@Awesomest

Even considering other games .... have you only ever played melee classes, or what? For caster types in more conventional MMOs (let's just go to the very convenient WoW as the industry standard example), who very much have valid DPS measurements, "not being able to attack constantly and regularly" has always been the case. There's mana conservation, spell cooldowns, and rotations to take into consideration there.

In Spiral Knights, DPS of a weapon is more-or-less a function of attack speed and average damage per hit. It's a potential number, not an absolute or a guarantee.

To add a more relevant post: I can pretty much "beast mode" on Jelly King with my Vile Striker with reckless abandon for my own health. I get him to his Spin Phase with usually a good chunk of health left, use 2 potions, throw a second set of vials, and continue spamming. He's usually down within 1-2 minutes.

This kind of behavior is not as effective with an Avenger or Combuster, because the Vile Striker's consistently high DPS vs the Avenger or Combuster's sparing burst damage is much more effective.

Following up - Vanaduke I have not yet attempted (Made it all the way to the stage just before without my Vile Striker)

For Jelly King: The reason I feel that DPS really makes a difference is that the more damage you can dish out consistently over 30 seconds, the better.

What I mean is: When fighting Jelly King, if I'm laying into him, he's hitting me back - but the more damage I can cram into those brief invulnerability periods after I get hit, the better. My damage output > enemy damage output in this case.

For Vanaduke I wouldn't recommend this because he can't be frothily zerged in 2 minutes like the King can. Personally I'm bringing a Combuster/Peacemaker to Vanaduke. Health preservation is a lot more important on the Duke, so backing away to safety - charging up - and releasing an instant burst of damage and recoiling back to safety is a more guaranteed formula for success - but JK does a lot less damage, and more importantly he self heals, so if you're not bashing him down whenever possible, the fight can last forever.

^

Well that depends on a number of factors.
For example, I wear volcanic plate set despite the aspd nerf, because in my opinion in T3: Not dying > Killing faster. And the alternatives give bomb or sword bonuses, when what I do mostly in citadel is gunning.
Then to do jelly king runs I use the highest dps gear I found (Deadly virulisk + Acheron with slimes mid uv), because survivality is pretty much guaranteed. And hitting slimes for 200 is fun.

Still, when just comparing weapons and not armor, you'll generally always want to go for the strongest one. Then it's all a matter of cost-benefit.
Should I pay 5000 ce for a UV that makes my dmg output only 10% higher? Depends on you.
Also with most mobs there will be a certain number of needed hits to kill them, which might make % increase in damage useless. But it's always better to have more than fall short.

So let me get this straight.

Subject title: DPS
Can someone please explain how this statistic is important in a game where you can't attack constantly and regularly?
I'm totally stumped.

You question the relevance of a stat called 'DPS' when you say that you can't attack constantly. Well, if you read my reply you would see that it has plenty of importance. Actual DPS takes into account that you don't attack constantly. Your initial assumption that 'DPS' doesn't take that into account was false to begin with because you assumed there was only 1 type of statistically relevant 'DPS' stat.

You could argue that because there's no easy way to measure actual DPS in this game, the numbers that people are reporting are misleading (because it's theoretical DPS and not actual DPS), but you totally cannot argue that 'DPS' is not a useful or important statistic for judging the potential of a weapon.

So how is theoretical DPS useful when they can't reflect actual DPS figures? Things like monster habits (including weaknesses and strengths), time spent shielding/attacking and other playing factors change from weapon to weapon, so theoretical DPS isn't even remotely reflecting the actual DPS, and actual DPS becomes tedious to calculate because it's situational—there are so many simpler and more qualitative ways of figuring out which wepaon is better than another.

All you've explained is that theoretical DPS is useful for measuring theoretical damage output in a theoretical environment, which is all but useless in the actual game where actual DPS is infeasible to measure because the actual damage output in the actual environment has a significant margin of error.

Which is exactly my point. Thanks for the assurance that I'm right.

Your initial argument was about the 'DPS' stat as a whole, which encompasses actual and theoretical DPS. I have stated that 'DPS' stat is indeed useful and just because the 'DPS' stat you're looking for (actual DPS) isn't easy to calculate, doesn't mean 'DPS' as a whole is useless.

