If one decides to use skills with cooldowns on their left click, the displayed dps shown in the character tab and weapons will be based on the notion that one ONLY uses that skill and does not use normal attacks between cool downs. This makes it much more difficult to gauge actual dps especially when considering weapons.
I don’t really get your point the normal attacks are not part of the skill effect. Why should they get counted in the skill’s dps?
There might be some kind of formula they could add to the game that would calculate how the auto attack and those certain skills work together, but it seem like it would be complicated or hard to implement.
In the character window it shows a calculation of your left mouse button dps. If you have a skill without a cooldown assigned to it, it will display the dps of using the skill as fast as you can continuously. If however you have a skill with a cooldown it will display the dps of only the skill. However, if you’re melee, you usually won’t only use the skill, you’ll use normal attacks between cool downs. An example is the Slam skill. The game tells me that using it on cooldown is a massive dps loss even though this is entirely untrue.
The calculation would be easy enough, it would simply put as many attacks as possible between cooldowns and average the dps of those things.
What attacks? Default weapon attacks? Savagery/Fire Strike/another attack replacer? Are you using other cooldown-based skills? Are you hitting said cooldown skills at the exact perfect time that they become available after cooldown? In what order? Programming such a thing simply is impractical.
Looking at sheet DPS for cooldown skills is not the way to determine how powerful they are as you said, because they would result in a loss of paper DPS. Instead, i weigh them based on their damage per hit which can be seen on the 2nd character tab.
AFAIK these things are only there to serve as a useful point of reference for players, so you have a much easier time comparing the relative DPS of skills. It’s up to you to determine how useful they actually are based on context.
They are not meant to actually tell you what your current DPS is, and even if they were designed to do that they would only be useful on a few builds -there’s an extremely long list of builds for which that function is just a pretty number to look at, from builds that use multiple persistent effect skills to (hybrid) summoners to proc-based builds to builds that use -cooldown effects.