Guild Wars 2

in order of base damage

spatial surge (assuming target is at 1200 range) – 348 (2 additional targets in beam)
long ranged shot (assuming target is at 1200 range) – 317 (projectile combo 20%)
fireball – 314
hip shot (with rifled barrels for 1200 range) – 251 (pierces targets, projectile combo 20%)
necrotic grasp – 246 (piercing , projectile combo 20%)
orb of wrath – 224
dual shot (with stronger bowstrings for 1200 range) – 212 (projectile combo 100%)
chain lightning – 203 (3 bounce)
stoning – 185 (weakness, projectile combo 100%)
bleeding shot – 155 (255 bleed, projectile combo 20%)
tranquilliser dart (with rifled barrels for 1200 range) – 130 (170 bleed, weakness, projectile combo 20%)
winds of chaos – 111 (chance of 298 bleed / 328 burn / vuln, 1 bounce, chance of might / fury to ally)
water blast – 111 (370 healing)

calculating dps based on wiki info:
Spatial surge with 1,5 second cast time 348 dmg:
(348/1,5)=232 dps
Long Ranged Shot (1500 range when traited) 3/4th second cast time.
317/0,75= 423 dps
fireball (Attack speed is 1 attack per 1.4 seconds.)
314/1,4= 224 dps
hip shot 3/4th second cast time:
251/0,75= 335 dps
necrotic grasp 3/4th second cast time:
246/0,75= 328 dps
orb of wrath Actual attack speed is once every .8 seconds.
224/0,8=280 dps
dual shot 2x 212 at approximately 1.19 seconds per attack.
414/1.19=348 dps
Chain Lightning 3/4th cast time:
203/0,75=271 dps (more than fireball even if there’s only one target)
stoning Attack speed is 1 attack per 1.35 seconds.
185/1,35= 137 dps
bleeding shot – Attack speed is approximately 0.96 seconds per attack damage is 155+255=410
410/0,96=427 dps
tranquilizer dart 300 damage every 3/4th second:
300/0,75= 400 dps
winds of chaos ( a bit trickier to calculate) 0,75 casting time:
111+((1/3×298)(1/3×328)(vulnerability,might,fury))/0,75=427 dps +boons and vulnerability.
water blast Attack speed is 1 attack per 1.35 seconds.
111/1,35=82 dps….. there’s a heal though….

So now in order of most dps to least dps:
Winds of Chaos (427 dps+perks) mesmer
Bleeding Shot (427 dps) warrior
Long ranged shot (423 dps) ranger
Tranquilizer dart (400dps) engineer
Dual shot (348 dps) warrior
Hip shot (335 dps) engineer
Necrotic grasp (328 dps) necromancer
Orb of Wrath (280 dps) Guardian

Chain lightning (271 dps) elementalist
Spatial surge (232 dps) mesmer
Fireball (224 dps) elementalist
Stoning (137 dps) elementalist
Water blast (82 dps) elementalist.

This is after the staff was buffed.

Conclusion:
lowest armor
lowest health
lowest damage
no innate survivability or damage mechanics like warriors, mesmers, thieves and necros have.

add a fact that control in this game is TERRIBLE compared to any other MMO RPG so staff ele dont have even a tool to stay at range and kite his target slowly… and if he can kite a bit, he cant kite long enough to kill target due to lowest hp and armor and other things…

and all 4 of those elementalists skills can be quite easily side-stepped.

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

calculating dps based on wiki info:
Spatial surge hits 3 times with 1,5 second cast time 348 dmg:
(348/1,5)x3=696 dps

Actually the damage listed (348 dmg) is for the 3 hits total, not per hit.

Also are you taking into account the aftercast time?

Alphard.6529:

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

calculating dps based on wiki info:
Spatial surge hits 3 times with 1,5 second cast time 348 dmg:
(348/1,5)x3=696 dps

Actually the damage listed (348 dmg) is for the 3 hits total, not per hit.

Also are you taking into account the aftercast time?

Very happy to hear that.
Wiki doesn’t say anything about what the aftercast is so I couldn’t include it in the calculation. So the damage would be:
348/1,5=232 dps which is actually pretty low yay! But it can’t be side stepped like all our range 1200 spells can be

Did I make any other mistakes?

