PoE 2: Skill Speed Explained

Skill Speed is a stat that alters the time taken for a Skill's animation to complete in Path of Exile 2.

Note for Path of Exile 1 players:

Skill Speed is not Action Speed in Path of Exile 2. Action Speed exists as a stat, but is significantly rarer.

What is Skill Speed?

Skill Speed is a generic stat that changes the amount of time needed to perform a Skill's animation. Modifiers that increase Skill Speed, such as Acceleration, will shorten the time required to complete a Skill animation.

Important note: Skill Speed is not to be confused with Action Speed, as these stats are calculated differently. See below for more information.

Skill Speed Application

Modifiers to Skill Speed are generic and affect any Skill. The Skill Speed stat is additive with any specific modifiers to particular types of Skills. For example, if you had Practiced Signs providing '6% increased Cast Speed' and Flow State providing '5% increased Skill Speed', you'd have a total '11% increased Cast Speed' for your Spell usage.

Some examples of Skill-specific speed stats include Warcry Speed, Attack Speed, Reload Speed and Totem Placement Speed. Modifiers to Skill Speed are always additive with these stats to form a total Skill Speed multiplier.

Calculating Skill Speed

The sum of all applicable modifiers to a Skill's execution speed can be used to calculate the final time needed to use a Skill. To do this, you'll need to convert a Skill's base speed into uses per second. For example, a Skill with a 1.2 second base use speed has 0.833 uses per second (1 / 1.2).

This can then be factored into the equation below to calculate the final uses per second, where UPS is a Skill's uses per second, and MSS is the total modifier to Skill Speed.

Final Uses Per Second = UPS * ( 1 + MSS% )

For example if you're using a Dreaming Quarterstaff with a base 1.5 Attacks per second and you have 30% total increased Skill Speed, you can use Siphoning Strike 1.95 times per second (1.5 * 1.3) for a final use time of 0.51 seconds (1 / 1.95).

Note: Skills with added total animation time, such as Rolling Slam, can only have their base use speed modified. The added animation time cannot be modified in any way, and therefore this fixed added time must be added to the final use time of the Skill to calculate how long an animation will be.

Server Limitations

Skill which do not require channelling can only be performed a single time per server frame (once every 0.033 seconds). If your final use time is less than 0.033 seconds for a Skill, you'll effectively lose DPS due to missing frames, even though this loss will not be accounted for in the Skill's tooltip information.

This means that you're able to perform a total 30.3 actions per second that will be fully accounted for.