The top thing that comes to mind if you really feel like you’re clearing faster with Silverbolt, especially trash, is the major +25% attack speed boost, and especially if you don’t have the complete Ulzuin set.
The interaction of attack speed and damage is hard to calculate in this game, but there’s some examples to highlight why you might sometimes feel like you’re clearing faster with a weaker weapon that shoots faster than a stronger one that shoots slower.
Imagine you had a very slow-firing sniper rifle that deals insane damage versus a submachine gun that fires super fast that deals very low damage. The DPS on the sniper rifle might be twice as high but you can imagine how a sniper could be in a bad situation against a bunch of soft zombies with low health charging at him. There the submachine gun is generally going to be better because it’s not wasting excess damage and time on each individual target.
That’s a simple and intuitive case against swarms of soft trash, but sometimes you might want to weapon swap to a faster-hitting weapon in those scenarios and switch to a stronger, slower one against bosses if you want to maximize efficiency.
A more complex case, but one that could help even with single targets, is the interaction of attack speed and procs and crits which can occur (ex: 25% chance on hitting an enemy). The procs and crits might not be as powerful with a weaker, faster-shooting weapon but they’ll be triggered more often, especially crits which have no CD. Unless the procs or crits are significantly weaker, triggering weaker versions of them, say, 25% more often in the same timespan might do more damage overall than triggering a stronger crit or proc less often.
Then there’s the interaction of attack speed and AoE damage from skills like explosive strike and primal strike/torrent. In that case, even if the AoE damage is slightly weaker as a result (say 10%), if you’re triggering it 25% more often as a result of attacking more often, surrounding enemies are going to lose health faster.
Another thing about Silverbolt is that it gives +2 to all skills, not a measly +3 to fire strike. If you have 4-pieces of the Ulzuin set then it’s almost as good to give +2 to all demo skills, but +2 to all skills might scale your damage output even more than the +fire% damage modifiers.
+200% fire damage is quite awesome but it doesn’t make that much of a difference if you already had like +850% fire damage before on your character sheet from skills and devotions and other gear. +72 OA is quite good but your OA before might already have been high enough to get crits fairly often, in which case attack speed might be better.
Last but not least is resistances. The particular types of enemies you’re fighting might be more resistant to fire than physical or piercing. Silverbolt might deal less total damage per second but it’ll deal more physical/piercing DPS when you factor in base weapon damage scaled by attack speed. If they’re chtonics then naturally Silverbolt helps quite a bit there since I think the +30% damage to chtonics actually scales your total damage.
I don’t know which weapon will net you more damage output but these are just some factors to think about which might explain why you feel like Silverbolt is working better for you.
