I set out to test how quickly the attack speed stacks decay on Vow of Zealous Fury and Stolen Edge of Arcvynorr. There are several threads on this and other stacks, but it seems that there has been no attempt to do systematic testing. Below is a summary of my results.
TL;DR Vow of Zealous Fury (VoZF) and Stolen Edge of Arcvynorr (SEaA) stacks seems to both last until death. Vow of Vengeance attack damage stacks appear to last somewhere between 5-10 seconds. Legendaries with a secondary stat of increased attack speed (like Vow of Vengeance (VoV) and Heliophagic Goggles (HG)) are bugged and do not increase attack speed (at least on some characters under some circumstances, like Attikus). Gearbox: PLEASE add a display of the number of active stacks. This would make this type of empirical testing much easier.
Now to the longer explanation. I am a cognitive scientist by trade and I do research on speeded responses, so I thought I would try to test the mechanics of legendaries that increase attack speed via stacks. And as an Attikus main, I often try to stack attack speed with 1 or more legendaries (like VoZF, SEoA, and even VoV for the secondary stat). So here’s a rundown of my procedure and my in depth results:
Methods:
All tests were done in private story mode with max roll gear. In order to acquire sufficient data per sample, I timed the duration of unloading a large amount of attacks (15 total clips for Oscar Mike and 100 total punches for Attikus) across 2+ tests and then averaged the full duration of each test to get the average values presented below. In general, the base values (i.e., no gear) that I found corresponded to the values in the Battleborn Bible (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18T8VNgX6iNLhPq30lj7dXppVjzoNcc6fTD6KTwXGDWo/edit#gid=1832219597), but I will mention 1 divergence. The bigger problems/bugs only occur with certain attack speed gear (see Attikus details below). And because I only tested two characters (OM & Attikus), any of these results could be idiosyncratic to these 1 or 2 characters or could generalize to all 29 Battleborn. As you’ll see, I did a more extensive set of tests on Attikus to try to pinpoint when the attack speed increases are bugged.
Oscar Mike Results:
Each result shows the total time to fire 15 clips or ammo and then the % increase in attack speed inside the subsequent parentheses. All tested attack speed buffs behave appropriately on Oscar Mike.
-No gear = 71 seconds (0%)
-VoZF + VoV with no stacks = 65.5 seconds (14%)
-VoZF + VoV immediately after completing 5 skills = 62.5 seconds (23%)
-VoZF + VoV several minutes after completing the last of 5 skills = 62.5 seconds (23%)
-SEoA + VoV several minutes after the most recent critical hit= 62.5 seconds (23%)
-With no gear, each clip takes 3 seconds to expend, which matches the Battleborn bible numberes exactly. Therefore, the 14 reloads take 26 seconds total, or ~1.86 seconds per reload (which is .41s longer than 1.45 seconds presented in the Battleborn bible).
-If you remove the 26 seconds of reload time, attack speed increases on Oscar Mike function appropriately (e.g., VoZF full stacks + VoV should increase attack speed to 1.168*1.0504=1.227 aka a 22.7% increase which is ~= 23%) and seemingly last forever.
Attikus Results:
Attikus total time to complete 100 punches (after the % attack speed increase for each test I state whether this result suggests that the item is functioning correctly or is bugged):
No Gear: 50 seconds (0%, correct)
SEoA with no stacks: 46.2 seconds (8.2%, correct)
SEoA with full stacks several minutes after the most recent critical hit: 42.9 seconds (16.5%, correct)
SEoA with full stacks + VoV: 42.9 seconds (16.5%, bugged)
VoV: 49.75 seconds (.5%, bugged)
VoV + Attikus’ level 7 helix increasing attack speed by 20%: 39.75 seconds (25.8%, correct)
HG: 49.75 seconds (.5%, bugged)
HG + VoV: 46 seconds (8.7%, bugged but not as far off as others)
HG + VoV + Attikus’ level 7 helix increasing attack speed by 20%: 39.75 seconds (25.8%, bugged)
Other isolated notes: VoV attack damage stacks seem to last only about 5-10 seconds. Oath of the sustained’s secondary damage increase works appropriately.
Conclusions:
On Oscar Mike, the limited number of tests that I tried produced the expected, correct results.
On Attikus, the more extensive set of tests produced some problematic/bugged results. Vow of Vengeance and Heliophagic Goggles produced little or no increase in attack speed compared to having no gear (the .25 second difference from between VoV or HG and no gear may have just been measurement error). Either item should have reduced the total time of 100 punches to 47.6 seconds. There was also no speed up of attack speed when adding HG to VoV + Attikus’ level 7 AS helix or adding VoV to SEoA with full stacks. However, as seen above, some of Attikus’ results were correct and behaved appropriately (e.g., SEoA alone).
I would be very interested to get feedback on these tests from Gearbox. @Jythri @JoeKGBX I’d also like to give a special shoutout to @anthonynicholson, one of the higher-ups at Gearbox. We played together for a couple hours on Xbox 2 weeks ago and he was super thoughtful, open, and helpful. Seeing his dedication to making Battleborn great was part of why I decided to try to do my part to improve the game by running these tests. I hope that these tests will help Gearbox identify the incorrect code underlying these problems/bugs for Attikus (and perhaps other Battleborn that I did not test) when using certain attack speed gear.
