Damage Per Second (DPS) Calculator

1. Damage Per Second Formula
2. DPS with reload vs. pure DPS
3. How to calculate DPS?
4. Game Examples

    Damage Per Second Formula

The most generic damage per second formula is: single shot damage * shots per second = damage per second and it can be applied to many different situations. However, games nowadays are much more complex, and weapons will often have various modifiers attached to them and the complexity of our damage calculator reflects that. The most common ones are critical damage, usually trigger on a given percentage of the shots (critical chance) using an RNG or PRNG.

Less common, but still widely encountered are elemental effect modifiers which work similarly to critical chance, but there are some differences. In most games elemental damage is not percent of base damage, but an additional source of damage, unlike critical dmg which is, most of the time, expressed as a multiplier of the base damage. Also, elemental effects can hit certain enemies harder, while doing close to nothing to others, depending on elemental resistances.

On top of the above, weapons usually don't have a fixed damage per shot, but a damage range, say 42-46 means that the weapon can deal any amount of damage between these numbers. Whether normal distribution or uniform distribution or some other distribution is used to determine the probability depends on each particular instance, so in our calculator we just give you a range as an output.

Incorporating all of these complications into a formula would make it quite long, and we have not yet reached the biggest complication - reloads.

    DPS with reload vs. pure DPS

Calculating DPS is easy when you don't care for reloading, but in most games you should care, as the magazine size and reload speed can make a huge difference when DPS needs to be sustained over prolonged periods of time, such as when fighting a really tough enemy or a boss fight.

In our DPS calculator we give you the option to enter magazine size and reload time and we calculate your DPS over a 30 second period, thus giving you a better idea of your sustained damage per second than simpler calculations. The larger the magazine, the longer you can fire without reloading, while the faster the reload speed, the less time you lose each time you reload.

Of course, it is the combination of the two that finally matters. A weapon with a short clip, but a very fast reload time due to easier handling might be preferable to a weapon with a large magazine of say, 60 bullets, that takes 3-4 seconds to reload.

    How to calculate DPS?

Weapon example: base damage is 35, the rate of fire is 4 shots per second, so DPS is 35x4 = 140 damage per second. Adding reload time and magazine size complicates things significantly, hence the present calculator.

Spell example: base damage is 100, rate of fire is 1 spell per second, "clip size" is 1, you have 10 second cooldown time, so that's 10 second "reload time". Over 30 seconds the spell average DPS would be 10.

    Game Examples

DPS calculations are useful in many games: Overwatch, CS:GO, Path of Exile (PoE), Dota 2. Note that instead of weapons you can use the calculator the see spell DPS, where the reload time would be the recharge time of the spell and the magazine would be 1.