THE BASIN |
The Bowazon in D2xBy Lok
|
| I. | Skill Changes Impacting Bowazons |
| II. | Non Skill Changes Impacting Bowazons |
| III. | The New Bowazon Uberbuild |
| IV. | Hotkeys + General Skill Use |
| V. | Gear |
| VI. | Mercs |
| VII. | Tricks to Employ in Your Life as a Bowazon |
| VIII. | Specific Comments on D2 Bowazon builds |
| IX. | How Nauseating Can the Uberbuild Get? |
| X. | Credits |
I. Skill Changes Impacting Bowazons
There have been many changes in the bowazon and as of the 1.09 patch the following changes appear
Passives changed:
Valkyrie
The nightmare and hell bonuses to valk life now display. Valk also gets a shot at new magic effects on their items such as nova upon generation.
Pierce
No changes to the skill here, but there are item changes. All unique bows with pierce now have a pierce rating which no longer uniformly 100% as it was in D2. Doomslinger dropped to 35%. The new exceptional unique crossbow Buriza, has a 100% pierce, so it is still possible to hit 100% on items alone. Your pierce skill seems to add with the bows pierce ability, so you can compensate for less than 100% pierce on an item with points invested in the pierce skill. The belt razor tail, conveys a 33% pierce, allowing javazons to exceed 100% pierce with lower investments in the skill.
The rest of the passives remain unchanged.
Bow and Crossbow Skills Changed:
Multishot
Nerfed to do 75% normal arrow damage. Only one check per monster per arrow is now made, so attack rating matters now for multishot (previously multiple arrow checks on one target would take place, and now you only check on pierced arrows). This is a pretty hard nerf, considering the 50% physical resistance in hell already, and the halving in leech for nm+. FA now exceeds multi for closely clustered monsters, and for off screen sniping guided is much better. Multi still is the best way to get the most arrows into the air at the same time, and is still the best way to apply physical damage to a tight cluster of monsters, which is useful when they are cold immune. For this reason I would no longer have multi take priority in builds. Note that elemental effects from your bow or charms only receive 75% of their listed damage from multishot- the nerf applies to elemental damage as well.
Cold arrow
Does half physical damage on the hit and full elementa damage from the skill. All other element damage from charms and items is halved when using this skill.
Fire arrow
Perhaps a new discovery of an old bug, but fire arrow converts your physical arrow damage into fire damage. There remains some lingering physical damage, as I have observed damage done to fire immunes with a fire arrow. The bulk of your damage is fire though. This did not matter that much prior to the days of immunities, but now it does matter as it is a means, and a cheap means at that (1 pt), of doing damage to physical immunes. It is actually counter productive pumping this skill since you will use it for those times when leech back is a problem, and a minimal mana cost means you can toss out more.
Exploding arrow
Now leeches and adds physical damage to the hit. The explosion damage even at lvl 20 remains small, so it is again relegated to the realm of variants/use prior to immo.
Ice arrow
Cold damage was upped considerably (from around 80ish max at 20 to 200ish). It has a longer freeze duration and a lower mana cost than freezing arrow, but for mass kill FA is much better.
Guided arrow
Pierces. This one change completely changes the skill. At high levels of piercing, the guided arrow will hit the target, pierce, turn around, hit it again, and repeat until it has hit the limit of its range. The arrow will turn around for multiple pierces if there is room beyond the target, so line up shots such that there is turn around room beyond the target. It never misses too now (before it just targeted but was not guaranteed a hit). You can do fantastic damage to a target with this skill now if you do get the pierce up there. Even though this is designed to enhance physical damage (5% / skill point), it also makes an effective delivery of weapon based elemental damage- so that 6 ort rune bow doing 6-300 electrical damage per hit can become potent due to the multiple hits per guided from pierce. This is definitely the new boss killer arrow. Also it is a near perfect solution for teleporting imps. Maxing this skill is not so important from a damage standpoint, but rather it matters more from a mana standpoint, as low mana cost means more guideds verses phys immunes.
Immolation arrow
Nerfed HARD. They (a) added a timer of 1s to this skill, (b) capped the after burn duration at 3s, and (c) roughly tripled the exploding damage on a hit. In D2, this skill was useful because when you got high levels of immo, you could spam out an immo stack that would burn a long time, and that burn over time stacking would drop most anything. Now with the shortened timer, the after burn damage is comparable to the exploding damage and no longer dominates. Furthermore, the timer ruins this skill for spamming. One would consider turning to exploding arrow, but the explosion damage is 3-4x less than that of the immo arrow, meaning you would need a frame rate on your normal attack of 6-7 to see equivalent exploding damage. The timer + cap effectively limits the stack size for immo at 3. This skill still has its uses- namely against physical and cold immune bosses in hell difficulty. The good news is you now get physical arrow damage on the target hit with immo, which can help with its mana expenditure. At max levels with high pierce, it is an effective means of clearing cold using creatures in zones such as the ancients or crystalline passage, but the timer makes this skill annoying to use.
