Bowazon Bis armours?

Nate wrote: 2 years ago

I think because everything’s magic resistance is so much lower than everything else, same way Bone Speer, holy hammer and

Berserk are so effective. The displayed damage is less than what monster really take

That the opposite, that every other monsters' resistances that can be so high. And Magic damage that doesn't get any mitigation (very few exceptions).
Therefore, the magic dealing skills deals there displayed damage while others skills deal far less (except for those physical that crushing blows, and, in a lesser measure critical/deadly strikes).

Nate wrote: 2 years ago

Man, I maxed out

Magic Arrow, it’s awesome! It’s not only great at physical immunes, but is also the highest single target damage attack in my arsenal

The reason I didn't put points into

Magic Arrow is

Magic Arrow converts damage with only a little buff, whereas with the new buffs the zon got to guided and multi (as well as

Strafe) she gets a damage bonus with GA. My GA is sitting at +436% damage. For example, my regular shot (no skill), is 1376-6055, and my

Magic Arrow is 1386-6065. Whereas my

Guided Arrow is 1737-7829.

As for the Valk, according to D2 wiki, her best gear comes in at level 27, but I had always heard the gear caps at 20? Anyone confirm anything?
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Valkyrie

Hmm, I've also just stumbled upon a possible massive failure of mine. I never respeced after I picked up my Faith and she still has 20 points into

Penetrate. Since I have Faith I only need to worry about the level aspect of the "to hit" calculation for multi shot. And since I'm level 90 I don't really need to worry about that. HOWEVER, if they do bring in

Terror zones to non ladder then the monsters would be at or above my level, bringing the level back into the equation. I shall have to wait and see before I eat my token.

Yea from what I can see points past level 27 into

Valkyrie just make her tankier, so for my respec I’m only going to do the bare min to get that with everything else. Apparently there was a program that allowed you to see her gear, but I’m on console, and I don’t mess with the programs.

Also I wasn’t going to add much into “

Penetrate”, likely just 1 and done, I feel like I get lots of attack rating from skills, Faith and my maxed out dex.

Also, would you guys recommend I put minimum points into strength the wear gear and everything else into dex? I was going that way but when I got to the

Chaos Sanctuary and worldstone keep i died enough times that I didn’t feel safe until I either maxed out my res’s and or put about 100 points into life... what do you think?

I dumped everything into vitality.
Health: 1564
Mana: 230

I used a few charm spaces for resistance charms to bring me to this in hell:
Fire: 75%
Cold: 69%
Light: 79%
Poison: 25%

I have 11% life leech, 5% mana stolen, and I keep a

Life Tap

Wand on switch for bosses. With the life leech if I start running low on health I just shoot more and my health comes back.

Nate wrote: 2 years ago

Yea from what I can see points past level 27 into

Valkyrie just make her tankier, so for my respec I’m only going to do the bare min to get that with everything else. Apparently there was a program that allowed you to see her gear, but I’m on console, and I don’t mess with the programs.

Also I wasn’t going to add much into “

Penetrate”, likely just 1 and done, I feel like I get lots of attack rating from skills, Faith and my maxed out dex.

Also, would you guys recommend I put minimum points into strength the wear gear and everything else into dex? I was going that way but when I got to the

Chaos Sanctuary and worldstone keep i died enough times that I didn’t feel safe until I either maxed out my res’s and or put about 100 points into life... what do you think?

My Valk is at level 31 with plus to skills stuff, and tankier is the point. She can tank everything in Hell level and that takes a load off of my merc. As for dex, you will reach a point where your chance to hit everything is at 95%, and that's as good as it gets, especially since your stuff will raise your attack rating. So put everything you can into dex until you reach the point where it will make no difference. The rest put into vitality. I chose

Strafe because of leech. It has the best leech of all zon skills and probably the best in the game. I regularly run the

Chaos Sanctuary, and

Baal without using a single potion.

Cool, how does that effect your damage and clear speed though? I’m primarily looking for just cows and

Chaos Sanctuary I think, so I may be ok with less res. I think if your primary attack is over 2k it’s fine for players 1, but I was hoping to keep decent clear speed up to at least players 3

But adding points into dex increases your bow damage! Or does it not? I thought it did

I’ve seen vids of people having nothing into vit and getting crazy high damage, 1 shoting everything keeps them from hitting you pretty well

I only do CS and WSK with her really, the odd time I do cows when I'm bored. I just keep running until I have a decent group herded then multi shot for 5 seconds or so then keep moving. Sometimes if I know there's a group ahead I'll just sit back and fan out off screen and watch my mana steal swirl above my head then keep going.

