Cannon main talents: Deadly Cannonball vs. Steady Bombardment

When the talent system was introduced, the first choice was easy. My main’s destination is to be a mean killer machine, so Mighty Offense was the obvious choice for the 130+ talent.

The second choice is somewhat trickier. There are basically two talents sounding good:

Deadly Cannonball (DC): “Basic attacks deal 50% additional damage against buildings. Grants a 50% chance to fire a deadly cannonball that poisons your target and decreases your target’s Attack Power.”

Steady Bombardment (SB): “For every Combo Count the target has, increases damage by 15%.”

The descriptions in quote marks are from Atlantica Online itself, and those for maximized talents (level 10).

I chose DC because other players told me that SB only works if your cannon main hits the target continuously. That a cannon main rarely does because his strongest feature is Devastation Shell, the reason the whole world envies us. Especially against a boss you will spam this skill roughly every 3rd turn, thus breaking the steadiness of the bombardment.

I recently learnt that this is wrong. As long as the target is continuously hit, the combo count of this target increases. A typical example:

Turn 1: Cannon main shells the boss. Sheriff hits the boss.

Turn 2: Cannon main hits – and gets already a bonus damage because the sheriff caused one combo count for the boss.

The main feature of DC is the extra damage to the building. Read “summon portal” instead of “building” because that is where this talent shines. After the Three Gateways patch African summon portals do their duty quite diligently and you really don’t want to spend more turns than necessary to take out one summon portal while the other(s) spawn. Examples where that can be critical are: Revenge Of The Spirits, Into The Spirit Realm, and as non-African mission: Battle Of The Red Cliffs.

For testing reasons I fought five battles with maximized SB and five with maximized DC against the Giant Erymanthian Boar. Buffs, gear, formation – all other conditions were as similar as I could make them. I fought in a main+5 formation. Here are the videos about it:

Deadly Cannonball:

Steady Bombardment:

If you play them slowly in your player you can see how the damage of the cannon main increases during the fight when it uses SB. With DC the fights lasted 7 turns (one exception: 6 turns). With SB the fights lasted 6 turns (one exception where the boss died in his turn after turn 5 from the trusty devastation shell).

In TBS missions the damage contribution of the cannon main is even larger because there are only 3 (in 3k: 4) toons who are fighting on your side. On the other hand: Mini-bosses die usually after two turns, whether you have SB or DC. It is no advantage that the hit point bar of the mini-boss is shorter after the first turn with SB than it is with DC – the decisive fact is that it is not zero, and that it will be at zero after the second turn. Of course that’s me… your gear may be just so that SB makes the difference. And there are missions where it is valuable for me, too. Last Stand for example, where I don’t have to shell the mini-bosses and can kill them with 2 hits from my cannon main now, instead of 3 (or waiting for my sheriff).

Concerning building damage: my sethed cannon main with DC makes more than 8.000 damage to a summon portal in Battle Of The Red Cliff. My sethed cannon main with SB makes about 5.500 to 6.000 damage.

So the decision remains a hard one. Without DC I lose 2 turns (1 at each summon portal) in Battle Of The Red Cliff and risk additional spawns. In Into The Spirit Realm I lose 3 turns (1 at each SP) and risk additional spawns. In Revenge Of the Spirit I lose 2 turns and risk additional spawns. The rest of the missions are uncritical for me (Troy’s Last Battle, Act Of War and other missions which contain summon portals – it is not important if I lose turns there, and the more spawns, the more drops). In skirmish and classic PVE DC is practically meaningless (yeah, there is this poisoning feature but really – who cares…).

With SB I gain additional damage when I hit a monster more than once. That helps a bit in skirmish, PVE and missions and may even shorten the life of certain mission bosses and thus gains turns.

Here a short overview about the effects of both talents:

Area	Deadly Cannonball	Steady Bombardment
PVP	no clue	no clue
PVE classic	More or less useless (only poison “dot”)	Helps (especially against bosses)
Skirmish	More or less useless (only poison “dot”)	Helps (especially against bosses)
TBS mission	Good chance to save a turn against summon portals	Chance to save a turn against bosses (or very resilient monsters)

I will try SB for a while longer and see if I miss the building damage so much that I have to go back. It is only 20 Atlas Ore to reset the talents anyway.