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If only they were easier to get they could be used on the feild all the time with drops lol. The Problem is actually getting an infested CC.... Nobody gets just 1 queen while offing an expo... Has to be very late game. Maybe if they spawned for free instead of costing so much and build time then they would be viable. I care about SC and learning Korean. 😊
Imagine Arty making his entire fucking life about StarCraft, hating protoss with such a passion, and he doesn't know reavers do normal damage, making them even more busted. Man continues to embarrass himself every day. For a list that was literally made just by copying Liquidpedia, Artosis's friend managed to do the bare minimum of research.
I think DPS as a stat is pretty useless to focus on in SC due to how armor reduces damage by a flat amount, favoring slower attacks with higher damage output over faster attacks with lower damage output. The reason people expected Tanks to be so much higher is because out of the 75 damage, you're usually losing like 2-3 points of damage against most units, which is reduction of around 3-4%, whereas going for Valks high DPS is practically useless against Carriers since their 6x8 attack is automatically reduced by 66% against the Carrier's 4 armor before the upgrades. Damage types, unit costs, and microability also make it even more complicated.
Many of those high dps units have high base damage (reaver, archon, ultra, DT all have 30+) while it's actually the high attack speed low damage units that have the lowest dps (marines, interceptors, broodlings). Only real exception is zerglings.
@@liberphilosophus7481 The effective dps of units with high attack speed would depend on the armour they encounter and dps/supply (which no one mentions) Herpus Derpus.
@@rocksparadox Obviously high damage units will perform better vs units with high armor. I was referring to true damage or, in other words, disregarding armor... obviously if high damage units have a higher dps at 0 armor, they will have a higher dps at 3 armor. The main advantage of low attack units is that they are able to be massed early for a timing attack before the better units can be produced... I don't even know why I'm replying to you; your comment is extremely stupid and condescending.
This list really goes to show how dynamic the game really is. Some interesting facts though, a single ling without crack out damaging a Zealot is pretty crazy for instance
There's at least one error on the list Artosis was given (Reavers deal normal damage, not explosive damage; doublechecked in game to be sure). Also as chat notes, the speed of fire is faster than the speed of building scarabs, so reaver damage isn't technically sustain damage. The carrier one, from what I understand, depends a lot on micro. As far as missile turrets almost never dealing full damage--they deal full damage to almost every air unit in the game...except half damage to mutas. So like...technically not wrong in a practical sense since mutas are the most common target for missile turrets. But missile turrets get full damage to Shuttles, Arbiters, Carriers, Scouts, Battlecruisers, Wraiths, Dropships, Valkyries, Science Vessels, Zerg air cocoons, Devourer, Guardian, Overlord, and flying terran buildings. Less than full damage to mutas of course (50%), queens (75%), interceptors, corsairs, and observers (but full damage to the shields on those three protoss units, so not even that bad). Technically full damage to about 3/4 of all flying units in the game. Just...not the one unit terran cares about (mutas). A general comment on these numbers is that they assume +3 attack upgrades, but also an enemy with 0 defence. Which is...unrealistic. If you have +3 attack upgrades, usually at best you attack something with 1 defence (enemy buildings). And it's pretty common to find yourself attacking things with 3 defence (+3 upgraded enemy units) or even 4 defence (+3 upgraded units that have 1 natural armour, which a lot of units do). Generally the un-upgraded numbers are a more realistic guess as to how well a unit will do in combat (not the upgraded numbers against a 0 defence enemy, which is what the table is sorted by). And yeah, obviously price needs to be considered. One ultra might out-damage two marines, but not four marines (same supply) and definitely not 8 marines (same overall cost).
Even without the Reaver Capacity upgrade, you could fire continuously 11x in a row before you'd have to wait .28s for the next shot. So it's not too big of a deal. Carrier one is obviously theoretical but either way, they carry that much DPS while flying too, which is a huge advantage. Missile turrets aren't used against most of those enemies, which is why he brings it up, the most common things turrets defend against are Muta, Interceptors, Arbiters and Transports. Arbiters are too tanky for it to matter what damage type anyway, Mutas obvious hinder a lot, Interceptors are true, but it still takes 6-9 hits (based on upgrades) from turrets each to kill one if they don't return by then. It is kinda hard to sort a list by factors like that too, a lot of the top units are already high single damage instances hitting with the exception of Carriers, Firebats and Lings. Also, there are buildings that have zero armor too, Missile Turrets, Photon Cannons, Spores, Pylons & Creep Colonies. But on saying that, it's not something to base strategy off, just mildly interesting :)
Distance absolutely matters. With melee units like lings, ultras, DTs and Zealots they have very high dps but they are not always hitting. Units with range hut far more consistently and the longer your range is, the more likely they will hit.
