Talk:Despair/@comment-194.46.183.160-20130726214258/@comment-13117751-20130729181244

That whole despair versus acrid thing has been going on forever.

No one questions that the Acrid does more gross damage, it's just a question on time to kill.

In some situations the despair can beat the acrid if it simply cuts down a target faster than the DoT from the acrid can build up momentum. In that case, hit-for-hit the despair is still doing less damage, but over a shorter duration of time it does more DPS.

On the flipside, the Acrid's DoT, as you said, is easily underestimated and on large, particularly tough, targets it can inflict massive damage when you look at adequately "large" time windows (of course, by large I mean a few extra seconds than the above scenario so it's still reasonably small).

So really in the end it's just situational.