Rate of fire? Overall attack speed? HUH? - A deep dive into CoH3s weapon firing cycles
Hi, I'm the new cohstats girl that's constantly changing the site lately. I've come to explain rate of fire and all its chaos for those insane enough to survive its curse.
Tl;dr:
- A unit's firing cycle is made up of [first shot/followup aim time] [wind up] [burst] [wind down] [cooldown/reload]
- "+Rate of fire" modifies only cooldown/reload.
- "attack speed" modifies aim time (not the first shot one), wind up, wind down, cooldown and reload.
- Attack speed is sometimes called attack speed, sometimes called rate of fire to make everything confusing.
- Because of all this, “+50% rate of fire” can mean anything from “barely noticeable” to “nearly double DPS.”
A unit's firing cycle
[ready aim time/fire aim time] [wind up] [shooting/burst] [wind down] [cooldown/reload]
[Aim time]
The game uses the terms "ready aim time" and "fire aim time". Ready aim time is the first shot on a model, it is a static range and not affected by any modifiers or distance.
Fire aim time is for any subsequent shots. Any interruptions during any part of the unit shooting, like the model dying will reset it back to ready aim time.
Fire aim time, like ready aim time is a range, but unlike that it can also change based on distance.
(sometimes fire aim time is longer than ready, at which point it is, in fact, a dps gain to interrupt the unit...)
[Wind Up]
This is static and unchanged by distance. This one is not too common, it's on mortars to load a round into the gun, but a few weapons like flamethrowers or the 17pndr have it too. Small quirk, if the wind up is >0 there is an additional 0.125s/1 tick of wait once its over. (makes the 17pndr shooting look beyond goofy if you slow it down)
[Shooting/burst]
If it's a single shot weapon, this basically acts as a burst of 0.125s length. It cannot be shorter than that and will always take 1 tick minimum. Burst weapons, this is just their burst duration, which is a range and can change by distance.
[Wind down]
This is incredibly common and on most guns. It can represent anything from cycling the bolt, ducking after an at gun shot, tanks barrel recoiling, etc. Also static and unchanged by range.
[+1 tick/0.125s]
Just a static tick that is unchanged by anything. Generally not super relevant, documentation says this is the unit requesting firing, but for some reason it happens inbetween wind down and cooldown/reload.
[Cooldown/Reload]
These can both be ranges and both can change based on distance, but reload is usually set to be the same regardless of how far the enemy is.
Reload timing is based on the number of cooldown cycles, not directly on the number of bullets fired. When a reload happens, it replaces cooldown in the full cycle rather than being added after it. So on some units, like FSJ, who have a shorter reload than their cooldown, when you see them reloading it's a dps gain. Weird stuff.
[Extra tick elaboration]
The game runs on 8 ticks a second, most things only happen on ticks, so if you reduce your cooldown, but it's not enough to reach the next tick, it'd do nothing. Of course most durations are long enough for this not to matter, but there are exceptions.
Case in point, the Crusader AA: It has 0 aim, wind up, wind down and 0.25s cooldown. This would give it a theoretical 4 shots a second, but because of the 1 tick wait and the 1 tick duration of shooting, it's 0.5s, 2 per second. Of course this is how it's balanced, but it is good to know when mathing!
Because of the short cooldown of 0.25s, it also means that its veterancy +20% rate of fire actually doesn't impact the time between shots at all. It only reduces cooldown to 0.2s, not enough to save a tick! It still affects its reload as normal though.
+Rate of Fire/Overall Attack Speed
There are two of them and naming gets weird, but let's go
[+Rate of Fire]
This is the old modifier, and this only affects cooldown and reload. +25% rate of fire means -25% cooldown and reload. How much this does can vary a lot depending on the unit (some examples later), how long it spends cooling down and reloading vs how much its winding up/down, aiming or bursting.
It's solid on tank guns, which generally have a short 0-0.125s aim and 0.875s wind down. So a HCat that has a refire time of 6.5s, spends 5.375s of it actually reloading.
