I recently upgraded from a Dagger to a Javelin on my monk – and suddenly, it feels like it takes a lot longer to use my abilities.
I checked, and found that the Dagger has 1.5 attacks per second compared to the Javelin's 1.2 — does this actually effect the animation time of the abilities? Abilities already base damage off of weapon DPS (instead of Max/Min damage), presumably to normalize the difference between fast and slow weapons.
But if faster weapons yield faster animations, they're clearly superior, even with slightly inferior DPS.
Does weapon speed actually effect this? (In my case, neither weapon is enchanted)
Best Answer
All spells and abilities use both the attack speed and damage of weapons into consideration. Take for example the Wizard, spells cast faster with a faster weapon and hit harder with a sharper blade.
The monk works under the same principle.
Also, I don't think damage is based on "DPS", but rather on the minimum and maximum damage of the weapon. The "DPS" should give an approximate value of your abilities damage before modifiers.
So in summary, higher min/max damage = more damage per ability usage and faster attack speed = more ability uses per second.
See this summary and the attached blue post: http://www.diablowiki.net/Spells