Guide Ned Reddavis' Guide to Optimizing DPS for Faster Looting Part 1

[Ned_Reddavis]

The way to obtain loot on land is by killing enemies and bosses and the faster they are killed the more loot you will be able to sift through to find what you want. In order to kill things faster and loot more, you can improve how much damage you're dealing to the enemy you are fighting, which is exactly what this guide will provide. I will start off simple, discussing the nature of damage and then go into more specific detail on it's calculation, ending in a discussion on damage per second (DPS) of all weapon types in part 2.

DISCLAIMER: Many of my calculations are based on statistical data and therefore may not be 100% accurate. This being the case, I have taken precautions by testing a thorough amount of times to have statistically significant data sets and/or enough to not need to extrapolate information. Thus I have complete confidence in the relative comparisons of weapons and nearly that much confidence with the true numbers of those weapons.

Boot-camp Basics
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"Damage" is the effect a player has on their enemy whenever they land an effective attack, thus depleting part of the enemy's health. Fighting higher level enemies and bosses is made much easier and faster with an increased amount of damage. To increase your damage there are quite a few things that one can do, such as increasing notoriety level, adding skill points to your attacks/passives, applying buffs, and using optimal attacking methods with ideal weapons. All factors that increase the damage of a weapon are applied multiplicatively to what I refer to as the "base damage" of the weapon. This is the damage that is indicated by an attack skill in any given skill tree. For example, the base attack of a rank 1 chop attack on a level 50 pirate is 21-42 damage. Now I will discuss other effects on damage, first non-weapon related, and then weapon related ones.

Nuances of Damage
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There are three things here that I want to discuss. Firstly, the damage numbers that I analyze later in this guide are ones that we see pop up as red text above an enemy on an attack hit, and theoretically this damage is applied to the health of the enemy. It is true that some damage gets applied to the health bar of the enemy, but this is very often not the exact number of the red text that you see show up. It is more often to be above or below the red number, which creates problems with discerning the real damage that is being dealt to the enemy. The total damage for red after 130 tests was 157371 and the total for health loss was 156672. The relative difference is a measly .444%, meaning that the damage dealt to health is 99.55% of the red damage numbers. This is so close to 100% that it can be assumed that the red damage numbers provide an accurate detail of how much damage you will do on average.

Secondly, weapons such as swords and daggers have a system of dealing damage wherein they chain attacks together. You can either achieve a perfect combo by timing it correctly or perform a mistimed combo for mistiming it. Mistimed combos do 25% less red damage than perfect combos, but the same health damage. This seems like a bug so for now, it is faster to use mistimed combos but in the future it likely won't be.

Lastly, the level of the enemy is important to how much damage you will do. After testing what I have figured out is that for gray and green level enemies you will do the same damage, and then damage begins to scale down as you increase enemy level (same for regular and boss enemies). Starting at 15 levels below your pirate's notoriety level you will lose 3.33% of your damage each level higher, up to 1/3 fighting enemies below your notoriety by 5 or fewer. It appears that enemies of higher level than you do not decrease damage further. The following chart may help further understanding. The numbers are color coded with the enemy level color.

Weapon Changes to Damage
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We are starting to get to the meat of this guide but first I would like to briefly discuss the weapon related factors that increase damage. Higher notoriety pirates deal more damage; a whopping 3 times damage from level 1 to 50! Using weapons that have higher attack values, damage increasing abilities, and using better ammunition all increase damage. Finally, there are buffs that can be used to increase damage, such as potions and the doll's curse ability. Now it is time to discuss the damage of the different weapon types.

Optimized Weapon Damage by Type
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Every weapon variant has some way to optimize your damage and do as much damage over the smallest time possible, allowing you to kill enemies faster and loot more. Weapon types usually have a general best usage format, but some specific weapons can be used a bit differently with good results.

