I was sighting in my cva optima with 100 grains of pyrodex pellets and the 250 grain tc shockwave today. I was dead on 100 yards and 3 feet, yes 3 feet low at 200! Has anyone seen this? What load does everyone prefer?

Please don't tell me to use 150 grains. I've read a lot of articles from experts that say it's not necessary and a waste of money.

If you want to shoot Pyrodex at 200 yds. You'll have to have it shoot high at 100yds, or use holdover at 200yds.

Pyrodex is only slightly more power than the weaker real BP powder. Switch up to T7, or BH 209 for less holdover. A BDC scope would help too.

Even 150gr of Pyro will shoot low at 200yds if you have it dead on at 100yds. It's not a 30-06.

Something is wrong somewhere. Were you shooting into a headwind? Here is the ballistic chart for that round

At 200 you shouldn't be more than 14-16 inches low give or take a couple inches. -36 inches then either your estimation is WAY off or you were shooting into a pretty stout wind.

According to Hodgdon he was getting 1712fps at the muzzle.

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Even at 1,700fps, it should only drop around 17".

Yes, but I don't know if it's really dropping 3 ft. My point being it's going to drop a lot with that load/zero.

I wasn't exaggerating if that's what you are implying here. I looked up all of the ballistics information that I could find and I was expecting about 14" of drop. I was astounded when I saw a 3 foot drop. My friend was shooting next to me and he was using the exact same load except for he was using the super glide sabots and he was hitting about 10" low. He was using an older knight.

Old pellets = low velocity?

There could be a multitude of different factors that affected your shots. Old pellets, moisture, shooter, etc.

Holy crap I never thought about the age of the pellets. I haven't shot a muzzleloader in about 8 years and I have had these pellets ever since! What causes the pellets to go bad over time, just moisture basically?