It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

Colony

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Jul 26, 2003
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It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

Thyiad’s been nice enough to host a PDF version of this guide on her site, which you might find easier to read through.

1. Introduction
1.1. Purpose of the Guide
1.2. PvP Rulesets
2. Breakpoints and Game Mechanics
2.1. Faster Hit Recovery (FHR)
2.2. Faster Cast Rate (FCR)
2.3. Energy Shield
2.4. Miscellaneous
3. Build Guides
3.1. Amazon
3.1.1. Bowazon Guide
3.1.2. GA/Poison Hybridzon
3.2. Assassin
3.3. Barbarian
3.4. Druid
3.4.1. Fury/Rabies
3.4.2. Wind Druid
3.5. Necromancer
3.5.1. Bone Necromancer
3.5.2. Poison Necromancer
3.6. Paladin
3.6.1. PvP Vindicator
3.6.2. Hammerdin
3.7. Sorceress
3.7.1. Fire Sorc
3.7.2. Blizzard Sorceress Guide
4. Non-Class Specific Information
4.1. Absorb, Max Resist Items, Resistance Stacking and Damage Reduction Order
4.2. Counters to specific builds
4.3. FFA and Team Duels
5. FAQ
6. Conclusion
Appendix
Links to other PvP guides
GM Rules
List of Abbreviations

(Copy the section title of interest and paste into your browser’s search bar to skip to a specific section)

[FONT=&quot]1. Introduction[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot] 1.1. Purpose of the Guide[/FONT]


Whilst Sint’s old PvP guide (http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=507437) was great when it was first written, a lot of things have changed since then, both on the SPF and in game. The general wealth of the SPF has increased greatly, to the extent that items that were once very rare to come across, such as Grief, are now regarded as being much easier to obtain. This guide will attempt to provide an updated version of Sint’s original guide. The rule set most commonly used will be discussed, a summary of some of the more important game mechanics aspects will be presented, with some indication of their significance. The build guides section outlines some of the more common builds that tend to be used in PvP games in general, followed by various information about absorb, general counters to builds, and a short discussion on team and FFA duelling. A lot of this information is already available in other forums, particularly the PvP forum and the Stats forum, but various points have been adapted so that they’re more applicable to the SPF, rather than Battle.net.

Obviously I couldn’t write something of this size on my own, I had some help from a few of the other members here:

Liquid_Evil – Druid guides and FAQ
Maxicek – Assassin guides and FAQ
Zhao_Yue – Bowazon and Blizzard sorc guides
Jingizu – Hybridzon guide
Bassano – Poison necro guide
Sequana/Denton – Smiter guide
Essojay – Team and FFA section

[FONT=&quot] 1.2. PvP Rulesets[/FONT]


The rules most commonly used nowadays are intended to prevent inherent imbalances in classes becoming too dominant and leading to too many one sided matches. Obviously this doesn’t always occur, and it is still possible to completely negate attacks under these rules, but in general if it’s just a standard game don’t stack and absorb someone to the point that their damage becomes insignificant. Save that sort of thing for tournaments. They’re fairly comparable to what’s being regarded as GM in public games on Battle.net, with a couple of exceptions, the main ones being the bans on Decrepify, Bone Prison and recasting Cyclone and Bone Armour.

No potions (except mana potions), mercs, wells, or shrines.
No recasting Cyclone and Bone Armour.
No minions that cannot be summoned in town with the exception of Decoy.
No Holy Freeze, Decrepify, Slow Missiles, or Bone Prison.
No mass slow (>10%), no mass poison from items (>200), no mass replenish (>25).
No curse charges (this includes Slow Missiles). Chance to cast is acceptable.
No over absorb. Limit 2 items per element with the standard ban on Rising Sun and Black Oak.
Mana potions are allowed for all characters except ES based sorcs

The old GM rules are hardly ever used anymore, but are given in the appendix for completeness.

[FONT=&quot]2. Breakpoints and Game Mechanics[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot] 2.1. Faster Hit Recovery (FHR) [/FONT]


When your character takes a certain amount of damage (one twelfth of their maximum life), or is hit by attacks with the stun effect, they are put into hit recovery. Examples of attacks that always stun are Mind Blast and Smite, you can tell if they’re influencing you by the swirly icon that appears above your head when they hit. One other skill to watch out for is Leap, which knocks you back as well as putting you into hit recovery. The breakpoints for all classes are given in the table below (taken from http://strategy.diii.net/news.php?id=551#General Breakpoints)

Code:
  [B]Character       Weapon           Hit Recovery Frames[/B]
  [B]                                 15     14      13      12      11      10      9      8      7      6      5      4      3      2[/B]
  [B]Amazon          All[/B]                                              0       6     13     20     32     52     86    174    600           
  [B]Assassin        All[/B]                                                             0      7     15     27     48     86    200      
  [B]Barbarian       All[/B]                                                             0      7     15     27     48     86    200     
  [B]Druid, human[/B]                             
  [B]      1-handed swinging weapons*[/B]         0       3       7      13      19     29     42     63     99    174    456                
  [B]           Other weapons[/B]                         0       5      10      16     26     39     56     86    152    377                          
  [B]Druid, werebear All[/B]                              0       5      10      16     24     37     54     86    152    360                         
  [B]Druid, werewolf All[/B]                                                                           0      9     20     42     86     280
  [B]Necromancer     All[/B]                              0       5      10      16     26     39     56     86    152    377                         
  [B]Paladin[/B]                             
  [B]           Spears and staves[/B]                     0       3       7      13     20     32     48     75    120    280               
  [B]           Other weapons[/B]                                                        0      7     15     27     48     86    200              
  [B]Sorceress       All[/B]               0      5       9      14      20      30     42     60     86    142    280
As the table shows, some classes will have a much tougher time against characters that use attacks that stun, particularly Sorceresses and human Druids. With some builds FHR is much more of a concern than others, most builds with uninterruptible attacks, such as WW Barbs, can get away with less FHR than other builds.

[FONT=&quot] 2.2. Faster Cast Rate (FCR) [/FONT]


FCR determines your characters casting speed. As with FHR there are certain breakpoints that will affect this.

Code:
  [B]Frames  Amazon  Assassin  Druid Human  Druid WW  Druid WB  Pal/Nec  Barb/Sorc  Sorc Light/CL[/B]
  [B]19[/B]        0                                                                         0
  [B]18[/B]        7                  0                                                      7
  [B]17[/B]       14                  4                                                     15
  [B]16[/B]       22       0         10             0         0                             23
  [B]15[/B]       32       8         19             6         7       0                     37
  [B]14[/B]       48      16         30            14        15       9                     52
  [B]13[/B]       68      27         46            26        26      18          0          78
  [B]12[/B]       99      42         68            40        40      30          9         117
  [B]11[/B]      152      65         99            60        63      48         20         194
  [B]10[/B]              102        163            95        99      75         37         
  [B]9[/B]               174                      157       163     125         63          
  [B]8[/B]                                                                     105         
  [B]7[/B]                                                                     200
In general it’s advisable to aim for one of the top 2 breakpoints for each class if any of your main skills are dependent on cast rate.

[FONT=&quot] 2.3. Energy Shield[/FONT]


Energy Shield is much more commonly seen on sorceresses in PvP than in PvM. The main reason for this is that mana burn monsters will drain mana very quickly when they hit, leaving you very vulnerable, though it also takes away skill points from synergies, lowering damage. The actual damage done to your character will also tend to be lower. The usefulness of energy shield for a particular build will depend on stat distribution, skills used, and the equipment available. It is also necessary to bear in mind that if you do use ES then you are no longer allowed to use mana potions, though with a well planned build this shouldn’t be a huge issue.

There are several cases where it is almost certainly worth using ES on a new build. The first is if you’re planning on not using any blocking at all, which in general, should really only be done on 200 FCR sorcs. It is possible to build a 105 FCR no block sorc, but you will be more vulnerable to physical damage without the extra speed. Another case would be if you’re likely to have spare skill points left over after finishing off your main skills, though this is only really common for Fire sorcs.

Energy Shield has a synergy, Telekinesis, which has the effect of reducing the amount of mana lost per point of damage taken. This reduction is equal to 1/16th of a point, or 0.0625, per level. With no points in telekinesis each point of damage that ES protects against would remove 2 mana. With 20 skill points in telekinesis only 0.75 mana will be drained for each point of damage taken. Points in ES itself will simply increase the percentage of the damage that gets diverted to mana and its duration. It is also important to remember that the mana loss is calculated before resistances are applied, so elemental attacks can be a considerable problem.

The actual formulae used to calculate damage to life and mana, taken from soepgroente’s ES FAQ (http://strategy.diii.net/news.php?id=564) are given below:
Damage to life = InitialDamage*(W/100)*(1-X/100)*(1-Z/100)
W = PvP penalty (for most, if not all attacks 17%)
X = % resistance (or damage reduction in case of a physical attack))
Z = % energy shield

Fill in zero if you have zero resistance or block or damage reduction.
For example if you take 12 000 damage hit from a fire ball when duelling another sorceress with maxed telekinesis, resistances and 95% (max) energy shield:
Damage to life = 12 000*0,17*(1-0,75)*(1-0)*(1-0,95) = 25,5 life lost
For damage to mana another formula can be used:
Damage to mana = Damage*(2 – 0,0625x)*(W/100)
x = slvl telekinesis
W = pvp penalty

Take the same example as above, with the fire ball hitting:
Damage to mana = 12 000*(2-0,0625*20)*(0,17) = 1530 mana lost
Points in telekinesis will generally have a better effect than points in ES, due to the way these damage formulae work, as even a large mana pool will quickly be drained if you take 2 or 3 damaging hits in quick succession. Maxing telekinesis first, before putting any points in ES is a good general method to use, though working out how many points to put in ES is more difficult, as it depends on how much damage you’re willing to sacrifice for more survivability. An 80% ES is a good minimum to aim for if you use limited prebuffing (ES Ormus and a +9 Memory staff). 95%, the maximum, takes a level 40 ES, which requires either a sizeable skill point investment, or a lot of prebuffing, which quickly becomes tedious to do every time you need to recast it.

One final point about ES is that it does not protect against poison damage and OW in any way, which when you also account for the fact that ES sorcs will almost always have lower life than non-ES builds, can lead to serious problems against particular builds, mainly Assassins.

2.4. Miscellaneous

Blocking

The chance to block an attack can be calculated using the formula below:

Final blocking = (Blocking – (Dexterity – 15))/(Character level × 2)

The base blocking on all shields will be different for each class, with Paladins having the highest probabilities, and Sorceresses, Necromancers and Druids having the lowest. The “Blocking” term in the formula is the sum of both the blocking inherent to the shield, and any other bonuses, such as Holy Shield. These are not capped at 75%, unlike the final chance to block. When running your chance to block is reduced to one-third of its normal value.

Chance to hit

The chance to hit can be calculated from:

Final CtH = 2 × (AR/(AR + DR)) × (Alvl/(Alvl + Dlvl)) × 100

Alvl = Attacker’s character level
Dlvl = Defender’s character level
AR = Attacker’s attack rating
DR = Defender’s defence

The level dependent part of the formula is the main reason that AR dependent characters often have to be levelled up further than casters, otherwise there is a noticeable drop in the chances of hitting. Most caster’s defence rating is negligible for a well built melee character, though cold sorcs using Chilling Armour can hit 5,000 with certain items. Paladin’s can reach very high defence values, often well over 20,000, so if your attack skills are not autohit skills it is often useful to use the Enchant from Demon Limb, as well as the Angelic amulet/ring. Hsaru’s boots and belt will also give a big AR boost. One other point to remember is that when running this calculation is completely ignored.

Run/Walk Speed

Unlike for cast speed and hit recovery there are no breakpoints for run and walk speeds. Skill based run/walk speed bonuses do not suffer from diminishing returns, but item based faster run/walk does. There are also penalties associated with using medium and heavy armour/shields, of 5% and 10% respectively. Like skill based FRW these are not subject to diminishing returns.

Deadly Strike, Crushing Blow and Open Wounds

These are grouped together as they all produce a certain effect when an attack hits. Deadly strike will make an attack do double damage, though this is not cumulative with critical strike from masteries. The chance of doing double damage is:

Chance to do double damage = 100 × (1 – ((1 – DS/100) × (1 – CS/100)))

DS = Total percentage chance to cause deadly strike
CS = Total percentage chance to cause critical strike

Crushing blow will remove a percentage of a player’s life when it hits, against other players this is 1/10th of their current life with a melee weapon, and 1/20th of their life with a ranged weapon. It’s not as useful in PvP as in PvM due to life totals being lower, and damage being higher, though for high life characters, such as Barbarians it can be helpful, as 1/10th of their life can sometimes be over 400 hit points.

Open wounds causes negative life regeneration when it is triggered, the amount of which depends on the attacker’s level and the type of target. In the case of interest here (character level 61+), the formula is:

Damage per frame = ((45 × Clvl – 1319)/256) × K
K = 0.25 for melee attacks, and 0.125 for ranged attacks
The duration of OW itself is 200 frames, or 8 seconds

For example, if a level 90 character triggers OW with a melee attack:
Damage per frame = (4050 – 1319)/256 × 0.25 = 2.67
Damage per second = 2.67 × 25 = 66.67
Total damage = 66.67 × 8 = 533.4

Most HLD characters are likely to be in at least their high 80s, with most melee or ranged builds including some form of OW, so it is important to plan for it, particularly with a low life build, such as a full ES sorc, or a bowazon. It’s very useful for builds that rely on melee attacks, but which have relatively low actual damage outputs, such as Ghosts. It can also be useful to swap an item for one that has a high OW chance when facing an ES sorc with a very strong energy shield.

[FONT=&quot]3. Build Guides[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot] 3.1. Amazon[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]3.1.1. Bowazon Guide[/FONT]


The Bowazon is a long ranged physical damage dealer, capable of dealing pain to opponents from afar, but less effective in close combat. One of the easier builds to play offensively, her Guided Arrow just needs to be shot in the general direction of the enemy and the arrow can home in on them. She is not as effective in 1v1 or FFA as other builds, but her real asset is in teams, where she can be boosted and protected by teammates, while supplying long range offence. She favours FRW to close in, sidestep or avoid an enemy as she does not utilize teleport. Besides attacking with a bow, she can switch to her javelin/shield for more offensive and defensive options.

Damage or Life?
This is you personal preference, as you may choose to put more points into vitality for more life, or into dexterity for more damage. I feel that a Bowazon is not meant to tank and needs to deal a decent amount of damage hence I would aim for a set amount of life, perhaps 800-1000 then put the rest into dexterity. Putting points into dexterity is especially important if you do not have a Fortitude Armour.

Skill Points
Guided Arrow (20) – Your main attack.
Critical Strike (20) – Your additional source of damage for both you arrows and javelins.
Dodge, Avoid and Evade (10+ each) – Allows you to avoid attacks, be aware of diminishing returns at higher levels. Try to achieve at least 50% in each of the 3 skills.
Multishot (1 or 8+) – Less powerful than Guided Arrow, but covers a much greater area. Useful when you are trying to hit fast moving players and you want to cover a general area. If you do choose to use this skill have at least 8 points for a decent coverage.
Strafe (1+) – Great against teleporting casters with no or low block, as the fast attack of Strafe added with knockback can stun them. You gain an additional shot every fourth level.
Decoy and Valkyrie (1) – Useful to be barriers against enemy projectiles.
Penetrate (1) – Helps AR with Jab, Strafe and Multishot.
Jab (1) – Useful for close combat.
Lightning Bolt (1) – This skill converts you javelin damage to 3/4 lightning damage and makes it ignore target defence and block. Not as strong as Lighting Fury but more effective when the target has low lightning resist and high block.
Lightning Fury (1) – This skill grants your javelin ignore target defence but is still blockable. Useful against charging Paladins and Barbarians. Also can be used to clear minions.

Status Points
Strength – 156 for Stormshield
Dexterity – Rest of your points here for max damage, or enough for max block with Stormshield if going for vitality build, or points to your discretion to attain a certain middle ground for life.
Vitality – Dependent on you decision on dexterity.
Energy – None.

Equipment
Your bow is your most important piece of equipment and depending on what type you choose, you should plan the rest of your gear around it.

Elite bows come in 4 base speeds:
10 – Crusader Bow, Hydra Bow, Grand Matron Bow
5 – Spider Bow
0 – Shadow Bow, Diamond Bow, Ward Bow
-10 – Blade Bow, Great Bow, MatriarchalBow

Increased Attack Speed
If you choose a 10 base speed bow, you want to achieve at least +86% IAS from gear for a 9 frame Guided Arrow, 0 base speed bow +105% IAS for 8 frame and -10 base speed bow +75% IAS for 8 frame.

Some bows to consider:
Eaglehorn Crusader Bow – A bow with very good damage and shouldn’t be expansive to acquire. However it lacks IAS so you’d need to make it up from equipment or socketing.

Windforce Hydra Bow – The most damaging bow you can acquire barring a ‘Faith’ bow. It has the knockback mod and includes 20% IAS so it saves you some equipment choices. However it is a bit more expensive.

Lysander’s Aim Grand Matron Bow – Provides decent damage however you need to use runes to upgrade.

Witchwild String Diamond Bow – Has % chance to cast Amplify Damage, scaling Deadly Strike, resistance and 2 sockets. Amp is fun when it goes off and 2 sockets gives you flexibility (Nef for Knockback, Shaels for IAS, etc). You can also use the points that would have gone into Critical Strike to another skill since Critical and Deadly are calculated separately. However the bow damage itself is low and you need to spend runes to upgrade it.

Widowmaker Ward – Decent damage, Deadly Strike and +Guided Arrow. However I think there are better choices.

Harmony MatriarchalBow (or Blade Bow or Great Bow) – A personal favourite of mine, it sports good damage and the Vigor aura for increased mobility at a relatively cheap price. However no IAS so it needs to be made up in equipment.

Passion Matriarchal Bow (or Blade Bow or Great Bow) – Provides decent damage with IAS at a cheap price. You could also use the HoW charges if you with, but you’d lose it when you switch to javelins.

Other Notes on Equipment
Knockback is essential on a Bowazon build, as when your arrows or javelins hit, your opponent has a 50% chance of being pushed back, giving you a bit of extra time to either continue your attack or reposition yourself.

Besides IAS, the other important things you should look for on your gear are items with Faster Run/Walk, damage or life. I would suggest to try to get at least get 120% FRW on you javelin switch. In terms of faster hit recovery, I would suggest at least the 20% FHR breakpoint.

Also, Bowazons tend to find obtaining resistances difficult, unless they make big sacrifices in their equipment and charms. I would suggest prioritizing, focusing on physical defence and lighting resistance first, as they are the most common types of attacks you face. You may keep extra gear/charms in your stash for fire or poison resistance.

Gear Choices
Helm
Valkyrie Wing – A useful helm to meet breakpoints. A common socketing choice is a 15% IAS jewel.
Harlequin Crest – Has 10% Damage Reduce and the +Life/Mana is very useful especially if you character is not receiving Battle Orders.
Andariel’s Visage – Used mainly for its 20% IAS. It also has massive poison resistance.
Giant Skull – The knockback mod allows you to wear different gloves if you bow does not have it. You have the option of socketing the helm with IAS jewels, however acquiring one might be pricey, especially one with 2 sockets.

Amulet
Cat’s Eye - +Dex, FRW and IAS the perfect Amulet for this build.
Highlander’s Wraith - +Deadly Strike, Lightning Resistance and IAS this is also a good amulet.
Atma’s Scarab – If you don’t need IAS from you amulet, you can consider this for the chance to cast Amplify Damage. It also has great poison resistance for poison users.

Weapon Switch
Titan’s Revenge and Stormshield – I can’t really suggest any alternative weapon switches as this is used by all bowazon builds, rich or poor. Titan’s have good damage, +Str/Dex and the ever important FRW mod. If you can afford it, upgrade them so you javelins do more damage. You can socket you shield with an Eld Rune to save dexterity for max block, or a nice –requirements jewel to save on strength.

Armour
Treachery Runeword - +45% IAS gives you a massive boost in reaching the next IAS breakpoint. Also gives 20% FHR and a small damage boost with Venom.
Duress Runeword – An option if you choose to include Open Wounds in your build, but keep in mind it is only half effective with ranged attacks. Also sports +40% FHR, a small bit of ED% and resistances.
Twitchthroe – Superb armour armour with +FHR, +IAS, +strength/dexterity. If you choose a vitality build, the +25% blocking saves you a good amount of dexterity.
Lionheart Runeword – A decent armoured providing stats across the board. Also provides some +ED% and resistances.
Fortitude – The ultimate armour for a Bowazon, it’s +300% ED makes her much more dangerous.

Gloves
Crafted Hitpower Gloves – Used mainly to get the knockback mod. Try to craft some with IAS.
Dracul’s Grasp – If you have Knockback from another sources consider this with Open Wounds and +strength, but also chance to cast Life Tap.
Bloodfist – A good alternative, with FHR, life, some IAS and +min damage.

Belt
Nosferatu’s Coil – Used for its IAS and +strength.
Crafted Blood Belt – A good one can give a nice boost to life and Open Wounds
Verdungo’s Hearty Cord – Provides Damage Reduce % if needed and also a healthy boost to vitality.
Thundergod’s Vigor – Used mainly against opponents who use lighting based attacks.

Rings
Ravenfrost – An important source of Cannot Be Frozen, and also dexterity and mana. I would suggest wearing a pair of these.
Dwarfstar – Has a nice boost to life and fire absorb.
Rare Ring – Look for one with +str/+dex, life/mana. But good ones are usually a bit expensive and it would probably be easier to get a Ravenfrost instead.

Boots
War Travellers – The +Damage on these boots help on low damage bows. Also provides some vitality and strength.
Waterwalks – Provides a healthy dose of life and dexterity.
Gore Riders – Small boost damage with +Deadly Strike and Open Wounds
Aldur’s Boots – Fast boots with +40% FRW, life and fire resistance.

Charms
Can be used to fill the holes that your gear couldn’t cover whether its life, FRW, damage or resistance. If you are looking for damage charms, I would suggest to go for Grand Charms with +Max damage ranging from 8-10, which shouldn’t be too expensive. Duel modded charms (+Max and life) are much better, but much more pricy.

Versus Strategies
Generally you should be continuously moving, both to avoid opponents or their projectiles and to position yourself for a better shot, unless you are confident of you position in which you can continuous launch arrows at your opponent. Ideally you want to use your range to your advantage and keep your opponent approximately 1 screen away from you.

However, be aware that Guided arrow can hit from 2-3 screens away, so feel free to snipe from a distance if you feel your opponent is in that general area. If you have life or mana leech, check for the red/blue swirls when you are firing your arrows, as they indicate you are hitting your opponent and you can continue to fire away.

Remember to get your javelin switch up when physical damage dealers are close by or about to attack. You have the option of switching to walk, whereby your block is increased to 75%, but mobility is greatly reduced.

Here are some tips on common builds you see in the moor.

Whirlwind Barbarian
Non-teleporting ones are not bad. They have to close the distance to attack so when they are running at you, fire at the red x on the minimap. When they appear on you screen keep firing, but be ready to switch to you Javelin/Shield switch. When he’s close to you, he’ll most likely start WWing at you and you need to switch weapons. Try to sidestep him and throw Lightning Furies at him. If you find you have some distance between you two because he did a long whirl or you managed to run away, switch back to your bow and fire away.

Teleporting Barbarians are much more difficult because they can close in much quicker with teleport. It’s very difficult to escape their screen as they teleport to you, but if you do manage to escape and he’s playing catch up, definitely switch back to bow to let a few arrows fly. Use the same strategy as above, but be ready to switch to your javelin switch much earlier. You’ll be using your shield switch much more in close combat, unless you are confident he is stuck in a long whirl and you can squeeze off a shot or 2.

Bone Necromancer
If Bone Spirits are homing in on you, keep moving and fire shots every few steps. Also remember to zigzag if he’s trying to hit you with Bone Spear. Try to constantly keep some arrows out, to ensure he’s pressured and discouraged from spamming in one spot. Avoid contact with his Clay Golem at all cost, he can slow your attack speed and run speed to a snail’s pace, which is a death sentence to you.

Fireball/Lightning Sorceress
Keep your Decoy and Valkyrie to create additional obstacles from their projectiles. If they are tying to shoot at you from long range, constantly move to avoid being a stationary target. If they are charging in to hit you up close, try to anticipate their teleport pattern and let your arrows fly in that general direction. If they are close by, run away in a zigzag patter to make yourself harder to hit and periodically shoot a Guided Arrow or 2 to place a little pressure on them. If they have no/low block, utilize Strafe when they are on your screen.

Blizzard Sorceress
Try to keep him off you screen as he’s probably trying to drop a blizzard on you, which will kill you in 1-2 hits. If he is close, move erratically to make yourself a harder target to hit. It’s a tough fight as she often has Chilling Armour that can negate you Arrows and the dreaded namelock means imminent death for you.

Hammerdin
The key here is to keep moving (preferably in a South or Southwest direction) and not be trapped in his hammerfield. You have the advantage here because you outrange him. No need to switch to your javelins; just stop and shoot every few steps.

Smiter
Make sure you are surrounded by puddles and other obstacles as he’s more likely to desync charge in to try to get some hits. When he’s close by, switch to your javelins and run away from him, flinging Lightning Furies as he is charging at you. Avoid letting him push you into a wall or obstacle as he can switch to Smite and entrap you by constantly smiting you.

Ghost Assassin
Treat like a WW Barb but get ready to break Mind Blast stun by rapidly switch weapons. Try to get some distance between you if you can.

