PSA: Don't sleep on fire/poison bows/crossbows in lategame.

[Wolfguarde]

I made a perhaps understandable mistake in the early-game by writing these off, as I was finding it a little too easy to accidentally kill my capture targets, even without pal assistance. However, after learning that debuffs increase capture rate, I decided to start playing with them, and I've discovered a couple of interesting things.

First is that the damage stat of the source of a debuff doesn't affect the tick damage; the level of the target does. Burning from a level 10, 30 power fire move is going to do the exact same amount of damage over time that a fire beam's burn does. You can literally take a caveman-tier fire/poison bow into combat with a legendary and chunk its health with burning and poison damage. (And yes, I'm aware this might get nerfed as a result of posting it - sorry folks).

Second, though, is how debuffs actually apply. After talking with a friend a few days back, I'd been under the impression that diminishing returns eventually make it impossible to debuff a creature, but now I don't think this is the case; rather, I think that debuffs apply at a random chance that scales linearly with debuff load. That is to say, the more times a target is hit with, say, burn or poison, the more load they build up, and the less random there is to the check that determines whether or not the next hit burns/poisons them.

Now, the meat of the second point: even low-tier bows seem to apply a lot of debuff load. Ordinarily, I'd only see maybe three applications of a debuff (burn, in this instance) during a frostallion fight. However, I'm noticing I can proc poison off the bow five or even six times a fight - and I'm only stopping there because it's running out of HP. In theory, if I'm right, you could rock a pair of status bows for a legendary fight and win solely from the chip damage the debuffs generate, as long as you know how to dodge.

Touch back on the fact that debuffs increase catch rate (1% per debuff might not seem like much on a 2% capture, but doubling the catch rate on a legendary fight isn't really something you want to pass up) along with the prior points, and I think that it's well worth keeping a couple of these and a few hundred of each elemental arrow in your kit. While firearms can out-DPS them in extended engagements like tower fights, in battles where hard damage mitigation is a factor, they're useful tools for players who haven't yet cleared the level grind to access rocket launchers.

As always, if I'm wrong, I'm happy to be corrected, but my results so far on this look pretty good for this theory.

[ROORnNUGZ]

my common fire crossbow doesn't seem to do ♥♥♥♥ to frostallion. hits for 1-5 damage

[Lunar Purge]

Originally posted by ROORnNUGZ:

my common fire crossbow doesn't seem to do ♥♥♥♥ to frostallion. hits for 1-5 damage

It's not the damage per shot, it's the burning effect itself. It seems to be % based, same with Poison. Having a Pal that has the dark move that poisons and having one of the flare arrow and the dark version of it that also burns and you will see their health just lose chunks. The poster is also helping his Pals with fire and poison arrows, this can put the debuffs over and over and win without much issues.

[Wolfguarde]

Originally posted by ROORnNUGZ:

my common fire crossbow doesn't seem to do ♥♥♥♥ to frostallion. hits for 1-5 damage

You're not using it for the impact damage, but for the status load. In my experience, the bows proc statuses quite quickly after the first proc (eg. from a pal's flame tornado) compared to successive procs from pals.

You can run, for example, a lv45+ fire team for damage/burn procs while proccing poison manually to finish that fight in less than ten minutes without a rocket launcher or guns.

[kampfer91]

Meh just 1% more chance , i have many spheres to spare and only need to capture legendary with 2 empty slots , yes there are stats difference but i dun want to lose my sanity trying to min max everything down to exact number .

[ROORnNUGZ]

Originally posted by Wolfguarde:

Originally posted by ROORnNUGZ:

my common fire crossbow doesn't seem to do ♥♥♥♥ to frostallion. hits for 1-5 damage

You're not using it for the impact damage, but for the status load. In my experience, the bows proc statuses quite quickly after the first proc (eg. from a pal's flame tornado) compared to successive procs from pals.

You can run, for example, a lv45+ fire team for damage/burn procs while proccing poison manually to finish that fight in less than ten minutes without a rocket launcher or guns.

yeah i dont think my fire team is strong enough yet

[Wolfguarde]

Mine wasn't either. I mainly rely on a couple of Blazamuts and a bred Helzephyr for damage, and keep a frostallion for damage soaking while they recover. I haven't found much else that can even chip reliably for more than a few dozen damage a move at most.

[❃ Galiäna Krüger ❃]

So I've heard supposedly poison increase capture rate - no it doesn't.

