Talk:Acrid/@comment-11753608-20130727132623/@comment-11753608-20130727150939

It is true, even for infested for two reasons:

1.  Despair does armor piercing damage which also ignores armor but has the benefit of a much larger base damage. Even with the light infested .5 MP for armor pierce, that is a base damage of 27 against them beating the Acrid by two while being over twice the base damage for everything else. Base damage and armor ignore is by far the two most important factors when choosing a weapon.

2.  Elemental mods (other than armor pierce) do NOT bypass armor and scale significantly better when the base damage of the weapon is higher. In fact, when it comes specifically to fire, frost, and electricity mod damage, base damage is much more important than whether the base damage is armor ignoring or not. This has to do with how the order of operations that mod calculations have. Because of armor scaling, the spread will be smaller in lower levels and much larger at higher levels.

You can test this yourself at the Damage Calculator if you like.

The only benefit to using the Acrid is that the majority of the damage happens in the ticks. It has a "set it and forget it" factor where you can load up an enemy with ticks and then spread the love. However Despair may offset this benefit with higher damage outputs and full auto, faster fire rate.