Strafe
Strafe's targeting range increased, making the skill much more useful. Since you fire at things further away, you have more time to dispatch them via strafe before they reach your position. Strafe is now capped at 10 arrows at lvl 6 skill. Strafe remains useful for areas with widely scattered enemies lacking ranged attacks, and it makes an excellent mana recovery arrow. In combination with knockback items and/or blinding effects, strafe can serve a defensive function. With decoy, valk, + hireling, you have a 4 arrows fire for 11 mana on a single target (note a bug in 1.09 prevents those arrows above the 1st from doing damage, apparently the same check being done for multi is also being done for strafe, with no more than one initial arrow hit applying). A strong competitor as leech back now to strafe is max guided- 3.2 mana for a multi pierced guaranteed hit on a single target can really yield nice returns.
Freezing arrow
The new reigning king of mass kill for tightly grouped packs of monsters. What makes this really work well is 100% pierce, either gained from items or items + the piercing skill. The main changes are physical arrow damage for each target struck, elimination of physical arrow damage on blast radius, and a jacking up of the cold damage in the blast radius. Cold damage in the blast radius is roughly 3x what it used to be at lvl 20. I have seen effects such as the holy bolt from the set item 'laying of hands' trigger far more frequently than one would expect from the main arrow hit alone, and conjecture that spell effects can trigger on the blast damage. Ideal gear can make multi achieve a total higher damage (say an amplify damage item and an extremely high base damage bow), but for most users with typical bowazon rigs, FA will rule the roost for tight clusters of monsters. It is unknown at this point whether other cold damage adders increase the cold damage done in the blast radius- on the one hand we have supporting evidence in the form of cold duration stacking, but on the other we have the fact that poison charms don't stack with poison nova. Testing is needed in this area.
II. Non Skill Changes Impacting Bowazons
Hirelings- you can now get your paladin on a stick and buy a might aura desert warrior (act 2) to up your number of strafe arrows and increase your physical arrow damage. An alternative is the holy freeze merc.
Crushing blow- now works on bows, but at a really restricted level - 1/8th for normal monsters, and 1/20th for all others.
Open wounds works on bows- damage tracks clvl, and can be as high as 90/s at clvl 99 for 4 sec
Knockback works on bows- this can be useful or annoying. If you have an immo pyre, this will keep flames from stacking (but that is not as important). In parties it can be annoying, as you push stuff away from your tanks.
Sockets, runes, elemental damage prefixes- this is a huge change, letting you get big elemental damage on bows now. Poison can be significant, as well as racked up fire/electrical damage. So you can now do elemental damage with physical center branch arrow skills. This can be sizable (e.g. shocking does 361-480 max electrical).
Deadly strike now works on bows- every little bit helps.
Vidala's set freezes target now works.
New exceptional uniques and set bows- can far exceed the old bow damage limits. Go check out the Buriza stats later for an example.
Fools/cruel - there are high end blue prefixes. Cruel does up to 300% enhanced damage (compare with the old 100% merciless), and screaming/fools have level dependent bonuses that can be very substantial.
Skill bonuses- you now can get up to +3 to a given tree, or +2 all on a weapon, taking token 1 point investments much further.
Monster flee- monster flee abilities work with bows. Items such as Rattlecage armor which has crushing blow and flee, which is undesirable from a melee standpoint can work well with bows.
Demon/undead killer dmg- these work with bows now, whether obtained by rune, gem, or prefix/suffix , and this damage can be SUBSTANCIAL, particularly the demon one on act bosses.
Bahamut- the enormous mana boost from this item (~100 ma) can really make zero energy builds viable.
Shael runes and socket quests- can now take bows beyond the 20% ias limit previously experienced via prefix alone. Socket quests (a5, kill Shenk) can insert at least one socket into anything and make a great bow fantastic.
+mana/kill- victorious with up to +5ma/kill and TIR runes with +2 ma/kill no matter where they are socketed can equate to mana return on physical immunes etc and provide an alternative to mana leech.
Leech- life leech is on rings, circlets and weapons, mana leech on ammys, circlets and weapons. Blood crafts let you put life leech on all slots. Low levels of leech are available on gloves. All leech is halved in nightmare and hell difficulty. Leech is now better at high prefix/suffix levels, but is hard to get early in the game.
all creatures have 50% phys res in hell diff, and there are physical immune monsters now in the game.
Spell effects can be on activated upon hit now, such as amplify damage curses to other sorceress skills.
Teleport items- let you move like as sorc in a pinch, but can be expensive to recharge for routine use
Hit blinds target now works with bows. This can be great if something interrupts their chase AI (monsters running at you will continue to run at you when blinded- they stop at the last targeted destination, and if you are within their blind awareness radius (1yd), they will engage or chase you- knockback in combination with blind will break this pathing function and have them stand at range blind). There is a problem with this in that if you have some other curse you want to work (such as amp), blinding will overwrite this curse.
