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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. pure DPSĬalculating 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. Incorporating all of these complications into a formula would make it quite long, and we have not yet reached the biggest complication - reloads. 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.
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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. Also, elemental effects can hit certain enemies harder, while doing close to nothing to others, depending on elemental resistances. 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.
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Less common, but still widely encountered are elemental effect modifiers which work similarly to critical chance, but there are some differences. The most common ones are critical damage, usually trigger on a given percentage of the shots (critical chance) using an RNG or PRNG.
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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.
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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.
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