Breakpoints
From Diablo Wiki
Breakpoints
Diablo 2 offers four attributes on gear that will affect how fast your character will react in certain situations. These four attributes are:
- Faster Block Rate
- Faster Cast Rate
- Faster Hit Recovery
- Increased Attack Speed
These attributes are coined FBR, FCR, FHR and IAS in their abbreviated forms, respectively.
To understand what a breakpoint is and how they work, it is important to know what these attributes do. To have FBR, a character must have a Block Rate to begin with. This will be done with certain class-specific skills, or equipping a shield. Should the Block Rate then trigger a successful block from an enemy attack, an animation will run its course: The shield being lowered, the shield deflecting the enemy's blow which leads to the shield being raised back into its resting position. This animation will take a certain amount of frames to display. Simply put, if the animation should take ten frames, with enough Faster Block Rate, the action takes only nine frames instead.
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[edit] Breakpoints Broken Down
There are two reasons why understanding these attributes is important. Without this knowledge, a player will neither know how these attributes work nor will they be able to work towards aimed character improvement. After understanding why these attributes are important and how they work exactly, players will be able to judge and evaluate which attributes are very beneficial towards their class and playstyle.
[edit] Why Breakpoints are Needed
A character performing any actions associated with these attributes is unable to move or start a new action until the action being performed is done. Since everyone will either block, cast, be hit or attack with a weapon, these attributes are important. If you consider that a character will do more than one of these actions, you can actually save a lot of time and be more mobile over the course of a game. To further expand on this, it could actually be counterproductive to have a high percentage to block without any FBR since you will stop dead in your tracks every time these animations are triggered. Quick scenario:
- Your character has 75% Block Rate
- You are being attacked by four monsters which have a 25-frame melee attack (25 frames is equal to one second)
- Suppose your block animation is 10 frames long
You can already tell that during this fight, you're not going to be doing a lot of attacking or fleeing - you will be stuck raising your shield too often. Something most seasoned players will have experienced at one point is a situation similar to a stunlock. When a character teleports into a bigger group of monsters who immediatley attack you, it can sometimes occur that you will not be able to teleport back out. This is because during all the blocking and hit recovering, you have no time to cast the teleport spell. With Faster Block Rate, Faster Hit Recovery and Faster Cast Rate however, you might end up escaping without any problems at all.
[edit] How Breakpoints Function
- An animation takes a certain amount of frames to display, depending on the class and action being rendered.
- Each animation is calculated in frames and not time. A certain value must be met before a frame will be removed because you can not remove parts or percentages of a frame.
- After meeting the required value to drop a frame, the animation will take exactly one frame less.
- The removal of multiple frames requires progressively bigger amounts of an attribute to be met, with diminishing returns. This keeps animations from being completely removed. After all, one could be faster than somebody else, but not fast enough to do nothing and still have the same effect as a slower person.
[edit] Differences in Calculating Frames
[edit] Character based Differences
It is also important to note that each class is different when it comes to the animation length of an action. One class could be slower when it comes to blocking, but very fast when it comes to attacking. These are hidden stats that can't be found in the actual game, but are important to know when gearing your character. This will avoid being short just a few points to hit the next breakpoint, but also overstacking an attribute. If, for example, a character would need 86 or more FBR to drop a certain amount of frames, but over 200 to drop one more frame than the 86 breakpoint, there is no use having 150 FBR. Instead, a piece of equipment could be used that will actually improve the character in another way. The breakpoints are a moot point however when it comes toward choosing a class to play. Blizzard has balanced the values required for each action of each class to a point where a Barbarian can expect to hit fast and a Sorceress will be able to cast faster than other classes naturally. This doesn't mean they shouldn't continue to expand on those strengths though.
[edit] Gear based Differences
In much the same manner, items that are used in conjunction of these actions may also differ from one another. A Short Sword will always be swung faster than a Heavy Axe by nature if both have the same amount of IAS on them, but a Scimitar will be even faster. Weapons will say either Very Fast, Fast, Normal, Slow, or Very Slow Attack Speed in the weaponstat tooltip, indicating how fast or slow using this weapon is at 0 IAS.
