Combine 10

**Combine 10** combines 10 projectiles into one super projectile, having the combined damage of all 10. It then doubles the total damage of the projectile.

Using this item means your projectiles pack a big punch, but you don't fire as many as a result.

## Skill Tree Upgrades

The first skill adds an additional count of Pierce, Death Pierce, and all Bounce effects to the super projectile, if the starting projectiles had any. So if your bullet already passed thru two Pierce and a single Random Bounce, the super projectile effectively has *three* Pierce and *two* Random Bounce effects on it. Since Pierce and Bounce items work well together (especially when combined with Crisscross or other direction-fixing items, to keep bounced bullets in the field), the ideal setup is one Pierce and one of each of the three Bounce items, giving you two pierces and six bounces in total for just four item slots.

The second skill causes the Combiner to, instead of always adding the damage of each incoming bullet, add *either* the incoming bullet's damage *or* the previous bullet's damage, whichever was higher. For example, if the input bullets dealt 10, 4, 3, 9, 7, 7, 1, 1, 7, 1 damage (combined into 50, then doubled to 100), it would instead act like the bullets were 10, 10, 4, 9, 9, 7, 7, 1, 7, 7 (combined into 71, then doubled to 142).

In practice, the second skill works best if your damage is highly variable. If your shots perfectly alternated between very high and very low damage, for example, it would effectively double the damage (for a total of x4, combined with the original damage doubling). Alternately, if a single bullet was worth several times the damage of the other 9 combined (which happens quite often, due to the nature of RNG multiplier items), doubling just that bullet would also nearly double your damage, regardless of how the other bullets were distributed. In practice, this will generally be worth between x1.5 and x2, making it an *extremely* effective skill.

## Interaction With Other Items

The bullet emitted by **Combine 10** counts as an "original" projectile for Add Projectile, regardless of how many "copy" projectiles went into it. This means that placing some Add Projectiles before a Combiner and some after will have a greater effect than putting them all before or all after.

**Combine 10**'s high-damage bullets make Death Pierce much more effective.

The much lower number of bullets make Sparse Damage much more effective.

**Combine 10** should always be used near the *end* of your bullet's path, after all your RNG damage multipliers (like X2 Damage). This is because you want more bullets to go thru those RNG items, to improve reliability. (Other non-damage RNG items, like Curve Right, can go before or after **Combine 10** equally; the super projectile will use the random path from the first input bullet.) Also, if you have the second skill for **Combine 10**, you want the damage of consecutive input bullets to be as variable as possible.

Note that in many situations, such as farming currency, firing a small amount of projectiles can slow you down a lot. It is only recommended to use **Combine 10** in situations where damage is more important than ejection rate.