Haste and You... A guide to the misinformed.

[SpankWustler]

I'm confused.... Maybe cause I've played games in the FF franchise for years to know that Haste = awesome so I never under rate it, but I don't get how some would actually think that haste gave a damage bonus.

You maybe have misread something, so I'll summarize in clearer language:

Attacking at twice the normal rate (this happens at 50% Haste) results in twice as much damage. You can weapon skill twice as frequently as well.

Attacking at five times the normal rate (this happens at 80% Haste) results in five times as much damage. You can weapon skill five times as frequently as well.

As you can see, the increase is not linear. Because of how the equation works, Haste becomes significantly more awesome as the value increases.

Even though it's difficult to eyeball the effect of small amounts of Haste, since it has no effect on the damage of each individual hit, it is often the most helpful buff for any brave soul hitting a thing with a thing.

Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf lived happily ever after, even though some old dude on FOX News called their marriage an abomination.

~THE END~

[Arcon]

Because of how the equation works, Haste becomes exponentially more awesome as the value increases.

While the correct increase of awesomeness is hard to measure qualitatively, I just wanna clarify that haste does not increase the damage output exponentially. The increase is larger than exponential. People have a tendency to say "exponentially" whenever the increase is pretty massive and adds up, but it's not quite correct. Exponential functions approach infinity if the input values approach infinity. This, however, approaches infinity for a certain input value. So it's actually a hyperbolic function, 1/(1-x) to be precise (notice the lack of exponentiation), with input values -1 to 0.8 (Slow caps at 100% (= -1), Haste caps at 80% (= 0.8)). The result is the percentage of the original speed. Here's examples:

100% Slow: 1/(1-(-1.00)) = 50.0%
70% Slow : 1/(1-( -0.70)) = 58.8%
25% Haste: 1/(1-(+0.25)) = 133.3%
50% Haste: 1/(1-(+0.50)) = 200.0%
70% Haste: 1/(1-(+0.70)) = 333.3%
80% Haste: 1/(1-(+0.80)) = 500.0%
90% Haste: 1/(1-(+0.90)) = 1000.0%
99% Haste: 1/(1-(+0.99)) = 10000.0%

Meanning at 99% Haste, you would do 100 hits in the time it would normally take you to do 1 hit. But as I said, Haste caps at 80%, so 5 times the amount of hits is the best we can do.

Another thing that annoys me at times is the misconception that you need 26% Haste to cap it. That's wrong, you need exactly 25% Haste to cap, and not one bit more. The issue is, that not every piece of gear gives the value it displays, and it's usually less. That's because of rounding errors, since Haste only works with fractions of 1024. So the closest approximation of 5% Haste would be 51/1024. That is, however, just 4.98% Haste. This is still relatively harmless, but some items diverge a lot from the original value (for reasons only known to SE, and quite probably not even to them). So often you need more than "25%" Haste on item descriptions, to actually reach the cap of 25% (256/1024). Just a technicality but still annoying when people brag about their Haste-knowledge and get it wrong.