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I'm playing The witcher 3 on Xbox one, and I'm a bit confused with the crossbow bolts stats. For instance, currently I have these stacks in my inventory:

        Quality: Blue (master)    | Yellow (magic)   | Brown (relic)    | Regular (black)
----------------|-----------------|------------------|------------------|------------------
Level required  | 9               | 14               | 22               | 1 
Quantity I have | 10              | 22               | 20               | Unlimited
Weight          | 0.51            | 1.11             | 3.01             | 0.06
Value           | 8 coins each    | 10 coins each    | 16 coins each    | 0 coins
Damage          | 7-9, +8 silver  | 9-11, +10 silver | 13-15 +14 silver | 9-11
Other effects   | bleeding 15s    |                  |                  |

So I can use the default crossbow bolts, which only do 11 damage at maximum, or swap to the relic ones, which would let me do 29 total damage until I run out of them. Everything is clear, right?

Well... I forgot to add something to the table above. The standard bolts also do a bit of silver damage. +400 silver damage, to be precise. Whaaaat!?

So I can choose between 17 damage (master quality), 21 (magical item), 29 (relic), or... 411 (crappy quality). Seriously? Also, I have an unlimited supply of those, and they don't even weight much, as opposed to the other bolt stacks.

What am I missing here?????

Should I just throw away all the non-standard bolt stacks? (No merchant is willing to buy them... no wonder why!)

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  • It says +4 silver damage for normal bolts on my system (PS4).
    – greg-449
    Jul 12, 2016 at 19:06
  • Ok, then it's bugged on Xbox. It's definitely +400, not a text error. With the other bolts I barely do any damage to level 4 drowners (I'm level 20 at the moment), while the normal bolts kill them with a single hit... which is pretty much what I would expect, I can kill them with just an Igni or a punch.
    – AJPerez
    Jul 12, 2016 at 19:36
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    I'm fairly, but not 100% certain, that it says +400 on PC at well. I know that I never switched to any special sort of bolt due to only using them underwater, and only regular killing things in one or two hits. It's extra concerning to me that this is not some sort of bug due to it not being fixed in the patches with the latest expac, and it's not exactly a rare 'bug', as far as I can tell.
    – Tylor
    Jul 12, 2016 at 19:49
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    Doesn't silver only affect monsters? (Ex. You don't do the silver damage against humans?)
    – zozo
    Jul 12, 2016 at 20:57
  • @zozo yes, silver only affects monsters, but anyway... against monsters, standard bolts deal 14x more damage than the "better" ones. Against other enemies, without the +400, crossbows are completely useless no matter which bolt I use
    – AJPerez
    Jul 13, 2016 at 11:12

1 Answer 1

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On the PS4 version with patch 1.23 the normal bolts display as +400 silver damage only when underwater. Otherwise they display as +4 silver damage. That also seems to match the damage they do.

People do seem to have run in to a bug where the game still considered you to be underwater when you were back on land again. Possibly you have hit that.

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    I was about to mention this. The bolts get a massive damage boost when underwater so that they can (mostly) one-shot things. This feels like a real cop-out for a game mechanic, but I won't get into that here...
    – Unknown Zombie
    Jul 13, 2016 at 13:56
  • That must be it. I just started the game and it displays +4 now. Thanks!
    – AJPerez
    Jul 15, 2016 at 9:16

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