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 am 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're so famous for strength?" Kung replied, "My fame isn't for having such strength, it's for being able to use such strength."
— Zen Story
Here's an interesting anecdote: while creating my first werebear druid (a class I like nearly as much as bowazons and assassins), I consulted TheDragoon's wonderful Werebear Guide for the advice that said "you'll eventually max Maul," which is exactly what I did. While I was pumping this skill at the expense of other useful skills, it eventually dawned on me that I wasn't using Maul nearly enough to justify a twenty point investment, which is when I made werebear #2 to experiment with the skills I did use then werebear #3 to combine the skills I used with the skills I wished I had with werebear #2. I started asking TD to expand on his werebear tactics, only to find that I didn't play like him at all. I didn't use the same mercs, I had different priorities, I thought about the werebear differently, but he was the authority on werebears, so I must've been doing something wrong. What the hell was wrong with me? Nothing at all; I learned differently and ended up playing the way I wanted to, and it was totally different from the way TD did it, and he was a better player than I was, but that didn't make me a bad player, just a different one.
If you remember one thing, remember this. The object of the game isn't to win, but to have fun while obeying the rules. If you find your own way, that doesn't mean you didn't learn anything. You did — you found your own way, and that's all you really need and all you should strive for. But until then, read on.
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 even detrimental to your playing style. None of us like to screw our characters up, but through our screw-ups we learn through our mistakes and become better players: a good player devotes little time to analyzing success when studying failure 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. Aside from the paladin, every class's skill tree follows a distinct pattern: primary offensive (the tree with the most attack skills, or 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 and druid are the only characters with two primary offensive trees and the best and most useful support skills in the game.
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 (as well as 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).
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 drastically different than the skill that proceeded it, making only four to seven out of twenty skills (Magic Arrow, Cold Arrow, Inner Sight, Evade) debatably useless due to bugs or obsolescence (but not synergies). 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. (They're just not very powerful, is all.)
That's a judgment call I am 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, D2.de Skill-Calc (English), and Chippydip's Diablo II: Lord of Destruction Skill Information. Many thanks to Bolshoi Too's Javazon Compendium for more information on passive skills.
last updated: Thursday, September 06, 2007
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