How the hell do you do dps in this game?

I can't seem to make anything work, no matter what guides I follow or what items I equip. How the fuck do you hit 100k+ dps at endgame? I can't even breach 35K. Can you just not do any dps if you go max block, or am I only going to be able to do end game stuff if I'm a glass cannon.

Kinda, yes, there will always be things you can't tank and there will be things you need high dps for, prolonged fights also require more flask charges than you have. See the problem?

"

raics wrote:

Kinda, yes, there will always be things you can't tank and there will be things you need high dps for, prolonged fights also require more flask charges than you have. See the problem?

So you're telling me that since you will usually die instantly, and fights can go on too long, I'm better off just playing straight dps?

So there's actually no way to do end game content, UNLESS you're a glass cannon.

First thing off, tooltip DPS numbers are relatively inaccurate, and only good to compare the same skill.

High damage is obtained through a mixture of:

1. High level gems. This is significant the your damage output.
2. Properly min-maxed equipment. A single accessory with the correct mods can chance your damage greatly.
3. Flasks. Proper flasks add a huge amount of damage.
4. A Passive Tree that has a significant amount of damage nodes and jewel sockets. You have to sacrifice defense for offense in this game.
5. Proper Jewels. Triple damage mod jewels are ridiculous.
6. 5/6 Link equipment. The final Link to your equipment skyrockets your damage.

Lets look at it this way.

My build in the previous league was the Endless Retch. When I finally got my 6 Link Atziri's Disfavour, my hideout tooltip DPS for my Cyclone was only ~60k with an Inc. AOE gem, Hatred, and Herald of Ash. I then pop on all my flasks. My tooltip DPS goes to 173k. And this is only showing what the Cyclone should be doing. My build also has a hidden DPS number from my belt, which should increase my damage output by up to 92%. And my gear was very subpar, and my jewels were incorrect.

In regards to what raics said, it doesn't mean that you should always forgo all defense for offense. There are certain attacks in this game that are very likely to kill you if you fail to dodge them. Even a perfect block character don't have a 100% survival rate against them. There are also some fights where the fight gets exponentially harder as the boss's health drops lower. Purely defensive builds might struggle there vs the enrage, and might not have the damage they need to finish the fight before they are overwhelmed. On the other hand, if you're geared towards pure offense, you might get 1 shotted more often than you like since you might not have as much Life as you would like.

So yeah, don't rely on the tooltip number. There are a lot of factors that change your damage output.

"

Sentilial wrote:

First thing off, tooltip DPS numbers are relatively inaccurate, and only good to compare the same skill.

High damage is obtained through a mixture of:

1. High level gems. This is significant the your damage output.
2. Properly min-maxed equipment. A single accessory with the correct mods can chance your damage greatly.
3. Flasks. Proper flasks add a huge amount of damage.
4. A Passive Tree that has a significant amount of damage nodes and jewel sockets. You have to sacrifice defense for offense in this game.
5. Proper Jewels. Triple damage mod jewels are ridiculous.
6. 5/6 Link equipment. The final Link to your equipment skyrockets your damage.

Lets look at it this way.

My build in the previous league was the Endless Retch. When I finally got my 6 Link Atziri's Disfavour, my hideout tooltip DPS for my Cyclone was only ~60k with an Inc. AOE gem, Hatred, and Herald of Ash. I then pop on all my flasks. My tooltip DPS goes to 173k. And this is only showing what the Cyclone should be doing. My build also has a hidden DPS number from my belt, which should increase my damage output by up to 92%. And my gear was very subpar, and my jewels were incorrect.

In regards to what raics said, it doesn't mean that you should always forgo all defense for offense. There are certain attacks in this game that are very likely to kill you if you fail to dodge them. Even a perfect block character don't have a 100% survival rate against them. There are also some fights where the fight gets exponentially harder as the boss's health drops lower. Purely defensive builds might struggle there vs the enrage, and might not have the damage they need to finish the fight before they are overwhelmed. On the other hand, if you're geared towards pure offense, you might get 1 shotted more often than you like since you might not have as much Life as you would like.