Trap Assassin
If the assassin is just sitting in his traps, use your superior range to snipe him from afar. However if she is aggressive and is chasing you, your main goal here is to try to keep him off screen to prevent him from Mind Blasting you. You also need to keep constantly moving to avoid any traps that are nearby. If you do find yourself stunned, rapidly weapon switch to break any locks he tries to do.

Wind Druid
Non-teleporting ones are easy as you can just out run their short ranged Tornadoes while sniping from afar.

However ones that teleport are pretty much impossible. The reason for this is because the combination of Hurricane, 5 Crows and Spirit Wolfs put you in dodge/block lock if your opponent teleports on top of you. Best thing to do is to keep moving so it’s hard for him to jump on top of you. Have you javelin switch on if he’s close by. You can try to rid him of his wolves and oak with Multishot or Lightning Fury, and if you do, hit him with Guided Arrow before he resummons his minions.

Bowazon
You have the choice of keeping your distance or closing in. If you choose to keep your space, make sure your Valkyrie and Decoy is up and be aware of obstacles you can hid behind. This goes down to who can snipe who first. If you chose to be more aggressive, switch to you javelin switch and run up to your opponent (not directly) and either throw Lightning Furies at him or chase him to Jab.

As an example of one of the harder types of opponent to beat, this video shows how to deal with a fast teleporting caster, in this case a bone necro (taken from TienJe’s hybrid amazon guide here: http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=573409):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68UynO-POFw

[FONT=&quot]3.1.2. GA/Poison Hybridzon[/FONT]


INTRO
If you want to make a PvP amazon, you have several choices. A Bowazon is a relatively expensive build if you want to make her really effective. Pure javazons are seldom seen nowadays, they are usually a little bithybridised, using guided arrow as a finishing and tactical attack. There is a very nice guide for this build written by Liquid_Evil http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=346563.
The build that is presented here is a real hybrid, having spread points into all three skill trees, dispensing decent physical and poison damage. This amazon has strong guided arrow attack capable of dealing a lot of damage from afar, together with a useful multiple shot covering the Moor witharrows. After weapon switch she is able to fill the air with poison clouds that are hard to avoid and difficult to survive without proper gear.

STATS

Strength - enough to wear equipment as usual, you will need 156 with Titan’s on switch, which means a maximum of 136 hard points.
Dexterity - 250+ being a hybrid that is trying to do good bow damage, otherwise at least enough for max block with Stormshield.
Vitality - aim for 1.2k+ life with equipment.
Energy - nothing.

SKILLS

Bow and crossbow skills
GA 20
Multiple shot 1-20
Strafe 0-1

Passive skills
Critical strike 1+
D/A/E 1+
Penetrate 1
Pierce 1
Valkyrie 1

Javelin skills
Poison javelin 20
Plague javelin 20
Lightning fury 1
Jab 0-1

SKILLS INFO

Guided arrow - one of the main attacks, maxing it is obvious.

Multiple shot - even with one hard point in penetrate and some AR charms you should have at least 3k attack rating, however I recommend getting over 4k, which ensures a chance to hit opponents of equal level with 1k defence 80% of the time. Don’t expect to hit high defence characters too often, but it should work against casters. Add enough points for 5-10 arrows or more if you use it often and like it. This skill is generally useful against low defence characters and for killing minions.

Strafe - could be useful in some duels either for block locking or for delivering damage/OW/knockback quickly to low/no block characters on your screen. Only a backup or situational attack, keep in mind that strafe depends on AR like multiple shot, so don’t use it against barbs, paladins etc. It has a 4 frame next delay to hit the same target, so with 3 fpa strafe you could hit your opponent every six frames (still much faster than 8 fpa GA).

Critical strike - 50% chance of doing double damage should be fine. If you are using witchwild string, less points are sufficient. If you have spare points, put them here up to 65% chance, after that the diminishing returns are almost unacceptable.

D/A/E - 12/7/12 after +skills means 50% chance. Don’t take these numbers too strictly and add as much points as you want, everything above 40% is nice. Combined with full DR and max block on switch, your amazon could be respectable opponent for physical attackers. You could have problem with D/A/E/block lock when facing fast attacking chars. You can’t shorten thelength of these passive skills, they always take 8 frames.

Valkyrie - useful in many duels, adding more than one point is a waste for this build, the points are better spent elsewhere.

Jab, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Fury - utility skills, will be discussed in strategy section.

Poison and plague javelin - these skills do comparable damage, but they differ a lot in poison length and timer. Poison javelin is almost spammable (2x slower than throw), which makes it a better skill for actually poisoning something - you can fill the air with poison clouds, but the poison damage lasts for a long time (typically one minute). Plague javelin‘s effect is much shorter (around 15 seconds), being a better skill at first glance, but has a long timer from a PvP point of view (100 frames) and travels slower, which makes it relatively difficult to hit someone with it.

IMPORTANT: In hell difficulty, where the duels take place, the poison length duration is 100% longer, which means that your poison skills do double the listed damage (over a longer period). For example, poison javelin’s poison damage does not apply for listed 13 seconds, but for 26 seconds, thus doubling the listed damage. Moreover, the poison length reduction on opponents gear subtracts the listed %, but from the original duration. That means that if your opponent takes Death’s Gloves with 75% poison length reduction and is hit by poison javelin, the poison length will be 26 - (0.75 x 13) = 16 seconds. Your opponent could take two sources of PLR (combination of Death’s gloves and Iratha’s amulet gives shorten the poison duration by 150%, that means it will last 50% of the original listed time).

In the table below I have listed an example of the real average PvP damage your opponent will receive from your poison skills and how long does it take.

Code:
                                  75% resist              75% resist              0% resist
                                  75% PLR                 0% PLR                  0% PLR
   
  Lvl 26 poison javelin           1010 life (72 sec.)     1596 life (116 sec.)    6384 life (116 sec.)
  Lvl 26 plague javelin           709 life (16 sec.)      1171 life (26 sec.)     4684 life (26 sec.)
Being a poison char, you have to understand how the poison works, especially what will happen when your opponent is hit repeatedly by your poison cloud. Generally speaking, there are two possibilities. Either the new source of poison damage has lower bite rate, in which case nothing will happen and the older poison damage and duration will not be overridden. Or, the new source has higher bite rate and will override the old one and reset the timer. Example - you have poison javelin doing 18175-19869 poison damage over 58 seconds. You hit an opponent, let’s say the game randomly chooses 19000 damage roll. Your opponent is poisoned and takes damage. If you hit him again 10 seconds later, the game rolls either lower damage and nothing will happen - the older 19k damage will last for the rest 48 seconds. But if the new roll has higher bite rate, the poison damage will be overridden and opponent will start to take newly calculated damage for newly started 58 seconds.
What does it mean for us PvP-wise? Once you hit an opponent with poison or plague javelin, you can’t multiply the current damage taken. You can only override it, but it depends on the damage roll. Also, plague javelin has a higher bite rate than poison javelin, so you can always override poison javelin by plague, but not override plague by poison. That could be handy if you fight an enemy that is hard to hit by plague javelin - hit him with poison javelin, he will think “now I can’t be poisoned again” and starts to play more offensively giving you better chance of hitting him with the faster killing plague javelin.

GEAR

What to look for on your equipment:

IAS - firing GAs fast is really essential. Don’t sacrifice a lot to get 8 fpa, however, it is the recommended breakpoint.
FRW - you will be hunted in almost every duel, aim for 120+% on javelin switch.
+ skills - being a hybrid, you will benefit quite a lot from + skills, not only do they increase your poison damage, but your passive skills too. Keep in mind that you don’t have enough hard points to have the passives at really high levels.
Knockback - knockback is a must, don’t forget it’s banned in good manner duels though. Knockback on bow is fine (Windforce), but on gloves it allows you to use it with LF and lightning bolt, which is good from tactical reasons.
FHR - aim for at least 8 frames, that’s 20% FHR, next breakpoints are 32 and 52 (7 and 6 frames).
Stats, life - of course, the more the better.
Resists - depends on opponent, sometimes it’s better to rely on a good damage setup with gemmed monarch on switch.
Open wounds - sometimes overestimated, for our build the damage it makes is not as good, you already have a good damaging bow switch and a lot of poison damage. Make sure you have some when facing defensive playing characters and ES sorceresses. If you have a relatively weak bow switch you could get a lot of OW, less points in bow skills, and play more like a javazon with GA backup.

Javelin
Titan’s Revenge - best choice, I would not use anything else. It’s awesome not only for its skill bonuses and stats, but there’s the 30 FRW mod that is very useful too. Upping is possible, although not necessary, it will help you only with jab, the physical part of poison skills, and LF (fortitude users would like the increased damage).

Shield
Stormshield - self explanatory. Socket it with a PDiamond, poison facet or nice jewel (-requirements, resist, etc.). Putting a Shael in it is useless, you would still block at 3 frames.

Spirit - against opponents where you don’t need block and DR, you could use it, two skills would increase your poison damage and you would get nice FHR bonus, some resists and life too.

Faceted monarch – You’re unlikely to need extra poison damage, but if you find yourself having trouble, then it could be worth trying.
Resist shield if necessary (gemmed monarch, Sanctuary).

Bow
Bow choice is very important. You are a bow/poison hybrid, not a 1 point GA backup javazon. You should not settle for a weak bow switch. Getting the recommended 8 fpa means you will be limited not only by the base bow speed, but by other equipment as well. I will add total off-weapon IAS needed for 8 fpa in parenthesis.

Upped Witchwild String (2x Shael, 65 IAS) - easy to find, with very high deadly strike and decent damage, 40 resist all could help too.

Harmony Matriarchal bow (75 IAS) - up to 275% ED, +3 bow skills and Vigor aura (36 Skill FRW). Very cheap and very universal.

Windforce (Shael, 110 IAS) - huge damage, but slow. However, the damage output is so good that I would play at 9 fpa speed with windforce (50 off-weapon IAS).

Rare bow - look for 300+ ED and good speed. Not easy to find, but could be very nice.

Faith - extremely hard to obtain, dream of all bowazons, could reach fabulous 7 fpa and fire arrows amazingly fast. Good luck getting Jah, but if you have one lying around, this bow is a great choice.

Armour
Even if you are poor, you could pick some easy obtainable armour like Crow Caw, Duriel’s Shell, Treachery, Duress or even Skin of the Vipermagi. They will work well, the choice is yours and depends quite a lot on other gear, if you need IAS, OW, resists…

Fortitude - the best possible armour for this build is Fortitude, which makes your arrows highly damaging projectiles - the guided arrow skill ED is somewhere above 100%, Fortitude adds 300% more… Should I say more? Only drawback is the lack of IAS which influences the pick of helm, gloves, belt, and amulet.
Bramble, Chains of Honor - expensive armours that enhance the javelin side of your build. But I suppose that if you can afford CoH, you can afford Fortitude as well which is imho better.

Helm
I recommend choosing a helm that offers some +skills, because they are easy to find and have good stats anyway. Sockets could be filled with IAS jewel, Shael, poison facet or some tasty rare jewel.
Valkyrie Wing - often forgotten, but offers two skills, 20 FHR and 20 FRW.
1.07 Valkyrie Wing - better for a pure bowazon, but still a very good choice.
Andariel’s Visage - two skills, strength bonus and up to 35% IAS - could be handy.
Shako - one of the best all around PvP helmets.
Rare - it’s hard to find one better than helms mentioned above, but could be godly, try to get one with two skills, FRW, two sockets, etc.

Gloves
Gloves, especially rares and crafts are a very important piece of equipment. Not only could they could help you to reach your demanded IAS or get knockback, but they could offer passive or javelin skills, stats, resists and life.
Uniques and sets are not that good. If you are tempted by Trang Oul’s gloves, you could try them, but even magical 2 java/IAS are better for this build.

Belt
Verdungo’s - classic PvP belt and doesn’t need further explanation.
Rare - could be very nice, look for life, FHR, OW, resists… Don’t count the strength from the belt when planning stats allocation, in some cases you will probably be forced to switch it.
Other common choices are Thundergod’s to cover lightning damage, Nosferatu for IAS and strength, or Mavina’s belt for another 20% FRW (1.07 version has 40% FRW).

Boots
War Traveller or Gore Rider’s - the main difference between them is added damage versus OW. Having strong poison attack, I would vote for raw damage.
Rare boots - finding godly tri resist boots is almost impossible, but getting 30 FRW/10FHR and two 30+ resists pair is easier.

Amulet
If you need IAS, pick Cat’s Eye or Highlord’s. Otherwise use Mara’s or Cat’s Eye again (yes, the FRW is awesome).

Rings
Two Ravens could never hurt, but being a hybrid, you could benefit from Raven/BKWB combo. Other rings should be used according to opponents (Wisp, Dwarf, etc.).

Inventory
Balance your FHR, FRW, + passive or +javelin skills, AR, damage. Resist charms against casters, if you need them. There is no “must have” in inventory for this build. If you have already covered everything and don’t know what to add, I would recommend damage/AR charms with life as second mod.

DUELING STRATEGIES

AMAZONS

Bowazon
Hard duel. She will try not to come close to you, so the opportunity of poisoning her is low, her goal is to force you to fight as a bowazon. In that case, she usually has better GA damage and better passive skills. Don’t go into a pure bow matchup if you don’t have much better equipment. Try to switch to the shield and get closer to her. If she is OW based and her damage is not so high, you could try to charge her and hit with poison javelin, LF, or even jab, if she is that slow. When she runs away, fire GAs after her.

Javazon
Dedicated poison amazons will usually have twice your poison damage, which means that even with Death’s gloves you will go down to 1 hp if hit. Get yourself the poison resist elsewhere, wear your favourite rare/crafted gloves instead, and shoot her to death. Be a bowazon in this duel, run fast, predict her moves and keep yourdistance. Of course throw some poison javelins, she would be probably hunting and following you. Pure lightning amazons are not seen often nowadays, but keep in mind that their CS could be very deadly, even with Thundergod’s the damage is very respectable. The main danger comes from “far casting”, a glitch in the game that enables throwing CS (by switching from throw to CS while namelocking an enemy). Fights against this amazon are not so hard, use the same strategy as with poison javazon.

ASSASSINS

Trapsin
Play defensively, run a lot, throw poison javelins in the direction they approach from, spam MS when you see them on the minimap. When you see a trap on the ground, run away in a spiral, not straight away, to give the lightning a lower chance of hitting you. Try to poison her and get some OW source. If she has teleport, she will get close and start mindblasting and trap laying.

WWsin
Easier than a ww barb, she has less life and not as good damage. Get good poison resist and PLR, stay in plague javelin cloud, walk, and fire GAs. When she teleports/dflies on you, start the same tactics like against whirlwind barbarian.

BARBARIAN
Barbarians have very large life pool so it’s hard to bring them down with poison if they are prepared and have 75% resist and some source of PLR. They have extremely good physical damage, 50% DR and max block are necessary.

Whirlwind
Very strong build. If you meet a good one, you will probably lose. When you see him on the mini-map, spam GA in his direction and run away. Teleporting barb will come close to you fast, when he enters your screen, start to walk instead of run, switch to javelin and don’t run away. Just after that he usually teleports right on you and starts ww. Use shift jab when he is on you, jab is uninterruptable and he has no block, so it gives you the opportunity to deliver some damage. You have good chance of releasing plague javelin when he is wwing from you. If he doesn’t have good resists and PLR, the poison WOULD hurt a lot. Don’t bother with more poison skills when he is poisoned and start “bowazon strategy”. After being whirlwinded over, you have a very short time to step aside, switch weapons and fire one or two arrows. Or you could hit him with LF or bolt, which knockbacks and stuns for a while. Rinse and repeat, if you are not already dead. If he is skilled enough and makes short triangles around you, you have quite a hard time due to dodge/block lock. Don’t even try to use a bow and try to kill him with poison, jab and fury.

Wolfbarb
Don’t let him come close to you, he usually attacks very fast and easily gets you into dodge/block lock. Do not use valk and decoy, he would charge up feral rage. Just spam GAs from distance and try to poison him. You should have the upper hand, you are afast moving ranged attacker. Fill the air with poison javelins and run, wait until he is on low life and finish with GAs.

DRUIDS

Windy
Askilled teleporting windy with max block is one of the toughest opponents you could meet. The best strategy you could choose is to predict where he is teleporting, poisoning him, killing Oak Sage, running, killing recasted Oak Sage (it’s immune to poison on hell) again and again and when he is on low life finishing him with GA. That could work if he doesn’t have good resist and PLR, otherwise you will probably die first.

Fury/Rabies or Fire Claws/Rabies
The tactic is quite simple. Don’t get poisoned, their damage will probably be capable of killing you. Use a running strategy with throwing poison javelins behind you and firing GAs. Don’t forget not to use Valk/Decoy, they are good target for charging feral rage and could pass on Rabies to you if they are infected.

NECROMANCERS

Bone
If you meet one with teleport and max block, it will be a very hard duel. Offensive necros will teleport close to you, trying to get you to hit recovery with teeth and finish with spears. Run from them, change directions, throw poison javelins and fire GAs if you have some time between running from spirits. Poisoning him and running is the key. Teeth can trigger hit recovery and clay golem will slow you. GAs can be blocked and absorbed by astrong bone armour. Not easy. Defensive playing boners are not such a threat, you have faster attack with bigger range, just keep moving and try to avoid running into invisible spirits.

Poison
If you have stacked resists (calculate with 100+), it will give you a good chance. Move a lot, try to stay in your poison clouds and spam GA and MS.

PALADINS

Smiter
These guys are very dangerous. They desync and charge a lot, trying to get close to you and finish with smite. Use your bow only if they are far away from you. Don’t stop running or they might land a smite. In particular, Grief and Fortitude users could easily kill you in a second. But even if they play with Oath or Redeemer their charge damage is deadly if they hit you with your bow out. Try to find terrain that does not give them a direct line of attack towards you. Use your minions. If you meet a really good and strong smiter, prepare to die often.

V/T and T/V
Again, not easy duels, try not to get namelocked and be charged/smited to death. Run a lot, use your poison skills in directions where he is coming, profit from terrain, use valk and decoy. Make sure you have full resist and some absorb too (monarch socketed with four perfect topazes to counter conviction is nice, but you lose block and DR, so choose shield according to your opponent’s playstyle).

Hammerdin
Not as hard as expected, if they are pure hammerdins and don’t use charge, try to stay in your own plague javelin poison cloud and fire GAs. When he teleports on you and gets poisoned, start moving to avoid hammers. If he charges, don’t use your bow much when he is near. Take your time, try to poison him repeatedly and fire GAs when it’s possible.

SORCERESSES
There are two main types of sorc from your point of view - with and without ES. It is almost impossible to kill ES sorc only with GA. Fortunately, you have poison damage which is a no no for them (ES doesn’t absorb poison damage), and they will do anything just to keep distance from your poison clouds. Get some OW, good resists and use poison javelin a lot.

Blizzard sorc
If you decide to overstack, it will cost you a lot of changes in equipment, but after that you’ll be able to survive a few blizzards. In that case play defensively, move a lot and try to get her with poison. I would personally not do it and would rely on my luck (that would be usually one hit KO duels for you). Either she will teleport in circles around casting blizzard on you. Play aggressively and fast, avoid running into blizzard and fire MS and GA. Or she will teleport right on you and try to kill you with ice blast, in that case use the same strategy as against fireball and lightning.

Fireball sorc
Very fast moving and attacking, poisoning her will not be easy. With Hotspur and Dwarf Star, even a fully synergized lvl 40+ fireball should do 200-250 damage, so you could survive several of them. Play as a bowazon, that means running zig zag from her and firing one or two GAs every turn. Occasionally change for plague javelin.

Lightning sorc
Same strategy as with fireball, she has similar type of projectile that could be dodged by moving fast and changing directions.

[FONT=&quot] 3.2. Assassin[/FONT]


Introduction

PvP Assassins come in many shapes and forms, particularly at the higher end of the budget. But they all have one thing in common - the Mind Blast + Trap stun sequence. Some builds will invest only a single point in each of these, but all the PvP assassins have these two skills at the core.

Trap laying speed is determined by your attack speed, the rate you Mind Blast is determined by Faster Cast Rate. So, unlike many other PvP builds, you have to balance both. When you add Faster Hit Recovery and resistances into the mix, there is a lot to balance when building an Assassin. I'll try to keep the numbers to a minimum, but it is an important part of all assassin builds, so you can't skip it.

The Trap Assassin

A trapper is one of the cheapest PvP builds to get started with. All the equipment is easily farmed from Hell Mephisto, shopped, gambled or traded for a few perfect gems. At the basic level, they are a more defensive character, sitting in a trap field waiting for their prey, like a spider in a web. If you have the mobility of Enigma, they open up to a much more aggressive play style.

Skills

Lightning Sentry - The primary source of damage for a trapper, you will be putting 20 points into this skill and all of its three synergies. Top end damage will be about 11K per shot. 9-10K is a more reasonable number to achieve without extremely rare claws, or for a weapon shield setup.

Wake of Fire - This trap fires faster that LS. It is shorter range, but covers a wider area, making it very effective for getting the initial stun-lock before they get hit with the lightning. One point here is very useful.

Mind Blast - Probably the skill you will use more than any other. Some of the BNet guides will advise two points in this. This is because when teleporting (Enigma) the Shadow Master is constrained and will do little else other than Mind Blast. If you max this skill, it is almost like having it on automatic. Two points is supposed to make sure she uses the skill more due to the way SM "learns" skills. For non-teleporting trappers one point is required as a minimum.

Weapon Block - Unlike shield blocking, this only works when attacking or standing still. It does however have the ability to block Blessed Hammers, Meteors, Smite, Fireballs - almost any spell or attack. For a teleporting build this is ideal - it works when teleporting, mind blasting, trapping so you have the benefit almost all of the time. For a non-teleporting build I think it is less useful. The time you spend attacking or standing still compared to moving is small, so most of the time you have no block. More on this in the equipment section. One point in any case.

Fade / Burst of Speed - You can have only one of these active at any time. For all builds both have their uses. Which one you use most of the time will depend on opponent and equipment. Check you equipment bonuses before investing more than one point into either of these.

Shadow Master - A useful distraction and sometime auto mind blaster, only a single point is needed for PvP. Even maxing her won’t allow her to survive more than one or two hits from another player so don't waste the points.

So the basic skill layout looks like this:

Traps
1 Fire Blast
1 Wake of Fire
0 Wake of Inferno
0 Blade Sentinel
0 Blade Fury
0 Blade Shield
20 Shock Web
20 Charged Bolt Sentry
20 Lightning Sentry
20 Death Sentry

Shadow Disciplines
1 Claw Mastery
1 Weapon Block
1 Psychic Hammer
1 Burst of Speed
1 Cloak of Shadows
1 Shadow Warrior
1 Fade
1 Shadow Master
1 Mind Blast
0 Venom

Martial Arts - Nothing required here

Well that gives a total of 91 skill points, which means the basic build is finished at level 80 with all quests done. I recommend that you level to 90, which gives you an extra 10 skill points to spend.

Suggestions for Spare Skill Points
- A few points into Fade may be useful if you need more resists, or Burst of Speed if you think you need more mobility. However, given the +skills you are likely to have on your equipment, chances are you will be hitting the point when adding more points starts to have only a minor benefit.

- Mind Blast. More points mean a longer stun length. This is my preference for spare skill points.

- Fire Blast. This will help a lot whilst levelling, you may want to consider this if you are building this character as more of a PvP capable PvM character. If you are fortunate enough to own an Enigma, this can be useful as a second source of damage and stun. Teleport on top of a stunned enemy and blast them at short range. (I'm not suggesting that you try to bomb people on the corners of the screen) It doesn't count as one of your five traps, so they can also be hit by the lightning at the same time. It also fires much faster than either WoF or LS.

There are two types of trapper:
Weapon + Shield (W/S)
As I have already mentioned, weapon block is reduced to zero when walking or running. Shield block is at full effectiveness when walking and 25% when running. Against barbarians and bowazons, this build is much stronger defensively. The downside is that it isn't possible to get as much damage as the dual claw build. You will also have a smaller life pool due to the higher investment in strength and dexterity. Both Fade and BoS builds are possible, depending on the equipment. Given the stat point investment for W/S builds, you will be able to use two claws if you want to against a specific opponent.

Stat Targets - W/S
Strength - Enough for gear - Typically 156 for the Stormshield
Dexterity - Enough for maximum block with a Stormshield
Vitality - Everything else
Energy - Nothing

Faster Hit Recovery (FHR) - 48% minimum (5 frames), 86% (4 frames) if you can.
Faster Cast Rate (FCR) - 65% (11 frames) minimum, 102% (10 frames) should be achievable with this setup.
Increased Attack Speed (IAS) - Enough for 9 Frame trap laying. Use the Latest German Weapon Speed Calculator by Titanseal or the table below. Burst of Speed level is in the left column, the Weapon Speed Modifier (WSM) across the top. Read across to find how much additional IAS you need to hit the 9 frame trap laying limit. If you are using Fade, BoS lvl = 0.

Code:
  [B]BoS Lvl Weapon Speed Modified[/B]
  [B]        -30     -25     -20     -15     -10[/B]
  [B]0[/B]        42      52      63      75      89
  [B]1[/B]        11      18      24      32      40
  [B]2[/B]         5      10      16      23      30
  [B]3[/B]         0       6      11      18      24
  [B]4[/B]         0       3       8      14      20
  [B]5[/B]         0       0       5      10      16
  [B]6[/B]         0       0       3       8      14
  [B]7[/B]         0       0       0       6      11
  [B]8[/B]         0       0       0       5      10
  [B]9[/B]         0       0       0       3       8
  [B]10[/B]        0       0       0       2       7
  [B]11[/B]        0       0       0       0       6
  [B]12[/B]        0       0       0       0       5
  [B]13[/B]        0       0       0       0       4
  [B]14[/B]        0       0       0       0       3
  [B]15[/B]        0       0       0       0       2
  [B]16[/B]        0       0       0       0       0
  [B]17[/B]        0       0       0       0       0
  [B]18[/B]        0       0       0       0       0
  [B]19[/B]        0       0       0       0       0
  [B]20[/B]        0       0       0       0       0
Resists - 75% resistance to all elements, not counting the 30% resist all that you get for rescuing Anya. You don't need this all the time, but you need to have the equipment available to get the resists to counter the elements that you are facing.

