Anyone tested the new dread enchantment?

joheym

Wanted to know if it's good for the sw

tribulex

Short answer: yes. Especially if you build around spamming SS

zachisrising

How is it for PvP?

whyrat

I've just started testing this (as I've just gotten around to acquiring one).

3.1K SW: Soulbinder / Damnation build. ~70-80% crit rate (depends on sudden precision ring and active buffs).
I used ACT... collected logs across a couple of major encounters (eDemo; Castle Never; Dragonflight; etc...).

My main findings:
1) Soul scorch goes up as a portion or your damage;
2) But so does the wraith claw (it's benefiting from the debuff). Remember; I'm Damnation... Fury may be different.

The Normal Dread (rank 8) performs on par with a Greater Vorpal (rank 9) as far as personal DPS... but the debuff means dread outperforms with respect to group DPS. This is pretty substantial given it's a rank lower.

Why the difference? Most of our damage is from encounters.... at-wills do *meh* damage wise (compared to hadar's grasp, soul scorch, harrowstorm, and the like). Rank 8 Dread is 40% crit severity on encounters; plus debuff; Rank 9 vorpal is 38% crit severity on everything. So our encounters hit harder; but at-will crits hit for less (but normal hits hit for more due to debuff). For dailies; I almost exclusively use Tyrannical Threat; which itself does no damage; but just is a multiplier on any other damage you do; so it benefits form Dread (by multiplying all damage done); where a direct damage daily (i.e. CW using ice knife) would not get such a benefit (or immolation spirits similarly would not benefit from the crit severity; but would from the debuff).

So, the net result is that Dread FAR outperforms Vorpal if you have high crit. I *will* be upgrading mine further and eventually switching out (well, once I can afford to...).

Fine print.... the results depend on your crit rate. I'm running ~15-16K crit on average; SWs with less crit will see less benefit; but at that point the debuff will benefit group DPS even more substatially than if you were running vorpal.

I've not been able to test creeping death as it relates to the enchantment necrotic damage... but the numbers are so low it doesn't really matter if it applies or not (15% of weapon damage / sec).

With the upcoming soul spark reduction from lolset change I think the debuff will weigh in even more than crit severity and further push dread to outperform vorpal.

whyrat

Another interesting outcome.... it used to be for single target DPS spamming at-wills produced more damage than using Dreadtheft on that single target. But now, because DT gets increased crit severity and at-wills do not the relative effectiveness for single target reverses. This may be unintentionally good; as it seems DT may be needed to build sparks quickly after the lol-set nerf.