Talk:Dread/@comment-129.21.113.73-20141112204637

The following is this reader's humble opinion and justification for holding it.

I've been using the Dread off and on ever since it debuted in the Stalker update. Back then - when armor ignore was still a thing - I remember everyone thought the paris was the better bow. They were wrong. Failing to take scaling into account, they didn't realize that the enemies would have to reach an unfeasible level before the armor ignore on the paris ever came close to the pure scaling power of the dread.

Then damage 2.0 came out and made both bows relatively useless with the changes. After a while they realized this and buffed both while also making a new Paris Prime bow, one that would actually be able to compete with the Dread. This brought bows back into the realm of usefulness with their insane crit scaling. The Paris Prime peeked at 12537 DPS and the Dread peeked at a slightly lower but basically equivalent 12178. Both were - and still are - viable weapons.

However, when they recently brought back the red crit mechanic, they gave the Dread yet another inherent advantage over the paris bows. The addition of the red crit mechanic gives a clear advantage to the Dread in DPS as it's base crit chance is slightly higher. Taking into account multi-shot, the Dread now has a 41.9% chance to get at least 1 red crit per trigger pull whereas the paris prime only has a 22.3% chance. Going back to raw DPS, the Dread's new peek DPS comes out to about 15223 whereas the Paris Prime's is 14104. This is too big a DPS gap to contextualize the differences to certain scenarios. The Dread is - once again - the clearly superior bow.

That's not to say the Paris Prime is bad, of course. Both viable late game weapons. Once you take into account the fact they can easily hit multiple enemies per shot, they reenter the discussion of best weapon in game.