improving ATT pow

improving ATT pow

at lvl 200+max, characters who wear attacker armour will have 25,554 ATT power, supporter armour will have 21,307 and defender armour will have 17,059. this is true for all weapon types, and the only exception is Folkwang, who is 2k under what she should be. this is true for SSRs, i can't test if it's true also for SRs and Rs. Raising ATT power is not a direct correlation to DPS, as some characters deal more dmg % than others, for example Aria and Guillotine are both 25,554, but my wife Guilly has 5.57% of ATT power per shot, where as the nikker has only 5.47%. This logic does not necessarily hold across diff weapon types with higher dmg%, as their att speed is different.
otherwise however, raising ATT power by 10% is the same as raising dps by 10%.

improve att speed

attack speed is a direct correlation to dps. for example 10% att speed increase will increase your dps by 10%.
however, this is not as good as ATT power, as it will drain your clip faster, and is especially bad on characters that take longer to reload.
it IS (usually) better for characters who want to perform last hit however

improve reload speed

reload speed varies between weapon types as well as characters. between around 1s and 2.5s, but somewhere around 2s is the average. let's take epinel and soline as examples, both are SMG attackers, but epinel reloads in 1s, where as soline takes 2s. both empty their clips in 10s. assuming that their DPS is the same (it isn't), in the average 90s (1:30) fight, the faster character will shoot for 82 seconds and reload for 8, where as the slower character will shoot for 74 seconds and reload for 16 (assuming that there's always something to shoot at). that means that decreasing the reload speed by 50% would result in around 11% dps increase (74+74*11/100=82.14). or 10% reload decrease would result in 2.2% dps increase

raising max ammo as a number

you would only want raise the ammo of SR/RL and SG, as MG / SMG / AR dps increase would be insignificant
for SG you would get a 12% reload speed decrease per extra bullet, and for SR/RL that's 16.5%. since we already established what relod speed is worth, this is around 2% dps increase for SG and 3% DPS increase for SR/RL
giving extra ammo is obviously worse for characters who want to do last hits
those numbers are reversed for skills that take ammo away
another argument in favor would be more shots to break boss weak spots with, or burst down a baddie when he shows up

increase dmg vs boss parts

direct dps increase, so long as they're landing

giving buffs that only last for some time

if you do a buff that raises dps by 100% for 10 seconds, but then have to wait another 10 seconds to recast it, then you may as well consider that a permanent 50% dps increase. again the only difference being that you'd have a harder time bursting things down

raising max ammo as a %

a 10% increase in ammo is equivalent to a 10% decrease to reload speed, consequently this is worth 2.2% increase in dps. unless the character doesn't have time to shoot it all, looking at you, diesel

improve splash radius

this will not turn a miss into a hit
on some bosses it could result in hitting them multiple times (in multiple body parts)
personally i've not seen splash radius make a useful difference, but some people have said they love it. no dps conversion as it depends on the situation a lot

splash in general

there's no dropoff, if you hit one baddie for 10,000 the baddie next to him would take another 10,000 as well. effectively doubling (or more) your dps
in terms of crits, it's independent per enemy hit. in terms of core hits, i've personally not seen splash dmg do a core hit , and wouldn't think it's possible

improving charge dmg

this does not make your attack speed any slower, even tho you're charging to a higher number
charge dmg does not correlate directly do dps increase. instead it raises your max charge number, here's an example: normally you'll hit with (818662.95/100)x250/100=X, assuming that your power was 8186 and bullet % was 62.95 with a 250 max charge power. raising your charge power by 16.15% would instead give you (818662.95/100)x261.15/100=X. in practice you will get a dps increase 10% lower than if you just raised your ATT power, so every 15% of charge power are worth about 5% dps increase.
charge dmg in practice has minor differences than the math, i assume the %s are either written wrong or they have aprox 0.005% kinda difference that isn't written down so as not to take too much room. either way it's nothing major
i've also noticed that n102's charge dmg buff works on whoever has the highest ATT, not highest HP, as the UI says

