Currently very low 30s, still have normal Respec available, currently have magic arrow to zero Mana, multiple shot to 5 arrows. It gains 12% more damage per level; either skill at level 20 will multiply the power of Blessed Hammer by 2.4. Her dexterity provides a nice boost, gaining her back about 14 percentage points. Made a demo of the budget bowazon setup, to display its efficiency. 4) Mercenaries can give you Might aura and either Pride for Concentration aura or Reapers for Decrep -50% phys resist, all of which is massively ramping up the DPS output for the power based Bowa much more than a Frost Maiden could benefit, even with Infinity. In the earlier parts of the game, this makes it easy for casual necromancers to build up skills above their characters level. Class strength: Can easily put out tons of ranged damage, uses spells exclusively, has the best mobility skill in the game. Youre saying an awful lot but youre arent reading anything. The bowazon, like the Traps assassin and the sorceress, can sit back at quite a distance, and enjoy the safety that distance affords. Go look up the skill charts in Arreat Summit and review the small damage gains that Freezing Arrow gets. Builds: 2 Fanatidin, Smiter, Hammerdin (the former two are both melee), Build strength: High defense and damage output, can get attack speed from a skill instead of an item, can wear a shield and block at a high rate, Build weakness: Somewhat limited elemental availability in his highest-damage skills, Elemental availability: Theoretically high, as he has abundant physical and magical damage, and can add several other elements to his physical attack via Vengeance. Builds: 2 Bowazon (uses bows and the bow/crossbow skill tree) and Javazon (uses javelins and the javelin skill tree), Build strength:Long range, two benefits from dexterity, Build weakness: Low damage, no spells, too many skills to invest in, Synergies: Poor, top-level skills only gain moderate damage from one other skill, and there arent enough skill points to spare to take advantage of it. Sometimes the shapeshifter druid can feel a little monotonous for this reason, until he reaches higher levels and can diversify his skills a little bit. Why couldnt this have been the case for the bowazon build? Youre build is based around God gear. Similarly, there are spells which help to control crowds, like Psychic Hammer and Mind Blast. Admittedly didnt try it, but just play style itself doesnt seem to come close to killing speed of MS in big open areas. Usually the first thing that happens is they realize putting on a Faith Bow is yielding more damage than Ice Bo. Rabies is a cool skill, but it has a systemic handicap in that almost all poison skills (except for Poison Nova) are hurt by expanding time denominators. Kill Baal (took 37 minutes), almost dying twice. Her ability to summon a minion also protects her much like the amazons Valkyrie protects that class. People manage to beat the game naked - with a bow or ( in case of a necro for example ) totally without gear, yet there is someone who claims that you can't do it with fully equipped char? you never needed the freeze in the first place. How should necromancer skill points be invested? For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. Even though you lose 140% enhanced damage from a Fort when you opt to use a 60/160, the thing is 6fpa is almost twice as fast of a rate of fire from 7fpa. You cannot compare Bowazon mass mob damage output to some of the other classes that are notoriously overpowered for single target boss kills, like Hammerdins or Blizzard Sorcs, or Smiters. So just going room to room gunning everything down is its own reward. Ive never used Multi shot and cleared Hell. You can go to this calculator or any of the others, and see that even with full synergies and even with a lv 80 base Freezing Arrow, it only deals about 5900 cold damage. The Barbarian tends to use several skills more often. Even Frost Maidens are bad with Enigma. But, for all their dexterity stacking, amazons dont hit significantly more often than other classes. Kill ancients (took 7 minutes), running around the room chased by Madawc, while merc and Valkyrie tanked Korlic and Talic in the centre. Moreover, the druid has no powerful passive or aura as the sorceress and paladin do. Ive visualized the damage of several high-level ranged skills, adding in the main synergies for them. Can use any two of those if the player is willing to trade away some top-end damage. Usually by the time I am ready to build a Faith, Im already honing in on a pvp setup and I end up skipping the GMB Faith and just make a Diamond Faith at that point. bowazon has unfortunately the end game paradox, You need the most expensive game to be very mediocre Upon returning, the appendages would sometimes disappear, I would cast Decoy next to Baal, and then unload on him as the Valkyrie was tanking him. Build weakness: Traps can be hard to place in certain tight corridors; fire damage has an effectively shorter range than lightning damage, Elemental availability: Moderate, can deal great fire or lightning damage, Synergies: One of the games few multi-element linear synergies gives the trapsassin build some very high damage. Accordingly, the druid can mix and match elements quite easily, thus avoiding the trap of elemental resistance on the hardest difficulty. Diablo 2 is so fast-paced that poison damage, which takes place over several seconds, doesnt always kill fast enough. The most important design dynamic for the summoner is that the strength of skeletons and golems is dependent only on the necromancers skill levels, whereas the strength of enemies raised by the Revive skill depends also on the strength of the