Guide Ned Reddavis' Guide to Gun Damage (Updated to pyp-v1.0.0)

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Ned_Reddavis

Honorable Pirate
Hello again pirates! For those of you who are as hungry as I am to find the optimal damaging weapons for farming, I am back with another damage guide, trying to discern which of your firearms do the most damage output over a given time interval. We'll discuss general perks, then a deep dive into the math behind calculating damage, and end with DPS comparisons.

The easiest and first step into this journey is looking at all of the skill abilities that each gun has the option of choosing. Below is an example skill tree.

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Ammunition
Any gun will fire a currently equipped ammunition type, if you have the requisite ammo, and can be fired in two ways: shot instantly, or aim then shoot. First, looking at the ammo, the final shot, steel shot, deals far and away the most damage per skill point put into that shot, closely followed by silver. These two shots must be used on their relevant enemy types in order to do the damage that the shot says it will (Silver-Undead and Steel-Living), otherwise they suffer a minimum 90% damage penalty. When used correctly, however, these shots do so much damage that just 1 point in them will do at least as much damage as a lead shot with 8 skill points. So, under the assumption that ammo is never an issue, guns should always use silver and steel shot to do maximum bullet damage, with the only exception being if you are shooting an undead enemy with a gun with +3 lead shot, in which case you may use either lead or silver.

Passives
Very quickly we will look at the passive abilities: Sharpshooter, Dodge, and Eagle Eye. If you play on a pirate with maximum gun and notoriety level, your gun should never rarely if ever miss, unless de-buffed, therefore sharpshooter is not necessary for damage, but may be helpful. The Dodge and Eagle Eye passives do not directly alter the amount of damage that you can put out, but Dodge may indirectly increase damage by occasionally avoiding the few enemy attacks that will decrease player damage for a short few seconds.

Shots
Finally, the last two abilities for guns are Shoot/Scattershot and Take Aim. The in-game damage of these abilities will be the same for both skills at the same skill points, but the damage output calculation is different. After tests, it is my belief that the damage of Take Aim will always start at the damage potential of using the Shoot ability, and ramp up either linearly, or slightly logarithmically. The damage output of blunderbusses under the same exact conditions as other weapons do not match, so it is at this point that I will only discuss the other three gun variants and come back around to blunderbusses later. For those non-blunder weapons, and under the same skill point conditions, a full Take Aim meter will do 3x damage than the same gun using just the Shoot ability. When comparing the damage of the Shoot ability versus animation time of these weapons (shooting and reload) to the damage of Take Aim versus its animations (aim, shoot, reload), muskets and pistols will always deal more damage per second using a full take aim. When comparing a three shot attack versus three aimed and then shot attacks on repeaters, we find that repeaters will deal more damage simply using the shoot ability, which matches with its typical weapon ability bonuses.

Total Damage

If you just want DPS comparisons, feel free to skip ahead there, otherwise let's talk raw damage. For non-blunderbusses, the very base damage of a rank 1 lead shot and shoot attack and reducing out the weapon attack bonus damage increase, we find that they deal a base 91/92 damage. The displayed damage of a rank 1 lead shot and shoot attack is 35 and 26, respectively. When added and multiplied by 1.5 that yields 91.5, as was the tested value. Inconveniently, however, guns work differently from swords in that even though the sum of the two attacks you use * 1.5 can net you your base damage, increasing the rank of either your ammunition of shooting ability will increase the total damage of the sum of attacks. This sounds odd, so here is an example of the issue. If my damage equation is to look like:

Dmg=constants * (shoot ability damage + ammo damage)

for the base, then by the distributive property I cannot also say that:

2*Dmg=constants * (shoot ability damage + 2*ammo damage),

Which is essentially what I am saying. So, the damage equation cannot have addition of basic shoot and ammo attacks beyond rank 1, and instead resolves them into a number and multiplies that by the relevant damage increase from rank 1 to the current rank of each ability. Each rank gives a unique damage increase and multiplying all of them gives the total increase from one rank to another:

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Minimum Damage Equation: D=1.5*(26.5+R1A)*S1*S2*(1 + .005 * A)*C*P
Maximum Damage = 2*D

Where:
  • R1A = Rank 1 Damage of ammunition type used
  • S1 = Net damage increase for shooting ability (3x for take aim)
  • S2 = Net damage increase for ammunition ability
  • A = Weapon attack value
  • C = Critical rank boost, 1.05, 1.066, 1.1
  • P = Powerful ability; gives 1.5% more damage per rank (i.e. 1.015, 1.03 etc)

