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The choice of weapon can make or break a melee character. Whichever weapon you decide to use will actually influence the choices made for what other equipment to use. This process can be difficult, as you must weigh the damage of a weapon versus its speed and its other bonuses. Thus, in this section, I hope to clear the muddy waters of weapon selection and make the choice as easy as possible for all Werebear players. Recently, in a combined effort, many members of the Lurker Lounge have figured out an equation that correctly models Wereform Attack Rates! So without dragging this out any longer, I'll go through the details of how Wereform Attack Speeds are determined. Note: This next section is probably going to be a bit math intensive as I explain the formula derived by Ebony Flame (dkass) and others. If you don't want to worry about the math, skip down to the Layman's Term's explanation. As I have stated before, Diablo II runs at 25 frames per second. Now, if you have a good video card, you may be able to attain frame rates higher than this for your display, however, this does not change the speed that the game runs at. What this means is that a frame rate of 75 frames per second will merely draw each frame of animation three times. Dropping below 25 frames per second (in multiplayer) does not reduce the speed of the action. Rather, it causes your computer to skip frames of animation, so you won't actually see every frame of animation that Diablo II is trying to show you. With the basics of frame rate covered, the basic question for attack speed can be asked: How many frames of animation is my attack. Since the game will not display partial animations, this must be a whole number corresponding to the "animation length" or the number of frames of animation per attack. Finding this animation length is the goal of trying to calculate a character's attack rate. Thus, I will now give the equations that model animation length data for a Wereform. Animation Length Calculation First, I will define some values pertaining to Increased Attack Speed: WIAS = Increased Attack Speed Found on a Weapon
EIAS = The effective IAS after calculating diminishing returns according to the formula:
SIAS = All of the Increased Attack Speed you are gaining from skills (skill IAS is not subject to diminishing returns and, so, is added in after using the diminishing formula). These include Werewolf, Frenzy (though you don’t get this with a druid!), Burst of Speed (same deal!), Fanaticism, etc. WS = Weapon Speed; This is the negative value of those numbers appearing in the Chaos Sanctuary for the base item type you are using (IE -10 for a Maul, +10 for a Great Axe)
Next, I will list off some data that is hard-coded into Diablo II in the form of the number of frames of animation each animation has:
Now for the main equations on how all of this works: [] Means Round Down, {} Means Round Up Now, the following equation is named "delay" because that's the terminology that Barbarians have been using when dealing with Whirlwind. delay = [256*(DA) / [(WIAS + WS + 100)*256/100]] Layman's Term's: Ok, that was just a lot of math. However there is quite a bit of meaning buried in there. First off, the separation of weapon IAS and other IAS is interesting as it means that IAS on your weapon is NOT the same as IAS on your other equipment. In addition, due to the way in which these values are handled, it essentially comes down that IAS on your weapon counts for a lot more than IAS on your other equipment. In fact, IAS on your equipment counts for almost nothing at very high amounts of weapon IAS (though it can be a very crucial amount). This means that if you want to attack very quickly, then you will want a weapon with a lot of IAS on it (and probably a fast base speed, too) and then use IAS on your other equipment to possibly drop one more frame off of the attack animation. With these basic rules understood, it is time to start thinking about what weapon to choose. So, how can you figure out the actual attack rate from this data? Simple, you don't! Just use my Wereform Attack Speed Calculator that I have written based on these equations: However, not everyone likes their data in calculator form. Plus I worked long and hard to test out many different combinations of base weapon speed, weapon IAS and other equipment IAS and compile the data into easy-to-read tables. So, if you prefer to read table data rather than use the calculator, here are my animation length tables: Selected Buriza-Do Kyanon Data Selected Baranar's Star Data One-Handed Weapons (Weapon Speed = 30) One-Handed Weapons (Weapon Speed = 10) One-Handed Weapons (Weapon Speed = 0) Two-Handed Axes/Mauls/Polearms/Staves (Weapon Speed = -20) Two-Handed Axes/Mauls/Polearms/Staves (Weapon Speed = -10) Two-Handed Axes/Mauls/Polearms/Staves (Weapon Speed = 0) Two-Handed Axes/Mauls/Polearms/Staves (Weapon Speed = 10) Two-Handed Axes/Mauls/Polearms/Staves (Weapon Speed = 15) But please note that these tables don't actually have ALL of the data that the calculator does. If you can't find the data you need here, you'll need to use the Calculator With weapon speed determination out of the way, I will now move on to Weapon Selection. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
