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Damage Per Second (DPS) in Sacred 2


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I'm curious about whether it's the question that can throw us off. I know that in lots of other games, DPS (Damage Per Second) can be calculated as a flat value, because damage per weapon and spells are always known.

 

Does the concept of DPS apply to Sacred 2 with all of it's variables?

 

Or, is there a way for us to document DPS in a manner that's useful to players?

 

:(

 

gogo

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As I see it, the unresponsiveness of the game does not allow the concepts of "action" and "dps". There is no dps when your char is stuck in the same place instead of moving and attacking the enemy (so you need to click multiple times...)

 

You can see what weapons do more damage, and you can compare their mods to pick a better one, and you can even roughly estimate which is faster, but that's about it.

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Of course it does. Damage per second is simply a unit of measure. I do think way too many people only focus on DPS and ignore many other vital things as well. The hardest for people to understand and adjust to is knowing how foes avoid and mitigate your damage, and optimizing to make attacks connect and do maximum damage is really the key to DPS.

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As Sacred 2 doesn't have an attack speed listed for the weapons (as some other games do), you can only go for the obvious (I.e. one-hand swords are faster than two-hand swords).

Thus, calculating dps would be difficult. Rather than posting some guessed dps value, I'd limit the info to the damage value form the weapon's stats.

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Not to mention the beauty of certain modifiers such as:

Chance to Ignore Armor, Decrease Armor etc.

 

Considering the fact that as in Sacred 1 the effect of armor is not %age based but rather a matter of something akin to (Damage * (Damage/(Damage + Armor))) for each type of damage then sum them all together.

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All very true to making calculating damage per second difficult, however, it does not mean the concept is not valid or does not apply. It is simply the damage inflicted on targets in a second. DPS came about mostly as a team raiding unit of measure when teams were taking on durable targets and boss encounters.

 

Here is a report of one such group's raid: http://wowwebstats.com/yjy5dm5obcvj3

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I'm not saying it's not valid or inapplicable, however I'm saying that it isn't something that should be applied to Sacred 2 in the sense of "Well this weapon has a higher DPS..."

 

There are other mods in Sacred 2 that are perhaps more valuable than outright damage in some cases (Deathblow, Chance to Halve Regen... secondary effects)... if you focus only on DPS and not those abilities you might ultimately be weakening your build.

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I'm not saying it's not valid or inapplicable, however I'm saying that it isn't something that should be applied to Sacred 2 in the sense of "Well this weapon has a higher DPS..."

 

You've said exactly what I was thinking about DPS this morning when someone on the SIF had brought it up. Cygnus, I understand what you mean by DPS being valid...but how useful is it for Sacred? ^^

 

Sacred has a kazillion variables. I was thinking why all this time noone was saying "hey guys I got a toon that does x dps!"...and I finally realized that instead of peeps touting DPS of their builds or Combat Arts, they would instead say that they have "fast Kill speed v.s. x monster in x level"

 

I guess because Ascaron hasn't released any forumulaes, and nothing is flat, it's going to be almost impossible to table, for example, stats on weapons as having x dps as being better than another weapon with x dps because it would always depend on the server level, number of players in the server and what kind of monster we were trying to take out, no?

 

:D

 

gogo

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Avoiding the issue of “damage mitigation” and “evade”, I’ve decided to try and present some conclusions to a question I had been asking about the ideal distribution of life points, defense and resistance – also the same for damage and attack (for which I have yet to find solutions).

 

First, a quick recap of things we’ve learned from Sacred:

1) The way defense(v) and attack(a) produce hit probability(p) is: p=a/(a+v)

2) The way resistance(r ) reduces damage(d): d*d/(d+r)

3) To sustain minimal damage from an attacker, your reistances should be proportioned exactly like his damage.

4) To deal maximal damage on an opponent, deal it in only one type.

5) It’s better to deal an amount of damage all in one go rather than many small ones. (Fireball vs Ice shards)

6) It’s better to lower your opponent’s damage than to raise your resistances.

7) It’s better to raise your damage than lower your opponent’s resistence.

8) To optimise CA regeneration time, have your +% evenly distributed over mental reg., meditation, celestial magic, etc.

 

A similar idea got me asking how much more important is damage than attack? And then, which is the most important: Life, defense, or resistance?

I put together a few equations and tried to find out.

 

I’ll use d,a,L,r,v to refer to damage, attack, life, resistance, and defense respectively.

If you interpret the hit probability as another factor by reducing the damage, then the (average) life lost per hit is

d*(d/(d+r))*(a/(a+v))

or in percent of total life

d*(d/(d+r))*(a/(a+v))/L

 

If you take d and a as given, then this percentage reaches a minimum when

L=(S+a+d)/3

r=L-d

v=L-a

where S = L+v+r.

