Bow/Crossbow Skills

A bowazon can't survive without passive/magic skills, but she will be using the bow/crossbow skills more than anything else. There are three distinct subsections in the bow/crossbow skills: magic/physical, fire, and cold. The trees are separate, making the bowazon an extremely versatile character for the least amount of skill point usage. What is important to note is that the amazon already has three types of AoE damage on a single tree: to be truly successful in Diablo II, a character needs at least two types of AoE attack. If the amazon decides upon the hybrid route, employing spears and javelins, she can have up to five types of AoE attacks. However, the more and more you play with bowazons, the more you'll probably find yourself specializing in two kinds of damage, and if you can afford it, dabbling in a third. The reason for this is something introduced in v1.10 called synergies. According to the Arreat Summit:

— Arreat Summit

Every class gained massive synergy bonuses to things like damage, so skills that used to be weak (like the druid's Fire Claws) would synergize with other underpowered skills (like Firestorm) for noticeable bonuses (for example, every level of Firestorm gave +22% fire damage to Fire Claws, among other things) and turn into massive damage dealers (as slvl-20 Firestorm would grant a +440% fire damage bonus to Fire Claws).

Every class, that is, except the bowazon.

She gained synergies to her elemental attacks (everybody did), but unlike other classes, she didn't gain any bonuses whatsoever to any of her physical attacks. In addition, her bow/crossbow synergies weren't very good when compared to similar attacks from other classes. It was safe to assume that her passive/magic skills were supposed to make up for this, and they would have, if it wasn't for one little thing. The bowazon's best physical attacks were bugged (and they still are).

• Guided Arrow, which was bugged too well in v1.09 with piercing and an exceptionally good search AI had its wings clipped when Blizzard decided that Guided Arrows could only hit targets that were within the amazon's line-of-sight so she couldn't do things like fire around corners, thus completely missing the point of a guided attack and buggering it up in the other direction.
• No matter how many points you drop into it, you'll never be able to coax more than 24 missiles out of Multiple Shot.
• Back in v1.09, Strafe's missiles were stacked in the same category as Multiple Shot's missiles, which meant that Strafe (like Multiple Shot) was bogged down with a 25% penalty to all damage — Blizzard never fixed that either.
• None of the Attack Rating bonuses from any of the skills in the Bow/Crossbow Skill tree work.

Don't even get me started on Immolation Arrow.

Considering that every other warrior class has a significant damage bonus to their physical attacks (like somewhere in the area of oh, +50~400% enhanced damage), the crippling of the bowazon's physical attacks put a significant dent to her standing as a serious contender of physical damage dealer. No damage bonuses meant she'd have to get her buffs from elsewhere, and if you need to get them "from elsewhere," then you'd better be damned sure everyone else had access to those buffs. Sure, she could make up for it with a Might aura packing hireling and CTC Amp Damage equipment, but so could everyone else. She could join a party, but if everyone was able to kill faster than she could, her usefulness to the team was limited. Does this mean the bowazon now sucks? Well, she's still one of the safest and most versatile characters in the game, it's just that the bulk of her damage is now elemental rather than physical. It's a radical change when one considers that other physical damage dealers have remained relatively unchanged for the past seven years, but it really doesn't affect the way the bowazon is played, it just changes the way she deals damage.

This section is divided into three parts:

Magic Arrow Skills

Magic arrows are the meat-and-potatoes of the bowazon: they may be applied to nearly any situation and are quite easy to use. While the lack of synergies and damage bonuses have humbled these skills a bit, they still have respectable damage. Because of their low mana cost, not only are they excellent primary and secondary attack skills, but in conjunction with leech, also serve to supply the bowazon with mana so that she may use her stronger but costlier elemental attacks. Because the beauty of magic arrow skills is that their effectiveness scales with equipment and stats, most bowazon builds revolve around magic arrow skills, but with the way immunities and resistances work nowadays, you'd be daft to depend on magic arrow skills alone.

Aside from Guided Arrow, magic arrow skills are treated as normal attacks — they are dependent on the bowazon's AR and can miss. Magic arrow skills have no synergies attached to them; this is important, because if you're going to specialize in any one of these skills, you'd better choose it in advance.

• Magic Arrow
• Multiple Shot
• Guided Arrow
• Strafe

Fire Arrow Skills

Personally, I am not a big fan of the amazon's fire skills: they just aren't her strong point. In single-player, the bowazon's fire skills are great, but her elemental specialty is cold damage. Even with synergies, fire skills just don't cause enough damage to justify their use over the other branches of the bow/crossbow tree, and the utility and cost-benefit ratio of cold arrows far outweighs anything the fire skills could possibly offer. According to Chippydip's Diablo II: Lord of Destruction Skill Information, a fully-synergized slvl-32 Immolation Arrow does 2,244-2,274 fire explosion damage, which is impressive (unless you consider the timer), but only 379-384 fire damage/second. For the price of 60 points, you'd expect something better. If the bowazon's fire skills could compete with her cold skills, I'd argue differently because they're fun to use, but this kind of damage handicap can't be ignored.

• Fire Arrow
• Exploding Arrow
• Immolation Arrow

Cold Arrow Skills

Cold arrows will either chill or freeze its target (so long as they aren't immune to cold or using equipment that negates chill/freeze), allowing a bowazon to slow the pace of combat or stop it altogether. When killed, chilled/frozen monsters have a chance of shattering, leaving no corpse: this is indispensable in NM and Hell.

Cold damage is important to the bowazon in particular because she is the only classic character who can take advantage of LOD's interchangeable and cumulative chill-freeze times: all cold damage items come with a chill duration of 1~10 seconds, and with enough cold damage items, it's possible to come up with a total chill duration of, say, 20-22 seconds. This chill duration is nice for physical attacks like Strafe, but its true power is revealed when it's stacked with Freezing Arrows's 2 second or Ice Arrow's 2-5.8 freeze duration, resulting in 22-24 seconds of freeze with Freezing Arrow or 22-27.8 seconds with Ice Arrow. This particular game mechanic works with all of the bowazon's cold arrow skills: you simply add up your total chill time and put that on top of your freeze time. It also makes the bowazon the undisputed queen of freezing cold damage: if she wants to increase the freeze duration on freezing arrow, she doesn't need to add skill points, just cold damage equipment.

• Cold Arrow
• Ice Arrow
• Freezing Arrow

For more information on the amazon's bow/crossbow skills, please refer to the amazon's bow/crossbow skills section of the Arreat Summit, D2.de Skill-Calc (English), and Chippydip's Diablo II: Lord of Destruction Skill Information.