Talk:Dread/@comment-69.242.89.46-20130627002848

Here's the thing about the Dread vs. Paris. If both weapons crit, your looking at 150 vs. 300 damage. That means on crit, the Dread does double damage. The enemy's armor would need to be 50% to make the Paris as good. Unfortunately, basically every enemy hits beyond this armor once the lvl reaches 80's and up.

Looking at the direct damage, the Paris wins. But the problem the ENTIRE Warframe community seems to have is that they only look at the base damage. They don't take elemental damage into account.

The thing is that every enemy has a different resistance for each element, and the Paris armor ignore DOES NOT affect elemental damage. Because the Dread's elemental damage scales off of a base that's 50% higher, the Dread's elemental damage does far more damage. Do this simple calculation: a paris and dread both crit on an enemy and both of them have a 60% AP mod on. In terms of critdamage(base(enemy armor) + elemental), the paris will deal 1.5(100(1) + 60) for 240 damage. The Dread will deal 2(150(x) + 90). That means the enemy's armor (x) would have to be 20% (or 0.2) before the Dread would do less damage than the Paris.

When I realized this, I also realized that the more elemental damage you have on the Dread, the more armor the enemy would need to make up for it. Since the enemy's resistances to elements would be same on both weapons, the Dread has an innate bonus from it's higher base damage and it's higher crit ratio. Theoretically, the elemental damage on the Dread would do more damage than the Paris even if the enemy armor reduced the base damage to 0. To find the magnitude of elemental damage you would need to reach this point, take graphing calculator and compare the Paris' equation 1.5(100 + x) to the Dread equation 2(0 + 1.5x). These equations COMPLETELY nullify the Dread's base damage and shows the elemental : base damage ratio you would in % on the x variable. They intersect at x = 100, which means that if your elemental damage magnitude is %100 of your base (i.e. your base and elemental damage is split 50/50), your dread will match the Paris in damage with the exact same mods AND assuming the enemy's armor COMPLETELY negates the Dread's base damage. If you do more elemental damage than base damage (which can be EASILY achieved with a lvl AP mod and any other lvl 5 elemental mod, picking the right elements against the right faction boosts the elemental magnitude even more) than your Dread's elemental damage will excede the Paris base and elemental damage COMBINED.

In conclusion, with maxed mods, your Dread will do more damage in every scenario simply because it's base stats scale elemental damage so much better than the Paris. Note that only one enemy in the game can scale enough armor to reduce the Dread's damage to 0, so the Dread does SIGNIFICANTLY more damage to every lvl 100 enemy in the game. The Paris armor ignore simply is not enough to counter the far superior stats on the Dread. If you still don't believe the Dread is better, have fun doing less damage with the Paris.