Amazon FAQ: Difference between revisions

=Bow & Crossbow=

 

=Passive & Magic=

This depends greatly on which kind of Amazon you're building. If you're aiming for a java- / bowazon, you don't need to put any more points than 1 as you'll already have high attack rating due to your points placed in dexterity - most bowazon or javazons have dexterity ranging from 250 to 350 upon completion of the character (when you have stopped leveling the character).  It is important to note that if you are using the elemental arrows or Guided Arrow as your primary skills that you don’t need to worry about Attack Rating.  However, if you're planning to build a spearazon you will need to put some points into Penetrate, as you won't be able to concentrate heavily on dexterity. Some people will argue that if your character is not hitting the monsters frequently enough, you should invest some points into it. This argument is fundamentally flawed as your attack rating is not the most important factor for chance to hit the monsters. The most important factors are rather monsters' lvl, monster defense and the skills / equipment you use.  

 

=Javelin & Spear=

Yes, Fend has a bug in which some of the hits shown on the screen are not registered on the server. This means you won't inflict damage even though it seems like on the screen that you successfully hit the monster.  This seems to happen very often if you keep your mouse button pressed on the creature you attack. If you get a hit in it and start the fend series, it is recommended to release your button and wait for it to end. Then reselect that monster and fend again. This "cure" will make the cosmetic swings occur a lot less.

Lightning Strike is a strange mix of skills and sadly this is why it doesn't work very well. First of all, it is composed of three factors. Damage from weapon, lighting damage that is added directly to each hit, and a Chain Lightning Effect.

 

Lightning Strike is listed as a skill that automatically hits and should therefore not require attack rating. This is however only partially true. The lightning damage that is directly added by the skill is autohit, the weapon damage (and with it the influence of your charms and gear) still requires attack rating. The chance to hit for this is the same as for "normal attack". The Chain Lighting effect has a jump radius of 6.6 yards, but occurs quite infrequently compared to this value. Attack rating does not seem to influence this. The confusing part of the skill is that it gives the impression that the Chain Lightning effect does a damage of 195-215 at level 20, but this is lightning damage that is directly added to the hit. The damage from the Chain Lightning is much lower and thought to be related to the sorceress skill, but than to act with a lower level than 20.

 

The skill is not very viable in hell difficulty because the Chain Lightning damage is far too low. It seems sometimes that the direct lightning damage that the skill adds is overwritten by the Chain Lighting, rendering your attack useless.

 

What many people think and conclude is that Lighting Strike is a horrible skill. In normal it is indeed not extremely powerful since you will most likely not get it above level 5 to 10. Starting and through the entire nightmare difficulty however, a maxed Lighting Strike does quite acceptable damage. With good bonus skills (10+) it is in fact quite effective in damaging groups of creatures (Note that it is not as powerful as fend is, nor as good as the javelin skill Lighting Fury).

In hell it is still a good skill to kill physical immune creatures with and maybe some groups of carvers and wraith type creature in act 1 and 2. This is however at a skill level of 20 to 25. Soon after that it becomes less and less attractive for sing against large powerful groups and fend is recommended. We are still debating on how exactly it works, but from what we can say is that Blizzard has been messing with skill combinations the way it's not supposed to and we hope it is fixed in version 1.10.

The two lesser javelin skills - Poison Javelin and Lightning Bolt - are only to be used as pre-requisites. However Lightning Fury in combination with the Pierce skill works best in areas with large creature packs, especially Hell Cows. Plague Javelin is good for preventing monster heal and doing some nifty damage at higher levels.

=General=

Common misconception about bowazons is that its not as good as sorceresses or other classes in terms of killing speed in cow level. However, aside from Javazon, bowazons are the fastest cow tippers with right equipments. Bowazons with Buriza du Kyanon and Atma's Scarab will kill tons of cows faster than nova sorceress due to high base / cold damage, 95% pierce (see earlier comments on pierce) and chance to cast amplify damage (doing triple damage after) Another example is typical speedazons with such bows as Eaglehorn / Mavina's Caster / or Lycander's Aim. (on some rare cases, Windforce) Pure speed / enhanced damage equipments can boost the damage potential of these bows greatly overtime. It is quite impressive to see cows mowed down in cow level by speedazons.  

Amazons have some variations in playing style. For Javazon, you want damage reduce equipment, +life mods, and moderate resist. The rest will be supplemented by her passive / magic skills and the javelin skills itself. For bowazons, you can go two routes. One is to attain high base damage bow / crossbow (Buriza, for example) and go with +life / elemental resist / physical reduce. Another is to attain the fastest bow with moderate damage and go pure +increased attack speed items in order to shoot the most arrows in given amount of time, which in turn will make up for the low base damage.

For bowazons, all the skills in fire tree and ice tree are useless because of high mana cost and no base damage boost. Also, strafe is useless in PvP because while you are shooting, you'll be stuck in one spot. For Javazons, you don't want to use anything other than fend, jab or lightning fury (depending on if you decide to get jab and fend) Lightning fury has auto-hit property like guided arrow, although it doesn't home in. Jab gives you fast attack speed and fend gives you attack rate / damage boost (and its uninterruptible).

Javelins with high elemental damage can be bought from vendors and supply a simple solution. With a shield that has good elemental damage, such as Tiamat's Rebuke, will leave you with less troubles. If you have many sources of elemental damage and especially charms, you can use the jab or fend skill to quickly deliver the damage to your foes. It will cost you some mana if you have boosted them to high skill levels, but it is a sure way of dispatching of physical immune creatures.

Bowazons have several options for this kind of situation. First is one level Fire Arrow. Fire Arrow, as it stands now is currently overpowered and converts most of your physical damage into fire damage (estimated to be about 50%). Therefore, with bows such as Eaglehorn or Buriza, you can do a significant amount of fire damage. Second solution is to either max Immolation or Freezing Arrow. This is the elementalists' or frostmaidens' choice, usually. But the mana cost will be pretty hefty. It would be much better and less mana intensive to max Ice Arrow or Exploding Arrow instead and use those to kill your monsters. The last one is to use lots of elemental damage from charms, socketed bows that can be bought easily from vendors and socketed with elemental damage runes / jewels / gems, and other items. For example: Burizons can just spam Guided Arrow and expect a good result as Guided Arrow pierces in order to inflict the cold damage multiple times.

All special modifiers work on bows for as well PvM as PvP.

Freeze will not work on cold immune creatures, champions, boss monsters, act bosses or players and their minions.

Damage inflicted per second, for 4 seconds = [(AL*9 + 40)*25]/256

Where: AL = Attacker Level.

| 4

Act 1 rogues make good and speedy mercenaries. They have a hidden power which is related to the amount of +skills equipment that they wear. Read more here. A smart person gets either a fire or cold rogue and puts on the amount of +skills to make her shoot the opposite. I.e. give a cold mercenary +skills to get her to shoot fire arrows as main attack.. the cold arrows will be shot by the rogue anyway. With a fast trigger the rogue can be quite a killer.

Act 3 mercenaries are of the elemental type. Also these can benefit from +skills to boost their damage. Most only choose cold for the freeze effect, but lightning and fire mercenaries can be quite good too, especially if you lack that type of damage.

* Listed Weapon Damage is the damage on your weapon. Socketing an Enhanced Damage Jewel or Rune will act on the base weapon damage. However, if the weapon already contains a magical enhanced damage modifier it will act on the base weapon damage + 1.

* For class-specific spears, use (0.8 x Strength + 0.35 x Dexterity)

Faster Hit Recovery Frame-Rate Table  

 

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| 20

| 63

| 200