Tiering of skill power- most skills used to just have a linear increase per level in the ability, with a few having a diminishing returns function applied. Now many the non diminishing skills such as immo, FA, etc are in a tiered system, where for say the first 8 levels or so you get a marginal increase, with the next 8 points invested giving you a moderate increase, and the last tier granting a very large increase. With skill adders now taking you well beyond the skill 20 limit, you can really see huge damage increase per level on these skills (for instance +10 skills will up a 20th FA from around 300 cold to 600 cold dmg, with similar numbers for immo).
The second tab- you now have a second weapons tab with associated skills. This allows you to go bowazon + javazon skills for an entire package.
Weapon speed has changed. Dagni discovered the following, which I'll repackage here in a convienant form with drawing from Trucidation- see also Afflicted-
s = w + fanat + z
z = 1/(1/i + 1/120)
y = 256*(s + 100)/100
x = 256*(b + 1)/rounddown(y)
frames = roundup(x) - 1
where w is the negative of the built in weapon type speed bonus listed at the Arreat Summit (eg. 30% for a phase blade), fanat is the fanaticism bonus, z is the diminishing returns effective Increased Attack Speed (IAS), s is your total speed adjustments capped at 75%, y and x are terms defined for mathematical convienance, b is the base weapon frames by class as listed in Truc et all at www.lurkerlounge.com (eg 19 frames for crossbows with amazons), i is the total of all IAS, and frames is the frame rate of your attack. The final number, frames, is how many frames it takes you to execute an attack sequence. Your attacks per second = 25/frames, since the game updates at 25 frames per second. This is for most attacks.
Attacks with framerate rollback, such as zeal, fend, strafe, fury..., have a different functional form and use a different base. There are two numbers for framerate rollback attacks- the first is the frames it takes to initiate the attack sequence, and this number is close to the normal attack rate. The second number is the frames between attacks in a given sequence. At the speed cap, crossbows are limited to 11/3 (11 frames to start the sequence, 3 frames for each bolt), and bows are limited to 7/2. To calculate the frames within a sequence, use roughly half the base and modify frames equation from frames = roundup(x) - 1 to frames = roundup(x).
With that background, we can now discuss what has changed. It used to be that s was just a linear sum of all bonuses, be it from weapon, IAS or say fanaticism. Now there are two catagories of speed modifiers- those which fall under the diminishing returns equation (the equation for z), and those that do not. If we define
o = 75 - w - fanat
we can find that
1/i = 1/o - 1/120
Here o essentailly is how much speed you lack to reach the 75% speed limit, and you can solve for the amount of IAS you need to cap by using the above equation. If you play around in the numbers, you find that with a very fast base weapon speed, w, you do not need absurd amounts of IAS to cap. For instance a w=60% CKN only needs about i=15% to cap. However slow base speed weapons (such as a ballista with w=-10) need huge amounts of IAS to cap (say around i=300%). But this does not mean you are dead in the water with slow weapons- if you say have the Buriza at w=-10 and a built in i=80, you can hit the speed limit cap if you are around a fanatic pally (fanat=35, lvl 20 fanat) and say you don goldwrap (i=10). At this point it is unknown how things such as the druid skill werewolf functions in this equation, and there have been reports that there is no speed cap on werecreatures.
III. The New Bowazon Uberbuild
So those are the major changes. My new idea of the bowazon uberbuild is:
20 freezing arrow
This is your main mass kill skill for non immune packs- the freezing and blast radius + spamming potential of this arrow make it fantastic. Maxing this skill should be a priority after achieving lvl 30.
20 immolation arrow or lightning fury
IMMO: You still need this, but probably can wait until hell diff before working on it. Its main use is a fire element attack against phys/cold immunes. You can avoid this entirely and skip the entire fire branch if you can compensate with a great fire hit weapon or lightning hit weapon or poison weapon. I hear magic find does not work if something is killed by poison, so I tend to avoid that element. A poor man's alternative is 1 point in fire arrow. LIGHTNING FURY: with a second tabbed weapon, it is fairly easy to map a weapon switch to say your mouse thumb button, and rapidly switch between bow and jav skills. The game remembers the skill tab configuration from the last time you used it, so the weapon tab serves as a double hotkey- for instance you could have guided on your left and FA on your right with a bow on tab 1, and have jab on your left and lightning fury on your right with a javelin on tab 2, and switch between the two setups with a single keystroke.
20 guided arrow
This skill is great even at lvl 1. I finished the game using it at level 1 at lvl 75 and got great benefit. Take to max if you want to use it heavily for scouting and or leech back. You pump this to high levels mainly for its reduced mana cost, which permits you to use it against physical immunes with a low mana drain.
7 crit hit
you get a lot of bang for your buck taking crit hit to this level, and often you will find that you break even on crits mana wise but lose mana on normal hits. Benefits continue to lvl 11, but skill adders can take you there.
6 Strafe
this puts you at the 10 arrow limit. Like guided, the 5% per level damage benefit from this skill can achieve marginal returns if you employ a high dex build.