Really highlights how insane the Reaver is as it has the most damage and one of the highest ranges. Although it does need an escort at all times which makes it balanced.
Interceptors/Carriers have a lot of weird mechanics that make getting an exact DPS value for them pretty much impossible (well, maybe not impossible, but really annoying). On paper, the values here are correct but in practice its DPS is constantly varying in a certain range (sometimes higher than shown here, sometimes lower) also, fun fact: If the Infested Terran *didn't* explode when attacking, it would have *11,904 dps* lol for anyone that is wondering, the attack speed values are calculated by doing: weapon cooldown frames * current game speed / 1000 (or, cooldown / (1000 / gamespeed), which can be simpler if you need to do a lot of these calculations in bulk) game speed in BW is a number of milliseconds to wait before each game frame. on the Fastest speed, this is 42ms. the Infested Terran's cooldown is 1 frame. so, 1 * 42 / 1000 = 0.042. then the actual DPS is 500 / 0.042 = ~11,904 also @ ~18:39 for people wondering, the SCV _technically_ has higher DPS if you spam-click it to attack. its normally brought down to about the same DPS as a Probe/Drone if it's just auto-attacking. all workers have a kind of weirdness with their range but its much much easier to abuse on Probes and Drones, and both Probes and Drones regenerate HP, so this is why they are overall better than an SCV even though the SCV on paper has better DPS and more HP. something like that anyway, im not 100% privy to how exactly it works, but its more or less something like that iirc
If you want to count infested terrans, then you should probably remove reavers from the list and add scarab. The Reaver has no attack, it's just a scarab factory.
@@Zraknul i wouldnt say thats comparable, Interceptors/Carriers is more comparable to Reavers and, well, yeah, Interceptors and Carriers are listed separately on this list. ultimately its more complicated than that, and Infested Terran technically can't really have a DPS value assigned to them due to exploding (and, same for an individual scarab :p), i was just providing a neat piece of trivia is all
"Contrary to popular belief mass spamming attack move or right click on another unit does not make the SCV attack faster. The attack animation appears faster but the attack rate is still the same." I got this from TL. Apparently SCV just straight up have a shorter weapon cooldown than probes and drones (0.63 vs 0.92), thats why they have a higher DPS. Though its still RNG because SCVs sometimes just don't attack and you can lose a 1v1 even tho you attacked first. Probes and drones have more range than the SCV, and the Probe has more sight range than both of them. SCVs also mine slower than the other 2 as well due to acceleration/deceleration.
@@Sapreme yeah, SCVs have a 15 frame cooldown while Probes and Drones have a 22 frame cooldown. I was under the assumption that due to the way their animations are set up, their effective attack cooldown was more inline with the 22 value tho.
