John Remedy
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Anything Goes D2 Lounge!
- Thread starter art_vandelay
- Start date
McGruber08
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I found an ethereal Shaft Stop this morning, and it looks perfect for my Phoenix Striker's merc. I'm thinking about upgrading it to Boneweave armor and socketing it.
Any ideas for a socket item? It will go with Vampire Gaze helm.
Any ideas for a socket item? It will go with Vampire Gaze helm.
b1ur
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Depends on a number of things. Resists is a safe bet since both armors don't come with any.
SirName
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Besides the resists mentioned by b1ur another thing that that setup lacks is faster hit recovery (unless available from weapon). A single shael jumps 4 breakpoints if your merc has no FHR to begin with. By the way Obedience runeword for polearms has both FHR and resists so not a bad choice for weapon in this case.
McGruber08
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So maybe an UM or a Shael. I usually don't have much luck with jewels, but I do have a few with +15% faster attack. I'll see if I can get both speed and resists in the merc build. Thanks! A crown of ages with Life Leach and Attack speed in sockets might even be better just much harder to come by. Or a diadem/Circlet with lots of good stats.
McGruber08
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For a unique ethereal body armor that you want to upgrade, do you ebug it first then upgrade it or the other way around?
CaseyJones
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To my knowledge, @McGruber08 , you can't eth-bug unique armors. The only way to add a socket is the Larzuk quest and you only get 1socket.
McGruber08
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makes sense. I saw a picture of one with very high defense as a boneweave ethereal. Must be path of diablo or something similar
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Depends on what you would call very high defense... if you up it, base defense will be rerolled (Boneweave is 399-505), multiplied by 1.5 (Ethereal), then multiplied again by %EDef... if it had max %EDef (220%) and rolled max base defense (505), final defense would be [505*1.5]=757 [*3.2]= 2422 defense
WoRG
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Reposting my Faith base theorycraft as well as some Bowa related posts by @Nano, @Gynli and @ffs since the old SPF seems to be temporarily back:
There is also a discussion on running Cows with Bowas but I didn't copy that:
I must have read every relevant thread on faith bases on the internet before choosing a base for mine and all of them came to slightly different conclusions with people advising for pretty much any bow except for Spider and Hydra. (There is even a post by me where I say that Crusader Bow/GMB are the best choices alltogether 
)
Since this thread is the most recent on the topic (on any forum as far as I can tell) I will put the things I gathered here so people don't have to look at 20 threads before choosing a reasonable base.
I do NOT compare damage here. Doing that is completely unfeasible with the amount of item combinations and charm options available. If you have the wealth to make the best possible Bowazon available (i.e. you are WoRG) you will not need any advice anyway because you have played the game for twenty years straight and know everything about it
What I do attempt here is in fact more of a qualitative approach. I want to narrow the choice of bows down without assuming too much, the actual choice between the (hopefully) few remaining bows is up to you and your equipment.
***
Some things I kept in mind while arguing for and against the different bases:
***
For convenience here are the stats of the ten elite bows:
We immediately see that Spider Bow can't get 4os so we are left with nine elite Bows with WSM of -10, 0 and 10 respectively.
Requirements; eliminating Hydra and Ward Bow
First off I want to eliminate regular Bows that are simply worse than others just from looking at their stats.
Level: Every elite bow has a lvl requirement below 65 (Jah Rune) so this requirement does not affect our choice.
Strength: A Bowazon will most likely wear War Travellers which means that she will have at least 105 strength; 95 needed for equipping WTs and 10 granted by them. Additionally ANY rogue will have at least 107 strength at level 65 which means that the only Bows where strength can be used as an argument against them are Great Bow, Hydra Bow and GMB. In the case of the GMB we only have to consider the Amazon and I'm sure she can spare three strength
Dexterity: A level 65 rogue has at least 159 Dex and hence the only bow that might be out of reach for her is the shadow bow. None of the dex requirements are really an obstacle for an Amazon.
Now Hydra and Crusader Bow have the same Weapon Speed Modifier of 10, i.e. they have the same speed, and they have the same average damage. However Hydra Bow has significantly higher requirements as well as lower minimum damage than Crusader Bow and hence is simply worse.
