Damage Per Second, or How I Learned to Love The Buffs

I've done a bit of work with actual skill effectiveness the last couple days - I just posted a table with the results HERE.

What does this data tell us?

The most important thing is that if you want to kill things quickly, you have to learn to embrace buff stacking. Enchantments, Stances, Preparations, and just normal skills all stack with each other, dealing damage simultaneously. With a good Sword, an Conjure, Warrior's Cunning, and Frenzy, you can easily get up to 40+ Damage per Second with just normal attacks - add in something like Power Attack to make things even worse.

Elementalist damage is severely underpowered. Rangers and Warriors can do better burst damage than you outside of two noteworthy cases (Immolate and Lightning Orb) - and they spend just a fraction of the resources to do so. The reasons for this are twofold - first, casting times and energy costs on Elementalist nukes are so high that the benefits of their high damage ratings are nullified, and second, Elementalists can't stack buffs the way that Warriors and Rangers can. Straight up Elementalist attacks are fine compared to Warrior and Ranger shots, but once those other classes start buffing up the Elementalist gets left in the dust.

Which means that if you want to win, don't use Elementalists as your nukers - use Warriors and Rangers who have learned to love the buff.

Peace,
-CxE

Very nice work. The amount of insight this brings to those of us who like to look at the raw numbers is invaluable.

Would it be possible to add a damage/min to Energy Duty ratio for each skill for each profession. If you did your chart in excel this should be a quick modification. That would be really nice when trying to decide on skills when you're trying to be conscience of the energy duty to dmg/min cost or vica versa.

Also is your Energy duty calculated as energy/min? I'm assuming it was due to the large numbers. Might be helpful to label that column though.

Very Nice!

Yeah, Energy Duty is energy per minute. Time Duty is seconds casting per minute. I'll edit that into the note at the bottom. Yes, most Elementalist skills have energy duties higher than your natural regen, so you either need a ton of energy management, or you need to get used to doing burst damage. =)

Damage Per Minute to Energy Duty is actually just skill damage divided by skill cost. All the other terms cancel. So it ends up being a pretty obvious number so I didn't include it - but if people think that the division will be useful, I'll put it in. =)

Peace,
-CxE

The numbers are a bit startling, really. They point to something that's become apparent recently and that's Rangers and Warriors being far superior in terms of damage output to Elementalists.

Here are some quick scratch calculations I made from the table. Everything's against a 60AL target (Chuck, did you use a Str of 12 when calculating the Warrior damages? I suppose you didn't as you'd have to consider the armor of the target a bit more. It doesn't matter as if you didn't it would just make it worse...). But look at how much damage per second Warriors and Rangers can crank out by stacking up just two damage buffs with a skill. Or even with their normal attacks.

Sword War - 18.92
w/Conjure - 28.67
W/Cunning - 32.56
Power Attack - 37.67
W/Conjure - 47.42
w/Cunning - 51.31

Axe War - 19.37
w/Conjure - 29.12
W/Cunning - 33.11
Power Attack - 38.12
W/Conjure - 47.87
w/Cunning - 51.86

Hammer War - 21.6
w/Conjure - 29.03
W/Cunning - 33.48
Power Attack - 35.89
W/Conjure - 43.32
w/Cunning - 47.77

Ranger - 15.07
w/Conjure - 21.67
w/RTW - 29.07
Power Shot - 32.07
w/Conjure - 38.67
w/RTW - 46.07

Elementalist - 12.63
w/Conjure - 20.06

Fire Ele
Flare - 22.29
Fireball - 25.07
Immolate - 48

Air Ele
Lightning Orb - 38.67
Lightning Strike - 30.38

Water Ele
Ice Spear - 16
Shard Storm - 40
Water Trident - 33.14

Earth Ele
Obsidian Flame - 34.18
Stone Daggers - 22.86
Stoning - 43.43


First off, Ice Spear is a joke. That's worse than a wand/conjure for the same amount of skill slots and a lot more energy/time.

Secondly, I think I have to give up my hammer. They get the highest numbers, yeah. But not high enough to really matter. So they can deal an extra 100 damage in a minute, big whoop. For that I have to give up that shield slot where I can get an extra two modifiers that are gong to help me out? To say nothing of the faster swing rate of swords and axes working better with further damage adds such as Order of Pain or Barbs and the like.