Blunderbusses
Now, if that wasn't confusing enough, we move on to the more vague and confusing blunderbusses. The data collected by me on blunders varies from that of the other guns. To start, a blunder's shot abilities are higher than all other guns, just about twice as much. This just adjusts the number 26 in the equation to a 53. Next, the standardized minimum value for blunder damage with lead shot and scattershot rank 1 does not fit the first equation when using the value of 1.5, instead it requires 2.22-2.25. Finally, the take aim bonus does not provide 3x damage like the other guns, but instead charges faster and gives a bonus 1.8x damage. Real nasty numbers, but those are all the differences that I could find changing the damage. So, our new model just for blunders is:

Minimum Damage Equation: D=2.25*(52.5+R1A)*S1*S2(1 + .005 * A)*C*P
Maximum Damage = 2*D

Where:
  • R1A = Rank 1 Damage of ammunition type used
  • S1 = Net damage increase for shooting ability (1.8x for take aim)
  • S2 = Net damage increase for ammunition ability
  • A = Weapon attack value
  • C = Critical
  • P = Powerful ability

Damage Per Second

Now, we take the damage range that we can calculate and divide that by the time required to produce that damage and we get our DPS. We have thus far found the damage of the gun without invoking any special abilities. Many of the gun abilities do not do any significant changes to damage or animation time for them to be relevant. For this reason I will leave out gun special abilities, but it should be noted that the perks Rapid Fire, Quick Load, and Point Blank provide significant weapon boosts.

After a ton of boring math we finally have our table of the best guns per category and their DPS. There are a LOT of guns and a LOT of ammo types AND two aiming techniques. I have done calculations for all of these variations for famed and legendaries, but the most important are the sorted data by best aiming technique (i.e. take aim for all but repeaters) and for steel shot and silver shot. Also the "Blunder swap" is using 4 blunderbusses by shooting them and swapping until the last one; "no reload" implies the reload time is not added to the total time since this is a high amount of damage and most situations call for the enemy's death by then.

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Takeaways

Pistols have the high class DPS, especially the legendary guns. Also, although Beckett's pistol has a +3 steel shot boost, by the nature of how the damage is calculated Mercer's Pistol with its +3 take aim boost will do the same damage increase, and on top of that Mercer's has a critical strike bonus thereby making Mercer's do more DPS than Beckett's. Unsurprising to me, muskets and bayonets are low on damage per second, but so are blunders (with the exception of 4 chained), although that isn't to say they don't pack a whopping one hit strike.
Curiously, repeaters take the top spots per category, and blunder swap strats are also up there; they are higher than even the coveted Mercer's Pistol. I know you're wondering "what crap gun does the least dps?", well let me tell ya it's Orangutan Repeater with lead shot and fully aiming at a whopping 111 DPS.

And that's all I have acquired thus far for finding gun DPS, for those of you that made it this far, and those that scrolled right to the bottom, I really hope that this was helpful in some way! If you're still interested in the other variations and their DPS, check out my google spreadsheet that I used to compile all this. That's all! Ned Reddavis out!
 
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Once again, another fabulous job number crunching! I may not fully follow (as Mathematics has always been my weakest subject) but the extroverted detail is vastly appreciated. I can say with certainty that I'm excited to see what you dive in to next.

Fair Winds!
 
This speaks to me. Well done! I'd like to see how Magma w/Bane shot stacks up to Fullmoon w/Silver, too!
That is a fantastic question! I think in my haste I knew by looking that the grand blunder would be the highest and shadow the magma so I never crunched it for this guide, but I sure should have. To answer your question: Magma when using bane shot will do 506-1013 DPS! With silver it will do less at 501-1002 DPS, and with steel shot it will still do the most with 530-1060 DPS! That makes it the second best blunder for raw damage!
 
Quality post. Do you think you could run the numbers on the Seven Seas blunderbuss? I'm wondering how it stacks up with +3 Scattershot compared to Take Aim +3 of the Grand.
 
Quality post. Do you think you could run the numbers on the Seven Seas blunderbuss? I'm wondering how it stacks up with +3 Scattershot compared to Take Aim +3 of the Grand.
With steel shot it will do 378-756 DPS using scattershot, compared to the Grand blunder which will do 311-622 DPS. Seven Seas does 435-870 DPS using take aim which is still it's best mode of use for damage and still less than grand blunder's 560-1120 DPS.
 
