Talk:Despair/@comment-98.227.137.42-20130717013740/@comment-11753608-20130717234816

Kunai do physics impact damage. This ignores armor for all mobs but grineer commanders, seekers, and rollers. Despair do armor piercing damage which also ignores armor but for all mobs. Armor Piercing damage is also subject to different multipliers for the various factions. They are:

Grinner - 1.5 (or +50%) to all.

Infested -  .5 (or -50%) to non-Ancients.

Corpus - an additional x2 for headshots for a total of 4 (or 400%) to all crewmen.

And, of course, Despair has a higher base damage which is much more important than people think when making layman assessments of the weapons on the wiki here for the reason you point out - everything you put on a gun is a % of that base damage and this factors into every calculation in the damage chain. In other words, that base damage stacks in the damage calculation a lot.

The ONLY chance for Kunai to do more damage than despair is when both have relative few or no mods in them and you are fighting light infested. Once the guns are leveled and leveled mods are in place, the Despair quickly outpaces the Kunai even with the .5 modifier. Potatoed and at max mod levels, these weapons aren't even in the same class.