Yo guys, what's good.
Az here, and we came here to answer a simple question. Is piercing damage good.
TLDR.: Depends on the enemies defense and your setup
And now for a little bit more detail.
I was playing around with Nermash, as some of you might know and was impressed by his damage.
On my never ending quest to find more Rares of his caliber, I stumbled onto Deradan.
His S2 has 490% Piercing Damage Multiplier.
Now, what is piercing damage.
The game simply said in a high librarian voice: "Piercing damage penetrates the enemies defense by a certain value."
Yo... I figured that would be the case, but how much?
5%, 50%?
And since the game didn't respond, I tested it myself.
Check this Google Spreadsheet for the numbers.
I equipped Nermash with around 1500 ATK and 180% Crit Damage and followed up by doing the same with Deradan.
Who is Deradan? Well, he is a Rare Fire Chaos type, utilizing magic damage.
He has a 490% Piercing Damage multiplier, the highest in the game.
Once that was done, I went into the campaign stage 10-11 to test on the Defense type unit.
It had around 10k HP and 1800 defense. Optimal values to test, because most units in PVP also have around 1800 defense. I'm not talking about tanks here.
So if we can one-shot that guy, we can pretty much kill anything.
And after 5 rounds of testing with each and painstakingly collecting the numbers (frame by frame) we got to this result.
First of all, the game is consistent. If you hit, you always deal the same damage. No variation whatsoever.
Blocks account for 65% of damage. Pretty huge.
Critical hits delivered us our expected 180% damage; that damage was around 12k.
12000 damage with those base stats is insane.
And those were for both types, piercing and non-piercing.
This leads us to a roughly 25% penetration, based on the difference in damage multipliers.
Unfortunately this is were my quest took kind of a sour note and we are coming to my conclusion.
The devs made sure that piercing damage is in fair relation to other high multipliers.
This means, you won't find units, that have 700% piercing damage.
Actually Deradan is the highest I could find, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Most piercing damage is around 96-250%, depending if it's an AOE or not.
There are some outliers with 420% like Monica tho.
So now you end up with a scenario, where you can pick your poison.
Unless you fight against seriously high defense targets, it's kinda irrelevant.
Pick a unit with a higher multiplier, which there are plenty and you are good.
Piercing Damage becomes better with higher defense, but you could compensate that by pumping more damage into the other unit.
And so far, piercing damage units don't seem to have higher attack stats, which could set them apart.
I hope you enjoyed it and if you watched the video, consider subscribing to my channel for more content like this.
Let me know in the comments, if you have done any testing and what your opinion about this damage type is.
As always, I will see you in the next one and until then... Enjoy the grind.
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