Put any damage dealer on the Trial dummy and watch the fight add up: every skill, Light and Heavy Attack, set proc and status effect, with the dummy's buffs and debuffs. Change skills, gear, Champion Points or the rotation and the numbers follow. The link in your address bar is the build and the fight.
Update 52 (PTS) version
This page is the Update 52 version of the DPS Simulator. Update 52 is on the PTS until January 19, 2027, so numbers can still move. Skill and set tooltips still show the live Update 51 text; hover one that changes to see what's new. For what works in game today, switch to Update 51 in the version picker (top right, or in the menu on phones). The full list is in the Update 52 patch notes.
Subclassing: swap up to two lines for lines from other classes, at most one from each. Keep at least one Dragonknight line.
Pure Dragonknight: pick 2 of the five passives.
Damage per second
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Loading the build…
UESP lists skill damage at fixed reference stats it doesn't publish, so the simulator fits one number (currently 36,044) so that builds with a published 21 million Health dummy parse land as close to it as they can. Updated 2026-10-30.
| Build (Boss setup) | Parse | Simulated | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arcanist Damage Dealer | 154k | 167.1k | +8.5% |
| Dragonknight Damage Dealer | 163k | 158.7k | -2.6% |
| Nightblade Damage Dealer | 155k | 176.7k | +14.0% |
| Nightblade Damage Dealer: Heavy Attack | 126k | 114.6k | -9.0% |
| Sorcerer Damage Dealer: Heavy Attack | 114k | 113.8k | -0.2% |
| Warden Damage Dealer | 183k | 161.7k | -11.6% |
| Subclassed Beam Damage Dealer: Assassination | 145k | 147.4k | +1.7% |
| Subclassed Beam Damage Dealer: Aedric Spear | 146k | 143.5k | -1.7% |
| Subclassed Beam Damage Dealer: Animal Companions | 145k | 150.2k | +3.6% |
It plays the fight in tenth-of-a-second steps. Every global cooldown it picks the next action the way a good player would: summons first, Ultimates when they're up (buffing ones before damage ones), skills whose effect is about to run out, spenders once their stacks are built, otherwise the filler that does the most damage, with a Light Attack woven before each. Damage over time effects tick, procs fire on their cooldowns, and the fight ends when the dummy dies.
Each hit is the skill's UESP tooltip damage scaled by your Weapon or Spell Damage and Max Magicka or Stamina on the bar it's cast from, then your damage done and the dummy's damage taken bonuses, average Critical damage, and what its 18,200 Armor lets through after your Penetration. Crits use their average, so the same build always gives the same number.
Execute phase: the dummy's Health falls as you hit it, and execute damage follows it. Impale, Killer's Blade, Reverse Slice, the Templar beams and other skills whose tooltip says they deal more damage to low Health enemies ramp up as they should, and the rotation swaps to them as its filler once they out-damage your spammable. Mages' Wrath explodes below 20%, Death Knell and Slaughter kick in at their thresholds, and Bloodthirsty adds 350 Weapon and Spell Damage per piece below 90%. A site build whose notes swap in an execute skill (such as Mages' Wrath for the last 20%) plays that swap too; you can turn it off in Rotation.
Estimates (≈): Light Attack damage, status effect damage, pet attack speed and a few set procs aren't published, so they're estimated. Skills marked as read from their tooltip only count the damage the tooltip lists. Resource sustain isn't simulated: the build is assumed to sustain its rotation. Real parses also vary a few percent with ping, animation cancelling and luck.
Plan the build itself in the Build Editor, or browse the damage dealer builds.