UPDATED TL; DR: If these data are accurate, there is no perfect attack speed for CoC Barrage. Average proc number per skill use decreases smoothly with attack speed, rather than dropping off suddenly. Proc rate per second does increase with attack speed, but not significantly until a high attack speed is reached. The current goal of ~2 APS seems to be just about the worst possible attack speed range.







UPDATE



Following on from all the below, I've run some more tests at higher attack speeds to start looking at optimisation as opposed to just mechanics. Here you go:











So this is interesting. While again these numbers are not perfect (sample sizes of about 130 crits, ideally you'd want something like ten times that), it seems that 2.0 is close to the worst possible attack speed. After that, your proc rate actually starts to scale better with attack speed (from 2 to 3 APS is a ~20% proc rate increase, from 3 to 4 is about 25%). My assumption is that this is due to you essentially having lots of "free attempts" with a high attack speed - you still get just as many chances to proc as a lower attack speed build, just not in a row, so the numbers you get are skewed to the high side of the theoretical maximum.



So the question now is, do you bother with attack speed? It does not seem to be an easy question to answer. 3 APS gets about 20% more procs than 1.5 APS, but obviously requires a lot of effort to reach, and this could alternatively be channeled into survivability or spell damage. Thoughts?











ORIGINAL POST



The Story So Far



Barrage is a strange beast. Its unusual mechanics and importance for CoC builds have made it the subject of much consternation, especially since the increase in CoC's cooldown to 50 ms.



Current Testing



I attempted another round of testing similar to that which I've linked above with the release of 2.0, hoping that lockstep might help. It didn't appear to, so I gave up again for a while. However, following continuing discussion on reddit I decided to try a different approach, measuring proc rate directly rather than trying to investigate attack times. This should bypass any client-side display issues.



In order to do this, I tested a few methods. The one I hit upon is detailed at length in the spoiler below, but to put it briefly, I set up a character tanky enough to ignore my Barrage damage, wailed on him in PvP, and used CoC SRS to count procs. I have not yet tested the full range of conditions (currently I have only tested GMP-linked Barage, and not at a full range of attack speeds), and my dataset is not really large enough to have much confidence in the quantitative data (I haven't tested for significance and really cannot be bothered to do so). However, I think this is enough to draw some preliminary conclusions. Here are the main data summaries of interest, in my opinion:











Again, don't read too much into the exact numbers just yet. Here are the main points to draw from this.



There is no threshold at which you drop from fully proccing Barrage to proccing it half as often. Proc rate per crit drops off smoothly. This is directly contrary to established wisdom on Barrage CoC.

In order to achieve maximum proc rate (theoretical 5.28 procs per crit with the level 17 CoC used, which eerily enough exactly matches my number), or to have a single instance of one use of Barrage proccing CoC 8 times, the literal minimum possible attack speed had to be attacined. As far as I am aware, 1.08 is as slow as you can possibly attack with Barrage, requiring a 1.2 APS weapon (no wand or bow is slower as of 2.0), The Anvil, and no sources of increased attack speed.

While attack speed does have a net positive effect on proc rate per second, it is very small. Increasing attack speed by 70% increased proc rate per second by ~10%. Again, don't take these numbers to be exact, but simply an indication of a trend. Note also that the maximum attack speed in this dataset is still very slow. I will hopefully have a chance to test more realistic speeds soon, but I imagine the usefulness of attack speed will drop off even further.



I'd love it if other people could take a look at the data and see whether I've done something stupid.



Also, I'm wondering how this occurs. As far as I can think, the only way this could happen is due to some sort of rounding or RNG meaning that times between projectiles are inconsistent.



My thanks to SnoopythegoD for his services as a pincushion.







