Arlen

You have probably seen a healing chart that looks impressive on paper but fails in practice. “The numbers say I’m pumping thousands of health points per second into the raid, yet my tank keeps screaming and dying during a split-second pause between casts.” That’s the disconnect. Effective healing isn’t the same as raw throughput. Raw … Read more

This should sound familiar to you; it happens a lot. You build that lifesteal champion with everything but kitchen sink, thinking you’re going to drain your opponent dry while staying untouched. So you step into lane and trade blows. After only two seconds, you’re dead because unseen mechanics stripped your heals. But hey, you say, … Read more

Sure, go ahead and debate fire rate if you’d like. But when it comes to a firefight, there’s no metric other then how you’re gonna use up the rest of your ammo. On paper, this sounds obvious. But in practice, most players view their magazine as a limitless supply, until they run out of bullets … Read more

In training mode, you might learn a move because it’s safe and fast and you’ve practiced it thousands of times. When you go into an online match, however, that very same move gets you punished most of the time. The reason is that fighting games aren’t about intuition. It’s about frames. Each frame are a … Read more

Push the button. Animation begins. Your enemy blocks. Was it because you’re not fast enough? Is game rigged against you? That’s what most people think when they fail to pull off a clean combo. What they don’t know is there’s something in-between human reaction and pure math: frame data. A calculator do the math by … Read more

So when you drop into a mission, you have three mags in your hip pouch and you feel confident-ish that it will suffice. You take down first dude with minimal fuss, clean up the room, and continue. Now as you’re stepping into that next hallway, your reload button is practically humming beneath your finger, thinking: … Read more

Remember getting that sweet combo route down during training mode only to see the damage number fall off the chart and settle back into mediocrity? That’s because most fighting games scales their damage through diminishing returns with every subsequent hit. The more times you hit something, the less damage it do. This means your input … Read more

Swapping weapons is an economic choice. It’s exchanging damage for the time spent in a weapon animation. Too slow = dead. Too weak = wasted time. That margin is what makes the difference between effective and feeling good about it. For most people, swapping are reflexive. “Oh shit, I’m flanked, better swap.” Or “Uh oh, … Read more

The other side of that issue comes from that split second when your magazine empties just as an enemy pops around a corner. Suddenly, you don’t have any damage output, your character is exposed, and all your survival rely on rapid finger tapping on R. This is where planning DPS meets real life. The number … Read more

You pull the trigger and watch as your shot falls just a bit to the left. They shifted right and you led, but you still missed as your bullet hit nothing but air where they once were. Anyone that go from hitting a target with hitscan weapons to one requiring a projectile with travel time … Read more

Burst windows are the bane of many players’ existence; this calculator removes all guesswork and turns timing into hard data to show you precisely how much output is in a window and how much you’re losing if your timing is off. A lot of people simply guess their way around timing, but that won’t optimize … Read more

Maybe you’re playing a shooter and you missed a bullet at 50 meters. That sucks, but it probably wasn’t bad luck, it was likely some math that snuck up on you. As you get further from an enemy, your weapon’s effectiveness decreases in what we call “damage falloff.” Even when you place the crosshair perfectly, … Read more