The Meaning of Attack Stats in Ranger Profile

Today, I will talk about damage dealing. I come from a background in Starcraft, BW, SC2, and World of Warcraft so this is near and dear to my heart. Nothing gets my gaming brain juices going like talks about economy, macro, micro, min, max, cooldowns and the much-sought-after damage-per-second (also known as DPS). So when this topic came up in an Asian gaming forum, it made me wonder... why didn't I do this testing myself sooner? Shame on me. I've always wondered myself about the numbers in the game profile, but someone actually got into the nitty gritty for the benefit of us all.

The post deduced that the number shown in the ranger profile for "ATK" is the ranger's average damage per second (DPS), regardless of the ranger's attack speed. Not all rangers fire once per second as we all know, so the number shown is an accurate representation, apples-to-apples, of how much damage rangers will be outputting. The number does not mean how much damage the ranger is doing per hit, which is what I believe a lot of people originally thought. The DPS number helps us compare rangers easily.

The Testing With Math and Such

For his troubles, please click on his forum post for reference. I'll give credit where credit is due, and these smart folks did the work so I'll talk about the actual experiments that they did to prove that the number shown is DPS, explaining the pics and specific rangers that they used. The original poster compared these two Attack rangers:

• Frankie - Level 30, Attack Speed: Very Slow; Attack: 4381
• Ellin - Level 30, Attack Speed: Fast; Attack 5172

He sent them off alone on two runs of a stage where the enemy tower has 20000 HP. Ellin fired 3 times to destroy it, which is roughly 7000 hp damage per hit. Frankie one-shot the enemy tower. So what we can see from this is that (1) Attack Speed matters and (2) the number in the profile isn't telling us everything we need to know.

Someone then replied to his post and took it a step further in a second experiment with these 2 Attack rangers:

• Ellin - Level 49, Attack Speed: Fast; Attack: 13458
• Legend Boss - Level 50, Attack Speed: Very Slow; Attack: 14140

This person took into account the speed of each ranger and used them in a similar test assault on an enemy tower. Ellin's "Fast" attack speed means she hits once every 1.5 seconds. Since Ellin is advertised to do 13458 per second, that means that when she fires every 1.5 seconds, she's actually doing 20187 damage per hit (13458*1.5). Sure enough, when she fired on a tower that started with 120000 HP, her first hit resulted in the tower having 99813 HP remaining. 

Similarly, Legend Boss attacks Very Slowly, which is approximately 3.5 to 3.55 seconds. Advertised DPS is 14140, so every single hit Legend Boss lands is doing approximately 49490. His first hit on a tower with 120000 HP resulted in 69569 HP remaining, which is roughly what is expected from the math. 

Which Ranger Should I Choose?

Now that these fine people of the internet have proven that the number in their profile is actual DPS, we can decide for ourselves which ranger we want on our team at any point in time. The decision will rest very much on what kind of enemies we are facing, so we can pick the very best rangers for the job.  For instance if we compare similar DPS rangers: 

Both Lia and Gentleman James have about 12K DPS, but James attacks Fast while Lia attacks Very Slow. Without getting into numbers, we know that each one of James' hits will be relatively less heavy than each one of Lia's hits. We also know that over the course of time, their total damage will be roughly the same because their DPS is similar. However, there are circumstances where faster, smaller damage hits is preferred over more seldom, heavier hits. 

Generally, stages where you have a lot of targets to hit and targets have relatively little health, faster attack speed is preferred. You can quickly fire on different targets in quick succession and take care of them all in a short amount of time. If you bring a lot of slow attack speed rangers and the AI dictates that they all fire upon the same low-health enemy among a group of 10 others, that 1 enemy will be nuked to death, but the other 9 won't take any damage for several more seconds while the slow rangers recharge, meanwhile they are beating up your team.

Situations such as some boss stages where there may not be a lot of enemies at a time (like 84) may be fine for slow attack speed rangers like Lia and Boss. You're hitting the same single target for a long while, so it doesn't matter if you're hitting it faster or slower so long as total damage output is as high as it can be. 

Of course, 4 other things to consider when comparing rangers for your team, unrelated to their damage output, are: 

1. Mineral Cost - Is mineral production an issue in the stage you are facing? Are you able to upgrade minerals, or are you going to be cash poor with pressure to defend your tower right away? Can you deploy enough rangers to do so? 
2. Target Max Range - Does the ranger hit from far range or is the ranger's max range close to the enemy front line? Is it going to be in danger of being hit by enemy splash damage? 
3. Deployment Cooldown - How quickly do you need your rangers deployed, and how quickly do you need reinforcements to pop and arrive for action? Do you need a few really beefy rangers or do you need a ton of bodies being produced all the time?
4. Move Speed - Is it critical for rangers to be able to move to the enemy quickly, or is it more important to stay on the home court side? Do you need reinforcements to arrive quickly, or are you fighting all the enemies close to your home tower where speed doesn't matter? 

Splash DPS was not part of the experiment discussed in this forum post, but I do believe that the number in their profile is damage-per-second on every target in range of being hit. This is why splash rangers are insanely powerful. Their damage output is literally multiplied over the number of targets they hit. And since faster attack speed is more desirable in almost every scenario, this is why Sorcerer Cony is preferred over all other splash rangers. Her DPS is higher, her attack and move speed are quite acceptable and better than most (versus Opera James' Slow/Slow, Clara's Very Slow/Normal), and she hits from long range. 

Finally, someone posted on that forum that after some extensive studying of game recordings, he found that the recharge time between hits for various attack speed rangers is as follows:

Very Fast	1 to 1.49 seconds
Fast	1.5 to 1.99 seconds
Normal	2.0 to 2.49 seconds
Slow	2.5 to 3.49 seconds
Very Slow	3.5 to 4.5 seconds

I don't know if they'll ever know, but I salute these guys for their effort and insight into the mysterious profile details. Very interesting results indeed! If you can read Chinese, I recommend you read through the whole thing. It's pretty neat stuff.