How to Dragoon per Second: A DPS Paradigm

[ReliaWylder]

On the contrary! Skill speed's value is mostly in its practicality, not in its stat weight. If it eases getting in a hit within some timed window (a boss phase, greased lightning, berserk, blood of the dragon, the long dark night of the Fire IV casting period) then it has helped you in ways that won't register on a dummy.

The problem is that (depending on the skill speed difference) in many cases you cannot get an extra hit until 4 minutes of uninterrupted GCDs. It makes it easier to do the same amount of hits with less strict timings, but you don't actually gain any and therefore gain no dps. And once fights have been practiced to the point that they're basically a dummy parse and you don't make mistakes on them anymore, it doesn't provide any value. And even if you do get an extra hit in, in many cases the DET or CRT would have already more than made up for that hit (as described above). What I'm saying is that the stat weight for skill speed looks good, but its practicality is very bad. At least for DRGs, I don't claim to know anything about other classes.

You can maintain 3 geirskoguls/min with about 480 skill speed. I feel that 580+ skill speed, already having a 100 skill speed buffer, is plenty for slight mistakes already. Any more skill speed is generally a waste.

Especially as phase transitions can make skill speed almost completely worthless. Again, if there is a phase transition before you can gain a full extra GCD, literally the only effect of skill speed is that your DoTs tick slightly harder. As there is no effect on the actual damage output of the weaponskills or off-GCDs. The entire effect on GCD is then wasted since the invuln period allows the lower skill speed person to "catch up" and begin at the same step in the GCD as the higher skill speed person once the invuln drops and DET would then scale about 8x stronger than SKS (since DoTs are only about 1/8th of your damage).

Edit: This is incorrect - further math has proven that skill speed is useful and I eat my words.