Weapon Choices
'Spirit' Phase Blade [WSM -30] - A Spirit Phase Blade is pretty much the only weapon that a W/S trapper can use to hit the fastest trap laying speed and still use Fade. With 55FHR, up to 35FCR and +2 skills, it is quite a nice weapon for a trapper.

'Heart of the Oak' Flail [WSM -10] - 30-40% resist all, 40% FCR and +3 skills makes this one of the best, if not the best, weapons for a W/S trapper. Due to the low speed of a Flail, this is a Burst of Speed only weapon though and the Vex required may be out of some peoples price ranges.

Wizardspike [WSM -20] - 50% FCR and 75% resist all gives you a lot more flexibility in the rest of your equipment, but offers no offensive power.

Shield
I'm only going to recommend one shield here, it has to be a Stormshield for the decent blocking and 35% Damage Reduction. Socket with an 'Eld' rune to reduce the dexterity requirement for max block, or a perfect diamond if you prefer. Investing the strength for a Stormshield also allows you to use a 'Spirit' Monarch or 4 Perfect Gemmed Monarch against non-physical opponents. If you don't like the look of the strength requirement on a Stormshield, the Claw Claw build may be better suited to you.

Claw Claw (C/C)
It is much easier to get higher damage and a larger life pool with this variant. But, due to the limitations of Weapon Block discussed in the skills section, this variant is much weaker defensively if you are not teleporting.

Stat Targets - C/C
Strength - Enough for gear
Dexterity - Enough for gear
Vitality - Everything else
Energy - Nothing

Faster Hit Recovery (FHR) - 48% minimum (5 frames), 86% (4 frames) if you can.
Faster Cast Rate (FCR) - 65% (11 frames)
Increased Attack Speed (IAS) - Enough for 9 Frame trap laying. Use the Latest German Weapon Speed Calculator by Titanseal or the table above.
Resists - 75% resistance to all elements, see notes above.

Weapons
The great thing about weapons for a trapper is that you can shop them from Hell Anya (next to the red portal in Harrogath). As a minimum you are looking for +2 Assassin Skill or +3 Trap Blade Talons [WSM -20] or preferably Greater Talons [WSM -30]. Be warned, any claw much better that a Cunning Greater Talon will take many hours of shopping. You need to average the WSM of your chosen claws when using the table above. IAS from claws only counts in the claw above the gloves.

Magical claws can get two sockets from Larzuk. Socket the primary claw (the one above the gloves) with Shaels / Jewels of Fervour until you hit the maximum trap laying speed. Socket the off hand claw (above the boots) with resistance jewels, either single element or resist all if you have them.

If you are having trouble getting enough FHR, Bartuc's Cut Throat is a reasonable choice for one or both of the claws, but with only +2 to all Assassin skills it can be a little weak offensively.

Which is best?
Both can be played very effectively so it is difficult to say which is best. If you are having trouble getting a full set of 10 skillers, I recommend the Claw Claw build. If you have 10 skillers and a Call to Arms, you may want to consider the Weapon Shield route. For Enigma owners, both are good choices.

General Equipment Selection

Helm
If you can find or trade for a circlet with 20FCR and +2 Skills, that is the top choice. A magical (blue) circlet with two sockets from Larzuk is often even better than a rare in this case.
Other rare circlets with +2 skills, stats and resists are also worth considering. Of the uniques, Harlequin Crest is nice for the +2 skills, damage reduction and life / mana boost, or Kira's Guardian if you need the resists.
Socket with a Jewel of Fervour if you need the IAS or a Shael if you need the FHR. After that runes for resistance or even a perfect ruby for the life are good choices.

Armour
Enigma.
OK, this isn't a BNet guide, so there are other options here. Skin of the Vipermagi for the FCR and resists is probably the best choice, 'Stealth' runeword is also a possibility. Socketing options are the same as for the helm.

Gloves
Trang Oul's claws are normally the best bet for the 20FCR and the 30% cold resistance. Magefists are viable. If you don't need the FCR (probably because you are using Vipermagi +20FCR Circlet + Arachnid Mesh), Bloodfist are a great choice for the 30FHR, life and 10IAS.

Belt
Arachnid Mesh by far the best choice here for the +1 Skills and 20FCR. You could use Verdungo's or a rare / crafted belt if you don't need the FCR.

Boots
Sandstorm Trek for the stats and 20FHR are probably the pick of the uniques for the C/C build. Rares are probably your best choice here though. Look for FRW, FHR and resists. If you can't find any decent rares, Aldur's Advance or Natalya's Soul are also good choices. If you are going for the W/S build, that nice chunk of strength on the Stormshield will allow you to equip Shadow Dancers. The FHR, dexterity bonus and +2 shadow skills are great, but they do lack resists.

Amulet
Mara's Kaleidoscope is a good all round choice. It can be beaten by a good rare, especially if it has 10FCR. A crafted casted Amulet is the high budget choice, with a potential 20FCR. You could use The Cat's Eye if you are in serious need of FRW, but I think it will leave you lacking elsewhere.

Rings
If you are running, one ring should be a Ravenfrost, unless you know your opponents will not be doing any cold damage. If you need more FCR, rings are a good place to get it. Look for rares with FCR, mana, resists etc. Stones of Jordan or Bul Kathos' Wedding Band good choices if you don't need the FCR or Cannot Be Frozen.

Weapon Switch
If you can afford one, 'Call to Arms' with a Spirit Shield or Lidless Wall is the obvious choice. If you can't, use two claws with +3 to Shadow Disciplines to pre-buff BoS / Fade etc.

Charms
Do your best to get hold of as many Entrapping Grand Charms, hopefully a full set of ten. Plain ones are fairly readily available, the better ones are in quite a lot of demand. Use the other slots for FHR, FRW or resists as you need them.

Stash
As you have to balance so many things on an Assassin, it can be difficult to switch out equipment to counter specific builds without compromising something else. For a W/S trapper, the usual selection of shields should be in the stash. For C/C trappers Kira's Guardian is useful to boost resists, but be careful if you are normally getting FCR on the circlet. Other standard counters like Dwarf Stars, Nokozan Relic, Death's Gloves, Thundergods's Vigor can also be considered.

Strategy

Stunlocking
As already mentioned, the most important thing about the trapper is the mind blast + trap stun sequence. The basic theory goes like this:
1. You have Mind Blast and your trap hot keyed to you right mouse button. Let's say mind blast is 'C' and trap is 'V'.
2. Keeping your opponent as far away from you as possible, try to click directly on them with the right mouse button and keep it held down. If you do this correctly you will see little swirly marks above their head (swirlies) and their life bar will be visible at the top of your screen. This is called namelocking.
3. Without lifting the right mouse button, switch skills and lay a trap. This will be right under their feet. As long as they have the swirlies above their head, any damage they take will put them into hit recovery.
4. Even if they manage to wriggle off your screen, as long as their life bar is visible at the top of your screen you can trap and mind blast them.
5. Alternate between MB and trap until they are dead.

Sounds simple doesn't it? Well the theory is easy, but putting it into practice is much more difficult. Getting the initial namelock isn't easy. You opponent isn't going to stand still and let you MB them, and you have to avoid their attack at the same time.

Note: It is possible, and for some builds easy, to get out of mind blast. More on this is the class specific strategies.

One of the problems that you can have with the basic sequence above is that Lightning Sentry takes a while to fire - 33 frame for the initial shot. Assuming you MB, trap, MB, given you trap laying speed and FCR, you have 11+9 frame between mind blasts - if they take no damage from traps and have decent FCR, they will escape.

This is where Wake of Fire comes in. Although it has a longer initial delay (40 frames) it fires at a much quicker rate (WoF = 17 Frames, LS = 30 frames) and over a wider area. So if you find yourself out of your trap field, laying a WoF and following with a Mind Blast can often be a good strategy. In this case the stun sequence becomes:

1. Lay Wake of Fire near the opponent.
2. Mindblast and hopefully namelock
3. Lightning Sentry, MB, LS, MB...

If you are a low budget trapper, you shouldn't be too far from your trap field, so the opponent should be within range of five traps anyway. In this case the WoF stun sequence isn't needed as much, but is very applicable to Enigma users.

Placing Traps
If you are not wearing Enigma, you need to try to keep in range of your five traps at all times. This means your enemy has to risk getting hit by five lightning blasts if he wants to get close. And the enemies that are most dangerous to you will want to get close.

With a trap laying speed of 9FPA, it takes almost two seconds to lay all five traps. Bear this in mind when you move from your trap field. Walk your traps towards your enemy, making sure that you are in range of at least 2-3 traps at any one time. If you are running, getting caught without traps out is likely to be certain death.

Try to keep your enemy to the north of you, i.e. in the top half of the screen. Due to the life bulbs etc there is more screen in this direction, giving you better range. Most enemies will be trying to do the same thing to you though.

Trap the corners of the screen. This can give you fantastic range, potentially better than most ranged characters. Try to keep the traps between you and the enemy. Again, this increases your range and means that anyone wanting to get close will have to move through the firing traps to get to you.

If you are facing an aggressive opponent, be patient and let them come to you. Choose your ground well. The marshy puddles on the map can be a useful barrier against charging Paladins, walls can stop you opponents circling around you. Sometimes you will need space to run.

If you are teleporting, remember that you can't place traps as quickly as a sorc or bone necro can fire at you. Pressure with Mind Blast. Try to force opponents into a pre-laid trap field with MB. Drop traps at screen corners to maximise your range. Know which opponents to pressure and which to play more defensively.

Class Specific Strategies
I'm assuming worst case opponents here - For the most part this means that they have enigma and are teleporting. Obviously this doesn't apply to the Amazons or Shapeshifters

Amazon - Bowazon
Play aggressively, circle in and go for the namelock as soon as you can. Keep the pressure on, you may have to take a few arrows in the process, but once you get the lock with MB the amazons relatively poor FHR and dodge animations will make it game over fairly quickly. WoF is great for the initial trap as its wide area of effect makes the first hit easier. Shadow Master should be kept out as an extra target for those arrows to lock on to. Keeping your distance is a recipe for slowly getting your life whittled away by Guided Arrows.

Assassin - Trapper
I hate trap vs. trap duels. With all those lightning bolts coming from all directions, it can get very confusing. Knowing which bolts are yours and which are your opponents is a nightmare. Try to get the best position with your opponent at the top of your screen. Try to get a range advantage by trapping the screen corners. This is a battle to see who can namelock better.

Assassin - Ghost
Keep your distance. Most ghosts will have a much higher level mind blast than you and will be trying to stunlock you with Wake of Fire. Don't let them get close enough. WoF has a short range, so use the superior range of LS against them. Keep moving and try to keep your traps between you and your opponent. Mind Blast is of limited use here as they can whirl out of it.

Barbarian - Whirlwind (BvC or BvA)
One of the toughest opponents for a trapper, if not the toughest. If you are a C/C build, this opponent will make you wish you went W/S. Fight them in much the same way as a Ghost. Distance is the key. They can Leap on the spot to knock you out of your trap field and WW through your mind blasts. Make them move through your traps to get to you. They are likely to try and circle around you to avoid trap blasts, so a good choice of ground may be useful. Probably the toughest duel for a trapper and not one you should expect to win.

Druid - Wind
Druids have poor FHR in human form, making them very vulnerable to mind blast. Use it liberally. This is one of the easier duels for a trapper. Keep track of where they are, try to avoid getting telestomped. If you MB the edges of the screen and keep good trap position you will come off on top.

Druid - Werewolf (and Wolfbarbs)
These guys have to come at you on foot. They will have very high FRW to close the distance quickly. They will want to charge up Feral Rage to move even quicker, don't use Shadow Master here. With BoS you are quicker than a wolf, as long as they are not in a Feral Rage. Keep your distance, as soon as they appear on your screen drop back.

Necromancer - Bone
This is one of the fights where you need to be aggressive. Fade will not help you, so use Burst of Speed and chase him down. Keep moving and circle around your opponent, you should be able to out run bone spirits. This also makes hitting with a bone spear more difficult. Re-cast Shadow Master if you have to, she will draw Bone Spirits away from you. Necros have poor FHR, so once you get a MB and namelock it will be difficult for them to escape.

Necromancer - Poison
If they aren't teleporting they are easily outranged. In any case, don't let them any closer than the edge of your screen. If they are teleporting, this is a much tougher duel. Keep some distance, try to predict where they are coming from and mind blast like crazy. Try to fight on ground that gives you an advantage, like closer to a wall.

Paladin - Smiter
Another tough duel for a trapper. Laying your trap field near a marshy area is a good tactic as it will stop them charging as they try to get close to you. Keep your distance again, try to make them move through the trap field to get to you. It is possible for them to charge out of MB too.

Paladin - Hammerdin
Set a trap field and keep the traps between you and them. An aggressive hammerdin will try and charge or teleport in close and cast some hammers. Avoid the initial charge and go for mind blast and namelock at the edge of your screen when they stop to cast. Remember they can charge out of MB though. As with the smiter, picking a marshy bit of ground helps here.
Defensive hammerdins will sit back in a hammer field and wait for you to come to them. Hammers are cast at only a short range, but they can hang around for a long time. Be careful not to run into one. If they are cast when you are off screen they can become invisible. You can see the patch of light for each hammer, but not the hammer itself. Keep well away, walk your traps towards them. You have a huge range advantage, fry them from a distance.

Sorceress
Don't chase them down as this is a recipe for running into something nasty like a fireball. Let them come and spam MB at the edges of the screen. Once you manage to hit them with a MB, and even better if you get the namelock, it should be over fairly quickly.

This video’s of a Trapper against a Bone Necro, and many of the techniques should be applicable to other matchups too. Keep an eye on the skill switches and the timing of when they occur:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr-uXlIqMJo

Trapper Variants
So you remember those spare skill points we had at level 90? If you put them into Venom, you can make a hybrid. Putting the spare points into Venom, the skill allocation at level 90 looks like this:

Traps
1 Fire Blast
1 Wake of Fire
20 Shock Web
20 Charged Bolt Sentry
20 Lightning Sentry
20 Death Sentry

Shadow Disciplines
10 Venom
1 point in all the other Shadow Disciplines (9 Total)

A more typical skill allocation for a Hybrid goes like this:

Traps
1 Fire Blast
1 Wake of Fire
10 Shock Web
20 Charged Bolt Sentry
20 Lightning Sentry
20 Death Sentry

Shadow Disciplines
20 Venom
1 point in all the other Shadow Disciplines (9 Total)

A hybrid normally refers to a Whirlwind Trap Assassin, but I'll discuss bow hybrids briefly too.

PvP WW Trap Hybrid by Happy_Assassin
As you have the ranged damage of traps, this build actually works quite nicely without Enigma. It is, like a pure trapper, still essentially a defensive build though.

As you may have seen from the strategy section above, most of the builds that are dangerous to a trapper are the ones that get close. Whirlwind gives you a short range attack. And the really great thing in that Weapon Block works during Whirlwind. So instead of running away and being vulnerable you can whirl away and have a decent chance of blocking Tornados, Bone Spears, Poison Novas and Smites. Nice eh? The downside is a drop in trap damage - 6K is a good figure for a WW/Trap hybrid.

The guide pretty much lays out the equipment for you, but armour choices need some discussion.

Skin of the Vipermagi - The resists, FCR and skill point makes this one of the best choices. The 30FCR opens up the helm and a ring slot, which makes gear choices much easier. Socket with a Shael for FHR, or an IAS jewel if you need it. If you need neither, socket for resists or life.

Fortitude - At first glance, this seems like the perfect armour, if you can afford it. Resists, Life, FCR all help the build. Lack of offensive power is the biggest problem. With no + skills it helps neither the WW or traps. The ED is largely redundant - The low base damage on most claws means it doesn't add that much. WW Assassins kill with Venom and Open Wounds, not physical damage. If you have some high damage claws though, it could work on some kind of physical damage hybrid.

Natalya's Shadow - If you want to raise your WW damage, socket this with 3x Poison Facets. The +2 Shadow Disciplines, life and poison resistance is nice too. This is a heavy armour though, so it will slow down your run/walk speed.

Getting good claws - both as a base type for Chaos and for the primary claw - is possibly more difficult than getting the runes for this build. For what mods to look for and where to get them, have a read of Shuko-Jutsu - The Art Of The Claw by maxicek.

The Ama-Sin (Bow Assassin) by BigChief
Using the Guided Arrow skill from Widowmaker with Venom gives a long range secondary attack. Personally I am not 100% convinced that a pure trapper is not a stronger option. In my opinion this approach give two weaker long range attacks and leaves the problem of strong close range attackers like Smiters unsolved. I have seen the build played well in SP PvP though.

A few additional comments:
- You will need to use burst of speed to hit the fastest attack speed with the bow.
- The author of the guide does not mention faster cast rate, you still want to get 65FCR as discussed in the trapper guide above.

High Budget Builds
When it comes to Assassins, by high budget we are talking about Enigma, Chaos, Call to Arms and a nice set of charms. The claws are very rare and very seldom come up for trade - anyone that has spent the hours shopping to find a +2 Assassin, +3LS claw is unlikely to part with it.

PvP WW Ghost Guide by TienJe
The Ghost Assassin has a high level fade for resistances and damage reduction and venom & mind blast with the Whirlwind skill from 'Chaos' runeword to lock down and kill opponents. A great guide with huge amounts of detail. If you are considering trying a build based on this guide without Enigma - Don't.

PvP Trapper Guide by TienJe
If you have been through the guide above, this guide will lay out the details of a high budget pure trapper guide for you.

PvP Kicksin Guide by wizAdept
Kickers are not the easiest build PvP, but if you want to try it, this is probably the best guide. Once more, don't try it without Enigma though.

PvP WW Trap Hybrid by Happy_Assassin
This build can be made without Enigma as discussed above, but having the ability to teleport opens up a whole new dimension to the gameplay.

[FONT=&quot] 3.3. Barbarian[/FONT]


Whilst barbarians are very viable for PvP I just didn’t feel that I could write a guide that would be useful for people without just regurgitating all the existing guides to them, and without also aiming it towards a battle.net audience. A BvC also needs some very expensive items to really shine. Teleport amulets can replace Enigma to some extent, but the weapons and charms can also be hard to acquire. Here are a couple of PvP guides that you might find useful though. They also go into far more detail than would be possible here.

http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=666078
http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=260648

[FONT=&quot] 3.4. Druid[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]3.4.1. Fury/Rabies[/FONT]


I. Introduction
If you have a love for shape shifting characters, this is perhaps the most formidable option. A Fury/Rabies wolf brings to the table an enormous amount of hit points, superb FHR, and the power that comes with utilizing dual attacks.

II. Stats
Strength- Just enough to equip your end game gear.
Dexterity- Enough for max block. (With no block, you leave yourself too vulnerable to a large chunk of the duelling population. If you’re certain you’ll only be fighting casters and won’t need block, then feel free to forsake it.)
Vitality- All the spare stat points should be placed in this area.
Energy- Zip. Zero. Nada.

III. Skills
1 Werewolf (if you level your character into the mid 90’s, additional points should be spent here)
20 Lycanthropy
20 Rabies
20 Poison Creeper
20 Fury
20 Oak (this gets maxed last)
1 Raven
1 Spirit Wolf
1 Feral Rage

IV. Formulas
Faster Hit Recovery Breakpoints
%FHR Needed/Frames
20% 5
42% 4
86% 3

To deal damage ourselves, we must make sure we are recovering from our opponents attacks as quickly as possible. This isn’t as hard as it sounds as werewolves have the best faster hit recovery in the game. Make sure you are hitting the 4 frame breakpoint with at least 42% FHR.


V. Gear Selection
HELMS
Jalal’s Mane- This helm has +skills, +resists, +strength, an attack rating boost, and 30% FHR. Socket it with a Shael for an immediate 4 frame FHR. If you can reach the breakpoint without the Shael, consider a Perfect Ruby or an added life boost.
Cerebus’ Bite- Comparable +skills, a nice attack rating boost, and a very nice 33% open wounds mod. If you can make up the FHR and resists you’ll lose from Jalal’s, then this is a nice alternative helm.
Rare Circlet- Look for +Druid skills, FRW, and resists. This helm can be useful against teleporters.

WEAPONS (1 HAND)
“Grief” Phase Blade- My personal favourite. Insane damage and good speed.
Death Cleaver s/ Shael- If you can’t net a “Grief” then this is a nice unique option.
“Oath” Scourge- Nice speed and damage, but the first options are superior.
Ethereal Baranar’s Star s/ Shael- Great AR boost, +stats, some decent elemental damage, and 5 frame Fury, what more could you want? You can use a non-ethereal one if you don’t like replacing your primary weapon that will lose durability as you duel, just remember to socket it with a Shael to hit that breakpoint. The physical damage difference between the regular and the ethereal is 129-159 and 192-237 respectively.

WEAPONS (2 HAND)
Tomb Reaver- Socket it with 2 IAS jewels and an Eth rune or Ruby jewel. It gives a pocket full of resists and is range 4 and incredibly fast.

ARMOUR
“Fortitude” Light Armour- This will increase your damage considerably and supplies you with a good chunk of resists.
“Enigma” Light Armour- Skills, strength, and most importantly, FRW. If you have one, it has a place in your arsenal.
“Duress” Light Armour- Decent resists, 40% FHR, 15% crushing blow, and a juicy 33% chance of open wounds.

BELTS
Verdungo’s Hearty Cord- 10-15% PDR, minor FHR, and a good life boost. The perfect belt.
Rare/crafted belt- Something with +life, resists, +stats, (OW if crafted), and FHR.

GLOVES
Dracul’s Grasp- 5% ctc Life Tap can make or break a duel, so I definitely advocate their use.
Trang Oul’s Claws- 25% Poison skill damage to increase your Rabies, a great set of cheap gloves.
Bloodfist- 30% FHR and +life make these normal gloves good enough for end game.
Cleglaw’s Claws- These are good if you’re having trouble with Smiters though they are considered fairly BM. Ask opponent before using them.

BOOTS
Gore Riders- The only pair of boots in the game with deadly strike, open wounds, and crushing blow mods. Tie all that to the 30% FRW they offer and you are looking at some darn nice boots.

SHIELDS
Stormshield- This is about the only shield I recommend. It has a much needed 35% PDR and great block rate. Get it. You can Shael it to hit the next blocking recovery breakpoint.

RINGS
Ravenfrost- Cold absorb, 15-20 dexterity, and a nice AR boost. What’s not to love? Use at least one.
Rare/crafted ring- Something with +life, +resists, and +stats. If you can’t get a good one, use another Ravenfrost.

AMULETS
Highlord’s Wrath- +1 skill, some lightning resist, and scaling deadly strike. This will help your effective Fury damage.
Cat’s Eye- +25 dexterity and 30% FRW. If you are finding yourself running too slow in certain match-ups, one of these might be the answer.

CHARMS
FRW charms- These cannot be neglected as you rely on quick foot speed to catch characters to deliver damage. They are much less important against melee characters, but keystone to successful caster killing.
+1 Shapeshifting (Spiritual) Skill Grand Charms- They will boost your AR, your life, your Fury damage, and your Rabies damage. Get some.
Steel Grand Charms- If your Attack Rating is poor, a few of these might be the answer.
Small charms- Look for mods like +life, +AR, and +resists. Maybe a FHR or two will be needed to hit a desired breakpoint.

WEAPON SWITCH
Death’s Web or x6 Poison Facet Phaser, and x4 Poison Facet Monarch should be your end game aspiration. A Demonlimb to prebuff with Enchant and a “Call to Arms” should have a home in your stash as well.

VI. General Knowledge & Strategy

  • After you have infected someone with Rabies with your main gear, if you hit the ‘w’ key, the added %enh poison damage and -ePR of your weapon switch will be taken into account and will hurt your infected opponent more. You only need to weapon switch for a moment before returning to your main gear to finish the rest of the duel. I highly recommend doing this. Here is a wonderful thread describing how Rabies works:
http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=717215

  • For duelling melee opponents, make sure you have close to 50% PDR (and with Stormshield and Verdungos/SoE, you should), a decent attack rating (with Steel Grand Charms and, if allowed, a Demon Limb prebuff) and your 75% block. Walk, rather than run, whenever possible and pick and choose the best angles of attack. Smiters are terribly hard on werewolves and certain whirlwind barbs can be as well.
  • For duelling caster opponents, make sure you have an appropriate amount of resists in the right element(s) and a good deal of FRW. If you can’t catch them, you can’t kill them. A 2-hand weapon for better range is also advisable.
  • Use Trang-Oul’s gloves against quick teleporters because a hard-hitting Rabies bite is more important than a potential Life Tap cast because you won’t be able to hit them often.
  • Here’s a link to PvP wereform basics that every Fury/Rabies player should know. Familiarize yourself with the range of your weapon and shift clicking Fury:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hf5kbWXqdQ

  • You’re bound to the ground and your opponent knows this. But just because you cannot teleport, don’t think that you can’t still surprise your opponent. Pile on the FRW, zigzag, change your run patterns, and do whatever it takes to keep them guessing. Running at them in a straight line (repeatedly) usually doesn’t bode well for you.
·While fighting an innately difficult opponent (i.e. a smiter), I like to run a lot, relying on Rabies rather than standing toe-to-toe with Fury. I usually zigzag in a pattern that keeps them guessing, but just when they think they have it figured out, I'll change directions and meet them head-on for an attempt at a Rabies bite. If I miss, then I rinse and repeat in a new pattern, and if I connect, then I hit my weapon switch key to lower their effective resists and let Rabies take its toll before engaging again, as shown here:

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/8462/pvpwolf1.jpg
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/6219/pvpwolf2.jpg

·This often works because I feel most players are caught offguard and don't have the reflexes to muster an attack in the time it takes two characters to pass one another going in opposite directions (and as a werewolf, you'll usually have a better-than-average FRW). Also, while your opponents are running, their defence means nothing and their block is reduced, leaving them more vulnerable to your AR-based attacks.

