DPS Calculator

DPS (Damage Per Second) is the standard way to compare offensive power in video games. Two weapons, two skill rotations, two whole builds: whatever the question, it usually comes down to which one empties the health bar faster.

Base DPS formula: DPS = Damage per Hit × Hits per Second

With critical hits: Effective DPS = DPS × (1 + Crit Chance × (Crit Multiplier − 1))

That minus one is the part people drop, and dropping it inflates the answer badly. A crit does not add its whole multiplier on top of a normal hit, it replaces the normal hit. At 35% chance and a 2.0× multiplier you gain 35% of one extra hit’s worth of damage, not 70%. Write it without the minus one and a 35/2.0 weapon reads as 1.70× when it is really 1.35×, a 26% overstatement.

With attack speed: Hits per Second = Attack Speed / Base Attack Interval

What each variable means:

• Damage per Hit: the average damage value of a single attack (midpoint of damage range: (min + max) / 2)
• Hits per Second: the attack rate; typically expressed as attacks per second (APS) or as an attack speed percentage
• Crit Chance: probability (0 to 1) of a critical hit occurring
• Crit Multiplier: the additional damage factor on a crit (e.g., 2.0× means crits deal 200% damage; some games add bonus damage on top, e.g., “+50% crit damage” means 1.5× total)
• Effective DPS: accounts for the probability-weighted bonus from critical hits

Worked example: Weapon: 150–200 damage, 1.4 attacks per second, 35% critical chance, 2.0× crit multiplier.

Average damage = (150 + 200) / 2 = 175 Base DPS = 175 × 1.4 = 245 DPS Crit bonus = 1 + (0.35 × (2.0 − 1.0)) = 1 + 0.35 = 1.35 Effective DPS = 245 × 1.35 = 330.75 DPS

Comparing two weapons: Weapon A: 245 base DPS, 35% crit, 2.0× → 331 effective DPS Weapon B: 300 base DPS, 10% crit, 1.5× → 300 × (1 + 0.10 × 0.5) = 300 × 1.05 = 315 effective DPS

Weapon A wins by about 5% despite giving up 55 points of base DPS. Its crit package adds 35% where Weapon B’s adds 5%.

Comparing crit builds properly

When you are weighing crit chance against crit damage, the quantity that decides it is crit chance × (multiplier − 1). That product is your crit factor minus one, and two builds with the same product hit equally hard on average.

It is worth being precise here because the shortcut version, chance × multiplier, gives the wrong answer. Take 50% chance at 2.0× and 25% chance at 4.0×. Both have a chance-times-multiplier product of 1.0, so the shortcut calls them equal. Run the real formula: the first gives 1 + 0.5 × 1.0 = 1.50, the second 1 + 0.25 × 3.0 = 1.75. The second build is 17% stronger. Anyone who compared them the lazy way just picked wrong.

The practical rule that falls out of this: a point of crit chance and a point of crit damage are worth the same when your current chance and your current (multiplier − 1) are equal. Below that, stack chance. Above it, stack damage.

Game-specific factors: Many games layer on resistance penetration, elemental bonuses, skill modifiers and buff uptime. Treat the number here as the ceiling on raw white damage, then apply your game’s multipliers in the order it actually applies them, because additive and multiplicative stacking give very different totals.