Ask a Bowman Thread.

Hm, I took like twenty minutes double checking my pomegranate.

Strafe's speed - First shot has a slight delay which makes it around 0.8 secs. Since you're spamming it twice, it makes sense to include the initial delay. Not that it's even relevant; you can never match up strafe to pierce unless you spam it for a couple of seconds

Pierce's speed - Again you forgot the initial skill delay / the delay on releasing the arrow. Unless you can spam three or just one strafe while you shoot pierce, the exact delay is irrelevant. A 0.1 sec delay would mess up the calculation in-game.

Defense penalty: You take a defense penalty for each shot of strafe/ustrafe versus just one for pierce.

"New Booster": Crossbow Booster (formerly known as Booster) now raises your attack speed by 2.

Including buffs: Since buffs apply to both, they're irrelevant. If you take critical into account then strafe might be better in terms of damage stability, but that's not the question being asked.

Pierce reduction: Opomegranate


If I'm going to be exact, I would plot a probability spread of how many shots it takes to down two enemies. If strafe and pierce does the same percent damage (or even strafe doing slightly better) they have the same odds of not downing an enemy in one shot. Since we have the option to use iron arrow or arrow eruption, if pierce fails to take down both enemies we could take them both down on the second shot but strafe will require four shots. I've seen analyses like these and they're very complex so I'm not even going to attempt it.

Reference: http://jisworld.blog18.fc2.com/blog-entry-391.html

I have no idea where you're getting this information from, but every shot of Strafe is identical in speed. Any variation is at the fault of the user or lag. And I obviously did consider the attack delay of Pierce itself. Pierce has a base attack speed of 840ms, which is affected by booster and reduced to 720ms on standard weapon speeds, and an additional 540ms charge time that is unaffected by booster.

Defense reduction occurs for two monsters on Pierce. There is no such thing as x skill will do less DPS because it attacks faster and thus gets defense reduced from its damage faster. By that logic, Hurricane is the shittiest skill in the game because it gets damage reduced on five hundred shots per minute compared to Strafe's eighty-four.

And there is no such thing as a new Booster. It's identical in Big Bang as to pre-Big Bang. They both reduce attack speed by 2.