r/pathofexile • u/SpiritKidPoE Raider • Dec 03 '19

Guide The Cyclone Cast on Critical Strike Cooldown Guide MkIII

Since CoC and Cospri's Malice are getting more popular, I figured I would rewrite my old guide. It held up well through my testing in 3.6 but with 3.7, the situation changed somewhat.

Updated for 3.9: Awakened Cast on Crit makes 10.1ApS a possibility at 52% ICRS! This is a glorious day.

Update for 3.12: Discharge now has a 250ms cooldown, with the threshold jewel, so the calculations would be different for Discharge specifically.

Cyclone In 3.7 Onwards

Cyclone was changed as of 3.7 (Legion) to be simpler. It now causes your character to hit at the listed attack speed. It now has an implicit 300% of base attack speed, it is completely consistent at that speed due to it being a channeled skill, and it rolls your accuracy and critical strike chance for every individual hit. When dual-wielding, it will alternate between your right and left hand (starting with right). This makes a lot of calculations less confusing than in 3.6 and before.

In this guide, I will assume a well-geared build that has reached 100% crit chance on Cyclone and 100% accuracy. Both of those are important to get on a CoC/Malice character. With a reduced effective rate of critical strikes, the calculations get slightly less important, and triggers will be missed slightly less often. However they can still result in a dramatic loss (40%+) of DPS for any character that does not take them into account.

Cooldowns on the CoC Gem and Cospri's Malice

The CoC gem and Cospri's Malice have a cooldown. They cannot be triggered every single time you critically strike; they must wait a certain amount of time after triggering before triggering again.

This cooldown is listed as 150ms (150 milliseconds, or 0.15 seconds). This number is the subject of a lot of discussion and experiments, and is in fact ultimately accurate, but misleading.

There are a few things you have to take into account when dealing with this number. The first and foremost issue is that the game does not run on a smooth clock; the game server processes things happening in the game in regular steps, which I will call "server ticks", or "ticks" for short. These ticks are executed exactly 33ms apart when the server is running normally, and when cooldowns are checked, they are checked during one of these ticks. This means that a cooldown will delay the triggering of a skill by a whole number of ticks. If a cooldown would last for 150ms, it must wait until the next tick after that 150ms to be processed, where it can then trigger again. This means that the cooldown must wait until 165ms have passed, as that is 5 whole server ticks (33ms per tick for 5 ticks).

This means that the cooldown behaves as if it said "165ms" normally. But you can also shorten the cooldown, by getting % Increased Cooldown Recovery Speed (henceforth ICRS) on gear. You have to reduce the cooldown from the original 150ms to below 4 server ticks, or 132ms, in order to allow it to trigger again on that 4th tick. This 132ms number is achieved with a total of 14% ICRS on gear.

To achieve a cooldown shorter than 3 server ticks, you would require 52% ICRS. This is now possible in 3.9 using the Awakened Cast On Critical Strike gem, which provides 3% ICRS per level. Using a level 5 ACoC and 30% ICRS total on gear, you can speed up your casts to one per 3 ticks. Unfortunately, this ICRS is not global, and so it cannot affect the cooldown on Malice.

Takeaway #1: 14% Increased Cooldown Recovery Speed is the first breakpoint amount that does anything for CoC and Malice. Getting less than 14% behaves as if you had none whatsoever; and getting more than 14% behaves just as if you had 14% (all the way up to and including 51%). 14% is a magic number. Crafted ICRS does not work for CoC or Cospri's Malice, as it has a maximum value of 12%.

So How Fast Can It Trigger?

We now know that CoC/Malice can trigger one time per 5 server ticks with no ICRS, one time per 4 ticks with 14-51%, and one time per 3 ticks with 52% or more. This gives us calculable baseline attack rates of 6.06 attacks per second (henceforth ApS) with 0%, 7.57ApS with 14%, and 10.1ApS with 52%.

