Talk:Dread/@comment-77.167.191.171-20140114221925

This bow is ill suited to attack shields and armour, because it does slash damage

My experiences are a bit different up untill high level. I haven't reached monster level 30+ yet, but atm I onehot everything. I wonder how the numbers work exactely, so bear with me if what follows is all BS, I make a provision at the end of the post.

Basedamage is high, so slap on +180% magnetic, corrosive, viral or something like that and you do a lot of damage to which shields and armour are very weak. Dread with lv 5 Seration and and lv.5 split chamber (which is what I have now) does over a 1000 viral damage on a regular shot, that's 1750 damage if you apply the weakness percentage (which, as mentioned on this site, effects all grineer), 4375 on a charged shot, 8750 on a charged crit and who knows what on a charged critical headshot. You can add the same damage as corrosive, which very conviently effects the heaviest of grineer for +75%. But oh no, the 550 slash damage does 15-50% less damage (which is 1375 on a charged critical).

With a lv.10 Serration these numbers increase bij 75% again. Rainbow Dread with Serration and Multishot than does (8750+8750) * 1.75 = 30.625 elemental damage, and also half of 2 * 1375 * 1.75 = 4813 slash damage, so versus Grineer you loose 2406 slash (the 50%) on charged critical hits, which seems very little in comparison to the elemental damage. All you need is a level 30 supercharged Dread for a total of 33.031 damage. I like to add Speed Trigger and Fast hand into the mix as well to significantly speed up the bows chargedtime, so you need to polarize Dread twice for that. Not a bad deal eh?

You can also drop one of the elements and increase the crit damage. Dropping toxic from the mix would remove viral, but add cold (+25% to heavy grineer). This allows for a maxed vital sense (+120% crit damage), for a total of 55.825 crit damage on heavy Grineer (but far less on the weaker Grineer, which obviously isn't a problem). Remove Fast Hand or Speed Trigger to add Point Strike for +150% crit chance, criting 1/4 instead of 1/10. You can do all this on a Dread which was polarized twice.

Now for the big question. I don't really know if these numbers are correct. Is elemental damage calculated like this or is slash damaged halved before elemental damage kicks in? That would seem like a sound assumption, and it would mean Rainbow Dread does "only" 17.418 damage to the heaviest of Grineer, and the crit build would do 27.913 damage. Please note these are crits on charged shots. Still seems like a good deal though, and I don't see how slash damage hampers the use of Dread versus heavy Grineer.

It might just work the way I said it though, because the sawtooth clip doesn't effect elemental damage (is this correct? It's what it says in the arsenal but that thing is a bit buggy). It would seem elemental damage is calculated off of the base damage of the bow, so perhaps the grineer resiliency to slash damage doesn't effect the elemental damage that was derived from it.