Multishot vs Piercing enchantment in Minecraft: Which one is better for your crossbow?

Enchanting an item in Minecraft is one of the best ways of improving it. As multiple enchantments can be applied to a single tool, players can enhance different aspects of their items.

Multishot and Piercing are two unique weapon enchantments that can only be applied to crossbows. Both were added to the game with the Minecraft 1.14 Village & Pillage update released on 23 April 2019.

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Minecraft enchantment comparison: Multishot Vs. Piercing

Maximum levels and enchantment weights

Levels comparison (Image via Minecraft)

Except for a few, almost every enchantment in Minecraft has different levels, and a few of them can go up to level five.

Like Silk Touch, Multishot does not have multiple levels, but Piercing, on the other hand, has four.

Piercing also has five times more enchantment weight. This means that the chances of a player receiving a free Piercing enchantment from the enchanting table are significantly higher than getting a Multishot.

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Effect on crossbow's durability

Using a crossbow with the Piercing enchantment will reduce its durability points by one per arrow shot. However, this isn't the case with the Multishot enchantment. Each arrow shot from a Multishot crossbow uses three durability points.

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Uses

Arrows shot from Multishot vs Pierce (Image via Minecraft)

Though Multishot and Piercing have a lot in common, how they shoot arrows is worlds apart. A crossbow with Multishot shoots three different arrows that are slightly horizontally apart.

As the name suggests, arrows shot from Piercing crossbows pierce through mobs. The number of mobs that an arrow can go through depends on the level of Piercing applied on the used crossbow. With a level four Piercing crossbow, an arrow can go through five mobs.

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Which enchantment is better for crossbows?

Multishot and Piercing are incompatible, meaning that a player cannot apply both of them on the same crossbow without using cheats. Since they cannot be used together, players often debate about which one is better.

As their uses are so different, one cannot be simply called better than the other. When the player has to fight multiple mobs approaching from different angles, Multishot will be more effective than Piercing.

However, in situations such as when multiple mobs are moving towards the player in a straight line, Piercing will be more helpful.

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Note: This article is subjective and solely reflects the opinion of the writer.