I primarily use DA and here are the pros and cons I experience when using it (some repeat from Bopp's guide):

+ Good single stroke damage and great reach
+ Slash-shield cancel hit and run tactics are pretty good (and greatly benefits from ASI boosts for shield canceling faster)
+ Charge attack slash does about the same damage as a full combo, and projectiles do roughly 1/3 slash damage each hit. You can get about 2 projectile hits on a single enemy if it travels through
+ Projectile knockback is huge and is multi-hit (about 2-3 hits, I believe) if the sword path doesn't push the monster away from its path

- Slow combo, slow charge and charge cooldown means you can't spam it as often as you'd like without taking hits. ASI boosts help, as well as larger parties for other monsters to target so you can unleash your charge safely. I find myself trading charge hits with Mecha Knights more often than I'd like.
- Slow charge attack also means you'll have trouble making contact with mobile enemies with the charge attack (ie. devilites, kats). Good thing constructs and undead are usually slow, but fast swords don't have a problem with either.
- Movement speed reduction while charging
- Projectiles spawn after your charge slash, but take about 1 second delay before shooting forward. During that time, the projectiles don't really do damage if you slashed at point-blank range and there was no knockback (ie. turret, monster that walks into range after the slash)
- Charge attack makes you step backwards before it is released, wouldn't be too big a problem except for the next con...
- Biggest con with DA charge: if you stand too close with your back facing a wall (or any object/obstacle that a projectile can't pass through, like statues or sprites), the projectiles thrust themselves backwards, explode, and do NO damage. It's like the projectiles need to travel backwards a bit before pushing forward, and this becomes a huge problem when fighting in tight rooms where most of the mobs or spikes are in the center of the room. Compounding the issue is that DA charge makes you step backwards too, so you need about 2 squares of distance between yourself and the wall (or impenetrable object, like switches, statues, etc)

I use an Acheron too so I can comment on my experience with the brandish line:

+ Great combo attack
+ Great speed
+ Great charge attack, especially with CTR Max. It's a single slash (with greater reach than normal slash, I believe) plus a wave of 5 explosions that travel the ground. Aim it between two enemies side by side and they will both ride the wave. Charge attacks become your main way of attacking--both single target and mobs, and finishing off weakened enemies with a few slashes.
+ No movement speed reduction while charging. You will start pre-charging always while running around since the charge attack is so good and not lag behind the rest of the party.

- Normal attack knockback is non-existent, things get bad when you are cornered and can't build a charge before dying. Shield bash and bumping helps, and is generally a non-issue if you're smart with using charge knockback frequently to keep things away from you.
- Somewhat a terrible partner to DA/GF users in your party: if you guys start attacking the same target, they will probably knock your target away from your charge attack and wiff the wave.
- Basic attack has a really narrow range, which can get annoying with targets that have ambiguous/small hit boxes (Kats, minis, gorgos, etc.) Not the worst problem, since charge attack works pretty fine, but it's a weapon that I find myself using auto aim quite often so that my targets ride the wave.

I got a DA for diversity from my Acheron, but I will most likely get a Combuster to take advantage of the Chaos set I am running.

I felt Argent Peacemaker was a good complement to DA in FSC--throwing a DA charge attack at a mob and sniping the weakened zombies to finish them off while dodging other crap. But I don't want to carry Argent AND Blitz, but blitz is too restricting given DA's slowness already, and running Chaos makes it all that more dangerous you'll spontaneously catch fire if you're not constantly dodging.

"Zeddy may chime in here on the exact number of strokes required."

If you say so.

Enemy health by depth.

Lacer Knightz damage data.

In T3, zombies have mecha knight health, so 1100 hit points at D24. At max bonus, a Divine Avenger combo deals 437 + 548 = 985. Lame :<

This means that no matter how much damage bonus you get, you can never oneshot a zombie with your Avenger. OR CAN YOU?

Let's say you bring a Venom Veiler. It reduces defence by 15%. At D24, zombies have about 65 elemental defence and 131 normal defence. Each attack to a zombie with DA will therefore do (65 + 131) * 15% = 30 points extra damage. Unfortunately, with two attacks, that only amounts to 60 extra damage, putting us at 1045. Still, if you hit with the blast of that Venom Veiler, that's an extra 239 damage right there without bonuses, more than enough to kill the zombie even without the bonuses. However, in the time it takes you to charge a Venom Veiler, you could've been charging your DA to just one-shot the zombies in the first place.

If you really want to kill a zombie in one combo without using other weapons, I suspect a poison vial should be exactly enough, as well.

However, this brings up another question. We've established that the minimum amount of hits required to kill a zombies is three, and that max damage bonus is pretty wasted if that was our goal. What's the mimium required bonus to kill a zombie in a combo and a half? We can figure this out using maths.