  • Unlike other poison damage sources, Rabies kills. Most opponents know this (and if they don’t, it usually doesn’t take too long to figure out after a couple of duels where it’s used), so unless they’re outfitted with max poison resist and PLR gear, opponents—casters in particular—generally play pretty defensively (at least before they are poisoned).

VII. Conclusion
Why should you use this build over another?
I would never go as far as to say it was overpowered, but a Fury/Rabies wolf is very competitive, and with good gear can handle almost any character in 1v1 matchups. This character also shines in free-for-all styled duels in which your Rabies is transferred from player to player even after your death. To top it all off, this character comes with a surplus of style points for anyone brave enough to take up the pelt and howl at the moon.
 
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Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide


[FONT=&quot]3.4.2. Wind Druid[/FONT]



I. Introduction
This is probably the Druid most suited for the world of PvP. It comes with dual attacks—cold and physical—boasts a good amount of hit points, and is able to absorb a certain amount of elemental damage via Cyclone Armour. Armed with Hurricane winds as well as Tornados, this is a formidable opponent for most any dueller.

II. Stats
Strength- Just enough to equip your end game gear.
Dexterity- Enough for max block or none at all. *
Vitality- All the spare stat points should be placed in this area.
Energy- Zip. Zero. Nada.

*Should I max block?
You either build a 163 FC Druid and neglect block, or you build a 99 FC Druid and get max block. The benefits of the former include more life and quicker teleports and Tornado-casting and the benefit of the latter is the obvious 75% block. Both have their merits.

III. Skills
20 Cyclone Armour
20 Twister
20 Tornado
20 Hurricane
20 Oak Sage (max this last)
1 point in Arctic Blast, Ravens, Spirit Wolf, Dire Wolf, and Grizzly**
This build finishes at level 94.

** Why a point in Grizzly?
There are certain battles—usually involving casters—in which minion stack does little to no good. In these matchups, a Grizzly can increase the offense of your Telestomps, and in the case of a fast-teleporting opponent, the Grizzly can occasionally net a lucky strike to help induce a stunlock for a quicker kill.

IV. Breakpoints
Druid (human)
FCR Frames
46% 13
68% 12
99% 11
163% 10

FHR Frames
29% 9
42% 8
63% 7
99% 6
174% 5


V. Gear Selection
Helms:
Tornado Pelt- This is my personal favourite. It must have +5 or +6 Tornado, but other gravy mods include FHR, life, stats and resist. It’s also pretty stylin’.
Rare circlet- Look for 20% FC and Druid skills. Especially beneficial if you’re opting for the 163 FC variant.
Harlequin Crest- Life, mana, skills, and PDR. What’s not to like?
Jalal’s Mane- An old standard, but it might be an option if you are needing some stats, resists, and FHR and cannot afford any of the above.

Weapon:
“Heart of the Oakâ€- My only suggestion. It’s a mean combination of skills and FCR.

Armour:
“Enigmaâ€- I’ve already touched on how important Teleport is to a successful Windy.
Skin of Vipermagi- Decent, but definitely not “Enigma.â€

Shields:
Stormshield (99 FC, block Druid)
“Spirit†Monarch (163 FC Druid)

Amulets: Mara’s Kaleidoscope or Crafted/Rare with FC & Druid skills. You’re looking for skills, resists, stats and potentially FCR. If you aren’t utilizing an “Enigma†then Amulet(s) with Teleport charges are what you’ll need. ***

Rings: Stone of Jordan or Bul-Kathos’ Wedding Band if you don’t need the FCR and are able to emphasize +skills. Use a Crafted/Rare with FCR otherwise. Ravenfrost, Wisp, and Dwarf all have their place in specific matchups as well.

Belt: Either Arachnid Mesh or Verdungo’s Hearty Cord. Which belt you use depends largely on your total amount of PDR, the necessary FCR, and what opponent you are duelling.

Gloves: Trang-Oul’s Claws or Magefist if you need FCR, Bloodfist if you do not.

Boots: I like Sandstorm Trek for the FHR, stats, and gravy poison resist, but rare boots can also be great.

Charms: Natural skillers and fill holes with appropriate resistance ones (for when Cyclone fades) or life.

***If you’re using amulet charges for your teleporting ability, then you’ll need to keep room in your personal inventory for several of them so that you’re able to swap mid-duel.

VI. General Knowledge & Strategy
Think of Tornado as your main attack and Hurricane as a supplementary damage source. For this reason, you should not invest heavily into (cold) Rainbow Facets or similar %enhanced cold damage items, but rather, you should concentrate on boosting the skill level of Tornado.

If you lack an “Enigma,†you can still make a successful Wind Druid so long as you make use of Teleport charges. Not utilizing Teleport is not an option; it is the cornerstone to the build, offering offence in the way of Telestomp attacks, and defence in the way of minion stack.

The term minion stack is a reference to what occurs when a Druid teleports with summoned minions; they crowd on top of the Druid, taking damage meant for him.
The term Telestomp denotes a tactic in which the Druid teleports directly atop an opponent and quickly attacks. Utilize minion stack whenever possible, and recast your minions quickly if they die, particularly Oak Sage. Most players that let you get away to constantly resummon are at a severe disadvantage, your minions are a great source of protection.

Trappers are the salt to your slug; they are the water to your sugar; they are genetically predisposed to taking down Wind Druids and far better at it than any other class. Avoid them in FFAs if at all possible.

Recasting Cyclone Armour is typically not allowed in SP duels. That means that it’s a lot safer for you to target non-elemental characters in free-for-all games after the armour has been diminished. Against those builds in 1v1’s you often must play offensively at the beginning to maximize your chances at ending the duel quickly in your favour before you lose your armour.

In games that are hosted on another continent, your Telestomp abilities will take a massive hit. In this scenario, don’t underestimate the power of the randomly dropped Tornados as you teleport around.

VII. Conclusion
Why should you use this build over another?
This is an extremely powerful character and it’s skill-based rather than item-dependent, so I find that they are a bit easier to fund than their Fury/Rabies Druid counterparts. I would place them in my personal top five list of ultimate PvP builds in 1.10+ as they are very well suited for dominant 1v1’s and have an answer for *almost* every class.
Bassano’s made some videos of his wind druid, there are only 2 links here, but there are also several more there:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oEptHsjxWs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdOoYS



[FONT=&quot]3.5[/FONT][FONT=&quot] Necromancer[/FONT]


3.5.1. Bone Necromancer

Bone necromancers offer several advantages over other builds. Their damage is unresistable, ensuring that you can’t be absorbed and nullified. They also have golems to use for both minion stacking and also for their other effects. Finally they have bone armour for additional protection from physical damage. Whilst they appear to be easy to play, there is actually a lot of tactical thinking required at times, particularly against certain builds. Their main weaknesses are that they have no way of effectively hurting a strong ES sorceress, as well as their slow FHR breakpoints.

Skills:
20 Bone Spirit/Spear
20 Bone Prison/Wall
1 in Clay Golem
Rest in Teeth

Optional Skills (1 point only):
Amp Damage (useful for team duels)
Golem Mastery (helps keep your golem alive, can be useful as it makes them take more than 1 hit)
Summon Resist (see Golem Mastery)

Important breakpoints:
As shown in the table in section 2 necromancers have breakpoints for FCR at 75 and 125 FCR. 75 FCR (10 frames) is an absolute minimum, 125 FCR (9 frames) is the recommended value. 9 frame casting helps greatly against low life characters such as sorceresses, as you can keep them in hit recovery more easily.

In terms of FHR the best breakpoints to aim for are 56 and 86 (7 and 6 frames respectively). Necromancers have high hit recovery times compared to other classes, and as such it is very important to get enough FHR from items to raise it to a useful level. Additionally your life will be lower than most other classes, making it much easier for people to deal enough damage to put you into hit recovery, as explained in section 2. FHR is also vital for escaping from attacks that automatically stun, such as mind blast and smite.

Gear Options:

Whilst you can make a bone necro with fairly cheap items, like all builds they benefit from more expensive options. 3 different levels of items are given, corresponding to poor, medium and high levels of wealth, with socketing options given at the end.

Helm
Low – Peasant Crown, Harlequin Crest

  • Harlequin Crest is a very hard to beat helm for any caster, but especially for necros and sorcs due to their lower base life.
  • Peasant Crown is a good alternative if you don’t have one
Medium – Harlequin Crest, +3 PnB/20 FCR Circlet, +2 skills/20 FCR rare circlet

  • Circlets are very useful for reaching the 125 FCR breakpoint, with 2 sockets they can also fill other gaps in your items
  • When choosing a helm bear in mind that +life/mana per level is not multiplied by Battle Orders
High – Circlet or 1.07 Valkyrie Wing – 30 FCR, 30 FHR, 30 FRW

  • A 1.07 Valk Wing makes hitting the FCR and FHR breakpoints much easier, the only downside to it the lack of +skills

Armour
Low – Stealth or Vipermagi

  • Stealth is a great armour for a bone necro if you can’t afford Enigma, the FCR and FHR are the main useful mods, but the FRW can also be very useful
  • Vipermagi give slightly more FCR than Stealth (30 instead of 25) but lacks the FHR and FRW. It does give much better resists though.
Medium – Same as Low
High – Enigma

  • Teleport, huge strength bonus, skills, doesn’t really need any more explanation

Weapon
Low – Wizardspike

  • Great resists which can free up a lot of other slots, as can the high FCR
Medium/High – Heart of the Oak

  • Like Wizardspike, but with lower FCR and resists, but +3 skills

Shield
This depends on if you’re going with max block or not. If you aren’t then Spirit is the obvious choice. With a max block build there are 2 main choices: Stormshield and Homunculus. Homunculus has the advantage of +skills and better resists, along with a slightly better blocking chance, but Stormshield has 35% DR, which is invaluable against characters that do high amounts of physical damage. Generally it’s better to just swap Homunculus for Stormshield when you need the extra DR.

Belt
There’s only really one choice here, Arachnid’s Mesh is the default belt for most casters for good reasons, the FCR is a massive help in getting to 125 FCR and more +skills are always useful.

Gloves
Trang Oul’s Claws or Magefist. Trang’s are generally preferred, due to the extra cold resistance and the mana regen on Magefist not being very useful when mana pots are allowed

Boots
Low – Aldur’s Advance, Natalya’s Soul

  • Good FRW, resists.
Medium – Sandstorm Trek

  • Decent amount of FRW, generally preferred over the set boots above as they have 20 FHR and give good stat bonuses
High – Tri-res Boots with FHR/FRW

  • Rare boots can get up to 40 resistance to 3 elements, as well as 10 FHR and 30 FRW, meaning that the best pairs will be far better than the uniques and sets. Very hard to find a pair like this though

Rings
In general the ring slots are a choice between FCR and +skills. They’re a good place to make up FCR that’s missing from other items. Mods to look for on FCR rings are stat bonuses, resists and life/mana. If you’re not using teleport then 1 ring will have to be a Ravenfrost for the CBF.

The +skill rings are all uniques, and the choice between them generally comes down to whether you need the mana from an SoJ or the life from a BKWB more.

Amulets
Low – Rare +skills amulet – Look for resists, stat bonuses and so on
Medium – Mara’s Kaleidoscope
High - Crafted amulet with 15+ FCR. Good ones can beat Mara’s, but are very difficult to craft

If you don’t use Enigma then a good amulet with teleport charges will help immensely.

Charms
Fungal GCs with second affixes are best, but plain Fungal GCs might not be worth using over additional resist/life charms. Your charms should make up for some of the deficiencies your main items leave, such as getting an extra 15 FHR to reach the next breakpoint. They’re also very useful for maxing out your resistances, particularly once you’ve accounted for the Anya bug. It’s not worth using 10 plain skillers if it leads to you having a very low final life total with poor resistances. Unlike other casters you don’t have to worry about being absorbed, so you can focus on the more defensive aspects instead.

Sockets
Sockets are useful for hitting that next FHR breakpoint, or getting that last bit of resistance you need. The most commonly used socket fillers are Shael and Um runes, Elds (for shields), Perfect Diamonds, -requirement jewels and jewels with combinations of these modifiers. If you use Spirit on switch then an Eld is better than a –req jewel for Stormshield as you’ll need 156 strength anyway. Shaels are good for armour and helms as they save more inventory space than Ums (20 FHR takes 4 SC slots, but 15 res all only takes 3)

Duelling Tactics

*All these strategies are for 1v1 play, but most can be applied to both FFA and team duels.

General

  • Always keep your golem up. It’s there to take hits for you, so let it. If you see its health decreasing without being hit then there are likely to be invisible missiles close by (or lag), which includes Bone Spirits, Hammers, and Guided Arrows, but most projectiles can turn invisible in some circumstances.
  • Learn to use Bone Walls, they provide an extra target for traps to waste shots on and block charging paladins (which also helps to prevent desync)
  • Always keep moving, you can’t tank a smiter so don’t try. Mobility is one of the most important aspects of PvP, so if you don’t have Enigma then try to at least get something with a good amount of teleport charges on. Get as much FRW as you can and try to use light shields/armour types
  • Use the right attack at the right time. Spirits are slow moving, but track targets and can turn invisible. Spears are fast moving and will hit everything they pass through, but only travel in straight lines. Teeth is the easiest way of killing low life minions such as a Druid’s wolves; it can also put some sorcs with low life into hit recovery and can force amazons into dodgelock
  • Practice, even with the best items you can’t just teleport around spamming spirits, that’s a quick way to get yourself killed

Amazon
Bowazon – Use plenty of Bone Walls to block GA and IGA. If you see your golem taking damage with nothing on the screen get behind a rock or a wall. Teleport charges are very useful here as zons normally have high quantities of FRW, making catching them hard. Once you have them close enough cast Teeth until you see the dodging animation begin, then switch to spear to finish them off.

Poison Zon – They’ll likely do massive amounts of poison damage over a relatively long period. Stay well clear of the poison clouds as without any additional PLR or +max resist over your normal items they might be able to do enough damage to take you down to 1 life in 1 hit. If necessary then you can swap in Death’s gloves, but only do this as a last resort. In terms of actually killing them use the same tactics as for the bowazon

Assassin
Trapper – There are two types of trappers, Weapon/Shield and Claw/Claw. With weapon/shield ones just keep your distance and spam Spirits until they’re forced to move out of their trap fields, giving you a chance to get closer in. Claw/Claw trappers are more difficult due to Claw Block giving them the chance to block half your attacks, but the principle’s the same. Mind Blast is likely to be problem at points, if they catch you with it then run out of range, teleporting will often take longer to escape with.

Ghosts – Not a particularly common build, but they are one of the hardest opponents, designed explicitly to counter casters through massive amounts of stun. They’ll likely be very aggressive, Mind Blasting and laying WoF traps round you in an attempt to keep you stunned, giving them a chance to teleport in and kill you with WW. Most of their damage comes from OW and Venom, their trap and physical damage is generally low, so make sure you’re poison resist is maxed, physical DR isn’t necessary. You’ll be forced onto the defensive and have to be very careful. If you do get stunlocked then walk rather than run out of the trap field. 86 FHR is the bare minimum here.

Hybrids – Generally you need to use a combination of the previous two tactics, depending on if they’ve focused more on trap damage or Venom/OW damage

Barbarian
WW Barbs – Keep as much distance as you can from them, don’t try to tank them and make sure you have a high amount of DR. The difficulty of this duel depends on their skill and how well they’re playing. If they do long whirls then use it as a chance to hit them with spirits and spears. If they’re good then you’ll need teleport charges to escape the leap -> tele -> whirl sequence. Spear can be useful, but at close range you need the homing ability of spirits.

Druid
Wind Druid – If they’re using wolves then there’s a very low chance of anything you cast hitting them before they’re dead. Fortunately they have very low life and 1 hit from Teeth will kill them. The hard part is getting close enough to them to use Teeth without getting so close that you get telestomped and hammered with Tornados. One advantage that is key to winning this match-up is that your FHR and FCR breakpoints are much better than a human Druid’s. Once you’ve eliminated their minions you need to be quick, as they’ll most likely immediately teleport away to resummon them. Spear is generally better than spirit at this point, as you need to hit them before they escape. An alternative tactic is to lay a field of spirits in an area, lure them over to it and then kill their minions with Teeth. Sometimes it’s possible to time it so that the spirits begin to home in on the Druid just as you destroy the wolves, dealing a lot of damage. This is difficult to pull off successfully though and can take several attempts to get right.

If you get caught by them then you have to act quickly, Tornados do a lot of damage and you can’t take many hits. Teleporting is normally too slow to allow you to escape them, you have to walk or run a bit first. As always you should have your golem around for taking some of the hits.

Necromancer
Bone – Keep close to walls and watch very carefully for any sign of IBS. It is actually possible to see an IBS, as it has a small light radius associated with it, but it’s very faint and you can’t rely on it. Recast your golem immediately if it dies and look for an opening. This match-up can sometimes go the whole way without either of you appearing on the others screen, so unless you somehow get in very close to them it’s normally better to stick with spirits.

Poison – You have a big range advantage, so take advantage of it. Poison Nova has a range of about a full screen (800x600) so try to stay at least that far away at all times. Again, spirit is in general the better attack.

Paladin
Hammerdin – High unresistable damage, high life and desync. They can also make invisible hammers. Try to cast Bone Walls in the line of their Charge, it makes it far more difficult for them to desync. Predicting desync is a major part of this duel, if you see them charging on the minimap then it’s generally safe to assume that their actual position is about half a screen to a full screen ahead of what the map shows. They’ll often be charging in seemingly random directions in an attempt to increase the amount they’re desyncing by, so be careful, as they could come from anywhere. If they try teleporting on you and then casting hammers simply walk straight down immediately and cast spears at them.

Smiter – Telesmiters are very rare here, but non teleporting ones are relatively common. As with Hammerdins you must be able to have a rough idea of where they actually are. When they close in cast a couple of Bone Walls in between them and yourself and then begin firing spears off at them. It’s still worth putting on more DR in case they do hit you, but unless they get you pinned against an obstacle they’ll have trouble keeping you stunned due to the knockback on Smite

Sorceress
Blizzard – Often they can kill you in one hit if you haven’t stacked any cold resistance over 75. Absorb won’t be much help as it can only heal the difference between your current life and maximum life. This is a hard match-up, the only real advantage you have is the lack of casting delay on your spells, their superior casting rates can make your range advantage difficult to use. If you see them cast a Blizzard and it’s clearly not going to hit you take advantage of their brief vulnerability and cast some spears at them. Alternatively cast Teeth first and see if it puts them in hit recovery. If it does then switch to spear after the first one or two hits.

Fire/Lightning – These are grouped together as the principles are similar. Fire sorcs have a tight damage range and faster casting that Light sorcs, but Light sorcs can reach enormous maximum damages. Take advantage of your wider range of damage dealing skills and don’t just spam spirits. As with all low life characters Teeth can be very effective if you can get close enough.

ES Sorcs – These are grouped together as no matter what attacking skill they use you’ll encounter similar problems with them. ES is very good for absorbing magic damage; you’ll often find it almost impossible to do any real damage to them whilst it’s still up. With their big mana pools that’s unlikely to happen though. The only real chance is to try to get multiple hits at the same time and drain their mana, but this is almost impossible if they’re awake. ES sorcs are the closest thing to a hard counter that a Bone Necro has, so don’t worry too much about not being able to beat them.

Some duels of a bone necro I found on youtube are here, there’s a mix of nec vs. nec, a fire sorc, and a WW barb:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnpV9e_4sC4

3.5.2. Poison Necromancer

INTRO
A poison necro is a very nice build to play. He is also powerful enough to kill several enemies. Necromancers have very nice FCR breakpoints so you will not be easy to kill. Poison nova deals very nice damage and when you have lower resist, it is not so easy to stack against, your enemy must sacrifice better items, or stay with lower poison resist which is very good for you. Nice advantage is, that lower resist has a very large range so you will never have a problem putting the curse on an enemy. Only problem you can have is assassins using fade because that will cause the curse length to be drastically reduced. Another advantage you have are spare points because the poison skills require only 60 points to be full synergised so you will have a chance to get nice damage in some bone spells vs. Enemies with stacked poison resist. Unique problem you sometime have is take last 1 HP from enemy. A Poison necromancer is one of best builds for teamplay and in duels is pretty good too. His only problem is with FFA because you are doing kills for other players.

STATS

Strength – you need to have 156 strength for Stormshield and spirit, enigma on level 90 provide you about 63 strength you will need about 90-100 points here
Dexterity – you really need max. Block with Stormshield to survive in several situations
On level 90 it is a little bit more than 200
Vitality – all you will have spare after you will have full block and 156 str. With gear
Energy - nothing

SKILLS

Poison and Bone skills
Poison Dagger 20
Poison Explosion 20
Poison Nova 20
Teeth 5-15 (to have final level of teeth 23 with gear to have 24 missiles)
Bone spirit 10-20 (depend on your final level and gear)
Bone armour 1
Bone wall 1-x (this is useful vs. e.g. smiters but I am not using it. And if you will have spare points on the end you will synergise bone armour and the damage of your bone spells)
All prereq. Skills 1

Curses
Lower resist 1
All prereq. Skills 1

Summoning skills
Clay Golem 1

SKILLS INFO

I will write about the skills in order to you need use them in battle

Lower resist – Your support skill to poison nova. With this skill you will do extra damage if your enemy has only classic 175 poison resist, so he must decide to let you deal higher damage or sacrifice some nice piece of his gear which provides an advantage vs. some builds. Because no builds with ideal gear have enough resist to stack your poison resist on hell.

Poison nova – Your first killing skill. You have an advantage, in that nova covers all of the area around you (especially when you spam several novas in few time). Range is not so good, so you need to be close of your enemy, which is a disadvantage vs. some fast caster enemies with long range projectiles. Damage you will have between 6,5k and 8,5k which is pretty good even for doing some damage to enemies with full resist.

Teeth – You really need them to finish your enemies. The level of this skill increases their number up to level 23 when you have 24 missiles. Then you must choose if you want to have better teeth damage to finish enemies with replenish (mostly from HOTO) or you need more bone spirit damage vs. e.g. smiters seems to be very useful.

Bone Spirit – This skill provides you extra damage that cannot be reduced by resist so you can use it vs. enemies with very high and stacked resist. Another advantage of this skill is also tactical, because you can move by some passive and dangerous enemy as trapsin,

Clay Golem – Your protector vs. several dangerous enemies, especially melee enemies. Clay golem is a really huge advantage vs. smiters, bowazons or something which can be slowed or which can hit only one target.

GEAR

What to look for on your equipment:

FCR – For teleport and poison nova casting you need at least 75 FCR to be effective, which is 10 frames. Vs several casters it is much better take 125 FCR to have a much better chance to catch them.
FHR – If you are using spirit vs. casters, it is easy and recommended use 86 FHR (6 frames), when you are using Stormshield, better will be try to have at least 56 FHR (7 frames) which you can try with shadow dancers or some amount of SCs in inventory
+ skills – Poison nova damage, same as lower resist efficiency increase very nicely with +skills so try to put on gear with as many +skills possible because the advantage will be very nice.
Stats, life - of course, the more the better.
Resists – If you are using HOTO and spirit vs. casters, you have quite good resists which can be easily stacked up to full resist on hell using some resist small charms. If you are using Death’s web, you may have resist and FCR problems so you will find out that DW is good only vs. some melee builds.

Weapon

In most duels you have 2 options:
HOTO: I think this is best option because you have nice FCR, nice resist, +3 skills is pretty good too and best advantage in some duels is oak sage as an extra target for enemy
Death’s Web: This option gives you better options for dealing more damage due to –EPR because 40-50 extra enemy resist makes for some serious poison resist stacking problems. Lower resist usually does about -60 and with about -45 from DW you can get more then -100 and getting 275 poison resist is not easy.

As another option for weapon I see wizardspike (50 FCR, nice resists only disadvantage is +0 to skills) or maybe spirit if you are not rich enough to have HOTO because spirit has nice FHR, skills, mana, FCR

On switch best option is CtA. If you are playing GM and you have not enough mana, you can use insight on switch.

Shield

Stormshield – You need to have block in some duels. Best option for socket I see is a shael for nice fast blocking which has proved to be very useful for not having problems with blocklock from some enemies.
Spirit – probably best anticaster option because the huge FHR and FCR is enough reason to use it.

Darkforce Spawn – you can use one with a +3 to poison and bone roll to have better damage, 30 FCR is good too

Homunculus – you can use even this as block option vs. melee but it is not nearly as good as Stormshield because damage reduction is important. Advantage is presence of skills and some stats on this shield

On switch best is spirit to boost BO or lidless wall if you have not enough strength

Armour

Here there is only one useful option how to be effective and that is Enigma

For GM you can choose Skin of Vipermagi for FCR and resists but in BM you will not be effective with it.

Or if your damage seems not enough, you can try Bramble which will make your damage really interesting.

