DPS Calculator

What is a DPS calculator?

A DPS calculator turns your weapon or ability stats into damage per second (DPS) — the single number players use to compare builds, weapons and characters across games like Destiny 2, Path of Exile, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Borderlands and most action RPGs and shooters. You give it the damage per hit, the attacks per second and your crit stats, and it returns the average sustained damage you deal every second.

The tool above reports three values at once: your DPS with crits factored in, your base DPS with no crit, and the average damage per hit. Everything runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

How is DPS calculated?

The simplest version of DPS multiplies how hard you hit by how often you hit:

• Base DPS = damage per hit × attacks per second

Once critical hits are involved, you no longer deal the same damage every swing — some hits crit for more. The tool handles this by working out the average hit, the expected damage of a typical swing given how often you crit and how much extra a crit does:

• avg hit = damage × (1 + critChance × (critMult − 1))
• DPS = avg hit × attacks per second

Here critChance is written as a decimal (25% becomes 0.25), and critMult is the crit multiplier. The term critChance × (critMult − 1) is the extra damage crits add on average, expressed as a fraction of a normal hit.

The inputs and their units are:

• Damage per hit — the damage of one normal (non-crit) hit, in your game’s damage units.
• Attacks per second — how many times you hit each second. This is the rate that converts per-hit damage into per-second damage.
• Crit chance — the probability a hit crits, entered as 0 to 100 percent.
• Crit multiplier — how much a crit is worth versus a normal hit, always at least 1. A multiplier of 1 means crits do nothing extra; 2 means double damage.

Because the multiplier is at least 1, the average hit is never below the base damage, so your crit DPS is always greater than or equal to your base DPS. With 0% crit the average hit equals the base damage and DPS simply equals base DPS.

Examples

Each example uses only the formulas above, so you can reproduce every answer by typing the same numbers into the calculator.

Example 1 — crit build (100 damage, 2 attacks/sec, 25% crit, 2× crit)

Damage 100, attacks per second 2, crit chance 25%, crit multiplier 2.

avg hit = 100 × (1 + 0.25 × (2 − 1)) = 100 × (1 + 0.25) = 100 × 1.25 = 125

DPS = avg hit × attacks per second = 125 × 2 = 250

base DPS = damage × attacks per second = 100 × 2 = 200

The 25% crit chance at a 2× multiplier raises the average hit from 100 to 125, lifting DPS from a base of 200 up to 250 — a 25% gain that matches the crit contribution.

Example 2 — no crit (100 damage, 2 attacks/sec, 0% crit)

Damage 100, attacks per second 2, crit chance 0%, crit multiplier 2.

avg hit = 100 × (1 + 0 × (2 − 1)) = 100 × 1 = 100

DPS = 100 × 2 = 200

With 0% crit the multiplier never matters, so the average hit stays at the base 100 and DPS equals the base DPS of 200. This shows base DPS is just the crit formula with crit chance set to zero.

Example 3 — fast, high-crit build (50 damage, 4 attacks/sec, 50% crit, 1.5× crit)

Damage 50, attacks per second 4, crit chance 50%, crit multiplier 1.5.

avg hit = 50 × (1 + 0.5 × (1.5 − 1)) = 50 × (1 + 0.25) = 50 × 1.25 = 62.5

DPS = 62.5 × 4 = 250

base DPS = 50 × 4 = 200

A smaller 50-damage hit fired four times a second still reaches a base 200 DPS, and the 50% crit at 1.5× pushes the average hit to 62.5 for 250 DPS — the same total as Example 1, by a different route.

DPS reference table

The table below works the formulas for a range of stats so you can sanity-check the tool. Every row uses avg hit = damage × (1 + critChance × (critMult − 1)) and DPS = avg hit × attacks per second, with base DPS as damage × attacks per second.

Damage	Attacks/sec	Crit %	Crit ×	Avg hit	DPS	Base DPS
100	2	25	2	125	250	200
100	2	0	2	100	200	200
50	4	50	1.5	62.5	250	200
200	1	100	2	400	400	200
80	3	20	3	112	336	240
150	1.5	0	1	150	225	225

Notice DPS only rises above base DPS when both crit chance and the multiplier exceed their no-effect values (0% and 1× respectively).

Common uses

DPS is one of the most-quoted numbers in build theorycrafting:

• Comparing weapons — checking which gun, sword or skill deals more sustained damage before committing to it.
• Build optimisation — testing whether more raw damage, more attack speed or more crit gives the bigger DPS jump for your gear.
• Boss and raid planning — estimating how long a fight will take given a target’s health pool and your team’s combined DPS.
• Crit vs. flat damage decisions — seeing exactly how much a crit chance or crit multiplier upgrade is worth on paper.
• Balancing a session — sanity-checking the in-game DPS readout against the underlying stats.

Tips and common mistakes

• Enter crit chance as a percent, not a decimal. The field expects 0 to 100, so type 25 for a quarter, not 0.25.
• The multiplier is a multiplier, not bonus damage. A 2× crit means double; if your game shows “+100% crit damage”, that is the same as a 2× multiplier here.
• Attacks per second, not per minute. If you only know rounds per minute, divide by 60 first to get the correct rate.
• Base DPS is the floor. Your real DPS can never drop below base DPS because the multiplier is at least 1 — if it looks lower, an input is wrong.
• Average hit is not a real swing. It is the expected value across many hits; an individual hit is either a normal hit or a full crit, never exactly the average.
• More attack speed and more damage scale base DPS equally. Doubling either doubles base DPS; crit only stacks on top of that.

Limitations and notes

This calculator models sustained, single-target DPS from steady stats. It does not account for reload and cooldown gaps, ammo limits, ramp-up or wind-up time, damage falloff with range, accuracy and misses, armour or resistances, damage-over-time effects, or burst windows — all of which shift your real in-game numbers. It also assumes crit damage is a flat multiplier on the hit; games with separate “crit damage” and “super crit” layers may need those folded into the multiplier first. The average-hit math gives the long-run expected DPS, so a short fight can swing above or below it through luck. Everything runs privately in your browser — your stats are never uploaded or stored, so you can compare as many builds as you like for free.

To round out your build math, pair this with the KDA calculator and win rate calculator for match performance, or the CS2 trade-up calculator for skin odds — and browse more in the gaming category.