But most importantly, the Elementalist numbers are shockingly low. Considering just how much energy and time those Elementalists are putting into pumping out damge they just don't compete with Rangers and Warriors who can stack up their damage buffs. Not even in burst damage where you'd expect Elementalists would be far ahead of the game. What Warriors and Rangers have is sustainability. They can keep going long after an ele has to stop because they've run out of energy. Their damage should be *lower*, then, because they'll make up for it over time.

An Elementalist also gives up a lot in terms of protection, too. They've got a big weakness compared to the more well armorored Rangers and Warriors. That should be because they're more front-loaded. They can go off on a target with a lot of quick, fast, unsustainable damage, taking the chance that they can drop it before it can drop them while the others are more willing to trade blows and win the battle of endurance. That's just not the case with the publically known data (I can't say whether or not the picture is different in the test now, but you'll all get a chance to see in a few weeks or so.) and, honestly, I can't see much of a point to playing as an Elementalist at the moment.

Hmm.. those are interesting points... however, I don't think magical damage should be calculated in the same format as physical damages... they are just not the same way of usage nor play style.

Just a small point Charles, but shouldn't all the normal attacks have a time duty equal to their attack rate, as you can't perform any actions during an attack?

Yes, the time duty for a weapon attack, in Charles's table, would be 60. Or 100%, however you want to calculate it. You only get the DPM by attacking constantly, and you can't do anything else while you're attacking the same way you can't while casting.

This means that the time you take out to buff Warrior's Cunning or Conjure Whatever reduces your DPM a bit and then you start getting into hideously complicated scenarios about just how things play out. Which, since you can probably assume all skill information to be at least slightly innaccurate these days, I'm not going to really get into.

Although it doesn't touch the metric of Chuckles's DPS, that's just Effect/casting.

How would you calculate it, then? Damage isn't all that difficult, regardless of play style or usage. You find a target, you get in range of that target, and you deal damage until they drop or you find a better target. Now, the ways you go about doing that are certainly different. But what Charles points out is the effect, not the methodology. All that matters in the end is the raw numbers. That's what tells you how good something is at dealing damage. And that's the concern here. Elementalists are, of necessity, going to have a different style of doing things because of the way their damage works. So will Rangers compared to Warriors, for that matter. But it doesn't matter how you have to use them to get the most damage out of them, it matters how quickly they can drop that target.

Yes, they should. I'd been kicking around the best way to list those and just giving them a maximum time duty does the trick.

And yes, having to stop to re-do your preparations cuts into your attacking time, which nullifies some of your damage per minute. Read the Wind is actually surprisingly mediocre because of that - you could just fire off another Power Shot or whatever during that time and dealt another 60+ damage, instead of using a buff that gives another 90 damage. It's still a solid damage boost, and the arrow speed is definitely worth it, but you do have to take those casting times into account.

Peace,
-CxE

Unlike the warrior and ranger... the elementalist would spam their spells one after another which are all different but working together (most of these skills stay on battle field as the next one is being casted). While warrior ranger attack skills pretty much work alone with itself in just that instant that are buffed up by other skills.

Warrior and Rangers stack their buffs to increase overall DPS
Elementalist stack their spell damages to increase overall DPS

Now also in terms of AoE, which everyone know...

Just want to confirm that you are taking each skill damage individually and dividing it by its recycle time (includes cast time right?) to get damage/s then multiply by 60s to get the duty cycle @ 1 min?

yeah, I realize its just the energy / dmg. I was just saying you could take Energy duty and Damage duty columns and divide them as long as the duty cycle was the same and the program you used to create the table was similar to Excel.

Anyhow I think it would be useful to have this column in your table because its a quick way to overview a large number of skill's energy:dmg/s or mult by 60 get energy:dmg/min. In particular its just a means of defining a skills efficiency at converting energy to damage or energy to health in the case of monks etc etc. Might be useful when trying to select between two skills of similar energy or damage duty cycles. This way you don't make us do the division in our heads... arrrrrrrg heheh A bit easier/faster for skill analysis, no guessing and no arithmetic mistakes

Just a thought, definitely open for discussion.

Heheh unless you have a good supporting Necromancer on your team whose purpose is to generate energy. Energy regen spikes and no more problems

Again nice spreedsheet.

For skills that are easy to calculate:

Damage per Second = Skill Damage / (Casting Time + .75)
Damage per Minute = Skill Damage * 60 / (Casting Time + Cooldown)
Energy Duty = Energy Cost * 60 / (Casting Time + Cooldown)
Time Duty = (Casting Time + .75) * 60 / (Casting Time + Cooldown)


Er, the /s or /min falls out when you do the division...