BTW, all these numbers are available on Liquipedia on the individual unit pages. You can also get them from the weapon type data by dividing DamageAmount by DamageCooldown and then dividing by 0.042. Exceptions are things like the Reaver and Carrier which need to be computed separately due to their unique logic, and units that shoot twice, like the goliath, which need to be doubled. Doing this can also get you some silly/meaningless results like the nuclear missile or infested Terran. That's because these all have a nominal cooldown of 1 frame, though in reality, that cooldown is not used. There are also a couple of unused attacks with undefined 0/0 damage/cd. The highest meaningful dps in an unmodified Brood War map is Zeratul, a dark templar hero, with108.2 dps. His attack is also normal (so no type reductions) and extremely resilient to armor (dealing 100 damage per hit). Next is a tie between Infested Kerrigan, and Torrasque with 79.4, but Torrasque's attack beats Kerrigans with upgrades, at +3 bonus instead of +1. After that, you get the unused Tassadar/Zeratul archon hero with 71.4 dps, and then, believe it or not, is Fenix the Dragoon (48.7). Then Edmund Duke in siege mode (47.6) and not in siege mode (45.0), Tom Kazansky wraith AA (43.3), Alan Schezar goliath AA tied with Fenix zealot (43.3), and then Norad II tied with the calculation for the reaver given in the video (39.7). After that is the pre-expansion DT hero tied with the regular archon (35.7), then Gui Montag (34.6 if it hits twice), and then Raynor tied with Kerrigan, Stukov, and Hyperion (32.5), and so on. At the very bottom, you have a bunch of 0s for spells that don't deal damage like stasis field, then the arbiter at 5.3, which shouldn't really surprise you. After that is a tie between the broodling, drone and, probe (5.4), devourer (6.0), wraith AG tied with scout AG (6.3), mutalisk (excluding bounces, 7.1), an unused unit called "Special Independent Starport" (7.6), SCV (7.9), marine without stim (9.5), mutalisk (including bounces, 10.3), Danimoth arbiter hero (10.6), floor and wall trap missiles and autocannons tied with ghosts (10.8), Tom Kazansky AG (12.7), lurkers (12.9), goliath AG (13.0), and so on. For this, I used v 1.16.1, but the results should be the same in every version since 1.04 when BW was introduced.
Incidentally, this list only includes actual attacks. The weakest offensivef hero unit in the game is not the Danimoth with 10.6 dps but Yggdrasil with 0 dps. Also, these were all without upgrades, which clearly makes a huge difference for weak units like the zergling. But it turns out if I give them all equal upgrades, they don't move around too much. The big exception is the carrier, which got pushed off my list but would have been very high up with max upgrades. I think that's misleading though, because you should never have 3 more weapons upgrades than your opponent has armor upgrades. If we assume every +1 weapons you get means +1 armor for the opponent, then the carrier does not look great.
The guy in the chat saying ,,Guys he s making a point about protoss again" ... deserves an award, he understands. The discussion wouldnt even happen if it was all terran units lmao :D
@@AdamDunebugDunas Not really. Because #1 and #2 would be Zergling and Marine, cause each ling is 25 minerals. It's nearly impossible to beat that. Quick head-math even 100% ignoring the gas costs (to give them a fighting chance) nothing is remotely close.
One thing I remember trying to explain to someone in a UMS game: range was far more important than damage. He had rigged the map with him playing as zerglings with 100 attack and I was playing with Ghosts with only 10 attack. But once I hit critical mass, zerglings could never get to ghosts. Still holds true in every "real" map for every RTS, arguably the most important stat any unit has is range, followed by movement speed, then actual damage, because the first two effectively show how you can micro or take advantage of other units.
@@jesusislord461 Really not though. Range > Movement Speed > Dmg. Just an extreme example. Range and movement speed allow you to micro / kite everything, and once a critical mass is hit, it's possible that melee units might not even get a single hit in.
funfact missile turrets doing explosive is pretty good, nearly all air units are actually large (every terran air unit is large) unfortunately mutas are small and are one of the most relevant units turrets have to fight, but in TvT or TvP turrets are doing full dps to everything except corsairs also before you reply, yes wraiths are large, yes scouts are large
Even though all Terran air units are large; Observers, Interceptors, Scourge & Muta are Small; Queens & Corsairs are Medium. It doesn't make too big of a difference vs Observers or Scourge as they're so weak already, but it makes a big difference vs Muta & Interceptors, which are some of the main reasons to have Missile Turrets outside of drops / detection.
Very interesting list. I didn't knew that workers have different DPS. Also, it confirms that tanks do more damage when sieged. This reminds me of my research for unit selection ranks, made 13 years ago: note that, there the terran race is superior :)
SCVs only _technically_ have higher DPS due to some weirdness with how their animations work. due to this, their attack speed is actually much closer to a Probe or Drone. however, by spamming the right orders to them, they actually attack slightly faster by bypassing the animation and just directly attacking at their actual attack speed. in practice, this means _generally_ speaking, a-moved SCVs do pretty much the same DPS, but if you do the right micro they have slightly more.
Taking into account the time it takes to siege and unsiege, the unsieged dps is higher (speed runners for example do not use siege mode). The real advantage with siege mode is the range and splash.
