Lock and Load: The Reassembled Machinist Guide

[Myon88]

My issue with skillspeed is that its effect on dps is a lot more nuanced than our other stats. The only source of damage we have that scales smoothly with more skillspeed is our single DoT - Lead Shot.

Putting DoTs aside, the damage increase from skillspeed manifests as more getting more casts out over the same time period. The issue with that is while it may hold true for an ideal scenario where you hit a target dummy for 10 minutes continuously, the more a fight deviates from that ideal with phase changes and jumps, the more uncertain the gains you get from skillspeed become.

Consider the situation where you have 10 seconds to fire weaponskills at the boss before it goes untargetable. With a GCD of 2.5 seconds you get can 5 attacks in. If you had enough skillspeed to lower your GCD to 2.4 seconds for example, you would still only get 5 attacks in, as you would be 2.1 seconds away from your 6th attack by the time the boss disappears - in this specific case, the value of the skillspeed on your gear is zero.

Of course sometimes the timing is favourable and you get an extra attck in - so you can see that the effect of skillspeed in such cases is not smooth but granular, sometimes it does nothing, sometimes you get an additional attack. I don't think it's as simple as just specifying a rule like "Above X is bad" or something, as in practice every fight is going to have extremely specific differences.

This also doesn't mean that a hypothetical target dummy fight is going to favour skillspeed either. It just means that in that case it will perform as advertised - but it can only start to underperform in practice. So personally the way I see it, we have no compelling reason to value it like BLMs or BRDs, we're not breakpoint dependent like DRGs, and we have a ton of single-use OGCDs that get no benefit from skillspeed entirely, so I just prefer to avoid it at all costs.