You now change your argument to say that your whole point to begin with is theoretical DPS doesn't matter but actual DPS does, but actual DPS is too hard to measure so 'DPS' isn't useful. Here's a tip. Actual DPS is derived from theoretical DPS. So already we now know that the theoretical DPS is a ceiling that actual DPS can match but not exceed. Hey look, it's useful to us already. Now, even if we can't calculate the exact amount of actual DPS we are doing, we can at least estimate or assume how often we aren't doing damage to a mob. We can then use that as a rough percentage of downtime penalty to our theoretical DPS (oh look I used it again, not so useless after all) and get a rough estimate of what our actual DPS might look like.

If you want to get more accurate estimates then you're going to have to use more accurate methods but to firstly say that 'DPS' isn't an important stat and then change your argument to say that 'theoretical DPS' isn't an important stat is just flat out wrong, on both accounts. If you're going to try and change your argument then at least make a new thread for it and at least make sure you're actually right.

I wonder why someone would ask a question and then rage at the people who try to help him.
Now I'm stumped.

Just looked at his replies to other threads.

Bro be trolling.

Honestly, it's gotten to the point where even if you can tell the difference between an overly aggressive debater and a troll, one can just claim they are the other to suite their own needs.

Nah, you should always debate, unless the troll is being blatantly obvious, then you should ignore them, this makes them furious.

The best thing to do is just not get mad, if you never get mad, you won't be trollbait, and they won't win.

I came here looking to find something helpful... It actually took me some time to read everything and i have come to a few conclusions.

1. Big words and long winded arguments doesn't mean higher intelligence. Typing a lengthy forum post just means you like beating around the bush. Fine line between content and smoking...

2.This game forum is not nice to read, very incomprehensible since everyone is most of the time making pointless points. A.K.A. Spamming or trolling (Largely due to the fact there's a lack of a rating system for the forum posts or editors)

3. Bottom line - DPS is damage per second (as pupu has pointed out). So technically as an answer to the forum question: "No dps does not take precedence over survival". Hence, if you have good survivability capabilities, one can solo vanduke with a proto-sword (the only exception being monster heals)

4. "I find this forum tends to have a higher intelligence base than most game forums"

This pointless debate about theoretical and actual dps reflects the underdeveloped gamer mindsets of people here. In other forums, gamers come up with dps calculators of all possible combinations. Fortunately, there's little mention of theoretics vs actual; the abstractness is of no help AT ALL.

@Jerakal
An Overly Aggressive debater with no valid points to make is smoking. And hence a troll

In case you failed to read my post Awesomeguy, I congratulated you on your forum topic, I said this is a very good question and had the potential to spark a lot of debate. Hell, I even commended your counter points saying how good of a job you were doing defending them, so my issue with it being a discussion forum is non existent.

My complaint was that you are being overtly rude and condescending to people that are HELPING you with your discussion and understanding. Insulting you to your face? Maybe, but that's what you tend to do to everyone else in everyone of your posts.

@1dinosaursqw; I like big posts (and I cannot lie), I like to give all the details not just a hard-line, a lot of miscommunication occurs when people fail to give supporting evidence, my point was complex (I didn't feel like scrawling rude words about certain people all over the forum) thus required some bushes to be beat.

This forum is delightful, yes, it's not elitistjerks, but nor would I expect it to be. But it's still a far cry from say the WoW forums or MMO-champion, those places are war-zones, hell those places I would recommend being condescending in, they're only sub-human there.

Theoretical and actual DPS values is very helpful; one is the maximum achievable in ideal circumstances (think target dummies in WoW), the other is variables which differs fight to fight. Theoretical is helpful to know as it is applicable to ALL encounters (what's my damage ceiling), actual is useful in a case by case basis, but generally requires thorough testing on each enemy type or DPS parses. This is what you would expect to do once the variables are taken into account.

This game isn't worth investing into a DPS calculator, as DPS is less important to a weapons usefulness (+UV's) in this game than others, these terms are a simplification of the theoretical ideals behind a DPS calculator/spreadsheet. They made perfect sense to me and now I understand. Maybe you've brought in the wrong mind-set from a different game (read: different, not underdeveloped). This game is also very new, DPS parsers and spreadsheets don't exist in most games until it's a little more seasoned and the facts of the game solidified, we still don't know how a lot of stuff works, thus theory is better for understanding than raw application of data that could be proven wrong within a week.

And for lords sake, not EVERYBODY who is angry is a troll (I hate the internet for this). Awesomest is aggressive, yes, but his points ARE VALID they are acceptable and not too far-fetched to be unexplainable (hence not a troll), his question and counter points make enough sense to spark discussion. Plus he gets way to passionate to be a troll...unless he's like a kamikaze troll.