Forums → Games → Piercing VS Stats

Right, like Eddy often says, piercing greatly increases your damage, especially against lower level enemies. I did a test against some zone one enemies using slash and withdrawal. Sonny was a speed build with the specialist armor and weapons.

Using slash I could do more than 300K points of damage. Using withdrawal I could only do around 48K in spite of the superior stats of the ability:2.6x(strength+instict+speed) vs 1.6x(strength+speed)for slash.

So when fighting low level enemies piercing is definately superior to stats. Now it remains to see whether the same is true when fighting guys in zone 5.

I find piercing is only good if you have some skill that improves the existing piercing. Also there are no good armor sets with high stats. In other games, you will usually find something like piercing with high offensive stats but no defensive or health.

So, I tested stats vs piercing against the mayor and to my surprise I inflicted more damage when using slash with a high piercing build.

The difference wasn`t that big though: with good stats and no piercing I did 19.2K points of damage while with the extra piercing I could do 21.4K. Still, this is lower than the 28.7K I could do using withdrawal.

So, I would say, that when fighting in zone 5, it`s best to go for withdrawal/poison based attacks and forget about physical piercing. Besides as you can see below the difference in stats is quite dramatic.

high piercing build:


optimal build:


With the specialist armor vitality is a pathetic 34 which translates into about 1250 hitpoints, when with a vitality of 200 you get more than 7000. Not worth the 2200 extra points of damage when using slash IMO.

Not a fan of the currently-available piercing armor or weapons. Of the end-game pierce armor/weap set, I think I only used the boots and the helm, and that was mostly for the speed attributes. The +focus and + # piercing were appreciated, but not the deciding factor on why I choose them.

Currently, I feel the attribute trade-off for a rather modest phys. piercing increase just isn't worth it. Maybe when they release future upgrades, they'll make it more viable.