High end bowazon questions

This is an intentional necropost, but I’m putting this here because I consider Schnorki’s build to be the bowazon benchmark in this forum among actual builds and those numbers are on the previous page. This is what I’m contributing to the Faith side of the discussion. First is the personal accomplishment, then the broader perspective of the two bows.

I didn’t turn this into a challenge until I realized it was an attainable target, but here is my Faith bowazon with 10K+ max damage per arrow using

Strafe and

Guided Arrow without any cheater (poison damage) charms. I did all this while keeping her resists maxed, which means that I left some damage on the table. This is my take on a nearly fully optimized Faith build with a few personal customizations.




Of note here is that D2Planner never fixed the 3/4 damage penalty on

Strafe, which is technically correct despite what the in-game character sheet says. For the sake of discussion, we’ll assume that the actual

Strafe damage per arrow matches the character sheet, which is at parity and even slightly ahead of

Guided Arrow when fully synergized.

A glass cannon Faith build that completely sells out for damage can reach over 12K max damage per arrow with

Strafe and

Guided Arrow. However, I never wanted to go full glass cannon, and maxing resists is another challenge that I’ve kept for my characters since the LoD days even though it’s not critical for a bowazon.

I did make one distinctly suboptimal DPS decision in this, and it’s that I gave up a third socket in her helm in favor of the Chromatic (29@) prefix on the

Tiara of Speed that I got from infinite gambling. After

Larzuk decided to cooperate for once with a 2-socket draw, I had to decide whether I wanted to roll with this tiara for vanity over max DPS.


This wouldn’t have been a decision if you had transmogrify in this game, ATVI. That and dyes are probably the only features from D3 that I still remember fondly.

I only lost about 400 DPS and saved the cost of 7-10

Jah runes over the “perfect” DPS option that would also compensate for the lost 29@ with a better rare ring and charms. I consider that a fair tradeoff because I find high value magic and rare trading to be aggravating. It took over a week to successfully trade for the last grand charm I needed where the seller wasn't ghosting or trying to rip off potential buyers with an exorbitant asking price.

Another thing to consider is that I purposely kept 10 free spaces plus an empty

Horadric Cube in her inventory for a total of 22 free spaces for picking up loot. If PC users were to receive the same functionality as console users to pick up items directly into the cube, I would pack the remaining inventory spaces.

Now, if I were to do that, well, first, 11K max damage per arrow would be a foregone conclusion with all my other gear staying the same. Second, I could then opt to make room for 12 spaces instead of 10 to accommodate four 10/70+ Sharp Grand Charms with my choice of suffix. Or, since those spaces are house money in terms of balancing my build, they could be 14/70+ charms instead. There are several possibilities that I'm unlikely to explore because I’m trying to be done with this game more than I’m trying to find ways to keep playing it regularly for another year.

As far as

Windforce vs. Faith, at an ultra high level, the cost difference between

Windforce and building Faith is insignificant when looking at an optimized build in totality. If you take either build far enough, the bow choice really becomes a quality of life preference.

Going by theorycrafted raw numbers,

Windforce does more DPS than Faith when comparing fully optimized builds. In practice, the problem is that most people don’t fully optimize either build. I’ve seen fewer people get

Windforce closer to optimal than Faith, and neither Maxroll nor Icy Veins gets either full kit completely right. Wowhead screwed up a critical part of the bowazon builds in their guides, so I really don’t have much Faith in what they published.

The key to Schnorki’s

Windforce build is actually pretty simple and runs counter to the current gameplay meta, but I’m also not going to give it away. The only thing I’ll let on is that there is enough headroom in that build to reach 15K max damage per arrow.

All that being said, unless a

Windforce user is following the build that Schnorki uses, they’re not out-DPSing me. At best, it’ll be a tie.

Does that matter/Do I care? No.
Is it relevant to the eternal

Windforce vs. Faith debate? Yes.
Does the debate matter? Not really, but I got on a roll with theorycrafting builds using both bows.

As for my take on

Windforce vs. Faith, I personally like steamrolling

Shenk the Overseer or any other superunique/boss in an open area with an army of the dead that would make

Blood Raven jealous. They may be slow, but they know their place and actually engage enemy mobs better than that idiot Emilio. Also, I find that you don’t make too many friends in public games when you’re constantly knocking back mobs that your teammates are trying to hit.

