Talk:Dread/@comment-129.21.251.137-20140207181204

The buffed Dread has officially taken back the thrown of highest single target DPS.

A small tidbit of math: elemental mods increase dps in a linear fashion whereas crit mods increase dps in an exponential fashion. Essentially, you use crit mods to make your elemental damage mods more efficient. This is why weapons that have high crit values like the soma and synapse have low base damages - it's to compensate for the exponential boost the crit mods give them. This is why full build crit weapons have scaled better than weapons with much higher base damage but low crit (such as most shotguns). It's like comparing a y=x graph to a y=x^2 graph. The linear won wins out in the short term, but is evetually beaten by the polynomial.

The Dread was one of the premiere weapons of choice back in U7 and U8 because of it's abnormally high crit chance (50% when fully modded). With a multishot mod, you essentially had a 75% chance to crit each trigger pull. At the time, weapons like the soma and synapse didn't exist. When they debuted in post-launch updates, they quickly became the standard late-game killers because of their incredibly strong crit mechanics. So I'm going to show some numbers comparing the base damages of these weapons with full vital sense and full point strike mods. I have to include the crit mods to show the real base damage because crit mods are the only ones that have polymial influence on overall damage. I don't need to calculate any elemental mods because they all influence the base damage in a linear way and so would effect each by the exact same margin, making no difference in comparison.

Base crit damage on Old Dread: 405 (no reload needed, but slow rate of fire and 50% crit chance on base damage of 150)

Base crit damage on synapse: 459(100% crit chance and high rate of fire + low reload, 12 base damage)

Base crit damage on current Soma: 538 (calculation ignores windup so the actual value is lower, 6.6X crit damage is insane, high rate of fire at full windup, 75% crit chance, 10 base damage, long reload hurts DPS)

Base crit damage on current Dread: 880 (Base damage buffed to 200, modded crit chance reaches 100%, still retains the advantage of no reload, rate of fire still low)


 * All calculations assume 100% accuracy while maintaining maximum fire rate. Assault rifles take much less skill to reach those conditions so take the Dread calculations to be slightly lower than the other calculations.

Still, I see myself using the new and improved Dread a lot more. BTW, someone needs to switch the crit chances between normal and charged attacks. A charged attack has a base damage of 200 and crit chance of 50%.