Bowazon Bis armours?

mhlg wrote: 2 years ago

Perhaps it depends on your bow and stuff? I have a perfect Faith GM bow and a

Windforce. My

Windforce has a higher Dps in my stats but Faith beats it in reality. In my experience there are no other Zon skills that can match the survivability of

Strafe because leech keeps both health and mana topped. Multi and Guided are both

Strafe synergies so you will max them out as well. I can choose any of them but multishot is a mana hog and not that good at leech. I find leech requires both speed and damage. I also have an Andy's socketed with 15 IAS 36 ED jewel, Nostferatu coil

Belt, and

Laying of Hands mitts.

I had all my stats listed here before but I felt like it was petty and starting a dick waving competition I didn't want to start. Needless to say I'm around 7k max damage for

Strafe and guided and around 5k damage for multi shot. Well enough damage for leech to fill both health and mana quite rapidly.

The reason

Strafe will always be slower than multi shot is it hits one at a time, 10

Arrows per volley. With multi I can aim 24

Arrows to be very close beside each other and hit an entire crowd in one shot, then keep doing that at 3.5 volleys per second. That's up to 84

Arrows per second of leech. You do have to work to aim multi shot though, you can't just blind right click it. The closer in to your character you shoot the wider your spread. click at the far Edge of the screen and you shoot with the

Arrows bunched up. Also I don't have

Strafe lock. I can shoot once move back, shoot some more, move again etc,

Strafe has gotten me into some bad spots a few times.

We should play sometimes maybe theres something I'm missing about

Strafe that you can show me.

Funny how we all experience the game differently, in 9 out of 10 scenarios I find

Strafe to be far more effective than multi shot. Safer and with faster killing speed.

Janet the Java wrote: 2 years ago

Funny how we all experience the game differently, in 9 out of 10 scenarios I find

Strafe to be far more effective than multi shot. Safer and with faster killing speed.

My Bowzon build uses both

Strafe and multishot (I maxed both and

Guided Arrow for bosses), and I regularly use both skills depending on the terrain. I love them both and am glad my build makes effective use of them.
The way I decide to use either one of the other is as follows;
-single targets or enemies in a tight cluster =

Strafe.
-maps with tight corridors, tunnels, or enclosed spaces (maggot lair, pit,

Ancient Tunnels, WSK, etc) =

Strafe.
-enemies bunched up in one direction, or in a general direction =

Strafe.
-when facing slow moving enemies such as zombies =

Strafe.

When I DON'T use

Strafe:
-When surrounded by enemies in the front and back
-When surrounded by enemies in more than two directions
-When facing extremely fast moving enemies in more than one direction (stygian dolls, crows, extra fast uniques)
-When facing multiple enemies that

Teleport (

Demon Imp,

Teleport uniques)
-When facing multiple enemies that can

Swarm you when you are in strafelock (multiple wraiths, stygians, etc).

Multishot I use most extensively in large open maps, such as in A1 plains, A2 desert maps, A4 Chaos, A5 siege maps, and cows.
Because of my build's extremely small mana pool, I can't spam too many volleys consecutively, so I usually fire 4 or 5 volleys and then revert to

Strafe which rebuilds my mana with mana leech and then rinse + repeat if necessary. If I want to continuously spam multi I can do so by sucking down mana pots, but at that point usually the mobs are all obliterated by then. I get roughly 7k dmg with

Strafe and 5.5k with multi, great fun being specced in both skills. They compliment each other quite well.

halflife wrote: 2 years ago

Janet the Java wrote: 2 years ago

Funny how we all experience the game differently, in 9 out of 10 scenarios I find

Strafe to be far more effective than multi shot. Safer and with faster killing speed.

My Bowzon build uses both

Strafe and multishot (I maxed both and

Guided Arrow for bosses), and I regularly use both skills depending on the terrain. I love them both and am glad my build makes effective use of them.
The way I decide to use either one of the other is as follows;
-single targets or enemies in a tight cluster =

Strafe.
-maps with tight corridors, tunnels, or enclosed spaces (maggot lair, pit,

Ancient Tunnels, WSK, etc) =

Strafe.
-enemies bunched up in one direction, or in a general direction =

Strafe.
-when facing slow moving enemies such as zombies =

Strafe.

When I DON'T use

Strafe:
-When surrounded by enemies in the front and back
-When surrounded by enemies in more than two directions
-When facing extremely fast moving enemies in more than one direction (stygian dolls, crows, extra fast uniques)
-When facing multiple enemies that

Teleport (

Demon Imp,

Teleport uniques)
-When facing multiple enemies that can

Swarm you when you are in strafelock (multiple wraiths, stygians, etc).