big hit for 1000 % dmg

let's take crow as the example. she has 120 bullets and each does 8.10% dmg, this means that one clip of hers does "972 %" dmg. considering she empties her clip in 10 seconds, and the average fight is worth 90s, that means that using her ult (which deals 915 %) would be about the same as raising her total dmg by an 11% (of pure dps) each time she uses it
if instead you have an ability which hits 10 people at 90% then you'd get the same result (assuming that there are 10 people to hit). i can't test if each boss piece takes a hit, as i've already killed all my available EXs and don't want to waste my gravenigger runs because i'm behind of purples
these hits are of power, so raising ATT power does make them stronger
ALSO, note that most if not all of those explosions cannot be core hits, where as someone like privaty (who fires a 1000 % shot) can do a core hit

core hits and crits

say you deal 10,000 dmg per shot. a core hit will deal 20,000 (double) and a crit would deal 15,000 (x1.5). these do not stack, so if you did a core crit, that would only deal 25,000 (x2.5). i hope that's a bug
this means that if you get a core crit on privaty's 1000 %, it's actually gonna be a 2500 %
MG and SR pretty much always score core hits, while SMGs rarely do. also in certain cases your autoaim on a SG could be aiming at the core, while it would be better for you to get more bullets into the enemy. same for RL, sometimes it would be better to hit them on the side instead of core, and land more splash hits

hit rates

hit rate stat makes the SG aim cirle smaller, making it easier to deal dmg, especially to further baddies. it's really hard to convert this to a dps increase, as it's gonna depend a lot on where the enemy is, what shape and size he is, and how lucky you are with your hits. it's particularly useless when the enemy is in your face, as you were gonna hit him anyway, and when he's really far a 25% hit rate increase could turn a 1 shot into a 3 shot, but that's still not a big amount of dmg. but if they were somewhere in the middle it could potentially even double your dps, depending on the factors listed above. so in short, i just don't know, and i know even less how effective it would be on other weapons.

crit chance

so in the experiments i ran (250 shots with a SR), the average crit chance appears to be around 15 %, i think that's the same for all weapons
so if you fired 100 shots, 15 of them would already be dealing 50% extra dmg. if they were all crits (100% crit rate) then that would raise your dps by 50%. this means that if your crit rate goes up by 10%, that would raise your dps by 5%. sometimes it will be more, and sometimes less, depending on luck
crit rate is particularly good if you're about hit the enemy with a large shot / aoe, but it depends on the shot how much better it is. the good thing about crits on big shots is that you can just re-play the fight if it doesn't go your way

poison

i've no idea, as i have no poison characters to test

pierce

kinda like splash, if there are baddies to hit, it will double your dps for each such shot. probably worse than splash, as i doubt you can hit multiple boss parts with it. tho for what it's worth you could shoot through the wall guys and assassinate a little boss in the back, unlike with splash

crit dmg

this stat seems to be very bugged. as i said scoring a crit will give you +50% dmg. so a 340 damage hit would turn into a 510 (340+340x0.5). however, rasing your crit damage by 20% would not turn that into 612 (510+510x0.2), nor would it turn it into a 578 (340+340x0.7), but instead it would give you 748. i tried raising the bullet % dmg, the ATT power, and several stats at the same time, but the only thing that gave me this result is to double the crit as well as give it 20% dmg (340+340x1.2)
there have been reports of dmg going in the negative on stages with high power difference, i think that's patched now, but either way i'm pretty sure the crit power is not reliable in it's current state either way
it's also possible that it works fine, and i'm just retarded, might test it more later

lowering defense

the usefulness of this seems to depends on the DEF stat of the enemy. in the training ground for example, it doesn't matter how much you lower the defense, the enemy will only take 1 extra point of dmg. in a real fight however it does seem to translate to a near direct dps increase. i assume it's even better against certain bosses, but haven't tested it enough. there are some enemies that can't be core hit, so it's possible there are some with 0 DEF stat and just lots of HP on which it would be useless, or ones with very high DEF and low HP. as we don't have the stats of the baddies tho it's complete speculation

