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On my healer commando, I obtained some mods to increase my Alacrity. I understand that it increases the speed at which abilities are casted, but what exactly does that mean.

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An example of a casted ability is Mortar Volley for the Trooper (Death from Above for the Bounty Hunter). Without any Alacrity, that move takes 3 seconds to complete. With 5% Alacrity, it will take 2.85 seconds ((1 - 0.05) * 3).

Since the 3.0 patch, Alacrity affects virtually everything: Cooldowns (internal timers, the Global Cooldown (GCD), and ability cooldowns), cast and channel times, tick speed of channels and Damage over Time (DoT) abilities, etc. As such, 1% Alacrity is essentially a 1% increase in Damage or Heals Done per Second (DPS/HPS). This is a bit simplified, since using Alacrity means giving up other stats you could use instead, but overall Alacrity is now very useful.

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  • After experimenting a bit myself, i cant really agree that 1% alacrity is 1% more DPS... if you are not a healer or casting DPS (usually ranged) then alacrity is not very useful compared to other stats. Alacrity also has a diminishing return, so trying to stack it to make your DoTs tick faster or getting a lot of seconds off a cooldown wont be possible without gimping yourself on other stats. Also worth mentioning, not all abilities get a reduced cooldown from alacrity, the general stunbreak that every class has is not reduced, neither is cloak on sith assassin or operatives.
    – Vahx
    Commented Jan 2, 2015 at 15:37
  • @Vahx Alacrity reduces time across the board; 3 GCDs will be shortened the same amount that a 4.5s channel will be, so it doesn't differ in that regard. Every stat except Power has a DR, but Alacrity has the shallowest curve of any other stat -- Surge's curve is far worse. It is affected by downtime in fights and some bugs, but generally speaking it's quite good. See this Reddit post for hard numbers.
    – Matthew Read
    Commented Jan 2, 2015 at 17:54
  • @Sergii Edits are not for changing what an answer says. They are for spelling and grammar mistakes, and updating for clarity. If an answer is wrong, you downvote it and/or leave a comment; you don't edit it to what you think is right. To that end, I have rolled back your edit.
    – Frank
    Commented Aug 28, 2017 at 11:51
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No, that is not how that works.

If it did, that would mean 100% alacrity turns your GCD and other Cooldowns into thin air. You would be a god capable of killing anything instantly.. because for all the game cares you could unleash a billion attacks in a millisecond.

Alacrity increases the speed at which you operate. It doesn't Multiply, it devides.

That means a 3sec ability would not be done 5% faster flat out, but rather be done at 105% of normal operating speed. Thus turn the ability into 3/1.05=2.857 seconds.

Doesn't seem like a big deal with these small cooldowns, but once you apply it to a 3 minute one you'll see there is quite a difference between the 2 manners of calculating it. And I assure you mine is the right one.

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  • Except it doens't mean 100% = no cooldown. Your own formula shows that; 100% alacrity would mean 3/(1+1) = 1.5 seconds. It makes it twice as fast, not eliminates it entirely.
    – Frank
    Commented Aug 27, 2017 at 13:34

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