I have some questions regarding two handed rifles. Why have some magical rifles much more dps than epic rifles? The dps is based on the other stats of the item as well right? (Like +offensive, +chaos damage etc)
Look at the huge difference in level, but the yellow one is already much stronger. I also have a level 35 epic which I use, it is only slightly weaker than the yellow one.
Which one would you use? I am a conjurer with high cunning, and using primal strike and savagery as my main attacks.
Lets talk about facts.
Yellow weapon deal 872 dps and epic deal 837 dps. Which means yellow weapon deal 4% more dps regarding character sheet.
Now lets talk about opinions, you are saying that 4% dps is “much more dps” and “much stronger”. I dont think so.
In my opinion, yellow weapon could be a better option if your character has a full cold damage build. And epic weapon could be a better option in any other case.
Watching you default weapon attack I can say epic one is better for you, because will grant you more lightning damage and lightning damage bonus. Without talking about remaining stats, that are nice. For example, 15% Damage to Aetherials? or 4% to all foes? 31 physique or 0 physique?
that is because the logic for determining the level is completely different for unique items vs regular items. Every unique is assigned a certain level while all regular / white items have a level requirement of 0, only stat requirements. They get a level requirement based on their affixes instead.
What you have here is therefore a ‘level 60’ base item with a level 35 affix that you compare to a level 40 unique. It always will win on base stats.
Hmm, I noticed this too after a while. I am using the epic, it has the bleeding bonus, and it grants me a good bleeding skill. When I use it, combined with the curse from occultist that increases bleeding damage, I noticed that I do massive damage on bosses that are even stronger than me. So I will keep the epic.
The fact I said there is a huge difference is because the other weapon is of much higher level, so relatively it is a huge difference, but not absolutely hehe.
Thanks for clearing up, that does make sense to me.
I would take the yellow rifle but keep/stash the epic.
The reason is that it’s not always going to be better as your epic actually does higher physical damage (146-206 vs. 41-235). The epic does an average of 176 physical damage (pay special note to the bonus physical damage below), the yellow does an average of 138.
Your epic actually does a whole lot more base physical damage even if we ignore the elemental damage and the +77% physical modifier. If you combine that with devotions like kraken (which any two-hander should probably take), you’ll start to see the epic significantly outshining your yellow rifle in terms of DPS.
HOWEVER, your yellow rifle is of alacrity and has a very big attack speed bonus, and currently I’m thinking you don’t have kraken for a lot of physical bonus modifiers and don’t have lots of lightning bonuses. It not only deals slightly higher DPS at the moment for your current build, but it attacks way faster.
For me I’d take a weapon that attacks faster with a slight dip in DPS to one with a higher DPS that attacks slower, all other things being roughly equal. The reason is that it’ll often still net you more effective damage output.
As an extreme example, imagine you have a machine gun that does one damage per bullet but fires 100 times faster than a sniper rifle which deals 110 damage per bullet. Now let’s say a mob of angry soft monsters, all with 1 health, come charging at you. Even though your sniper rifle has more damage per second than your machine gun, you will be doing 110 damage per slow-firing round of which 109 damage is wasted per enemy. Your machine gun is going to kill a lot, lot, lot faster while the sniper is going to get swarmed reloading his rifle in between each target. Usually it’s not so exaggerated, but attack speed is something to factor in sometimes even at the cost of some on-paper DPS. Slow-hitting weapons are often going to waste a lot of their excess damage and time on each target. When you add on hit and on critical procs into the mix then higher attack speed becomes even more valuable at the point where I might even sacrifice 20% on-paper DPS in favor of a much higher attack speed.
When in doubt though, try it out. To me you can’t always trust the crude DPS calculation on a weapon tooltip. It’s not even calculated the same way as when you equip the item (sometimes you will find a weapon reporting -X DPS in the tooltip will add DPS when you equip it). But you can’t even trust the DPS calculation on your character sheet, since it doesn’t factor in things like procs to my knowledge or anything of that sort (not even sure it factors in criticals), and sometimes you will have things kick in during the heat of battle that boost damage and alter everything. So without trying to delve into accounting for everything, when in doubt, I think you should just equip the weapon and kill stuff and see if that stuff dies faster or not.
The reverse could also be true- if you’re primarily using a cooldown skill with a large weapon damage factor, something like Blitz perhaps, then you might care much more about big per-hit damage and not care at all about weapon speed or DPS.
Very much so – any proc/skill triggering % weapon damage and especially one with a cooldown would definitely make things way more complicated and start making big, slow weapons with high damage a lot more attractive. It’s all very complex – I edited my end note to just say, “When in doubt, try it out!”
On the reverse reverse side though, if you have, say, a 3-second CD proc which deals % main-hand/off-hand damage with a slow-hitting weapon which triggers 15% chance of the time you hit, you might not trigger that anywhere close to 1 time every 3 seconds – maybe an average of once every 9 seconds.
Meanwhile a fast-hitting weapon might trigger it somewhere a lot closer to once every, say, 4.5 seconds average which means even though the proc is weaker, it’s being triggered roughly twice as often, and that might be better. Unless it’s less than half the strength as a result, it’s still a lot better than triggering that stronger proc once every 9 seconds unless it was more than twice as powerful.
It’s so complicated! I can’t sit down on paper and work all this stuff out – but often I feel like attack speed is something that could use more attention overall.
Attack speed can also factor into survivality when relying on attack damage converted to health. When taking big hits very quickly, your ability to recover health soon enough might be the key to living or dying. In that case, someone who swings or shoots very slowly might recover a ton of health with each hit but the time window in between each swing/firing of the weapon might be too large for him that he takes too many hits in that time frame leading to his demise. Meanwhile the fast hitter has a much smaller time window between taking damage and recovering health.
… in general I just tend to think attack speed is a really awesome, awesome property in the majority of the scenarios that could use a bit more attention, while the DPS calculation on character sheets and tooltips is overrated.