Necrotic grasp is much slower than once every 3/4ths of a second – it’s around 1.35 seconds per attack. (First try was 29 in 39 seconds, second try was 26 in 35 seconds, third try was 29 in 39 seconds again.)

I believe that drops it to somewhere between fireball and stoning.

I wish the stats on tooltips / the wiki were a bit more useable. Aftercast delay is a huge factor for dps, but it’s not listed anywhere in game. Best of luck getting all the stats for the 1200 range attacks though, it’s great to see them all directly compared.

Edit: I think chain lightning’s cast time is closer to 1.22 seconds / attack?

If you want to calculate auto-attack dps, you should go to LA, hit a practice dummy for a few minutes, record how much damage you’ve done, then divide by the number of minutes. Be sure to have the same amount of power on each char (beware might stacks), prec & crit don’t matter since you can’t crit on the dummies.

I’m curious why do you think that winds of chaos with it’s infamously slow projectile speed(roughly similar to guardian’s orb) is top dps 1200 auto out there?
It’s fairly ok in melee range, but after even 400-600 players can outrun it.

Winds.3087:

I’m curious why do you think that winds of chaos with it’s infamously slow projectile speed(roughly similar to guardian’s orb) is top dps 1200 auto out there?

he’s counting burn/bleed to the numbers

The Ele’s #1 skills tend to be lackluster, but I’m ok with that. I tend to dislike specs that encourage you to spend all your time autoattacking.

SilverUniverse.7103:

Winds.3087:

I’m curious why do you think that winds of chaos with it’s infamously slow projectile speed(roughly similar to guardian’s orb) is top dps 1200 auto out there?

he’s counting burn/bleed to the numbers

Burns and bleeds don’t matter if they still aren’t hitting their target.

Unfortunatly, DPS from auto-attacks can’t be calculated like this. The activation time on the tooltip is often wrong. For example, Spatial Surge (mesmer) fires about as often as Long Range Shot (ranger), while their tooltips say differently.
Nice effort, but unfortunatly this data is very inaccurate.

What Bean said. Also your calculations of Winds of Chaos fails to take into account that since its damage comes from two sources (direct and condition) that it will scale poorly in practice. My Ele’s Fireballs crit for about 2k and can do so because they’re entirely direct damage based so scale with crit damage and power. Try that with Winds of Chaos (either condition or direct damage gear) and you’ll find it’s more utilitous than damaging because you really can’t max Condition Damage, Crit Damage, Power, and Precision all on the same character.

I hope OP edits his post with a note that these numbers are not checked and has no idea if they reflect anything real in game.

First of all there is no such thing as base damage in guild wars 2. And no, calling naked vs naked with exotic weapon, or naked vs 2600 armor with exotic weapon as base damage is wrong and missleading. The wiki damage numbers might be with any random amount of power. And even if they are with 916 power, the tooltip cast times do not reflect reality as many animations take longer to fully complete than the tooltip activation time says.

So the list was made without any checking or calculating.

I checked these in an hour. Concider cast times +-0.1s. Skill coefficient in brackets, I think accurate, anet has em in 2 digits for most ive seen. In order of DPS.

Sabull.5670:

And no, calling naked vs naked with exotic weapon, or naked vs 2600 armor with exotic weapon as base damage is wrong and missleading. The wiki damage numbers might be with any random amount of power. And even if they are with 916 power, the tooltip cast times do not reflect reality as many animations take longer to fully complete than the tooltip activation time says.

The wiki actually has a standard formula for posting damage values, that was put in place quite early in the game’s history. Basically it’s 916 power, and maximum weapon damage at level 80 for all weapon skills. Full set of rules here.

There’s also been a rise in posting the actual coefficient for some of the weapon skills.

I’ll admit it’s somewhat misleading, but since all the skill damage values are reported from the same baseline, it allows comparison between skills.

Even if those values were all correct, we can’t judge the elementalist’s staff based on its dps value. Staff is a crowd control/ party support weapon, with plenty of aoe and combo fields. Elementalists’ also don’t rely on auto-attacks that much, exceptions aside, while classes like rangers grealy depend on them.

did this chart take into account each one of the skills listed has a different damage multiplier with power scaling?

