How the hell do you do dps in this game?

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Attlus wrote:

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.

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Attlus wrote:

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

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Attlus wrote:

So you're telling me dry dps, with no auras or anything in a hub doesn't normally break 100k? It's only around that high when you hit all your flasks with max charges? So what's the normal benchmark dps generally?

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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Attlus wrote:

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

those people are idiots, ignore them.

I would ignore chaos resist tbh.

You dont have to double dip, do poison etc to have decent damage. Builds do get better with budget though, obviously. If you want to be tanky and have good dps most of the time it requires some rly good gear, and most of the time good gear comes with a big price tag.

Some ideas are not going to have great dps, 1h RT groundslam max block with a 1h axe using a BoR so 1 of your gems is inc aoe and another faster attacks which is basically 2 gems that dont rly give you dps on quake, anvil amulet... Yeah, thats never going to do great dps. Quake itself never has high tooltip, 50k tooltip quake is going out perform 100k tooltip cyclone, it will out perform 100k tooltip on most melee skills tbh.

The reave char u have is a decent looking tree, but again u got inc aoe and fortify in your 6L so you have a 4L skill in dps terms and youre using an anvil which has 10% reduced attack speed rather than a 70 life, double crit + flat physical amulet, if you want deeps these things are gonna hold u back. I have a block gladiator using crit swords, but I have a full dps 6L setup, a crit+phys amulet and Im using a rats nest hat with a proper chest. I still have 70/70 block without a bringer or an anvil, just from passives and cwdt tempest shield. I wont have 78/78, but going ham on 1 thing often takes its toll on other areas, that character has about 8,770 combined hp for example, youre not gonna get that with a bor and an anvil while still being a full on sword crit build with a good amount of armour and life regen and all these other things you need in the bigger picture. Youre not going to get it all on a shoe string budget or a sub lvl90 char either.

Its an arpg, gear matters, thats just always gonna be a part of it. But good gear doesnt have to cost the earth, a melee weapon is probably always going to demand to be paid for, but the other pieces you can shop around and find the deals on. The dual res boots that you can spot room to master the 3rd res on, the ring thats been up for 10 minutes way undervalued, the gloves with room to bench attack speed that everyones overlooked. Some of my best gloves cost me 5 chaos in a league and Im using them on a character who has other pieces that cost me 200 exalts for a single item.

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1453R wrote:

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Attlus wrote:

So you're telling me dry dps, with no auras or anything in a hub doesn't normally break 100k? It's only around that high when you hit all your flasks with max charges? So what's the normal benchmark dps generally?

Exactly.

All the yakalopes advertising whatever ridiculous DPS number in the build forums are doing it all-in, with every charge, every flask, every reservation, and some of them even go so far as to invite a Guardian or Necromancer aurabot to stand in their hideout offscreen for the DPS screengrab. It's moose piss, but they want you to click their thread and Phat Numbaz generate clicks.

The issue with looking for a 'benchmark' DPS is that it changes, drastically, based on the skill. 50k tooltip DPS Cleave, for example, would actually be doing significantly less than 3k DPS Blade Vortex, back during the days when Blade Vortex was actually good. The way the game calculates tooltip for any given skill tends to be dependent on the skill itself, with different contrived formulas to try and approximate 'real' DPS values. Then there's skills like Firestorm where 'real' DPS calculations amount to "FUGG IF I KNOW, BRUH" because the skill behaves in a way that makes math-heads cry.

The other thing is that little bonuses really do stack up over time, because every little bonus tends to compound with all the other little bonuses. Quality on gems and gem level is a big deal, a bigger one than newer folks tend to expect. Getting all your gems to level 20, hitting the Q recipe, then leveling them back up often gets you exceeding your previous DPS counts by gem level 12, simply because all the quality stacks up with itself and boosts the whole mess. Optimized trees, and every piece of optimized gear you can find for your given build, all add their own little chunk, and each chunk magnifies the effects of the other chunks to some extent.

That's how high-end level 95+ streamers and such can get pwnooblerizingly butt-clenching DPS numbers - they've eliminated all the slack and maximized all the things, and it adds up.

For newer players, more budget-constrained players, or players who spend less than eighteen hours a day on PoE, the general mark is "do I die relatively rarely/at all if Hardcore, and am I able to clear the content I'm setting as my goal relatively comfortably?" Most newer folks target high yellow/low red maps, in the T8-12 range or so, as a typical to-hit mark and work in that range until they hit their epiphanies, figure out that one character where everything comes together and makes sense.

