it STILL DOES NOT give 20% attack speed
That’s because ‘Attack Speed’ is a made-up fake stat that’s not actually used by the game engine anywhere.
It is instead a calculated stat derived from actual in-game values and displayed to the player purely for convenience.
Since you mentioned Archers, for example, it’s actual attack speed related stats are as follows :
- Aim Time : 0.25 seconds
- Weapon Wind Down : 0.5 seconds
- Reload Time : 0.75 seconds
0.25 + 0.5 + 0.75 = 1.50 seconds + 0.125 seconds(this is now added by the in-game UI since Season 2’s attack speed rework) = 1.625 seconds → Rounded down = 1.62 seconds is displayed.
When a unit is said to “attack [x]% faster”, it’s actually supposed to be calculated as follows : [The time it takes for a unit to attack] / (1 + 0.)
So, if “Attack Speed” was a real stat, the buffed Attack Speed should be 1.50 seconds / 1.20 = 1.25 seconds, but the displayed value doesn’t match that.
Please also understand that “Unit attacks [x]% faster” DOES NOT MEAN the same thing as “Unit’s attack cooldown/reload time decreased by [x]%”. The second sentence should be calculated as : [The time it takes for a unit to attack] * (1 - 0.), which for the Archer’s case, should be 1.50 seconds * 0.80 = 1.20 seconds.
Now, the reason the buffed Archer’s attack speed is displayed as 1.37 seconds is very simple. The attack speed ‘buff’ is actually only applied to the wind_down and reload time. So the actual in-game calculation is as follows : 0.25 + 0.8(0.5 + 0.75) → 1.25(ACTUAL buffed Archer’s delay between attacks) + 0.125(added by UI) = 1.375 seconds → Rounded down = 1.37 seconds(the displayed “attack speed” in the game’s UI)
This is also why “attack speed” buff never applied properly to the Man-at-Arms unit for both England’s Network of Castle effect and Delhi’s Tower of Victory effect. The Man-at-Arms unit’s weapon DOES NOT have a ‘Cooldown’ time nor ‘Reload’ time, it instead only has ‘Wind Up’ and ‘Wind Down’ time, so the devs had to specify that ‘attack speed buff’ for MAAs should be applied as “[wind_down time] * [attack speed multiplier]”. That one specific unit required an entirely different specific modifier for it to actually attack faster.
Wind_up(the time it takes since the attack animation is played) and fire_aim time(the time it takes for a ranged unit to AIM before they begin attack animation) should not be changed currently due to the way units attack in this game engine as both are tied to the unit model’s attack animation. “Attack speed” modifiers currently usually only applies to wind_down(the time it takes since the attack damage is applied before ‘cooldown’ or ‘reload’ takes place), cooldown(the time it takes for a weapon to re-start its attack animation, usually only used by melee units in this game), and reload_time(only used by some ranged and siege weapons).
I hope this helps you understand how this game works better, I had to actually use the Essense Editor/Content Creator to take a look at weapon stats to understand why and how the game displays its ‘attack speed’ values.