@@abstractdaddy1384 in scenarios where Siege Tanks are _already_ sieged and are doing their damage without having to wait to be sieged at all it is definitely still a bit better lol
I feel it’s a problem to not factor in distance. Does a marine have more DPS if you factor in it can start hitting before the other unit walks up to it? You could take the sum of all damage once in marine range, if you wanted a more realistic damage amount
@@Barricade706 Agreed, but I don't really care. Splash is its own category. I think that DPS is meaningless if you don't factor in range. Marines are artificially low because it does not factor in the copious free hits they get relative to a zealot/zergling.
There are at least 5 numerical mistakes here, assuming we are only talking about a single unit hitting a single target. But i might as well talk about all mistakes in general. The most DPS comes from a stimmed firebat if all 3 lines of attack hit the target. That is 24/11 = 2.181818... But i can let that one slide cuz it's too esoteric. Normally only 2 lines of attack hit the target so it is 16/11 = 1.454545... The Reaver does NORMAL damage, not explosive. "The Carrier"...You mean 8 interceptors? See this is why u gotta be clear about single unit. But no big deal i guess. The stimmed firebat (2 hits) and goliath air attack have the same DPS. 16/11 = 32/22 = 1.454545... The crackling and missile turret are tied too, 8/6 = 20/15 = 1.333333... The Tank (Siege) and BC are tied too, 85/75 = 34/30 = 1.133333... After the Valk, the next unit should be the stimmed marine. 9/8 = 1.125. This is assuming that the Cooldown of a simmed marine is equal to half of it's normal Cooldown, but 15/2 = 7.5 and that gets rounded up to 8. Then after that it is the Tank (Unsieged), 39/37 = 1.054054... Then finally we get to the zergling, no adrenal (8/8), but it turns out there are THREE OTHER things tied with it. Spore Colony (15/15), zealot (22/22), and Corsair (8/8). These all exactly = 1. Okay after that i think there are still some mistakes but i'm not gonna go that far. I would like to end this by explaining why these mistakes are so common. First, whoever made that chart was using actual seconds, so you have to use that ridiculous time factor of 1000/42 which is an absurd number. Ppl punch it into the calculator wrong all the time. It is way way WAY better to just use integers in the FRAME COUNT. Go by frames, not seconds. Both of these things use damage-per-time. Second, ppl get confused on the upgrade numbers. For example, a zealot starts with 16 and gets +2 per upgrade, so the total upgraded attack is 22. A pompom tank starts with 30 and gets +3 per upgrade, so the total upgraded attack is 39. And it gets more confusing when there are 2 hits, or multiple hits, from the unit. You have to very carefully add and multiple things there. And to whoever made the chart, double check your numbers plz. This is WAY EASIER if you go by frame count, not seconds.
Makes you think if firebats are underused. 2x the damage of vultures while also being easier to produce because a barracks is significantly cheaper than a factory. But I suppose reavers stomp so hard on bio that it's not worth it to go bio at all.
Firebats are crap. As is sometimes said, it's 75 minerals for 3 spider mines and you get a vulture for free. But a vulture without mines is still far better than a firebat. Heck, it'd pretty much have to be vulture with no spider mines vs firebats with spider mines for me to really have to think about which is better. Firebat just has basically nothing going for it until the defilers come out in which case some damage is better than no damage. I think it's one of those things where a company patches to what the pros want. And firebat is so far out of meta for most situations that they pretty much forgot it exists for the sake of balancing.
@@redfish337 Good point on the spider mines. Problem with firebats in TvZ is they deal 25% damage to ultras and 50% to lurkers, and they're incredibly squishy for how slow they are. Need to double up the hp and armor and then MAYBE they're viable as the Terran version of a zealot lol.
@@liberphilosophus7481 Firebats aren't quite as bad as people think vs Ultra, especially in combination with a Bunker vs late game Zerg. They're not perfect, but they're doing a surprising amount more. You remove armor before doing the 25% damage which saves a good amount of Firebat damage and people think Firebats have two attacks (it says that in game) but in testing, they actually have 3 attacks, but generally the third attack only hits on large units, so you actually get more DPS than that list. Taking into account full upgrades on both sides, Firebats have very close time to kill to the same amount of marines and can do it under Dark Swarm.
