Lancer Knightz (Guild)/Sword Combos Per Minute

The guild Lancer Knightz has a long-running project to collect data on the speed and damage of various weapons. If you'd like to help, then please contact Donkeyhaute.

This table shows the combos per minute of various swords, at various levels of attack speed increase (ASI). To collect such data, the tester goes to a safe area, such as Moorcroft Manor. He (or she) executes combos for a minute straight against thin air, turning as necessary to avoid obstacles. He records the result in the hidden HTML comments in this table. The test is repeated until it seems to settle on a single answer, which is entered into the table explicitly. However, even this reproducible answer should be regarded as approximate. Data from swords marked ^B were collected by Bopp; all other data were collected by Donkeyhaute. Thanks to Squamph for some preliminary data.

Some remarks:

• In most cases, each increment of ASI results in a 2%-5% increase in the combos per minute. The geometric mean of the increases is about 3.6%.
• Gran Faust's speed bar is much longer than Divine Avenger's, although it seems no faster in practice. These data support that view that GF is not faster than DA.
• Either Dread Venom Striker reaches a speed cap, or the tester just can't swing fast enough to exploit ASI+6.
• Although it may just be experimental error, Wild Hunting Blade seems to be slightly slower than Dread Venom Striker. This has been confirmed by Bopp's retesting of both swords, and it is also true for charges.

We can combine our combos per minute data with damage data from the wiki, to compute the damage per second (DPS) that results for comboing as fast as possible. In detail, we take the ASI+6 data from the table above. We look up the depth-28 damage on the wiki. For swords with no data (e.g., Voltedge), we use the available data from similar swords (Glacius). We total the damage for all of the strokes in the sword's combo. Then we compute

damage per second = damage per combo * combos per minute * minutes per second,

where minutes per second is obviously 1/60. It is worth noting that, because combos per minute are precise to within a few percent only, so is DPS precise to within a few percent only. For example, the difference between 628 (Combuster against constructs) and 607 (Final Flourish against beasts) may not be significant.