The Cohhilition

Hello everyone,

So after spending some time searching online for this, I couldn't find any information. Hopefully someone here can help. This is my second league in PoE, and I hit this wall when I start doing maps. I find zero useful loot and I cannot move any further than the first couple of maps in to the atlas.

This season I have followed Cohh's build as close as possible. I have all rares and a tab rasa. Gems are about the same level +/- 1. The question I have is, when Cohh shows his damage per second in his character sheet it's like 12k, mine says 495 -.-. My GC spell however shows 26k. Which number is more important? So what number do I want to look at when I equip a new weapon and the numbers change? I have a mace with 30% ele damage, 23% spell damage, 13% fire damage, +30 int, 20-35 fire damage, 16% cast speed, then I swap to what I think is a better weapon and my character sheet dps goes up +500 but my GC dps goes down 3k.

I had the same issue last season too, I played frost blades and just started getting one shot around T3 maps.

Thanks for the help and reading my issue.

First of all, your tooltip-DPS ist just a rough indicator of how much damage you can deal. There are several mechanics, skills and extra stuff in the game, which boosts your dps in a more hidden way. So if your tooltip ingame says 27k dps it could as well be, that you deal 150k total.

I have a built with Molten Strike as my main skill and I use the lavaballs of it to generate my dps. My Molten Strike tooltip says 9k dps but in fact I deal about 60k on a Boss and even more an several Targets due to spread AoE damage.

The most important thing is to know the difference between "Spells" and "Attacks".

If you use a skill which is a "Spell" your weapon damage basically is worthless. You could equip a dagger with 10-20 phys damage, if it has 40% spelldamage, 100% crit and another extra 40% spell damage, it's great cause you're using spells and not attacks.

For attacks it's the other way round. You want high base damage if you're using attacks as skills.

Your Default attack dps is worthless either way, cause you're never using your default attack^^

If you use Glacial Cascade (GC) you just have to look for the GC dps tooltip to get a basic idea.

If you're used to some game mechanics, you can start using build planners to optimize your builds and get a better understanding of DPS and what influences it. For now I would recommend you just play the game more and think about the difference between spells and attacks. If you have more specific questions, ask away.

Otherwise a generally good spot to look up game mechanics and calculations is the official PoE-wiki:

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Path_of_Exile_Wiki

Thanks Arandur87 for the reply. I'll continue playing and I plan on putting my stuff in to Path of Building to get a better look at the numbers.

Thanks again!!