Does DPS fit diablo?

[Chaboi]

I think with how quick monsters die DPS doesn't really work as a good measure of skill. Title says it all..discuss

[marshmallow]

Gotta keep that creep's aggro in check with my toon.

[Karpalo]

DPS is the only standard that makes sense. Now why this weren't commonly used in D2 is probably because:

- Tooltips were super unclear and they did not have explanations available. Ie. Crushing blow, deadly strike, wounding... Attack speed and FCR looks simple, but surprise surprise they are not.

- Hidden breakpoints. 20% attack speed could either be worthless or best thing ever. Only way to know for sure was to look into game files or look it up from the internet after someone else had took a peak into the game files.

- Crushing blow was ridiculously good. Pretty much best in slot boots were second tier uniques and best helm was low tier set helm due the fact that one certain attribute was so overly good and it only scaled with target health and attack speed. For reference last kicksin i made had 103% crushing blow with hardcapped kick speed. Your dps hardly matters when everything is down to half health in a second.

Pretty much every other game uses DPS as a performance benchmark.

[Chaboi]

Wouldn't the killing rate of a player be a better barometer?

[Soval]

What should they use to represent your approximate base damage then? Your weapon's min-max numbers are not the only thing determining how much damage your skills do, you also have to factor in swing/cast speed, critical hit chance and damage bonus, and +damage stats as well. And that's precisely what the displayed DPS does. It's also why weapons list their own DPS quite prominently.

What damage range a single hit against a single enemy with a plain attack can hit for is not a very useful piece of information. Your general damage output capacity is a lot more relevant to understanding the lethallity of you toon.

[Chaboi]

While what you say is true, the DPS number shown is only for your normal attack. With "you will always have a skill to use" as a design philosophy, showing DPS from standard attack is in no way a correct measurement of your characters "lethality". Different skills have different damage augmentations etc etc. Even the same skill has effects that are independent of swing timers..take swings 1 and 2 of crippling wave, they have a different cast time (animation length) versus strike 3.

All in all I think when comparing player skill..DPS doesn't fit well in the realm of diablo

[Kaeros]

I would rather see left-hand damage range and right-hand damage range (if dual-wielding), after modifiers from your items. For example, my left-hand standard attack would display as: 30-70 damage, 1.5x a second.

That's a pretty easy number to work with. If I know my Leap Attack does 150% main-hand damage, then I can take 30-70, multiply it by 1.5, and viola; Leap Attack does 45-105 damage (and I could cast it 1.5x a second, barring cooldowns). That's more helpful than a straight DPS, because I'm not gonna be casting Leap Attack successively.

DPS is really only helping me out for skills that I spam repeatedly without interruption. I think it would be beneficial to show your most recently used skill's damage output (per cast, per monster) somewhere on the UI.

[Soval]

While what you say is true, the DPS number shown is only for your normal attack. With "you will always have a skill to use" as a design philosophy, showing DPS from standard attack is in no way a correct measurement of your characters "lethality".]Different skills have different damage augmentations etc etc. Even the same skill has effects that are independent of swing timers..take swings 1 and 2 of crippling wave, they have a different cast time (animation length) versus strike 3.

The DPS is not supposed to represent any one application or source (skill or regular attack), but is intended as a general base to understand your overall damage dealing power over time. It would take too much space on your character sheet to list the modified damage ranges for each skill individually, so it gives us a neutral, multifactored starting point to provide a sense of how much killing power our damage dealing skills are starting from.

All in all I think when comparing player skill..DPS doesn't fit well in the realm of diablo

What exactly does that mean? Please exlain,

[Karpalo]

You can check your damage by hoovering over your auto attack. It shows flat damage it does unlike skills which just show % tooltip damage.

[Crudesash68]

I think Chaboi is saying we should not use how much DPS a player actually does as a barometer of player skill, the way we do in WoW.

First off, let me say that gauging DPS was a useful tool in WoW, and can be in D3, for those that want to improve their performance. When I saw that my Mage's DPS was lower than others with my spec, I set out to be sure why; was it my rotation? My gear? My addons? I never wanted to leave anything to chance; no, I never would reach the level of the best players, but by doing my best I knew I was helping my guild.

For D3, this will be more personal; I do not have other people depending on my performance to anywhere near the degree I would in WoW; I can, by my volition, choose to never play MP, and then never worry if I am a burden to a group. That said, I might want to know if someone with my gear and build is doing much better than me, for my own satisfaction.

DPS can be that tool, for at least one aspect of a player's skill. As in WoW, DPS does not measure how well a player uses CC/Utility skills, or how they avoid taking damage, and in the fast paced world of D3, those aspects will certainly be invaluable. What I do hope is that DPS will not become the arbitrary "noob" detector it became in WoW; too many players allowed it to be the be-all and end-all barometer of skill, and in D3, as in WoW, I believe we'll see that there is more to a player than giant yellow numbers.