You need to have as much CDR as humanly possible. 35% w/ cubed Dawn, and the max possible without. And as far as I know, there's no such thing as too much area damage.

pretty sure the cap for CDR is ~37, and I've got lots of room to improve on my shoulders, so I'd rather get my CDR there than my weapon. Why would I cube a dawn, clearly I have a primal....

As for area damage, here's what I'm thinking:

Area damage is "all attacks have a 20% chance to also deal x damage to all enemies within 10 yards"
I figure that since all my damage is multiplied based on my weapons, I figure it makes more sense to have that number be higher, rather than have a higher % (the "x" above) of a lower damage

I was simply stating that if you aren't using a dawn and have it cubed, you need a mandatory 35 CDR. The same also goes for actually using a Dawn that's primal. You absolutely need to roll with 35 CDR. Whether you want to put CDR on your weapon or not is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if you have it on your shoulders already either. At the end of the day you shouldn't be any less than the required CDR for your build. Any less than 35 CDR and you're doing it all wrong, period.

Nope

consider it to have either cooldown 10% or area damage 24% then (instead of 10% damage, as I can reroll that perk until I get those), getting off topic a bit but thanks for discussion and input. I may try the 24% area damage on it

9/10

10