In the same vein Ward and Diamond Bow have the same WSM, average damage and unproblematic requirements but the minimum damage of the Diamond Bow is 13 points higher than that of the Ward Bow.
Eliminations for an Amazon-only Faith
In the case that we do not want our Rogue to be able to use the Faith the choices become much simpler. The GMB has significantly higher average damage (more than 10% extra!) than the other two WSM 10 bows and similarly the Matriarchal Bow has higher average damage than the other two WSM -10 Bows.
Since we do not have to think of the Rogue's ability to equip a shadow bow it will be better than Diamond Bow for us. So we are left with Matriarchal Bow, Shadow Bow and GMB.
Considerations for a first Faith and low runewealth
If you do not have Jahs lying around like some people () you might be interested in the number of rerolls it takes to get certain fanaticism levels on your faith:
The less than 1 in 50 chance to get lvl 12 Fana if you make three faiths is somewhat reasonable if you're rich, but avoiding lvl 12-13 at all costs will drive you into poverty.
Now why is the lvl 12 roll so dreaded? The answer is actually very simple:
An Amazon wielding a WSM 10 bow (Hydra, Crusader, GMB) under the influence of a Faith (either her own or her mercenary's) needs 100% IAS to reach 7fpa if fanaticism rolled level 12 and 95% IAS if the roll is level 13 or higher.
It just so happens that you can get a maximum of exactly 95% IAS by using the glove, belt, helm and amulet slots together and that is assuming a 45% IAS helm and NO Razortail. This means that either your Bow or your Armor will have to provide the IAS in order for you to reach 7fpa. If your Bow does not provide any IAS (e.g. Faith) this means that you can't use Fortitude AND reach 7fpa at the same time.
If you use GSA you have an inherent 50% IAS and no problems reaching the needed IAS. For a Windforce you will have 20% on the Windforce so even if you do not socket it with more IAS you can still use Razortail AND Fortitude at the same time while reaching 7fpa.
Needless to say it's quite a lot harder to make a good 4os IAS body armor than to make a Fortitude.
***
My takeaway here is that it is a huge risk to make your first Faith in a WSM 10 bow if you do not have the runewealth to reroll. So the list of remaining bows for a first/'poor man's' faith is down to the WSM -10 and 0 bows excluding the Ward Bow, i.e. five bows remaining.
WSM -10 vs. 0
I will now compare those non-classspecific bows with WSM -10 to those with WSM 0 for an Amazon. Before I do this I want to note that the difference between min and max damage is 7 for Diamond and at least 20 for every other bow, so assuming a non-superior base the difference between mix and max after applying the On-weapon ED from Faith is 30,1 for Diamond and at least 86 for every other bow. This only becomes larger in a superior base. I do not know exactly what happens when min exceeds max damage but it won't matter in most cases because only the richest of the rich could ever afford to put 86 min damage on their equipment. So for the time being I assume that the max damage bonus on equip exceeds the min damage bonus.
If we want to compare the dps of WSM -10 and 0 bows we only need to compare the term:
where aps is the amount of attacks per second, avgbonus is the average of the min and the max bonus on equip and avgbase is the average of the min and the max damage of the base weapon.
In order to get a Faith in a WSM -10 base to 7fpa you need 50%/45% IAS at Fana level 12-13/14-15. I can't imagine a scenario where you would not get that, so this is the fpa I will use for the WSM -10 calculations.
Similarly a Faith in a WSM 0 base reaches 8fpa at 35%/30% IAS if the Fana level is 12/13-15 and again I will take this as the absolute lowest fpa acceptable. Additionally it reaches 7fpa at 70%/65% IAS with Fana level 12-13/14-15. This is perfectly achievable with something like 35% Andi, 20% Gloves and 20% Amulet. (You can also use Giant Skull for the Knockback!)