 

So, if we know d and a of the attacker, we can easily optimise L,r and v.

The situation for optimising d and a is unfortunately a lot more complicated.

In order to give a conclusion that's accurate and simple for L,r,v I'll have to find, among others, an average proportion of d:a in various opponents.

 

I'll, uh, .. let you know.

Edited by nokka
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Against many bosses, unless you're outright godly, your p value might be below 1. Your formula is too complex for me to calculate it, I'm not about to squareroot, divide and multiply etc.

 

Consider say, Kral of the Winged Daemons (boss of Jungle region) with 45,000 HP, 800 attack and 300 damage

 

versus a Seraphim with 4,000 HP, 1000 attack, 500 defense, and say 1000 of resistances

 

Keep in mind evade isn't counted, and that, except for spells, they are calculated *after* chance to hit is calculated. So if the boss has say, 30% chance to hit me, and I have +100% evade (resulting in something like 60% 'real' evade'), it won't hit me very much at all.

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Against many bosses, unless you're outright godly, your p value might be below 1. Your formula is too complex for me to calculate it, I'm not about to squareroot, divide and multiply etc.

 

Consider say, Kral of the Winged Daemons (boss of Jungle region) with 45,000 HP, 800 attack and 300 damage

 

versus a Seraphim with 4,000 HP, 1000 attack, 500 defense, and say 1000 of resistances

 

Keep in mind evade isn't counted, and that, except for spells, they are calculated *after* chance to hit is calculated. So if the boss has say, 30% chance to hit me, and I have +100% evade (resulting in something like 60% 'real' evade'), it won't hit me very much at all.

 

In that case, Kral would have 800+300=1100 as his sum and yours would be 4000+500+1000=5500 so p=5. Only the attackers damage and attack are counted in his sum, whereas your resistance, defense and life are counted in yours. Better?

 

nat

 

By the way, I had said I would leave out how I came to the conclusion - which I did - but a lot of it is in there anyway.

Should I leave out the part with all the red stuff? It would probably be easier.

Edited by nokka
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I went over my notes again and made some corrections and some shortenings in my horrendously long post.

 

Merry Christmas, by the way.

Edited by nokka
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A weapon's DPS would vary greatly against different resistances, so unless you're going to start quoting a lot of different things (DPS of X against monster Y at level Z with resistances of A, B, C, D & E), I personally think that a single DPS figure would have to make so many approximations that it would be wildly inaccurate).

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I can't stress this point too strongly: The numbers are all really, really simplified.

 

What I actually should have done - and knowing myself will eventually do - is give a statistical expectation of p for the stronger types of opponants.

Only then can the numbers actually be considered even remotely optimal.

 

I'll get on that as soon as I see Sacred 2 again.

 

grrr.. I guess I'll see you all in a year or so...

 

nat

 

Oh, and Happy New Year, everyone.

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I think you calcualtions look great nokka and I appreciate the input.

 

Most DPS in games is not pre-calcualted, infact, it is reported. So people see and review the results and make tweeks to try to optimize their damage potential based on past results....and then see the results with changes made..etc.

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  • 1 year later...

This is a good topic, and the cool thing is, it's almost exactly a year old today!

 

:cry:

 

So here's a hale and hearty Christmas bump to all the mechanics lovers out there... this one's for you

 

:)

 

gogo

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Avoiding the issue of “damage mitigation” and “evade”, I’ve decided to try and present some conclusions to a question I had been asking about the ideal distribution of life points, defense and resistance – also the same for damage and attack (for which I have yet to find solutions).

 

First, a quick recap of things we’ve learned from Sacred:

1) The way defense(v) and attack(a) produce hit probability(p) is: p=a/(a+v)

2) The way resistance(r ) reduces damage(d): d*d/(d+r)

3) To sustain minimal damage from an attacker, your reistances should be proportioned exactly like his damage.

4) To deal maximal damage on an opponent, deal it in only one type.

5) It’s better to deal an amount of damage all in one go rather than many small ones. (Fireball vs Ice shards)

6) It’s better to lower your opponent’s damage than to raise your resistances.

7) It’s better to raise your damage than lower your opponent’s resistence.

8) To optimise Combat Art regeneration time, have your +% evenly distributed over mental reg., meditation, celestial magic, etc.

 

Are all of these stll true for sacred 2?

