Speed cap on daggers?

[sidusar]

Question for you dagger users out there.

The speed statistic on weapons is measured in Hit/Minute. Now I always assumed this number really literally meant the number of attacks the weapon did in one minute. I never really tried to measure the speed to confirm that, but it always felt like my 1-handed sword with 30 hpm did needed about 2 seconds per attack, and my 2-handed axe with 20 hpm about 3 seconds.

But last week I decided to make myself some max speed daggers to play around with. 60 hit/minute. When using them I noticed they didn't seem twice as fast as my sword, not by far. So I took a watch and counted how many attacks I really did in one minute.

With a 1-handed sword, speed 32 hpm, I did about 30 attacks in one minute. So that seemed correct.
But with a dagger, speed 60 hpm, I only did about 35 attacks in one minute. Nowhere near 60.

So my question here: Has anyone actually managed to reach more than 40 hits per minute with a dagger? If so, what am I doing wrong? If not, is there some cap on weapon speed? If it does indeed max out at about 35 hits per minute, then what's the point of weapons with 60 speed?

[ncrijns]

Here are some untested things to think of:

It matters what you equip in your other hand. I assume you didn't equip anything there, but I noticed that when I use dagger/dagger the hitrate is better then with sword/dagger, as I would expect.
Penalty, wether from swords, shields, dagger or armour matters. Higher penalty means lower hitrate.

[petej]

Depends if thats a capped speed or proportional to what it should be

[sidusar]

Just for clarification, I tested with only the single weapon in one hand, and wearing light armor. A sword has a higher penalty than a dagger so that wouldn't explain such a huge slowing down of the dagger.

I'm pretty sure penalty doesn't effect hitrate anyway, I've never seen heavy armor slow a meleer down. I did test doublewielding too, and found using two identical daggers gives the same hitrate as one dagger, using a sword and a dagger gives the hitrate of the sword.

[sidusar]

Depends if thats a capped speed or proportional to what it should be

More tests were in order

2h axe, 20 speed: 20 hits per minute
2h pike, 23 speed: 21 hits per minute
pistol, 27 speed: 26 hits per minute
same pistol with hitrate stanza: 48 hits per minute
1h sword, 32 speed: 30 hits per minute
1h sword, 34 speed: 32 hits per minute
1h sword, 38 speed: 36 hits per minute

dagger, 46 speed: 35 hits per minute
dagger, 60 speed: 35 hits per minute

Looks like a cap, one that effects only daggers too. Actually, I've never seen a dagger with a speed below 35, so looks like the speed on daggers is just not working and it always uses the mimimum speed. I'd really like for someone else to test this as well, because if I'm correct this would be exactly why daggers are underpowered.

[vguerin]

Is this possibly affected by lag/latency ? I am also thinking the animation itself could impede the rates we should be getting. The animation seems to have a fixed speed that cannot be accomplished faster and may be limited by system speeds... just thinking here.

[amitst]

Things to add:

When you dual wield your hitrate is supposed to be the hitrate of the slower weapon.

Using a high enough hit rate stanza shoudl always double your hit/minute and I clocked my pistol at 60 hpm with a stop watch when using the hit rate stanza.

[sidusar]

Is this possibly affected by lag/latency ? I am also thinking the animation itself could impede the rates we should be getting. The animation seems to have a fixed speed that cannot be accomplished faster and may be limited by system speeds... just thinking here.

That's quite possible. I did consider that myself and did all my tests in first-person mode, but I might still be limited by the maximum speed of the animation.

Still, if that is the reason, that doesn't change that attack speed is capped at way lower than it should be. If they're going to have weapons with 60 attacks per minute, they should have an animation that can decently keep up.

Using a high enough hit rate stanza shoudl always double your hit/minute and I clocked my pistol at 60 hpm with a stop watch when using the hit rate stanza.

It never doubled my hit/minute, increased it by 85% at most. Maybe my pistol suffers from a fixed animation speed too.

[tylarth]

did you count the sysinfo attacks?

[sidusar]

did you count the sysinfo attacks?

Yep. And the number of actual attacks. There's no difference.

I tried turning all my graphics down and though it does make the attack animation smoother, it doesn't make it any faster.