You still get the damage, just the secondary effect is what it's immune to. Example Trap Beast does damage, buffs you & roots the enemy. Against bosses it does damage & buffs you, just the root is what the boss is immune to.

Also people ask for your dps since mobs have like 20-40k health, which even at 5k dps doesnt take much longer than say 30k dps to get them dead. Bosses have upwards of a couple million, so the difference between 5k and 30k is a lot of time in those situations and adding mechanics into the mix can and likely will be the difference between a clear and a wipe.

EDIT: putting it into perspective:
Mobs (40k health) - 5k dps = 8 seconds. 30k dps = 2 seconds.
Bosses (3 mil health) - 5k dps = 600 seconds (10 minutes). 30k dps = 100 seconds (less than 2 minutes).

And the game only gives you the bar as feedback, so it will appear that a low DPS attack is doing nothing. In fact it's just doing very little, and you can't see the difference. Higher rates of damage will be needed to see anything.

Some of the Damage over Time (DoT) attacks will be enough to kill trash mobs before they expire, but will have their full effect against a boss that lasts long enough to endure it all. Those skills are probably better than you think, but you just can't see it. Piling more types of attack on top will make it start to show, because your total DPS will be increasing.

Assuming you don't have access to add-ons, can you access a training dummy through a guild house or a friend?

You can do a self-buffed DPS test against a 3 mil or 6 mil health dummy. When its dead, it will tell you what your DPS was. The goal is to have constant, steady damage along with good uptime on your DOTs and your buffs. You'll also need to sustain your rotation so you arent running out of magicka/stamina before the boss is dead.

If you are on PC, addons like FTC or Combat Metrics will also give you your DPS count and a breakdown of what skills did the most DPS.

If you do the test, and discover to your dismay that your DPS is rather low (like I did), the next step to look online at builds for your class. Choose one with gear that you can acquire and then practice the rotation. Practice, practice, practice. DPS is mostly about having steady, sustainable damage from a rotation of DOTs, single target skills, weaving light and heavy attacks, and good uptime on buffs, so practice!

Tonestar34 wrote: »

I got some great feed back on this guys. Thankyou. I play on xbox so I won't be able to use those mods. Only started playing in March this year, I made it my goal to max out my CP thinking that would make me ready for Vet Dungeons... But then I've become paranoid about joining Vet Dungeons that Players might not want to play with me due to my DPS not being to their standards. I will look into that Test Dummy idea.

Your DPS for vet dungeons does not need to be 40K or even 30K. Aside from the DLC dungeons, a 20K DPS who doesn't run around like a fool can melt a lot of stuff in there. Even in the harder DLC dungeons, unless you are looking for a no death run and/or speed run, you should be just fine. Those high DPS requirements are more for vet trials, and even then, mostly for people doing vMOL, vAS, vHOF, and maybe vCR, or for scoring runs.

XBox should have the option to put up the combat feedback thingy. I have PS4 and its on there.

8k is alright for normal dungeons, but not great. There's definitely room for improvement. 10-15k would be better, 15k is okay for starting easier Vet dungeons.

What class are you? I'd suggest looking up a build for your class and try out the rotation of skills they suggest. Most likely, they will suggest Dual Wield/Bow for your weapons.

Your gear is okay (there's other sets you could run, but its okay for now), so for the moment focus on your rotation, keeping up your DOTs and buffs.

Tonestar34 wrote: »

So I just did a test on a 3mil Test Dummy.
I thought it was reasonable... But apparently its not good... 7985 DPS over 6 min 17 secs. I'm not sure what to do... To increase my DPS. My bow already has nirhone in it. I run Bone Pirates with Marksman and Kraghs Visage for head and shoulders.

Steps I would go through:

When people push for high DPS, they do additional things that you may not consider relevant when you haven't put a lot of time into those boss fights. A couple easy ones are: using ultimates as soon as they become ready, and regular use of potions to recover resources and possibly give you extra buffs if you use the higher-tier potions. Also, food. Always use food.

Get used to using those as if they were normal, rather than extraordinary, actions.


Next, I'm not sure whether you hit the CP cap (you said you were aiming for it, but didn't say how far along you were), but CP will continue to be a passive boost to your total DPS as you level up. Even without complicated optimization, it's like climbing a ladder all the way to the CP cap. At the same time, not being at cap CP will put a limit on how high your DPS can go, so don't overly stress over your total DPS just because it's not as high as some others can do.

As for what to spend CP on, a non-optimized approach would be to spend 50 CP in each star that's boosting your damage: overall damage (Mighty, for stamina), penetration (Piercing, for stamina), direct damage (Master at Arms), DOT damage (Thaumaturge), and crit damage (Precise Strikes). Don't worry about the one for light/heavy weapon attacks; that doesn't provide enough extra to matter at the current CP cap. (Consider it when we hit CP 900 as a max.)

Adjust slightly to only just put in as many points as needed to roll over to a new integer percent (eg: Mighty will roll over to 11.10% at 49 points, so that's all you'd need to get the 11% boost).

That simple approach will give you the vast majority of the benefits you can get out of CP. You can still get a bit more if you take time to research what's truly important for your build, and possibly tweak for the passives you want, but taking the above in order will get you solid results for the least effort.