The point I will attempt to make here is that a 7fpa Faith in a WSM -10 bow barely outdamages an 8fpa Faith in a WSM 0 bow. So even if you lack the equipment to get to 7fpa with a WSM 0 bow it is still better to avoid the WSM -10 base because a lucky drop can get you to the next IAS BP and hence significantly more dps while the WSM -10 base is maxed out for good and will never beat a 7fpa WSM 0 base anyway.
To facilitate things I assume that the bows in consideration are all superior with 15% ED. I only look at some of the possible average damage bonuses from equipment. Among them the baseline 0, the WT+Razor Combo 25, the same with eight 1.14d max dam GCs and then the same with eight 1.07 max dam GCs. For reference a GC can get up to 14 max dam in 1.14d and 40 in 1.07. The last value is just for science since the chances of having eight 40 maxdam GCs from 1.07 but not being able to hit 70% IAS from your equip are rather low (Valkyrie Wing anyone?)
Remember that to get the average bonus you have to divide all that maxdam from the GCs by 2 On the far right I calculated the dps for WSM -10 bows at 7fpa and the dps for WSM 0 bows at 8fpa. I then marked the lowest value in each column with red color and the highest value in green (everything in between is yellow). The values in the last row are obtained by dividing the highest WSM -10 value by the highest WSM 0 value.
So you need a total of 320 max dam on top of your WT+Razortail combo just to make your 8fpa WSM -10 bow do 7% more damage than your 8fps WSM 10 bow. Case closed.
I would argue that this eliminates Blade and Great Bow for good if you want to use this on your Bowa.
Why did I not make the same argument for Mat Bow vs. GMB? The difference here is that due to the 'WSM 10 + lvl 12 Fana' combo you might very well be stuck with 8fpa on your GMB while in the WSM 0 case you can reach 7fpa even with a bad roll AND you get to keep your armor. I have no doubt in my mind that 8fpa GMB always outdamages 7fpa Mat Bow.
Conclusion
In my opinion I gave good arguments to disregard Spider, Blade, Great, Ward and Hydra bow altogether which means that there are only five options in total: Crusader+GMB in the WSM 10 category, Diamond+Shadow in the WSM 0 category and Mat Bow in the WSM -10 category.
So what did I pick? Well, I don't swim in Jah's so no Crusader/GMB for me. Also I want to use this on a Rogue for weird builds (or you know, go full Gripphon with an AS Java) so no Mat Bow either. That leaves the choice between Diamond and Shadow where I landed on Diamond because it requires no extra Dex to equip for the Rogue at lvl 65. The damage difference here matters very little ultimately.
I hope this settles the Faith base debate for good
***
Some responses to this post:
)Since this thread is the most recent on the topic (on any forum as far as I can tell) I will put the things I gathered here so people don't have to look at 20 threads before choosing a reasonable base.
I do NOT compare damage here. Doing that is completely unfeasible with the amount of item combinations and charm options available. If you have the wealth to make the best possible Bowazon available (i.e. you are WoRG) you will not need any advice anyway because you have played the game for twenty years straight and know everything about it
What I do attempt here is in fact more of a qualitative approach. I want to narrow the choice of bows down without assuming too much, the actual choice between the (hopefully) few remaining bows is up to you and your equipment.
***
Some things I kept in mind while arguing for and against the different bases:
- Requirements for str, dex and lvl should not be too restrictive
- If two bows have the same average damage then the bow with the higher minimum damage is to be prefered. (people want reliable leech!)
- Rogues can't equip amazon specific bows or crossbows
- Due to the way that animations work in this game there is no way to get a crossbow to 7fpa, so they won't be considered here at all.
- We live in the post 1.13a era, so making a Fortitude is not the limiting factor when building a Bowazon. In fact making any other sort of damage armor is significantly more time and resource draining.
***
For convenience here are the stats of the ten elite bows:
We immediately see that Spider Bow can't get 4os so we are left with nine elite Bows with WSM of -10, 0 and 10 respectively.
Requirements; eliminating Hydra and Ward Bow
First off I want to eliminate regular Bows that are simply worse than others just from looking at their stats.
Level: Every elite bow has a lvl requirement below 65 (Jah Rune) so this requirement does not affect our choice.