Multishot I use most extensively in large open maps, such as in A1 plains, A2 desert maps, A4 Chaos, A5 siege maps, and cows.
Because of my build's extremely small mana pool, I can't spam too many volleys consecutively, so I usually fire 4 or 5 volleys and then revert to

Strafe which rebuilds my mana with mana leech and then rinse + repeat if necessary. If I want to continuously spam multi I can do so by sucking down mana pots, but at that point usually the mobs are all obliterated by then. I get roughly 7k dmg with

Strafe and 5.5k with multi, great fun being specced in both skills. They compliment each other quite well.

Well any decent strafezon will have max multi shot too I suppose, I just forget to use it. You make a valid point about certain scenarios requiring multi though, I'll definitely adjust how I play a bit to take advantage of its strengths. I might test a few

Helm options later and report back, I feel like that's the most difficult piece if gear to get right on a bowa since the rest is fairly obvious.

@Janet yeah the

Helm is really the wild card. You could also argue

Boots too but I love that I switched back to gore's over war travs

I'm kind of curious guys, how much mana leech you guys have and how much total mana you have?

I have about 225 mana, 5% mana leech and 5k damage on multi.

davme_mcreg wrote: 2 years ago

@Janet yeah the

Helm is really the wild card. You could also argue

Boots too but I love that I switched back to gore's over war travs

I'm kind of curious guys, how much mana leech you guys have and how much total mana you have?

I have about 225 mana, 5% mana leech and 5k damage on multi.

I find that for my build 6% mana leech is enough to keep my mana ball filled with blue. For life I have 24%, but only because of the stuff I use. My damage with the Faith is a little over 6.8K

Strafe, and about 8.9 dps

Windforce. A

Windforce with more damage still loses out over the Faith. I prefer

Magic Arrow to tackle immunes, because it takes them down fast. I'm using an A2 Mighr merc with 27% LL, wearing a Fortitude, 12%

Crown of Thieves socketed with 15ias 15dps jewel (probably not needed because of

Fanaticism), and non

Eth shaeled Reapers, and he very rarely dies.

Now I'm going to create some controversy.

Eth items are often way over hyped. The only time an

Eth item is better is when its attributes are better than a perfect normal version, and that's not very often. I have another merc wearing a 11%

Eth

Crown of Thieves which isn't quite as good as the normal 12% I have. If you have a Faith then Andariels just puts your mercenary at risk for poison damage. I've tried it and the added speed doesn't do anything worth while. Since Rogues can now use Zon specific items such as GM bow, I've tried a Faith wielding Act1 Rogue merc while using a

Windforce, and that too is mostly hype. My build is still much better with the Act2 Might merc mentioned above and the Faith. So why do I have a

Windforce, because I have 3 of them on my account, and I can, and if I accidentally hit the weapons swap button, I'm still rocking .

Yeah the

Eth is just for extra def and less requirements.

An act 1 merc is never as good as an act 2 merc just purely damage wise because of might aura and Pride. However a manic pixie act 1 merc would a be a fun experiment though!

I have the runes to make a Pride but I just can't see how it is going to be better than a Reaper's Toll. The

Concentration aura is nice but if you have a Faith with 15%

Fanaticism, it's going to make your merc more powerful and faster. Add to that the Reaper's has 15% life leech, decreptify (breaks physical immunes), ignore target's defense, and 33% deadly strike your merc becomes a potent weapon. My merc can tank and survive

Baal in Hell. I think my merc and my Valk might be able to take

Baal without my help.

My merc never has a chance to hit anything really, they're all dead before he gets a chance to get a lot of attacks in, unless they're physical immune.

When i get home from thanksgiving I'll post some numbers with and without

Concentration/might auras.

best build in my opinion is Faith bow on ur ama, and might merc with Pride as a 2h wep , i use

Lava Gout for fire

Enchant and 20 ias

i use

Magic Arrow and multy shoot , not so many phisical imunes and

Magic Arrow owns them

I just made this video a few minutes ago. I ran

Travincal with my Zon. As you will see I tanked the Town Council in seconds using

Strafe. How's that for survivability? Notice the life and Mana ball changes very little because of Mana and Life leech.

Great video man, thanks for sharing. I'm home now from thanksgiving and I thought I would make one too for you to take a look at!

davme_mcreg wrote: 2 years ago

Great video man, thanks for sharing. I'm home now from thanksgiving and I thought I would make one too for you to take a look at!