Anyway, yeah, it's a useful number and one that I'd like to include at some point. Actually I want to make an article out of all of this and explain things in a bit more detail, and divide things up in a way so that they make more sense (try making all of the Time Duties work in a way that's consistent. It's maddening.) Adding statistics like that are useful, and I'd like to get something like that done at some point for every skill in the game (again with all sorts of unification problems that have to be worked out), but for now that table's up there as a teaser, to get people thinking about how these things work.


Well, you have two classes of skills really - those that buff damage, like Warrior's Cunning/Conjure Element, and those that deal damage, like Power Attack/Immolate. Basically, skills that you stack, and those that you chain. You have to treat each one differently and the distinction is one that I'd like to draw a bit better in the future.

The fact that damage over time and area of effect skills aren't listed (besides fireball) was done on purpose, because they introduce other problems. For example, people rarely stand in a Firestorm, so figuring out how much damage one actually deals is problematic. What's the DPS from Firestorm, including the cast time? As I said, problematic, which is why they aren't included.

Of course, I am saved by the fact that the various storm skills, with the notable exception of Maelstrom, are awful beyond words, so analyzing their DPS and DPE isn't all that useful. Maelstrom you don't use for the damage anyway, but the interrupting - there are probably more Maelstroms cast at level 0 than any other level.

If there's a lesson in this, it's that skills are varied enough that single metrics cannot be applied to all of them.

Peace,
-CxE

Damage per second or DPS is equal to Damage divided by casting time. Not recycle time. It's a measure of burst damage, just how much damage you'll do of that skill per cast. When you're not casting it you're free to do other things and that's where DPM comes in because that's includes the recycle time somewhat by dint of including the overall time. For a skill like Immolate there's a 17.5 Duty Time. That means that over the 60 seconds to get that 840 damage you'll spend 17.5 seconds of it casting and will have 42.5 seconds of down time where you're recharging. That's time you can fill up with other things, including more skills to cast to damage or refreshing your buffs or whatever else.

To get DPM then, you multiply DPS times the Duty Time. Immolate has a DPS of 48. 17.5 times that equals 840.

I know, it's weird. But that's how Chuck's done it so that's what we're discussing.

Well, if you want to look at it that way, Warriors and Rangers also "stack" skills to cause more damage. A Warrior doesn't just stand there and swipe with his sword. He uses Power Attack and Sever Artery and Gash and Galrath and Pure Strike and Final Thrust in rapid succession the same way an Elementalist would use Fire Storm, Fireball, Immolate, Rodgort's Invocation, and Searing Heat in rapid order. But those Warrior skills are attack skills, meaning they add on to weapon damage and anything modifying weapon damage. All the Conjures and Barbs and whatever else just pile on top of that base damage that a Warrior/Ranger doesn't have to spend any energy to get.

It's more accurate to say that damage dealers stack their skills to increase their DPS. And Warriors and Rangers can stack buffs to increase their skills.

But, if you want to look at it in terms of what a character can produce, we'll have to turn from DPS to DPM because we'll need to include strings of skills. So, to calculate how an Elementalist or a Warrior will deal damage over time with a series of skills you need first to determine the amount of time and then what skills you're dealing with. We'll use Chuck's 60 seconds as a starting point. Then, for each source of damage you need to figure out how much of the time it's going to be used during that time, that's the Time Duty. Multiply that times the DPS, add up all the sums and you'll have the amount of damage a character will do during that 60 seconds. Here's some more quick scratchings on how that works out, I've included the energy duty and the amount of damage per energy so we can compare just how efficient a particular character is being :

Sword War - 1135
Time Spent Attacking - 60
Energy Spent - 0
Damage per en - N/A

Sword War w/ Conjure - 1692
Time Spent attacking - 59
Energy Spent - 10
Damage per en - 169

Sword War w/Conjure and Cunning - 1921
Time Spent Attacking - 59
Energy Spent - 25
Damage per en - 77

Sword War w/Conjure and Cunning spamming Power Attack - 2202
Time Spent Attacking - 59 (44 with regular, 15 with Power Attack)
Energy Spent - 81
Damage per en - 27

Sword War w/ Conjure and Cunning spamming Power Attack, Galrath, and Final - 2653
Time Spent Attacking - 59 (15 w/ Power Attack, 8 w/ Galrath, 6 w/ Final, 30 w/ regular)
Energy Spent - 81
Damage per en - 33

Sword War w/ Conjure and Cunning spamming Galrath and Final - 2372
Time Spent Attacking - 59 (8 w/ Galrath, 6 w/ Final, 45 w/ regular)
Energy Spent - 25
Damage per en - 95