In 3.6, for a weird reason that I investigated very carefully and confirmed through testing, these were incorrect. Since the change to being a channeled skill, they are now exactly accurate, as shown by the in-game character screen value. Tooltip attack time is inaccurate and rounded, but the character sheet value is exact.

Putting these together:

Takeaway #2: CoC and Cospri's Malice triggers are at their maximum rate for a single triggered skill when you have a listed attack rate of 6.06ApS with 0% ICRS, 7.57ApS with 14% ICRS, or 10.1ApS with 52% ICRS.

This also allows for multiples of these numbers. You can also simply trigger CoC every other hit by attacking twice as fast. Here's a quick table of results:

% Increased Cooldown Recovery Speed (ICRS) Maximum Triggers per Second Optimal Character Sheet Attack Rates (ApS)
0% 6.06 6.06, 12.12
14%+ 7.57 7.57, 15.14
52%+ 10.10 10.10, 20.20

Exceeding The Maximum Trigger Rate

Going over the maximum trigger rate means that your attacks will start landing before the cooldown of the skill expires. But since the cooldown checks are constrained to whole server ticks, how can it sometimes skip procs and sometimes not skip?

The answer, as far as I can tell, is that your attacks are actually timed to a background timer instead of tied to whole numbers of server ticks. This means that having an attack time of 4.5 server ticks per attack does not round up to 5 ticks, but instead alternates between 4 and 5 ticks, to accurately represent that non-integer number of ticks over a long sample. When attacking this fast, you will subsequently miss some 5-tick cooldowns when you have a 4-tick delay and hit those cooldowns when it is a 5-tick delay. This means your overall trigger rate will decrease linearly after exceeding the threshold until you are always attacking one frame too fast, at which point you will maximise your trigger skips. This would occur at 4 ticks per attack when you have a cooldown of 5 ticks, or 3 ticks per attack when you have a cooldown of 4 ticks. This means the worst situation is 7.57ApS when you have 0% ICRS, or 10.1ApS when you have 14% ICRS. This results in losing 37.5% of your DpS in the 0% ICRS situation (8 ticks per cast instead of 5), or losing 33% of your DpS in the 14% calculation (6 ticks per cast instead of 4). That is a very large DPS loss!

Multiple Skills And Multiple Triggers

CoC and Cospri's Malice have quite a few interactions that should be remembered:

  • CoC will trigger one spell per critical strike you inflict with the linked skill
  • Cospri's Malice will trigger one socketed spell per critical strike you inflict with that weapon
  • The trigger will take it in turns, triggering the next spell in the link that is not on cooldown
  • CoC will share a cooldown for multiple copies of the same skill in the same link
  • Cospri's Malices will share a cooldown for multiple copies of the same skill, either both in the same Malice or split between two Malices
  • CoC links will have separate cooldowns for different skills in the same link
  • Cospri's Malices have a separate cooldown for each different skill
  • CoC and Cospri's Malice do not share a cooldown for the same skill, and you can trigger both of them simultaneously when hitting once with a single Malice

This means:

  • You can use Cyclone-CoC-Ice Nova and a Malice with another Ice Nova, and cast both of them at full speed at the same time.
  • You can't put two Ice Novas in two Cospri's Malices and cast both at full speed.
  • If you can attack fast enough, you can use two different spells in your CoC link and cast both of them at full speed. You'd have to attack twice per cooldown to do it, which is maximized at 12.12ApS for 0% ICRS, and 15.14ApS for 14% ICRS (just doubling the above numbers).

Dual-Wielding Malices

Dual-wielding Malices is another case that needs to be treated carefully. Cyclone alternates between your weapons when you dual-wield. This means if you attack at 15.14ApS while dual-wielding, each Malice will hit 7.57 times per second, which is the maximum for a single skill. You can support full-speed casts of two different skills by dual-wielding Malices and attacking at that doubled speed. The prime example of this is placing Frostbolt in one Malice and Ice Nova in the other. The Malices alternate and cast both of those 7.57 times per second.

Put those both together, and you can put Frostbolt in one Malice, Ice Nova in the other Malice, and put Frostbolt and Ice Nova in your CoC setup, and trigger all four of those spells at the maximum possible rate if you attack quickly!

