02-03-2004, 06:43 AM
Quote:RE: Pierce; I don't have the link, but I'm pretty sure after the first pierce, your chance to pierce the next target gets reduced 50%, and if it pierces again, gets reduced another 50%, etc. If that's right, then the higer pierce you have, the better your chance of continued pierce, but if its CAPPED at 100%, then thats the limit. But i guess I might be wrong about the way pierce works. I'll check the Amazon Basin out about this.
There really isn't anything of the sort.
It does get less likely to get more pierces, but that's just because of the multiplicative property of probabilities. Let's suppose you have 80% pierce.
You have an 80% chance of piercing once.
You have a 64% chance of piercing twice.
You have a 51% chance of piercing three times.
You have a 41% chance of piercing four times.
Every time, you have an 80% chance, but it becomes increasingly unlikely that you'll actually pass all the rolls.
Also, if you have 80% pierce but only a 75% chance to hit, you have a 60% effective chance of piercing, since both conditions have to be met each time. In 1.10, a lot of the previously auto-hit skills have been given chance-to-hit checks, and even a 95% chance to hit will miss part of the time.
I think the rumour about the halving effect came about in 1.09, due to the piercing guided arrow. People found that even 100% pierce wouldn't let a guided arrow hit the target forever. However, this was because the guided arrow has a maximum distance it can travel and because there was a hard cap on the number of pierces (IIRC, 4, for a total of 5 hits).
I recall reading that the pierce cap had been removed from 1.10, but this doesn't match my experiences, at least not for all skills. Lightning bolt is still auto-hit, but even against tightly-packed, motionless monsters, I can't get the lightning bolt to pierce straight through a mob.