How DPS Is Calculated, and Why Your Biggest Number Is Often Wrong
DPS looks like one number. It is really four numbers multiplied together, and the reason your highest-damage weapon loses to a lower one is almost always hiding in the parts the tooltip does not show.
By Rohit Sharma, Founder, SEOShouts
Damage per second is the single most argued-about number in games with combat, and most of the arguments come from comparing the wrong figure. The number a weapon shows on its tooltip is rarely the number it does in a fight. Understanding the gap is what separates a build that reads well on paper from one that actually performs.
The base formula
DPS = hit damage x attacks per second
A weapon hitting for 200 twice a second does 400 DPS before anything else is applied.
That is the honest floor. Everything interesting happens when you layer critical hits and modifiers on top, because those do not add to the total, they multiply it.
Crit multiplies, it does not add
effective DPS = base DPS x (1 + crit chance x (crit multiplier - 1))
crit chance is a decimal (0.25 for 25%); crit multiplier is the damage on a crit (2.0 for double).
Take 400 base DPS, 25% crit chance, and a 2x crit multiplier. The crit term is 0.25 x (2.0 - 1) = 0.25, so effective DPS is 400 x 1.25 = 500. The reason this matters: crit chance and crit damage multiply each other. Stacking one without the other wastes both, which is why a stat that looks small in isolation can be the best upgrade you can make.
| Build | Crit chance | Crit multiplier | Effective DPS (400 base) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Balanced | 25% | 2.0x | 500 |
| All chance | 50% | 2.0x | 600 |
| All damage | 25% | 3.0x | 600 |
| Both scaled | 50% | 3.0x | 800 |
The bottom row is not the sum of the two middle rows, it is their product. That multiplicative interaction is the whole reason crit builds spike so hard once both stats are high, and feel weak until then.
Tooltip DPS versus real DPS
Tooltip DPS assumes you are attacking every single second with no interruptions. Real fights are full of gaps: reloads, animation lock, cooldowns, moving out of a boss attack, waiting for a resource to regenerate. The fraction of time you are actually dealing damage is your uptime, and it scales the whole number.
real DPS = effective DPS x uptime
uptime is the share of the fight spent actually attacking, from 0 to 1.
An 800-DPS burst build that can only attack 60% of the time does 480 real DPS. A steady 550-DPS build with 95% uptime does 522. The lower tooltip wins the fight. This is the single most common mistake in build comparison: ranking weapons by their peak number instead of their sustained number.
Burst versus sustained
The right number depends on the fight. Against a boss with a short damage window, burst DPS during that window is what counts and uptime matters less. Against a long endurance fight or trash clearing, sustained DPS wins. A build is not simply good or bad, it is good or bad for a fight shape, which is why speedrun and endgame loadouts often look nothing alike.
- Start from base DPS: hit damage times attack speed.
- Apply crit as a multiplier, remembering chance and damage scale each other.
- Layer other percentage buffs (they usually multiply too, so order rarely matters).
- Multiply by realistic uptime for the fight you actually run.
- Compare the final sustained number, not the tooltip.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my higher-damage weapon do less DPS?
Almost always attack speed or uptime. A weapon with a huge per-hit number but a slow swing, long reload, or heavy animation lock spends less of the fight actually dealing damage, so its sustained DPS falls below a faster, steadier weapon.
Should I stack crit chance or crit damage?
Both, roughly in balance, because they multiply each other. A common rule of thumb is to keep crit damage around twice your crit chance, but the real answer is whichever your current stats make scarcer, since the multiplicative term rewards the lagging one.
Is cooldown reduction really a DPS stat?
Yes, whenever your damage comes from abilities rather than auto-attacks. Reducing cooldowns raises how often your biggest hits land, which raises uptime and therefore real DPS, even though it never shows up in the damage-per-hit number.
Calculators from this guide
About the author
Rohit Sharma is the founder of SEOShouts, a search consultancy in India, and has worked in technical SEO and content strategy since 2014. He builds and maintains Calcshark.