Skills

Kung Yi-tsu was famous for his strength. King Hsuän of Chou went to call on him with full ceremony, but when he got there, he found that Kung was a weakling. The king asked, "How strong are you?" Kung replied, "I can break the waist of a strong insect, I can bear the wing of an autumn cicada." The king flushed and said, "I'm strong enough to tear apart rhinoceros hide and drag nine oxen by the tail — yet I still lament my weakness. How can it be that you are so famous for strength?" Kung replied, "My fame is not for having such strength, it is for being able to use such strength."

— Zen Story

Beyond the prerequisites and staple survival skills, the bowazon has few catch-all skills. Each skill is just as effective as the next, provided that the right course of action is used. It will take some time to find out which skills are more desirable to your personal style than others; part of the purpose of this guide is to help your decision-making process so that you don't waste skill points on skills that are either wasteful or counterintuitive to your playing style. None of us like to screw our characters up, but through screwing up we learn our mistakes and become better players: a good player devotes little time to analyzing their successes when studying their failures is so much more rewarding. Skilled players would rather find out how other skills interconnect than waste it on one or two skills. (An obvious connection between the skill trees is in seeing how the bow/crossbow skills interact with the passive/magic skills. By confining oneself to the magic arrow subtree, a player misses out on experiencing the power of Valkyrie and Pierce.) Knowing how to play the game, then appreciating the design of the game is something that must be learned.

I advise better-developed passive skills with lower active skills, resulting in more effective active skills for less skill point investment and a more well-rounded out bowazon. This conclusion was reached after an examination of the amazon's skill trees. Save the paladin, every class's skill tree follows a distinct pattern: primary offensive (the tree with the most attack skills, or failing that, the most damaging skills), auxiliary offensive (the tree with the second-most attack skills) and support (non-active skills that rarely cause damage by themselves, like auras, curses, certain lightning skills, passive skills and so on). The amazon is the only character with two primary offensive trees (both trees have ten damaging attack skills each, both being equally powerful — when they work correctly) and the best defensive skills in the game. (While the same argument can be made for the druid — two primary offensive trees and some of the best auxiliary skills in the game, his elemental attacks are so weak that they get pushed back to support.) A quick look at the skill trees of all classes will show that the second benefit the amazon has is her skills — not only their uses, but also the structure of her trees. Compared to casters, the amazon (and barbarian and assassin, which are beyond the discussion of this guide) benefits most from the ability to simultaneously use abilities from fundamentally different trees. In fact, she benefits from just having fundamentally different trees: in addition to supporting each other, her skills have many uses in themselves. The amazon, due to the construction of her skill trees, can only use two trees simultaneously, as javelin/spear and bow/crossbow are mutually exclusive, even with the weapon switch. It is this forced specialization that makes the amazon so effective at ranged combat (just as this same exclusivity principle that makes the druid such an effective melee fighter).

Passive skills take precedence for me because the offensive ability of the bowazon is not something I'm really concerned about: very few of her skills need more than one point because they are based, in part, on her already-high physical damage (The only one that really needs to be maxed is Immolation Arrow.), and this makes a big difference, especially when compared to the max-it-or-forget-it philosophy of the sorceress. The amazon is already able to dish out three types of AoE damage — the two requirements for offense in D2 are AoE damage and multiple element damage — at minimal skill point costs, meaning that she has the best offensive skill trees in the game. Because her offense is naturally strong, it only makes sense to work on her support skills (or if you want to make a hybrid, her javelin/spear skills).

Choosing skills is a matter of personal preference, but the general rule of LOD is that all skills are based on the principle that the "higher" counterpart is more effective than the last. However, this does not apply to the amazon because every [bow/crossbow and passive/magic] skill is geared towards different goals, making only four to five out of twenty skills (Magic Arrow, Cold Arrow, Inner Sight, Evade) debatably useless due to bugs or obsolescence. The most important decisions concerning skill choices are balancing the bowazon's two primary skill trees; almost all of her skills are strong, but every point spent in one skill is a point that could have been used somewhere else.

The amazon's superiority is based on the inherent imbalances of the structure and uses of the skill trees: along with the barbarian, necromancer and assassin, she has the most well-designed skill trees in the game. Blizzard's obsessiveness in having each character's 30 skills divided to 10 in each tree and its poor design decisions such as giving the paladin two aura trees applied a virtual nerf to the classes before the game came out.

That's a judgment call I'm makin', but it just happens to be true, which gives it that extra oomph.

For more information on skills, please refer to the Arreat Summit and the irreplaceable Chippydip's Diablo II: Lord of Destruction Skill Information. Many thanks to Bolshoi Too's Javazon Compendium for more information on passive skills.