3-4 valk
one point is too little, and this is a workable level for solo play. If all you will ever do is play in high player count games, you can just put one in valk and let your adders do the rest.
enough pierce to achieve 100% pierce
If you have a bow in mind, this becomes easier to specify- you get nice returns for a total of 6-8pts in the skill. Nonzero levels in this skill gives you a chance to pierce on non piercing weapons too, or for some javelin skills. Note there is a new exceptional belt which grants a low (~30%) level of piercing, which when combined with a reasonable investment in the piercing skill can make any bow achieve 100% pierce.
1 point in everything else except passives, which you build to taste
as always dodge, avoid, evade are of great help, and the 40% level is a pretty reasonable target. I would strive to pick up an ammy or a circlet with +2 or +3 passives to take token point investments in this area to much higher levels.
Stats-
110-137 str
100 vit
20 ene
all the rest in Dex
Explanation- at 110 str you can use the Buriza and Grand Matron bows, perhaps the best bows in the game in my humble opinion. 137 str lets you use the top end elite hydra bow, which is useful if you want to shop for cruel versions. Vitality is important- 100 vit will give you the ability to take a decent hit in hell difficulty, and it will result in longer lasting decoys. The starting level of energy works if you use a Bahamut ring to get your mana pool up to a usable level. Dexterity as always is important for damage and hit rates.
IV. Hotkeys + General Skill Use
Hotkeys are really subjective. Every revision I change my philosophy. I will put up what mine currently are here and the reasoning behind their choice. I would be very interested in hearing of your configuration on keys and reasoning behind the configuration. In general I prefer a remap of skills 1-4 to asdf, and skills 5-8 to qwer. This permits my left hand to remain on the keyboard and punch skills in a rapid fashion. My highest use skills are on the asdf row, or the default row where my fingers rest. One row above are the next 4, and the row below , zxcv is reserved for routine inventory and show item functions.
Right actions:
Q=Strafe
W=Slow missiles
E=Decoy
R=Valkyrie
S=Freezing Arrow
D=Immo or LF
Left actions:
A=Guided
F=Fire arrow
I presently employ guided so much now that I really want it up at virtually all times. As some skills like valk or decoy can only be on the right, this puts guided on my left. The guided/decoy or valk combo is a great boss killer setup- you lay down the decoy/valk and then rapid fire guideds until the decoy/valk drops, and repeat. Time is of the essence here, and switching between keys can make you dead. Both guided and decoy make great scouts. For details on these tactics see the tricks section. The only real time I want guided off my left is when I face physical immunes. In this case I want to use fire arrow in combination with decoy/valk.
The rest of the skills are on the right. I have combat skills on my default finger row (asdf), and noncombat on the row above (qwer). The non combat skills are not used as much, and that is why they are not on a default finger resting. Strafe is the exception- there are a few instances in which you have widely spread , low life foes or say heavy desynch, and you want to spread the damage around. Strafe is good for this. IF the grouping is packed in tight, I find either immo, LF, or FA does the trick. Slow missiles is there mainly for lightning enchanted bosses, whose charge range and propagation speed are cut enormously with slow. Another main use of slow missiles is for scouting in dungeons with doors and chambers. In most other instances I find it better to just concentrate with taking them out rather than slowing missiles.
V. Gear
I could go into specific gear lists, but that sort of thing is tiresome, and usually you only really need general goals in terms of gear. Who wants to really read long lists of gear that you don't have? Not me. So here you go- general goals to hit in your gear searching. Personally I prefer a magic find rig, with a 4 topaz socketed armor and additional items to take me up as high as I can stand. The 4 socket armor shows up in nightmare. Go ahead and pick a light version so you have no running penalty. Usually the glove slot, boot slot, armor slot can all be assigned to find magic items. Find magic does have diminishing returns beyond 110%, but you will still notice a difference out to say 200% or so. The helmet slot has circlets with leech and other nice abilities such as skills and say teleport, so giving up that slot to find magic hurts. Nice circlets also increase your effective level for gambling, and it is covenant not switching to a gambling circlet or tying up stash space with a gambling circlet. It is usually not too difficult getting find item boots with some speed on them. At least one of your jewelry slots is tied up with a Bahamut item, and probably your ammy is tied up with mana leech, which leaves your other ring for probably life leech (blood craft perhaps?). If you can get leech and find on these slots, great, else I go with just leech. You can find a unique ring with mana leech on it, a nice ammy with leech on it, and perhaps a circlet with it on it. If you take pains to achieve super high physical damage and get your leech, you will be able to leech back a level 20 FA. Your main weapon should have damage and speed- this typically means you have to pass over leech and resistance to get your damage and speed.