Strength: A Bowazon will most likely wear War Travellers which means that she will have at least 105 strength; 95 needed for equipping WTs and 10 granted by them. Additionally ANY rogue will have at least 107 strength at level 65 which means that the only Bows where strength can be used as an argument against them are Great Bow, Hydra Bow and GMB. In the case of the GMB we only have to consider the Amazon and I'm sure she can spare three strength
Dexterity: A level 65 rogue has at least 159 Dex and hence the only bow that might be out of reach for her is the shadow bow. None of the dex requirements are really an obstacle for an Amazon.
Now Hydra and Crusader Bow have the same Weapon Speed Modifier of 10, i.e. they have the same speed, and they have the same average damage. However Hydra Bow has significantly higher requirements as well as lower minimum damage than Crusader Bow and hence is simply worse.
In the same vein Ward and Diamond Bow have the same WSM, average damage and unproblematic requirements but the minimum damage of the Diamond Bow is 13 points higher than that of the Ward Bow.
Eliminations for an Amazon-only Faith
In the case that we do not want our Rogue to be able to use the Faith the choices become much simpler. The GMB has significantly higher average damage (more than 10% extra!) than the other two WSM 10 bows and similarly the Matriarchal Bow has higher average damage than the other two WSM -10 Bows.
Since we do not have to think of the Rogue's ability to equip a shadow bow it will be better than Diamond Bow for us. So we are left with Matriarchal Bow, Shadow Bow and GMB.
Considerations for a first Faith and low runewealth
If you do not have Jahs lying around like some people (
) you might be interested in the number of rerolls it takes to get certain fanaticism levels on your faith:The less than 1 in 50 chance to get lvl 12 Fana if you make three faiths is somewhat reasonable if you're rich, but avoiding lvl 12-13 at all costs will drive you into poverty.
Now why is the lvl 12 roll so dreaded? The answer is actually very simple:
An Amazon wielding a WSM 10 bow (Hydra, Crusader, GMB) under the influence of a Faith (either her own or her mercenary's) needs 100% IAS to reach 7fpa if fanaticism rolled level 12 and 95% IAS if the roll is level 13 or higher.
It just so happens that you can get a maximum of exactly 95% IAS by using the glove, belt, helm and amulet slots together and that is assuming a 45% IAS helm and NO Razortail. This means that either your Bow or your Armor will have to provide the IAS in order for you to reach 7fpa. If your Bow does not provide any IAS (e.g. Faith) this means that you can't use Fortitude AND reach 7fpa at the same time.
If you use GSA you have an inherent 50% IAS and no problems reaching the needed IAS. For a Windforce you will have 20% on the Windforce so even if you do not socket it with more IAS you can still use Razortail AND Fortitude at the same time while reaching 7fpa.
Needless to say it's quite a lot harder to make a good 4os IAS body armor than to make a Fortitude.
***
My takeaway here is that it is a huge risk to make your first Faith in a WSM 10 bow if you do not have the runewealth to reroll. So the list of remaining bows for a first/'poor man's' faith is down to the WSM -10 and 0 bows excluding the Ward Bow, i.e. five bows remaining.
WSM -10 vs. 0
I will now compare those non-classspecific bows with WSM -10 to those with WSM 0 for an Amazon. Before I do this I want to note that the difference between min and max damage is 7 for Diamond and at least 20 for every other bow, so assuming a non-superior base the difference between mix and max after applying the On-weapon ED from Faith is 30,1 for Diamond and at least 86 for every other bow. This only becomes larger in a superior base. I do not know exactly what happens when min exceeds max damage but it won't matter in most cases because only the richest of the rich could ever afford to put 86 min damage on their equipment. So for the time being I assume that the max damage bonus on equip exceeds the min damage bonus.
If we want to compare the dps of WSM -10 and 0 bows we only need to compare the term:
Code:
aps*(avgbonus+(1+onweaponED/100)*avgbase)In order to get a Faith in a WSM -10 base to 7fpa you need 50%/45% IAS at Fana level 12-13/14-15. I can't imagine a scenario where you would not get that, so this is the fpa I will use for the WSM -10 calculations.
