I had a mechanics mystery dawn upon me while I was studying a warrior dps sheet the other day. According to most calcs(as well as some common sense), after a certain point the best increase in damage enchants are the ones that hasten your attack speed. However, from a programming perspective, there has to be some sort of "maximum resolution" in terms of the order combat events are processed. I wonder if at a certain point haste effects are victims to getting "rounded off."

The interesting collarary of this thought is whether it uses the "splitting the difference system" several elements of the game use. For example, the current max rank of Blessing of Wisdom is 33 mana/5. If you spec for imp. Blessing of Wisdom, you would expect to gain an additional (33*.2) 6.6 mana/5, which would round up to 40. But rather than rounding the number, as far as I know, you gain alternate ticks of 40 and 39 (correct me if it's even more complicated than that... sometimes I swear I get two 39 ticks in a row- though of course this could have to do with the fullness of my mana bar.) It's actually a pretty elegant solution to the rounding problem; aside from dots and BoW, however; I'm not sure what other elements of the game use it or what the exact cutoff/rounding point is. Anyone have any insight on this?

Improved Blessing of Wisdom provides a proportional chance of each tick being 39 or 40 mana, it's not half and half. Any given tick has a 60% chance to return 40 mana, 40% chance to return 39 mana. As far as weapon speed goes, it's rounded off in hundredths of a second, so there's not nearly as much granularity.

Actually this had me puzzled last week - I saw a link to a trinket in the Xpack that had an On Use effect that said something along the lines of "reduces time between attacks to 0 for X seconds". I was trying to figure out how many white attacks you could get in X seconds if the time between attacks is 0. Didn't make any sense to me.

Wow. The infinite-damage item of RPG lore and legend, obviously.

WTB.

And now of course I can't figure out where the hell I saw this at.

"Of lore and legend" indeed. Who knows when the secret of doing positive damage in zero time will ever again be unearthed by man.

Good that it was melee attack, because hunters would have to refill their quiver after each use of that trinket :)

But then on the other hand, it would probably be worth it if you used it on a boss :D

Oh Snap! It was indeed!

Ok so not an item, but yah this is what I saw. Lemme dig up that link...

Shape of the beast:
Time between attacks decreased by 75%
Chance on hit to decrease time between attacks by an additional 100% for 8 seconds
Cannot cast spells
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6..._the_beast.jpg

So there you go - if the time between your attacks is already reduced by 75%, and then you reduce it by 100% for 8 seconds, the time between attacks is effectively... zero... right? So that was what puzzled me last week when I saw this. How many attacks does it let you make?

This is the fabled "I-win button"!

If that's actually accurate, which if I read it correctly will not make it into any live builds, the amount of attacks it would let you make is infinite. Autoattack is not affected by the global CD. If auto melee attack can be done in 0 time, infinitely, then you will autoattack an infinite number of times for 8 seconds. In other words, in the first 0 seconds after that chance on hit would go off, you would hit the mob or boss until it's dead, and if you moved to another target during the 8 second duration and simply hit your autoattack key, it would also die instantly assuming the server could parse that many attacks that quickly without crashing.

This can't be real.

How about...

attack speed / 1.75
and
attack speed / 1.75 / 2.0

That would make shape of the beast 75% and 100% work exactly like flurry works at 30%

Definitely badly worded though.

Not worded badly, worded like a marketing rep for Macy's.

It doesn't say "100% increased attack speed." It says, "reduces time between attacks by 100%." It's pretty explicit.

An Artifact, obviously. Somebody upload to Allakhazam.

They could have written:

Chance on Hit: Win.

what they mean by time reduced between attacks by 100% is: Swing Speed increase by 100%. You attack twice as fast, so a 2.0 speed wep becomes a 1.0 speed.

Though in a 5 second window, Ekshandar's Main Hand's proc (+30% speed) Proc'd on a Crit (Flurry, +30% speed) and poping Troll Berserk at low HP (+30% speed), I figured it would be 90% speed increase. I would think my 1.5 speed Claw would go to somewhere a bit over 0.75 speed but no it was in fact lower (0.6ish), wich still leaves me puzzled.

Attack speed increases in WoW are multiplicative, not additive.
So it works like:

130% * 130% * 130% ~= 220% attack speed increase

1.5 / 2.2 = 0.68 attack speed, which is what you were experiencing.

Actually, the splitting the difference effect you see is an effect of truncation on what is displayed, but keeping full double precision floating point values for the true value. You get 39.6 mana/5 from improved BoW. Let's say you have 0 mana. First tick gets you to 39.6, the game displays 39 mana, so you went from 0->39 and it says you get +39 mana. Then the next tick, you go up to 79.2. The game displays 79, this is 40 more than 39, so you got +39. Then you go up to 118.8, which the game displays as 118 and is a +39 gain from the 79 you had. And so forth. You will see the same effect going on with reputation and the human +10% rep ability. Go kill mobs over and over again that are worth 1 rep each. The 10th one you kill, it will report +2 rep. I am sure that weapon speeds are treated the same way. So even a 1% haste will work out correctly over the course of a fight for even a nice fast dagger.

If your current weapon speed is 1.5 for example, your attack speed while procced will be 1.5 / [(1.0 + .75) * (1.0 + 1.0)] ~ 0.43

edit: already answered

The floating-point tracking is definitely true of Human rep. You get an extra point every 10 points, not randomly distributed. BoW appears kind of random, but that could be largely due to the Spirit regen happening concurrently.

For what it's worth, Diablo 1/2 both tracked floating-point HP/Mana, but both had strongly stratified swing times (i.e. in D1, "of Speed" and "of Haste" were identical). However, both of those games ran on a fixed cycle of 20 game updates per second.

Interesting effect from that spell then. You can basically attack as fast as you can spam your button then?

My imp wisdow ticks are 40-39-39-40 repeating, always. We'll last night they were I remember paying particular attention because an attempt before I was getting 33 ticks.. effing pallys...

Well according to the double point precision theory you should be getting

39,40,39,40,40 (repeat).

I remember when I first got the AQ wisdom book, I kept forgetting to train the raid version back at the trainer(I don't respec often). Being the class captain I would usually dodge the issue by assigning myself Kings. It never made since to me that you would have to train the raid version seperate. Why not just have the book teach you both? Anyway it was always real embarassing on the 20man runs where I was the only paladin and wis ticked for 30 =(. I'd usually buff myself with the 5min version.