Hi. I am a new Grim Dawn player but not new to ARPG’s. The damage calculations in Grim Dawn are confusing to me. I am playing a dual wielding Tactician (Cadence). A lot of times I find new guns I believe are clear upgrades with much better base damage (and what I believe is not much worse other modifiers) but when I check them against the damage to my current weapons that is not the case. Can someone please explain to me how damage calculations actually work?
Thanks in advance.
Old player also confused about damage calculations 
Take it with a grain of salt.
Here is a perfect example. I am level 24. I stripped off all my gear and placed a gun in the main hand spot. Weapon damage says its 154-200. Cadence is supposed to be 430% of main hand damage (860). Game says my Cadence hit is 1127-1375.
How can this possibly be?
Cadance has flat dmg too
Well it depends. Cunning gives physical damage bonuses; the weapon could have magical damage that gets boosted by Spirit. We’d need some more details to answer that question.
Here is another question. Trying to search for this gun on Grimtools and it comes up unfound -
Heart Piercing Tarnished Pepperbox Gun of Alacrity.
This gun has 11-18 flat physical damage.
100% Pierce
It also has 4-5 piercing damage; and
12% piercing damage.
The tooltip in game says the 12% additional piercing damage comes to [11-17]
12% of 15-23 is NOT 11-17.
Can anyone please explain?
How do I provide that info to you here please?
Cadance has flat damage too…
Name - Tarnished Pepperbox Gun
Prefix - Heart Piercing
Suffix - of Alacrity
Thanks. I was looking for the gun with its total name and not broken down by components.
Can you please answer my question about the gun’s damage?
This gun has 11-18 flat physical damage.
100% Pierce
It also has 4-5 piercing damage; and
12% piercing damage.
The tooltip in game says the 12% additional piercing damage comes to [11-17]
12% of 15-23 is NOT 11-17.
This is a range of values from which one will randomly roll that you have on the weapon. Just disable it in options.
Your weapon rolled 12 from the range of [11-17]
Ok thanks - that’s better.
Back to my damage question please. How does the gun listed above with 11-18 base damage have a better DPS than Maurader’s Justice with 22-41 base damage?
Marauder’s Justice is Cold Damage
Many things input into DPS. In this case trust it. For switching between items it is good. But do not trust it when you compare totally different builds.
Calculation for each skill is different.
I am stripped with no gear on. This is pure damage.
Unless you are level 1 with no mastery choices and attribute points spent, I would guess that your current character has more +% Pierce damage than it does +% Cold and that is why you see a difference. An Arcanist would see the calculated numbers differently.
I am a level 24 Tactician with 311 Cunning (127% additional physical and pierce damage).
Ok so now I am comparing between 2 physical damage guns:
versus
Which gun should have higher DPS?
No way of knowing until you wield them. If your skills/devotions are buffing physical damage, the first one could have the edge. But all things being equal, even without the 7% attack speed, the second weapon seems much better.
You can use grimtools.com to import your build and share it with us.
Thanks as requested:
I am playing on Normal difficulty.
Yeah. There’s a lot going on with your skills that will affect damage calculations and throw you off. If you really wanted to learn how damage is shown in your character sheet, you must remove all thos points and start from there.
But here’s some advice:
Trust the game. GD has a very strong theorycraft community. Any bugs/issues with damage calculations would have been fixed by now. Unless you want to become one yourself, don’t think too hard on how the numbers end up being shown to you. Even expert players don’t.
This only means you don’t need to concern yourself about the calculations. But the resulting numbers still matter, of course. However…
You have to be careful around DPS calculations. I personally almost never rely on it and relegate it as the last indicator when evaluating if I should replace a piece of equipment. The way Grim Dawn calculates it is by using the damage range you can see on the second page of your character sheet and multiplying it by your attack speed.
But that damage range isn’t telling the whole story of how your skills will perform. It won’t factor in “chance to x” stats in the equipment and skills, for instance. It also won’t factor in other effects your equipment and skills will have on other skills, et cetera. And because DPS has a multiplier in it, those stats can make a big difference in actual play. Essentially a weapon or other piece of equipment may seem to lower your damage output on paper, but in fact greatly increase it when used. Or entirely the other way around.
Essentially: 1) you always want to look at your damage range on page II of your character sheet for the skills being used, not your DPS. 2) You want to always look at that range as the minimum range of damage you will achieve on said skill. While fighting it is likely higher than what is shown. 3) You want to look at the other stats in the equipment and what do they offer your build, and make an (un)informed decision whether they are worth it 4) you don’t want to min/max in this game until you reach level 100 and decide you want to try the endgame content.
During gameplay the game will offer you equipment that is clearly much better than what you have. Usually anything that has you scratch your head is likely not an important enough of a change to warrant much thinking. As you gain experience in the game (and read the game guide at the grim dawn official site) you will start becoming better at making in-game decisions, and that (un)informed decision process will become more informed.
One last thing about DPS:
As you progress through the game, assuming you are gearing up well and levelling at your own pace (not trying to speed level), you will realize the game is designed around AOE skills and player damage outputs that can kill most non-boss monsters in one or two hits. This type of gameplay doesn’t benefit from DPS, but instead from single-hit high damage output. DPS becomes more relevant when fighting bosses and higher types. But even then, only if you a tanky build who can stand toe-to-toe with a boss. If your build relies on movement and kitting, hit-and-run tactics also render DPS less important.
All in all, DPS is the type of stat in this game that you will hear a lot when discussing build viability. But you must understand it’s being spoken in very generic manner and only to mean your general capacity to inflict damage. You never see anyone actually listing a value. And no one really cares about the DPS stat on the character sheet.