Hi all,
Not sure where to post this, so please tell me where to move if necessary, but...

So I know many people place a high priority on DPS when choosing a new weapon (which seems obvious) but I think it's possible to be misled by the DPS figure for many weapons.

For example, I find that, during normal PvE play, I rarely use the final strike of the 3-strike combo in Brandish upgrades (such as Shockburst Brandish ) and I often use only the first combo strike for Sealed Sword and Troika lines, except when I have plenty of time on my hands in front of an immobilised opponent. This is because letting the combo run to completion leaves me vulnerable to attacks before I can shield up in normal battle situations versus lichen colonies, for example. So it strikes me that, in a normal battle situation, although Shockburst will do less damage per hit than Sealed Sword, I will get twice as many hits in the same amount of time, since I will be forced to shield to preempt enemy attacks.

Now suppose I take an imaginary Troika line weapon and an imaginary Brandish line sword with identical DPS figures. The DPS is normally calculated by the damage done per combo divided by the time taken. But in normal combat, I will only get a chance to use (slightly less than*) half the total available damage available for the Troika combo, whereas for the Brandish I will get to make use of (slightly less than*) two thirds of the combo damage pool. So for me, the Brandish sword is the obvious option (although you can argue benefits of say knockback with Sealed Sword and similar).

Now for the radical bit - I propose an alternative damage measure method to account for this. Of course this could not replace DPS, since DPS is still valid for situations vs. an immobilised/incapacitated enemy like an attack to the rear of a Lumber-type monster. You could do a calculation based on DPS of all strikes bar the final in the combo, which would be more helpful for PvE. However I have recently been toying with Cutter-line swords, and I notice you can't get four out of five combo strikes on most enemies without incurring damage in return. So I suggest that rather than making the length of the combo the base unit for DPS, we instead calculate the damage that can be done in the first second of the combo, allowing for a shield block before a monster has time to react.

I know I've used sword and shield examples here, but a similar thing applies to guns - I often run to the penultimate shot on my guns to avoid being vulnerable in the reload animation, since you can't shield whilst reloading (a bizarre notion, but necessarily implemented by OOO to avoid OP'ing guns). This makes my Damage Per Combo reduced by a half-combo for Alchemer line guns, but only by one sixth for Antigua lines.

So, thoughts? ideas? questions?
Cheers,

R.

P.s. Maybe you could call this alternative indicator DinFS (Damage in First Second, since DFS has too many sofa-related connotations [;)

(*Of course, the final combo hit of any sword does more damage than other combo hits - another fact that skews DPS figures.)