Similarly a Faith in a WSM 0 base reaches 8fpa at 35%/30% IAS if the Fana level is 12/13-15 and again I will take this as the absolute lowest fpa acceptable. Additionally it reaches 7fpa at 70%/65% IAS with Fana level 12-13/14-15. This is perfectly achievable with something like 35% Andi, 20% Gloves and 20% Amulet. (You can also use Giant Skull for the Knockback!
)The point I will attempt to make here is that a 7fpa Faith in a WSM -10 bow barely outdamages an 8fpa Faith in a WSM 0 bow. So even if you lack the equipment to get to 7fpa with a WSM 0 bow it is still better to avoid the WSM -10 base because a lucky drop can get you to the next IAS BP and hence significantly more dps while the WSM -10 base is maxed out for good and will never beat a 7fpa WSM 0 base anyway.
To facilitate things I assume that the bows in consideration are all superior with 15% ED. I only look at some of the possible average damage bonuses from equipment. Among them the baseline 0, the WT+Razor Combo 25, the same with eight 1.14d max dam GCs and then the same with eight 1.07 max dam GCs. For reference a GC can get up to 14 max dam in 1.14d and 40 in 1.07. The last value is just for science since the chances of having eight 40 maxdam GCs from 1.07 but not being able to hit 70% IAS from your equip are rather low
(Valkyrie Wing anyone?)Remember that to get the average bonus you have to divide all that maxdam from the GCs by 2
On the far right I calculated the dps for WSM -10 bows at 7fpa and the dps for WSM 0 bows at 8fpa. I then marked the lowest value in each column with red color and the highest value in green (everything in between is yellow). The values in the last row are obtained by dividing the highest WSM -10 value by the highest WSM 0 value.So you need a total of 320 max dam on top of your WT+Razortail combo just to make your 8fpa WSM -10 bow do 7% more damage than your 8fps WSM 10 bow. Case closed.
Looking at the value ('7fpa Great Bow dmg + avgbonus'/'8fpa Shadow Bow dmg + avgbonus')-1 one can see that it grows as avgbonus grows. It is bounded from above by its limit for avgbonus->infty which is (8/7)-1=1/7=1,14... and that in turn means that no matter how much avgbonus you stack on you will never get to 15% higher damage on your 7fpa WSM -10 bow compared to the 8fpa WSM 0 bow.
If this was too technical for you, check this out: I told excel to NOT display stuff after the decimal point and then to double check my results I wrote down the above ratio on a piece of paper using the incorrect values 142 and 165 from the +345% ED column. (they are higher than what's displayed of course)
I then proceeded to try and find out why the formula I came up with for the ratio did not agree with the values obtained in the spreadsheet. Took me way too long to figure that out ...
If this was too technical for you, check this out: I told excel to NOT display stuff after the decimal point and then to double check my results I wrote down the above ratio on a piece of paper using the incorrect values 142 and 165 from the +345% ED column. (they are higher than what's displayed of course)
I then proceeded to try and find out why the formula I came up with for the ratio did not agree with the values obtained in the spreadsheet. Took me way too long to figure that out ...
I would argue that this eliminates Blade and Great Bow for good if you want to use this on your Bowa.
Why did I not make the same argument for Mat Bow vs. GMB? The difference here is that due to the 'WSM 10 + lvl 12 Fana' combo you might very well be stuck with 8fpa on your GMB while in the WSM 0 case you can reach 7fpa even with a bad roll AND you get to keep your armor. I have no doubt in my mind that 8fpa GMB always outdamages 7fpa Mat Bow.
Conclusion
In my opinion I gave good arguments to disregard Spider, Blade, Great, Ward and Hydra bow altogether which means that there are only five options in total: Crusader+GMB in the WSM 10 category, Diamond+Shadow in the WSM 0 category and Mat Bow in the WSM -10 category.
