Quote Originally Posted by Hachiko View Post
Sword oath absolutely provides more for a fast weapon than a slow weapon.
I'm operating on the assumption that the 50 potency is applied to the weapon damage before it's normalized for delay. You're operating under the assumption that the 50 potency is applied to the weapon damage after it's normalized for delay, which is where we're coming to an impasse. I'd be curious to see if anyone has done any log analysis to actually suss out which actually occurs.

Auto-attacks deal their listed physical damage every 3 seconds. Auto-attack damage is simply the listed weapon damage divided by delay. A 50% increase to that damage would apply the same benefits to slow weapons as well as fast ones. I opt into thinking this is the way they do it because that's the way that makes sense to me, else fast weapons are explicitly better than slow ones, which doesn't sit right with me considering it's not like you have much choice (plus, most MMOs have done away with the weapon speed effect construct in favor of normalization of weapon speed across bonuses).

If you apply the 50 potency to the attacks after they are normalized for delay, then, yet, you're going to get differentiated contributions. A weapon with twice the attack speed is going to end up dealing 33% more damage ((.5 + .5) x (1 / .5) = 2; (1 + .5) x (1 / 1) = 1.5; 2/1.5 = .33).

Of course, until you get to massively disparate attack speeds, the differences are remarkably small: The difference between a 2.1 and 2.2 weapon would be 4.7% (((2.1/2.2) + .5) x (1 / (2.1/2.2)) = 1.047). Auto-attack damage makes up roughly 33% of total DPS, so the difference will be all of 1.6%.