[Snake]

Burst damage is way better than DPS if we're talking about this weapon's theme, you take all damage done to you and WHAM. But the 'all' part is often turned into a constant DPS if you have Riposte on. A Narcus user with Riposte can be pretty annoying, I think the on-hit effect ignores the 50% damage reduction so you're constantly reflecting 100% of the enemy's damage back at them per Riposte.
Bonus points if the enemy is a VA with Dagger Dancer, each hit gets Riposte'd so expect tons of damage being deflected at every single chance.

It's better for it to trigger once but big, than trigger at every chance you give the enemy so it turns into a beyond-big DPS, when you add all instances where Narcus triggered together. A big 400 damage is way better than 700 over two rounds, tl;dr.