DPS vs Damage - a detailed comparison

[JaytB]

Introduction

In this topic, I’d like to shed some light on the DPS vs Damage (Dmg) mechanics. For this, I went out to find the highest DPS build and compared it to the highest Dmg build, in terms of skill Dmg.

I hope this will help understand some people what stats to focus on when making a Sorcerer. I’m looking at it from a PvE perspective in this discussion.

Personally, I believe sorcerers are made to deal as much damage as possible. As a farmer, I want to be able to kill as quick as I can. An effectively equipped sorcerer can help farming times go down by a lot.

Personally, I’m using 4 Dmg skills (no heal) in my purely PvE based build. Dmg Skills mostly have a decent range to them, allowing you to nuke from afar. I use the auto attack button only when all 4 of my skills are on cooldown, which isn’t a lot of times given to low cooldown of most dmg skills.

So, in order to deal the maximum amount of Damage, I would have to max out my skill Damage and not my auto attack Damage.


What’s DPS

First off, let’s start with what DPS actually means.

I’m sure everyone knows it stands for Damage Per Second. But what some of you might not know is that DPS is actually a really simple calculation, as in Weapon Damage divided by Weapon speed (DPS=DMG/Weapon Speed). A slow weapon could have a weapon speed of 1.2x, meaning it will fire every 1.2 seconds, while a fast weapon could have a weapon speed of 0.5x seconds, meaning it could be fired 2 times a second.

So, as you can deduct from the calculation, a weapon with a higher speed (lower multiplier) shows more DPS because it can be fired quicker. DPS has nothing to do with your skill Dmg, it only refers to your auto attack button. It basically describes the possible Damage per second you can do on an enemy without armor, using your auto attack button. So basically, fast weapons with low Dmg output could show a high DPS number as compared to slow weapons with high Dmg output.

If the mechanics are similar as in the other STS games, real Dmg dealt is depending on the enemies’ armor. Let’s say that you’d deal 1000 Dmg on an enemy with 200 armor… This would mean the actual Dmg you dealt would be less than 1000, depending on how much enemies’ armor is taken into account. In PL for example, it can simply be calculated as follows: Real DMG = Dmg dealt – Enemies’ armor. Or, for the example above, real Dmg = 1000 – 200 = 800 real Dmg dealt.

Why is this important?
The more Dmg you’d deal, the less influence armor will have on your actual Dmg dealt.


tl;dr? Here’s the summary…

• DPS=Dmg/weapon speed and refers to your auto attack dmg.
• Higher speed weapons, in general, will give you a higher DPS but lower Dmg value.
• Skill Damage is more important than Auto attack DMG for a high DMG output mage.

Give me the numbers

Let’s take a look at the highest (as far as I could find out) DPS vs the Highest Dmg (Damage) build.


The High DPS build




Let’s check out the the skill dmg…

Fireball: 245-306 Damage



Lightning Strike: 376-470 Damage



Gale Force: 245-306 Damage



Frost Bolt: 327-408 Damage



Time Shift: 327-408 Damage



And just for comparison purposes…

Life Giver: Heals 653-817 Damage




The High Damage Build



As you can see in the picture above, this build adds a nice amount of Damage while keeping your INT more or less the same. This to show that the only thing changed is the Damage value while keeping your INT value roughly the same. Notice the poor DPS performance? Does that mean this build does less Dmg?

In order to find out, let’s take a look at the skill Dmg output.

Fireball: 273-342 Damage (+28 minimum, and +36 maximum skill Dmg)



Lightning Strike: 419-524 Damage (+43 min, +54 max Dmg)



Gale force: 273-342 Damage (+28 min, +36 max Dmg)



Frost Bolt: 364-456 Damage (+37 min, +48 max Dmg)



Time Shift: 364-456 Damage (+37 min, +48 max Dmg)



Lifegiver: Heals 729-911 Dmg (+76 min, +94 max Dmg heal)




Conclusion

Given you attack mostly with your skills as a pure Damage mage, it should be clear that skill damage is more important as compared to auto-attack Dmg. And when comparing skill damage for a high DPS build vs a High Dmg build, it’s clear that the high Dmg build is vastly superior, in therms of dealing damage, as compared to the high DPS build.

So, next time when someone tells you ‘your DPS sucks’, you might want to point them to this topic


As always, leave your constructive feedback below