I tested many times since I first heard it, does not even increase by 0.01%

Both fire/poison risk the chance losing capturing pals at low hp

[hirn78]

At least the electric status effect "stunned" should increase capture rate.

[Zero]

Originally posted by hirn78:

At least the electric status effect "stunned" should increase capture rate.

It does. You can even throw another ball if it escapes the first one and it still benefits from the effect. Then you have to apply it again.

[Wolfguarde]

Originally posted by ❃ Galiäna Krüger ❃:

So I've heard supposedly poison increase capture rate - no it doesn't.

I tested many times since I first heard it, does not even increase by 0.01%

Both fire/poison risk the chance losing capturing pals at low hp

It does. Bring a frostallion down to 10% HP (any lower is a waste of time, since it doesn't increase capture rate further) and burn and/or poison it. You'll have a 3% display chance while it's debuffed with at least one status.

[❃ Galiäna Krüger ❃]

Originally posted by Wolfguarde:

Originally posted by ❃ Galiäna Krüger ❃:

So I've heard supposedly poison increase capture rate - no it doesn't.

I tested many times since I first heard it, does not even increase by 0.01%

Both fire/poison risk the chance losing capturing pals at low hp

It does. Bring a frostallion down to 10% HP (any lower is a waste of time, since it doesn't increase capture rate further) and burn and/or poison it. You'll have a 3% display chance while it's debuffed with at least one status.

only that and 10% seems way too high to quality as low hp. capture at 1%

[Wolfguarde]

Originally posted by ❃ Galiäna Krüger ❃:

Originally posted by Wolfguarde:

It does. Bring a frostallion down to 10% HP (any lower is a waste of time, since it doesn't increase capture rate further) and burn and/or poison it. You'll have a 3% display chance while it's debuffed with at least one status.

only that and 10% seems way too high to quality as low hp. capture at 1%

Ok, I went and did another round of data testing to see what would come up here, and was surprised on a couple of points.

You're partially right. There is a difference between 10% HP and single digits (testing using frostallion); however, it's small enough that it only shows up as a 1% increase on the first roll (12% > 13%). While negligible, it is there.

That said, on a 14k HP frostallion, the base capture rate (pre-throw) is 2% at 2k HP and less. Poison (not to be confused with blind, which is the status most dark moves afflict targets with) seems to be a sub-percent increase to capture rate as well, as it pre-throw testing was still showing 2% catch rate until around 400HP, at which point it increased to 3%. Whether this is true for other statuses or not, I'm not sure, but I'd guess that poison is around a 0.5-0.75% increase to capture rate for a legendary at low health. Again, not much, but it is there. It's less than I thought, but this is also possibly because I was assuming the 2% capture rate threshold was around 10% HP, when it actually seems to be a bit closer to 14-15%.

[Imstrength]

Originally posted by Wolfguarde:

Originally posted by ROORnNUGZ:

my common fire crossbow doesn't seem to do ♥♥♥♥ to frostallion. hits for 1-5 damage

You're not using it for the impact damage, but for the status load. In my experience, the bows proc statuses quite quickly after the first proc (eg. from a pal's flame tornado) compared to successive procs from pals.

You can run, for example, a lv45+ fire team for damage/burn procs while proccing poison manually to finish that fight in less than ten minutes without a rocket launcher or guns.

im level 44 with pretty much every pal in the game, i have a team of jormuntides, literally 5 of them. all of them are level capped to 44 but are 45-49.

i used a poison crossbow, and a poison bow, to add the debuff, i still cannot clear Marcus & Faleris. jormuntides are so big they have difficulty lining up shots so i was mostly using them to aggro and add some nice super effective side damage.

after 3-4 poisons are inflicted its nearly impossible to inflict another. after 4 attempts the closest i got was down to 40k hp remaining.

not really seeing how killing this boss solo is possible legit without being ridiculous about it such as, cheating bringing in the npcs, or grinding all the way to 50 first, farming an insane amount of rockets for just spamming him, changing the game settings for more damage or whatever.

my next thought to attempt is going to be to gather and BREED Suzaku Aqua, for perfect pvp stats. id breed jormuntide but to breed the correct traits would take quite awhile as you breed FOR jormuntide you dont breed THEM and probably wouldnt be worth it.

probably going to add a relaxasaurus with rockets to the team as well.

going off the base difficulty of the game as a whole, the bosses have a ridiculous amount of HP that should be adjusted, and scaled against team size.

