in my overall attack speed of 1.2 vs 1.9, I did not notice a difference in the frequency of attacks from hydra (i.e. attack speed does not make it attack faster), but I also did not notice the massive increase in damage you would expect from switching to the much slower, higher damage weapon if IAS did not have any effect.
What I think is happening is that for fire and forget DOT spells like Blizzard and Hydra the attacks happen at the same frequency but the game utilizes your DPS to determine the damage done each tick, not your weapon damage. So in that way IAS is factored in but does not actually increase the tick rate.
What I think is happening is that for fire and forget DOT spells like Blizzard and Hydra the attacks happen at the same frequency but the game utilizes your DPS to determine the damage done each tick, not your weapon damage. So in that way IAS is factored in but does not actually increase the tick rate.
When I finally hit 60 (56 and 4 bars from 57 now) I'll get 2 weapons with the same DPS rating and INT amount and test if it affects damage from hydra or blizzard. I'll probably use regular hydra and not venom though since those numbers should be more consistant since I won't be looking at stacking pools.
This correlates really well to the 1h vs 2h weapon discussion going on in the witch doctor forums.
WDs have their own inconsistency with weapon dmg vs AS. Spamable DOTs and pet dmg doesnt check for AS at all.
Making every skill based off of weapon dmg was kind of a late addition. Then after that they realized the mistake of not including AS in their equations. These mistakes seem like the result of hastily adding AS as a variable in spells.
ps. You math is good and you are obviously going through alot of effort to share it. But some of your post are coming off as kind of harsh. Maybe if you spend some time thinking on how you present the info instead of what you are presenting it would go down smoother. Good job I look forward to reading more from you.
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And it also applies for Disintegrate.
I'm very glad you asked this. I was told that this was the case: it is not true.
Hydra and Blizzard do not benefit from attack speed at all
I tested this using two 15% attack speed rings. Whether equipped or unequipped, Blizzard dealt 12 ticks over 6 seconds, regardless of attack speed. Hydra also seemed to be ticking twice per second, despite a large difference in attack speed. I confirmed these results by switching to a 2h.
What does this mean?
Equipment with attack speed on it is effectively worthless for Wizards, as it does not equate to a DPS increase on most of our spells. I am as of yet unsure whether the damage done by a Blizzard or Hydra stems from the DPS of a weapon, or if its own attack speed is irrelevant, but I do know that the "damage" stat on the character screen is extremely misleading.
I must confess the way you are calculating this is a bit strange because you are using two different constants for two different variables. But if we look at this this way:
Weapon A: 100 DMG, 1.0 A/S
Casting ray of frost (unmodified) for 10 seconds [100+(10xT)-(20xT)=0 where T=time (in seconds)=10] you run out of mana and get
1(100x2.15)x10=2150 damage in 10 seconds
A(DxM)xT=Total
A = Number of attacks a second
D = Base damage of weapon
M = Damage modifier on spell
T = Time spent attacking
Weapon B: 50 DMG, 2.0 A/S
Casting ray of frost (unmodified) for 3.33 seconds (rounding to 3 though) [100+(10xT)-(40xT)=0 where T=time (in seconds)=3.33] you will run out of mana and get
2(50x2.15)x3=645 damage in 3 seconds
BUT!
With 7 seconds left over you can cast magic missle 14 times at 115% modifier for 14(50x1.15)=805 extra damage brining the total to 1450 damage and have 70 mana at the end.
Then we can see your point.
In the end Weapon A will do more damage because players have more time to use a spell with a higher damage modifier. When we calculate spells like disintegrate with the rune that causes mobs to have a chance to explode at 315% (I believe) weapon damage we can see an even bigger overall DPS increase. However, should you ever have a choice between two weapons with the same damage but one that attacks faster, you should choose the faster one because over a period of 10 seconds you will still end up with more damage even with using lower damage modifer spells.
(I bolded text to help people read what I was saying to avoid confusion.)
Now since we have arrived at this conclusion, it was the OPs original point that by modifing the ray of frost with lower mana cost/second you can successfully cast it for longer over that 10 seconds and thus raise your total DPS over 10 seconds with a faster swinging weapon.
At this point however, since you were equipping runes to be optimal, he presumed that the person not having AP management problems would equip a rune to increase the spell damage modifier on ray of frost brining you to his original calculations.
From there he then expanded into the idea that using a higher delay, slightly lower DPS, weapon would be more beneficial for most players since they commonly use spells like disintegrate and hydra.
The only problem is the OP seems to have skipped sharing some of that in his first post.
In fact i have used a fast weapon combo during most of my inferno progress because i got a high damage one -hand and an awesome off-hand. The difference was just too big. Even using Astral Presence and Cold Blooded i was still running out of ap during long casts, like during Azmodan and Belial. It was still a dps gain using the 1h because the damage was just much higher. When i got a slow weapon that could match that damage i started using Disintegrate (not viable before, getting out of ap in 4secs) and the 280% damage rune for Ray of Frost and that's a dps gain.
I heard a rumor about a bug, that Ray of Frost was never criting (i think other spells aswell) and in fact i haven't seen it crit like...ever, even with 10+ % crit chance. Can anyone confirm this?
I could be wrong, but based on observational testing when switching between my current weapon (a .9 speed 2 handed mace) and my previous weapon (a 1.5 speed dagger), which considering my other gear made a fairly substantial change in my overall attack speed of 1.2 vs 1.9, I did not notice a difference in the frequency of attacks from hydra (i.e. attack speed does not make it attack faster), but I also did not notice the massive increase in damage you would expect from switching to the much slower, higher damage weapon if IAS did not have any effect.
What I think is happening is that for fire and forget DOT spells like Blizzard and Hydra the attacks happen at the same frequency but the game utilizes your DPS to determine the damage done each tick, not your weapon damage. So in that way IAS is factored in but does not actually increase the tick rate.
Could be...
WDs have their own inconsistency with weapon dmg vs AS. Spamable DOTs and pet dmg doesnt check for AS at all.
Making every skill based off of weapon dmg was kind of a late addition. Then after that they realized the mistake of not including AS in their equations. These mistakes seem like the result of hastily adding AS as a variable in spells.
ps. You math is good and you are obviously going through alot of effort to share it. But some of your post are coming off as kind of harsh. Maybe if you spend some time thinking on how you present the info instead of what you are presenting it would go down smoother. Good job I look forward to reading more from you.