So yeah, don't rely on the tooltip number. There are a lot of factors that change your damage output.

Everone says the tooltip doesn't matter, and yet I see plenty of folks wrecking content with minimal effort. Then most builds state "200K+ dps!" and I'm told regularly if your dps is 100k or less, it's shit re-roll. So when I finally get close to endgame and my dps is still roughly 15k, what the fuck do I do? I keep re-rolling, and re-specing my character, but it doesn't do much of anything. I still mostly die in one shot, and I still can't do damage. Do you absolutely need tons of dps in flasks or something? Do some skill gems just suck balls and can't do endgame content without 20 exalts worth of gear? Do I absolutely have to double dip, and use flame/bleed/poison heavy builds? Are Certain characters ultimately pointless? I have no clue what benchmarks to aim for, or what gear to get outside of getting 5K health plus, and maxing resistances with some positive chaos. That and anything sub 100k is trash.

With the Endless Retch build, I finished everything but Shaper, Uber Atziri and Chimera solo (can't do split phase bosses with the build). The build was a map clearing build. I finished every t15 with tooltip 36k prior flasks on a 5 Link Brain Rattler. My final build was 14 ex (10 ex for the 6l Disfavour), but I did all the t15 with 4ex worth of gear (2 of the gear pieces were expensive. Everything else was generic). The skill was Cyclone.

Double dipping is very nice and all, but you don't need to double dip to reach end game.

Not every skill is created equal. Gear helps, but in the end, it's a combination of everything.

The "generic" go to for starters are:

1. Cap your elemental resistances. This is critical to survival. Chaos res isn't necessary; it's really a luxury. Almost all my builds stayed at -60 Chaos res, and it was perfectly fine.

2. If you're going Life, try to aim for ~150% Life minimum on the tree (prior jewels), and try to see if you can reach 4.5k+ Life as a general safety mark. Obviously, the more life, the better, but you might have to sacrifice damage in that case. (Or you get away with a Kaom's Heart if you're fine with 1 6Link or no 6Link at all).

3. If you're going ES, you'll want at least 8k to survive "safely" in higher tier maps. You may have to push 10k or so to tackle endgame content with siginficantly less risk.

Start by explaining which character you're working on, what skill, the build, etc. and we can try to help you with it. Damage and survivabililty varies per build, and there are just too many things to take into account, rather than have a single answer to it.

"

Sentilial wrote:

In regards to what raics said, it doesn't mean that you should always forgo all defense for offense. There are certain attacks in this game that are very likely to kill you if you fail to dodge them. Even a perfect block character don't have a 100% survival rate against them. There are also some fights where the fight gets exponentially harder as the boss's health drops lower. Purely defensive builds might struggle there vs the enrage, and might not have the damage they need to finish the fight before they are overwhelmed. On the other hand, if you're geared towards pure offense, you might get 1 shotted more often than you like since you might not have as much Life as you would like.

Aye, I kept it overly simple. The thing about top tier endgame glass cannons is they are glass cannons by investment but not by end result. It doesn't take all that much investment to hit 10k ES and Vaal Pact directly transfers dps into survivability so you're double dipping into your dps investment, sorta.

What do you consider endgame or "end game stuff" as you say in your original post? 15k tooltip is just about par for the course if you've just reached Mapping, especially if you're on a 4-link or lower.

"

Attlus wrote:

I'm told regularly if your dps is 100k or less, it's shit re-roll.

Whoever's telling you this is probably trolling you or has their bar set so high that their head's in the clouds :P

If you are frequently getting one-shot, that sounds like you're making the common new player mistake of not playing "Path of Life Nodes." Nowadays it is commonly said that 150% is the minimum increased maximum Life from passive tree you need to survive on a Life build, although I personally flirt with danger and only get 100% sometimes. Once you have that sorted out, you need medium to high Life rolls on almost every piece of gear you can get it on - chest, ring, ring, amulet, belt, gloves, boots, hat, and shield if you're using it. If you have all high rolls, you can substitute 1 to 3 of these for Uniques that don't have maximum Life, but it starts to get dangerous after that. You also want your Resistances to be capped at all times; a total of 135% to all elemental resists by the time you Map is probably the bare minimum you want in combined stats (i.e. if your character sheet shows 75% (75%) or higher in Merciless, or if it shows 75% (135%) or higher in your hideout/Normal difficulty).

