The Monk Temple

[Powercow]

Absurdity is absurdity, regardless of how absurd. Which does it's job in combating the massive amount of misinformation on these boards.

I promised I'd explain it more when I got home, so time to really get into this... warning, colossal wall of text inc.

One caveat: strength, accuracy and determination all benefit both sets equally. If anything, the determination formula benefits autoattack slightly more (thus making SS slightly worse overall), but we'll disregard that for now.

First is figuring out how much damage skills that are not boosted by Skillspeed contribute to your overall damage. Autoattack is 100p/3s (common knowledge by now). DoTs are 85p/3s (40 from Demolish, 25 from Touch of Death, 20 form Fracture.) Steel Peak is 150 potency on a 40s cooldown (so 11.25p/3s), Howling Fist is 170 potency on a 60s cooldown (8.5p/3s). For what it's worth, Shoulder Tackle is 3.3p/3s, but it's not really too feasible to use it due to the long range requirement and that it's quite helpful for mobility, so we'll discount it for now.

This means skills that do not benefit from Skillspeed are about 204.75 potency every 3 seconds, or more appropriately, 216.725 after Dragon Kick's modifier. With 10% crit, this becomes 227.561~ potency every 3 seconds.

Now let's assume you have a fairly high amount of Skillspeed. Assume that with 3 stacks of Greased Lightning you're at a flat 2.0 GCD (this will keep the math easier to follow). OK? Let's go figure out how much skills boosted by Skillspeed give! All of these will factor in crit values of 10% baseline crit, which is having a small but not totally ignored amount of crit. They will also assume Dragon Kick, which benefits all of them.

Bootshine is 214.5 potency. (130 * 1.5 * 1.1)
Dragon Kick is 173.25 potency. (150 * 1.05 * 1.1)
Twin Snakes is 161.7 potency. (140 * 1.05 * 1.1)
True Strike is 177.375 potency (150 * 1.075 * 1.1)
Snap Punch is 207.9 potency (180 * 1.05 * 1.1) and is usually used twice, so we'll count it twice.

This means the GCDs not used to apply DoT abilities are doing, assuming an equal-ish use of all of them, 190.4375 potency per use, or 286.656p/3s. But we're not done yet!

See, assuming 200 GCDs used (which is a 6m 40s fight, which is a decent size), you'll end up spending:
--20 GCDs reapplying Demolish, which does no initial damage.
--20 GCDs reapplying Fracture, which does 173.25 potency every 18s, or 28.875p/3s.
--13 GCDs reapplying Touch of Death, which does 23.1 potency every 30s, or 2.31p/3s.

Since 53 of your 200 GCDs are not being used for the normal abilities, this means 26.5% of that damage needs to be replaced with the initial damage from the DoTs.

286.656 * 0.735 + 28.875 + 2.31= 241.142 potency every 3 seconds worth of damage comes from abilities boosted by Skillspeed.

Whoo-whee, that's a lot of basic math thrown around! This means that with enough SS to get your GCD down to 2.0 seconds, about 51.4% of your damage will come from attacks boosted by Skillspeed.

For funsies, assuming minimal skillspeed let's say a BiS pre turn 5 set, which has 106 skillspeed on it + the 15% from Greased Lightning, and 139 crit (so 14.78% crit, up from 10%, and Internal Release used on cooldown, so 22.28% average crit)...

GL3 reduces the base GCD to 2.17 with no skillspeed. With the 106 skillspeed it'll drop it to 2.086 GCD. So instead of simply multiplying all the weaponskills by 1.5, you multiply them by 1.438~, which gets you the following results...

Non-SS-boosted damage is 243.5989p/3s. (216.725 * 1.124)

Bootshine is still 214.5 potency. (130 * 1.5 * 1.1)
Dragon Kick is now 185.625 potency. (150 * 1.124 * 1.1)
Twin Snakes is now 173.096 potency. (140 * 1.124 * 1.1)
True Strike is now 187.506 potency (150 * 1.1364 * 1.1)
Snap Punch is now 222.552 potency (180 * 1.124 * 1.1) again, twice.

So with the higher crit value, SS-boosted skills do 200.97 potency per use, or, adjusted for skillspeed, 288.997p/3s. But wait, we still need to adjust for DoTs!

Now with this much skillspeed, DoT timing might be a bit off. On average though, it's not worth clipping Fracture or Demolish, and it would be worth clipping Touch of Death to every 14 GCDs. Assuming the same 400s fight, you'll have 191.754 GCDs during that time (let's round it to 192 for simplicity's sake.)

--20 GCDs reapplying Demolish, which does no initial damage.
--20 GCDs reapplying Fracture, which does 173.25 potency every 18s, or 28.875p/3s.
--13 GCDs reapplying Touch of Death, which does 23.1 potency every 30s, or 2.31p/3s.

Since 53 of your 192 GCDs are not being used for the normal abilities, this means 27.6% of that damage needs to be replaced with the initial damage from the DoTs.

288.997 * 0.724 + 28.875 + 2.31= 240.419 potency every 3 seconds worth of damage comes from abilities boosted by Skillspeed with this set.

In conclusion, with a typical set of gear, 243.5989p/3s is from skills not boosted by SS. 240.419p/3s is. This means 49.6% of your damage will come from skills boosted by Skillspeed. This means that Skillspeed will, on average, only benefit about half of your damage in the best scenarios.

So can we please get back to avoiding Skillspeed as much as possible?

Edit - I'm aware some people use ID. This post isn't going to get into the increased TP use of high SS, but needless to say, Monks do have TP issues in longer fights. Skillspeed only hurts this issue more, and ID hurts it even more beyond that.
I'm also aware it's a common practice to not use True Strike unless your GCD is very low. This is a fair practice, as the gains from True Strike over Twin Snakes are very minimal, and even then all this would do is serve to make Skillspeed even worse.
I'm aware somebody will say "well in X really long complicated rotation, it'd be more like 242.314p/3s for skills boosted by Skillspeed, so HA!" Fine, whatever, the point still stands -- Skillspeed is still only boosting half your damage.
I'm aware Bootshine doesn't scale with crit rating. Bootshine is about 6.4% of your overall DPS in the best of cases. This is a small amount and not enough to put Skillspeed anywhere near as valuable as Crit.

[KaosPrimeZero]

/snip

Very appreciated for the long description (and very informative) You can have a cookie

[Risbyn]

/snip

Very nice, I can see now where you're getting the 50% number. Wish more people posted like this so that we all can at least understand where they are getting their numbers. Your post is appreciated.

[Perthaneus-Magnum]

Now let's assume you have a fairly high amount of Skillspeed. Assume that with 3 stacks of Greased Lightning you're at a flat 2.0 GCD (this will keep the math easier to follow). OK?

Sooooo, how in the world are you going to not stack SS if you need it to be at 490 to be at 2.0sec GCD ?

You stack SS to 492~497 and then you use crit....which is a CHANCE to crit. This is not over 100 times, it is EACH hit has a % to crit. The same as with melding. Just because you have 40% chance to successfully meld an item doesn't mean that you will have 40 successful melds every 100 tries. This game doesn't work that way.

[Powercow]

Sooooo, how in the world are you going to not stack SS if you need it to be at 490 to be at 2.0sec GCD ?

You stack SS to 492~497 and then you use crit....which is a CHANCE to crit. This is not over 100 times, it is EACH hit has a % to crit. The same as with melding. Just because you have 40% chance to successfully meld an item doesn't mean that you will have 40 successful melds every 100 tries. This game doesn't work that way.

That first example was someone with a heavy emphasis on SS. That was the point -- even if you heavily emphasize SS, it's still going to suck.