I've been looking for days and I can't find a resource that tells me the yards / frame speed of projectile attacks. I know Cluster Arrow's impact is nearly instantaneous which is one of its overlooked advantages, in my opinion, but I'm curious about just how fast it's traveling vs other skills. I think there might be a difference in Evasive Fire, Hungering Arrow and maybe even Entangling Shot. If someone could get their aps fast enough could one actually get off 3 Cluster Arrow impacts in the same time it takes 2 Entangling Shots to hit?

It must exist somewhere on the Internet, right? Please help me find this work on the web. If it's not there, then it sounds like I have a weekend project. Thanks!

Edit: I posted the results of my test below. Enjoy!

I haven't looked, but I think you have a project.

Okay, I spent the weekend on this project and found some pretty interesting results. I'm thinking I'll include them in a much more extensive post/article on damage focused on DHs. Anyway, here's the table of skills for the Demon Hunter projectile attacks:


Sorry for the picture, but I don't know how to post tables on these forums. Any help on that would be appreciated.

By far, but the most surprising result is that the Normal attack (no skill) is the fastest attack the DH has. Wow. I don't trust my Multishot results, so I believe Cluster Arrow is the fastest skill.

2-handed crossbow bolts, in my rough testing, appear to travel markedly slower than their 1H Xbow counterparts. The speed of the projectile is not reliant on attack speed. The 2H crossbow results in the table were fired with 7% IAS (forgot to remove a ring). I repeated all the 2H crossbow results with 37% IAS and had exactly the same Y/f.

The Hungering Arrow pierce results were strange. I recorded four occurrences where my Hungering Arrow pierced a monster. Two were at melee distance which went 8 and 9 frames past the monster before turning around. I shot another monster at the very edge of the effective range of a Hungering Arrow and it took only 4 frames for it to reverse course. Finally, I fired off to the side of one monster and after it turned 90 degrees to hit the monster, it pierced and took 13 frames to reverse course. My best guess on the 4-frame return was caused by the arrow reaching its maximum range and it "bounced back" quickly. It takes quite a bit of effort to collect the data so I'm happy so far with just knowing that the pierce return distance is variable.

Hungering Arrow interesting fact:
A Hungering Arrow that pierces gives the DH a stealth buff to attack speed. We'll say that a pierced arrow will return in about the same time it takes an arrow fired at a target 25 yards away. Given that there's a delay while you fire off a second arrow, a pierced arrow will usually begin its return before the 2nd arrow is even fired. That means, essentially, a pierced arrow is effectively adding and average of at least 35% IAS (35% chance to pierce), assuming the monster has to be hit a second time. Puncturing Arrow gives your Hungering Arrows a 50% chance to pierce.

I realized I've already been naturally taking this into account in my playstyle. When a monster is partically down on HP, I will generally shift to a second target before my last arrow has actually hit the monster in question. I haven't worked out the numbers until now, but they agree with my intuition. About 46% of the time, I'll land a critical hit which will kill most wounded monsters. The 54% of the time it doesn't crit, there's a 50% chance (Puncturing arrow) that it will pierce and hit them a second time so there's about a 73% chance that arrow will kill the monster in question.

Agreed. Very useful!

I combined ideas from two different studies, but Mwille over at Diablo IncGamers did a study regarding a way to measure yards. You can read about it here:
Diablo 3 Art of Distance
The biggest magic find study on Diablo 3 said their research was done with Fraps. They found that the first item to drop from an Elite is Blue or Yellow, 2nd and 3rd items to drop from an Elite will be White or blue, a 4th item drops half the time and will be either Yellow or Blue and a NV rare drops 5th. the items drop in that order every single time and they were able to track it by doing a frame-by-frame analysis with Fraps. So I combined the two ideas.



From there it was play, pause and advance one frame at a time. Do that at least twice for each entry in the table above. I did it three times if the two trials didn't agree. Nothing all that scientific, but the numbers are close enough to match my personal experience during actual game play. Cluster Arrow hits almost instantaneously and Hungering Arrow takes a while to get there.

It took around 4-6 hours to do everything from learning how to use Fraps to compiling my final results, but it was worth it. It's been bugging me for weeks and I'm relieved I wasn't going crazy thinking all of my arrows were traveling at different speeds. I only figured out a way to measure it last week and had to wait until the weekend to find the time to do the actual work.

One more fun fact, only Hungering Arrow casts a shadow.

@ecocd Thanks for all the information. Very interesting material.

@ecocd Thanks, that is a lot of info. Thanks for the details.

@ecocd I upvoted all of your posts here because six hours of work totally deserves three upvotes. Good work.