Help with auto attack explanation

[Hipolyte]

Hello all,

I am fairly new to the game and I trying to understand how the auto attack concept is working.
For example if you have a weapon with 2,4 attack speed does it mean that every 2,4 secs you will do an auto attack?
If you are dual wield does it makes any difference like 2 auto attacks?
When you use an ability is there a chance to trigger an auto attack?
How does the weapon damage influence the damage the auto attack is having?

Thank you in advance.

[Zxul]

If you have a weapon with 2,4 attack speed, indeed every 2,4 secs you will do an auto attack.

In baseline situation slower weapon will do a higher auto attack dmg per hit, but will hit slower, in total however two weapons with different speed but same weapon dmg will do the same dmg over time.

If dual wielding, offhand will contribute percentage of its weapon dmg to abilities, and has if I remember right 40% to do an additional autoattack hit when main hand autoattack hits.

Abilities don't trigger autoattacks, however you do autoattack during the time that you use abilities- except during the time that you use channels.

Where attack speed matters is if you have ability or tactic which increases your autoattack speed- the slower is the weapon, the more it benefits from the speed buff.

Also, auto attack can proc your procs (chance on hit to do extra dmg), so if in a build where you gain significant dmg from procs the faster is the weapons, the better, since you can get more procs off.

Also, slower weapon can help with burst- over time it will do same dmg, but a single hit will be higher- which can make a difference when trying to maximize burst.

[Omegus]

How does the weapon damage influence the damage the auto attack is having?

Zxul covered most of it, but for this point: 1-handed and 2-handed auto-attack damage is calculated using the steps below. I'm not including enemy mitigation in here. Dual wield is weird.

1) DPS bonus from stats. This is either: "(Strength + Melee Power) / 10" for melee weapons or "(Ballistic Skill + Ranged Power) / 10" for ranged weapons. Assume 1000 strength and 100 melee power, you get (1000 + 100) / 10 = 110 DPS bonus
2) DPS bonus on the weapon is then added to the amount calculated in step 1. For this example the weapon DPS will be 60, so the current total DPS bonus is 110 + 60 = 170 DPS
3) The total damage (before mitigation) is then multiplied by the attack speed of the weapon. If the weapon attack speed is 2.4 seconds - i.e. one swing every 2.4 seconds - then you would multiply 170 DPS by 2.4 to get a total damage of 408 damage per hit.

The total damage is based on the attack speed listed on the weapon, so you are doing 408 damage every 2.4 seconds. If you then get some kind of auto-attack buff that lets you swing twice as fast then it does not change the damage per hit so you still do 408 damage per hit, but you now do it every 1.2 seconds instead.

If you are dual wielding then your main weapon does damage using the above formula and each time you do an auto-attack with the main-hand, the off-hand weapon has a chance to proc an auto-attack. I can't remember the scaling but I seem to remember that the damage calculation used the main hand's attack speed rather than the off-hand's attack speed or something like that as the swing rate depends on the main hand.