Poll: Damage vs attack speed

[Terrible Opinions]

Simple maths say attack speed is far better.

Enemy has 350HP. You can deal 100 damage per hit, once per second, or 50 damage, every half-second.

Who kills the enemy faster?

There are more factors at play than simple math, but yes, the big advantage of weak, rapid attacks is that you don't overkill. That, and misses are a bit more forgiving. There are advantages going in the other direction, though.

You don't have to worry much about damage reduction, for example. In the case of your 350 HP enemy: what if, say, he had armour that knocked off 25 points per hit? Then you'd be killing him in five seconds with the heavy attack (375) or seven seconds with the light attacks (14 attacks at 25 damage a piece). Those armour upgrades are worth more against the marines than the siege tanks, aye?

The other noteworthy advantage: front-loaded burst damage can kill an enemy before he has a chance to counterattack.

Anyway, I like tanky tank tanks. Though fast weapons are definitely better in Elder Scrolls games because of the weapon enchanting.

 

[s0meNo0b]

Most of the time I can go for either, but lately I've been more in the mood to destory the crap out of things in a few satisfying blows so Power for me.

 

[Signa]

Simple maths say attack speed is far better.

Enemy has 350HP. You can deal 100 damage per hit, once per second, or 50 damage, every half-second.

Who kills the enemy faster?

There are more factors at play than simple math, but yes, the big advantage of weak, rapid attacks is that you don't overkill. That, and misses are a bit more forgiving. There are advantages going in the other direction, though.

You don't have to worry much about damage reduction, for example. In the case of your 350 HP enemy: what if, say, he had armour that knocked off 25 points per hit? Then you'd be killing him in five seconds with the heavy attack (375) or seven seconds with the light attacks (14 attacks at 25 damage a piece). Those armour upgrades are worth more against the marines than the siege tanks, aye?

The other noteworthy advantage: front-loaded burst damage can kill an enemy before he has a chance to counterattack.

Anyway, I like tanky tank tanks. Though fast weapons are definitely better in Elder Scrolls games because of the weapon enchanting.

Good point. I think the reason I've never noticed that was because I stack DOTs on the quick attacks if I can. Elemental damage usually isn't affected by armor.

 

[Terrible Opinions]

Yeah, any time you start throwing on additional effects to weapons, faster attacks get more attractive, as with Elder Scrolls games. Elemental damage, % chance to stun... that stuff is usually the same for all weapons, regardless of their base stats, so yeah, best to put them on the fast attacks.

 

[JeffBergGold]

OHKO all day. Rog, Zangief, Ganondorf, Hugo, O.Sagat those kinda guys.

 

[gigastrike]

Slow and hard. I love the feel of a heavy attack, and you can spend to downtime between them dodging.

 

[The_Blue_Rider]

If its melee then damage all the way, if its guns then i want speed

 

[Nerexor]

I prefer to play characters that swing super fast and make lots of little damage attacks. I'm not saying it's better, I just think it's kind of awesome as opposed to a big burly guy taking fifteen seconds to swing and do one blast of damage.

Captcha: In stitches... this is about the fourth subject relevant captcha in a row, are we sure the captcha generator isn't sentient?

 

[CannibalCorpses]

It varies from game to game depending on the mechanics of combat but i prefer the slower, more skillfull attacks where possible. The repetition of pecking bosses to death with daggers is just boring

 

[Burst6]

Slow and strong. Why? Because in many games slow things also have large range. If you get used to the range and timing on your 2h great sword you'll be able to drop any dual dagger wielding sissy to the ground.

In dark souls my favorite weapon was the murakumo. It was a giant 2-handed curved sword. It was hard to build for as your character needed to be balanced in both dexterity and strength, and it was probably the slowest weapon in the game for the initial attack, but when that first attack hit the enemy was pretty much dead. If they survived the first hit, they got hit with a second, and a third. I think it was the only weapon in the game that could be chained indefinitely if you ignore stamina.


Also the great sword in dragons dogma was amazing. It controlled weird and was slow, but it had some of the easiest knockdowns in the game. It was always fun whenever an enemy charged at me. I would sweep at their feet with my sword and their corpse would fly right over me.

 

[emeraldrafael]

I prefer fast because I never like putting everything into one super attack until im sure the odds of it not biting me in the ass are quite heavily tipped in my favor. But also because when given the option (and this usually takes place more in my D&D games with my friends) I enjoy targetting specific portions of a body with quick fast attacks and dealing damage to those points to weaken the body more.

 

[taciturnCandid]

I like fast attacks that do less damage, but stagger. Stagger is delicious and it doesn't matter how strong your attacks are if you can't attack.

I also like when I get multiple attacks in a round and I can chain combat maneuvers in it. People underestimate the monk until they encounter a trip build.

 

[ThePenguinKnight]

I choose the secret third option, stack-able DoT.

 

[ecoho]

slow but masssive damage. The reason i chose this is while your fast and moble with quick yet weak weapons be aware in order to use those right your in light armor which mean i hit you once and your dead, were as me sitting in my plate can just swing my massive war hammer around and all you can do is dart in and hope you can get in a few lucky hits.

 

[Nautical Honors Society]

Both and neither.

They both work out to be the exact same thing. And both have the potential to look awesome. So I guess it's just what I'm feeling at the time.

 

[Twilight_guy]

I prefer the inbetween. Rather then a fuck off, buster sword or a super cracktastic knife I prefer a short sword and shield, which is usually a medium speed middle of the road affair.

 

[CpT_x_Killsteal]

I don't care how fast you think you are, when you get a nice big smack to the face, you're done for.

 

[chimeracreator]

It really depends on the damage reduction mechanic and the pre-shot time vs the cooldown between attacks. All of this while ignoring other possible benefits of an attack such as area effects, interrupts, stuns and the like and if these are based on a flat percentage of the amount of damage dealt.

So to make this easy lets look at two attack types for all of these scenarios. The slow one does 100 damage with 1 attack per second, the fast one does 10 damage with 10 attacks per second. So on face value their DPS is the same.

For damage reduction based on percentage damages these remain the same in all cases. However for flat numeric damage reduction per attack high damage wins as the reduction effect is multiplied for high attack speeds. A game like Starcraft 2 plays on this by having some units ignore damage OVER a certain point thus greatly favoring high attack speed against such units.

For weapons that use almost all of their time as part of a pre-shot timer fast attack speed produces less lag between you pulling the trigger and shooting, which makes it more intuitive and in many games makes it a lot harder to dodge. While weapons that use almost all of their time as a cooldown often make more powerful attacks count more because you have the possibility of taking an enemy out of the fight before they have a chance to do anything.

So yep, no easy answer, but because I've been reading through UFOpedia about the classic X-COM I have to say slow, powerful attacks because sectopods are monsters with their insane armor of death that weaker weapons can't hope to penetrate.

 

[lunavixen]

it depends on the game, but i have a deep seated preference for faster attacks that deal less damage, in a lot of cases, the speed of attacks (faster) equals out the total damage dealt between heavy and faster weapons (well, i found it is)

 

[loa]

I dislike god of may cry games where enemies take a million hits and you have to air juggle them in stylish combos for half an hour.
Games like metroid or zelda handle it much better, each attack has much more impact, you can easily see what you're doing and improvements are immediately recognizable whereas in god of war it's kind of fuzzy how much more exactly a "damage upgrade" does.