Anyway, with the find rig you are in a situation where you have negative resistance. Negative resistance is playable in hell with this zon if you use decoy scouting (described here in detail later), a technique where you cast a decoy and advance to its position if nothing goes after the decoy. This puts you in a position where your valk/decoy/merc is always taking all the hits, and your passives (dodge/avoid/evade) reduce stray shots to an acceptable level. It is extremely difficult achieving reasonable resistance as a zon, so I don't even bother with resistance and just employ tactics/positioning. High leech is desirable, and harder to get now. Usually you don't have much freedom for it on your main weapon, and your socket quest is frequently needed for other damage aspects. You can find a unique ring with mana leech on it, a nice ammy with leech on it, and perhaps a circlet with it on it. If you take pains to achieve super high physical damage and get your leech, you will be able to leech back a max FA.
As far as skill adders go, I prefer +skills in the passives tree. A few +passives items can turn a low investment in something like dodge into a nice solid rating. I feel you get more benefit by skills in passives than you do in the bow tree, so if given the choice I would go with the passives.
There are numerous interesting items that now work well with the zon. For instance Cleglaws pinchers which combine knockback and slowing are very handy for strafeazons. To this add new items such as the unique amulet which has a percent chance of triggering amp damage on a hit- amp will help immensly in countering the global 50% phys res in hell difficulty.
Finally, your bows. Note I said bows. That is right, abandon the single weapon mentality of D2 right now. You should also even consider javelins now. You have a tab 2 weapon, and you should use it. There are a ton of good bows out there for the bowazon now. Perhaps the best are the exceptional/elite unique bows. I like to think of characters in D2 as having attack form triads- for the bowazon it is cold/fire/physical. You have the FA skill and immo for the former two, and normal arrow damage for the latter. For the tab 2 bow, I like to expand my elemental attack options by either going after a lightning damage bow or a poison bow. The latter can be really nice for things like MSLEB's, as its damage over time does not force out sparks, and you can send off a shot and let the poison go to work. A 6 socket perfect emerald bow can deliver 600 poison over 7s, and the entire time monster regeneration is disabled. The problem with poison is that if poison kills the monster, your magic find does not influence the drop. From the lightning damage perspective, the most interesting bows are the shocking bows (prefix form lightning damage tree). This prefix only shows up on normal magic weapons, so pick up all blue weapons you have. Shocking adds 361-480 max lightning damage- and if you get lucky on a socketing, you can get 2 sockets and add another 2-80 from perfect topazes, or 2-100 from a pair of ort runes, or even more from say a nice jewel. Also you can get lucky on the suffix side and get electrical on the suffix too. The good news is you can actually buy this kind of weapon, so intensive shopping can yield this. For the elemental damage lighting weapon, base bow damage is not such a driving factor- instead speed matters more, so look for bows over crossbows and go for the faster bow versions if you have a choice. On your main weapon, you want big damage, fast speed, and perhaps cold or fire damage to supplement your main attack forms.
VI. Mercs
I played around with several mercs. The barbs were a bit redundant if you heavily use decoy and valk- odds are if it is going to drop your valk, it will drop the merc. Rogues are also a bit redundant- their ranged attack contributes little when placed next to your bowazon's fire. Sorcs from a3 are mainly useful for the cold merc that freezes foes, however since you have tied down most crowds on your decoys and valks you do not really need relief from swarming that a cold merc could provide. Fire and lightning sorcs wade in too much and get killed too much, although some claim the inferno Ironwolf does really well with a valk tank. That leaves a2 mercs. Prayer mercs are fine early on, providing self healing for you and a much needed tank. I prefer them to a defiance merc (as your armor rating is worthless, and odds are in the early game you don't have the gear for the merc to take advantage of its own meager aura). Blessed aim mercs can get your hit rate way up there, and if you are say pushing str over dex early, this can compensate, but otherwise you should look at a prayer merc for normal diff. Upgrade it to a barb in a5. When you hit nm, you have access to a thorns merc (worthless, even with your valk), and a holy freeze or a might merc. Holy freeze is a nice aura, but again if you use valks and decoys, you do not need defensive relief. That leaves the might merc- might mercs have might go up ad nauseum, which really boosts your damage. This matters a great deal if you are strafing and nailing stuff at range before it closes. So by elimination, they are the most useful for your cause.
I hired a lvl 31 might merc in nightmare, and tracked my damage as a function of merc level over a range of levels where I remained constant in gear and level. I was able to calculate my damage to within 1 point or so of the listed damage, and from that I was able to back out the following: (a) the might merc I had gained one level in might per 3 levels, and (b) he had a level 1 might at merc level 11. Since might is a level 1 pally aura, in principal the merc could have it at level 1. To get a level 1 might merc, you need to tow a level 1 bowazon into a2 nm with the help of a friend. If might really does start at lvl 1, then you could see maybe a 3-4 level increase over a normal lvl 31 nightmare hire. Also your mercs statistics are better if you hire them at a lower level. Some view towing as unethical, and there will be others who wish to build the perfect bowazon and will go through the trouble of towing into a2 nm. It is a real shame that Bliz did not code this so the hire level would not matter in terms of the skill development.
