This is a full damage-per-second model, not a toy. Min and max hit damage, attack speed, crit chance and crit multiplier, damage bonuses, target mitigation, AoE targets hit, fight uptime, and an optional damage-over-time component all feed into a real pipeline that outputs sustained DPS, burst DPS, time to kill, and a breakdown of exactly where your damage is coming from and where it's leaking. It is deliberately built to work for any game rather than one specific title, so plug in your own numbers from whatever build you're theorycrafting.
The Core DPS Formula
At its simplest, damage per second is average hit damage multiplied by how many hits land per second: DPS = ((min damage + max damage) / 2) x attacks per second. That single line is where most quick-and-dirty DPS calculators stop, and it is also why they are usually wrong. Real combat systems layer crit chance, buffs, target defenses, and fight-specific conditions on top of that base number, and each layer changes the result multiplicatively, not by simple addition. This calculator treats the base formula as step one of a longer pipeline, exactly the way a real combat log parser or theorycrafting spreadsheet would.
Why Crit Chance Isn't Just Added On
A common mistake is treating crit chance as a flat bonus, like tacking 25 percent onto your damage because you have a 25 percent crit chance. That is not what crit chance does. Crit chance changes the probability distribution of your hits, some hits deal normal damage, some deal crit damage, and the expected value across a large number of hits is what actually matters for a sustained DPS estimate. The correct formula for your expected damage multiplier is 1 + (crit chance x (crit multiplier - 1)). At a 25 percent crit chance with a 2.0x crit multiplier, that works out to an expected multiplier of 1.25, not 2.0 and not 1.25 by accident, it is math: 75 percent of hits deal 1x damage and 25 percent deal 2x damage, and the weighted average of that mix is exactly 1.25x. This calculator's "damage from crits" readout shows what percentage of your total output that crit layer is actually contributing, which is a genuinely useful number for deciding whether more crit chance or more crit damage is the better upgrade on your next piece of gear.
Buffs, Mitigation, and the Order of Operations
After crit, this calculator applies your flat damage bonus (gear, buffs, talents, whatever multiplicative source you are modeling) as a straight percentage increase, then applies the target's mitigation (armor, resistance, damage reduction) as a percentage decrease on what is left. Order matters here: a 15 percent damage buff and a 10 percent mitigation are not the same as a flat 5 percent net gain, because mitigation applies to your already-buffed number, not your base number. Run 100 base damage through a 15 percent buff and you get 115, then run that through 10 percent mitigation and you land at 103.5, not 105. It is a small gap on paper and a real one in a long fight. The calculator's breakdown shows each of these steps as its own line, base, after crit, after buffs, after mitigation, specifically so you can see where the number actually moved and by how much.
AoE, Uptime, and Damage Over Time
Single-target DPS and total DPS are different questions, and this calculator answers both. Enter how many targets a swing or ability hits and you get a second set of numbers scaled by that count, useful for comparing a cleave-heavy build against a pure single-target build without doing the multiplication yourself. Uptime handles the other half of the realism problem: almost nobody attacks 100 percent of every fight, movement, mechanics, positioning, and interrupts all eat into actual attacking time. A build boasting a huge burst DPS number can lose badly to a less flashy build with better uptime once you account for real fight conditions, which is exactly why this calculator reports both a burst number (zero downtime) and a sustained number (scaled by your uptime percentage) side by side. Damage-over-time effects get modeled separately as a steady per-second contribution (damage per tick divided by seconds between ticks), added on top of your direct-hit DPS rather than folded into the crit and mitigation math that direct hits go through, since DoTs frequently ignore some of those modifiers in real games.
Time to Kill: The Number That Actually Matters
Raw DPS is an abstraction. Time to kill is the number you actually feel in a fight, and it is just target HP divided by your DPS, but which DPS you divide by changes the answer meaningfully. This calculator reports time to kill twice: once using your sustained DPS (the realistic number, accounting for downtime) and once using your burst DPS (the optimistic number, assuming perfect uptime). The gap between those two times is effectively a measurement of how much a fight's mechanics are costing you, and it is a genuinely useful thing to know when you are deciding whether to invest in more raw damage or in better mobility and uptime instead.
Worked Examples
Basic case, no advanced options: a weapon hitting for 40 to 60 damage (50 average) at 1.5 attacks per second with a 20 percent crit chance and a 1.5x crit multiplier produces a base DPS of 75, an expected crit multiplier of 1.1, and a final DPS of 82.5, with crits contributing about 9.1 percent of that total. Against a 1,000 HP target, that is a time to kill of roughly 12.1 seconds.
Full advanced case: a weapon hitting for 50 to 90 damage (70 average) at 1.2 attacks per second, 25 percent crit chance, 2.0x crit multiplier, a 15 percent damage buff, 10 percent target mitigation, a damage-over-time effect ticking for 20 every 2 seconds, hitting 3 targets, at 85 percent uptime, works out to a base DPS of 84, climbing to 105 after crit, 120.75 after the buff, 108.675 after mitigation, plus 10 DPS from the DoT for a single-target total of 118.675. At 85 percent uptime, sustained single-target DPS lands at roughly 100.9, and total sustained DPS across all three targets comes out to roughly 302.6. Against a 5,000 HP target, sustained time to kill is about 49.6 seconds, versus 42.1 seconds at burst, a real 7.4-second gap purely from downtime.
Common DPS Math Mistakes
Adding crit chance directly to your damage percentage instead of computing the expected-value multiplier is the single most common error, and it consistently overstates real output. Applying percentage buffs and percentage mitigation in the wrong order, or averaging them together instead of multiplying them in sequence, is the second most common one, and the gap it introduces grows with fight length. Ignoring uptime entirely and comparing two builds only on their theoretical maximum DPS is the third, and it is the one that causes the most real-world disappointment, since the build with the flashier burst number on paper regularly loses in practice to the build that can actually maintain its output through a fight's mechanics.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the actual formula for DPS?+
In its simplest form, DPS equals average hit damage multiplied by attacks per second. A complete model layers on an expected-value crit multiplier, then multiplicative buffs, then multiplicative mitigation, then adds any damage-over-time contribution, exactly the pipeline this calculator runs.
How do you calculate damage per second with crit chance?+
Compute your expected crit multiplier as 1 plus (crit chance times (crit multiplier minus 1)), then multiply your base DPS by that number. Do not simply add your crit chance percentage to 100 percent, that overstates or understates the real expected output depending on your crit multiplier.
Does this work for a specific game I'm playing?+
This is a generic model built on standard combat math, not tuned to any one game's exact internal formula. Most action RPGs, MMOs, and shooters use some variation of this same pipeline, so it is a strong general-purpose estimate, plug in your specific game's numbers for the closest match.
Why does my sustained DPS look so much lower than my burst DPS?+
That gap is your uptime cost. If you are only attacking 70 percent of a fight due to movement or mechanics, your sustained DPS will be exactly 70 percent of your burst number, no matter how large your burst number looks on paper.
Should damage-over-time effects use the same crit and mitigation math as direct hits?+
It depends on the specific game, many treat DoTs differently from direct hits, sometimes excluding them from crit entirely or applying mitigation differently. This calculator models DoT as a flat, steady contribution on top of your direct-hit pipeline for that reason, adjust the per-tick number yourself if your game's DoTs do crit or get mitigated the same way direct hits do.
Real DPS is a pipeline, not a single multiplication.
Crit chance, buffs, mitigation, uptime, and DoT each move the number in their own specific way, and the only way to actually know where your damage is going is to run them through in the right order. That is what this calculator does.
Plug in your build and see the full breakdown.