Dual Elemental Bowazon - Cant decide how to allocate skills! der=0

[Kitriara]

Dual Elemental Bowazon - Cant decide how to allocate skills!

I've searched through pages upon pages but all I've found are threads about Multishot or Strafe, about using Breath of the Dying, or deciding between all the uniques people have stashed.

I'm doing an untwinked, unrushed bowazon using her Freezing and Immolation arrows - the skills that dont require uber gear to do damage. I'm probably going to get a holy freeze merc to help with crowd control.

I play hardcore and figure on taking this gal into her 80s - she'll be "done" when I kill hell baal.

SO! The problem is that in order to achieve decent numbers in both cold and fire (so I'm not a one trick pony) I need to invest 80 points!... 20 for each main skill and 20 for each damage synergy. This leaves me enough points to drop one in each dodge skill (letting +skills pump them) and throw a few into pierce.

With pgems she has found I've traded for a Kuko (totals +6 to my immolation arrow). Right now I'm only working on the fire side, and once I'm 40ish I'll start down the cold.

If I play almost exclusively with parties, do I really need to worry about a valk? Investing points into her would take away from my ability to diversify my damage types.

This post got a little longwinded so thanks to anyone who read it and can help me! Many, many thanks in advance.

- Kit

 

[simmk81]

check under the magezon build- though pretty underplayed, is not bad as a break from the usual conventions. You might want to check out Freyas's FA guide since you'll get a pretty good idea of what'll you need and build up your fire skill from the guide after that if you're still keen.

 

[Krunch_Kidney]

Yeah, look under magezon. FA is a very powerful skill, immo arrow less so. If you have to compromise, however, you could use FA mostly for its ability to freeze rather than damage and roast them with immo arrow while they're frozen. In other words, build up immo arrow and its synergy and use FA mainly to hold them in place. To do this you will want to gather lots of cold charms and wear cold damage gear to increase FA's freeze duration. Every cold charm gives increases your freeze time by 1 second in normal, 1/2 in nightmare and 1/4 in hell. And each piece of cold gear like buriza or eye of etlitch have inherent freeze durations. Check out Freyas guide at the top of the forum for tons of info bout FA and freeze times. If you always play with a group then you may not need a valk. I would definitely go with a magezon build so that you don't have to put pts into penetrate to raise your AR.

 

[Freyas]

You can get by pretty well with the elemental skills without maxing the synergies. What I might recommend would be to put 20 points into Freezing and Immo Arrows, and 10 into cold and exploding arrows. I would definately recommend investing some points into valkyrie, since she will keep monsters off of you, and hold them in place so your immolations have a chance to work. For an untwinked character, you will have a lot of difficulties equipping a merc who can survive against some of the nasty cold immunes in hell, and you won't be able to keep them in place using FA. A valkyrie can generally survive most anything, especially if you use FA and decoy to take pressure off of her in nasty situations.

A valkyrie will hold crowds of monsters in one place, and have them grouped up around her, which allows your elemental skills to have the greatest effect. If the monsters are tightly packed, your FA splash damage, as well as the explosion damage from Immo or exploding arrow, will hit many monsters each time it hits, and if it pierces, each hit you get with that arrow will hit several targets. If you can get a good amount of +skills, you don't really need too many points into valkyrie to get her to a high enough level to survive well.

I would recommend trying to find a bow that has a fast attack and inherent piercing, such as Kuko, though this could be difficult untwinked. In fact, Kuko would probably be about the best bow for this type of build, since it has a nice amount of fire damage that will spread with your immo/exploding arrows, inherent piercing(50%, iirc), +skills, and a fast base attack speed. The extra points into immo arrow will help out nicely as well.

As the other posters have recommended, read the FA guide that is stickied, which explains FA in detail. Most of the information is correct/similar with the fire skills, such as that fire damage from equipment is spread through your explosion, and the section dealing with effects triggering off the arrow hitting versus splash damage is also relevant for the fire skills.

For an untwinked character, especially one only focusing on the elemental attacks, I would recommend using a mageazon(mana regen) build. Even untwinked, you can use gear socketed with skulls or topazes to increase your mana pool and mana regen in order to help sustain your firing, and hopefully you'll be able to find some good equipment to help in this respect. The chances of finding good equipment for mana + regen on an untwinked character is much better than stumbling across a high damage bow and some sources of mana leech.

Hope this helped some.
Freyas

 

[Darklord-kz]

Freyas, thx. your suggestion help me out a lot, i know where i should go for now. i also am a magezon, go for FA and Exploding arrow. :worship:

-dark knight