Voodoo Staffs
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Flaming skull and banish (for the staff of water only) are the staff spells to use. Since the spells can be charged before a fight, desolation does the most pre-charged DPS. If you can survive using a charged desolation and then moving onto flaming skull or banish, that is the best DPS possible. Unfortunately spirit mastery is not working at the moment, but the other three passives for staff should be invested in to rank 5, as well as the doll tree passive.

Voodoo Dolls
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Dolls do damage with poke, swarm, scorch, and life drain and all of these are important for optimal damage since they are cool-down based. All four of these attacks and the focus passive should be rank 5. After testing, I have found that the following series of attacks is optimal DPS: curse, life drain, scorch, swarm, poke, poke, swarm, poke, poke, swarm, poke (then repeat from start, cursing as necessary).

Grenades
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The animation times of throwing grenades are the same using all grenade ammunition types, so using the highest damaging grenade, siege charge, will deal the most DPS. The best throwing technique is minimum charged long volleys to maximize DPS. Finally, the cannon passive barrage increases damage and should be rank 5.

Guns
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For all gun types, the best ammunitions to use are steel shot, or silver shot if the weapon has high silver shot bonuses. For a select few guns, bane shot will do more damage than silver shot, but not more than steel shot. When comparing DPS, repeaters will do the most when rapidly using the shoot ability (as is intended by the weapon's bonuses and style), but all other gun variants will do the most when fully aiming with take aim (which provides bonus damage). Guns do not have useful passives for damage so points can go elsewhere.

Daggers
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Daggers are rather complex because they provide a large amount of variety in how they can be used and how to spend your skill points. In general, the optimal DPS is a combination of full perfect timed combos and throwing daggers, typically viper's nest and rarely sidewinders. Throwing daggers should be done as often as possible but at the end of attack combos. Daggers also offer a few useful damaging abilities that should also be used on cool-down and at the end of combos. Finally, to deal the most damage you will also want to backstab the enemies for an extra 25% damage. Both passives should be rank 5, with finesse possibly allowing rank 4. The best allocation of points will be to not put points into the first main dagger attack and put those four elsewhere.

Swords
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Swords do the best DPS when performing a full perfect combo. Using sweep decreases DPS and bladestorm only increases DPS for a couple swords. Swords have the largest variety of special weapon abilities and therefore the most abilities that increase damage. Bloodfire and Dutchman's Wrath do not work at the moment to increase damage. Ghost forms or the equivalent increase damage by 20% while under the effect. The sword passive abilities do not provide extra damage.

Weapon Damage Equations
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For guns and grenades the equation is: D=Z*(R1S+R1A+0.5*P)*S1*S2*(1 + .005 * A)*C*PA

• Z=1.5 for grenades and non-blunder guns; Z=2.25 for blunders
• R1S= Rank 1 damage of the throw/shoot ability being used as shown by skill tree
• R1A= Rank 1 damage of the ammunition being used as shown by skill tree
• S1= Damage increase based on rank of throw/shoot ability
• S2= Damage increase based on rank of ammunition type
• A= Attack power of weapon used
• C= Critical Strike bonus; 1 if none up to 1.1 for critical strike rank 3
• PA= rank of passive ability increasing damage (ranks 0-5; extra .05 for 1st 5 ranks, slightly less at later ranks)
• P= Powerful ability rank (ranks 0-4)
• Additionally, for non-blunders using full take aim, multiply by 3; for blunders using take aim, multiply by 1.8

For all other weapons the equation is: D=1.5*(B + 0.5 * P)*(1 + .005 * A)*PA*C

• B= Rank 1 damage of attack being done

Ok, that's all I can fit in this first part of the guide, in the next part I will break down DPS and make comparisons there. See you in part 2! Ned Reddavis out.

 

[Reese Jenner]

Any chance this information is correct in 2020?

I think some of this needs updating.

 

[Ned_Reddavis]

Any chance this information is correct in 2020?

I think some of this needs updating.

You're right, but I'm waiting to finish updating the individual guides before I re-tackle this one again.