As with most RPGs, your success in Path of Exile hinges on more than your weapon’s base damage. There’s a metric far more important when choosing a deadly implement with which to arm yourself during your march across Wraeclast: damage per second (“DPS”). As its name suggests, DPS is the amount of damage you can deliver each second based on your weapon, armor, abilities, and stats. When choosing a weapon, its DPS can often be more important than its base damage. For example, a sword with low base damage but high DPS would be superior to a high-damage weapon with low DPS. However, PoE doesn’t tell you a weapon’s DPS in its tooltip. Fortunately, there is a PoE Weapon DPS Calculator feature for weapons that have different ones. We’re here to help you find them!

How is DPS Calculated?

Rather than just dropping a bunch of calculators in your lap and sending you out into Wraeclast, we thought it would be a good idea to give you a basic understanding of how DPS is calculated. At the most basic level, every PoE weapon has minimum damage, maximum damage (base damage), and attack speed. In addition, a weapon will also have additional attributes, such as attack speed bonuses, damage bonuses, elemental damage, and quality. Let’s take the Siege Axe as an example:

Siege Axe

  • Base damage: 38-70
  • Attack per second: 1.5

Bonus Effects

  • 150% Increased Physical Damage
  • 10-20 Flat Physical Damage
  • 15% Increased Attack Speed
  • 20 Quality

Many novice players are tempted to conclude that the Siege Axe will do 38-70 damage per attack and call it a day. Based on this assumption alone, they will decide whether to wield or discard the Siege Axe. It should be obvious why this assumption is incorrect. About a half-dozen attributes of the weapon are being ignored, all of which are critical in determining true DPS. The formula for determining a weapon's DPS is simple: minimum base damage plus maximum damage (plus any bonus flat damage), divided by 2; times the bonus damage percentage plus quality; times one plus attack speed (times1+ any attack speed bonus); equals DPS.

If you take the stats of the Siege Axe, the equation will look like this:

  • (38+70+10+20)/2) * (1+ 150% +20%) * 1.5 * (1 + 15%) = 321.3675 DPS

That 321 DPS is much bigger and more impressive than 38-70. It’s also a much more significant number. Your Siege Axe will have you putting out 321 damage every second, not 38-70, and this is what matters when picking a weapon. For example, imagine a weapon with higher base damage than the Siege Axe. Still, a lower attack per second and worse bonus effects would result in a lower DPS than the Siege Axe and would, therefore, be less desirable.

What Are the Best DPS Calculators for Path of Exile?

Now that you understand why DPS is crucial and how DPS calculation works, we’re ready to share some of our favorite PoE weapon DPS calculators with you. That’s right—you don’t have to do any complex math yourself when deciding which weapon to use when carving up your enemies across Wraeclast. A good number of calculators out there do roughly the same thing. Input Ctrl+C when hovering over a weapon in the game and then paste it into your chosen browser-based calculator.

The different calculators distinguish themselves from one another in the user interface and the level of detail they provide in their input and output. For example, you can find a dozen different DPS calculators on GitHub that are simple, no-frills boxes for you to paste your weapon, with a space for “Total DPS” next to it that populates after you’ve pasted your weapon of choice. Others allow you to simulate crafting the item so you can see its DPS when you eventually finish crafting it. Others still make you manually enter the DPS equation variables before hitting enter to receive your results. There are a ton of them—and they all work well enough. You can only hunt around on Google, the PoE forums, Reddit, and the like until you find one that you find aesthetically pleasing and easy to use.

Here are some samples of PoE Calculators that each has their own flare:

As mentioned previously, there are a bunch more out there; nonetheless, the ones we’ve shared are a good place to start zeroing in on your preference.

Say Goodbye to Manually Crunching the Numbers

If you want to survive the dangers of Wraeclast, you will need a good weapon. Choosing the best weapon requires more than simply reading the weapons tooltip – you need to calculate with a PoE DPS Calculator. While you can do this calculation by hand, many community members have created calculators to do all the work for you. You can find many of them online, but you can use one of our favorites which we’ve shared, to get started!