Weapon Reload DPS Calculator

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 of bullets per minute and each bullet’s damage appear on the weapon card, but those figures represent what happens if you’ll never run out of ammunition. It represents a shooting gallery instead of a chaotic fight that ends your life in the time it takes to change a clip. Most players underestimate gap between sustained firepower versus burst potential. Sure, that fast rate of fire sounds badass until you discover it will deplete your entire magazine within two seconds. If your reload animation take another two seconds to complete, you’re spending half your time doing nothing but waiting. Half of your time spent waiting around? No thank you.

How to Choose the Right Weapon for Your Playstyle

All you have to do is input your weapon’s stats into the calculator above, and it’ll do all the math for you, saving you from splitting magazine sizes by reload time whenever you need to test a new build. It will break down how much difference there is when shooting in a short burst compared to a longer engagement.

That’s where understanding uptime comes into play. What’s uptime? It’s how much of your time with that weapon were spent shooting instead of waiting to reload. Having a large magazine will help your uptime since it buys you extra seconds before you has to stop and put in another clip. While it might not improve your raw burst damage, it does mean you can spend more time firing and less time recharging. This is why assault rifles can outperforms submachine guns at mid ranges during combat, even though they may have a slower base fire rate. You’re spending more downtime to swap mags with an SMG, which lowers your average damage per second across the course of a firefight.

Playing smart will also greatly change the equation by changing tactics on reloading. Rather than having to discard an empty mag during a reload, you can skip that part of the animation if you have enough time to reload before your mag is empty. This will give you around five rounds to spare and allow you to switch out magazines while still having some ammunition. It feels counterintuitive because you’re essentially “wasting” those remaining bullets, but the time gained from the reload is generaly more valuable then the lost damage. You can even input tactical and full reload times into the tool to get a solid idea as to when this shortcut becomes less worthwhile.

Recoil affects your accuracy much more than most would of you to believe. You’re not going to make up for lower effective DPS by reloading quickly if you’re constantly shooting wide or shooting bullets directly into the sky. Drop your hit percentage in the options menu and see what kind of difference that makes. Yeah, it sucks, but you’ll never know exactly how many shots you’re wasting until you do this. That slow-reloading gun with 80 percent accuracy may end up beating out your fast one that has only 60 because it hits more often while it’s firing.

And then there’s how often you hit weak points plus crit multipliers. Headshots deal more damage per shot (which translates into killing enemies sooner, sometimes fast enough they won’t even reload). But when the enemy character model isn’t showing much head, a large crit multiplier is useless. It’s about balancing the potential spike in damage with how likely you are to actualy land those critical hits. You’re balancing out a likely real-world outcome with a theoretical spike.

This is laid out in the reference tables on the page that compare various weapon archetypes: snipers deal insane burst damage with terrible uptime, they’re great for one shots if you can track ‘em down. Launchers are at the other end of the spectrum where your single shot makes an enormous difference and the reload time is effectively dead air. LMGs provides steady pressure, but will punish you hard if you run dry.

At the end of the day, your build comes down to reducing risk over anything else. Don’t get me wrong, you can pump as many numbers into a spreadsheet as you like, but ultimately the right weapon for you is the one that matches your playstyle. Do you like to push aggressively? Shorter tactical reload times is going to be more important. Are you holding angles and camping? Then magazine capacity and sustained DPS will matter most. There isn’t one perfect build; there’s just the right mix for your preferred play style.