Action Delays

Purpose

The purpose of this page is two-fold:

• Highlight the overall issue of attack speed rounding.
• Create a place for people to view the action delays of their skills, without the requirement of looking at Wz files.

Generally, this page will not be "actively maintained". If there a balance patch that reduces skill delays across the board similar to v.267 I will hopefully add those values as a new data source, but that's about it.

Attack Speed: Two Naming Conventions

Attack Speed often uses two opposite naming conventions, which can be confusing:

• Stage 1-10: The in-game wording. Stage 10 is the fastest.
• AS0-AS9: Historical player convention. AS0 is the fastest (AS = 10 - Stage).

This page uses both: "Stage" for calculations, "AS" for display. Stage 10 = AS0 = fastest possible.

The Scaling Formula

When you use a skill, each animation frame is scaled by your attack speed:

At Stage 4 (AS6, the "base" speed), the multiplier is exactly 1.0. For this reason, Stage 4 (AS6) is considered the "base" speed.

The 30ms Frame Rule/Penalty

Each individual frame has a minimum duration of 30ms. If a scaled frame would be less than 30ms, it gets rounded up to 30ms.

As a result of the multiplier at Stage 10 attack speed, this means any skill with a 30ms frame as its last frame will benefit less from attack speed than skills without, even if their total delays are identical.

Furthermore, the total sum of any skill's frames is rounded up to the nearest multiple of 30ms.

This means that despite the final values only being (412.5ms vs 435ms), the total delay is rounded up to 420ms and 450ms respectively, turning a 22.5ms difference into a 30ms difference.

This difference can be amplified in other cases.

This can cause a small loss in attack speed for 1 frame to compound into a larger one, but it also means that having more than one 30ms frame does not compound the loss until a certain point.

In other words, having more than one 30ms frame does not compound the loss until the total delay reaches the next multiple of 30ms.

When and Why This Matters

• Increased prevalence in v.267. As a result of the recent balance changes, many more classes have a 30ms frame in their main attacking skill than before. This issue has always existed, but was less common. One longstanding example is Kaiser's Gigas Wave.
• The gains of attack speed are deceptively different between classes. As explained previously, two skills with the same base delay can have very different attack speed gains depending on how many 30ms frames they have.
• Unintentional balance differences. This is an unintended side-effect of the rounding system that is generally not present as Stage 8 (AS2). If this issue affects your class' main attacking skill, you're getting 7% fewer hits than a class with the same base delay but no 30ms frames.
• Obviously, the existence of Stage 10 Attack Speed has been an unfair balance issue for many years, since it does not benefit hurricane classes. Given that KMS does not consider these effects when balancing, our version is even more out of balance.

  (not that nexon cares)

• Where it matters less: While every class has at least one skill affected by this issue, the effect is not as impactful on skills that are not cast as often.

Reading the Skill Cards

• Base delay: Total frame duration at Stage 6 (AS4)
• → Fastest delay: Total at Stage 10 (AS0). Yellow ⚠ indicates floor penalty.
• Yellow frames: These hit the 30ms floor at AS0
• Parenthetical value: What the delay would be without the floor
• You can click on a stage to see the individual frame delays at that stage

References & Attributions

• Reddit post by /u/screeeeeeee investigating the attack speed-to-delay discrepancy in Gigas Wave (2022)
• Comment by /u/hailcrest in the above thread explaining the 30ms floor effect
• Nexon forum post about skills not working properly with AS10
• Credits to Jaepy for asking me to look into this in the first place - this was fun to investigate and compile :)