(05-10-2012, 10:02 PM)Roland Wrote: 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.