I always felt like even pros use devourers wrong. Theyre a support unit designed to buff muta bounces, but every once in a while youll see a pro use guardians and for air support they build a single devourer that dies instantly
I agree, but their tech tree makes them really non-viable imo. You gotta go into Hive tech AND get Greater Spire. Except for the Guardian rush against Terran, I can't think of a strat where you could justify that investment, only to reduce the armor of some units for Muta bounces. What high armor air units do Zerg even go against?
@@BLooDCoMPleX you also gotta sac a muta for a devourer, which is literally worst than suiciding your mutas into a vessel or turrets when they're no longer effective.
We all know Infested Terran and Scourge have the best dps, dont try to lie to us. Kinda confused on why Hydra spines and Sunken tendril are explosive damage...
yeah, not a bad explanation. usually they are picking on units that are well-below their weight class. but when you think about putting much fewer Mutalisks against more tanky targets, such as Tanks, BCs, Carriers, Dragoons, or Reavers, the numbers start to line up more reasonably.
Hey Arty, I think it would be nice to have a chart/explanation with which units beat which other. Something like… 2 marines lose to 1 zealot 3 marines beat 1 zealot (heavy micro) … 12 mutas beat 12 goliaths … Something like that. Please and thank you
I was kinda hoping for a deep dive lecture format instead of a game show to learn how the actual calculations worked but ah well, it was worth a skim to learn that Reavers have sneakily been doing explosive damage all along when I thought the scarab just glitched
Overall a pretty ‘meh’ ranking list. Armor negation and damage types really makes this list obsolete. Abilities like Plagguuuuu and Storm out DPS everything, ignoring armor. Ultras pathing is really sketchy and reavers scarabs duds often. That is why siege tanks are so good at DPSing (albeit at a critical mass): they don’t miss nor need to path to their targets, making their DPS consistent on a defensive stance. On a funny final note, a single infested terran in the middle of a mass of units and nukes would probably be at the top of the list since all their DPS is in a single frame!
Reavers, Archons, and Dark Templars, Firebats and Ultralisks need high DPS to compensate for how slow, expensive, inefficient and short ranged they are, telling you this as an honest zerg main, not as a pesagi propagandist.
'BVUUUUUUUT ARTOSIS' - DPS is only an illusion with such high damage. You have to assumne that you've done damage with reaver (even with +damage upgrade), where you have to minus the over-kill damage. You can't pretend that doing a NUKE'S worth of damage against a 1 hp zergling technically has such massive damage. WHICH technically according to the situation here since nukes cost minerals and gas and take supply is the most DPSing unit in the game!
Yeah, as soon as you throw in COST of a unit, the list loses most of it's use, but it IS interesting. There is a mission in BW where you get marines and you can put single marines into Goliaths... but turns out that even when NOT stimmed, the marine has better DPS. lol
Artosis what do you think about starcraft original and brood war art. I think its all interesting. Make a video about your opinions. I am writing from my mothers account.
this isnt correct. units with splash should be way higher when hitting multiple targets, should math that out properly. also need to calculate the dps/cost and dps/supply etc
@@ironman1458 I mean, we usually measure DPS by how often it fires. So one nuclear silo can fire a nuke every 77 seconds. Or potentially you could maybe say it was a spell and have the DPS how long it takes to cast, in which case it'd be 17s or 29.4 DPS. But generally, you can't measure the DPS of any unit that suicides because it only ever fires once, so measuring it as the missile would be undefined, as would a baneling, as would an infested terran. You could argue that the Reaver has two DPS values, one for full scarabs, one for empty. So 39.7 (+9.9) DPS for full or 25 (+6.3) DPS for empty.
A work of love, but extremely meaningless and quite misleading. The tests are done vs protoss shields meaning all damage is done in full. The DPS for most units is even lower than that, due to the failed damage type vs unit type . The DPS for all units is lower vs units with native armor.
I find it interesting how Artosis says the missile turret deals full damage to basically nothing that flies, when in reality there are only 6 air units that don't take full damage. (Interceptor, Corsair, Observer, Queen, Mutalisk, Scourge). Literally every other air unit takes full damage, and only one of the listed units can attack the turret directly.