Helm

Shako – nice +2 skills +mana, life
Best choice for socket I see is a Shael for reaching the 86 FHR breakpoint or if you want to have huge damage, you can use a facet

Rare circlet – you need to have +2necro skills/20 FCR. Some +life or mana is good, usually Shael as socket. Or a magical circlet with +3 poison and bone/20 FCR

1.07 Valkyrie Wing – best choice for players who possess this piece of gear because 30 FCR gives you more flexibility, and FHR is pretty useful too. Socket is about choice here because with this helm and spirit your FHR will be probably enough to have 86 breakpoint so you can use a facet or resist jewel in place of a Shael.

Gloves

Here is a very easy choice and that is Trang´s Oul's claws because of the +25% to your poison skill damage and 20 FCR. And +2 curses is not so bad too when you are using lower resist

Belt

Arachnid mesh – Best choice if you need FCR

Verdungo – if you have enough FCR and you need full damage reduction, you can take this because extra vitality is nice.

Boots

Rare boots – triple resist (in order to light, fire, cold and poison is best) ones with 10 FHR are the best choice but it is hard to get them

Shadow dancers – 30 FHR and +dexterity is very nice, because when you are using Stormshield, you will need FHR and you can build your necro with a smaller amount of dexterity with full block only using shadow dancers

Hotspurs – Fire sorcs are one of your worst enemies so you will probably need very good fire resist to beat them.

Amulet

Mara’s Kaleidoscope - +2 to all skills (boost even your BO), +all resist and +5 to all stats is very nice

Crafted caster ammy - +2necro (or poison and bone) /+FCR with some life or good resists
If you want to have 125 FCR with Stormshield sometimes you will need at least +15 FCR on ammy so it is not easy to find good one

Rings

Two SoJs is the best option I think, because mana is one of the most important things even if you can spam mana pots, because it is not good when you must drink a mana pot every few seconds. If you want you can use BKWB for more life.
If you will have some special enemy, you can take e.g. wisps or raven frost

Inventory

I am using 6-8 poison and bone skillers for have good damage (with life or FHR are better)
Rest of inventory are vita SCs. If you will have some elemental enemy, you can put some resist SCs to your inventory or if you will need FHR SCs you can replace some vita SCs.

DUELING STRATEGIES

Duelling strategy for nearly all duels is in 3 parts:
First you must spam lower resist to enemy. This is very easy because your lower resist has a huge range and you shouldn’t be hit during this phase. Do not forget about curse length and sometime during the duel recast it on enemy. The only problem is with assassins using Fade because you need to cast curse only a few moments before you attack.
Second part is teleing around and spamming poison nova. This phase will depend on the enemy because sometimes you must attack and tele on your enemy and sometime you are only defending your position and spamming novas. Poison nova is only 2 seconds long so you can hit your enemy more often than with other poison attacks.
After you have the feeling that your enemy is on 1 life (you will see lock on him or you will hit many times) you should use teeth on enemy. This is just pure attacking action because after first your hit enemy should be dead so you can try attack even dangerous enemies.

AMAZONS

Bowazon
You should be superior against bowazons because you are very fast and you can escape from arrows. Best strategy is to be offensive, telestomp on the bowazon, and let golem a hit because after she will be slowed, which is much better for you. But do not stay too long in her presence, one poison nova is enough, then go far away, and again you can go back and attack again directly. In this case full block with Stormshield is necessary. Also bone armour should help you take some hits.

Javazon
Javazon should not be problem for you but you must be careful to not go into the poison cloud. You are much faster and your poison nova has better coverage of the screen. The only change against bowazon strategy is not to go right for the javazon but only enough close to poison nova, because a lightning javazon can smash you quickly.

ASSASSINS

Trapsin
This duel is very complicated for both you and the trapsin. If the enemy trapsin does not have teleport you must spam bone spirits to force the enemy move from his trap field. Then you can try attack from close, but you must be very careful to not let him MB you, because you will have problems even with 86 FHR. Try to run from MB (not tele) and then again attack. Trappers should have problems with resists so in this case it may be better to use Death’s Web with only 75 FCR.

WWsin
Not really easy enemy but it is not impossible to beat it. You must play a purely defensive strategy with very fast combo of LR/poison nova/tele around. She will reduce your lower resist length with fade and she also have about 65-72 extra poison resist from fade. But even with fade her resist is not enough to stack your poison with ideal gear, so Death’s Web is better in this case. If she has enough stacked poison resist even for Death’s web, then switch back to the 125 FCR setup.

BARBARIAN

Whirlwind
Poison necros seem to be one of the effective builds against this very powerful barbarian. You have bone armour, full block and with Stormshield and enigma 43% damage reduction. It is important is find out how many poison novas you need to get him to 1 HP. In the case of a good resist stacked WW barb you will have problems because it is not easy to hit him when he is using leap and when he is whirling through you it is painful for you. In this case try to spam more bone spirits because even 4 your spirits do about 1k damage to your enemy and that is not insignificant. Most of the duels depend on your skill to dodge his WW well enough. An ideal moment for your attack is usually just after he starts WW. The basis for success is that you must hit him every time he is whirling through you after he has just caught you. Usually you can not survive so many hits from him as he from you though, so you must catch him with nova when he is unprepared. When he is on 1 HP, it should be easy for you because he has no replenish, unlike many casters and one teeth will do it. Then you must only survive his ww and he will be dead. Best gear for me seems again to be Death’s Web with 75 FCR which is not so easy because you need circlet + ring + ammy or you need at least 2/+15FCR crafted ammy for necro but then you will have a nice advantage.

DRUIDS

Windy
This is a very complicated duel for you because you must be very patient and not let him catch you. You will have a better chance than a bone necro would, but it is still not easy. Poison nova should easily kill minions so that is not your problem but oak sage is immune to poison, so you will be against his huge amount of HP (over 5k) all duel. In this case it is better not to cast oak sage from HOTO because it gives him another target to lock you with. Another problem will be the last HP, because they will usually be using HOTO, so his replenish will be quite high, and damage of your teeth is not impressive. Therefore you must cast poison nova even after he seems to be on 1 HP to get him back to 1 HP. You should use Stormshield for damage reduction and 75 FCR with Death’s Web or 125FCR with HOTO and Stormshield.

NECROMANCERS

Bone
This is one of the worst enemies for you because they are very quick and have much longer ranged projectiles, which do high damage. You must use 125 FCR gear to have a chance and you must cast oak sage from HOTO and clay golem every time they die. They provide you with at least a small chance to save you from the many bone spirits you will have around when you attack him. Try to use unsummon lock as many times as possible even if it is really hard to catch a 125 FCR bone necro. Tele on top of him, cast poison nova and then disappear. He can also attack you with bone spears and you again have problems, so be careful even when being offensive.

Poison
Same builds against each other is never easy but try to spam some spirits to force him to move and attack you. Cast poison nova randomly to have a chance to hit him during his tele through because here a defensive strategy is probably better then offensive and when both will stay on their place it will be not duel. I never played vs. Another poison necro so I do not really know another strategy.

PALADINS

Smiter
Not an easy enemy but you should be patient enough to let poison and spirits kill him. Spam many spirits to let him charge through. Sometimes cast bonewall to stop his charge and his desync. Do not stay in the same place for more than a few seconds, because desync will cause you problems. Use poison nova when he is charging towards you, spirits can be used for more long range attacks, when you see him very far from you. Be very careful even when you need to finish him with teeth, because he can desync you and kill easily without receiving any hits. Use sage from HOTO, let him charge to golem to have a chance to slow him and be careful when you have Life Tap on you. Then it is better to recast your golem and your sage from HOTO to not let him take any HP back.

V/T and T/V
Here it is most important use sage from HOTO and recast golem because they can take some FoH. You can try to attack him from moderate distances, but it is better to use nova when he is charging to you and spam many bone spirits.

Hammerdin
You must be very patient and not let him catch you. It is better to use a defensive style, spamming poison nova around you, and spirits in the right direction. Try to stay along walls in the moor because hammers can be destroyed by walls. Sometime you can tele through a house in the moor to get some time. In this case teeth for the last hit should work well.

SORCERESSES

Blizzard sorc
This enemy will smash you with very few hits but blizzard is not as good to attack with as fireball. If you decide to overstack, it will cost you a lot of changes in equipment, but after that you will be able to survive enough blizzards to attack your enemy with poison nova. In other cases you try to spam many spirits and use poison nova as a defensive way to keep him at a distance. I am not overstacking resists most of the time, so I prefer to rely on my skill to dodge blizzard. Spamming novas when you are escaping from sorc is important as is using 125 FCR gear.

Fireball sorc
Probably along with bone necros your hardest enemy to beat. You will not survive many fireballs, so you can’t stay and attack him. Also, the range of fireballs is much higher than your attacks. You must try to get on top of enemy, spam nova and then again escape. If the fire sorc attacks you, you will have a better chance because you should be able to dodge some sorc attacks and hit with poison nova, but at the same you will have problems escaping from fireball stun when he catches you, particularly if they use 200 FCR, which is too fast to avoid. 125 FCR gear and good resist are essential.

Lightning sorc
It is similar to the fire sorc strategy, because light sorc can hunt you and you will have really big problems with hunting the sorc. Maybe use wisps to survive more and try to catch him. Spirits also help to your strategy, but only if the sorc does not have ES because your bone damage will be very small with ES (same with fire sorc).

[FONT=&quot] 3.6. Paladin[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]3.6.1. PvP Vindicator[/FONT]

(by Sequana and Denton, partners in crime)

Welcome. This guide is meant for the SPF PvP scene. The difference between an SP Vindicator and a b.net Vindicator is partially in the distribution of the status points, but mainly in the equipment and strategy sections. Many things allowed/available on b.net are banned/not available on SP.

Introduction:

Vindicator: a paladin using Smite and Charge as his main attacks, accompanied with Fanaticism as his primary aura, also known as the "smiter". He deals plain physical damage, but in a unique way. Smite is a melee attack that some don’t even consider as a melee attack, that is because Smite does not rely on Attack Rating at all and it always hits – it cannot be blocked with a shield. Smite however can be dodged by Amazon’s dodge skills and blocked by Assassin’s Claw Block. Smite is uninterruptible, meaning that as long as you keep smiting, the only thing that can interrupt the attack is when the smiter’s hitpoints reach zero (i.e. character’s death). Smite also knocks back and stuns. (Note that Stun does not actually disable a player character, but as long as the “stun swirlies†are visible on a character’s head, he/she will go into hit recovery from any amount of damage.)
Open Wounds works with Smite but Deadly Strike does not. Life Tap curse does work with Smite, but Life Steal (aka “leechâ€) does not. Getting hit by “Slow %†affects Smite attack speed, so if you get hit by a Clay Golem your Smite speed can be reduced noticeably until the effect of the slow wears off. Note that chill affects Smite attack speed, so Cannot Be Frozen –property is important to have in the equipment.

Charge is the second one of smiter’s main attacks. It is a great way of transportation, on plain fields almost as fast as teleport, and it’s a powerful attack especially against low-defence opponents. Charge knocks back when it hits, so you can keep on charging until the target isn’t knocked back anymore. Charge is fast, and that brings with it an interesting and very powerful feature (in fact it’s a bug or imperfection in the MP code of D2, but let’s call it a feature): the so called desync (short for desynchronization), which allows the charging paladin to appear to be almost invisible for other players.

Status points:

Strength – Enough to equip all gear. Basically it means to be able to equip Stormshield, or Crown of Ages if you want to use it. It is not really good to calculate with +strength from other items like charms or rings as it can ruin flexibility. You will need different gear vs. different opponents.

Dexterity – Enough to get 75% block with Stormshield with Holy Shield on. Again it is not really good to be dependant on dexterity from items, however one exception is Ravenfrost, you basically have to use one Ravenfrost vs. everything you need block for, so the 20 dexterity from a Ravenfrost is recommended to be built in.
With a level 20 Holy Shield (adds 35% to the block chance), Stormshield requires 136 dexterity at level 90 for a 75% chance to block.

Vitality – Rest of the status points.

Energy – None.

Skill points:

20 Smite
20 Holy Shield
20 Fanaticism
20 Defiance
1 Vigor
rest in Charge

Other options:
1 Salvation (it is not needed, but it can be handy)
1 Conviction (definitely not mandatory, can be useful only if you plan to participate in team duelling)
1 Cleansing (personally I never used it, usually you don’t have enough time for it to be really useful)
20 Resist Lightning instead of Defiance (Defiance’s passive bonus to the defence bonus of Holy Shield is useful vs. melee opponents, but not vs. casters. Usually there are more casters than melee characters, and lightning is probably the most common element, so the passive bonus of +10% to max lightning resistance from maxed Resist Lightning is useful and can free an equipment slot for something better than anti-lightning gear. But remember that the +max resist is counted as a source of absorb in the SPF duelling rules.)

The gear:

Good thing is that smiter needs mostly Meph stuff, it means relatively easily available (or tradeable) items. Only exceptions are armour and weapon, which unfortunately are two of the most important things for a smiter, and honestly together with a poor armour and weapon, you can’t expect much even from a smiter.

As I will list soon, one of the best armours is Fortitude, especially for its 300% ED. However the 300% ED is not crucial to be effective, thanks to the huge ED from your skills (Fanaticism, Smite and Strength together give about 1000% ED).

Weapon is another story. Grief is by far the best choice of weapon for a smiter, made in either a Berserker Axe (BA) or a Phase Blade (PB). The +340-400 to damage attribute found in Grief is added to the base Smite damage. The difference in damage with Grief compared to other weapons is huge. Anyone who plans to play with a smiter more should aim for this weapon, it’s really worth it. If you can’t afford Grief, then focusing on a setup with OW can work nicely.

Armour
Best choice: Fortitude Archon Plate – best option for the damage boost, resists and defence bonus. A bit expensive, but at present certainly not so uncommon.

Other options:
Expensive: Enigma - if you are ready to learn and utilize telesmite, Enigma is a top-end choice of armour. See the section about telesmiting.
Infamous 1.07 Arkaine’s Valor - a bit underestimated as a smiter’s armour, but it can be as good as Fortitude (more life, less damage).

Cheaper: Shaftstop (great especially vs. physical attackers, allows to use HoZ while retaining a good amount of DR %), Duress, Lionheart, Stone, Arkaine’s Valor.

Weapon
Best choice: Grief – without a doubt the best weapon for smiter in the game. Best base weapons for Grief are Phase Blade and Berserker Axe. In terms of damage it doesn’t matter almost at all which one is chosen, as Grief does not enhance the base damage of the weapon by a percentage, instead it just adds the +340-400, depending on the Grief’s roll, on top of the base weapon damage. PB is faster, it doesn’t require any off-weapon IAS to achieve a 6 frame Smite together with Fanaticism, whereas BA requires a little bit of off-weapon IAS. But especially in melee vs. melee duels BA is superior thanks to its range 3 compared to the range 2 found in a PB.

Other options:
The Redeemer - gives the second highest Smite damage after Grief, thanks to the substantial up to +120 damage added.
Oath BA - high Charge damage with relatively low cost, good speed.
Kingslayer BA - good OW %, but lacks a bit in damage.

Shield
Best choice: Herald of Zakarum – best paladin shield in the game although not best in every situation. Upgrading the HoZ is recommended but not necessary; the increase in defence is small, and the shield’s base damage goes up from 20-28 to 46. Chance to block remains the same. The shield’s base damage seems to get a large boost, but keep in mind that Grief for example adds up to 400 to the shield’s base damage, it’s just not shown on the shield’s damage reading. Most smiters meet the strength requirement of 142 for an upgraded HoZ, so if you have the runes to upgrade it, go for it, but don’t worry about it if you don’t have the runes.

Other options:
Expensive: Exile - very high defence thanks to the active Defiance aura, high chance of Life Tap (15%) makes it awesome in some situations. BM shield.

Stormshield – vs. physical attackers often better than HoZ, always good to have in stash.

In stash: 4x PTopaz and 4x PSapphire pala shield

Weapon Switch
Weapon: Call to Arms – Battle Orders (BO) gives a huge bonus to life, it’s often simply necessary in PvP. Battle Command (BC) is mostly just gravy; it gives a slight damage boost and adds 1 level to the BO (remember to cast it before BO).
Shield: Spirit in a paladin shield – +2 to all skills, used to boost BO level for more life.

Other options:
“any weapon with +x to paladin skills/Holy Shield†+ “any shield with +x to paladin/all skills†– if you don’t have a CtA, you can at least boost your Holy Shield level with the weapon switch.

Helm
Best choice: Harlequin Crest – easy to find or trade and at the same time excellent helm, socketed with 15 resist all jewel.

Other options:
Expensive: Crown of Ages – great especially vs. physical attackers, it is important to take into account its high strength requirement, socketed with 15 resist all/-15 req or 15 resist all/15 IAS jewel if you need the IAS.
Cheap-expensive: rare circlet - pala skills, resists, life, strength... (optional FCR for teleporting).

Andariel’s Visage (10 to maximum poison resist and 70 poison resist, 2 skills, +strength) vs. poison attackers.

Belt
Best choice: Verdungo’s Hearty Cord – best smiter belt, again Meph stuff and it is really worth to gain it.

Other options:
Thundergod’s Vigor - great especially vs. light attackers, be careful to not use it together with Fortitude (too many absorb sources then).
String of Ears – can be considered as a cheap Verdungo’s.

Gloves
Best choice: Bloodfist – cheap and absolutely great. Upgrade them for better defence.

Other options:
Dracul’s Grasp – strength bonus and OW make them nice gloves, LT can be handy (although it won’t trigger so often), be aware to use them only in BM duelling
rare gloves – with resists (useful only if you are in big need for resists)

Death’s Hand (PLR 75% and 50% poison resist) vs. poison attackers

Boots
Best choices: Gore Rider – DS adds some charge damage and the OW is really useful. Upgrade for better defence, their str req will be 156 – exactly the same as Stormshield’s.
Waterwalk – Good life bonus: +65 to life, and it’s BO’able. Upgrade for better defence.
Sandstorm Trek - (especially ethereal) the 20% FHR bonus doesn’t hurt and the poison resistance can be useful vs. poison users. If you have really good treks (+15 str, eth), you can consider building the +str into the character, but that will limit options if you need more resists etc.

Other options:
Natalya’s Soul – if you need to increase cold and light resist (for example in FFA), very cheap.
Rare boots with resists – can be much better than Natalya’s, but they are harder to gain, especially good ones.

Rings
1st slot: RavenFrost – this is necessary, try to get a 20 dexterity one.
2nd slot: Good to have open for absorbing (second Ravenfrost, Dwarf, Wisp Projector). If you don’t need any absorb, then BKWB ring or a rare ring (with mods such as life, strength, resists...) is the best choice.

Amulet
Best choices: Mara’s Kaleidoscope - Simply a great amulet.
Highlord’s Wrath – The DS % helps Charge damage and the 20% IAS can be useful or even required for BA users, so this amulet is a top contender along with Mara’s.

Other options:
Rare amulet with + paladin skills and other desirable mods (all resist, life, strength...), good one can be even better than Mara’s.

Iratha’s Collar (PLR 75% and 30 poison resist) vs. poison attackers.

Inventory
Small Charms with life and/or resists, and Lion Branded GCs (aka combat skillers), ideally with life, are the most useful charms for a smiter. Plain Small Charms of Vita with 19 or 20 life are not so difficult to find and they are better than plain or low life combat skillers. A Smiter does not need skillers to be powerful. The ultimate smiter charms are combat skillers of Vita, and Shimmering SCs of Vita, but those are very hard to get.

Strategies:

This part is mainly for those who are new to PvP or are not so skilled with smiter, as those who pwn all don’t have to read any strategic suggestions :). (Although I hope even they can find some new tips). There can be a general feeling that smiter should “charge/smite/done†most of the character builds. It can be, but often even duels where you have upper hand can be painful, especially at the beginning of your smiting career.

In general, one should be aware of few points. If you face up to a physical attacker, be sure you have 50% of physical damage reduction (DR for short) or as close to it as possible. With helm and belt you can easily get 20-25% DR and then, according your wealth, you can use Fortitude and Stormshield or Shaftstop and HoZ to get the remaining 25-30%. The final Smite damage difference when comparing Stormshield to HoZ is not so big, because most of the Smite damage comes from elsewhere (e.g. Holy Shield, +xxx dmg from Grief), so Stormshield is a very good option when you need DR %.

Vs. opponents with blockable attacks don’t forget to switch to walk instead of run to preserve chance to block and defence rating. Note that regarding block/defence, charging is considered as running. While running, block chance gets reduced to 1/3rd of what it is during standing or walking, and defence is ignored. The cap for block is 25% while running.

One technique that can be utilized in duels where you need to walk, is to switch to Vigor every time you walk and then switch back to Fanaticism when you attack the opponent. This requires quite good timing with the skill switches so that you won’t accidentally attack the opponent with Vigor aura active instead of Fanaticism. The additional FRW from Vigor can make a noticeable difference - duel against a WW barb being one good example.

1 vs. 1

Amazon
• Bowazon – her classical tactic is to run as quick as possible with shield switch and try to shoot GA when she is a bit farther. Her dodging makes quite difficult to hit her. Nevertheless you have the upper hand. Main attack here is charge and often it is also finishing one. Sometimes it needs patience, but I recommend to be as pushing as possible, don’t give her even short time to rest. GA may hurt (it ignores defence and during charging your block is reduced to 1/3 of what the block was), but your charge hurts much more, especially if you hit her on bow switch, that can be end of duel. Clever bowazons can run skilfully among bushes and other map formations what is for charging paladin a bit unpleasant, but with a bit of practice this is not such a deal.

• Poison/Hybrid – Be sure you have max poison resist and Death’s gloves, if still have feeling that poison eats you alive put on Andariel’s Visage or change Mara’s for Iratha’s Collar. With this set up poison should not hurt you much. The rest then is similar as vs. bowazon, be pressing, don’t give her chance to shoot much.

• Jab zon – in face to face fight make sure to smite first, as Jab is an uninterruptible skill and together with OW can hurt. You will have huge advantage still. They can be more dangerous while running a lot (again annoying dodging) and use throw/LF/LB skills. Most of their damage comes from OW and can hurt a lot while you can have difficulties to charge/smite her.

• Light javazon – Their Charged Strike is among the highest damaging attacks in the game, especially if most of the CS lightning bolts hit a single target. And as a ranged attack they have thrown javelins in the form of Lightning Bolt and Lightning Fury. Lightning Fury does physical damage in addition to lightning damage, and both LB and LF can carry OW and knockback for example. They are also difficult to hit thanks to their dodge skills and block, so they are a powerful enemy for a smiter. Having maxed lightning resistance is a must, and remember that they can have a bit of -res in their gear from Griffon’s and light facets so adding a bit of resist stack is important (~40-50 over your max res should be enough, unless the javazon happens to be using a faceted shield, then more stack is required). In addition to max lightning resistance, you will need some absorb and/or + to max resist. Against an optimally equipped (highest damage) light javazon two high % Wisp Projectors are best, and against an average equipped light javazon Tgod’s is better.

You can try to do hit & run charge attacks to deliver OW, this way you are less likely to get hit by the high damage CS, or you can just charge at them and follow with Smite, hoping that you can out-tank the amazon. In general smiter has the upper hand in this duel, but light javazon will be able to hit you even though CS is an interruptible attack and smite is uninterruptible, and CS really does hurt, so a light javazon shouldn’t be underestimated.

Assassin
• Trap – Max light resist is a need, be sure you do not use Thundergod’s with Fortitude together. Fortitude and Wisp Projector is one good option, or Thundergod's with different armour, Arkaine’s Valor can be nice for its FHR. You should aim for 86 FHR here, good thing is that you can use charge to get out of MB. Good tactic here is desync-charge-smite. Be aware that dual claw assasins can block smite.

• Whirlwind – deals mostly poison and OW damage, physical damage is just a small part (even if they use Fortitude). You don’t need Stormshield, HoZ is better here. Harlequin Crest and Verdungo’s are enough for DR, Death’s Hand for PLR and full poison resist. Their Claw Block can block your main attack – smite, so a well equipped WW sin can take more hits than even a BvC, but they have a smaller chance to hit you than vice versa. Also claws only have a range of 2, so they are at a range disadvantage if you use a BA (range 3).

The Whirlwind skill which Chaos rune word grants for these assassins, is exactly the same skill as what Barbarians have, so please refer to the Whirlwind Barbarian section, most of the strategies apply for a WW sin too.

Barbarian
• Whirlwind – Ah, a sort of a clash of the titans. Two of the arguably most powerful physical melee attacks in the game (in PvP at least) face each other. Whirlwind (WW) and hits much faster than Smite (4 frames per hit (or two simultaneous hits when the barb dual-wields weapons) vs. 6 frames per hit), but Whirlwind can be blocked and you usually have high defence. Whirlwind is uninterruptible and the barb can’t die until the WW ends. Duelling against a WW barb puts more bias on weapon range than duels vs. most other characters, so BA is strongly recommended with its range of 3. Barbarians usually use BA’s, so PB is at a disadvantage with its range of 2. BvC (Barbarian vs. Caster) is the most typical whirlwind barbarian for PvP, they dual-wield weapons (Grief + Beast for example). Barbarians can’t effectively use CtC LT, because CtC effects do not trigger with WW. You can try Exile and/or Dracul’s for LT, but don’t forget about DR %.

First of all, use walk, don’t run. And shift-smiting is necessary in this match-up. Shift-smiting means holding shift button down and namelocking the opponent with Smite, this way you will keep smiting in place and as soon as the target comes in range, you will hit him. In a direct head-on battle where the barb remains in constant smite range smiter will bring the WW barb down because you will hit him much more than he hits you, but a WW barb will try to avoid whirling through you, rather he will whirl around you.

