A few people asked me to move my guide from the old forums so I decided to remake it and place it here. Feel free to use it or change it up, but I personally I feel this is the most optimal rotation you can possibly get.
DPS Flow Chart during Enhance Bolt: Hunting party, build 180 sp, enhance bolt, double hollow, perforate, double hollow, six shooter, double hollow, perforate, double hollow, six shooter, etc. until enhance bolt is off cooldown. Sometimes if your speed is really high, you may end up in a scenario where all of your skills are on CD. In that case, pewpewpew away.
DPS Flow Chart when Enhance Bolt is off CD: You should have alot of sp left over from hunting party and enhanced perforate + cat statue. Bolt Storm and Nuke accordingly, trying to get headshots as much as possible with bolt storm. Six shooter is a viable move still even without enhance bolt and perforate if you land mostly headshots. You should bolt storm before nuking since it builds you more sp back but that depends on the boss (ie. Succubus Queen, Iset, Lugh, etc.). Try to leave yourself at least 250 sp so when you enhance bolt you waste no time and can go into that flowchart listed above immediately. Greater cat statue syncs very nicely with hunting party. These should ALWAYS be used in conjunction.
Side Note:
1. In certain scenarios, sometimes you will find yourself in a situation where the boss is down and you are still in enhance bolt. If you can manage to get the majority of your shots headshots, then I would definitely go with using bolt storm even though it doesnt receive any buffs from enhance bolt. Bolt storm is actually his most damaging move if 80-100% of the hits are headshots. Even if none are headshot it still does tremendous damage.
2. ALWAYS USE HUNTING PARTY. I can't stress that enough. Many many many kais fail to do this and its frustrating since with just two kais you can keep hunting party up 100% of the time. Hunting party actually boosts kai's own damage considerably since he has much better sp management.
3. Speed is important on Gun Kai. Aim for 40-50 to be comfortable. Higher is better as you build more sp with faster bolt shooting, but the benefits diminish the higher you go since kai is ultimately restricted by cooldowns on his active skills. Still, at high speeds he feels very fluid and dynamic.
Awakenings:
Damage: Hollow Shot, Spin Smash and Six Shooter. Damage can be put on Perforate if your speed is very high, which means your SP gain is higher from faster left click shooting. 55+ should be when you can debate whether to use Damage or SP.
SP reduction: Hunting Party and Bolt Storm. SP reduction can be put on Perforate if your speed is mediocre or slow. I would say under 40 you should definitely go SP reduction.
Cooldown reduction: Enhance Bolt and Massive Impact. Enhance bolt is an absolute must.
The inclusion of enhance bolt and reworkin of his active skills has made kai more complex and deeper mechanic-wise. He has much more things to keep track of and alot of options to choose from. He isnt hard to do damage with or to survive (buff to dodge was op), but playing him at a higher level has become harder and increased the gap between a bad kai, a good kai and an amazing kai. There are tons of people who dismiss kai has a baby mode and easy character and thus feel he is one dimensional and takes very little effort. Therefore they do not try and they don't explore his rather interesting and powerful kit.
Demonstration of Optimal Rotation For Kai: Zecallion Solo
Sorry for the low quality, I have since then figured how to record in higher quality.
Comments
six shooters / hollows during enhanced bolt, bolt storm whenever possible, hollows aswell, nuke if you have spare SP
My waking build consists of
Hollow shot +10% damage
spin smash 10% damage.
Hunting party 70 sp
perforate 70 sp
six shooter 70 sp
enhanced bolt 22 seconds
massive impact 22 seconds
bolt storm 5 seconds
hand bomb 5 seconds (used for break offs and for faster lavasat runs)
Bunker buster 8% damage (holding skill barely use this unless it's extremely situational).
by the time your bolt storm is finished firing you will have a 44 second cooldown, adding a 5 second cool down stone will reduce it to once every 39 seconds before the next charge is ready since the bolt storm takes 6 seconds to fire it's entire clip.
On average, if you hit all the shots and depending on where you aim bolt storm, you are doing essentially up to 80-120,000 damage, 35-40,000 more damage that what massive impact is capable of, and depending on how fast you spam it, you can essentially obliterate the boss in no time flat in groups. Bolt storm also has insane range where you can even hit some bosses from across their arena.
A +15 gun does up to 3,500 damage per bolt if it hits the boss's head, giving bolt storm a total of 140,000 damage if all bolts hit the head, 20,000 more damage than my +11 gun.
Though, by the time one massive with 22 seconds (2:38) cools off, you can essentially spam 3 or 4 (:39) bolt storms in that time, as opposed to 1 or 2 (:44) bolt storms.
The explosive side depends more on critical rating, where if a kai has low crit rating, it would essentially cause the damage (like real explosions) to be extremely unstable and all over the place. Six shot's average damage is 3,000 per explosion, where 6 hits would total up to 18,000 assuming you hit all 6 bolts on your target. However, I have seen some 7K shots, so that can give six shot's potential to hit up to 42,000 damage. Heck, two six shooters even does more damage than a massive impact.
as you said before, hunting party is a must for every kai, and combining it with the greater cat's sp boost gives you 1.5 bars of charge, or 375 SP, which can make or break the next bolt storm charge, or the next attack in general.
However, if you plan on being a soloer, then bolt storm poses more of a risk to use on hand and chaining six shot and perf is a better option.
There are two viable builds for X gun kai, depending on your attack rating to critical hit ratio and assuming your balance is at 90 with 40-50 attack speed, or in my case, 52 attack speed. Sometimes you have to take a risk to get your reward of high damage output.
Additionally, as soon as the :39 or :44 marker hits, you can cancel out the ending animation to bolt storm by dodging (depending on what stone you have), and get right back into the action.
Just throwing it out there, but if you disagree, that's fine. Everyone has their preferences.
Regarding critical rating, im not sure what you mean but Imma break it down for you using +15 and capped stats as a baseline. As a guide line, the first number will be a noncrit and the second number will be a crit. These are average numbers btw.
Non enhance bolt:
Six shooter: 3000-6000 per shot
Perforate: 500-1000 per shot; there are 5 shots per perforate. (sp reduction)
600-1200 (10% damage)
Hollow shot: 6500-13000
Enhance bolt:
Six shooter: 4000-8000 per shot
Perforate: 625-1250-2500 (non crit); 1250-2500-4900 (crit) (sp reduction)
750-1500-2900 (non crit); 1500-2900-5700 (crit) (10% damage)
Hollow: 10000-19500 (first hollow)
6000-12000 (second hollow).
Bolt storm: 2200-2300 non headshot x 30 shots
3400-3600 headshots x 30. Keep in mind bolt storm technically always crits so when you get crit damage buff from trans, you do more damage per shot.
Nuke: 44000-88000
Those are pretty much accurate numbers. I've played kai alot so I know how he works very well.
the numbers i listed are from 300 additional damage/attcapped/balcapped