Use time

Use time counts how many ticks have to pass after you use something before it can be used again, and a tick is a sixtieth of a second. Lower is faster. Shortswords sit around 10 to 13 and feel instant. The Volcano sits at 40 and feels like a commitment. The tooltip converts the figure into words like very fast, which is fine for a rough read and useless for comparing two weapons inside the same band.

Underneath there are three separate values, and they explain nearly every odd case you will run into.

• useAnimation is the length of one press. This is the figure listed as use time on a weapon's page.
• useTime is the gap between the actual effects. For most items it matches useAnimation, so one press does one thing.
• reuseDelay is a forced pause added after the animation ends, used to rein in weapons that would otherwise fire absurdly fast.

When useTime is smaller than useAnimation, one press produces several uses. That is the entire mechanism behind burst weapons. The Golden Shower animates for 18 ticks and acts every 6, so one click sprays three times. The Clockwork Assault Rifle acts every 4 ticks across a 12 tick animation for its three round burst, then adds a 14 tick delay before the next burst can start.

For tools the split is visible on the page. A pickaxe's tool speed is its useTime, which decides how fast it chews through blocks, while its use time is the swing animation, which decides how fast it deals melee damage. The two are frequently very different numbers on the same pick.

An overhead swing can only damage a given target once per animation, however long the sword spends in the air. Extra reach never turns into extra hits on the same enemy, only into hits on more enemies.

Some projectile swords fire on their useTime rather than their useAnimation, which is why weapons like Starfury, Beam Sword, Chlorophyte Saber and Terra Blade sometimes swing without shooting anything. Only a modifier can move useTime, so melee speed gear will never fix it, and even then the projectile cannot come out twice inside one swing.

A few weapons cap their own output regardless of how the animation is scaled. Nightglow and the Tome of Infinite Wisdom fire four times per press, Eventide five.

Autoswinging items restart their animation one tick before it would end. The game normally compensates by adding a tick during the calculation, but that step happens after melee weapons have already been resolved, so an autoswinging melee weapon is genuinely one tick faster than the number printed on its page.

At a use time of 12 that is a rounding error. At a use time of 4 it is a quarter of the weapon's speed, which is why heavily stacked melee builds get far more out of their last few percent of melee speed than the arithmetic on paper suggests. It is also why the fastest melee setups feel like they cross a threshold rather than improving smoothly.

A speed modifier rescales the raw stats and rounds to the nearest whole tick before anything else runs, and the melee speed step floors its result afterwards. Both of those hurt fast weapons disproportionately. Fifteen percent off a use time of 40 saves six ticks. The same modifier on a use time of 7 saves one, and on a use time of 4 it can save nothing at all.

When you are comparing reforges on an already fast weapon, work in ticks rather than percentages, because the percentage is quietly lying about what you will actually get.

Divide 60 by the use time to get attacks per second. A Megashark at 7 ticks fires about 8.6 times a second, which works out to a little over 500 rounds a minute. Multiply that by damage per shot to compare two weapons honestly, then remember that ammunition cost, piercing behavior and enemy hit cooldowns can all drag the real figure well under the paper one.

Some items ignore use time for their cooldown entirely. Healing items run on their own separate timer no matter how fast the animation is, and flails and boomerangs cannot be thrown again until the projectile is back in your hand.

While either internal counter is still running, the game locks you out of more than most people realize: swapping your held item, changing armor or accessories, dropping the item, quick selling or trashing, switching loadouts, and most interface interaction. The grapple, quick mount, quick buff and both quick recovery keys keep working through all of it, which is the entire reason those hotkeys are worth binding.

On a slow weapon the lockout is long enough to kill you if your plan was to open the inventory and click a healing potion by hand. Bind quick heal before you fight anything that hits for a third of your health.