So I joined like a week before the UI update, and now we have health bars. Health bars will now tell us wether or not we kill something just barely or overkill something. It can tell us if a low damage bonus leads to a monster's death with one entire less attack.

I am sort of theorycrafting (minus testing or math) as to which is better. Or really, I am just proposing a hypothesis.

From the advice I have been given, it has been a biased "oh damage bonus damage damage". Well, nobody who has given me advice has done tests for a comparison to attack speed increase.

I have my gear planned out, damage bonus vs. attack speed is irrelevant for my gear because going for one or the other intentionally means reaching past maximum. In other words, I am just theorycrafting and this will likely only affect those that don't come close to the maximum for either.

This game works in a way that killing a monster can be a matter of a few hits. Sometimes 3, sometimes 7, whatever. The point is that the amount of hits is small. The only exception is bosses.

Someone sitting and facing a wall attacking as much as they can for one minute to get a number will not work. We aren't fighting training dummies, but rather enemies that die quick.

It's now different for every person. If it takes my alchemer four hits to kill a mender, but the first three hits bring it to like 1% health (something that only now we can know), then a low damage bonus might be what pushes my alchemer over the edge to kill that mender in three hits.

What else does that mean? Well..... damage bonus past low will be unecessary, as it will likely remain a three hit kill wether or not I have an additional medium damage bonus. This means that damage bonus can theoretically be useless at a certain point in certain scenarios (albeit very specific, it could possibly be taken into account).

Attack speed? always useful. Even if it takes 3 hits to kill something regardless of how much I increase my ASI, my ASI will always make me shoot faster and, therefore, kill the enemy faster. However, it will never be extremely useful in specific scenarios like the previously mentioned low damage bonus that reduced a whole necessary shot.

That low damage bonus putting me over the edge to kill that mender in three hits rather than four will be so much more useful than any ASI obtainable. 25% less shots means that 25% attack speed increase would be necessary to even it out for DPS against that mender.

Tests according to the wiki suggest that each level of attack speed increase is worth 3.6% to 4%. This means that maximum ASI (around 24%) wouldn't even be as useful as that low damage bonus which pushes me over the edge to kill that mender in 3 hits rather than 4. 25% less shots > 24% faster shooting. theoretically and way different for every scenario.

However, with damage bonus potentially being useless in certain scenarios (that low damage bonus lets me kill the mender in 3 hits rather than 4. But what if, at very high damage, it still takes me three hits to kill it?) this means that it is possible that a low ASI bonus could potentially be better than very high damage bonus in very specific scenarios.

Does what I am saying make any sense? lol. What I am saying is that if we graphed the usefulness of damage bonus and ASI in how it increases DPS on a weapon, the graph for Damage Bonus would be spikier with potentially very huge benefits, but also potentially useless. The graph for DPS increased by ASI would gradually increase always, but it would never be significant (however, always reliable).

On bosses, however, everything would be useful, so target dummy tests would work. Bosses aren't a matter of 3 vs. 4 hits.