For example, I would think that reducing an enemies (well, a boss/champion anyway) physical resistance (by far the largest armor value) would cause considerable more damage than, trying to raise your own physical damage by the same amount. Conversely, it only makes sense to try to try and reduce an enemies attack value if there is a significant reduction in the amount of time you are hit. Ignoring armor is pretty cool if the percentage get's high enough, since (I assume) it will ignore all types of of armor, not just physical

 

On the defensive side of the ball, I've noticed a few things

1. You gain HP, and defense automatically.

2. there is no difference in performance when you are a 1 HP, vs 1,000,000 HP.

3. Armor can be obtained easilty throughout the game

4. Evade won't help you vs non melee Combat Arts (dragon's breath, octo's Combat Art, etc)

 

5. That makes Mitigation the most useful defense, followed closely by willpower to remove DoT effects. I am unsure if mitigation affects DoT (I don't have enough of it to test)

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Willpower is useless against DOT attacks, with my Shadow Warrior with 3K willpower the DOT's hit me for 2.5K-3K with each tic in the swamp.

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In my World of Warcraft days DPS was very easy to calculate because the game kept a combat log. This allowed people to create mods that simply started a stopwatch when the combat log said combat had started, it then kept track of all the damage done by your character from that point on. When the combat log stated that combat had ended it would stop the clock and then simply divide all the damage done by the amount of time the fight took.

 

Very simple.

 

Now since every boss fight was different in some way Blizzard always had one boss each expansion who was known as a simple "tank and spank" fight which meant that the tank(s) simply positioned the boss in one spot and that boss only damaged the tank. This allowed your DPS classes to stand in one spot for the entirety of the fight and unleash as much damage as possible. Usually the fight was determined by an enrage timer so that if enough DPS was not put out to bring down the boss within n seconds then the boss would enrage and do basically unhealable damage to the tank, tank would die and of course the boss would rampaging through your raid one-shotting everyone else, raid asplode!

 

Now what you quickly learned about DPS was it was not just dependant on your gear. You had to have an optimal build and a spell rotation that was optimal to that build, your level of gear and for some, your level of internet latency.

 

In terms of Sacred 2 this would basically be determining down to the very last point which ten skills to pick for your character and how many hard and soft points you would need to invest in each skill. After that would be the "perfect" gear set with exactly what to put in each socket so at attain a "perfect" amount of regen per hit, deathblow, damage modifiers, etc and finally the exact number of runes to each for each Combat Art as well as which Combat Art combos to use and when.

 

In the end it was kind of fun theorycrafting builds and rotations and such but for probably 99% of the people playing WoW they are the equivalent of someone following a build posted on this site down to the letter and that led to you logging in and 9/10 people playing a character are basically playing the exact same character.

 

I kind of like the fact that you can't build a reliable DPS meter in this game because it leaves everyone at the theorycrafting stage on character building and while you can obtain empirical data about how successful your build is there are no definitive hard numbers showing that you have the absolute best build possible for that character thus people change things here and there and sometimes you can have two characters with the exact same skillset yet they play completely differently.

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Thank you for that read.

Great explanation and insight into the uses of theory crafting for gaming. And, the fact that someone like you who is coming from a wWOW background famous for builds and that is finding enjoyment here with this game's very infuriating way of keeping us addicted to builds has given me another dose of patience for this game.

 

 

 

 

:)

 

gogo

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I kind of like the fact that you can't build a reliable DPS meter in this game because it leaves everyone at the theorycrafting stage on character building and while you can obtain empirical data about how successful your build is there are no definitive hard numbers showing that you have the absolute best build possible for that character thus people change things here and there and sometimes you can have two characters with the exact same skillset yet they play completely differently.

 

wow. good post. I to like that there is no one build that is "the build" to have for each class.

 

I wish it felt more like there were different ways to defend though. In this game it seems like you need high HP, armor, defense, reflect AND evade to stay alive. (as opposed to some games where 1 or 2 of these might suffice.

 

On the offsensive side of the ball I wish there were more need to the different damage types. The way it is now, you need fire and poison. That's about it.

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  • 1 month later...
I wish it felt more like there were different ways to defend though. In this game it seems like you need high HP, armor, defense, reflect AND evade to stay alive. (as opposed to some games where 1 or 2 of these might suffice.

Yeah, it would be nice if defences were a bit more effective, but if you've got high levels of reflect, you don't need evade or defence (or much armour/resists TBH).

 

On the offsensive side of the ball I wish there were more need to the different damage types. The way it is now, you need fire and poison. That's about it.

Magic is very effective, especially against bosses (proc weaken on the Nameless Guardians & their HP drops by ~15% or so, calculated from the decrease to the % life leach damage, this was in Gold against level ~65-70 Guardians, IIRC, the leach damage dropped by ~300 & that was with ~1.5% leach -> HP reduction of ~20k). That's nice, especially since it effectively ignores/bypasses all other forms of defence.

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