I'm very surprised to see that Brigadier's Bayonet has a slight edge over Grand Blunderbuss. I'd assume that it's because the bayonet reloads faster. What doesn't make sense to me is Beckett's Pistol with silver shot dealing more DPS than Grand.
 
Great guide. One thing you kinda missed is that there are guns out there that have good bane boosts that make them quite attractive for use with bane shot particularly when you consider the status that they impart to your enemy and the resulting reduction in damage to you when you use them.
 
Maaaan... I do believe this person is a genius. To be honest, I don't have the base understanding of Mathematics Terms & Lingo to really understand some of the phrases and such, but the end results seem to put it in plain English. I'm still a bit confused on how much "Attack Power" actually affects a weapon's total DPS with all things considered. Does it multiply passive boosts like skills? Or is it simply a flat damage addition to base starting damage? I'd really like to understand this so I might find a few things out for myself, thanks.
 
Maaaan... I do believe this person is a genius. To be honest, I don't have the base understanding of Mathematics Terms & Lingo to really understand some of the phrases and such, but the end results seem to put it in plain English. I'm still a bit confused on how much "Attack Power" actually affects a weapon's total DPS with all things considered. Does it multiply passive boosts like skills? Or is it simply a flat damage addition to base starting damage? I'd really like to understand this so I might find a few things out for myself, thanks.
Yeah guns are a bit confusing and threw me for a spin trying to figure them out. I think the easiest way to understand how damage is formed is by looking at the equation on each guide. This one is the most daunting and nuanced of all the guides, but in essence it has a base damage (here it was the sum of the base shooting damage which is equal for both shooting types, plus the base damage of whatever shot you use) and then there are a multitude of factors that will multiplicatively (not additively) increase the damage of that base damage. Only in strange cases like for guns do we need to do any adding at all, typically it is easier where we have a base damage that the weapon can do according to the skill on the skill tree and then we simply multiply that by whatever increases its damage. Here is an example of how I calculated the damage for mercer's pistol, maybe that can help with your ventures in this realm:

Mercer's has a base "attack power" of 85, a critical strike of rank 3, and take aim boost of rank 3.

Ok now we have to figure out the five unknown variables to plug into the damage equation for pistols and that will net us the damage.
  1. R1A: Let's say here that the ammo we're using is steel shot. Based on the chart provided this is 96.
  2. S1: The shooting skill we will use is take aim drawn fully. This means that S1 = damage increase based on another net damage increase chart, which is 2.5. Additionally using take aim fully drawn provides an extra 3 multiplier for pistols.
  3. S2: The ammunition rank of the steel shot we use will be 5. Under the same damage increase chart this nets a 2 times multiplier.
  4. A: Attack as we stated was 85 so we just plug that right in.
  5. C: We said that Mercer's has rank 3 crit, so this is a 1.1 times multiplier to overall damage on average.
Plugging these numbers into the damage equation for pistols:

Dmin=1.5*(26+R1A)*S1*S2*(1 + .005 * A)*C
Dmin=1.5*(26+96)*(2.5*3)*(2)*(1+.005*85)*(1.1)=4302.7875
Dmax=2*Dmin=8605.575


Now none of my guides actually go into detail about the animation times of all the attacks and such, but I will say for this example as a pistol using full take aim this takes 4.73 seconds experimentally.

So for the DPS for Mercer's we now take the min and max damage and divide by the 4.73 seconds to deal that damage and boom DPS. If you check this that goes to 909.68-1819.36 DPS which I nicely rounded up to 910-1820 DPS.

Regarding how attack power affects overall DPS, since it is multiplied it affects DPS by its factor directly. Here, Mercer's has a 1.425 damage multiplier to the whole equation meaning that attack power alone brings up the damage of the weapon by 1.425 times. It doesn't matter if the gun does a max of 2 damage when everything but attack power is accounted for or if it does 2,000,000 damage, the attack multiplier would still increase the damage by 1.425 times on this gun.

Ok, hopefully that answered your question and didn't turn into some futile tangent. Sorry for the late response, school has started again and been clouding my brain.
 
Not a problem, but to be entirely honest I still need to research into what some of those math symbols mean. xD Once I do that, and read over your guide a bit more then I'm sure I'll be able to grasp the true concept. Thanks a lot though, you're work is definitely appreciated.
 
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