That's some solid numbers for a Faith build. Well done.
I'm curious though, did you actually drop some points in vitality? 100 seems a tad high for a dmg zon.

Agreed in that the underlying debate really doesn't matter much. Fully perfecting either side is rare enough and once you do, the difference isn't exactly massive and to me will always come down to "do I prefer to 1-shot everything and laugh at knocking around those few things that do survive more than 1 arrow?" vs. "do I prefer the feel of faster attack speed?".

Hell, even with all of the theorycrafting done, neither of us fully perfects the damage aspect of it and intentionally so. I just can't stand to look at a char screen and not see all resistances capped, along with a couple other pieces that I prefer over solely maximizing raw dmg.


PS:
Props for the give-away pun that may or may not have been intended.
Although the extra headroom allows for pushing to well over 16k, not 15.

Thanks. I did put 30 points into vitality. The rest is 20 base, 10 from

War Traveler, 20 from

Hellfire Torch, and 20 from

Annihilus. No solid reason for the extra vitality other than to get that number to a round and even 100. I could certainly do just fine with 770 life at level 99 as I could with 860. I could always respec whenever.

I guess it's more of a habit and maybe a little bit of a placebo effect to feel slightly more confident having a little extra health. This came from not entirely trusting situations that I could find myself in when playing public games. Currently, the only situation I absolutely can't account for is an Undead Soul Killer's max roll crit explosion, but otherwise, I can usually take a single hit from them too.

If it were possible to revisit what I did with my classic D2 and early LoD builds, I would be curious to see what I felt comfortable with health-wise as a bowazon back then. In classic, I wouldn't be surprised if I had her at mid-400 health. I distinctly remember it wasn't in the 500s. I think I had mid-700s in LoD.

As for max sheet damage with

Windforce, I'm sure 16K is doable. I'm probably underestimating maxed Faith by 1K as well. I think the gear set I was theorycrafting with still had maxed fire and lightning resist and a number of Shimmering Small Charms instead of Fine. My desire to see resistances capped partly comes from the old days of the game when you would see the satisfying "MAX" instead of 75 (or 80, 85, etc.) on the character sheet when it was maxed out. Since the gear exists to make it achievable in LoD/D2R, I wanted to make it happen.

Building up physical damage characters is more of a numbers game than with elemental damage characters. Every charm has to be carefully accounted for rather than stacking gear with skills and skill charms. For an elemental damage character, your peripheral quality of life may be affected without optimization, but the damage is the damage because it's largely driven by skill points. If I say my javazon has 45 Javelin and Spear skill points,

Thunderstroke,

Griffon's Eye, and Infinity, you pretty much already know how much damage she can deal. Meanwhile, a bowazon could be good or bad and just having

Windforce or Faith doesn't tell me much at all.

The one other note on my build I have is another requirement I added only in recent weeks, which was movement speed as a necessity for both XP runs and quality of life. Pub TZ running without Enigma is a major complication and I solved it as best I could for the bowazon* in wide open areas that don't have barriers or bridges, so basically Act 1 outdoors,

Travincal, and

Chaos Sanctuary. Also, she's fast AF now, so at least that's two of the holy trinity of attack speed, run/walk speed, and cast rate. I can't do anything about the latter and it largely doesn't matter anyway.

Thankfully, building this up didn't have any real effect on damage output because Inertia is a suffix and most of the major damage modifiers are prefixes.



*Yes, there are

Teleport charge amulets. 25 charges don't last long at all when you play in the TZ games I've played in and even hosted.

Snakecharmed wrote: 2 years ago

If it were possible to revisit what I did with my classic D2 and early LoD builds, I would be curious to see what I felt comfortable with health-wise as a bowazon back then.

I still remember that... 1 :p
0 points in vit back then, 0 points in vit now. And no charms or anything stacking life. It's the one class where full blown damage actually works as well as it does while never* facing any survivability problems because of it.
(*obvious exceptions apply..random pug portals into a tri-aura'd champ pack inside a soul-filled throne room naturally doesn't end well but that's true for most builds who then simply die in the loading screen)

Agreed on the move speed. Can't have enough of that!