So what did I pick? Well, I don't swim in Jah's so no Crusader/GMB for me. Also I want to use this on a Rogue for weird builds (or you know, go full Gripphon with an AS Java
) so no Mat Bow either. That leaves the choice between Diamond and Shadow where I landed on Diamond because it requires no extra Dex to equip for the Rogue at lvl 65. The damage difference here matters very little ultimately.I hope this settles the Faith base debate for good
***
Some responses to this post:
Assuming you have a suitable FCR/dual leech ring, you could drop the Spirit for some low-req FCR shield and save a lot of strength points no? When going 68 FCR, which I don't like of course.
When I recently overhauled my Bowie for P7 I didn't run CS much at all I must admit. Especially on P8 against those high HP mobs she's even harder to make work smoothly.. In particular Decrepify from OKs is annoying. I've tried to seriously challenge Blizzard 2 Seal XP numbers with Javazon, and I'd say Decrepify was the main reason she couldn't quite do it. Still >2x faster than Bowie ofc...
Good XP gain with Bowie is an interesting aspect generally. I had planned to take mine to Baal next, with a similar setup than yours (going 7 FPA and dropping to 68 FCR due to less teleporting), except with Reaper's/GF Merc. Could still be too tough for her though, haven't gotten around to trying it yet...
I played around a bit with Bowazon setups and trying to build one for Pit running on higher player settings. I've always liked Bowies, but at the same time was often underwhelmed with their performance when running somewhat more difficult content. So as a little side project I fooled around with a lot of different setups for her, in an attempt to make her viable for P7 Pit runs. After some testing, gearing around and several respecs, I've ended up with a build and setup that I thought performed surpringly well. And while testing different approaches she got me a Zod – which is a big plus for any build in my book.
When it comes to teleporting Amazons, I'm an advocate of the 99% FCR breakpoint, in particular for Javazon (for which I've also made a video some time ago). So I was also going for that here. Hitting 7 FPA Multishot was quickly discarded, given those FCR needs made it not feasible. Running the numbers quickly indicated that neither GMB nor Mat Bow provided a DPS advantage (considering the IAS range I was able to move within), but Diamond/Shadow Bow seemed appealing for 8 FPA. I ended up using my first Faith I made in a Diamond Bow, which I like also for the close damage range providing consistent leech. That meant 8 FPA required 30% IAS from other gear with 13+ Fanaticism, which I got via the headpiece socket and a pair of craft gloves. Actually both of these are quite nice items that I've been meaning to put to use for some time.
Since I figured it's overall better explained by talking, I made this little vid.
Equipment:
Build:
- +2 Amazon, 20% FCR, 30% ED, + life circlet, socketed with IAS/8 min dmg jewel
- +2 Amazon, 20% FCR craft amulet
- +2 P&M, 20% IAS, 2% LL, 10% Crushing Blow craft gloves
- Faith Diamond Bow (13/1)
- Enigma MP
- Arachnid Mesh
- Rare ring with 10% FCR, 6 ML, 6 LL, Mana, MF
- Ravenfrost
- War Traveler
- Switch: CtA, 34% Spirit (29+ necessary with the above FCR gear)
- Merc: Pride GPA (16 aura
As stated in the vid, she can't really compete with top P7/P8 Pit runners like Necro or Java. But surprisingly she's not too bad, and it's definitely a lot of fun running with this setup.Stats: Dex-as-dex-can (156 Str for Monarch, rest to Dex). Could be worthwhile to stat Vit instead of going high Dex, though she seems to be just fine with her current life pool.
- 20 Pierce
- 20 CS
- 10 Multishot
- 3 Valkyrie (17 after + skills)
- 20 Magic Arrow (Currently she doesn't have this though, since I was trying with max Guided Arrow before, but that didn't perform as well as Magic Arrow. Alas, I'm out of essences and was too lazy to farm another one.
- 1 Strafe for situational use, probably will put remaining points here when min-maxing her build at some point (i.e. after ditching GA)
I'm curious as to how others have tried to run Bowie on P7/P8 – any thoughts or comments on her? I find it an interesting and fun little challenge to push her to higher player settings.