Ranger - 904
Time Spent - 60
Energy Spent Attacking - 59
Damage per en - N/A

Ranger w/ Conjure - 1284
Time Spent Attacking - 59
Energy Spent - 10
Damage per en - 128

Ranger w/ Conjure and Read The Wind - 1454
Time Spent Attacking - 50
Energy Spent - 31.4 (variable depending on Exp)
Damage per en - 46.3

Ranger w/ Conjur and Read the Wind spamming Power Shot - 1482
Time Spent Attacking - 50 (15 with Power Shot, 35 with regular)
Energy Spent - 106.4 (variable depedning on Exp)
Damage per en - 14

Elementalist w/ Wand - 758
Time Spent Attacking - 60
Energy Spent - 0
Damage per en - N/A

Elementalist w/ Wand w/ Conjure - 1189
Time Spent Attacking - 59
Energy Spent - 10
Damage per en - 118

Air Elementalist - 1443
Time Spent Attacking - 41 (24 w/ Lighting Orb, 18 w/ Lightning Strike)
Energy Spent - 179
Damage per en - 8

Air Elementalist w/ Wand w/Conjure - 1804
Time Spent Attacking - 59 (41 w/ skills, 18 w/ wand)
Energy Spent - 189
Damage per en - 10

Fire Elementalist - 1869
Time Spent Attacking - 60 (17 w/ Fireball, 17 w/ Immolate, 26 w/ Flare)
Energy Spent - 169
Damage per en - 11

Earth Elementalist - 1566
Time Spent Attacking - 42 (24 w/ Obsidian Flame, 18 w/ Stoning)
Energy Spent - 236
Damage per en - 7

Earth Elementalist w/ wand w/ Conjure - 1907
Time Spent Attacking - 59 (42 w/skills, 17 w/ wand)
Energy Spent - 246
Damage per en - 8

Water Elementalist - 1672
Time Spent Attacking - 62 (26 w/ Ice Spear, 26 w/ Water Trident, 10 w/ Ice Spear)
Energy Spent - 205
Damage per en - 8

I just did sword wars because they're roughly equal to axes and not that far off from hammers and they're the "worst" case as far as initial damage goes.

So, once again, Elementalists do less damage and they take a lot more energy to do it with. The most efficient are Warriors, but that's not surprising given how they can skirt around energy with adrenaline and also the fact that they need to work harder to get and stay in ranger than Rangers and Elementalists. They need to be a bit more efficient because they won't get as much of a chance to do damage (That's if you start off with everyone being equal. Consider Rangers the baseline for damage. Warriors need to do more damage at higher efficiencies than Rangers because of the lack of range. Elementalists need to do more damage at lower efficiencies because of their vulnerabilities. In a perfect world, of course). And here's something else to keep in mind :

Energy Gain over 60 seconds
Warrior - 40
Ranger - 60
Elementalist - 80

Any energy usage at or below those numbers means that character can keep going indefinitly. Anything above and that character is going to have to stop before the 60 seconds are up at some point. Then you're just waiting for a BiP or regen because your damage output is 0.

Add up all the Elementalist skills you want and try and pump that DPS higher, what Ensign has on his list are the most efficient ele spells. Things like Fire Storm and Earthquake are less efficient because of the AoE effects. They do more damage to more targets so they do a bit less damage per each individual target. But no matter what you add you're still going to burn through energy at a prodigious rate. Far more than you can sustain. Compare that to that Sword War using just a Conjure, Cunning, and the adrenal sword skills (Chuck doesn't have Pure Strike on there, that'd be even worse. There's still time to toss in the occasional Sever and Gash, as well) who'll spend just 25 energy - far less than they'll have to worry about - to get more damage than most Elementalists. That's energy that can be spent elsewhere, perhaps on the Sprint to catch up to a target, or the Hamstring to keep them close, or the rez your team suddenly needs.

It is surprising how much of a difference there is between warrior and elementalist damage, though it does fit with my experience well. The reason that elementalists show up so much worse here, is that they are generally based around burst damage. In a short period of time, no character can match the sheer damage output that an elementalist can do. However, in order to get that sheer damage output, they lose efficiency. Regardless of damage buffs, no warrior will be able to deal the same damage as a PBAoE elementalist spamming all their skills as fast as they can- 100 damage from inferno, 90-100 damage from flame burst x2, 85 damage(ignoring armor) from crystal wave, throw in an immolate and maybe an obsidian flame or two, and an aftershock, all within 10 seconds, and you output an enormous amount of damage(to anyone or anything foolish enough to not run away). However, after blowing your energy on this string of spells, you're pretty much out of the battle for a minute trying to regenerate your energy, while a warrior or ranger can continue to deal their damage consistantly for the entire period of time.

