what is this APS?

DevonicAngel - Lost City wrote: »

was reading that if your not a 5.0 aps bm you might as well stop playing.

hasnoface wrote: »

True. Spend 500 million coins on APS or a few thousand dollars or stop playing because if you're not 4-5 APS, people won't need you in high lvl FCC / Nirvana. No one needs my axe BM for 90+ FCC anymore... I gave it up. =/

Fleuri - Sanctuary wrote: »

Its probably worth noting that 5aps only becomes an issue for level 99 or 100+ characters.

Also, 5aps, by itself, is nice but not super impressive. In terms of overall damage increase, for most people using it, it's maybe a 3x or 3.25x damage increase for a weapon that has relatively low base damage.

But you also build chi really fast, when you get 5 attacks in a second, for classes whose spark skill increases their physical attack.. And that's another 2x..3x damage multiplier. And, these two multipliers:

* multiply with each other (most in game multipliers add with each other even though they multiply something else)
* are pretty much exclusive to 5aps users (the in game multipliers which multiply with each other are mostly available to all classes)

Additionally, when fighting high health opponents (bosses), 5aps users dispel negative effects on themselves maybe every 12 seconds, gain a self heal for 20% of their health every 12 seconds and also spend maybe 20% of the time being invulnerable to damage, which can help make heals on them effective.

To balance this, there are some significant disadvantages to using 5aps. (To get 5aps most people need to use a weapon with -interval on it. 5aps is 5 attacks per second against a single target, and area of effect skills can get much higher net dps when they have enough targets. 5aps weapons have very short range. Very few skills work with 5aps weapons, and 5aps itself implies you are not using any skills during any second where you get those 5 attacks. 5aps skill use requires weapon switching for a number of important skills. 5aps weapons wear out relatively quickly. 5aps requires the user not spend significant time stunned, slept, sealed, or otherwise not attacking. Triple spark, which 5aps requires, prevents the user from attacking or taking other actions for 3 seconds -- and note that this is the same period of time when they are invulnerable to damage.)

However, those disadvantages are trivial in some of the most important and popular high-level content in the current game, most of which have their challenge based on opponents with millions of health points and with attacks doing a few thousand points of damage every second or three.

So [until the next expansion comes out] you should expect to see people talking about how unfair this current system is, mostly because of the effect of the compounded damage multipliers, which people have not figured out how to get with other gear configurations.