For merc gear, I am a firm believer in the biggest, slowest pike/polearm you can put on these guys. The main cause of merc death is jabbing themselves to death on LEB's (lightning enchanted bosses)- the way around this is to dramatically increase the damage per blow, which usually comes at the expense of attack rate. Also a slower attack rate means you have a few more fractions of a second to get a pot to the merc or to force it to disengage by retreating. For armor, get the heaviest ethereal piece you can get. Bring home all the blue exceptional/elite armor you find. If you are really wealthy, you could consider putting a lighting absorb item on the merc- lightning absorb will instead heal life at the percent listed. For instance, I was grouping with some people who were ignoring blue magic items, and a blue boneweave armor turned out to be ethereal and holy for 1200 def- this kind of def helps out. On the helmet slot, give your merc some big resistance and or life. You should have at least 2 columns of your belt assigned to full rejuvenation potions (you can generate these with the 1 gem + 3 heals + 3 manas cube recipe, just bring up all the mana pots you find until you have a sufficient supply) and you should practice hitting shift + column number so you feed that merc a pot. In combat feed it purples. Post combat, feed it reds.
Also there are some easter eggs involved with merc gear. For instance one player discovered that with +3 skill adders, his Rogue started casting lighting bolts instead of using arrows, and those bolts were very highly damaging. The arreat summit hints that one merc from a2 has a chance at gaining fanaticism at higher levels- perhaps something like using skill adders will trigger this unknown ability?
VII. Tricks to Employ in Your Life as a Bowazon
1. The merc scrape off
If you face an exploding minion, be it the kind in a5, or say a doll boss, it is usually best to just run around and let the thing blow up on the minion. I have tried to nail these things with FA on the fly out of explosion range, but often the arrow will hit and the creature will keep closing *even though it is dead*. My guess is desynch has given me false security about the suicide minions location, and I only discover this discrepency when it kills me. Merc scrape off is great for this reason. Usually your merc has a long weapon and it can reach out and poke the offending chasing monster.
2. Decoys in front of Baal in the throne room
Stand off to the side in the columns and cast a decoy in front of Baal in the throne room. Then when he summons minions, they go for the decoy. This decoy lasts long enough for your big dumb valk to wander on in and take the punishment, and you can stay off to the side, out of decrepify range and dish out the damage.
3. Decoys in the packs of ranged attackers
If you face something like abyss knights who stand off something like 3 screens and toss lethal magic, decoy advance. You toss out a decoy, run at the decoy, recast the decoy, and advance rapidly. Knight's fire at the decoy and you can close. Then when you are close enough, dump your valk on top of the knights and fire away. You can do this to defuse a large group of skeletons too.
4. Sniping and Guided Scouting
You can move by the left click and hold, moving your held click to where you want to go. Periodically tap the shift key, and your left action executes- in this case guided- which heads off in the direction you are moving seeking out a target. If you see a red or blue leech swirl, then you know you have a target in range. This is guided sniping. Once you have a swirl, hold down your shift and spam out guideds until it is dead. This is sniping. In this manner you can kill stuff long before it sees you (IE employing the dirty trick abyss knights use on you). Many think multishot is better for sniping than guided- from a mana standpoint this only really works well if the space you are adventuring through has large open obstruction free zones with large groups of monsters. In situations where there are smaller groups and or turnings and obstructions, guided sniping will prove more effective.
5. Diablo trapping
On the corner of the exterior wall between the DeSeis leg and the Infitus leg of the chaos sanctuary is a protrusion of many walls and barriers. You trap Diablo when you are on the Infitus side and he is on the DeSeis side- he tries to come right at you and gets hung up in the corner. When this occurs, you can fire a guided roughly off the corner and have it turn and hit Diablo. You are completely protected from Diablo's flames in this position too. If you stray too far around the corner, Diablo will come off. All you need to do then is move back and Diablo will go back. To make the trap work, you want to draw Diablo up towards the DeSeis leg, then you run tightly around the corner to position. Note Diablo is much tougher now- and seems to block many more missile hits.
6. Doing Baal
I like to hit the Worldstone chamber running with guided on my left and decoy on my right. I stop short of the bridge and cast a decoy onto the bridge with that pillar between Baal and me. Baal starts up his bag of elemental tricks, but the pillar shields you. He also is distracted briefly by the decoy. You fire around the pillar with guided. If Baal teleports, run and gun guideds in the pillars.
7. Parking
I usually reserve this as a last resort trick for those times when you get the physical immune, cold immune multishot lightning enchanted boss. The only real way to deal with this kind of threat is to use poison over time, but that ties up your tab 2 gear slot with a poison bow. To park, you run into an area you have explored and can easily avoid, and cast a portal. Then you return to the problem monster, lure it in a chase to your portal and exit through the portal. Return via the waypoint and recast your portal. It is now parked- you can either return and deal with it with proper gear, or ignore it entirely. I often use a parking strategy in Durance 3 to deal with out of control stairs traps- you run into the main chamber and again into the side chamber and cast in the far corner- all the stairs trap stuff follows and is parked. You return by Durance 2 and have your breathing room needed to handle the mess one creature at a time.