enemy raised. But it would still never be as good of a crowd killer as a pure power based Multiple Shot Bowa that can mow down mobs 2 screens off in a massively wide cone. No Bowa guide would be complete without listing these two historical setups. To summarize the essence of the barbarian, I want to point to a set of his most important passive skills: Masteries. Do it, enjoy it. All your damage is coming from physical on your Frost Maiden and all components that can buff physical damage like your mercs Might or Conc aura or Decrep from Reaper, is so much more effective & practical to use in Hell Diff. Otherwise, thanks a ton. If the primary tactical dilemma of melee fighters in Diablo 2 is the choice between gear that emphasizes attack or survivability, the barbarian solves that dilemma by allowing the player to complement his choice of gear with abilities that eliminate the drawback. The problem is that Blessed Hammer enjoys one of the only multiplicative synergies in the game. No, Frost Maiden is ineffective. The real drawback for the javazon is that she deals almost all of her damage as lightning, and therefore simply cannot kill enemies who are lightning immune without having rare, resistance-removing gear, or companions who can do that for her. JavaScript is disabled. The bowazons other advantage is her ability to gain two benefits from dexterity. None of them can match what concentration does for Blessed Hammer, though. Long story short, Im done. Now in D2r, they can hit 6fpa at either 150% ias or 155% ias Cant remember which it was but this is actually obtainable on gear through the use of 45/120, 60/160, Cats or Highlords, Nosferatu, 20% gloves. Necromancer itemization is a little unusual as well. So although the barbarian doesnt break the game, he can make a dent in the designers time table. As for an armor suggestion I would keep a Treachery in inventory to proc the Fade skill chance and wear Peace (Until your Valkyrie Skill hits level 15 or higher, then swap it out.) I agree that, if you were trying to build the perfect killing machine, you should have the maximum possible attack speed all the time. Overview: A more technically advanced caster, the poison/bone necromancer is nevertheless a powerful class when played by an experienced player. Freeze them in place a Strafe them down. The reverse is also true. Which Im sure Ill get around to when the time comes after proper testing. Not sure what guide youre reading that says add 17 points to Valk, but there is absolutely no reason to do that. Oh yeah I missed out on the witchwild string as well. Ive cleared all of Hell without it as a Bowazon. Buriza is actually a lot of damage my dude. After all, the summoner build is still viable, even if players face an uneven challenge when playing it. Not looking through the gear lists and picking each piece of God gear. As for pvp it seems you can be mean and use Cleglavs gloves at 6FPA (have to keep armor, but get to choose belt and Amy). I own most of the endgame gear and the amazon is still mega slow in clear speed. First 10 minutes were spent in shock, after Festering Appendages stunlocked me, making me drink all of my Rejuvenation Potions. Futhermore, if you wanted to look into strange Matriarchal Faith setups which can obtain 7fpa at 45% ias, they can now obtain 6fpa at I believe it was 105% the testers said. The Valkyrie and the Decoy actually, get the same bonuses for dodge/avoid/evade that you get from the base points added. Consumes more skill points than the poison/bone build, reducing the necromancers utility. Either way, these new breakpoints if not patched, will rewrite the end-game for this guide. The only thing where I could be wrong here, is if Immolation Arrow now in D2r, is also strangely bugged like Firewall in Cooleys build. Its bonuses to damage and attack rating also scale well and can make even simple builds with low-level gear into effective killing machines. This is a guide for Bowazon, not Frostmaiden. Frostmaiden (amazon) guide for Diablo 2 single player hardcore, 1.14. That said, weve already seen in the bowazon analysis that assassins get great attack bonuses from Claw Mastery, in addition to gaining damage and critical strike. yeah they have been nerfed to hell and back!! The gear I suggest during the actual walkthrough is to trade to get a cheap Skystrike from lv 28 to lv 41, and then trade to get a cheap Buriza to carry you through rest of Hell Diff walkthrough. Fire Claws, Shock Wave, and Fury operate more like the combat skills of other classes, but all of them are enhanced versions of the basic attack. Moreover, no affix or skill radically changes the way that the sorceress class is played. This is when it occurs to a player that trading to get the Frost Maiden setup was actually a waste of time & resources and that they should have just been working to accumulate power based gear to begin with, which would have saved resources & time in the end. Is the player supposed to save points in bow skills and reallocate into passive skills? The point of weapon masteries is not to proscribe weapon types, but to adapt to what the player encounters. What you didnt consider was actually reading this guide before commenting on it. [Diablo II Skill Calculator - Skill Planner - D2Anya - D2 Item Shop](https://www.d2anya.com/article-35-diablo-2-items-skill-planner) Realistically at base 20 with full synergies, youre looking more around 1100 cold damage which is completely useless in Hell Diff when 50% of the creatures or more are immune to cold or have a lot of cold res, and you dont have Infinity or even Cold Mastery. The problem is that its poison damage, which is generally difficult to use in Diablo 2. But for the most part, other