[ROORnNUGZ]

Originally posted by Imstrength:

Originally posted by Wolfguarde:

You're not using it for the impact damage, but for the status load. In my experience, the bows proc statuses quite quickly after the first proc (eg. from a pal's flame tornado) compared to successive procs from pals.

You can run, for example, a lv45+ fire team for damage/burn procs while proccing poison manually to finish that fight in less than ten minutes without a rocket launcher or guns.

im level 44 with pretty much every pal in the game, i have a team of jormuntides, literally 5 of them. all of them are level capped to 44 but are 45-49.

i used a poison crossbow, and a poison bow, to add the debuff, i still cannot clear Marcus & Faleris. jormuntides are so big they have difficulty lining up shots so i was mostly using them to aggro and add some nice super effective side damage.

after 3-4 poisons are inflicted its nearly impossible to inflict another. after 4 attempts the closest i got was down to 40k hp remaining.

not really seeing how killing this boss solo is possible legit without being ridiculous about it such as, cheating bringing in the npcs, or grinding all the way to 50 first, farming an insane amount of rockets for just spamming him, changing the game settings for more damage or whatever.

my next thought to attempt is going to be to gather and BREED Suzaku Aqua, for perfect pvp stats. id breed jormuntide but to breed the correct traits would take quite awhile as you breed FOR jormuntide you dont breed THEM and probably wouldnt be worth it.

probably going to add a relaxasaurus with rockets to the team as well.

going off the base difficulty of the game as a whole, the bosses have a ridiculous amount of HP that should be adjusted, and scaled against team size.

Damn are you doing this as your fourth tower? I just finished the third one and was going to work towards this one next. Jormnuntide was what i was going to go for. Are yours all 4 stars? I did use the rocket launcher a lot for the third tower and to help tame some legendaries. I only had to pull out frostallion really for the third tower.

[Wolfguarde]

Originally posted by Imstrength:

Originally posted by Wolfguarde:

You're not using it for the impact damage, but for the status load. In my experience, the bows proc statuses quite quickly after the first proc (eg. from a pal's flame tornado) compared to successive procs from pals.

You can run, for example, a lv45+ fire team for damage/burn procs while proccing poison manually to finish that fight in less than ten minutes without a rocket launcher or guns.

im level 44 with pretty much every pal in the game, i have a team of jormuntides, literally 5 of them. all of them are level capped to 44 but are 45-49.

i used a poison crossbow, and a poison bow, to add the debuff, i still cannot clear Marcus & Faleris. jormuntides are so big they have difficulty lining up shots so i was mostly using them to aggro and add some nice super effective side damage.

after 3-4 poisons are inflicted its nearly impossible to inflict another. after 4 attempts the closest i got was down to 40k hp remaining.

not really seeing how killing this boss solo is possible legit without being ridiculous about it such as, cheating bringing in the npcs, or grinding all the way to 50 first, farming an insane amount of rockets for just spamming him, changing the game settings for more damage or whatever.

my next thought to attempt is going to be to gather and BREED Suzaku Aqua, for perfect pvp stats. id breed jormuntide but to breed the correct traits would take quite awhile as you breed FOR jormuntide you dont breed THEM and probably wouldnt be worth it.

probably going to add a relaxasaurus with rockets to the team as well.

going off the base difficulty of the game as a whole, the bosses have a ridiculous amount of HP that should be adjusted, and scaled against team size.

For the fourth tower, while I did make use of the bows, I relied primarily on the AR (I've got a blue one) and my bred helzephyr for damage. Fifth tower I used those, a blue shotgun, green rocket launcher, and two stock jetragons to clear. The issue with using the bows excessively in those fights is the time limit. They can help, but with the sheer amount of damage you need to do you're probably going to be better off with an AR and a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of bullets.

I went through 1k AR rounds, around 60 shotgun rounds, and 5 rockets on the fifth tower fight, but I honestly could have cleared it with a couple more minutes to spare if I'd gone in with 1500 AR rounds. The three procs I managed to get for each debuff helped, but they're not your primary damage dealer in those fights. With the legendaries, given they're more a farm/grind than a one-time fight, you have the time and the incentive to fight without spending ammunition, so the bows are a lot more viable and save you ammo/repair costs on your guns.