So the goal is to try to manoeuvre by walking to be in the WW’s path so that you are able to deliver as many Smite hits as possible. Sounds simple, but good WW barbarians vary their WW’s direction and duration a lot, making it difficult to predict the ideal spots for shift-smiting. And because a WW’ing barbarian moves during the attack and WW hits faster than Smite, he can do so called clipping whirls. “Clip-whirl†means that the barbarian passes by you just on the edge of his weapon range so that he has a chance to get a hit or two in. Even if you keep shift-smiting during his clip-whirl, it’s unlikely that you can hit the barbarian because Smite hits only at 6 FPA compared to the 4 FPA of Whirlwind. In other words, the barbarian needs to be in weapon range for a considerably shorter time than you to be able to get a hit in.

Barbarian also is good at creating desync. In MP games a WW’ing barb seems to move at walk speed, while in “reality†(on server side) he moves at run speed, this causes the barbarian’s exact location to be very difficult to determine, especially if he does long and continuous whirls. You have to practically predict where the WW’ing barbarian most likely is, often you should start shift-smiting at the barbarian before he actually appears to be in your weapon’s range, because in reality the barb already is in range. If things get too confusing, you can try to charge far away from the barb for a while to calm the situation down a bit, but charge is very risky to use against a WW barb, especially if the barb has access to teleport.

You should never namelock the WW barb with Smite without pressing shift down first, because when you are walking, you are not smiting. And when you are not smiting, you are not “uninterruptibleâ€, which means that you can go into hit recovery when you get hit, and that results in wasted time and life, because you can start smiting at earliest only after the hit recovery animation has finished, and usually by then the WW barb is out of range again. One effective defensive tactic that the barb can try to utilize is WW’ing away from you; if they keep their whirls short while moving away from you, you have almost no choice but to wait until the barb makes an offensive move again, because if you try to follow them, you will get hit but you can’t hit the barb effectively.

• WC barbs - I never met any on SP. War Cry is the only damaging attack. But it doesn’t have long radius, doesn’t do high damage and doesn’t knockback. Although it stuns always when it hits, it shouldn’t be any bigger threat to a smiter. Paladins have quite good hit recovery, and because War Cry can be blocked, even a 7 frame Warcry can't really stunlock a paladin.

• Wolfbarb – You have upper hand. 50% DR and max block are important. Don’t forget to switch to walk mode. They can have high defence, so charge can become ineffective, but your main attack in this duel is smite.

Druid
• Wind – Very hard duel. 50% DR is a need, CtC LT can help a lot (you can use Exile and Shaftstop instead of Stormshield), unfortunately you can’t block tornados. Slightly good thing is that tornados move in random direction and with big piece of luck sometimes they can miss you. IMO you can win mostly only if your opponent makes some mistake. For example if he tele directly on you while you manage to smite fast, it is possible to smite druid directly and not his summons. With his poor hit recovery it can be lethal for him. If he teleports near you and casts tornados, you can either quickly charge at the druid, or run away by using Charge and wait for a better chance. In this case it is important to namelock the druid, otherwise you will for sure charge into summons. Even with namelock it is not for sure you will charge directly druid, but your chance is much higher. After successful charge comes right while for smite. Keep in mind that vs. windy druid it is always risky.

It’s a good idea to follow the druid by charging around him, thanks to desync your location will be partially invisible, and try to strike at the druid by namelocking him when he is teleporting just to move from a place to another so that there aren’t tornados flying around him.

• Fury/Rabies – Max poison resist in combination with Death’s gloves is a need here, if you feel it is not enough then take other source of PLR (Iratha’s Collar) or max resist (Andariel’s Visage). In face to face fight advantage is on your side. If he tries tactics to poison you and then run away, then it is a need to be well poison durable.

Necromancer

• Bone – Difficult one. Problem is that you can’t effectively reduce magic damage and good bone necromancer does quite a big magic damage. Gladly in the SPF arena bone necros don’t use bone prison and even bone walls use in moderate way. Still it is hard duel as you can’t tank too many bone spirits, try to avoid them, but be prepared you will eat many of them. Charge with desync is the best way to chase them, try to surprise them. Good idea is to put on some OW-gear, it can work even before you break his bone armour (bone armour can absorb one of your charges easily, but OW can still be triggered). Typical unpleasant thing is hitting golem instead of necro (assuming that he teleports), which slows you down. In BM duels Exile shield is good bet (CtC LT) if you have it.

• Poison – Easier duel than with bone necromancer, but still don’t underestimate him. With full poison resist (plus ~60 additional poison resist to cover Lower Resist Curse) and some anti-poison gear (Death’s Hand and Andariel’s Visage work nicely), poison won’t hurt you so much. Poison necro is not as durable as bone one, his bone armour is much weaker (it can’t even nearly absorb your first hit), bone spirits do noticeably lower damage. Same as for bone necro charge with desync is best tactic, after hitting him with charge switch quickly to smite and again charge before they can manage to teleport away. They can’t survive many hits.

Paladin
• Hammerdin – frankly this is the worst possible opponent for a Smiter. Synergized Blessed Hammer does a lot of damage, and the worst part is that it’s pure magic damage, so it cannot be resisted. Some items have Magic Damage Reduction (MDR) and Magic Absorb, but it’s not possible to get even nearly enough of either so that it would make any practical difference against the huge damage from hammers.

With Smite and Charge it’s pretty much impossible to beat a decent Hammerdin. The Hammerdin will charge around (creating desync), making it very difficult to hit him, while he can spam hammers here and there, and with desynching some of the hammers can even be invisible.

Hammers circle in a clockwise direction, and just as the hammer is cast, it does not immediately hit a close by target that is South-East or South of the hammerdin, so if the hammerdin happens to stop for a moment and he does not have hammers circling on him already, it’s possible to do a quick hit & run attack from those directions, but the hammers circle around quite fast, so there is time only for one smite. Usually hammerdins don’t stop (unless they already have hammers circling that area), so that’s a very risky tactic. Open Wounds is very good for hit & run attacks.

Another tactic is using Widowmaker’s Guided Arrows. This can actually make the hammerdin have to work a little bit for his kill. The strategy is to stay on the move by charging around (with weapon switch) and trying to avoid the hammers, while pausing every now and then to spam Guided Arrows towards where the hammerdin probably is, hoping that the arrows hit. This is a very tedious tactic, but it can at least do a little bit of damage to the Hammerdin. It might be a good idea to have a spare pack of arrows, or two, and a good chance of Open Wounds is strongly recommended. Beware of the hammerdin’s charge; the hammerdin might use a damaging weapon for charging, so be careful with the bow switch.

• Templar or T/V – here I strongly recommend to use a 4x PTopaz Sacred Targe (you can gain even around 200 light resist). You need to have full resist under Conviction, otherwise he will have upper hand as smite can be avoided quite well with charge while FoH is auto-aim and it does at least some damage. You can try charging, but that’s not very reliable. If he FoH you, you will probably take more damage over time than he would from your charge, because it is difficult to hit with charge when another is charging too. T/V paladin has less smite damage even after you switch anti-FoH gear on.

• Smite-biased T/V (I.E. smiter with 1 point in Conviction and with points in FoH instead of Defiance) – this can be tough duel. He will do very low FoH damage, but still you need to cover that. And beside it is regular smiter. To compensate light + physical damage it is good to consider to equip Shaftstop + Thundergod’s + HoZ + add light resist sc. Then it becomes smiter vs. smiter duel.

• Smiter – difficulty depends on the equipment and skill level of the opponent. At simplest each one charges in and starts smiting, with the one landing the first hit always having a big advantage, as Smite damage is very consistent. As this opponent relies on physical damage, 50% DR or as close to as it as possible is important.

Desynching plays quite a big role in this fight, because both of the paladins create desync as they charge around and both of them have a damaging charge. Even though the screen doesn’t tell the true location of a desynching opponent, it’s a good idea to namelock the opponent with Charge, keep charging him and observe when it seems to connect, then it’s time to switch to Smite and hope the opponent didn’t do that faster. Never stop and wait to namelock the opponent only when he appears on your screen, because then it will usually be too late, as the opponent will have already namelocked you and can be right next to you invisible, preparing to Smite. Two charging smiters duelling each other can be quite confusing at first.

Life Tap is very effective in Smite vs. Smite, although some people consider it lame, and perhaps it’s not the most “noble†way for two smiting paladins to confront each other, as then luck has much bigger effect on the outcome; if LT triggers on the first hit for one of the smiters, the other one has to run/charge away or face an almost certain defeat. Cleansing is good to use for getting rid of the LT curse faster while running/charging away. Exile shield triggers LT quite consistently but lacks DR %, while Dracul’s Grasp triggers it a bit too inconsistently for relying on it.

Again a good chance for Open Wounds is very useful for hit & run attacks. But in plain hold-smite-until-one-is-down -battles OW has very little effect.

• Zealot – Hits harder (DS works with Zeal) and faster than a smiter, and it also is an uninterruptible attack, but Zeal hits can be blocked unlike Smite hits, so smiter has the upper hand by far. Zealots also have Smite, but their Smite is inevitably weaker than yours.

Sorceress
In general a smiter can do well vs. sorcs, especially if he stacks resists/uses absorb. Also OW can work here (Gore Riders, Dracul’s). The general tactic is to try to desync and surprise her with charge. Sorcs with a high chance to block are of course more difficult to hit with Charge. Keep in mind that over-absorbing so that the opponent’s elemental attacks do almost no damage can be considered lame – this is especially prominent against a Fire sorc.

• Blizzard – Blizzard has a cast delay, which of course helps you to reach the sorc, but Blizzard hits hard and is “fire and forget†so the sorc doesn’t have to namelock or aim directly at you in order to hit. 1 or 2 Ravenfrosts and highly stacked cold resistance are recommended. For example with a 4x PSapphire paladin shield you can gain around 200 additional cold resist, which together with 1 or 2 Ravenfrosts makes you quite durable, while your Charge and Smite damage remains almost the same as with “normal†gear. But fully stacking over the Cold Mastery combined with 2 Ravenfrosts can make the paladin almost too durable against cold attacks.

• Fire – Fire sorcs are extremely mobile and attack fast because their primary attacks (Fire Ball, and if they want to conserve mana, Fire Bolt) do not have casting delays. Meteor can do high damage, but it has a cast delay which makes it risky for them to use, and there’s a long delay until the actual meteor hits the ground so you should be able to avoid direct Meteor hits. Combination of Hotspurs and a Dwarf Star rules here. However, that setup can make fire attacks do almost too little damage to be fair. Consider using Infernostrides instead of Hotspurs, or Hotspurs with no other source of absorb/max resist.

• Light – Much slower attacking but higher damage version of a Fire sorc. Using two high percentage absorb Wisp Projectors is highly recommended. Thundergod’s Vigor’s absorb doesn’t help much at all against the high damage of Lightning because it is not percentage based absorb, Tgod’s’ absorb works much better against lower lightning damage, but the +max resistance works of course. Note that Lightning sorcs often use Griffon’s Eye, so they can have a bit more -res than Fire sorcs (i.e. remember to stack a bit of light res).

• ES – Max block ES sorc (especially blizzard) can be a very respectable opponent. OW can be very handy here because ES does not affect it, and ES sorcs usually have much lower life than non-ES sorcs.

Telesmiting
The so called telesmite is a demanding and powerful technique. It requires a lot of practice and is most likely among the most difficult techniques in the game to master. It shouldn't replace usage of Charge to get to the opponent, as charge has the huge benefit from the desync it creates, instead telesmite is rather a complementary technique to be used along with Charge. Mixing charge and telesmite attacks is better than relying on only one of the attacks.

Telesmite basically means that you teleport on your target and smite the target immediately after teleporting, and even if the opponent tries to teleport or run away, you teleport on the target again - with a delay of your choosing - and smite again. This can be continued as long as you have mana (and life), putting big pressure on the target.

Efficient use of telesmite requires "chainlocking", which is basically continuous namelocking. After namelocking your target, you switch to teleport skill to teleport on the target, but the opponent is quite likely to escape for example after a hit or two, either by running/walking or by teleporting away, so the idea is that you keep the namelock all the time, and then teleport on the target again, forming a chain of namelocks.

So to do successful chained telesmiting, you have to switch between Teleport and damage aura (Fanaticism) on mouse button 2, and use Smite with mouse button 1. The first namelocking can be done with mouse button 2, in which case teleporting on the namelocked target can be done simply by switching to Teleport skill while holding the namelock, but in order to do chained telesmiting from that point onwards, you have to namelock with mouse button 1 instead.

Step by step explanation follows:

(You should have both Teleport and the primary damage aura (Fanaticism) assigned somewhere where they are easily accessible, they will be on the "mouse button 2" -side. Smite (and optionally Throw) should be assigned as mouse button 1 skills.)

1.) Choose Fanaticism skill (it will be on the "mouse button 2" -side), point the cursor on the target and press mouse button 2 down and keep it pressed, the opponent will be "namelocked", but nothing else happens now, your character stays in place.

2.) Keep the mouse button 2 pressed down, and move your mouse cursor in the middle of the screen on top of your own character before you teleport on the target. Now while still keeping mouse button 2 pressed down, choose Teleport skill on "mouse button 2" -side, this will cast teleport and as you have namelocked the target, you will teleport right on the target. You should release mouse button 2 as soon as you have started casting teleport. Choose Fanaticism aura.

Note that instead of choosing Fanaticism first in step 1, you can choose Teleport straight away, this way you will cast teleport right away, which can be better in some situations. But by namelocking the target with some "passive" skill first (any auras, Unsummon, Throw), you can add a delay of your choosing before switching to teleport and teleporting on the target, this can be important sometimes as your opponent can expect an immediate namelock-tele.

3.) Now right after you have teleported on your target (you don't have any mouse buttons pressed at this point), namelock the target that is now right next to you with mouse button 1 (Smite), so you start smiting the target. In the previous step you moved the mouse cursor in the middle so that you can immediately namelock the target just by pressing mouse button 1 down, without having to aim with the cursor at this point.

4.) The target can try to run away from the smite range and teleport away, but you still have the namelock with mouse button 1 on. Now if the target teleports away, move your cursor in the middle again, choose Teleport on mouse button 2 while still holding the namelock with mouse button 1 (now you can add a delay to confuse the opponent or you can proceed right away), and then click mouse button 2, this will cast teleport and you will teleport on the target again. Remember to choose Fanaticism aura again.

5.) Now if the opponent still escapes and you want to continue chained telesmiting, repeat steps 3 and 4.

Note that PB can be better than a BA for a telesmiter because he needs a little bit of IAS (in addition to for example the 40% IAS from Grief) to reach a 6 FPA Smite with BA, whereas with a PB he doesn’t need any off-weapon IAS, freeing equipment slots for FCR gear.

In video form, from Camden’s smiter guide:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcsxZpgl8GM

FFA and team duelling

FFA – At first, it is really fun. You won’t be pwned all the time and also you won’t pwn all the time, what is a great combination. Of course it depends on the setup of opponents. Your typical counters can be hammerdins, wind-druids, ww-barbs and bone necros. On the other hand most of amazons, non-tele sins, and melee druids won’t be eager to meet you face to face. Thanks to charge you can run away from too hot place and thanks to infamous desync most of chars will pay higher attention to you and your possible sudden attack. No one can be really safe if there is charging paladin around in FFA ;).

Teams – At first glance one can have feeling that smiter isn’t the best team mate, as he needs charge a lot around, desync and mostly attack on his own. But there are few chars where good partnership can be rewarded. Every physical damage dealing character can profit from fanaticism aura, although the damage bonus isn’t really high. The biggest attraction of fanaticism is its IAS which is especially beneficial for bowazons. Another useful aura here can be conviction (if it is available) in team with trapsin. Also smiter can work as protector for trapsin (ideal situation is when she MB opponent while smiter can smite smite), bowazons and some other fragile chars. Sometimes smiter can be also useful in providing cleansing aura to get rid of poison and curses, although not always there is chance and time for this.

[FONT=&quot]3.6.2. Hammerdin[/FONT]


Hammerdins have a certain reputation among players as being very overpowered. This is only really true in PvM though, in PvP whilst being one of the top tier builds they have weaknesses on a similar scale to the other top builds. The massive unresistable damage is a big advantage for them, but they suffer against builds that make use of minion stacking, such as wind druids.

Skills and Stats:
Blessed hammer – 20
Vigour – 20
Blessed Aim – 20
Concentration – 20
Holy Shield – 1+

The remaining skill points can go in several places. If the items you’re planning on using have high defence then putting the rest into Holy Shield could be a good idea. Alternatively you could put them in Charge for extra damage if you have a weapon switch for that, or you can put points in the resist auras for the passive bonus to max resistances, but remember that these count as 1 source of absorb.

Stat points are the same as most builds; enough in strength for all your items without strength bugging, enough dexterity for max block with Holy Shield and the rest into vitality.

Breakpoints:

Paladins have the same FCR breakpoints as necromancers, and should also be aiming for the same target, 125 FCR. This is a lot easier to hit than it seems at first though, particularly with the RWM making Spirit available. If you make a Liberator build then 75 FCR is the best feasible breakpoint to aim for, assuming you don’t have a godly rare circlet and a great crafted amulet.

FHR is less of a priority than for other builds as Charge gives you the ability to escape from most hazards, such as Mind Blast and trap fields and paladins start with quite good recovery rates. Despite this you will need some and 48 is a good target to aim for. 86 gives you 4 frame hit recovery, and is likely to be what you’ll hit anyway with a Spirit shield.

Items:

Hammerdins are fairly cheap in comparison to other builds for their effectiveness. This is because they have Charge for mobility and don’t have to rely on large quantities of FRW gear, teleport charges, or Enigma.

Helm:
Harlequin Crest is the obvious choice here, a nice life/mana boost, +2 skills and 10% DR. Another option is a circlet which can be very useful, particularly if it spawns with FCR. Crown of Ages can be useful in some situations, but the strength requirement is far higher than any other item you’ll use.

Amulet:
Mara’s is a great choice, +skills, resistances and stats. It’s very hard for a rare or crafted amulet to beat on this build, as you are unlikely to need extra FCR. If you have a really good amulet though then use it, it could allow you to swap a FCR ring for a +skill ring among other things. Other amulets you could use if you don’t have Mara’s are any rare amulets with +skills and resistances.

Armour:
Assuming you don’t have Enigma then Vipermagi is the next best choice, the FCR will be very useful for reaching the 125 FCR breakpoint and more resistances.
Weapon:
Wizardspike or Heart of the Oak here, HotO if you have it, then Wizardspike if you don’t or just need the extra resistances
Grief PB is a great choice for Liberators, the damage is easily enough to deal with casters that can be awkward to hit with only 75 FCR. Liberators can use any high damage 1-handed weapon though if Grief isn’t available, the speed doesn’t matter for Charge.

Shield:
There are 2 main choices here, Spirit in a high resist elite Paladin Shield, or Herald of Zakarum. HoZ will give you more damage and the stat bonuses, but Spirit gives 35 FCR, 55 FHR, a decent life bonus and a lot of mana. Spirit will generally be the better choice as with Holy Shield it isn’t too hard to reach 75% blocking with it.

Gloves – Trang Oul’s Claws
Belt – Arachnid’s Mesh if you have no reason to use one of the others, such as TGods or Verdungo’s
Boots – Waterwalks, Treks and good rares are all reasonable choices here, it all depends on what you need that your other items can’t provide.

Rings:
Raven Frost – You need CBF from somewhere, otherwise your Charge speed will suffer. This is the easiest place to get it from, and the cold absorb is also useful against blizz sorcs
As with the boots you should be trying to make up for deficiencies in your other items, in this case it will likely come down to a choice between FCR rings and SoJs/BKWBs for the other ring slot.

Charms:
You don’t need to fill your inventory up with combat skillers, a lot of the time extra damage isn’t particularly useful as it’ll still take the same number of hits to kill someone. Aim for about 8.5k damage (with Concentration on) as a minimum, which isn’t particularly hard to reach, then add skillers if you have the room. You want to look for the normal useful mods on charms, such as life, resists and FHR.

Strategy
General

Desyncing is the most important skill you can learn. Firstly, make sure that you have your hotkeys set up so that you can easily switch between using Charge/Vigor and Hammers/Concentration at the same time. For example I use the following hotkeys:

Charge – A
Vigor – W
Hammers – D
Concentration – E

I can switch from Charge/Vigor to Hammer/Conc quickly whilst keeping the stand still key (Ctrl in my case) held down. The process of desyncing is not exact and the same actions won’t always cause the same effects, but in general the idea is that the faster you move, the more quickly you’ll begin to see the effects. You’ll appear to be further away from other people than you really are on the minimap. You might also begin to cast invisible hammers. The reason for making sure that Vigor is always on when you’re charging is that the faster you’re moving the bigger the effect will be. In order to actually desync there is no one set way, if you charge in a straight line you’ll be quite easy to predict, but if you’re too random then you’ll never get anywhere. I find that a good compromise is to use a slightly random zigzag pattern, laying a hammer or two along the way.

Laying hammer fields correctly takes a lot of practice and isn’t as simple as it seems; their tightness will have to vary with how mobile your opponent is, as will the density of hammers, for example a fast teleporting sorc is likely to need a larger hammer field with few hammers. Teleport charges aren’t necessary, but can be useful in certain match-ups, particularly ones against high life builds (including ES sorcs) and builds that have a lot of minions, such as wind druids.

Amazon
Bowazon – You can normally dodge most GAs when charging and as you’ll be moving faster you can quickly close in on them and box them in. It can still be hard to hit them because of Dodge, but as they can’t teleport you have a mobility advantage. Liberators can just charge them when they see an opportunity. If their damage output is too high then you may have to use teleport or teleport charges to get close enough and still have enough life left.
Javazon – If you get hit by a poison cloud then you can turn on Cleansing to reduce the duration, otherwise they’re the same as bowazons

Assassin
Trapper – They’re likely to try and sit in their trap fields and wait for you to come and attack them. It’s useful to bear in mind that Charge can get you out of MB locks very easily, so one way of getting them out of their trap fields is to charge in, cast a couple of hammers, then quickly get out of there. If they run then you should be able to get in front of them and cut them off. Remember that you can take a lot more hits from traps than they can from hammers, but MB can cause you take a couple of hits more than you’d like, so be careful about aggressively going after them.

Barbarian
WW – If they use Leap and Widowmaker this can be quite hard, Leap will knock you back killing all desync and the Widowmaker is an attempt to force you to play more aggressively. They may also try to counter your desync with long whirls across the direction you’re charging in. Once you get within about a screen of them they’ll begin leaping and be likely to start whirling, make sure you have a couple of hammers up around you at this stage so that even if you get hit so will he. Don’t try to tank them, if they do tele-whirl you then charge away in the direction that their whirl began.

Druid
Wind – Very hard. Wolves will stop your hammers from doing any damage and Tornados will cause you massive problems if you get too close. This is one of the duels that teleport charges are very useful in, you have to be able to catch them quickly when they run off to recast, it’s one of the few times that they’ll be vulnerable. Try to keep your screen full of hammers so that when they approach you their minions get killed. Once they’ve lost some of them you can try desyncing much closer to them than before and hopefully get some hits in. This is probably the hardest match-up for a pure Hammerdin, so don’t be too put off if you nearly always lose it.

Necromancer
Bone – If you play aggressively you’re likely to get hit by a lot of spirits and spears, as well as being blocked off by Bone Walls. You need to stay on the defensive and lay hammer fields, whilst being ensuring that you watch out for IBS. They generally only need 2 hammers to kill, so hoping for a random hit is often your best chance here, try to generate as much desync as possible. Trying to charge them with a liberator can be risky, as their Bone Armour will likely protect them from the first hit.

Paladin
Smiter – Try to not let them approach you from the bottom of the screen, there’s a spot directly below your character where hammers don’t hit and they can safely hit you from. They’ll have a lot of trouble trying to close in, so keep a bit of distance and keep the hammers up.

Hammerdin – In general the winner of the mirror match will come down to who can desync better and predict the others movements with greater accuracy. Don’t chase them, that’s a guaranteed way to get yourself killed, instead focus on remembering where their old hammers are and where they’re likely to go next.

Sorceress
Blizzard – Their short range gives you a big advantage here, charge away from them whilst laying hammers and they’re very likely to hit one eventually. If you have teleport or teleport charges then you can try to take advantage of their casting delays by tele-hammering them just after they cast a blizzard, but this can be risky. If you have a lot of problems then you can use Raven Frosts to reduce their damage to manageable levels, but it generally won’t be necessary.

Fire/Light – If they play defensively then use that against them to build up a lot of desync and lay some very dangerous hammer fields. If they’re more aggressive things become a lot harder, you have to concentrate on dodging their attacks whilst also trying to keep enough hammers up that if they make a mistake you’ll get a hit. Energy Shield sorcs are likely to play aggressively as they can take a lot more hits, keeping the pattern of your charging random so that they can’t easily predict where you’re going then becomes even more important. Charge hits with high damaging weapons are very useful against ES sorcs, particularly if you have a bit of OW somewhere, just be very careful about eating a lot of fire balls when you get close.

This video gives a good overview of some of the basic things you need to consider, such as desync and where the blind spot is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKvNo-6N-ok
 
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Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

[FONT=&quot]3.7. Sorceress[/FONT]

3.7.1. Fire Sorc

Fire sorceresses can be a very good build for newer players, as a lot of the items are fairly common and you already start with teleport. The fast FCR breakpoints allow you to escape some situations that slower casters such as bone necros can’t. There a couple of main variants, but I’ll focus on 105 FCR fire sorcs with max block and both with and without ES here. 200 FCR sorcs are definitely viable, but take quite specific items and also need much quicker reflexes due to not having any blocking.

