Attack speed and its interaction with various skills

The nonintuitve part of "Increase attack speed by x%" is, it also increases your CAST speed.

There are a fair few different type of skills in Diablo3, in addition to the generic "nuke":

• Channelled
• Summons
• Fire/Forget
• Damage over time

How does increased attack speed interact with the aforementioned list of skill types?

This is a followup on Is resource cost adjusted with weapon speed in diablo 3?, which answers the weapon speed aspect of channelling spells but does not comprehensively cover other spell types.

Solution 1:

Attack speed increases animation time, thus gives you the ability to have more primary animations go off. (Primary animations are always forced to be displayed, secondary animations are only displayed if you are idle, for example the barbarians war cries)

In the case of channeling (a primary animation, that would be interrupted if you cast another primary animation, because only one can be displayed at a time) your damage ticks will occur more frequentlyb tu your resource wil drain faster as well, making very high attackspeed on channeled abilities rather useless. It'd be better to have a slow, hard hitting weapon, since most challens have pretty fast damage ticks already.

Summons benefit from attackspeed in two ways. First your summoning animation is faster, meaning you can drop that Gargantuan in the enemies face quicker, to faster go and collect loot again.

Second, most pets scale proportional to your attack speed, meaning if your attack speed in the Stats-Page is higher, your pets will also hit faster. (Also the Thasker and Theo's Gloves multiply with your attacckspeed, making your pets go berserk)

For Fire/Forget spells, you oughta read up on every spell you want to know about seperatly, because they are all individual. (Frozen orb will be casted faster but the spikes it shoots stay the same rate - Hydra will be casted faster but also attacks faster, etc.)

Finally damage over time spells only benefit from the cast animation (wich might be useful for Jade Harvester builds to get those dots in faster before you blow them up) but do not increase their damage if you run higher attackspeed. (Critchance and Critical hit Damage do increase the damage of dots)

I know this is a very old question, but seeing that the only answer was completely wrong in most points (dunno what's with that) i figured i'd go and set it right.

Hope I was helpful, guy from 3 years ago.

Tophatcrusader

Solution 2:

From playing the Witch Doctor, with my friend as a Wizard, I have seen all variances in relation to attack speed, especially during periods of increased attack speed through shrines and other interactions.

Channeled Spells like the Witch Doctor's Firebats appears to impart damage more frequently with increased attack damage. Especially useful, as resource usage is based off time, and thus you are gaining more damage without expending more resource.

Summons like the Witch Doctor's Gargantuan may summon slightly faster, but pets and minions have a set attack speed, and are not influenced by your current or increased attack speed. While Fire and Forget spells bring out a pet that stays in place, and expires, the same rules apply.

Damage Over Time effects like the Witch Doctor's Haunt tick over more quickly with increased attack speed, so although they will deal the same amount of damage, it will take less time for them to do so.