Rule of thumb: Tank guns, at guns, etc., reliably good increase. Anything else? Complete gamble.
[Overall Attack Speed]
This is the new modifier introduced in 2.2. This one modifies fire aim time (not ready), wind up, wind down, cooldown AND reload. So nearly the whole firing cycle.
Sadly because Relic hates me, this one is ALSO often called +rate of fire, to make things confusing. Generally any unit reworked or added since 2.2 should use this instead of the old one (like generalist medium tanks got reworked and now use attack speed). Except then they add stuff like the siege camp. which uses the old one for some reason, and therefore is ineffective on the nebelwerfer because it has 0 cooldown and reload (instead its rate of fire is entirely wind up/wind down).
Also another caveat, it does not affect burst duration. It'll reduce the time between bursts, but the more time a unit already spends bursting, the less effective this becomes. Particularly Machine Guns tend to shoot for a long time with shorter breaks, meaning even +50% attack speed only represents like +17% dps for a vickers.
Yes, this also works like rate of fire by -those durations, so +50% attack speed will halve the time inbetween shots/bursts (though it still doesn't affect the static 1 tick waits, so a tiny bit less). Representing more like +100% dps.
Same Wording, wildly different Results
Example A: Old Rate of Fire can often just not matter, here is Gurkhas Veterancy (+25% and +15% rate of fire)
(here with a hypothetical +20% and +15% attack speed, they love to take 5% off)
Example B: Burst weapons scale poorly even with attack speed.
Examples C: Buffs that were changed
War Cry was changed from +50% rate of fire to +50% attack speed, here is what that actually means
Tommies Old rate of fire vet (+15% +15%) vs their new one (+10%, +15%, but it's attack speed), i am leaving out accuracy and whatnot from the graph to keep it clean, but feel free to play around with that stuff on cohstats.
Bersaglieris new +15% attack speed vs their old +20% rate of fire
There are also weapons where the difference doesn’t matter too much because both modifiers scale well. With 2.4 the semovente was moved from rate of fire to attack speed without even a number reduction. The difference is modest, but still there.
Does this matter?
In a way, no, most players don't really care about how much a buff does and care more about just... it gets stronger. That said, it absolutely affects a players perception and decision making. Putting a nice juicy vengeance on a vickers, to help it wreck a push, only for that to just change so little, is disappointing and just unintuitive. It also just makes the math super messy.
Whether it be what buff to put on a unit, evaluating how worthwhile an upgrade or ability is and just not being able to tell how powerful a buff is before using it, i do think it matters in some ways.
A small plea to relic
A: Having the same name for two very different modifiers is very confusing. Until everything (hopefully) can move to attack speed, having them both be floating around with the same name is just very confusing. I'd propose changing +rate of fire to -cooldown/reload reduction, making it very clear what it does.
B: Burst heavy weapons not benefiting from "rate of fire" is just very unintuitive and makes those scale poorly in an odd way that's not really controlled. I'd suggest having attack speed reduce the burst time (keep the same shots). So that burst weapons scale just as well as single shotters, i.e. 20% attack speed makes everything take 20% less time.
C: Okay this is more of a nitpick, but it still matters. Please don't call a 50% reduction in something +50% speed or +50% rate of fire. If you add 50% speed to a car, it doesn't then take HALF as long. That's +100% speed. Either call it a 50% time reduction, or call it +100% speed/rate of fire. No need to change the actual values, just the text.
D: Could you please let us peer into state trees pretty please? Cohstats is trying, but it just runs into so much stuff that happens in the black magic box that is state trees... I'm just 1 girl doing her best, i beg of thee.
Oh as a final cursed little tidbit, if you made it this far.
Infantry will often play random animations while waiting for cooldown and stuff. These can massively delay their next shot. Doesn't affect team weapons and vehicles.
Have fun! And thanks for reading. Hope someone out there found it worth their while.
Posted Jun 1, 2026, 7:21 PM UTC