8. Working the edge on catapult maps
Catapults fire on things in front of them. If you clear the map in reverse, you eliminate most of the catapult fire since you take them out at range from behind them. A negative resistance bowazon is in real danger from catapults, particularly the poison one and the fire one. So what I do is pick a map edge, decoy scout up the side and try to get all the way to the end as fast as possible. You can just do a balls out run for it, but that leaves you with an unpleasant crowd and boss or two to dispatch at the end. The key is to just cast the decoy forward and in from the edge, and you walk behind the decoy and along the edge. Guided helps a great deal on these maps too.
9. Decoy scouting
As mentioned previously, you cast a decoy into unexplored territory. If there is something within activation range of the decoy, it goes and chews on the decoy. If there is nothing, you advance to a point just behind the decoy and repeat the process. This works really well with a high life zon (100vit) as the decoy just lasts long enough for your stupid valkryrie to notice and reach the point of engagement. Points invested in decoy will drive its cost down to make this easier, but you can make do with a low point investment as long as you enhance your mana pool with items such as a Bahamut ring.
10. Run and Gun
There are times when you face things that just wont fall for the decoy/valk combo. An instance of this is the ancients on the Arreat summit. One whirls through your minions at you, the other just spends its time leap attacking you ad nauseum, and the third runs around chucking axes at you. This area, btw, is perhaps the most annoying map of all for a zon. The most effective strat I have found is to spend 95% of your time running and staying ahead. Always go in a big circle and not a straight line, so those leaps miss and the hatchets miss. However if you have guided on your left every now and then you can hit the shift key from your left click and hold run and fire off a guided which works its magic on those that follow. This tactic requires you have decent stamina (another reason for the 100 vit build), but is often your safest technique.
11. River trapping
The goal here is to find a land cropping out into the river and trap the monster that you don't want on you on that bit of land across from you on the river- As you clear the river map, keep an eye out for these ideal bits of land- what you want is a close separation between that land and the other side of the shore. Then when you get say Hephasto, run at that piece of land and cast valk/decoy there, and run around to the other bank of the river. Hopefully Hephasto picks up the decoy and you have enough time to get around. Once he is on one side and you are on the other, his path finding cant find a way to reach you, and he will wander about on the far bank. Cast guideds on him until he drops, and if he wanders out of range, cast another decoy on the other side of the bank to draw him back. If you have a teleport item, you can do this even easier.
12. Slow missiles scouting
Here you are running some place with doors. You cast slow missiles prior to opening the door. If the room on the other side lights up, you know you have monsters. In fact you can tell if they are crowding the door in ambush by where the light is. Open the door and send in guideds or a decoy and fire support into the room. FA is nice for this since the blast radius will take out stuff you cant see. You can also use slow missiles to see if there are river watchers in the water- if there are, you will see a little glow animation on the water surface.
13. Mephisto sniping
After you have cleared out the southern half of Durance 3, go fetch Mephisto by running into his room and tossing a few guideds his way. Back off and throw up a valk on the bank and end run through the side chamber into the main front room. You want to head far south then inch your way north until you can just make out Mephisto on the other side of the bank. Hold down shift and fire off guideds until it dies. If you get too close, he sees you and returns with magic fire. Your merc has a tendency to wander on up and get killed..
14. The Council
The council can usually be taken out with guideds. You can either just position yourself in front of the council chamber such that you can hit them but they can not hit you, or you can retreat to one of the buildings off to the north and south of the council chamber. If they start up guardians, run around behind the council chamber until they quit firing. It is really easy to park the council in Travincal, since you have a waypoint right there.
15. Multishot LEB's
After your minions are dead, toss up a decoy. It wont swing and generate sparks. Approach and cast slow missiles. This will cut the range of the multishot emission greatly. Now stand off out of range and alternate between decoy and guided. Strive to trap the monster on some kind of obstruction and fire around corners from behind protected walls.
VIII. Specific Comments on D2 Bowazon builds
1. Frost Maiden
You are probably in pretty good shape, although you will now want to max out FA. Also the new high damage piercing bows mean you can achieve 100% pierce, and no longer need to employ the ice arrow probing attacks for the piercing direction. Also pierce seems different now, where you can get different piercing results from the same location and direction of fire. Like most zons you will want to look into guided and another element for cold/physical immunes.
2. Mageazon
Well blizzard turned you into a mule. Stacked immo burning for 20+ seconds is gone. Also the timer on it negates the need for a huge mana pool, and the beef of valk life probably means you don't need a lvl 20 valk anymore. A low dex build is still possible with a mana pump, you will just need to (a) probably compensate for low pierce with the piercing skill, (b) focus solely upon always hit missiles like immo, freezing arrow, and guided, and (c) look carefully into enhancing item based elemental damage to make your guided arrow mean something. I would actually consider going hard after skill adders in the bow/crossbow tree to pump immo, FA well beyond the 20 level, and really seek out elemental damage type bows. This should take damage up to the outstanding range. I am slowly gearing up Arrowitch for this purpose. FA is your highest priority, and consider an extremely fast bow to deliver it.
