PSA: Important Information regarding Melee Weapons and Attack Speed

Okay so I discovered a few things in my testing perks and items, which made me curious about how exactly melee weapons work and why things feel so limited when it comes to attack speed perks and mods. And I believe I can summarize it after all my recent findings using a Katana as my example, and then branching off to other weapon types.

TL;DR

1. Crit chance and crit damage do not affect the DPS calculation on melee weapons. Test is below showing Crit chance mods clearly working, yet the DPS calculations were the same with/without them.
2. Attack speed is affected by Street Brawler for Blunt weapons, and Blades for.. Blades.
3. Melee weapons at any point in the game have 1 of 2 attacks per second. 1 is capped, the other is the minimum. Because of point #2, The capped version receives no benefits from leveling the respective skill.
4. In the end I show how much each perk/cyberware/mod actually affects attack speed if we didn't have faulty weapons that already have capped attack speed.

For context, I'm using a modded save file with all my ATTRIBUTES leveled to max, but all my SKILL levels at level 1, and the skill part is actually really important to remember.

I start off by leveling the skill to 18 to be able to craft legendary weapons. When you hover over the Katana in the craft menu, you can see one of two variations. Every time you click on the Katana it refreshes the preview, so clicking it a bunch will show you the two possibilities eventually.

​

Level 50 Character values

It's easy to immediately think that the clear winner here would be a crafted katana with the stats on the right, but that's because there are stats that upgrade that is NOT clearly communicated to us in any description.

And the stat that I'm referring to is blades attack speed. When you look at the Blades level bonuses in the page showing Blades perks, at levels 2, 11, and 13 it explicitly states that attack speed is increased by 10%. But every single level of Blades actually increases attack speed. Here's a table of the values and percent changes:

​

Bolded percent changes where the description states 10% increase

So at blades level 20, this Katana that started off at 2.5 attacks per second is at 4.75 attacks per second, and because 5 is the cap for Katana attack speed, the Katana that started at 5 stays at 5 with no increase in DPS from these perks.

So here's a before and after comparison for each Katana when leveling blades from 1 to 20. Left two images being the Katana starting at 2.5 before then after, and the right being the same but for the one with 5 attacks per second at the start.

​

End difference 2,516 DPS vs 2,648 DPS.

First of all, I noticed these DPS values are not correct. Adding any amount of crit chance vs crit damage via mods do nothing, and those mods do actually show added value in the description. I found this to be an opportunity to test the crit chance mod, so here's some definitive proof that they work:

​

Notice the DPS doesn't change with crit chance mods added

NOTE: This is obviously a heavily modded save file. What is modded? A level 1 legendary weapon with 3 slots, so that I can stay on a target for a while to test damage. Armor and health so I can stay alive. Level 1 Reflexes so that I can almost completely remove any base crit chance for more noticeable results

Now back to the 2 Katanas above at level 50. The 64% crit chance vs the the 5% crit chance I think make a big enough difference to have the point of this thread be self explanatory. The DPS on the left Katana in reality would make the DPS of the right katana look like a joke. You can actually find the Katana on the right with matching Crit chance instead of Crit damage, but it'd be missing all the crit damage. It also only takes 1 attack speed weapon mod to get the 4.75 up to 5.

So at the end of the day, the point is:

The hidden attack speed gains that we get from leveling blades are completely wasted when using a Katana (or any blade) that already has capped attack speed.

Another point that I make in my posts about whether or not perks/items/cyberware/etc are working is that at some point (very early on) any attack speed modifier becomes useless because of how much attack speed grows naturally with level into blades. This is for sure a design flaw, and as of right now there really isn't any way to get around it. You can play with blades and have the skill be level 1 to make use of the perks/cyberware/whatever, but at some point it's going to level up and make it all essentially do nothing.

And that brings me to my second point

Part 2: Literally everything that I just said about Blades is the same for Blunt weapons and the Street Brawler skill.

Leveling up Street Brawler increases the attack speed of all blunt weapons. An easy comparison to make was using a Baseball Bat, which starts with the same 2 attacks per second as Katanas (2.5 and 5) and by level 20 street brawler they're at 4.75 and 5 respectively.

That was a short part..

Part 3:

This part I'm adding for those who are curious (like myself) about how much each attack speed modifying item/perk actually add to attack speed, which they are most likely never seeing because they play the game normally, and the caps are reached very prematurely.

To demonstrate this, I'm again using a modded save file to ensure that I can level up/equip these perks while keeping my blades level at a minimum 2.5.

So what I'm focusing on is just showing the comparisons from a 2.5 attacks per second Katana and the end result from adding whatever mod/item/etc that's mentioned.

​

• Weapon Mod Differences

​

0, 1, 2, 3 attack speed mods

• Blades Attack Speed Perk

0, 1, 2, 3 points into perk "Sting Like A Bee"

• Cold Blood stacks without Melee Damage perk

​

0, 1, 2, 3, 4 stacks. Does not increase at 5

Hopefully this helps whoever plays with melee weapons understand a bit better the differences in DPS and helps them make better choices about what to use when comparing the misleading DPS calculations. Thanks for reading

​

EDIT: u/TentacleFist brought up Arms cyberware, which I didn't look at.

Here are the Mantis Blade stats that I saw after resetting all perks, resetting all items.

• Level 0 Blades: 2.00 AS
• Level 5 Blades: 2.45 AS
• Level 10 Blades: 2.77 AS
• Level 15 Blades: 3.48 AS
• Level 20 Blades: 3.80 AS

Attack speed cap for Mantis Blade = 4