Because if it didnt, the thread doesnt matter.

Softspoken.2410:

The wiki actually has a standard formula for posting damage values, that was put in place quite early in the game’s history. Basically it’s 916 power, and maximum weapon damage at level 80 for all weapon skills. Full set of rules here.

There’s also been a rise in posting the actual coefficient for some of the weapon skills.

I’ll admit it’s somewhat misleading, but since all the skill damage values are reported from the same baseline, it allows comparison between skills.

916 power is way to low to really compare scaling, and its very misleading.

I’m also a bit unsure why AoE considerations are not being given in this, especially since other skills are having traits considered.

For instance, assuming the DPS calculations in the OP are accurate, tranquilizer dart sits at 400 DPS, which looks better than fireball’s 224 DPS. However, once fireball is hitting two targets, it’s DPS doubles to 448. In fact, fireball can hit up to five targets for 1120 DPS. However, tranquilizer dart is capped at 400 DPS since it can only hit one target at a time.

Additionally, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to put trait considerations into this. Using tranquilizer dart, it’s default range is 900, but you can take a trait to make it 1200. However, fireball is 1200 by default. Comparing a traited skill to a non-traited skill is not fair. If tranquilizer dart had a 1200 default range, it’s possible it would be naturally weaker.

A similar comparison can be made to dual shot and hip shot.

The calculations also assume all condition damage is distributed as an immediate package instead of over time. While it’s possible to simply numbers this way, it does not accurately describe the behaviour of the damage, nor does it give a true DPS rating. The DPS in a real scenario would be different than the simplified calculations show for abilities that use condition damage.

Furthermore, these are still only auto-attacks, which to not completely characterize an entire weapon. While that falls outside the scope of this thread, I don’t think it’s a good idea to draw any strong conclusions when a key piece of context is missing.

Ele autoattacks are lackuster because you have other 16 skills, instead of 4, to rotate.

In other words, you’ll rarely find yourself in the situation “Autoattacking cause i’m waiting cooldowns”, because you can just hop in another attunement.

Given that you’re not playing very poorly, but that’s another story.

Raven.9603:

did this chart take into account each one of the skills listed has a different damage multiplier with power scaling?

Because if it didnt, the thread doesnt matter.

Softspoken.2410:

The wiki actually has a standard formula for posting damage values, that was put in place quite early in the game’s history. Basically it’s 916 power, and maximum weapon damage at level 80 for all weapon skills. Full set of rules here.

There’s also been a rise in posting the actual coefficient for some of the weapon skills.

I’ll admit it’s somewhat misleading, but since all the skill damage values are reported from the same baseline, it allows comparison between skills.

916 power is way to low to really compare scaling, and its very misleading.

As long as you compare skills in a multiplicative / divisive way (X skill’s DPS is 15% higher than Y skill) it doesn’t really matter how much power you take the measurements at, as long as it’s consistent. If you’d like, just double every number you see on the wiki and that should simulate the damage at 1832 power.

Edit: I will add though, that any skill that also applies conditions throws a gigantic wrench in the works because of how differently condition and direct damage scale.

After cast is very, very important because the total time for an attack used for attack rate is actually activation time+after cast duration. Hopefully OP’s list can be updated witht he real dps in the fute. So thank you Sabull and anyone else who puts time into finding the real attack rate.

WTB recount
/15chars

Yeah. We’ll need to actually test attacks per minute for each skill to determine that part of the equation. I do have one of each profession between two accounts, so I’ll try to do that when I have a chance.

Redo this taking aoe into account and damage over, say, 1 minute. Fireball is not too bad.

All I did was calculate with the cast time/aftercast and damage provided to me by the wiki to find out which skills have the most or least dps. That’s the only thing I calculated.
I did this considering that there is only one target.

Fiontar.4695:

Yeah. We’ll need to actually test attacks per minute for each skill to determine that part of the equation. I do have one of each profession between two accounts, so I’ll try to do that when I have a chance.

Thank you! looking forward to hearing the results.