Methodology One character was pointed and geared for maximum tankiness (~10.2k life, 13% regen/s). Kaom's Roots were used to prevent accuracy being a consideration. A second character was pointed and geared for maximum critical strike chance, and various combinations of bow, passive points and other gear were used to achieve a number of different attack speeds. For each attack speed, one full PvP "duel" was conducted. This consisted of the bow wielder standing in melee range of the tank in order to ensure that all Barrage projectiles hit, and firing Barrages one at a time at the tank. The links used were Barrage - CoC - SRS - GMP - Less Duration. On critical strike, no further attacks were used until the spirits had dissipated in order to aid counting. This process was continued for 7 rounds of 90 seconds (the maximum allowed before the duel is declared a draw). All tests were recorded with Fraps.



For each critical hit, the number of spirits summoned was noted by reviewing the footage after the fact. Non-critical hits were not considered. A limitation of the methodology is that any critical hit that resulted in 0 CoC procs was not recorded, but this was not judged to be significant. : If these data are accurate, there is no perfect attack speed for CoC Barrage. Average proc number per skill use decreases smoothly with attack speed, rather than dropping off suddenly. Proc rate per second does increase with attack speed, but not significantly until a high attack speed is reached. The current goal of ~2 APS seems to be just about the worst possible attack speed range.Following on from all the below, I've run some more tests at higher attack speeds to start looking at optimisation as opposed to just mechanics. Here you go:So this is interesting. While again these numbers are not perfect (sample sizes of about 130 crits, ideally you'd want something like ten times that), it seems that 2.0 is close to the worst possible attack speed. After that, your proc rate actually starts to scale better with attack speed (from 2 to 3 APS is a ~20% proc rate increase, from 3 to 4 is about 25%). My assumption is that this is due to you essentially having lots of "free attempts" with a high attack speed - you still get just as many chances to proc as a lower attack speed build, just not in a row, so the numbers you get are skewed to the high side of the theoretical maximum.So the question now is, do you bother with attack speed? It does not seem to be an easy question to answer. 3 APS gets about 20% more procs than 1.5 APS, but obviously requires a lot of effort to reach, and this could alternatively be channeled into survivability or spell damage. Thoughts?Barrage is a strange beast. Its unusual mechanics and importance for CoC builds have made it the subject of much consternation, especially since the increase in CoC's cooldown to 50 ms. My previous thread has some detail on this and GGG information on it (including a post on client-side issues with how Barrage is displayed here which rendered my methods more or less moot), but in short, there's long been the assumption that there is an optimal attack speed for Barrage, that being the maximum attack speed that does not cause individual projectiles to land within 50 ms of each other. However, there has been significant confusion on exactly what this value is.I attempted another round of testing similar to that which I've linked above with the release of 2.0, hoping that lockstep might help. It didn't appear to, so I gave up again for a while. However, following continuing discussion on reddit I decided to try a different approach, measuring proc rate directly rather than trying to investigate attack times. This should bypass any client-side display issues.In order to do this, I tested a few methods. The one I hit upon is detailed at length in the spoiler below, but to put it briefly, I set up a character tanky enough to ignore my Barrage damage, wailed on him in PvP, and used CoC SRS to count procs. I have not yet tested the full range of conditions (currently I have only tested GMP-linked Barage, and not at a full range of attack speeds), and my dataset is not really large enough to have much confidence in the quantitative data (I haven't tested for significance and really cannot be bothered to do so). However, I think this is enough to draw some preliminary conclusions. Here are the main data summaries of interest, in my opinion:Again, don't read too much into the exact numbers just yet. Here are the main points to draw from this.I'd love it if other people could take a look at the data and see whether I've done something stupid.Also, I'm wondering how this occurs. As far as I can think, the only way this could happen is due to some sort of rounding or RNG meaning that times between projectiles are inconsistent.My thanks to SnoopythegoD for his services as a pincushion. Raw data (.xlsx) (I've recorded all my experimentation, but the folder is 161 GB so you'd better give me a good reason to compress and upload it somewhere if you want it!) Have you done something awesome with Sire of Shards ? PM me and tell me all about it! Last edited by viperesque on Sep 8, 2015, 5:07:47 AM Last bumped on Mar 28, 2016, 7:45:17 PM