@Gynli Thanks for your response, those are good points. I've considered a number of them and mentioned some above and in the vid, but here's my thoughts them:
- Dex vs Vit: As mentioned above I basically just went with maximum Dex first and so far didn't feel her ~900 life was too low. But you are of course right that Faith doesn't benefit as much from high Dex as WF, and I'm indeed thinking about going for higher Vit with the next respec for min-maxing purposes.
- CtA: I don't think I'll drop it for this type of runs, even with high Vit. It's still higher life, but also higher mana which is very useful for teleporting, and most importantly it helps the Merc's survivability a ton really.
- Multishot: I agree and I do have 20+ arrows on it. 10-12 is not enough for Pit runs either IMO, gaps will be too big when widening the angle e.g. in those "camp"/"nest" parts.
- Glove choice: LoH is of course a good standard choice, but I felt for P7/P8 Pit runs they are not quite as aweome as they are in most other scenarios. Stone Skin bosses are generally what slows her down a bit, and in particular Skeletons at that (as well as Skeleton champion packs). Demons don't usually take long to kill, that's why I prefer the the CB and +2 P&M from the blood craft gloves I'm using. But admittedly I didn't test LoH on her that much yet – will do that and see how it affects run times.
- Reaper's vs. Pride: I was thinking Pride wins easily for this type of area running, since I don't always want to rely on Decrepify to proc and moreover it will only hit a small portion of the monsters I'm firing at. Pride on the other hand gives you the damage bonus for 100% of your arrows, and no matter how far targets are away. But I might try with Reaper's and see how run times compare.
- 7 FPA: The choice is kind of between 7 FPA with 68 FCR and 8 FPA with 99 FCR, and I wanted to go for the latter. Not entirely sure it's better objectively, but I am sure that personally I enjoy the 99 FCR gameplay.
- Bow choice: Given I wanted to hit 99 FCR, I am only able to incorporate up to 35 IAS with the circlet she's using currently. Diamond Bow/Shadow Bow perform best for this IAS range. GMB will only hit 9 FPA (and at least when running Sharp GCs resulted in lower overall damage) and Mat Bow will also hit 8 FPA but provide lower damage than Diamond/Shadow Bow. As you said, it could be worthwhile to use GMB with a 2os/FCR circlet though. Thing is I don't have any truly amazing ones. Best I could do is a blue +3 P&M/20% FCR that I could take to Larzuk and hope for 2os. With that I could hit 50 IAS and use GMB Faith, which would then also hit 8 FPA Multi. I'll have to run the numbers to see whether this will result in higher damage over my current setup.
QUOTE from Gynli: 'About bowas and /p8. She's bad at it. =P'
That's the general sentiment I know, but I was hoping to challenge that at least to some extent.
QUOTE from Gynli: 'About the Pride/Teleport bug. You have to click for each teleport.'
Tried this briefly and it still happened... But like I said I don't mind it that much honestly, just thought it's something worth noting.
Here's the quote from @onderduiker from this thread regarding concentration bug. Apparently it's already been almost a year since I read it.
QUOTE from onderduiker: '
Failure to Teleport while Concentration is active is definitely linked to its chance uninterruptible 20%: I edited Skills.txt to increase it to 100%, and Teleport failed every (other) time (always teleporting in place before teleporting to the cursor); I decreased it to 0%, and Teleport never failed.
However, this only applied when holding down the right mouse button: when I clicked for each individual Teleport, then it didn't fail. I haven't tested it, but based on this I wouldn't expect mercenaries and pets to be affected since there's an AI delay between every action.'
CtA.
Yup; if you want to hold onto the CtA then I'd agree with high dex and even base vit.
LoH.
good point. now that I recall to strafing back in the early days of my bowa at pits, it was stoneskin skellies that were the slowest to take down - and might/amp archers the scariest.
Pride.
I don't own a Pride to test it out; but I thought possible that time earned from Decrep on Stone Skin might outweight the increase in damage with pride. I do have LoH and fortitude on my bowa, so the dmg from conc is even less significant shud i use it. But like you said, should be worth testing. =)
Hope it works out, and thanks for the gameplay vid btw. I can safely say ill take up a teleport setup of my own for lvl 98.