The next step is a whole cycle of interlinked optimizations. These include:

1) Gear choices. Your two primary gear sets are heavily focused on recovery, probably exceeding what you need. You can probably change one of those sets to one more focused on damage.

1a) A common suggestion for stamina builds is Hunding's Rage, but there are a lot of others that are likely to be more useful to you. Given your current DPS, I'd look for proc sets like Red Mountain or Syvarra's Scales. Regardless, always keep experimenting with new sets, because what you need will change over time.

1b) In terms of upgrading gear (green to blue to purple to gold), most upgrades will have very little impact, so you won't really see a difference at your current level. Taking weapons from purple to gold is the only really noticeable boost, but even then should only be done when you're really sure about making long-term use of the gear set they're a part of. Obviously upgrade when you can, but don't think that that's going to be making a difference that will completely change your DPS life.


2) Action efficiency. This is all about finding ways to better and more frequently use your skills and light/heavy attacks.

2a) Heavy attacks can use action buffering, where you hit a skill while the heavy attack is winding up, and the game will automatically fire the skill when the heavy attack ends. (This is an easy improvement, and pretty foolproof. I'd start here.)

2b) Light attacks can use animation cancelling, where you can use a skill immediately after the light attack, overwriting some of the light attack animation. (This is harder to get right, and takes practice, but has higher damage potential.)

2c) The third component is trying to minimize the time between the end of a skill and activating your next action (generally a light or heavy attack). This just takes time and practice, to get used to figuring out what you're going to do next during the process of performing the previous action.

'Weaving' is often used to describe one or more of the above concepts, but usually only 2b. It really should be considered all three of the above, as a whole.


3) Simplify your skill bar as much as possible. The fewer choices you have to make at each stage, the easier it is to perform. Something like a buff and a DOT on your starting bar, and couple directs on your main bar. Fill the other spots with passive bonuses. Get good at using those, and add to that only when you recognize that you have enough spare time that it would be useful to add in another skill. Clumsy rotations trying to do too much too fast hurt more than they help.



Anyway, yeah. Summary of: ultimates/potions/food, CP, and gear/action efficiency. Just keep trying different things, and maybe look up web sites of YouTube videos for more detailed suggestions.


Minor aside: You don't have to kill the dummy to get a DPS reading. That's good for getting long-term damage, and to test sustain, and you'll want to do it that way occasionally, but you can do spot checks where you only take off maybe 500k of its health (1/6 of the health bar) just to see what things look like. Basically, once you stop doing damage, after a few seconds it will go back to yellow and report on the damage you did while it was red.

Anyway, that's just a shortcut to more easily iterate through your attempts to improve, although it'll mess up a bit if you have DOTs running after you step back.

I decided to change from Marksman to Hundings rage... Tested myself against a dummy and frustratingly my dps went down 😒.

8679.6 in 5.39 minutes down to:
8030.7 in 6.09 minutes.

But then I decided to add in the Wherewolf... My DPS now sits at:

10416.7 in 4.49 Seconds.

Intermediate player here with a simple bow/bow stamsorc (Sprigsx5, Hungdingsx5, 2 monster bits from diff sets) who loves to run solo. Can get about 20k dps vs dummy. Half the dps comes from hail & caltrops. Challenge is keeping boss in that killing zone so I need to 'face tank' if necessary to keep them still (Surge + Hurricane + Dark Exchange). Stam sustain is very tough on bow/bow stamsorc so lots of light attacks (she's tweaked so each LA hits very hard). Try to always use a snipe when barswapping from that bar but, again, trying to conserve stam.

Hail & Caltrops alone deliver about 10k for me. If I do a pure LA spam (with surge active), that alone delivers 10k dps so I feel fine 'spamming' a lot of LA and they don't eat stam.

This char can solo most of the non-dlc group dungeons and most of the non-dlc wb.

Tonestar34 wrote: »

Tonestar34 wrote: »

I decided to change from Marksman to Hundings rage... Tested myself against a dummy and frustratingly my dps went down 😒.

8679.6 in 5.39 minutes down to:
8030.7 in 6.09 minutes.

But then I decided to add in the Wherewolf... My DPS now sits at:

10416.7 in 4.49 Seconds.

Ok... So... Just discovered this thing called anomation cancellation... And tried it out on the same test dummy as before...

13159.2 DPS in 3 mins 49 seconds... Which I am quite excited by... But how realistic is this damage I'm doing? If this was a solo world boss I'd be rolling around to dodge, block and being a stam blade reguarly trying to heal... I can not just constantly spam damage attacks. Some world bosses can one shot me.

You'll see some DPS loss, but because you always have your DOTs active on the boss, you'll constantly be doing damage.

If you are going solo for the most part, you will see a greater DPS loss due to just following mechanics. For trials, that loss is partially compensated for the greater amount of buffs you get from your teammates - but thats quite above what you need to be concerned with.

If you want to test yourself "in the field" as it were, I would do an easy group dungeon through groupfinder and see how you fare against the bosses. Its different with a group - when I solo them, I have to deal with every boss mechanic and stun and so my DPS is usually a lot lower.

You've still got a lot of room for improvement, but I hope you enjoy seeing the results!