How to Calculate DPS (And Why Crit Is Overrated in Your Head)

The mistake everyone makes

You have 25% crit chance and crits deal double damage. How much does crit add to your DPS?

The instinct says something like 50%. It's 25%.

Here's why, and it's the whole subject: a crit replaces a normal hit — it isn't added on top of one. A 2× crit deals one extra hit's worth of damage, not two. And only on the quarter of swings that actually crit.

The formula

Average hit = damage × (1 + crit chance × (crit multiplier − 1))

DPS = average hit × attacks per second

That (multiplier − 1) is where the intuition goes wrong. With a 2× crit, the bonus is 1× — not 2×.

250 base damage, 25% crit, 2× multiplier, 1.6 attacks/sec:

250 × (1 + 0.25 × 1) = 312.5 average hit

312.5 × 1.6 = 500 DPS

Two sanity checks that make it click:

• 0% crit chance → average hit = 250, exactly your base damage ✓
• 100% crit chance at 2× → average hit = 500, exactly double ✓

Everything in between is a straight line between those two, weighted by how often you crit.

Read your crit damage stat carefully

This is the second most common source of wrong build numbers.

Games are inconsistent about whether the crit stat is a multiplier or a bonus:

• "Crits deal 200% damage" → enter 2
• "+150% crit damage" → crits land for 250% of normal → enter 2.5

Get this backwards and every number after it is wrong.

Which stat should you buy?

Crit chance and crit damage multiply each other, which means neither is worth much alone:

• Crit damage does nothing on hits that don't crit
• Crit chance does little if crits barely hit harder than normal

So the usual answer is whichever you have less of. The calculator's "share of your damage from crits" figure makes this concrete — at 25% chance and 2× damage, only 20% of your average hit comes from crits, which is usually less than people assume they're getting.

And often the honest answer is base damage, because it scales everything — including the crits.

This number is a ceiling

It assumes you attack continuously, forever, with nothing in the way. Real fights have:

• Attack windup and animation lock
• Movement, repositioning, dodging
• Resource costs and cooldowns on your biggest hits
• Armour, resistances and damage reduction on the target
• Buffs that aren't up all the time

Your real damage will be lower. That's fine, because the useful thing here is comparison, not prediction.

How to actually use it

Run your current build. Write the DPS down. Change one stat. Look at the difference.

The absolute number is the least trustworthy part of this calculation; the relative one is the most, because the same optimistic assumptions apply to both builds and largely cancel out.

Which is why this answers "is this upgrade better?" very well, and "how long will this boss take?" quite badly.

If your game shows attack time

Divide 1 by it. An attack time of 0.8 seconds is 1 ÷ 0.8 = 1.25 attacks per second.

Watch for games quoting a base weapon speed that's then modified by haste or attack speed elsewhere — you want the final figure from your character sheet, after everything.

One thing worth saying about game maths

This calculator contains no game data at all. Every number comes from you.

That's deliberate. Invented or half-remembered game constants are worse than no tool — players check, and a calculator that's confidently wrong about a specific game's numbers is actively harmful. Generic damage maths with your own inputs can't be wrong about your game, because it never claims to know anything about it.

Print the build comparison sheet and change one stat per row.