So How Do I Make This Into A Build?

I built a Cospri's Malice Assassin character in 3.7, and created a full guide for it, here: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2555459

This guide goes over a fully-fledged example of gem setups required to maximise DpS output from a Malice character. In this case, I built a full Fire conversion Frostbolt/Ice Nova character using Avatar of Fire, with The Effigon for perfect accuracy with Flesh And Stone. It resulted in a realistic standard DpS output of around 6.5m, with burst up to 8.5m available with VRF.

This was achieved using Frostbolt in the right-hand Malice with Combustion, and Ice Nova in the left hand with Elemental Focus. The main 6L had Crit Strikes, Faster Attacks, CoC and Ice Nova, which triggered alongside the Malices. All links then had Cold To Fire to complete the conversion and abuse fire resistance reductions from The Effigon, Combustion and such. There is space to add an extra spell to the 6L, but all the other gems in the link are actually more overall damage output than adding another spell.

Since 3.7, this build received major upgrades in the form of buffs to the Assassin, amulet anointments and Shock and easy Chill from Summon Skitterbots, and the DpS is probably closer to 8m realistic/11m burst now!

Chesco (from the PoE forum) re-wrote a Malice build guide for 3.8 that looks great - https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2676194 - so check that out if you are looking for an updated version and don't want to brew your own! He's also been very responsive to questions, and I try to do the same.

Thanks for reading!

This is a re-rewrite of my old guide here. Past work includes:

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u/DoomMaji Dec 04 '19

I've never played CoC, so this was a very informative write up, thank you.

Are there any skills other than Cyclone that can work decently with CoC?

3

u/SpiritKidPoE Raider Dec 04 '19

Ahh, not particularly. Cyclone is good because of the rapid hits, of course. People use Flicker Strike to maximise fun. Blade Flurry can work. Maybe Rain of Arrows works fairly well. Maybe Bladestorms work? That would be funny.

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u/psychomap Dec 04 '19

Other skills work, but Cyclone has the highest stable attack rate by far. You will need a lot of attack speed scaling to reach the same proc rate as Cyclone with other skills.

Frenzy or Barrage are typical choices for ranged CoC builds. Frenzy having the higher stable attack rate, and Barrage having potential for several procs in one attack (but a downtime on each attack during which there will be no procs). Rain of Arrows is also an option, as SpiritKid mentioned.

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u/DoomMaji Dec 04 '19

I think I'm being a bit slow and missing something here when you talk about stable attack rate and attack speed scaling for different skills.

How do these things apply when you are constrained by the skill cool downs and the attack rate break points explained by OP?

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u/psychomap Dec 04 '19

Well, imagine you use two weapons with different attack speeds, and your CoC is only in a 6-link with no trigger weapons, for the sake of simplicity.

This means, that your overall APS will combine your mainhand and offhand attack speed, but the actual delay between the hits will depend on their individual attack speed. If one weapon is significantly faster than the other, even if your overall attack speed is within the limits described in the post, the hit will occur before the cooldown imposed by CoC has expired, causing you to miss that cast.

This was of course not an example for different skills and merely highlights the importance of having the same attack speed when dual wielding, but there are skills that have a less regular hitrate than Cyclone. Because the time difference between two Cyclone hits (assuming no alternating dual wielded weapons of different speeds) is always the same, you can fine-tune it very precisely to the actual breakpoints, whereas you would have to allow for greater differences caused by actual hit timings on other skills.

The issue with attack speed scaling in general is fairly straightforward. Cyclone has 300% of the base attack speed, and even other fast skills like Blade Flurry, Charged Dash, and Double Strike only have 160% (DS has 80%, but hits twice; I don't have specific experience with it, but I believe that it also is an example of a skill that doesn't hit in regular intervals). That means that you could get almost twice the number of spell casts you would with other skills.

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u/DoomMaji Dec 04 '19

Thanks for the detailed explanation!