builds avoided these kinds of systemic pitfalls. This build also has relatively fine control over its balance of tankiness or deadliness, Build weakness: Although this build has a variety of passive abilities and attacks, druids who change into the bear or wolf form can only use one spell, Elemental availability: High for a melee class; they can output significant physical and fire damage, and have a passable poison option, Synergies: Two moderate synergies, discussed below. Her finishing moves have practical effects, and the Shadow Discipline skills give her tons of utility on the battlefield, although it can be difficult to switch to those skills in the heat of battle. The amazon has an entire skill tree of passive and magic skills which could complement her bow skills reasonably well. Fury, for example, is a more powerful version of the paladin's Zeal skill, with the various passive and pseudo-passive skills standing in for Fanaticism. Most players arent going to use those prerequisites in high-level play, because theyre too weak. As we saw in the amazon section, the paladin's bonuses to hit rating and damage are comparable to any class's best passive skills. Technically, there are sub-builds of these three elements, but the mechanical differences and strategy are not different between those builds in the same way that the hammerdin is different from the fanatidin. Most players also like to invest in utility skills like Pierce or Guided Arrow. One would expect, based on the setup of his physical skills, that the paladin's magical options would be divided between single-target and multi-target spells, but it isn't so. Indeed, Fanaticism is one of the few skills in the game that gives significant attack speed bonuses without compromising defense (as Frenzy incidentally does), or locking out other skills (as shapeshifting skills do). you can beat this game half naked, doesnt mean it is satisfying. Thus, he has several options for getting closer to enemies. Although character construction is all about tactical choices, the split in weapon mastery skills seems unnecessarily punitive. Also consider where and how you will be farming with bowa - CS, Pits, Cows and you will want to clear it, not go for bosses/packs only - neither of this benefits from teleport greatly. But in D2r people were seriously overpricing Mav Diadem in first week or two, and I found it much cheaper to just get a hold of any 3os helm and a few budget IAS jewels. I don't know if I've been pretty lucky with gear but I found a Lycander's Aim (NM Pindle), Shako (Hell Duriel), and all runes up to Mal so far (Hellforge dropped Pul Rune so I could upgrade Lycander's). Summoner mechanics are also unique, although there is much of difference between the use of skeletons, golems and revived monsters. Its not hard. Hello I thinking about maxing magic arrow (pierce,magic damage) instead of guided arrow (no pierce, full physical) is it viable ?
And switching between jav and bow is endless fun! It doesn't ruin the game; other classes can choose versatility over concentrated power as well. webmaster@thegamedesignforum.com, All material copyright by The Game Design Forum 2017. Thus, the javazon doesnt have to worry about attack rating as much, nor the extremely widespread resistance to physical damage. frost maiden / phys hybrid setup will net you a lot better results and give you the flexibility to kill everything in the game. Berserk, on the other end of the spectrum, provides a lot more magical damage, but it sets the barbarians defense rating to zero while active. The point of the game is to become an unstoppable killing machine, so this balance dynamic seems a little out of place. Eaglehorn or buri it really does negative dmg basically. Ive cleared all of Hell without it as a Bowazon. Its unusual in that it occupies the shield slot, meaning that the necromancer can also equip a wand which has even more +skill bonuses. I've gambled a couple decent circlets, got plain MF gear where possible. These two melee classes are viable for just that reason. The two sets of skills share some passive abilities (Skeleton Mastery and Summon Resist), but otherwise present a problem for players. The big differences in the game now is that zons now need resistance, particularly fire and lightning. ith a Bowazon, players need to accept the idea that it is a requirement to slow down and actually kill & get XP area to area before progressing. Thus, the relatively low damage of a spell like Bone Spirit can be augmented by a much faster cast rate.
In no way are Frost Maiden setups anywhere nearly as effective as a standard Bowa that is built correctly. Because the bowazons damage output is also tied to dexterity, she can spend most of her points on it. I strongly suggest you get your resistances as high as you can. All of the bowazons damage skills are attacks, and are therefore subject to attack rating (except for Guided Arrow). Freeze mobs in place and toss Immolation under them. Both builds rely on a similar setup and similar gear, however, and are mechanically very easy. When you look at Arreat Summit and the reality occurs to you that Freezing Arrow at lv 20 only has a base 310-320 cold damage, and only benefits 1 synergy for damage from Ice Arrow, and how many things in hell diff have cold immunity or at least high cold res, and that Amazon does not get a Cold Mastery like Sorc, you might want to consider whats going on here with sheer DPS output potential. A druid trying to put 80 skill points into elemental spells and synergies doesn't really have room to take advantage of that. Instead of dealing tons of damage directly, the necromancer uses curses to weaken his opponents before hitting them with sources of