@necrolemming Indeed that is a very nice headpiece for this one. Ironically, while I don't time travel generally, I do have a 1.07 Valk on some old mule character that isn't part of my current stashes/characters. That's because it's so long ago I'm not sure of its provenance (not entirely sure I found it myself, and back then I sometimes traded with a friend who fooled around with open bnet etc...). So apart from generally just using self-found current patch gear, I think I'll pass up on this one.
Played around with her for another hour or so yesterday. Following the discussion here I bit the bullet, farmed another Diablo essence and went for another respec. Moved some ~60 points from Dex to Vit (now ~1150 life after BO), maxed MA and went up to 24 arrows MS. CS and Pierce remain maxed. I checked again and with my + skill setup the last point increases 1% each. Remaining points to Strafe for situational use. The overhaul didn't have a huge impact overall since I was kind of close to this build before, but it's an optimization nonetheless.
I also checked damage for 2os/20 FCR circlet to use with GMB Faith for 50 IAS/8 FPA. It is a DPS improvement, but only by some 3-4%, while losing some other useful stats. Should be a more significant difference though if I drop Sharp GCs, which I might do at some point. But for now I'll stick to her current circlet. I tried LoH and while it didn't really improve run times, some very brief testing indicated it was pretty much the same clear speed, definitely better than I had thought. Probably requires more testing to see how it compares long-term regarding those undead toughies. Reaper's on the other hand resulted in slower runs. Just doesn't always proc in time and only affects a portion of the targets.
@Gynli Regarding the Teleport issue, I tried again with clicking for every Teleport. While it helps indeed, it still happens occasionally. I think it's when the click occurs just before the previous animation finishes. But again it's totally fine IMO, even more so with that semi-workaround.
I like WF + Faith Merc for non-teleporting Bowie, but for teleporting Bowie at one point I concluded Faith + Might Merc (with extra damage from either Pride or Reaper's) was better. IIRC I briefly talked about this in the vid also. Again the teleport issue with Pride didn't bother me that much tbh.
For Enigma setups, 8 FPA + 99 FCR can be reached with both variants (WF or Faith). IIRC self-wield Faith + Might + Pride provides higher damage than WF + Faith Merc, because Fortitude provides a large portion of damage which makes WF setup competitive. On the other hand, Fortitude doesn't do that much for self-wield Faith setups with Might Merc (and in particular with Pride on top), because the setup already has very high off-weapon ED. Also when going for 7 FPA + 68 FCR, the WF setup requires 95 IAS which makes it harder to hit 68 FCR in comparison to 7+68 setups with Faith...
At least the above was the case for my case witch Diamond Bow Faith (ofc Shadow is same). Mat Bow is lower damage and slightly faster, making it easier to juggle FCR + IAS. GMB hits harder but is slower, making it a little harder to balance breakpoints... Pick your poison.
There is also a discussion on running Cows with Bowas but I didn't copy that:
Revisiting Bowazon for P7/P8 running
How about using atma amulet for ctc AMP and crescent moon on merc?
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Peytron
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So I was questing my Lightning Sorceress now that her mercenary has Infinity, and as we walked into Lower Kurast we were presented with this map:
I've not been too much of a fan of Lower Kurast runs, but maybe we can hang out here for a bit to replenish the two Ber Runes we expended to get this far.
I've not been too much of a fan of Lower Kurast runs, but maybe we can hang out here for a bit to replenish the two Ber Runes we expended to get this far.
McGruber08
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- Mar 19, 2020
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The stars denote the superchest huts, 2 at each campfire. The max is indeed 2 fires (4 huts) per map.
McGruber08
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I almost always check those chest huts. I have found Ist, Mal and Ohm on them. Love em.
SirName
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- Nov 28, 2019
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Was wondering why CE had an extra level on my Bonemancer. Turns out it was thanks to Magefist gloves +1 fireskills. I knew that CE was 50% physical and 50% fire but had kind of forgotten it. This got me thinking of facets and CE. Do both -enemy resists and +firedamage from facets work with CE?
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