I've taken a look at how Attack/Action Speed works in Deadfire, and will list the aggregated info in this thread.
First of all here are the main differences between Beta2 and PoE1:
- weapons' recovery duration (on average) was doubled
- but they now have almost halved attacking duration
- reloading weapons no longer have recovery phase at all
- weapons deal damage right at the end of attacking phase (instead of doing that somewhat in the middle of it)
- in PoE1 we could "abuse" Quick Switch and skip recovery of firearms along with reloading. This is not possible in Deadfire even