Skills and Stats
No ES:
20 Fire Ball/Bolt
20 Meteor
20 Fire Mastery
1 in Warmth, Teleport and pre-reqs
86 skill points used
Leftover points can go in Warmth for more mana regeneration, one of the Frozen armours to improve defence (Chilling is generally best), or somewhere else

ES:
20 Fire Ball/Bolt
20 Meteor
1 Fire Mastery
20 Telekinesis
1 in Warmth and Teleport
86 skills points used

There are two main options after this, either increase your damage further by putting points in FM, or improve your ES by putting points there. Excessive prebuffing is annoying, both to you and the people waiting for you, so in general I’d favour putting points in ES rather than FM.

The mechanics of ES are explained in detail in section 2.

Stats
For a non ES build they’re the same as most characters, enough strength to wear all your items, enough dexterity for max blocking and then the rest in vitality. For ES based builds this is more complicated, since you need to balance the rate at which you lose life and mana. It is definitely possible to get away without blocking with an ES build, and rely on your mana pool for coping with physical damage, but I’d only do this with a strong ES, probably above 85%. It’s generally a good idea to wait until you have all you’re items equipped before splitting the stat points available for vitality and energy.

There is no one optimum distribution of points between vitality and energy, you’ll have to make a decision on how much of a factor OW is likely to be as well as the fact that mana regenerates far more quickly than life. It’s one of those things that can only really be worked out through experience.
Breakpoints

105 FCR (8 frames) is what you’ll need to aim for, 63 is too slow, and 200 takes some very specific items. Sorcs have slow hit recovery times, so 86 is the best breakpoint to aim for; only use 60 if there really is no way you could hit 86.

Items
Whilst a lot of the items can be found easily enough there are certain ones that are hard to find and can make a significant difference.

Helm
Harlequin Crest - +skills, big life/mana boost, 10% DR. Even if you have a good circlet this is often a better choice
+2 skills/20 FCR rare circlet, or +3 Fire skills/20 FCR magic circlet – These can be good if you’re going with an ES build as it frees up another slot, such as using Frostburns instead of Magefist

Armour – Skin of the Vipermagi: The best choice here is also very common, so just get one with as high resists as possible.

Weapon
The Oculus – Skills, resists and decent FCR. The CtC teleport can be annoying in PvM, in PvP it can sometimes be useful but can also be dangerous, it depends on personal preference really
Wizardspike – Great resists and FCR, the mana bonus is a big boost for ES builds too
HotO – The extra damage from the +skills may make up for the lost mana and resists from not using Wizardspike, it depends on the rest of your items. As fire damage can be quite easily reduced through Hotspurs it can often be a better choice if your damage is lacking

Shield
Stormshield – The DR is a big bonus against physical damage characters and will help to offset your low life. A good choice for non-ES builds
Whitstan’s – Generally only useful on ES builds where DR is less important and the dexterity saving will give a big boost to your life/mana.
Spirit – If you’re using Stormshield as your main shield this can be a good switch if you don’t need blocking. The FHR, skills and mana are all a good boost.
Sanctuary – Reasonable blocking, good resists and FHR, but no DR, could be a good switch for ES sorcs who don’t need blocking for a certain match-up.

Belt
Arachnid’s Mesh – If you need more FCR
Gloom’s Trap – Good for ES sorcs that don’t need the FCR from Arachnid’s Mesh

Gloves
Magefist – The +1 fire skills makes these much more preferable to Trang’s for this build
Frostburn – Massive mana boost for ES builds that can do without the FCR and +skill from Magefist

Boots
There are many choices here, Natalya’s for resists, Treks for FHR and poison resist, Silkweave for extra mana, Waterwalks for the dex and life bonuses, as well as rare options. Look at what your other items are missing and try to make up for something here.

Amulet
Mara’s – Very difficult for a rare/craft to beat, especially as you’re unlikely to need FCR from this slot. Crafted caster amulets can beat it, allowing you more flexibility in other equipment slots, but they’re very rare.

Rings
FCR rings or +skills rings here. ES builds should aim for 2 SoJs if possible, which when only aiming for 105 FCR should be doable.

Sockets
Shaels and Ums are again a good choice, or jewels with combinations of those mods.

Charms
You want as many Fire skillers as you can get, even plain ones, though preferably with life or FHR. The remaining inventory slots should be dedicated to adding resists first, then life, assuming your main equipment doesn’t give 75 to all resists in Hell. If you have to sacrifice one element to get the other up to reasonable levels then choose cold if possible, it’s nowhere near as common, and the main source of it, Blizzard sorcs, will reduce your cold resistance to -100 anyway.

Strategy
General – Keep your distance, even with an ES build you can’t tank high damage melee characters. Meteor isn’t particularly useful, stick to Fire Ball/Bolt, they do similar damage at high levels. Fire Ball costs more mana, but will damage characters that use minion stacking, such as necromancers and druids, Bolt costs less mana, but only hits one target. Using the right attack is particularly important for ES builds as you can’t use mana potions. It’ll take a while to get used to aiming in the right places, don’t expect to hit everything straight away.

Amazon – Don’t teleport straight at them as that’s a good way to teleport right into a poison cloud, circle round them and don’t stand still casting for too long. Don’t get too close unless you’re completely sure you can finish them off

Assassin
Trapper – Don’t get close to them, MB will keep you locked up long enough for the traps to get a hit or two in. Spam Fire Balls from a distance (they have a range of about 2 to 2 and a half screens) to force them out of their trap fields. If they chase you then teleport away defensively, casting a couple of missiles each time. Traps will quickly take down an ES builds mana, but will be much easier to deal with for non-ES builds.

Ghost – Very difficult, you’ll constantly be on the defensive, having to avoid all MB and trap hits. As their physical damage is quite low this match-up will often be easier for non-ES builds. You’re best chance is to just keep as far away as possible and keep spamming. If you do get caught then your best chance of escaping comes from walking a short distance before trying to teleport away.

Barbarian
WW – They use the same FCR breakpoints as sorcs, but will likely only be using 40 FCR, so you have a good speed advantage. If you get knocked back by Leap then get away from them as fast as possible. Keep an eye on their casting animation, if you see them about to cast then teleport away and cast a couple of Fire Balls at your old position, but again, don’t hang around too long. This can be very hard as it takes you a lot of hits to kill them, but they only need to get a couple of good whirls in, unless you have a strong ES.

Druid
Wind – You don’t need to worry about their minions as long as you have enough mana for Fire Ball, you also have a much longer range attack and better casting breakpoints. Their minions can sometimes work to your advantage as if they move a short distance away from the druid a Fire Ball that hits one will also damage the druid due to the splash damage radius. If they do catch you then walk away a short distance before teleporting out.

Necromancer
Bone – With an ES build these are a lot easier than a non-ES build. If their teeth can put you into hit recovery then be very careful as they’ll likely use that to keep you in place so they can switch to spears. As with wind druids their minions can work to your advantage, giving you a slightly bigger target to aim at. Keep close to walls if possible as IBS can be a big problem, but don’t play too defensively, if you can get a couple of hits in they’ll often go into hit recovery and give you an easy chance to finish them off.

Poison – A much bigger problem for ES builds, as it is likely that one nova will take you down to 1 life. Again, this is a case of taking advantage of your longer range, and not giving them the opportunity to hit you with nova.

Paladin
Hammerdin – Can be hard as they’ll often have high life and resists. If you use ES this is a lot easier. Due to their desync they’re real position will often be in front of the position shown on the map, so keep that in mind when aiming. If they teleport on top of you then immediately walk directly down a short distance and hit them with as many fire balls as possible.

Smiter – The difficulty of this match-up depends a lot on how well you can read desync, if you know exactly where they are then it becomes much easier. Unfortunately this just comes down to practice, but you should be able to get better with time. Don’t try to tank them, but you can often make short teleports away that give you enough distance to cast once or twice, but are still close enough to guarantee hits.

Sorceress
Blizzard – Your longer range and faster attacks should give you a big advantage here, but for non-ES builds be careful as they may be able to kill you in 1 hit. If necessary stack some cold resist, but you should be able to manage without it

Fire/Light – This often comes down to being better at predicting their teleport patterns and dodging their attacks. Sorc vs. sorc can either be very tense, or quite dull depending on the players. Whatever you do, don’t teleport in straight lines when chasing them (though this should also apply to all duels).

Here are some videos I made quickly against a smiter and ghost. This was using a 200 FCR sorc with no blocking, and you can clearly see the issues I had against the ghost:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwR02K-z-Eg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdODPq8Xhjw

[FONT=&quot]
3.7.2. Blizzard Sorceress Guide
[/FONT]



The Blizzard Sorceress is a medium ranged magic damage dealer that randomly delivers cold damage within a targeted area for a few seconds. The damage is enhanced by the reduction of opponents’ resistance via Cold Mastery. She is different from her fire and lightning sisters as her main attack is not spammable so she must work her timing to compensate for her casting delay. However she can instantaneously hit opponents regardless of range. She can be effective in any battle environment (1v1, FFA, teams) as opponents aren’t often prepared against cold attacks. One big plus with this build it can be easily be doubled as a MF sorc, whereas you can gain good levels with Pindleskin or Ancient Tunnel runs.

Energy Shield or not?
Not only does Energy Shield work well to defend against physical attackers, but it is especially effective against Hammerdins and Bonemancers. The drawback is that it requires a commitment of skill points, which will take away from your blizzard damage. I would recommend no using Energy Shield as you want to maximize your damage, unless you are extremely wealthy.

Skill Points
Blizzard (20) – Your main attack. Keep in mind of its casting delay.
Ice Blast (20) – Not just a synergy for Blizzard but can be spammed at close opponents if you are stuck in a casting delay or wish to do hit and run attacks. Keep in mind that this projectile is extremely slow and is difficult to use on targets at range.
Cold Mastery (20) – Reduces your opponent’s cold resistance to increase your spell damage.
Glacial Spike (20) – Synergy to Blizzard. Can be used against opponents with minion stack, like Wind Druids.
Ice Bolt (Rest of your points here) – Synergy to Blizzard.
Chilling Armour (1) – Optional, will increase your defence, but cannot deflect ranged attacks as many people think.
Warmth (1)
Teleport (1) – Your main method of transportation.

Status Points
Strength – 156 for Stormshield
Dexterity – Enough for maximum block with Stormshield.
Vitality – Rest of you points here.
Energy – None.

Essential Maths
I recommend that you try to reach the following metrics:
At least 60% faster hit recovery, 86% is better. As a caster, the Sorceress takes longer to recover from stun, so reducing that time will help you recover so you can regroup.
At least 63% faster cast rate, 105% is better. It is true that Bizzard has a casting delay, but FCR is still important for Teleporting especially against other casters.

Equipment
Helm
Nightwing’s Veil – Best helm for this build, +2 skills and +cold damage.
Harlequin Crest – Another good helm, has +2 skills and 10% Damage Reduce and the +Life/Mana is very useful especially if you character is not receiving Battle Orders.
Kira’s Guardian – its main selling point is its massive boost to resistances and cannot be frozen.
Rare Circlet – It can spawn +skills, +FCR and +life/mana but finding a good one can be pricy.

Amulet
Mara’s Kaleidoscope - +2 skills and resistances, the top of the line amulet.
Tal Rasha's Adjudication - +2 Sorc skills, +life/mana and resistance to light
Rare or Crafted Caster Amulet – Can help you with reaching a casting BP. Look for one with +Sorc or cold skills, life/mana and resistances.

Weapon
Death's Fathom – The best weapon you can get for this build, but extremely expensive. It’s +cold damage% will increase you cold attacks substantially. Also comes with +3 sorc skills, +20% FCR and some resistances to fire and lightning.
Heart of the Oak – Another good alternate at the price of a Vex rune, this provides +40% FCR, resistances and mana. It also has charges for Oak Sage, which can be used for a life boost and a little minion stack.
The Oculus – An interesting choice, has +3 sorc skills, some resistances, +vitality/energy and +30% FCR and it’s not too expansive to acquire. But it also has CTC teleport, which can help or hinder you if you are being attacked by physical damage.
Spirit Sword - +2 Skills, +25-35% FCR, +55% FHR and +life/mana, a very nice and cheap option especially if you are severely lacking in FHR.

Shield
Stormshield – +35% Damage Reduce and a good block rate, the best shield to use against physical attackers.
Spirit Monarch – If you don’t need blocking, this shield is hard to beat – +25-35% FCR, +55% FHR, +life/mana and resistances to cold, light and poison.
Gemmed Monarch Shield – Used if you are in need of stacked resistances. For example, put 4 Perfect Topazes in a 4-socket Monarch and you have a shield with +160 lightning resistance.

Armour
Ormus’s Robes – An armour to maximize your Blizzard damage, has 20% FCR and +10-15% to cold damage. Try to get one with +Blizzard.
Skin of the Vipermagi – An all around good caster armour, with +1 Skill, 30% FCR and resistances across the board.
Que-Hegan’s Wisdom - +1 skill, +20% FCR, +20% FHR, also a decent armour if you overlook its lack of resistances.

Gloves
Magefist – 20% FCR and +1 to Fire Skills that helps Warmth.
Trang's Gloves – 20% FCR and some cold resistance.
Bloodfist – If you don’t need FCR in your glove slot, a good alternative, with FHR and life.

Belt
Arachnid Mesh – +1 Skills and a small mana boost.
Crafted Caster Belt – Can help you reach a casting BP. Look for one with life/mana and resistance.
String of Ears/Verdungo Hearty Cord – Both belts provide up to 15% DR if you feel you need more help against physical attackers.
Thunder God’s Vigor – Used mainly against opponents who attack with lighting damage because of it’s +Max lightning and lightning absorb.
Snowclash – Provides +2 to Blizzard, but nothing much else. Can be used to pre-buff Chilling Armour.

Rings
Stone of Jordan – +1 Skills and +Mana, this ring is the best choice for this build.
BK Wedding Band – Also has the +1 Skill with some life, but it’s pretty pricey.
Ravenfrost – An important source of Cannot Be Frozen, and also dexterity and mana. I would suggest wearing a pair of these.
Dwarfstar – Has a nice boost to life and fire absorb.
Rare Ring – Look for one with +str/+dex, life/mana. But good ones are usually a bit expensive and it would probably be easier to get a Ravenfrost instead.

Boots
Sandstorm Trek – The +Damage on these boots help on low damage bows. Also provides some vitality and strength.
Waterwalks – Provides a healthy dose of life and dexterity.
Gore Riders – Small boost damage with +Deadly Strike and Open Wounds
Alder’s Boots – Fast boots with +40% FRW, life and fire resistance.

Charms
Can be used to fill the holes that your gear couldn’t cover whether its life, damage or resistance. You would be looking for Chilling charms to boost your cold skills, but if you lack those, fill you space with more life charms.

Versus Strategies
Here are some tips on common builds you see in the moor.

Whirlwind Barbarian
Try to keep a Blizzard between you two if he’s still afar, so you try to get him as he’s approaching. He can tank a few Blizzards because of his massive life, so expect him to reach you – he’s going to Teleport on top of you and Whirlwind. But anticipate this and throw Blizzard on top of yourself. Try to sidestep his Whirlwind between Blizzard casts and feel free to spam Ice Blast when he’s up close. Ensure that you are set to walk mode to retain your 75% blocking.

Hammerdin
He will try to teleport on top of you then cast his hammers, so cast Blizzards on top of yourself. In it’s casting delay, run in a southern direction and teleport away to avoid his hammers.



Smiter
Make sure you are surrounded by puddles and other obstacles as he’s more likely to desync charge in to try to get some hits. Try to anticipate where he’s coming from and keep casting a Blizzard in that path so he is forced to Charge through it. If he does close the distance, teleport away and ensure you have a Blizzard behind you. Avoid being too near obstacles as he can push you into them and keep you Smite locked.

Ghost Assassin
Treat like a WW Barb but get ready to break Mind Blast stun by rapidly switch weapons. Keep in mind that her Weapon Block will allow her to tank you attack. Be ready to rapidly switch your weapons with the w key to break out of MB stun if you find yourself stunned from a distance, but if you are too close, expect the assassin to tack advantage of you lack of block to Whirlwind you.

Trap Assassin
If placed properly, her traps can effectively keep you at bay because of their range. This match you will need patience also, as you want to avoid being stunned in her trapfield. Look for gaps in her trap placement – areas where traps are far apart – and use this area to close in to drop a Blizzard. Keep in mind that it takes time for a trapper to lay new traps and for them to fire, use this to your advantage. As both of you are trying to get a namelock on each other, try to attack from the south; you’d be able to get a namelock by clicking on your opponents legs, but she wouldn’t be able to do the same as her character information bar is blocking the bottom portion of her screen. If you find yourself in a MB lock, rapidly switch your weapons with the w key and run away so you have a chance to Teleport out to get some breathing space.

Wind Druid
His main goal is to teleport on top of you, so be ready to throw Blizzard on top of yourself. You also have the option of shooting Glacial Spikes at his group, this will freeze up his grouped up Spirit Wolves for a short time, which help reduce the chance of you getting block locked. In this match up, I recommend a source of cannot be frozen. If he is getting you in block lock, you need to run away from him to give yourself some space to teleport away, and being immune to the chilling effect of his Hurricane helps greatly.

Bowazon
If you have max block and Chilling Armour, the match should be in your favour. The onus is on you to be aggressive as if you choose to stay at a distance, the bowazon will just snipe you from afar. Don’t teleport to the bowazon in a straight line, instead approach at a tangent. Go in quick, get her onscreen and throw a Blizzard on her. Since it is AoE, you don’t have to necessarily have your pointer right on her initially. The first Blizzard will usually make her run away, if she doesn’t, feel free to continually cast on her. If she runs, try to get a namelock so you can continue to shower her even when off screen.

Fireball/Lightning Sorceress
Keep in mind that they have ranged spells that are spammable so I’d recommend to have at least have 105 FCR to keep up with them. They will most likely try to keep their distance from you and use their range advantage. You’re going to have to chase them, but make sure you don’t follow them in a straight line. Best time to get them is when they are spamming their attack spell, throw a Blizzard. This match up will require patience and fast clicking.

Blizzard Sorceress
Usually whomever can namelock Blizzard their opponent first will win; you are trying to one hit KO each other. Both players tend to be more defensive knowing this, so try to be patient. Try to attack from the south so you have that namelock advantage.

Bone Necromancer
Similar to the Fire/Lightning Sorceresses but his attacks have more variety, but are slower. He will also try to keep his distance from you so you’ll need to chase him, but it will be a little easier since he casts slower. It is doubly important not to approach in a straight line as he tends to cast IBS from a distance.

[FONT=&quot]4. Non-Class Specific Information[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]4.1. Absorb, Max Resist Items, Resistance Stacking and Damage Reduction Order[/FONT]


This section presents a brief explanation of how absorb and +max resist items work in terms of damage calculation, and then lists some of the most commonly used items for each element. People often misunderstand the order in which resistance, percentage based absorb, and absolute absorb are applied, as well as the PvP penalty and MDR. The correct order is given here:


  • PvP Penalty (17%, not 1/6th, but 1/6th is a good estimate)
  • Energy Shield
  • Integer based MDR/PDR
  • Resistances (Elemental/Physical/Magic)
  • X% absorb
  • +X absorb
  • Damage Goes to Mana
  • Damage taken
  • Mana Burn

The absorb steps occur in the order below:
·Elemental damage reduced by resistance
·Percentage absorb applied, amount to be healed is added before damage taken
·Absolute absorb applied, as with percentage absorb the healing occurs before the damage is taken

There is also a cap of 40% on all percentage based absorb, though there is no cap for absolute absorb.

To clarify this, here’s an example:

5,000 Lightning damage taken (after the PvP penalty) against a character with 1,000 out of 2,000 life, 85% resistance, 10% absorb, and 20 absolute absorb:

Apply resistance: 5,000 × 0.15 = 750
Apply percentage absorb: 750 × 10% = 75 life is added
Reduce damage from percentage absorb: 750 – 75 = 675
Apply absolute absorb: 20 life is added, absorb reduces damage to 675 – 20 = 655
Final life remaining = 1000 + 75 + 20 – 655 = 440 (560 damage taken)

If the character was on full life when hit:
Apply resistance: 5,000 × 0.15 = 750
Apply percentage absorb healing: 750 × 10% = 0
Reduce damage from percentage absorb: 750 – 75 = 675
Apply absolute absorb: 0 life is added, absorb reduces damage to 675 – 20 = 655
Final life remaining = 2000 – 655 = 1345 (655 damage taken)

The order in which the healing is done can be either good or bad. One case in which it can be very damaging to you is against Blizz sorcs, which due to high level CM can do massive amounts of damage that’s difficult to reduce. As you can only receive the amount of healing equal to the difference between your maximum life and current life, absorb is not generally useful for most lower life characters. As an example:

1,500 PvP damage, dealt by a Blizz sorc with a total of -230% enemy resistance, against a character on full life, with 2000 life, 110 total cold resistance after difficulty penalties, and wearing 2 Raven Frosts:

Calculate effective resistance = 110 – 230 = -120, capped at -100
Apply resistance: 1,500 × 2 = 3,000
Apply percentage absorb: 3,000 × 40% = 1,200 life is added
Reduce damage from percentage absorb: 3,000 – 1,200 = 1,800
Final life remaining = 2000 + 0 – 1,800 = 200 (1,800 damage taken)

In order to survive a second hit the character would need to have 2,401 maximum life. This order of dealing damage is the reason that some elemental builds with very high damage are able to deal much greater quantities of damage on the first than on subsequent hits against characters with high absorb.

However, if the player then swaps in some more cold resistance equipment, taking their total cold resistance to 230 after the hell penalty, the same hits would then do:

Calculate effective resistance = 230 – 230 = 0
Apply resistance: 1,500 × 1 = 1,500
Apply percentage absorb: 1,500 × 40% = 600 life is added
Reduce damage from percentage absorb: 1,500 – 600 = 900
Final life remaining = 2000 + 0 – 900 = 1,100 (900 damage taken)

Each further hit would then only do 300 damage. Obviously this is much more manageable than in the first case, with a 1,800 damage first hit and 600 damage on subsequent hits. Of course, this extra resistance can be difficult to obtain, often requiring items that don’t give any other useful mods, such as PSapphire shields or a Kira’s socketed with a Thul.

Some of the most commonly used items for resistance stacking and absorb are listed below:

Fire
Hotspur – 45% Fire resist, +15% max fire resist
Dwarf Star – 15% Fire absorb
Waterwalk - +5% Max fire resist

Cold
Raven Frost – 20% Cold absorb
Snowclash - +15 Cold absorb, +15% max cold resist
Perfect Sapphire Monarch – 160% Cold resist

Lightning
Thundergod’s Vigor - +20 Lightning absorb, +10% max lightning resist
Wisp Projector – 10-20% Lightning absorb
[FONT=&quot] 4.2. Counters to specific builds[/FONT]


Whilst it may not appear to be so sometimes, there is no build that cannot be countered by another build. Some of the best builds to use if you’re up against a certain build are listed here; whilst it is possible to beat them it is very difficult and normally requires either better playing skills, or a vast difference in item quality. The builds listed are strong counters, many builds have a slight advantage against other builds, but the difference is nowhere near as pronounced as for these matchups.
Code:
  [B]Build              Countered by        Explanation[/B]
  BvC                BvB                 BvBs are specifically designed to duel other barbs, with full DR, blocking 
                                         and high defence it makes it nearly impossible for a BvC to win.
  Bone Necromancer   ES Sorcs            The sorcs mana regeneration can easily keep pace with any damage the necro 
                                         can deal, with a negligible life loss.
  Wind Druid         Ghost, Trapsin      Druids in human form do not have good FHR breakpoints. The combination of 
                                         MB and traps can keep them stunned much longer than other classes.
  Hammerdin          Wind Druid          The druid’s minion stack makes it almost impossible for the hammerdin to get
                                         a hit. Liberators have it slightly easier, but it’s still very hard.
  Smiter             Wind Druid          Same problem as the hammerdin, no easy way to actually target the druid.
  Max block ES Sorc  OW, Poison          Sorcs with a high level ES will often focus on increasing mana rather than 
                                         life. Both of these damage types completely ignore ES. 
  Ghost              Hammerdin,          Ghosts may be very good against casters, but as their damage is mainly from
                     BvC, Smiter         OW and Venom they have trouble with high life builds
[FONT=&quot]4.3 FFA and Team Duels[/FONT]


Most PvP guides focus on 1-on-1 match-ups in their strategy sections because many 1-on-1 strategies also work in Free-for-all (FFA) or Team Duel (TD) situations. In this section, I discuss strategic considerations that might not normally apply in 1-on-1.

1. Definition of terms

1-on-1: One player against one other player.

Free-for-all (FFA): Everyone against everyone else. FFA is the default in games with more than 2 duellers.

Teams (TD): Each team against the other team(s). A team consists of 2 or more players who are partied together to support and protect each other. 2-vs-2 is the most common match-up, but any combination (3-vs-3, 2-vs-2-vs-2, 4-vs-4) works.

2. Rules
Wait until everyone has said "ready" before you go. If you die, stay in town until one person (or team) wins. In FFA, last one alive wins. In teams, the team that outlives (i.e. at least one member alive) the other(s) wins. Because you can't visit town in the middle of the match, teams are set once you leave town. As always, follow the host's rules.

3. FFA strategies

a) Gear selection

When facing more than one opponent, you can't use the optimal setup against each enemy--you'll have to find a balance. For example, if you're a wind druid facing a blizzard sorc and a trapsin, you might stack just enough cold resist to avoid a 1- or 2-hit KO by blizzard, and focus the rest of your gear on FHR and lightning/poison resist to counter the assassin, who is the bigger threat. (A wind druid generally fares well against sorcs thanks to his large life bulb and cyclone armour, but poorly against trapsins because of his slow hit recovery and casting animations.)

