Talk:Dread/@comment-69.242.89.46-20130625200828

After a while of using them, I think the Dread is in fact a little stronger than the Paris, and here's why. If your still personally debating on which weapon you should devote your resources to, I hope this helps. Otherwise, this is going to look unnecessarily long-winded.

Some people have claimed that it's a faction difference: that the Dread is better against infested and the Paris is better against everything else. That assumption is based on ONLY taking enemy resistances into account and not actually factoring in the innate advantages of the Dread. So obviously the Paris will look better if you only take its advantages into account and not the Dread's.

First off: more base damage. 50% more base damage. That means that not only your direct damage, but your elemental mods will sacle 50% better. The same AP mod on the Dread will do 50% more damage than its counterpart on the Paris simply because the base damage is higher.

Secondly, the armor on most enemies (except heavies)  reduces damage by 33%. That drops the Dread's base to 100, where the Paris is already at. That means that against non heavy enemies, you can hit with more damage on the Dread because the base is equal but its mods will do more damage.

Third, the Dread flight time is faster and more direct, making it easier to hit weak spots. Weak spots are not armored and apply direct damage multipliers. A paris hitting a headshot will deal 200 damage, whereas a Dread will deal 300 damage. A big part of the Dread's ability to outdamage the Paris is hitting weak spots.

Fourth and most importantly, the crit damage on the paris has a 1.5 multiplier whereas the Dread has a 2.0 multiplier. That means the bonus damage from citical hits is TWICE as big on the Dread as it is on the Paris. Critical hits are the Dread's bread and butter when you hit T3 runs or wave 30+ defense missions. Also critical hit multipliers are calculated off the final damage of the shot, which means the bonus crit damage will not be affected by armor (however the shot it's basing the calculation off will be affected by armor and still suffer some reduced damage). If you get a headshot at base and both weapons crit, the paris will do 300 damage and the Dread will do 600.

So to sum up, the Dread simply scales better. The Paris' saving grace is it's ability to do consistent damage to heavy enemies regardless of hit location. However, on crit the Dread has a 50% damage advantage, and on a weakspot the Dread has another 50% damage advantage. That means the Dread is better with crit builds and on skilled shots. However, if you get a crit AND a weakspot at the same time, the Dread is literally doing double damage with the same mods. When I headshot lvl 85 heavy gunners, I break 10K damage on my dread occasionally (that's a headshot and both shots from Split Chamber criting for 4K + 1K elemental each) with a trigger pull. The Paris simply cannot reach that damage threshold in my experience.

Thanks for reading :)