[Guide] The Death Metal Amazon

[xMeox]

With a maxed Death Metal, I'm assuming you can get >100 spikes. Meaning that if every spike hits....

NHD --> you cant hit all the time...
actually, this is what the last ~15 posts were about ^^

[Borgin]

Well, on /players 1 in Destruction, 15K physical damage will kill everything in one hit... so the NHD isn't a big deal with my Crossbow build.

I get that the NHD really hurts the 'zon with higher levels of DM, but losing the NHD will result in an unintentional 8x damage increase (layered missiles). So... we just have to live with it.

And I was just "assuming" for the sake of some sketchy mathematics. My damage is radically different (lower) because I don't have a perfect Curse, I don't have maxed skills, and I don't play the game perfectly (I hardly ever have Bloodlust active, because I'm lazy, for example).

--Borgin

[pza]

well it'd not be 8x damage. at least not like a mulitplier. why not? everything that can be triggered would have 8 tiems the chance to be triggered, in best case it would be triggered 8 times. same with CB. that's because that'd be 8 independant hits. that means, if it had no ND, but 1/8 weapon damage modifier it still would be much stronger than with nd and full damage.

[Borgin]

Very true.

The actual physical damage of DM would increase eightfold, which is what I meant. But thanks to the huge number of procs in Median, going from 100 spikes to basically 800 would probably crash the game with a decent proc weapon.

--Borgin

[Incompetent]

I'm playing a crossbow tankzon, and I decided on Buckshot because if you're going to get anything out of that skill, you need tanking ability. But it sounds like it's not so good as a main skill. Leveraging it into corpse skills is a good idea, though.

The point of Buckshot is not to do high damage to everything near you, but to wtfkill a single target in the face with x15 damage. Barrage doesn't do that.

The spread is too wide on Buckshot for it to do that, because there's a limit to how tightly missiles can be crammed on a Multishot clone, and being forced to fire it point-blank spreads the missiles further. It does the most damage when the monsters in melee range form an arc of 90-180 degrees (and I suspect the monsters either side of you get hit hardest, rather than the one you aim at). The concentration of missiles against a single target is better than Barrage, but not that much better.

At the moment, if you have monsters in melee range on one side, and nothing on the other side, Buckshot beats Barrage. If you're surrounded, or the monsters are a little further apart (so you can't get this optimum Buckshot arc), Barrage wins. Barrage also wins in situations where there's an overkill problem (ie a big pack of weak monsters) - no matter how much Buckshot you pepper the first line of monsters with, none of the missiles will reach the second line of monsters, whereas with Barrage, any 'spare' missiles will carry on to hit the next row.

Also, Barrage gets more arrows from soft points, but Buckshot doesn't. How come?