Endgame Physical Bowazon Advice

Hello! I am working towards the final pieces to a perfect physical bowazon and I am a little confused about ias/damage optimization.

NOTE: I prefer to use

Strafe over split arrow.

Currently I have 80ias with the following gear:

-andys

Helm (20)
-cats eye (20)
-perf

Windforce with 40ed jewel (20)
-2/20 gloves (20)

Also using Fortitude (perf sup

Archon Plate), Gore Riders (better frw than war travs and prefer no MF),

Razortail, ravenfrost, dual leach ring. Harmony bow on switch.

Currently I am using an A2 might merc with Pride (18

Concentration ). I find this gives me much higher damage than A1 merc with a perfect Faith (which I have). I also prefer

Windforce over Faith since I prefer

Strafe, Faith seems to have little/no benefit over

Windforce with

Strafe.

I use this build for base farming so I prefer not to have magic find and run/walk speed is prioritized.

My Question

I am working toward getting an Artisan's

Diadem/

Tiara of speed to replace the andy's. All the top builds I've seen put 3 15/40 ias jewels in this and also have a 15/40 ias jewel in

Windforce. This would give me 120ias. However, the IAS calculator suggest that 80ias gives the max benefit. Is this true? If so, wouldn't it make more sense to put 2 15/40's in the

Helm and 1 jewel with 40ed +max/min damage? Given the expense of this final piece I want to make sure I'm not missing something here.

Note I will not be using 15/40's but 15/37-39. I can't possibly afford/find that many 15/40's.

In addition to my question I would welcome any advice on any part of this build that you think I may be doing wrong or may not have considered.

Thanks!

2FPA

Strafe actually works in D2R, so having 120IAS is benefical for sure.

attackspeed.php?char=Amazon&data=0-0-Hy ... -0-0-0-0-0

for a PVM physical build, there are no better gloves than

Laying of Hands imo.

Giant Skull is also nice for strafezon.

@uuee
Ok thanks! I will continue down the 4 x 15ias jewels path then.

I have seen many say LOH gloves are the best, however they don't offer LL/ML or Res like my 2/20 gloves do.
I've been meaning to revisit the LOH gloves and see how they play. It's been some time since I used them on this build.

@Tornado_OLO

Thanks. I will have a look at that.

brownSys wrote: 6 months ago

@uuee
Ok thanks! I will continue down the 4 x 15ias jewels path then.

I have seen many say LOH gloves are the best, however they don't offer LL/ML or Res like my 2/20 gloves do.
I've been meaning to revisit the LOH gloves and see how they play. It's been some time since I used them on this build.

Well you've got your ML covered by

Windforce, 50 fire res is not too shabby for a pair of gloves, LL can be taken care by a rare ring I guess (for now, its covered by Andys)

uuee wrote: 6 months ago

brownSys wrote: 6 months ago

@uuee
Ok thanks! I will continue down the 4 x 15ias jewels path then.

I have seen many say LOH gloves are the best, however they don't offer LL/ML or Res like my 2/20 gloves do.
I've been meaning to revisit the LOH gloves and see how they play. It's been some time since I used them on this build.

Well you've got your ML covered by

Windforce, 50 fire res is not too shabby for a pair of gloves, LL can be taken care by a rare ring I guess (for now, its covered by Andys)

Yeah you're right. I'm going to need a better rare dual leech ring eventually. The thing is I actually use Harmony frequently to kill weaker mobs when it makes sense or I'm feeling lazy. It's nice to have a good source of mana leech for this.

I missed that LOH has 50 fire res. That would really help while using andy's. Ranged fire skeletons have created some close calls.

brownSys wrote: 6 months ago

uuee wrote: 6 months ago

brownSys wrote: 6 months ago

@uuee
Ok thanks! I will continue down the 4 x 15ias jewels path then.

I have seen many say LOH gloves are the best, however they don't offer LL/ML or Res like my 2/20 gloves do.
I've been meaning to revisit the LOH gloves and see how they play. It's been some time since I used them on this build.

Well you've got your ML covered by

Windforce, 50 fire res is not too shabby for a pair of gloves, LL can be taken care by a rare ring I guess (for now, its covered by Andys)

Yeah you're right. I'm going to need a better rare dual leech ring eventually. The thing is I actually use Harmony frequently to kill weaker mobs when it makes sense or I'm feeling lazy. It's nice to have a good source of mana leech for this.

I missed that LOH has 50 fire res. That would really help while using andy's. Ranged fire skeletons have created some close calls.

With

Strafe, the 8% mana leech on your

Windforce alone is enough to keep your mana ball filled. That means you can place your focus more on life leech. Use only as much attribute points as you need to use your gear and then place the bulk of the rest in Dexterity.

@uuee

Can confirm

Laying of Hands is better. Thanks again!

Your FRW might be a little overstacked. You already have +60% from items (30 from cats and 30 from Gores). With

Vigor, this gives you a run speed of 9.15 yd/s. At +90% (from items), you'll go to 9.69 yd/s and 127% yields 10.07 yd/s. That's a pretty big investment for a 5-10% effective movement speed.

I recommend picking up 9x 3max 3frw SCs as they add damage and speed, and then looking for a Jeweler's

Tiara of Nirvana (30 Dex). That way you'll have 87% frw from items (9.64 yd/s), and gain more clear speed from the extra damage from +27 max dmg and +30 dex. I suppose you may also want to look into +max dmg GCs.

One thing worth considering is that Hustle armor might be worth it over Fortitude. If you can go from 3 frame to volleys to 2 frame volleys, then your damage is increased 50% (at least, against multiple targets, as

Strafe has nextDelay of 4 frames). This might ease up what other items you need to hit your breakpoints, and the 65% FRW on the armor is huge, even after diminishing returns. I think Hustle is underrated for the bowazon, but it may depend on other factors like the player count and where you are farming - single target damage will be worse.

Another thing is you can have a Hustle bow in your cube.

Burst of Speed should proc pretty quickly with

Strafe, and you'll get a "true" boost to run speed and attack rate for the next 2 minutes. That could make it much easier to hit IAS breakpoints, although it could get annoying to refresh.

I'll offer this from personal experience, which I've said before in the past: 5% proc rates suck and 2 minutes is not enough uptime considering that won't even get you through a solo

Baal run with teleporting. Everyone assumes 100% uptime when running calculations with the Hustle bow on D2Planner or other tools, but it's really nowhere near that. When the proc is active, it's great, but if you end up on an awful series of rolls where you're not hitting on those 1/20 odds, you end up wasting a bunch of time.

Atma's Scarab is a necklace switch I use for solo

Baal kills over

Highlord's Wrath. I've had games where

Baal doesn't get cursed until he's down to 1/2 or less of his health, and he is kind of slow to take down with 40K raw

Strafe DPS, which means there was a long time before a proc. My other characters kill him much quicker without needing a proc-based DPS booster.

Treachery is another item where I depend on the

Fade proc to pre-buff for

Uber Mephisto with my javazon. There have been numerous times I've had her stand in one of the

River of Flame fire pillars beside

Hadriel for 2000+ HP damage without a

Fade proc, at which point I'm concerned enough to go back to town for a heal before resuming because being slain by an Evil Force would be embarrassing.

On another note, I'll also concur that

The Cat's Eye is not a great amulet because the only benefit it offers over

Highlord's Wrath is the movement speed. The latter is much better overall with the Deadly Strike and skill point bonuses.

Like Snakecharmed I also use Atama's scarab on my strafezon, and the zon is also my fastest

Travincal farmer because it can clear

Travincal in about a minute. Here is a video I made to demonstrate.