AoE spells such as fireball or phoenix serve different purposes- they can be some of the most efficient ways of dealing damage, but it's circumstancial. If you can hit 6 people with your fireballs, it does excellent both in dps and dpe(damage per energy). If you only hit one person, it's not too great. Storm spells such as firestorm have the potential to output great dpe, and decent dps, if you can get your enemies to stay in them. Firestorm has the potential to deal 240 damage per target, for 4 seconds casting time and 15 energy. That's 60 damage per second you spend casting it, and 16 damage per energy. If you've got multiple enemies inside the effect, it's efficiency skyrockets. However, unless you're playing PvE, it becomes far less appealing, as people will just move out of the area of effect, and you will often only get a few hits for 24 damage in for your 15 energy and 4 seconds. The exception is when you're dealing with crucial territory in PvP, such as KoTH maps in tombs. If you're trying to take the central altar in the Hall of Heroes, you can cast a firestorm, and be guaranteed to at least be hitting the enemy ghostly hero, and likely get quite a bit of damage in on enemy characters that are trying to protect the hero.

Overall, Elementalists have a lower general dps and higher dpe than warriors or rangers, as they tend to either depend on certain situations to deal large amounts of damage, or do a lot of damage in a small period of time, but then next to no damage due to having used up all their energy. Warriors come out on top, as they can consistantly deal their damage over an extended period of time- attacks are free. The biggest lopsidedness that I can see, however, mostly comes from the fact that warriors can benefit from a large number of effects to increase their damage, whereas there is very little that an elementalist can do to increase their damage output.

Ensign, I'm not curious as to whether or not you considered hitting more than one character with some of the elementalist skills you specified. I do agree (especially after seeing these tables) that warriors and rangers are best at single target damage, but, elementalists can SURELY surpass them if 2-3 targets are being considered.

Another issue with ranger damage is that their arrows miss, especially at long range. This is not a problem for warriors, and less of one for ele's especially with splash damage attacks. For warriors the problem is energy, its difficult to have energy to spam power attack and keep up warriors cunning for example.

Warrior's problem is when they can spend too much time chasing their target, or whatever. Ranger's have a little area to work with.. but.. still area...

As well, there are tons of skills that can block/evade/negate Warrior and Ranger damage, you can't really say the same for a Firestorm, or Fireball, w/e (though some spells can be evaded, like Water Trident, which has 10% accuracy )

The above confuses me. I am reading that as being a case of using Warrior's Cunning against two targets, one in 100AL armour and one in 60AL armour. How in heck does the DPS result in being higher against the 100AL target?

Looks to me like there's something really wrong with your calculations. The problem is duplicated throughout your table for all skills that have armour penetration.

100 AL -> 82 AL (after Warrior's Cunning) (-18 AL off target)
60AL -> 49 (after Warrior's Cunning) (-11 AL off target)

11 / 18 = 0.61
to verify Ensign's numbers:
3.89 / 6.36 = 0.61

18% off 100 AL benefits more than 18% off 60 AL... So the damage benefit from armor penetration (Warrior's Cunning) on someone with higher armor is bigger (more damage added).

He's not talking about the base damage. The base damage on a 100 AL target is still significantly worse than on a target with 60 AL...

I believe what you're looking at with the 60AL vs. 100AL descriptions is the increase to DPS. That table can be seen as sums to be totaled. And sums that largely ignore the effects of armor (otherwise there's be something like "All damage is against a 60AL target, against a 50AL target it's raised by x%"). You figure out what sort of attacks a character is doing, you add that all up and then figure out how armor is to see what you're really really doing.

Warrior's Cunning, then, and all other skills that penetrate armor have a jump when used against higher armor because they're more effective. 100AL is effectively 82AL. While 60AL is only effectively 49AL. You can check out Ensign's essay on the damage equation and more here for exactly what that means (bring your slide rule, folk!) but the percentage of damage you're dealing will be raised more with a difference of 18AL versus a difference of 11AL. The damage will increase more against that more armored target and that's what the table shows. The number is higher against the 100AL target because that's how much of a jump you'll get from the normal DPS or DPM. However, the actual damage will be lower because that's still more armor when you actually loook to how your damage will be influenced by the armor of your target.

OK, I was reading it wrong then. In which case ... it needs a far better set of explanations on what is being displayed .