I'm looking forward to seeing it. So you're Canadian eh?

mhlg wrote: 2 years ago

I have the runes to make a Pride but I just can't see how it is going to be better than a Reaper's Toll. The

Concentration aura is nice but if you have a Faith with 15%

Fanaticism, it's going to make your merc more powerful and faster. Add to that the Reaper's has 15% life leech, decreptify (breaks physical immunes), ignore target's defense, and 33% deadly strike your merc becomes a potent weapon. My merc can tank and survive

Baal in Hell. I think my merc and my Valk might be able to take

Baal without my help.

From personal experience, my argument for Pride is that my merc is a complete dumbass and I don't trust any on-hit curse procs to be remotely useful when he decides to attack a

Lightning Spire,

Catapult, barricade, raptor nest, or quill rat two screens behind me. I'd care about my merc being able to tank

Baal if he could find him first, not stand behind the pillar around the corner of the bridge to the worldstone like DJ Khaled acting as if he's doing something. In fact, you know what? I'll just take

Baal myself by equipping

Atma's Scarab and

Guillaume's Face.

Even in your

Travincal video above, he retreats for no fathomable reason at 0:06, procs

Decrepify exactly twice and both times were too late to make a difference, decides to disappear for a smoke break or something like a lazy coworker at 0:33, then collects his participation award against the water watcher before letting the

Valkyrie finish the job instead. BUM.

If ATVI ever decides to focus on improving merc AI to something resembling even a first generation Roomba instead of stepping on rakes like Sideshow Bob while trying to fix sunder charms, maybe I'll take on-hit curse procs from Act 2 mercs more seriously.

Until then, since I don't have the benefit of Enigma to carry his stupid ass because I'm using Fortitude, I want all the auras.

Yup! Proud boy from the Great White North haha. I realized I never showed some information in the video so I'm adding it here first and when I logged on what do you know - Trav is terrorized. If only it was when I did my video. I couldn't get the audio to sync properly so there is about a 1 second delay, but there's no game audio so it's not disorienting.

So first I forgot to show the damage when both

Concentration and might were active so I've attached them as a picture.

And lastly here is my video. Its about 16 minutes long, sorry. But I added timestamps so you can just jump around if you don't want to listen to me :p. I had to jump through a bunch of youtube hoops to get this uploaded too.

Without further ado, here it is.



Soooo my chapters didn't embed themselves in the bar so I've added them here. Sorry you'll have to move the bar manually to get to them. First video on youtube, I don't know why it didn't work.

0:00
0:10 intro
0:30 Trav Multishot
2:27 Trav

Strafe
5:48 Shoutout to the Comunity
6:13 Mana Consumption Numbers
6:40 Arrow Spread in

Chaos Sanctuary
9:07 Diablo
9:40 Example of Good

Strafe Area
13:30 Cows with Multishot
13:50 Tip about Aiming Multishot
14:37 Cows with

Strafe
15:46 Clsoing Out

davme_mcreg wrote: 2 years ago

Soooo my chapters didn't embed themselves in the bar so I've added them here. Sorry you'll have to move the bar manually to get to them. First video on youtube, I don't know why it didn't work.

I've had that problem before. There isn't really a definitive reason for it other than your account is bugged in some unknown way and it will hopefully randomly resolve itself some time later. The common reason is if you have an unresolved copyright claim or something that keeps your account from being in perfectly good standing, but that's not the issue here since you have no music in your video and you have no other videos. The timestamps in your video description still work though, so opening the video in a new browser tab will do.

you forgot to post gear

Great video Dave. I think our builds demonstrate the effectiveness of Multi and

Strafe. The reason I choose

Strafe over multi is because its resource requirements are much lower and its leech is much more effective which improves survivability.


I just recorded three more Trav runs, keep an eye on the life and mana balls. Notice in the first video the might aura is not active, and the third video demonstrates the effectiveness of

Strafe life/mana leech, and hence survivability. I can easily do 30 Trav runs in under 60 minutes without requiring a single potion.

For the curious my stuff includes: Perfect GM Faith,

Helm 10% LL

Andariel’s socketed with 15% IAS/26ED jewel, mitts

Laying of Hands,

Belt 7% Nosferatu’s Coil, Armor (Armour if you’re Brit or Canadian ) Fortitude,

Boots War Travs. Rings: Dual leech 6% mana, 8% life, 28% Mara’s. Several charms too long to list.

Merc Gear:

Helm 12%

Crown of Thieves,15% shaeled Reaper’s, and AP Fortitude. None are

Eth.