It's actually Damage Per Activation time. It's the damage dealt divided by the number of seconds the animation is (usually modified for Arcanatime). The dimension is damage/second.
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It's actually Damage Per Activation time. It's the damage dealt divided by the number of seconds the animation is (usually modified for Arcanatime). The dimension is damage/second.
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Yeah, the DPA reported by the game is per activation time. I use DPA to mean damage per Arcanatime.
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It's actually Damage Per Activation time. It's the damage dealt divided by the number of seconds the animation is (usually modified for Arcanatime). The dimension is damage/second.
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Yeah, the DPA reported by the game is per activation time. I use DPA to mean damage per Arcanatime.
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Oh, and before anyone asks:
ArcanaTime = ( RoundUp( CastTime / 0.132) +1 ) * 0.132
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It's actually Damage Per Activation time. It's the damage dealt divided by the number of seconds the animation is (usually modified for Arcanatime). The dimension is damage/second.
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Yeah, the DPA reported by the game is per activation time. I use DPA to mean damage per Arcanatime.
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The most accurate term would be Damage per Activation/Arcanatime Second. It's a derived value based on both concepts of damage per second and damage per activation.
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Just as an FYI/History review, at one time long ago, people were consistently talking about "DPS" when talking about attacks which was basically "damage per second." Attacks were rated and ranked based on the amount of damage they did per second, which was computed by dividing damage by the recharge time (or alternatively, just by the damage they did period, regardless of recharge or cast time).
I say "recharge time" because we didn't have good numbers for "activation time" back then, so recharge time was all we had. When we started to get good numbers for "cast time" people started talking about DPC - damage per cycle-second which was the damage per second, averaged over an entire firing cycle, which was cast time + recharge time.
It made no sense to me to talk about either DPS or DPC in general, so I started talking about DPA, and I defined the term to mean damage per activation-second. I wasn't the only one talking about this quantity back then: a few posters started talking about using this value rather than "DPS" when we started to have good numbers for cast time, but I think I was the first to use that specific acronym to reference it**. In fact, when I first started using the term it was a quantity I couldn't always compute, because the information wasn't consistently available. I actually helped make PQP measurements just to try to compute these values in some cases (the PQP was the Powers Quantification Project, and one of its subprojects was measuring the cast times for all of the player powers).
"DPA" now is generally recognized to mean "damage per second, averaged over the total time it takes from the moment of activation to the moment when the next attack can be activated." Or more colloquially "the amount of time the attack 'burns up.'" Cast time is the usual approximation for this window of time, but increasingly "ArcanaTime"*** is the preferred estimate for this time, as it reflects how the game works better and is much more consistent with sustained damage testing that other players have done (including Werner's).
People colloquially call DPA "damage per activation" even though that is a misnomer of sorts: "damage per activation" really just means "damage per use" or just "damage." But its shorter than "damage per activation-second" and the "-second" tends to be implied.
** In fact, there were some heated arguments back then about whether "damage per activation-second" should really be referred to as "DPS" because it was, in fact a damage per second metric (over the cast time) or DPC (damage per cast-second). I refused because DPS and DPC were already appropriated terms, and I continued to use the term DPA even when the other two terms were being used to refer to the same quantity in the same thread. It took a while for "DPA" to have the universally recognized meaning it does today.
*** I've made up a lot of terms that have entered the CoH lexicon, but ArcanaTime is not one of them. Someone else made that one up, and I only found out about it later.
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I believe that DPA stands for Damage Per Activation, however, I'm not sure what is meant by "Activation." When talking about activation in the DPA sense, does it mean the average damage delivered per activation time, or per endurance used per activation, or something else altogether? That stat seems to be thrown around a lot now, but I'm not sure what dimension activation is referring to.