a guide to bowazons: introduction

This guide is written for Diablo II, v1.11. In previous editions, this bowazon guide was written with the assumption that the reader already knew what it was bowazons did, and simply used the guide as way of refining what should have been (fundamentally) a very simple way of playing the game. After all, it's been almost eight years, so everyone must have played a bowzon by now, right? This was an extremely bad assumption to make because not everyone has played bowazons before, but if you found this guide, it's safe to presume that you want to know more about bowazons and have many questions about them.

The first question on the mind of many would-be bowazon players would probably be, "Does the bowazon dominate in any one area?" The answer, sadly, is "no." If you were expecting huge amounts of ranged damage and systematic domination of large areas, go somewhere else, you aren't going to find it here; the bowazon's dominance in those areas ended the day v1.10 came out. Comparatively speaking, bowazons don't do that much damage anymore. You want massive cold damage? Get a sorc or druid. You want massive fire damage? Get a sorc. You want killer minions? Choose between a druid and necromancer. You want massive physical damage? Get anybody else, but you aren't going to get it out of the bowazon.

First of all, they're fun. What's really cool playing most of the game with a ranged weapon is never having to worry about breakage, never having to worry about things like defense rating, faster hit recovery, mana regeneration, faster cast rating, or skill bonuses, concentrating on the simple joy of shooting things knowing you're going to hit at least 5-10 targets at once, and knowing that someone else is going to take all the punishment that no other character can survive (and because that someone else is a minion, they're never going to complain and they're always going to be where you want them).

Second of all, despite her lack of v1.10 improvements and bugged attacks, the bowazon remains a tactical presence on the battlefield. The bowazon's not a massive damage dealer, but she can pelt many things at once with her many multiple-target attacks, and if she's fast enough with Strafe, she can pelt many things without pause for a very long time. In addition, she can use and abuse Freezing Arrow, one of the best stopping skills in the game. Unlike the sorceress, a bowazon with enough mana and life leech can keep going with her physical and elemental damage so long as she has ammo in her inventory. She's the only physical damage dealer who considers the dreaded Iron Maiden curse a total joke. Her advantage is range: she might not own the battlefield, but she sure as hell can control it.

The bowazon's role in a group is support and cover fire; she eliminates weaker enemies (like fallen, skeletons, flayers, flesh beasts, blood maggot young, and so forth) en masse and ranged attackers (like spear cats, archers, oblivion knights) while softening up tougher targets for melee fighters whose role it's to take out targets with higher priority (like fallen shaman, horadric mummies, flayer shaman, flesh spawners, blood maggots, uniques, champions, bosses) and other melee fighters (crushers, urdar, doom knights). Finally, the bowazon has the tightest defensive perimeter of any physical damage dealer in the game, bar none, using her valkyrie, mercenary, decoy, and freezing arrows.

And lastly, it's a challenge, but an enjoyable one. Instead of depending on overwhelming damage or defense, you're depending on your understanding of spacing within the game, your attentiveness to attacks, and a mind you should hope is quick enough to assess threats before they become problems. As mentioned in previous introductions, every character does something better than the bowazon: more damage, more minions, better elements, whatever. The bowazon's one specialty doesn't make itself apparent on the character screen: she's a ranged attacker with a buttload of defenses. A character with ranged attacks is at a distinct advantage because she can hit her targets from far away while being immune to counterattack: she can attack everything within range (re: everything she sees) very quickly with the least-resisted form of damage in the game, and this one thing makes up for everything else.

Sound like fun? Trust me, it's. I wouldn't have tweaked this guide over the course of four years if I didn't think bowazons were the best subclass in the game.

This guide will attempt to cover all aspects of playing bowazons, but will mostly focus on style and strategy from the beginning all the way into Hell. I am not going to offer a detailed walkthrough for the game: Diablo II isn't rocket science. There are very few situations where you should genuinely be at a loss, but if a specific problem or monster is worth talking about, I'll focus on that but for the most part, you're on your own. Though they're in the guide, I'll admit that screwing around with equations and formulas about how damage, speed and the like are made isn't my thing: I am more concerned about improving my game and if a little math can help you out with that, then so much the better, but all the math in the world won't help if you can't play. The difference between a bad bowazon player and a good bowazon player really has nothing to do with equipment, stats or skill point allocation, but knowing how to play the game, how to exploit the unique advantage of being a ranged attacker (and having the right tools to exploit), how to deal with the unexpected and how to keep a party alive. I am going to try to stay as non-biased as possible, presenting as many builds as I possibly can, but this guide is primarily for softcore standard bowazons in multiplayer.

I've made every effort to keep the guide free of critical errors, outdated information and typographical errors, but they'll inevitably sneak in. If you, the reader, notice any mistakes, write to me at my e-mail address <ak404@hotmail.com>, I can turn immediately to the file in question and make a correction or clarification. I invite you to do so.

Introduction