Damage against enemies with 0 defence on depth 24.

A combo and a half from an unbonused DA does 511 + 511 + 600 = 1622 damage. That SEEMS like it's enough, but you have to subtract 3 * (65 + 131) = 588 defence for an actual total of 1034. (The actual total is 1026. His is because, when you subtract 131 from half of 511 (255.5), the results is less than 131 and as such things get funky. This will become irrelevant once we stack a bit of damage bonus on and as such we can ignore it.)

We are looking at a formula that's somewhat like this:

1622 * x - 588 = 1100

Where x is our damage bonus. This is simple mathematics, kids.

x = (1100 + 588) / 1622 = 1688 / 1622 = 1.0406

One level of damage bonus is 4%. Might that be enough? In theory, yes, but depending on tresholds and rounding shenanigans, a medium might be required. At any rate, going for a max damage bonus is a complete waste when attacking a zombie with a DA, provided the second stroke is used somewhere in the process. Of course, this is only if you solo. I'd love to go more in-depth, but I did that once before and all day went into it. Someday I'll write a program to figure all of this out for me.

Until then, the optimal loadout for fighting zombies at depth 24 using DA's combo looks like it's this:

Kat Claw Cowl
Vog Cub Coat
Swiftstrike Buckler
Divine Avenger

Keep in mind that's not going to sustain itself all the way to depth 28. In fact, it'll probably fall out of date already at depth 25.

If you charge a DA attack and behind you is a wall of Zombies (not a wall, Sprite, Totem, just monsters) will the charge still be executed or will the Zombies prevent a sucessful execution?

The charge will execute. By the way, the fact that DA's charge fails when your back is against a wall is a little irritating, but you get used to it. I mean, you come to learn how far away from the wall you must be, and you automatically maneuver to make that happen. When I was using DA a lot, even after this "feature" was introduced, I spammed DA charges without ever consciously thinking about walls.

Thanks for the spreadsheets you provided--but given that info, couldn't we compute everything from d24-d28 using Mecha Knight health data as equivalent to Slags? Do you have a source for the info regarding monster defenses? (like how you knew they had 65 elem and 131 normal defense)

Assumptions I'm making:
- Each level of damage boost is +4% from base
- Slag HP mimics that of Mecha Knight (from the spreadsheet provided above)
- Monster HP increase as party increases is the same as in the spreadsheet for bosses (+33% per party member added)
- Damage calculation is based on base damage * bonus - defense

Thus if you are soloing until d28: slag HP is 1448, a full combo and a half at max bonus does 1423 damage, and you fall just short of a kill in the Vanaduke level.

But that's not a problem since you'll mostly be prodding Vanaduke, what about d27? At 1361 HP, Ultra bonus falls just short at 1358--and maybe with rounding it'll be just enough to kill.

But what is of particular interest to me is--Is it worth equipping Barbarous Thorn Shield and going for +6 damage or is just +4 good enough--for full parties and solo?

d27 HP solo = 1361; d27 full party HP = 2722 (double the base HP)

You can form two tables of # of slashes required to kill vs damage bonus (crudely listed here):

Solo (d27) - 1361 HP
+1: 5 slashes @ 1677 (4 slashes comes 20 HP short), 2 full combos @ 1526
+2: 4 slashes @ 1423, 2 full combo @ 1615
+3: 4 slashes @ 1505, 2 full combo @ 1704
+4: 4 slashes @ 1587, 2 full combo @ 1793
+5: 4 slashes @ 1669, 2 full combo @ 1882 (1.5 combo is close at 1358 and might work)
+6: 4 slashes @ 1750, 1.5 combo @ 1423

Full party (d27) - 2722 HP
+1: 9 slashes @ 3019, 4 full combos @ 3053
+2: 8 slashes @ 2847, 3.5 combos @ 2780
+3: 8 slashes @ 3010, 3.5 combos @ 2933
+4: 7 slashes @ 2777, 3.5 combos @ 3087 (3 combo is pretty close at 2690)
+5: 7 slashes @ 2920, 3 combos @ 2824
+6: 7 slashes @ 3063, 3 combos @ 2957

Assuming these numbers are anywhere near accurate, what does this mean? When going solo in T3, damage bonuses won't reduce your swings per kill drastically, but some bonus is definitely better than no bonus. With larger parties (and thus, larger monster HP), the number of slashes required to kill is more pronounced and it seems +4 will be good enough.

if i had full snarby maxed to level ten including the barbarous thorn shield, with the damage versus undead high on my DA ( divine avenger is also an elemental weapon), how much damage would i be putting out? because i already put out 778 on the initial hit then 300+ on the after hits

edit: i put this amount of damage on the slags at FSC.