Piercing Attack

September 3, 2026

Piercing Attack is a chance for a missile to carry on through the target it hit instead of stopping there. It applies to arrows, bolts, javelins, throwing axes and throwing knives, and it turns a single target attack into a line of damage without changing the skill being used.

How a pierce is rolled

The pierce roll happens whenever a hit check succeeds, or whenever one is skipped.

Lightning Bolt and

Lightning Fury always hit, so they always get their roll. Every other missile has to connect first.

That ordering produces the single most misread behaviour of the stat. If the hit check fails but the pierce roll succeeds, the missile continues visually and can even play its graphical effects on the targets behind, yet applies no damage and no modifiers to any of them. A

Freezing Arrow that misses the first monster can appear to explode on the second without damaging or freezing it. Low Attack Rating therefore wastes Piercing Attack twice over.

Blocking behaves the other way around. A target that blocks the missile takes no damage and receives none of its modifiers, but the block does not stop the missile from piercing onward.

Four pierces, five targets

A single missile can pierce a maximum of four times, which lets it hit up to five targets in total. The chance is rolled again at each target, so reaching the fifth requires four consecutive successes. At 50% chance that is one shot in sixteen; only at 100% does every missile travel the full length of a pack.

This is why the stat scales with monster density rather than with damage. Against a single target it does nothing at all, and no amount of it will make one arrow hit the same monster twice.

Adding up the chance

Piercing Attack from items is added together, and added on top of the Amazon

Pierce skill. Anything past 100% is redundant, so a Bowazon who has already maxed Pierce gains nothing from

Razortail and should use the belt slot for something else.

When two weapons are carried, only the attacking weapon counts. The Piercing Attack on the weapon that is not being used for that attack is ignored entirely, which is the same rule that governs Deadly Strike and Slows Target on a dual wield setup.

The Amazon Pierce skill

Pierce is a passive on the Bow and Crossbow tree, available at character level 30. It is worth far more per point at the start than at the end, so most builds spend a handful of points and let skill bonuses from gear carry the rest.

Pierce chance by skill level
Skill level	Chance
1	23%
2	34%
3	42%
5	55%
10	71%
15	80%
20	85%
30	91%

The first point is worth 23%, the second adds 11% and the twentieth adds well under one percent. Three points reach 42%, which combined with Razortail at 33% covers three quarters of all shots for a fraction of the investment that maxing it would cost.

Throwing Mastery

In Resurrected the Barbarian

Throwing Mastery also grants Piercing Attack, capped at 55% and applying to throwing weapons only. It is available at character level 6, which makes it the earliest access to the stat of any character, and it is the reason a throwing Barbarian clears packs at all rather than picking off one monster per throw.

Throwing Mastery pierce chance by skill level
Skill level	Chance
1	8%
5	27%
10	37%
20	46%
30	50%

Limitations

Guided Arrow can no longer pierce. It tracks a single target instead, so Piercing Attack is dead weight on a build using it.
Blade Fury does not pierce either, regardless of how much of the stat the Assassin is carrying.
It does nothing on a melee attack. Only missiles pierce, so the stat is wasted on any character not using a bow, a crossbow or a thrown weapon.
Chance beyond 100% is discarded, and the fifth target is the hard ceiling no matter what the total reads.

Sources

Magic and rare items can never roll Piercing Attack, so every source is a unique item, a set bonus or a runeword. Ichorsting at required level 18 is the earliest unique to carry it, and no item carries more than its 50% until Buriza-Do Kyanon reaches 100% at level 41. Razortail is the one most builds settle on, because a belt is the cheapest slot to spend on a stat that adds no damage of its own.

The two set bonuses are worth knowing about early. Vidala's Rig gives 50% for the full set from required level 14, which makes it the earliest item source of the stat in the game, and Iratha's Finery gives 24% once three of its four pieces are worn, from required level 15. Both are granted by the set rather than by any single piece, so the bonus disappears the moment the set is broken up.