Help me understand the damage of Bonestorm
Working on a build and got to 1 tap cast Bonestorm. There are a few unclear interactions. Bonestorm projectiles are meant to explode even without charge consumption. How does that explosion damage work? More precisely does the explosion also hit the target the projectile hits? That would almost double the DPS. Secondly with Scattershot, usually only one of the Scattershot projectiles can hit a single target, making it bad vs single target. However with Bonestorm it simply stores 3 spears per cast. Does the game remember which spears come from Scattershot? When Bonestorm is released, can all 20 projectiles still hit a single target or only a third of them if you use Scattershot? Obviously this would also massively affect Bonestorm's DPS.
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Note that all my experience with bonestorm was in 0.1 so idk how things have really changed.
how does that explosion work?
From playing it last league as far as I can tell an enemy can’t get hit by both the projectile and the explosion. They also scale separately (projectile damage vs. AoE damage) and there’s more support to projectiles so it was better to scale them. Power charges were kind of a red herring.
scattershot…
Looks like you’ve gotten most of the answers here. Bonestorm is different than other projectile skills because it can inherently shotgun (multiple projectiles can hit the same target). There’s no “remembering” which projectiles are from scattershot.
Again from playing it last league there was an interaction where using scattershot would allow you to gain more spears from tapping cast than without. For example baseline bonestorm you would always cast 1 spear regardless of cast speed. WITH scatter you could gain all 20 spears if you had enough cast speed, the breakpoint was around 0.29s tooltip cast time or around 160% increased cast speed, not sure if this interaction exists still.
Another neat interaction was Ricochet. The ground counted as terrain, so if you for example cast a 20 spear Bonestorm in a boss fight and hit 10, 40% of the other 10 would impact the ground and then chain back to the boss (i.e. it was anywhere from 20-40% more single target damage).
Scattershot works the same as Fusilade from what I remember, it just helps you generate proj faster at the cost of speed/damage.
From leveling my Bonestorm Infernalist, they seem to hit and explode no matter what. Charges increase the size of the explosion, making it more viable for clear early on but kinda pointless otherwise as it only increases explosion area.
If it's a big target you can hit them with all 20 in my experience, but most mobs you'll hit like 3/4ths unless there's some aim tech I'm unaware of.
The interaction that I hope works how I think is fork. If proj hit -> explode -> fork -> explode works, then it might even be better for clear than charges. Not high enough level to test for myself, though, probably soon if I don't die tho.
Given that there are 20 spears and my full charge 100% ricochet Bonestorm applies 20 impales against single targets, I think the explosions are just a bit of AoE to help with hitting tiny targets rather than separate instances of damage.
Also, 100% ricochet chance Widowhail Bonestorm feels pretty great to play once you get the mana costs handled. It also means you can extract impales yourself with attacks that can leech, which is pretty great.
Good answers in here. I made a bonestorm guide in 1.0 going into cast speed breakpoints and ricochet mechanics. As far I understand it, only one projectile can actually hit an enemy from a channel (pre ricochet) since projectiles act this way unless otherwise specified. The explosions do shotgun and overlap though. Ricochet back to an enemy seemingly does hit with the proj and also explodes again and deal damage again.
In case anyone was wondering. I tested and confirmed that the snakepit + ricochet interaction is gone. If you get fork elsewhere it should still work with ricochet though. The patch notes for dawn only specified instances where “projectiles cannot chain” was still allowing ricochet chains to happen.
Piggybacking here because a lot of interesting info.
I had an interesting interaction yesterday I’ve been trying to replicate. I have been trying out mana tempest for bonestorm to add damage and potentially shock. Mana tempest causes a split on hit in addition to the extra damage.
I swear one time i was fighting a double boss, and the 2nd boss got absolutely one shot when i hit the first. I cannot get it to reproduce though.
Oh what id give for a target dummy….