damage. I barely spent any time doing runs just been doing full clears most of the time. The budget build listed in this guide is not slow clear speed. Harmony is a pretty decent RuneWord for a Bow (Tir + Ith + Sol + Ko), just make sure you have Ladder Runewords allowed since you're playing Single-Player. Several of the best javazon skills are spells, and therefore always hit. The paladin class is naturally durable, thanks to good bonuses from vitality and the highest natural block rate in the game. In even pvm, Diamond Faith is only about a 15% decrease in average damage per second than a Faith GMB. To be fair, because the amazon skills are attacks, they also gain weapon damage not visualized here. The Minions of Destruction have both lots of life and high damage, so my strategy was to unload Freezing Arrows on them, while trying to contain them all around my tanks. It can take a long time to kill monsters especially those that are cold immune (cause everything is physical resistant at baseline it seems in Hell) but with the Valkyrie, Decoy and Merc you're pretty much safe to just spam arrows from a distance. The Windforce is to be obtained at the end of the Hell Diff walkthrough, which is easy to trade for with your cumulative drops + w/e came from your Hell Diff forge quest. Using freezing arrow on a single mob obviously wont do much. I like it! see it trading for gul-vex, but whatever. The Eth Titans in that setup can be replaced with normal Titans. For instance, one solution to the elemental availability problem is to simply avoid lightning immunes; there are plenty of areas in which this is possible. In an orthodox tabletop RPG, they should incur a penalty; that balance is a basic tenet of good design. My main merc was an Act 2 Nightmare one, of the Defensive variety. Madawc would sometime latch unto merc or Valkyrie, letting me get a few consecutive shots from the outside into the fray. Moreover, they provide a significantly lower damage multiplier than those other skills, especially when we remember that those melee classes are using better weapons. Its a big commitment in terms of skill points, but is a viable means of delivering elemental damage. In the context of Diablo 2, the barbarian makes more sense. Most of his best attacks are physical, naturally, but he has another source of fire damage and a somewhat useful poison damage skill. 1) You have how Critical Strike interacts with raw power damage. I'm grateful to get some validation on strafe. If a barbarian has high damage, but little attack speed, his player will have an easier time acquiring a little bit of attack speed through his skills than acquiring marginally higher damage on his weapon. I have little to no gear yet, I cant wait to see this really shine when I have the full kit! This guide points out several times that Bowazon is not for single target boss kills, but rather for mass mob kills as it possesses the largest area of effect attack in the game, Multiple Shot. Unlike bowazon shots, spells never miss (as long as the animation connects with the enemy sprite). The trapsassin, however, uses spell damage. Whatever wealth & resources youve invested into a Frost Maiden, it can be converted into a full power based Bowa that is in every way stronger than a Frost Maiden setup. So the effective elemental availability is much lower than it seems, Synergies: Unremarkable, moderately powerful synergies. The latter mind-controls a group of common enemies and makes them fight their allies. Sorry guys, Im deleting this guide as it will be outdated anyway once v2.4 drops, and I dont want this thread to keep getting bumped. Yeah, Bowa is best at just big wide open areas for mass mob kills to find things that MF doesnt really effect. Pure frost is garbage Freezing arrow is better for example in cows and chaos They use the Holy Freeze aura, an excellent crowd control skill. Watch the demo link I posted. You couldnt call that a Bowazon or even a true Frostmaiden. By spending that many points in synergies, though, the druid loses utility. I find the game more fun when my main damaging skill (Freezing Arrow) is also my main crowd-control skill. (It also explains why the hammerdin is ludicrously popular to people who know about the math. The central tenet of barbarian design is that he has to use multiple active skills to survive and kill his enemies. Build strength: Lots of types of damage, finishing moves with a variety of practical effects, Build weakness: Not as rugged as paladin or barbarian, defensive skills require more micromanagement than in other melee classes, Elemental availability: Very highsignificant amounts of cold, fire, lightning, or physical damage, plus the attack rating bonuses to actually hit with them, Synergies: No big linear synergy chains, but skill synergies mixed with passive skill synergies power the kicksassin up considerably, Overview: The kicksassin is a melee fighter with a lot of different attacks to use, many of which have elemental components. Were going to cover this in a lot more depth in the section on action mechanics, but what should be clear is that the barbarian has a variety of ways to get around the battlefieldespecially when moving towards an enemy. Now youre just fabricating garbage. Mercenaries can give you Might aura and either Pride for Concentration aura or Reapers for Decrep -50% phys resist, all of which is massively ramping up the DPS output for the power based Bowa much more than a Frost Maiden could benefit, even with Infinity. Factor in the Lower Resist curse, and suddenly the build makes a lot more sense for poison damage builds. There is a difference in terminology within the community between what a Bowazon is and what a Frost Maiden is. 