Add me to bnet and we can play sometime. I'll show off the Beast that is the bowazon haha

I saw you posted while I was typing this:
Yes more dex does add more damage. I've never felt the need for the dex bonus. Nothing against that, but life is always good, especially against undead who do not contribute to life steal. With my life I'm usually at half health or a bit less after a group of lightning gloams. And let's not forget about the little buggers that explode when killed!

Nate wrote: 2 years ago

Cool, how does that effect your damage and clear speed though? I’m primarily looking for just cows and

Chaos Sanctuary I think, so I may be ok with less res. I think if your primary attack is over 2k it’s fine for players 1, but I was hoping to keep decent clear speed up to at least players 3

I clear Chaos and cows in a matter of minutes. Running

Nihlathak for keys is a breeze and is over in minutes, and much quicker than my Uber smiter. When you level

Strafe, you will need to put points in multi arrow for synergy, so you will still level multi arrow to its point of diminishing returns. The problem with multi arrow is that the more points you put in to it the more mana it uses but its damage doesn't increase that much. With

Strafe your life and mana are always up because you're leeching both at a rate faster than you need.

mhlg wrote: 2 years ago

When you level

Strafe, you will need to put points in multi arrow for synergy, so you will still level multi arrow to its point of diminishing returns. The problem with multi arrow is that the more points you put in to it the more mana it uses but its damage doesn't increase that much. With

Strafe your life and mana are always up because you're leeching both at a rate faster than you need.

You'll want to max multi even though it's only hurting your multi mana cost,

Strafe gets+5% per multi point. Also

Guided Arrow gets +10% per multi, but that's only if you use it. Just a tip

davme_mcreg wrote: 2 years ago

mhlg wrote: 2 years ago

When you level

Strafe, you will need to put points in multi arrow for synergy, so you will still level multi arrow to its point of diminishing returns. The problem with multi arrow is that the more points you put in to it the more mana it uses but its damage doesn't increase that much. With

Strafe your life and mana are always up because you're leeching both at a rate faster than you need.

You'll want to max multi even though it's only hurting your multi mana cost,

Strafe gets+5% per multi point. Also

Guided Arrow gets +10% per multi, but that's only if you use it. Just a tip

True multi does increase

Strafe (synergy) and you will eventually want to max it, but you should max

Strafe first because it suffers no mana issues and with the right stuff it keeps you alive. I've seen a couple of guides on

Strafe builds that warn about how frail the build is. That's only partially true, because with enough leech you can actually tank the Trav council, and zip through Worldstone Keep, but you have to have the stuff to make it work because the build is expensive. I have a perfect GMB Faith, Shaeled

Windforce, Fortitude for armor,

Andariel's socketed with 15ias 15 max damage jewel, 28% Mara's,

Laying of Hands,

Nosferatu's Coil, Natalyias

Boots, dual leech ring,

Raven Frost ring, and too man charms to mention. It is an expensive build.

Oh for sure, 100% agree that you do

Strafe first. It just sounded like you were saying to not max out multi because it didn't improve the multi skill.

And oh buddy is she expensive. All of my unid annis have been sold just to gear her. I thought my sorc was expensive, but 1

Ber and a hoto were nothing compared to her lol.

And yes, there is something quite enjoyable about tanking trav, except that the merc keeps dieing

davme_mcreg wrote: 2 years ago

Oh for sure, 100% agree that you do

Strafe first. It just sounded like you were saying to not max out multi because it didn't improve the multi skill.

And oh buddy is she expensive. All of my unid annis have been sold just to gear her. I thought my sorc was expensive, but 1

Ber and a hoto were nothing compared to her lol.

And yes, there is something quite enjoyable about tanking trav, except that the merc keeps dieing

When you get to the entrance of Durance, just run inside and your merc will follow. If he looks like he's going, go through the door to Durance lvl 1. What stuff does your merc have? My merc rarely dies in trav.