Of course, many on the forum agree that Energy Shield (ES) is superior to Life and of course you wouldn't get increased maximum Life or Life on gear for an ES build, but those tend to be more advanced as you have to cover up the various holes that ES exposes you to, so we try to tell new players to stick with Life.

If you are an Attack/Weapon build, the vast majority of your damage is likely to come from your Weapon, so you usually have to shell out a certain amount of cash to get a good weapon. I assume you're not playing HC, since you talk about so many one-shots. In that case, there should be a ton of Unique items with ridiculous DPS for their cost (i.e. very cheap compared to what a Rare would have cost if this Unique did not exist). Scaeva is one such weapon for 1-handed swords. Doomsower is probably your best bet for 2-handed Weapons.

If you are a Spell or otherwise non-Attack build, then you'll just have to be patient. Spells and a few Spell-like Attacks here and there scale heavily with gem level, and it takes a long time to reach gem level 20. You'll probably hit Maps with your Spells around level 16, which is workable, but each level grants about 8% more damage, compounding, so you'll get noticeably more oomph as you level up.

For both Attack and Spell builds, most of the time, getting more damage Supports in your main damage link-up scales your DPS literally exponentially. This is because "x% More Damage" always stacks multiplicatively, and most damage-based Support gems nowadays include some amount of x% more Damage. It's not quite (1.69)^5, as there aren't enough high-damage Supports, but you get the idea. For a conservative example, suppose you already have Lacerate - Melee Physical Damage - Added Fire Damage - Faster Attacks. Then, you add on Multistrike and Hypothermia.* Multistrike level 16 has 90% more attack speed and 30% less attack damage, so it's a net 1.9 * 0.7 = 1.33 or 33% more DPS. Hypothermia level 16 has 35% more damage, or 1.35 multiplier. Together combined, 1.33*1.35 = 1.7955, or nearly 80% more damage. If you level these gems to 20, it becomes 1.94*0.7*1.39, or 1.8876, or nearly 90% more damage. That's 10% "more damage" short of doubling your damage. All for the cost of 2 support Sockets.

*Hypothermia is chosen here because Chilled Ground, such as from Arctic Armour or Cast-when-Damage-Taken-level-1-Arctic-Breath can reliably Chill practically any enemy for a new player, including bosses, as only certain special "advanced" bosses are immune to Chill.

people want to attract players with high dps numbers in build guide titles, so they often count in all the possible buffs and flask in an ideal scenario. Also many people have their builds 99% min maxed, investing lots of time, knowledge and currency

some people also are too attracted by tooltip dps, even for the cost of overall clear speed and performance.

I personally dont care about tooltip at all. You either clear fast enough, or not. Last season my last build was a tank, able to do up to T15 bossses and clear maps relatively fast. T16 have much more life, Minotaur kill was really slow but I facetanked him so I felt good.. my tooltip was in 10-15k range depending on buffs, but if I counted everything in an optimal scenario, dps I could have advertised would be around 100k..

It is one of the problem with streamers. People watch them having easy time and set their expectations too high. Most of the streamers know the game very well, invest tons of time, and have tons of currency. So average player will never be able to reach their level.. and instead of being happy to make it to endgame and clear the maps decently, they are frustrated because the expect to faceroll hardest content instantly like in some other games..

I think the biggest bait to the guides that scream "### DPS!!!" and such, is that they "neglect" to mention that they need ridiculously min-max gear. And then the "budget" version builds end up being semi-min-max required.

Most people think that the second they get the gear, their damage reaches the breaking point. Proper links, skill gem level (especially for spells), quality, and all that, play a huge role in your damage output. The weapon is critical for an Attack build. My damage nearly doubled when I swapped over from the 5L Brain Rattler (~480 weapon DPS ) to the 6L Atziri's Disfavour (~600 weapon DPS ).