Core Keeper weapon damage: how I estimate DPS, and what the estimate leaves out

Base damage, cooldown, damage percentages and attack speed are enough to compare weapons on paper. Here's the simple model Coreplan uses, worked through for a dagger, a sword and an axe, with the caveats.

By MaxPublished 29 Oct 20263 min read

Data is from the Core Keeper Wiki (data labelled 1.2.0.7). The DPS figure is an estimate, not a measurement. I haven't compared it with in-game numbers, and the game has moved on to 1.3.x.

If you want to know whether weapon A is better than weapon B, you need a number. The game gives you base damage and a few stat lines, but turning those into "how much damage per second" is something you have to do yourself. This is how Coreplan does it, and the places where I think it's wrong.

The model

Each weapon in the data has a base damage that depends on its level, and a cooldown. Everything else comes from the rest of your build:

1. Add up your damage percentages: all-damage bonuses, plus the melee or ranged ones, minus any decreases.
2. Hit = base damage × (1 + damage % ÷ 100).
3. Attacks per second = (1 ÷ cooldown) × (1 + attack speed % ÷ 100).
4. DPS = hit × attacks per second.

Magic weapons skip the attack speed part, and the equipped weapon's own stat lines count too (a sword that gives +9.9% melee attack speed adds it to the pot).

A dagger, a sword and an axe at level 20

Take three melee weapons at level 20 with nothing else equipped and compare them:

The dagger and the sword come out nearly identical. The sword's slower swing is made up by its bigger hit and its attack speed bonus. The axe leads, but notice how much of that lead is the +44.5% damage on the weapon itself, not the slow, heavy swing.

Now add what a character with the Melee skill at 100 has (+50% melee damage), and then five points in the Quick strikes talent (+10% melee attack speed):

Two things stand out. First, the +50% from the skill is worth a lot more than the order of the weapons: it adds about 475 DPS to the dagger and 417 to the axe. Second, the +10% attack speed from Quick strikes is worth about 10% more DPS to each of them. The dagger gains 143, the sword 130 and the axe 162. The sword gets a touch less in percentage terms (about 9%) because it already had its own attack speed bonus in the mix.

Why higher level swamps almost everything

Look at how much the same Iron Sword changes with level. By itself, it goes from about 346 DPS at level 7 to 953 at level 20, nearly three times as much, without changing a single stat. Compare that with swapping the dagger for the sword, which changed the result by 3 DPS. Weapon level is worth more than weapon type, which matches what I found in the gear levels guide.

What the estimate leaves out

• Crits. Crit chance and crit damage aren't in the DPS number. A weapon that boosts crits, like the Scarlet Sword, is undersold.
• Enemy armor and resistances. Nothing about the target is modelled, so heavy hits and fast hits are treated as equal against everything.
• Special effects. Slows, life on hit, bonus damage against bosses or stunned targets and the like don't show up.
• Whether damage percentages add or multiply. I assume they add. If any of them multiply in the game, the real numbers will be higher for stacked builds.
• Reinforcement, pets and food. None of these are in the model yet. Food can be typed in as an extra.

So treat the DPS line as a way to rank builds against each other, and I'd trust the gaps that are large (a 30% difference means something) more than the small ones (3 DPS is noise). If you find a case where it's clearly wrong in-game, email me the numbers and I'll look into it.