'make take more dmg'

this skill works exactly as expected, making the enemy take 30% extra dmg is a direct dps increase of each party member who's attacking him by 30%, regardless of armour. keep in mind however that novel uses this completely at random, so even in a boss fight she might aim for a limb instead of the body

increase burst charge

by herself, product 19 (MG burst 3 attacker) couldn't get to burst 1 in 90s, with over 5 clips (1,500 bullets), and 1,500,000 damage, tho she was close.
same with aria (MG burst 2 attacker) even with 2,000,000 damage
same with emma (MG burst 1 supporter), with 1,550,000 damage
so it does not appear that the number of bullets is a factor, nor the number of damage dealt, nor the number of core hits (as MGs always score them), nor the number of crits (as MG as very good at that statistically as well), nor the Burst level of the character, nor the armour type of the character
by herself, n102 (RL burst 1 supporter) was even closer, but still not there, without too many splash hits
by herself, vesti (RL burst 3 attacker) managed to reach burst 1 in 55s, with heavy use of splash hits, at 1,000,000. i also noticed that hitting just enemy walls also builds your meter
so it does appeat that weapon type is a factor
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by herself, alice (SR, burst 3 attacker) managed to reach burst 1 in 60s, at 1,140,000 dmg, while only making limited use of her pierce shots
by herself, product 08 (SR, burst 1 support) managed to reach burst 1 in 60s, with only 504,000 dmg
this confirms that the weapon type is by far the most important (if not only) factor for building burst meter
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by herself, rapi (AR) managed to reach burst 1 in 63s
by herself, volume (SMG +1star) did not manage to reach burst 1 in 90s, and was about as bad as a MG
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hold on to your hats
by herself, sugar (SG) managed to reach burst 1 in 37s (in just 600,000 dmg), and when i kept manually blasting the closest guy, she got there in about 29s with 800,000 dmg
by manually blasting the closest guy, ether (SG burst 1) reached burst 1 in 53s with 930,000 dmg
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your hats are about to leave orbit
i made a team of nothing but SGs (sugar, maiden, noah, soldier fa and product 23), and aiming at closest guy with sugar managed to reach burst 1 in 6 seconds
conclusion: burst meter is built by weapon type in order SG > RL *> SR = AR > MG = SMG. the * is because RL has to score splash damage to be better than SR, and if it doesn't it's worse. you also want to land as many pellets as possible with your SG, so hit rate would raise burst meter charge, and you also want to raise your ATT speed and to a lessor extent reload speed, so you can get even more shots in, raising it even further

lower burst cooldown and lower burst duration

the usefulness of this is going to depend a lot on what weapons your team is using, as well as the other factors listed above, as WELL as what it is that you're even trying to achieve with burst mode. the best you can hope for is around 5 seconds of burst build up and 5 seconds of burst mode, which somehow wipes the baddies off the screen every 10 seconds. this is gonna be very hard to achieve tho. a 10 seconds buildup with 10 seconds burst is a lot more reasonable, tho you would have to lower your skill cooldowns by about 10 seconds as well, and by then your skills probably still won't be able to wipe the screen. anyway i'll leave the burst talk at that at least for now, as it depends a lot on your situation

defensive abilities and dps

take shared dmg

since there are characters who buff themselves when they have been attacked a certain number of times (on when hp is low), having shared dmg on basically gives you taunt as well as a DEF increase. most healers work with aoe, so that makes it easyer on them as well. the only char this would be bad for is soline, who does not want to get her hands dirty. it's hard to test if this works, but i think it does

taunt / attract

again, if you want to be buffed from being hit, this is a good ability. if you want to be hit however and someone else in your party has this, then it's bad

give immunity

not really something that can give you dps, however if you're buffed from having low hp, when this can keep you at peak dps without dieing

give shield

same as above

revive

comparable to the above 2, except you get to die

heal as % of hp

a strong heal, but it means your healer will want high HP, and there are some buffs that only apply to the "character with highest HP in the party". you wanna buff your dps with dmg buffs, not your healer

heal as dmg %

this is much slower than the last heal, sadly i don't care to count at what ratios they compare as it has nothing to do with dps (other than higher dps means this will heal you more), might count it later

lower enemy att
raise ally defense

i've no great way to count and compare these, but also it's not dps related. might do later

raise healing received

not dps related. the clock is your main enemy most of the time

version: 26/11/2022

i'll probably update this pastebin at some point

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