Treachery, Pride, and vamp gaze. Still deciding on giving him a fort or making a Grief for my smiter. It really doesn't bother me that he dies, I rarely do trav runs nowadays, just a little nuisance.

davme_mcreg wrote: 2 years ago

As for the Valk, according to D2 wiki, her best gear comes in at level 27, but I had always heard the gear caps at 20? Anyone confirm anything?
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Valkyrie

Hmm, I've also just stumbled upon a possible massive failure of mine. I never respeced after I picked up my Faith and she still has 20 points into

Penetrate. Since I have Faith I only need to worry about the level aspect of the "to hit" calculation for multi shot. And since I'm level 90 I don't really need to worry about that. HOWEVER, if they do bring in

Terror zones to non ladder then the monsters would be at or above my level, bringing the level back into the equation. I shall have to wait and see before I eat my token.

Thanks to everyone who posted info in this thread. I'm still working on improving my bowazon, and there's loads of good info here.

From what I've read here it sounds like the Valk is pretty great, and I've put no points into that skill tree column with my current spec (Strafezon, and I feel like I may have too many points into Multi), opting for max synergy damage. I'm considering what to try with a respec (for more DEX, too), but that's potentially quite a lot of points into

Valkyrie (and

Decoy hard points for +Res), though it sounds like it could be a nice replacement for an A2 Merc rather than just using 1 point into

Decoy to draw enemy fire. I'm currently using a Might merc (

The Reaper's Toll helps with physical immunes, but MA sounds quite tempting now too) after switching from an A1 Merc, but would like to switch back to an A1 Merc in the end as long as it makes sense. Guess I will be using a few tokens to figure out what I like best I still need to make Fortitude and try it out before doing so.


The linked site mentions randomly having immunities but no specifics about if that's only on Hell difficulty or how to tell if or which she has. Is there a way to view those in-game similar to how you can view stats & res on a Merc? This was a bit confusing...how would one know if she has immunities (or what the properties of any of the rare gear she's using at higher levels are, for that matter)?

Sometimes Valkyries may (randomly) have immunities on higher difficulties. They can be re-summoned until the desired immunities are obtained.

This was also particularly interesting:

The Valkyries' resistances are equal to twice their level, to a max of 85. For example, a level 10

Valkyrie will have +20 to all Resistances. Valkyries also get a hidden synergy bonus from

Decoy, in which every physical point in

Decoy will add +2 to all Resistances. The whole formula comes out as: 2x(

Valkyrie level + Base

Decoy Level)

I found something else interesting about the Valk armor color, apparently being based upon the armor affixes. I'm not sure if the coloring is all the same in D2R vs LoD, however.

The

Valkyrie appears in different colors based on what bonuses are found on her Armor. This works exactly the same way as it does on player characters. The following table lists some common affixes on the

Valkyrie armor, and the associated color.

source:
The Tankazon Resource (archive)

All true, you can take a look here if there's any new info for you:

https://diablo-archive.fandom.com/wiki/ ... Diablo_II)

I wouldn't worry about putting points into

Decoy for her, she's pretty good just on her own. Focus first on maxing

Strafe, then

Guided Arrow, then multi-shot.

As for

Critical Strike and

Pierce, I put enough points until I was no longer seeing a % gain for each skill point. I then maxed valk. That being said, I don't run

Strafe so I have more points free to use. Just started throwing them into

Strafe tonight to play around with it.

Just a little update guys. I did a few runs with

Gore Rider instead of

War Traveler. I didn't really notice a difference on the regular mobs, maybe a touch slower on them, but diablo died a lot faster than normal. I didn't seem to see much difference in the kill speed of

Baal though, which was weird.

The crushing blow defiantly made a difference on the bosses.

Yeah, Crushing Blow definitely makes a big difference on bosses. Soloing

Baal as a bowazon was night and day with

Guillaume's Face. Combined with

Atma's Scarab, the combo really cuts down

Baal-killing times to something that feels reasonable instead of being a tedious chore like it usually is on physical damage characters.

Turning this into a bit of a general bowa topic but I recently found a

Cham rune, has anyone tried Mist on an A1 merc? Mine is currently using Harmony, which is nice for

Vigor, but I have a 5os +3 GMB so maybe Mist is worth a go. I hesitate because maybe the

Cham will be worth more once the season ends and others want to try Mist, currently don't think it's worth selling

Oh, and I don't have the runes to make Pride but if that's much better then I could hold on to the

Cham, of course. It will be a while before I have a spare

Sur and

Lo though, other runewords being a higher priority!

If you're non ladder you have to wait for ladder's end for Mist, it's (for a little more time) a ladder only RW.