3. Speedazon
Well the good news is you can hit high speeds easier, but the bad news is there is a speed limit of 75%. The new system shows (see more detailed comments in the other changes section) that it is more important having an intrinsically fast weapon than IAS. Guided is a great skill to consider, and so too is strafe/multi. You will need to come up with some kind of strategy for dealing with phys immunes, be it skill based elemental damage or be it item based elemental damage.
IX. How Nauseating Can the Uberbuild Get?
Well here are a few numbers for my less than perfect 75th level bowazon, StunLok, who is a matriarch (killed Baal, SC, hell diff) and has negative resistance and 168% find. She wasted 3 points in multi, 6 in strafe, and perhaps a few more in pierce and penetrate- but c'est la vie. With her 75th level might merc, her level 1 guided arrow lists at around 600-2200 damage. I am using the Buriza.
Buriza-Do Kyanon
Two-Hand Damage: (85-102) To (142.5-415.5) (113.75-258.75 Avg)
Required Level: 41
Required Strength: 110
Required Dexterity: 80
Base Weapon Speed: [10]
+150-200% Enhanced Damage(varies)
+ (2.5 Per Character Level) 2.5-247.5 To Maximum Damage (Based On Character Level)
Adds 32-196 Cold Damage - 4 Second Duration
Piercing Attack (100)
Freezes Target +3
+75-150 Defense(varies)
+35 to Dexterity
80% Increased Attack Speed
(Only Spawns In Patch 1.09 or later)
The Buriza dropped for me in I think the Great marsh, NM, and I have some friends who got it on a Duriel Drop, NM, so hunt for it late a2/early a3 nightmare. So this thing pierces 100% (and usually hits at least 2x), has a net attack speed of 70% IAS on the weapon (need only 5% more to hit limit), does huge cold damage and freezes lower level creatures. I have a 54% chance to critical hit, and socketed the Buriza with a Pul rune for 75% extra damage on demons. With such a bow I can drop Baal in Hell with about 5-10 guideds. That's it. The damage is so high that unless it is phys res, I can leech back the mana cost on a lvl 20 FA with the FA itself. I have 260 dex, 110 str, and 110 vit.
To this guided we add her FA, which combined with the Buriza blasts for 310-320 + 32-196 = 342-516 cold damage in a 3.3yd radius. My estimated attack speed is 10 frames, or about 2.5 arrows per second. With pierce and overlapping explosions in tight groups, she can reduce a crowd to melted ice quickly. Her freeze duration is only 6/4 = 1.5s in hell, and I at one time had an inventory stuffed with cold charms (+1s duration each), but have since abandoned them as 1.5s is more than sufficient for my needs since I can essentially hold down fire as I leech back all the mana cost on it with the FA itself. Creatures that shrug off the duration usually are better dispatched with guided anyway.
To this I add my now lvl 17 immo. I can achieve a 3 stack burning for roughly 300/s and I can zing off 1 per second worth of ~ 300 explosion damage, so I net around 600 fire damage per second- this is less than the FA because of the timer, but it still can help out in situations where I face phys/cold immunes.
On my tab 2 I have the following
Skystrike
Two-Hand Damage: (17.5-21) To (50-60) (33.75-40.5 Avg)
Required Level: 28
Required Strength: 25
Required Dexterity: 43
Base Weapon Speed: [5]
+150-200% Enhanced Damage(varies)
Adds 1-250 Lightning Damage
2% Chance To Cast Level 6 Meteor On Striking
30% Increased Attack Rate
+100 To Attack Rating
+1 To Amazon Skill Levels
+10 to Energy
(Only Spawns In Patch 1.09 or later)
The main point of this bow for now is its elemental damage delivered at a fast rate of fire. I can do better than this. There have been times when this bow has been able to make progress while all my other attacks have failed. What I would really like would be a high damage electrical bow with speed and piercing, but such a beast does not exist.
Anyway, you can and probably will do better than StunLok if you really go hard after good gear. This merely shows you what is reasonably achievable.
X. Credits
Again credit to The Amazon Basin
and posters therein (Corwin the Brute, Wutangyang, Muffler, Ldread, Sheepdog, Bolshoi, Msler, Snowdog, Flick, Bowazon Spender, Jondefool, Sheepdog) for refining this guide. These people have had a substancial impact on the revision of this guide, particularly LDread and his fire arrow report and Wutangyang's idea of using LF instead of immo as the third attack. Thanks as well as the numerous well written D2 guides referenced previously. Namely those by
AK404 and LineNoise who tend to have nice comprehensive general guides,
ChunLi who has done a good job with PK, Double_Trouble who really does a nice job with attack speed issues,
Icemage who has a nice general guide,
and Saddguy who wrote a brilliant compendium of tactics well worth reading. Also JondeFool who wrote the original mageazon variant which inspired my manual.
Home | Diablo II | Star Wars: Galaxies | World of Warcraft | Guild Wars | Hellgate:London | Warhammer