Once you get there...well, everything makes more sense. PoE is a very knowledge-intensive game, and there's only so much of that knowledge you can soak up secondhand on the forums.

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1453R wrote:

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Attlus wrote:

So you're telling me dry dps, with no auras or anything in a hub doesn't normally break 100k? It's only around that high when you hit all your flasks with max charges? So what's the normal benchmark dps generally?

Exactly.

All the yakalopes advertising whatever ridiculous DPS number in the build forums are doing it all-in, with every charge, every flask, every reservation, and some of them even go so far as to invite a Guardian or Necromancer aurabot to stand in their hideout offscreen for the DPS screengrab. It's moose piss, but they want you to click their thread and Phat Numbaz generate clicks.

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Attlus wrote:

Fuck man, I on't even go by streamers, I go by running lake and mapping, and it just looks liek nothing I did mattered because some guy ran up with some broken ass spell and wiped everything in a second.

The only two builds I did worth a damn was the crit reaver, which could be better, and the dual wield lacerate build, which I recently respeced to see if another build was better, and it doesn't seem so at all. But like, on my character, fighitng Dominus in a high tier map, I can't even touch him let alone stand up to him. Same goes for that boss with the lightning lazer in the prison, to be frank, it's been a while since I've even been there since last I checked the dps was too much to handle. I was able to kill endgame map abomiation Piety with a friend, and on hardcore as well.

In fact I've gotten to 90 before on hc, twice, but I die or get bored and my dps feels lacking, always. I just have no idea what dps to be aiming for with a given skill really.

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1453R wrote:

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Attlus wrote:

Fuck man, I on't even go by streamers, I go by running lake and mapping, and it just looks liek nothing I did mattered because some guy ran up with some broken ass spell and wiped everything in a second.

The only two builds I did worth a damn was the crit reaver, which could be better, and the dual wield lacerate build, which I recently respeced to see if another build was better, and it doesn't seem so at all. But like, on my character, fighitng Dominus in a high tier map, I can't even touch him let alone stand up to him. Same goes for that boss with the lightning lazer in the prison, to be frank, it's been a while since I've even been there since last I checked the dps was too much to handle. I was able to kill endgame map abomiation Piety with a friend, and on hardcore as well.

In fact I've gotten to 90 before on hc, twice, but I die or get bored and my dps feels lacking, always. I just have no idea what dps to be aiming for with a given skill really.

A couple of those bosses are problems for anybody that don't have the mechanics down pat. I still have trouble with a number of red map bosses myself, and Facelaser the Squidstroyer of Worlds is not a nice one.

Anyways.

Any given skill's DPS is 'enough that you like it'. My best character is (ironically) a Frost Blades Raider as well. I use dual Touch of Anguish for the chaining effects; my hideout tooltip with Hatred up is something like 27k. With my Frenzies up (which is a reasonable assumption for any decently-built Frenzy Raider) it's in the region of 45-50k. With my Warchief active, Vaal Haste active, and my damage flasks up I top out somewhere in the realm of 120k DPS - but only in short, resource-intensive bursts I cannot possibly sustain.

That character flies through most maps I've subjected her to. General trash-clearing is a breeze, most bosses melt in less than a minute. Even the ones that don't take visible damage from my attacks; my particular build lacks penetration as, up until 2.6.0, there was no good way to get penetration for a dual-element Frost Blades Phys2Light build, but outside of the nasty effect lack of penetration had on my boss DPS? My 27k 'dry' tooltip DPS turned into roughly double that with my normal mapping buffs up, and that was more than enough for Maiden to absolutely wreck anything I asked her to wreck.

Got a triple Warchiefs Bringer of Rain Scion that cost peanuts to assemble and has ~28-30k dry tooltip in town. That's a great example of how tooltips can lie, since her actual DPS is slightly more than triple that - the tooltip lists per-totem DPS, and with three totems down I get that DPS three times over, plus extra for having a Warchief active and getting its melee buff. That build wrecks stuff as hard as the Raider does; she's not nearly as fast, but she was comfortably handling business when her tooltip was hovering around 20k or even less.

'Benchmark' DPS doesn't really exist. It's so skill-dependent, and so dependent on the expectations of the individual player, that any figure someone tries to give you as a round number is irrelevant. If you like the character, then its DPS is enough. If you don't like it, then you need to fix it. Which character are you working on currently, in specific?