My never having played thoughts

[swirly]

I forgot to mention this in the podcast, but the skill speed, even for magic attacks, is based off of your weapon speed so you can get a quicker cast time on the spiders with a quicker weapon.

That is actually something I was wondering about with Spiders. I know with Dogs instead of making things happen faster they scale the damage based off of speed as well (so basically using dps instead of straight damage). So they hit harder instead of more often. Meanwhile with things like Poison Dart they just make it cast faster. Spiders seems like an odd middle group where they could have gone either way. They could have sped up the animation time so you can cast it quicker or they could have kept that constant and make the spiders themselves hit harder based off of it. It's like half spell half pet in some ways. I suspect it is treated like a generic spell and the cast time sped up like you say, but it is one of the many things I'm not sure about.

edit: Sped is a much better word than speeded...

[Treesh]

I forgot to mention this in the podcast, but the skill speed, even for magic attacks, is based off of your weapon speed so you can get a quicker cast time on the spiders with a quicker weapon.

That is actually something I was wondering about with Spiders. I know with Dogs instead of making things happen faster they scale the damage based off of speed as well (so basically using dps instead of straight damage). So they hit harder instead of more often. Meanwhile with things like Poison Dart they just make it cast faster. Spiders seems like an odd middle group where they could have gone either way. They could have speeded up the animation time so you can cast it quicker or they could have kept that constant and make the spiders themselves hit harder based off of it. It's like half spell half pet in some ways. I suspect it is treated like a generic spell and the cast time sped up like you say, but it is one of the many things I'm not sure about.

If I remember correctly, it did speed up the cast of the spiders rather boost the spiders attack, but I may not be remembering that right. I'm about 70% sure it was cast time that I saw. Maybe 75%. Just think, on the 15th you'll know for sure.

[Roland]

Yeah, we talked about this a little bit on the podcast. The issue we were discussing involved animation canceling. The problem as it relates to Spiders is that the cast time for flinging a Spider Bottle is pretty long (1+ second) and it is a skill that you are going to want to spam a lot. Because it is a long-ish casting time spell as well as one that you would spam a lot it was extremely common in the beta for you to be caught in a delay where you would continue casting queued up Spiders despite wanting to cancel and cast a different spell.

This is something the Devs have reportedly decided to look into to fix (I guess we'll see in a few days.)

Oh man, that's right! I forgot about that, but yes that was SO annoying. I truly hope they fix that upon release, as it's a pretty severe nuisance during gameplay.

---

If I remember correctly, it did speed up the cast of the spiders rather boost the spiders attack, but I may not be remembering that right. I'm about 70% sure it was cast time that I saw. Maybe 75%. Just think, on the 15th you'll know for sure.

Pretty sure weapon speed is tied to casting speed for all classes, regardless of whether the spell is an "attack" or a "spell." OTOH, I don't believe weapon speed increases spell damage as it appeared from my playtesting that when a skill states X% of weapon damage, they mean the literal damage numbers. I.e. Bola Shot fired from a Hand Crossbow dealing 6 - 12 damage would deal between 7.8 and 15.6 damage (from the main explosion). Of course, increasing attack speed increases DPS because you cast faster, so there is that.

[swirly]

Pretty sure weapon speed is tied to casting speed for all classes, regardless of whether the spell is an "attack" or a "spell." OTOH, I don't believe weapon speed increases spell damage as it appeared from my playtesting that when a skill states X% of weapon damage, they mean the literal damage numbers. I.e. Bola Shot fired from a Hand Crossbow dealing 6 - 12 damage would deal between 7.8 and 15.6 damage (from the main explosion). Of course, increasing attack speed increases DPS because you cast faster, so there is that.

The feeling I'm getting is that it is more complicated than that for some skills. This isn't the original place I stumbled on this info, but a google search for a source today turned it up. http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showt...et-Scaling It's odd cause they say for Exploding Palm the DOT scales by speed, but for Poison Dart it doesn't. So there is some inconsistencies going on. I believe it is true for Zombie Dogs that they scale their damage by cast speed too because there was a forum I ran across where somebody claimed to actually have tested that specific thing. For Spiders I do expect that it is purely cast speed adjustment since there is no cooldown on them and I feel like I read somewhere about there being some kind of link with this happening and there being a cooldown. Though that doesn't explain the Exploding Palm thing. I freely admit that this whole topic is one I don't have a solid grasp on at all. It just does seem like for some skills there is something else going on other than a pure weapon speed = cast time translation.

It seems to make sense to me for channeled spells since they basically have no casting time. To make those scale correctly with weapons it would make sense to factor in the weapon speed into the size of the damage. They could have also made them tick faster, but I do believe they went down the increasing damage path instead. So skills like Fire Bats use speed to increase damage. It makes sense for spells with cooldowns too since those you can't spam so the gain from casting speed increases would be very limited. That doesn't mean they have done that with all or any of them though.

I'm sure after the official game is released somebody will put out a more complete study of this kind of thing. Probably with a list of how each skill is affected by damage and speed. For now I'm sure there will be skills that it simply isn't clear for.

[swirly]

If I were to summarize the basics of my understanding on this matter it would be as follows.

Direct damage spells don't scale with speed, but cast faster.
Spammable DoTs (like Haunt) don't scale with speed, but cast faster.
Always on DoTs (like the poison from a Gargantuan) do scale with speed.
Channeled spells (like Fire Bats) do scale with speed.
Summoned pets (like Zombie Dogs) do scale with speed.

I'm not exactly confident with this information, but it is the understanding I am currently running under.

edit: I think most of this actually comes from http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4...721?page=1 rather than the link I gave earlier. The one earlier I hadn't really read thoroughly, but just found. I think this is more the one that was really influential in my forming this understanding.

[FireIceTalon]

Here's a exotic petless build I might experiment with:


http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...dUj!bYZ!aYacZY

[swirly]

Here's a exotic petless build I might experiment with:


http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...dUj!bYZ!aYacZY

I guess one of us should tell you that your link is bad instead of sitting here and saying nothing.

[FireIceTalon]

Fixed:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wi...Zbf!aabYYa

Grasp of the Dead and Mass Confusion for crowd control, Acid Cloud for AOE, SB for single target dmg. The rest is to escape or at least increase my survival chances in hairy situations and efficient resource management with some dmg reduction in Jungle Fortitude.

[swirly]

I think I have decided to try the build I posted in hardcore first. I'll make a witch doctor and play it till level 10 to get a feel for things and then once hardcore is unlocked I'll reroll one there and play that one primarily. I don't expect to get far before my first death, but I'm going to give it a shot!