Pierce for strafezon

I am wondering about

Pierce. A lot of people are saying a good

Belt for a strafezon is

Razortail because it gives huge

Pierce. But is

Pierce really that important? I understand that it gives the arrow the chance to go through the current monster to the next, but there aren't too many monsters that cluster together in a big group, other than cows and maybe a few others. As for act bosses like Diablo, he appears by himself, there are no others monsters to

Pierce. It seems wasted.

Yes, it is extremely important. But you are right that there are situations where it is not as useful or not needed

One way to think about it--a major issue for melee builds is that they have very little or no area of effect--they have to kill one or a few close range monsters per use of a skill. That really slows you down vs. caster and ranged builds

If you are running a ranged build without

Pierce, you have the same problem. But ranged builds with

Pierce overcome this, because you (most of the time) have opportunities to kill more than one monster at a time, which is more efficient

Killing monsters more efficiently is the most important factor for dropping more items and finding rarer items more frequently. The best areas to find these items also tend to have high monster density and high monster health. Against both of these factors,

Pierce optimizes your kill speed

On an endgame build,

Razortail is best in slot because it allows you to hit 100%

Pierce with only a few skill points invested. It is also is useful because it gives you dex and +max damage, two of the most important off-weapon contributors to your overall damage

I have a

Double Throw Barbarian and a

Lightning Fury Amazon. I don't trade my

Razortail for nothing
And even thinking in trying Wisdom +

Razortail with the Barbarian to get the 100%

Pierce

I see. Thank you

I would also add that

Pierce in tandem with

Strafe has the benefit of sending not only the front line of foes into hit recovery, but caster- and archer-type enemies as well. This is important because

Strafe forces you to stand still, meaning you are an easy target for the ranged attacks of such monsters. In tandem with the knockback affix, this characteristic can be particularly potent, as it removes any need to meet a particular damage threshold as a precondition to forcing hit-recovery.

I know you're running a physical bowzon, but if you ever run a javazon or elemental bowzon, you'll get to visually see the effects of what 100%

Pierce can do.

Lightning Javazon example:

Lightning Fury will release its lightning

Bolts for EACH enemy your physically thrown

Javelin pierces.

Frost maiden example:

Freezing Arrow will release its freezing Ice cloud for each monster the arrow pierces.

My 2 cents Re:

Pierce.

On my Faith RW phys bowazon, I run

Razortail because it helps immensely with

Strafe when I hit mobs in corridors and tight spaces all in a line. The fana aura and high AS allows me to repeatedly spam and hit them all in a line. This same build when I was using WF, the 100%

Pierce was less useful, since mobs were getting knocked back and the WF did not match the AS of Faith.
On my Silence/WF bow strafezon, she doesn't use nor need 100%

Pierce.

So my conclusion is it really depends on what kind of bow your strafezon is running, but if you are running higher AS builds,

Pierce is likely better, since you can proc it more often with more attacks. But 100%

Pierce is no-where near as important as say, for a Javazon, who can clear cows in 5 minutes or less with such.

Also another sidenote to my opinion Re: 100%

Pierce on strafezon, it to me was not very important until towards late game, because I often use Rare or Crafted belts with +STR and multi-resist,

Blood Belt, mana regen or

Goldwrap for AS+MF, and these stats were more important than full

Pierce.

To give an idea, my MF strafzon with +2 skills circulet has 59%

Pierce chance with only 1 skill point put into

Pierce (+skills brought it up to level 6).

So if you can run it, great. But dont

Sacrifice res all, +stats, life/mana leech or regen if you need them doing so.

thanks all

Pierce is a definite plus with

Strafe, and it's not hard to hit 100% with plus to skill items. For a starfezon I put only two points into

Pierce which along with plus to skills items to give my build 71%, add the 33% from

Razortail and I reach the max of 100%. I found

Pierce especially effective on a

Witchwild String build, because

Pierce increases the number of hits which in turn increases the odds of

Amplify Damage procing. Then by adding

Atma's Scarab

Amplify Damage is almost continuously in play.