What is "weapon damage"

[shijan]

A lot of players (as well as the Character tab in the game) measure the overall damage effectiveness of a character by DPS.

However, skill damage usually seems to be based on this nebulous attribute called "weapon damage", which isn't actually stated anywhere on your Character tab. There is of course a min-max range of damage on your weapon, but when you factor in +damage and +%damage and passives and crit, I lose sight of what "weapon damage" actually is.

As I can figure, weapon damage would be (DPS divided by attacks per second), so for example, this would be correct:
14000 DPS at 1.40 attacks per second = 10,000 damage per attack = average weapon damage?

Where it gets confusing for me is when comparing, say, a stream of Hungering Arrows vs. just firing off a Rain of Vengeance or other non-spammable skills that may (may not?) be affected by attack speed. At least in a theoretical sense of comparing, since weapon damage for each individual attack would be rolled at the time of the hit, and may fluctuate based on the min-max of the weapon.

In summary:

1. Is it worth it to try to measure weapon damage
2. How do you measure it
3. Why is DPS a more common measure
4. How does one evaluate the damage of non-spammable skills against the damage of spammable skills

Thanks

[LeOsTyLe]

Weapondmg is the amount of dmg you do to the monster, when you hit the monster one time, with the "normal attack" ( no skill selected = 100% wep dmg ). All question you can answer yourself by having this info.

[HardRock]

Like you said, you can calculate your average weapon damage by dividing your displayed DPS by your attack speed, although as far as I know your DPS value may not correctly include damage bonuses from the +x% elemental damage affixes from Legendaries. If someone has definitive info about this I'd like to see it, as I didn't find such a Legendary yet to test this stat extensively.

I find DPS more useful since battles generally last longer than one hit in Inferno. With non-spammable skills (skills that have cooldowns) weapon damage could be much more important, but I seem to recall from my testing in the beta that these skills use your DPS to calculate their damage.