Fourth Job DB Skill Questions: Monster Bomb, Final Cut, SR?

1. Let's get the easy question out of the way first: Is Monster Bomb at all useful? The cooldown on it makes it pretty much a huge turnoff for the amount of damage it does, and nobody seems to put it in their skill builds except to include it in the section where they say "get whatever skills you want".

2. How does Final Cut work? Based on the description, it should increase the "attack rate", meaning that I should attack faster. But instead, it seems to simply double the attack DAMAGE that I do on certain attacks. Maxing it out gives it a 60 second run time with 40 seconds of CD. Is this, when compared to its 30 second run time with 70 second CD, worth the early 30 points?

3. Sudden Raid seems to be the DB's Genesis. But when taking into consideration our mobility (we seem to be the most mobile class in the game yet), wouldn't it be faster to train at O4/O5 than at Skeles/Gallos with Sudden Raid?

4. Assuming I wanted to go for a bossing skill (since SR isn't going to be too helpful at O4/O5 and Final Cut's increased duration doesn't feel like it's completely worth it IMO), which order of skills would be ideal? Thorns -> Final Cut -> CoH -> Mirrored Target?


Thanks in advance for the help, and I look forward to hearing from you other fourth job DBs.
If any of you want to discuss DB skills or whatever, feel free to buddy my DB on Bera. IGN: Ascendant

1. Nope, the targeting is awkward, and the damage isn't instant and is low anyways. The range is also pretty small. I only really use this at zakum arms and horntail since the parts are close enough together to hit almost all the arms/body parts, but outside of that, it's pretty pointless.

2. When you hit something with final cut, you get the final cut buff based on how much you charged the skill. It's 2x damage on non-mirrored hits if you charge it fully, at all levels, and it doesn't work with sudden raid. It's very easily worth the 30 points, the damage boost while training is crazy, and it's also useful for bossing damage. I'd recommend maxing it 2nd after thorns, unless you think you'll be at bosses a ton between 140-150 in which case you should go chains. Alternating max chains/fatal blow + level 1 final cut seems to be about the same damage rate as spamming fatal blow + max final cut, but chains does have the invincibility.

3. Sudden raid's damage is way too inconsistent to use for training. Magic classes have very high consistency so that they can always kill a certain monster in x number of hits, while criticals, general damage range inconsistency, and venom activation makes the number of hits to kill something with sudden raid vary widely. DBs are already an incredibly fast killing class at oblivion 4. I dunno how much you could get spamming sudden raid, but I get about 17.5mil/hour soloing oblivion 4 on 1x exp without a ring mule or HS.

4. That looks good, but trust me, final cut's increased duration will be amazing in training =S

Final Cut it is

Thanks for the advice. I'd been looking for the answer for a while with no success. Should've come to Southperry first, lol. I'm actually 139 with 28 points saved up, so I think I'll just dump it all into FC.

Also, thanks for your contribution to the DB knowledge base. I see you everywhere in these forums, and I think you don't get enough credit for it because it's pretty clear that the community could use some guidance. (: