I’ve been running the current season, and I always prefer to try out custom builds. This time I’m going with a LoN Frenzied Rimeheart build. Get those Frostburns up, hit the target a ton of times, proc Rimeheart like mad. My character:
My issue arose when I joined a group a few days ago and a player was talking about builds and mentioned that you can only do a maximum of 5 actions per second. “Hold on…” I thought, as I know undoubtedly my Frenzy build attacks way faster than that. So fast, in fact, that the animation starts to stall out and it doesn’t sync with all the numbers flying around the screen. My character, I would estimate, does 12+ attacks per second based on the scrolling numbers as I rail on a boss.
One important component to this is I have one of the new soul shards that guarantees crits on anyone who is frozen. This is amazing for a Rimeheart build with Frenzy perpetually stunlocking them. What’s better, there’s a 3rd tier bonus that I gain a 50% attack speed increase for 5 seconds if I can crit fast enough to keep it up, which is never an issue. However, if for some reason I’m seeing this wrong and the IAS thing isn’t giving me more because I’m capped, I could trade it for 20% increased cold damage.
Do I need to drop this or is everything working the way I hope it is?
Your sheet attack speed is capped at 5 APS (you can verify this for yourself using Vyr’s Archon at high stack counts or Pain Enhancer in a gigantic pull).
However, skill-specific attack speed modifiers allow you to exceed this cap for specific skills. Frenzy is a good example of this. Basically your global attack speed is capped at 5 APS but you can exceed that for specific skills. There’s a number of items with skill-specific attack speed multipliers (e.g. Oathkeeper) that can exceed the 5 APS cap for that skill, and sometimes the skills themselves will have skill-specific attack speed multipliers too that can exceed the cap for that skill (e.g. the per stack attack speed on Frenzy).
So, in summary, until my sheet attacks per second reaches 5.0, i can keep stacking IAS and not worry about it? Even if my Frenzy skill attack speed is off the charts?
Someone also mentioned something about frames of animation, will that affect me?
Yes. There will be breakpoints. The animation can only occur over a discrete number of frames. The D3 engine runs at 60 frames (regardless of the framerate on your monitor). You can’t have animations over partial frames, e.g. you can’t have 5.5 frame attack, it’s either 6 frames or 5 frames. So sometimes if you are at 6 frames and add some attack speed, it won’t be enough to get you down to 5 frames, so you’ll stay at 6 frames and the extra bit of attack speed did nothing. That’s the idea of breakpoints, there’s certain thresholds you want to hit to bump you up to the next fastest animation framelength, and adding attack speed between those breakpoints doesn’t do anything unless it puts you over the next one.
You can play around in d3planner (https://d3.maxroll.gg/d3planner), import your character and go to the skills tab, there’s a spot where it shows you the breakpoints there. It’ll show you what breakpoint you are at, and if you mouse over it’ll show you the full table. And you are able to tweak your gear, rolls etc. in d3planner so you might find it helpful to make changes there and see how that affects your frenzy speed.
Someone should mention Rimeheart is useless. It doesn’t make you freeze more and the legendary power, all that does is tickle the enemy. It doesn’t benefit from anything besides multipliers that directly change the damage of your character, not a certain skill. So in your case, it only has a multiplier of the 2 piece of savages or your legendary gems. You’d literally be wasting space with a Rimeheart.
If you’re playing a cold variant of H90/Frenzy, then you should consider Azurewrath to go with your Oathkeeper because it rolls with 15-20% cold damage. If using Physical, use a Doombringer as it rolls with 15-20% physical damage. As you’re getting the effect of all the Frenzy runes from The Undisputed Champion, it doesn’t matter which element you pick, just so long as you keep the same element on off-hand / bracers / amulet, so you can get up to 60% on that element.
For fire variant I’d go for The Burning Axe of Sankis for the 30% periodic damage mitigation and up to 20% extra fire damage.
edit:
Azurewrath has the extra benefit over other options that it has up to 25% chance to freeze enemies, thus proccing the 2 piece bonus of H90 of double damage.