Be flexible in your equipment setup. Store items like Kira's Guardian, Stormshield and 4-sapphire Monarchs in your stash to counter specific builds, just as you would for 1-vs-1. Sometimes, it might not be enough to have a vs.-Melee setup and a vs.-Caster setup--you might need to mix and match. In other words, make sure you're not bound to certain combinations. For example, don't rely on Harlequin Crest's +2 Str/Dex to achieve max block and wear the rest of your items, since you might need to swap in Kira's Guardian while maintaining the rest of your original setup.

b) Targeting

Pay attention to the minimap; otherwise, someone might sneak in and steal your kill, or worse, kill you! In general, target players against whom you match well, but if you see two players battling it out against each other, try to sneak in a hit on the one who poses the greater threat to you. Once that player is dead, you'll have an easier time finishing off the other player. Sometimes this leads to an informal (and tenuous) alliance among weaker characters against a stronger, well-equipped character. Be ready to switch targets or run away, since the tides can turn easily in FFA. The spirit is to kill indiscriminately!

c) Mobility

Mobility is the name of the game in FFA. If several opponents concentrate fire on you, often you're better off running away rather than fielding all of them at once. Be sure to carry extra FRW if you don't have teleport.

d) Pre-buffing

Like 1-vs-1, FFA tends to be very fast-paced. This means you generally won't have to worry about your prebuffs (using your switch weapons or items from the stash to enhance the power of cast-and-forget skills like Battle Orders) running out, but in the case of visiting the stash, you might not think it's worth it to take 10 extra seconds to get ready before every duel.

4. Team strategies

a) Character selection

Many team duels occur on a whim--someone will suggest it in the middle of a FFA game with enough people. Therefore, it's not worth it to create a character catered to team duelling but not 1-vs-1 or FFA (e.g. Holy Bolt Paladin). Just play FFA with your favourite PvP character, and you'll run into team duels occasionally. Team duels can be fun especially if the field is uneven--you can set the teams so that each team has a mix of experienced and new players. As for character builds, any team of varied, independently strong characters will do well, but it's still good to keep in mind how team members can complement each other. The below is not an exhaustive list.

Offensive support
- Auras: Conviction, Fanaticism, Concentration
- Curses: Amplify Damage, Lower Resist, Cloak of Shadows, Inner Sight
- prebuff: Heart of Wolverine, Enchant
- knockback/hit recovery: Mind Blast, Leap, Smite
- minion control: Lightning Fury, Leap, Howl, Fireball

Defensive support
- Auras: Salvation, Resist Lightning, Meditation, Vigor
- Curses: Weaken, Slow Missiles
- prebuff: BC/BO/Shout, Oak Sage
- healing: Holy Bolt (banned in GM. not specifically banned in BM, but healing isn't really in the spirit of PvP, so use it scarcely.)
- missile fodder: Clay Golem, Valkyrie, Shadow Master, Druid summons
- protection: Hurricane, Blessed Hammer, Poison Nova

Some good team combinations
- Barb + Wind Druid, Sorceress and/or Necromancer: Barb covers his teammates' weakness to WW/Trap Assassins. High level BO (and OS from Druid) makes for a durable team
- Hammerdin + any glass cannon (sorc, bowazon): Spammed hammers provide protection. Concentration helps the Bowazon's damage; Meditation is great for ES sorcs.
- Poison Necro + Sorceress: It's hard to stack resists in 2 elements, especially with Lower Resist. Poison Nova keeps weak enemies at bay, while sorcs can finish off lingering enemies.
- Trapsin + Barb: Barbs have some great moves to keep enemies in hit recovery while Traps and MB do their thing. This team should play aggressively.

Lots of other combinations exist. Above all, pick teammates who provide variety in your attacks. e.g. A Javazon + Trapsin team is easy to counter with stacked lightning resists.

b) Gear selection

A lot of this is similar to FFA. It's always hard to counter all of your opponents, so you'll have to make a compromise. In TD, your teammates can help cover some of your weaknesses or specialize in certain support skills. For instance, if a teammate is a Barb, you can put away your CTA switch and use something more useful, like a Demon Limb (for Enchant charges) or a Widowmaker (Guided Arrow). Discuss with your teammates--squelch your opponents or use ! before the text to keep your conversation secret from the other teams.

c) Coordinated attacks

If mobility and flexibility are the keys to success in FFA, coordination is the key for TD. Before you duel, you should quickly go over with your teammates which Auras to use, whom to target first, etc. And once the duel starts, your team should stick together as much as possible to prevent the other team(s) from concentrating fire on one member. Tanking hits for your team is great if you can actually take the hits, but it's difficult (especially among big teams) to tank the entire enemy team. Don't stick too close (unless you have a reason to do so, like a Bowazon resting inside an ally Hammer field), though, or you might fall prey to area-of-effect skills like Blizzard, Chain Lightning and Poison Nova.

For those interested, here are a few videos of some FFA and team duels from the SPF:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBGIUwF6wTI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzcdR1cnyPY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDRtepYzlmo

[FONT=&quot]5. FAQ[/FONT]


Why should I PvP?
Have you ever wondered if there’s more to the endgame of D2 than MF runs and xp runs? Wouldn’t it be great if some of those awesome items you find when doing MF runs that aren’t commonly used in PvM had a use? PvP is quite different to PvM gameplay in D2, and this is mainly caused by the differences in damage and life. In general characters have more damaging attacks and lower life than monsters, leading to a change in build style. You’re facing someone who’s constantly analysing the situation and trying to find the best way to beat your character, rather than monsters obeying their programmed AI. If you’re a competitive person then it’ll definitely help to satisfy that urge. If you like optimising characters then there’s an enormous amount of room for that; there are also many other types of player that PvP can be suited for.

Where should I check for PvP games?

The PvP thread in the MP subforum is where most games are posted. For tournaments the games may be posted in the tournament thread itself.

What are the common PvP acronyms and terms I should know?

A lot of the terminology is similar to PvM play, but there are a few additions, some of the major terms used are:

FFA: Free for all. Last one left alive wins.
Stacking: Stacking resistance to one or several elements over the maximum limit, in order to account for any –enemy resist your opponents might have.
BM: Refers to “bad mannered†duelling. This term has a very different meaning on the SPF than on battle.net. On the SPF the BM rules are designed to prevent certain skills and items from creating massive imbalances and to prevent negative play styles.
Desync: When a character becomes desynchronised from the host server they are said to be “desyncingâ€. Their location shown on the map will be inaccurate and they won’t show up on your screen in their actual location. This commonly happens with fast moving characters, such as charging paladins, amazons with large amounts of FRW, and whirlwinding characters doing long whirls. Some builds, particularly hammerdins, rely heavily on this, and predicting their actual location is a big part of countering them.
CP: Cold Plains

Why do people duel in the Blood Moor?

It’s a place that everyone has access to, the monsters are easy enough to clear, and it’s also a fairly open area, with a few obstacles to keep things interesting.

Can we duel elsewhere?

The Cold Plains is also used sometimes, mainly when there are multiple 1v1 duels occurring at the same time, and in a really busy game the Stony Field might be used too.

How important is FHR?

If you plan on never being hit then it’s irrelevant. If you don’t have the reflexes of a 12 year old that’s drunk a litre of Mountain Dew then it’ll vary according to your build. Characters with slow hit recovery speeds, such as human druids, necromancers and sorceresses, are much more reliant on it than those with fast speeds and uninterruptible attacks, such as WW barbs and paladins. If you’re facing a character with an attack that stuns it becomes much more important.

How important is FRW?
If you have teleport then it’s irrelevant. For non-teleporting builds you want as much as possible though, mobility is one of the vital aspects of a good PvP character, you have to be able to dodge attacks and get in good positions to deal damage from.

How important is max block?
This varies depending on the build. If you only have short range attacks and low mobility then it’s much more important than with long range attacks and high mobility. This is why a 200 FCR fireball sorc can do well without it, but a blizzard sorc will struggle.

How much of a disadvantage will I be at if I don’t use Teleport?

There’s no getting around the fact that teleport is a huge help, but some builds are more dependent on it than others. Paladins don’t suffer much due to having charge, and an amazon’s cast rate is too low to use it effectively. Sins also have BoS to help a bit. Basically, if you have a speed enhancing skill it becomes less noticeable. Try to get an item with a good number of teleport charges on if you’re really worried about it, you don’t need to spam it, but the occasional teleport can easily get you out of
trouble or into a good position.

How important is attack rating?

Anything that isn’t a barb, paladin, or perhaps a druid in wereform will generally not have enough defence to worry you. Paladins can reach very high levels of defence though, smiters can have well over 20k, and even hammerdins can get over 10k fairly easily. As they’ll almost certainly have max block you want to get your AR as high as possible against them, if necessary using the Angelic rings/amulet or Hsaru’s boots/belt.

How important is defence?

Unless you’re using a paladin you’re unlikely to be able to reach a high enough value to make yourself difficult to hit, especially as half of the chance to hit is determined by level differences. It just isn’t worth the sacrifices needed to reach the high defence values that’ll really help with most builds.

How important are resists?

Very. There are more elemental damage characters than physical based characters around, and a lot of the time their attacks also have higher average damages. You really should have at least 75 resist against whatever elements you’re facing. This isn’t always possible against multiple opponents though, so try to focus on the most damaging one.

How much resistance should I overstack against Cold sorcs?
Cold sorcs designed for PvP will have CM maxed, meaning they’ll easily be able to reach over 200 –enemy resist, often approaching 250 once facets are included. If you get killed in 1 or 2 hits, it’s definitely time to get out the Kira’s and Wizardspikes socketed with resist jewels, but stacking that much resistance can badly hurt your damage and speed. Stacking’s more important against blizzard than orb, due to the reduced effectiveness of absorb when you have full life (see the absorb section for details).

How much resistance should I overstack against FoH paladins?
It depends on your attack range. If you can still damage them without getting in range of conviction then you won’t need it nearly as badly as a shorter ranged character. Conviction has a cap of -150 enemy resist, so it’s much easier to deal with than CM. Lightning should also be ones of the elements your resists are very good against anyway, so you might not be able to completely negate conviction, but even 50-100 extra resist will go a long way.

Should I have max resists for every duel?

Only if you need them. This is more complicated in FFAs, but in general you want to aim to have at least 75 resistance against any element you’re facing.

What’s the most effective build in terms of countering the most opponents?
As always it depends. There is generally a group of builds that could be considered to be the most effective against the widest range of opponents, but they all still have weaknesses. A bone necro will struggle with ES sorcs, a BvC will always lose to a BvB, a hammerdin might not be able to get through a wind druid’s minion stack and so on. One common feature of most of them is that their main attack either does physical or magic damage; elemental builds are vulnerable to absorb.

What’s a FFA?

Free for all. The last one left alive at the end wins.

What’s the best FFA character?

There isn’t one, the best FFA builds are generally ones that can do very high damage quickly, whilst also having mobility and being able to either take a lot of damage or avoid it through having a longer range. Examples of builds like this are blizz sorcs, hammerdins and smiters, though there are many more.

Should I make my character with team duelling in mind or stick to a 1v1 mentality?

A lot of the normal games posted will end up being a mix of FFA and team duel games, simply because it means there aren’t 4 people standing around the Rogue Encampment all the time. It can be a good idea to consider team duelling when making a character, though most of the tournaments are based more on a 1v1 structure.

What does “prebuff†mean?
Prebuffing normally refers to swapping an item of equipment before a duel to cast something and then swapping back to the original item. The most common uses of this are for boosting your ES level, or casting Enchant from Demon Limb to increase your AR. If you do this then bear n mind that you might be keeping people waiting, and no one likes to be stood around for 2 minutes while you swap in 10 lightning skillers to get your ES up to level 40.

Can I use Thawing/Antidote potions to prebuff?
No

Can I use Mana potions during a duel?

Yes, provided you’re not also using ES.

What is the hardest attack to effectively counter? Why?
Anything that does magic damage will be very difficult to counter effectively, simply as there are no items that give enough of a damage reduction against it to be useful. The two main sources of magic damage in a PvP game are the necromancer’s bone spells and blessed hammers. Physical attacks can also be hard to counter as percentage based damage reduction is capped at 50%.

How do I signify readiness?
Type “readyâ€, “râ€, “rdyâ€, or something along those lines, and wait until everyone else has done the same before starting.

Is PvP just the same as PK?

No, PK’ing normally refers to non-consensual player killing, PvP is used to particular duelling games.

Are there common PvP events at the SPF?
There are tournaments every few months, as well as the PvP week Maxicek hosts a couple of times a year. There are also fairly regular games played, though over the last few months there have been a lot less.

How much wealth is tied up in the average SP PvP’er around here?

It varies enormously, some characters have multiple HRs in their items, but some are built mainly from Meph items. Stating an exact average is difficult, but most players have been able to put together a CtA and a RW with a Lo in.

What level is the average SP PvP’er?

Anything from level 85 upwards, getting into the 90s is more important for AR dependent builds than casters.

How do I easily level my PvP’er?
If they’re a build that struggles with PvM then the most convenient way is in MP games. If you have an enchantress then that can take them up to mid NM easily too, or you can just rush them through to Hell yourself.

Which is the most important out of items, clvl, general duelling skill, and lag in regard to consistently winning?

They’re all important to some extent, though character level is the least important provided that it’s reasonable. Ping affects some builds more than others, WW barbs and WW sins suffer particularly badly, with anything over about 120 being very hard to play. Most builds can be played with pings of up to 170-200 before it becomes very noticeable though. Unfortunately there isn’t much that can be done about this; the distances involved will always play a big factor in the ping. In terms of the importance of items compared to skill there is no definite answer. You can beat someone with much better items if there’s a reasonable gap in skill, but it also can’t be denied that Enigma gives a big advantage. Items make less of a difference than you might initially think, experience really will improve your skill, even if may not seem like it the first few times you play.

How do I check my lag/ping in games?

Open the chat window and type “/fpsâ€. For a more detailed view you can also type “/framerateâ€, though that one it isn’t really useful, except for taking up more space on the screen

Should I collect ears? Do most people?

If you want to, most people don’t normally bother though

What does “gg†mean? Why is it used?

GG stands for “good gameâ€. It’s used to signify that a good duel just occurred, though in SPF games it gets used after nearly all of them.

Is cheating a big factor in SP duels?

If you mean some of the hacks you find on battle.net, such as auto-aim and farcast, then no one uses them (and it’d be fairly obvious if they did). Unfortunately there’s still the same issue as on the trade forums and standard MP games in terms of the item legitimacy. Of course, you also can’t be tainted in a PvP game, so you don’t have to worry too much about it most of the time.

Does my defence drop to zero when I run?
This is a common misconception, your defence doesn’t drop to zero when running, all attacks will simply bypass the chance to hit formula. You can still block, but your block rate is cut to one third of its original value.

What if my skill (i.e. Charge) breaks during a duel?
If it’s during the duel then you should finish it first without it. If it breaks on death, as charge often does, then simply leave and rejoin the game. If you’re the host and using a skill that does break often, then it’s often better to host with a different character and join with your main one in a second window.

What is the Anya bug? Can I do anything about it?

Basically, when you die you lose the resists you get from Malah for saving Anya, so subtract 30 from all your resistances to get the true value.

What other bugs should I know about?

Apart from the Charge and Anya bugs there are only one or two other serious ones. If you’re using a barbarian Leap will very occasionally break, forcing you to leave and rejoin. It’s also possible to get stuck in the Rogue Encampment when the entrance to the Blood Moor faces SW, if you teleport between two of the pillars.

What should I do if I am consistently losing?

Try something different. Swap being defensive for an aggressive strategy, find out their builds weaknesses and exploit them, just don’t keep trying the same things and expect it to change anything. Maybe your hotkeys could be set up better to allow faster skill switches. Check that you have enough resistances or DR to reduce their damage to a reasonable level. It may just be that their build perfectly counters yours, in which case there isn’t much you can do about it.

What are the pros and cons of each character class in regard to duelling?


Amazon – Slowest casting speeds, but can do high damage with several different damage types
Assassin – MB is great against casters, claw block can block anything but only works when stood still or attacking. They get a very useful minion in SM too.
Barbarian – One of the most item dependent classes, and is also quite hard to play at first, but is very good at dealing with a wide range of builds and can reach very high life totals
Druid – Slow hit recovery in human form, but minion stack helps to make up for that. Werewolves get the only poison attack that can kill; druids in general will also tend to have high life
Necromancer – Gets some high magic damage skills that are effective at short and long range. Like sorcs they suffer from low life compared to similarly equipped character from other classes
Paladin – Builds for all ranges of wealth are possible, depending on the skills chosen. They’re able to get high resists and max blocking very easily and can also reach the highest defence totals. They also get the best non-teleport mobility skill, in Charge. They don’t get any minions though and almost all their skills are short range or melee
Sorceress – Fastest cast breakpoints (along with barbs); they can also deal massive amounts of elemental damage and are relatively item independent. ES can mitigate their low life to some extent, but they have below average hit recovery speeds and are very vulnerable to absorb.

How active is the SP duelling scene? Are there regulars? Are they nice and open to newcomers?
It tends to vary a lot, some weeks there’ll be a few games a week, others there might only be one. During tournaments there are often several games a day. There is a group of people who play regularly, though that also changes fairly often. New players are always welcome; it keeps things fresh to have new opponents rather than the same characters everyone’s seen before. I don’t know about the others, but if I know that someone’s never duelled before I’ll go easy on them at first, only using some of my more irritating tactics once they’ve had a chance to get better. 1v1 or 2v2 also tends to be the easiest way to learn too, there’s far more to consider in a FFA, both in terms of item selection and what’s going on once everything’s started.

Tell me why PvP is so great. Sell me on it.

You’re awesome aren’t you? Don’t you want to prove that you’re awesome? It’s more fun than PvM and can provide a thrill you thought D2 might have lost. Every game is always different, even with the same players they might play in a different style or be better or worse than previously. Even outside of a tournament the competitive aspect can be an important factor to many people. It’s another dimension to D2 that you might just have not even considered before, PvP isn’t just for l33t battle.net players.

[FONT=&quot]6. Conclusion[/FONT]


Hopefully this guide will serve as a good source of information for both players who are completely new to PvP, and those who have some experience. People with a lot of PvP experience might have picked something up too (apart from a glazing of the eyes whilst reading this wall of text). The guide was written to attempt to update Sint’s old guide, which hopefully it has done. As I stated at the start I couldn’t write something of this size on my own in any reasonable length of time, so I’d like to thank a few people for their work, as well as a few others.

Thanks for everyone who helped write up a guide for the build guides section, and for the FFA/teams write up, I don’t have a clue about some of the builds written about, so it wouldn’t have been possible to finish this otherwise. Thanks to Sint for the original guide too, I’d never have written this if the other guide hadn’t already existed.

In addition to those I’m also grateful for the work put in by all the people in the Stats forum, so much of the information on the mechanics of the game had to be worked out, and even though some of this was done almost a decade ago it’s still clearly organised and relevant.

Finally I’ll thank the SPF, it might feel like I’ve been here forever, but there was a time when I was worryingly similar to the average battle.net player when I first found the SPF, but everyone answered my obvious questions helpfully. I was also new to PvP at one point, and even though most of the players from back then have moved on, they’re a big part of the reason that I’m still here.

I didn’t expect this guide to grow to such an enormous size when I started, and even though a lot of the content is taken up by the build guides, I hope the extra information is useful.

Appendix

[FONT=&quot]Links to other PvP guides[/FONT]


The links here are mainly aimed at battle.net, so expect to see high runes and perfect items aplenty. They do however go into much more detail than most of the guides here. Obviously there are many more guides available, this is just a short selection:

Liquid_Evil’s Sidewinder (PJ, CS, GA zon): http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=346563
TienJe’s Hybridzon: http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=573409
TienJe’s Ghost: http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=573390
Ling’s BvC: http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=666078
Xombie’s Bone Necro: http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?p=5308229
sweetalmond’s Wind Druid: http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=681857
Dennis_KoreanGuy’s 1v7 Hammerdin: http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=537153
Camden’s Smiter: http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=534560
mephiztophelez’s Guide to Fire sorcs: http://www.purediablo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=705248

[FONT=&quot]GM Rules[/FONT]


These rules aren’t really used anymore, but a couple of tournaments have been based on them, so they’re included here for completeness.

Equipment Rules

* Bugged, hacked or duped items cannot be used – 1.07 crafted items are included in this category.
* All “1.07/1.08 vita†items like Arkaine’s Valor, Harlequin’s Crest, Baranar’s Star and Gerke’s Sanctuary are not allowed. The 1.09 or 1.10 versions of these items are acceptable, however.
* Items with the “Slows Target by X%†modifier are not allowed on physical-damage attackers (for example, Cleglaw’s Claw or Blackhorn’s Face). A caster character like a Necromancer or Sorceress, however, can use Blackhorn’s Face or other items with the “Slows Target by X%†modifier if they want.
* Items with the “Knockback†modifier are not allowed on any character class. Skills that provide a knockback effect (for example, Smite, Bash, Charge or Leap Attack) are still allowable.
* Total Life Replenish from items and skills combined is limited to 25.
* Poison damage is limited to 200 from items, per player. Poison damage from skills (for example, Venom or Poison Nova) is allowed in any amount.
* All duellers may use items that provide auras, with the exception of the “Doom†runeword as it provides the Holy Freeze aura.
* Each character is only allowed to wear two sources of +max resist/absorb per element. For poison, Poison Length Reduction gear will count as absorb. For example, you may wear 2 Ravenfrosts or 1 Ravenfrost and a Guardian Angel, but not 2 Ravenfrosts and a Guardian Angel. Items like Thundergod's Vigor with both +max resist and absorb will count as both of your two sources for that element, so you may not wear Thundergod's Vigor in conjunction with another item that provides +max resist lightning, +max resist all, or +lightning absorb. Finally, putting points into the paladin's passive resist skills will count as a source of +max resist.
* The Rising Sun amulet is not allowed on any character class.
* Blackoak Luna is not allowed on any character class.

Faster Run/Walk Restrictions
Maximum of 110% frw combined from skills, gear, and charms. For example, a Barbarian with 30% frw from Increased Speed can have no more than 80% frw from gear and charms. The skills that give frw are Frenzy, Feral Rage, Increased Speed, Vigor, and Burst of Speed. If you're going to be using any of these skills, plan your frw accordingly.

Banned Skills

The following skills are not to be used at any stage of a duel. They may have points invested in them as a pre-requisite for higher-tier skills or for synergy benefits.

* Lifetap
* Amplify Damage
* Iron Maiden
* Bone Prison (Necromancer)
* Decrepify (Necromancer)
* Blessed Hammer and Concentration at the same time (Paladin)
* Holy Bolt (Paladin)
* Holy Freeze (Paladin)
* Blaze (Sorceress)
* Teleport (Sorceress)

These items may not be used in the form of class skills, o-skills granted by items, charges, or chance to cast when striking.

Skill Restrictions

The following skills are capped or have limitations regarding their use in duels.

* Bone Armour (Necromancer) - It cannot be cast more than once per duel.
* Cyclone Armour (Druid) - It cannot be cast more than once per duel.

[FONT=&quot]List of Abbreviations[/FONT]


BM – Refers to the more commonly used BM rules
BoS- Burst of Speed
CB – Crushing blow
CoS- Cloak of Shadows
CS – Critical strike or charged strike
DF - Dragon Flight
DS – Deadly strike
ES – Energy Shield
FBR – Faster block rate
FCR – Faster cast rate
FFA – Free for all duelling, last one left alive wins
FHR – Faster hit recovery
FoH – Fist of the Heavens
FPA – Frames per attack (1 second = 25 frames)
FRW – Faster Run/Walk
GM – Refers to the GM rules
IAS – Increased attack speed
IBS – Invisible bone spirit
IGA – Invisible guided arrow
KB – Knockback
LF – Lightning Fury
LS - Lightning Sentry
MB - Mind Blast
MS – Multishot
OW – Open wounds
PvP – Player vs. Player, as opposed to PvM (Player vs. monster)
Res - Resistance
SM - Shadow Master
TK – Telekinesis
V/T – Vindicator/Templar (Smite/FoH paladin)
WB – Weapon Block
WoF – Wake of Fire
WW – Whirlwind or Werewolf, depending on context
 
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Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

That's it. Feel free to post comments, point out obvious mistakes and so forth. I am going to try and update if there's something major missing.
 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

Jesus! that is vast.

Good job to all involved, will read through some later.
 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

As I said when you sent the PDF, Col; that is an awesome piece of work.

Really outstanding. :) Well done and many thanks to you and all who contributed to the guide and its predecessors.
 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

I know you've spent a lot of time on this, thanks a lot, looks very insightful although I only managed to read the bowazon part so far :)
 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

...wow.

Even if I don't do PvP at all, I'll have to read it just to show respect to the amount of work put in to it. Great job!
 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

Whew. I just read the entire thing, minus the class-specific dueling strategies for a few of the builds. Very nicely done, very informative, and very helpful. Thank you for the hard work!
 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

Thanks for your incredible efforts putting this together guys/girls. :). Hopefully it will be a great resource for everyone, especially those who are considering joining the PvP scene.

Just a few things from the ones I've read so far, ZY's bowazon guide has 'Duress' listed twice for armor choices. Also, I'm not sure if Chilling Armor actually deflects attacks, as he is hinting at in his sorceress guide. (Also, prebuffing Chilling Armor doesn't work IIRC.)
 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

Nice work col :thumbup:
nice to see even some video from SPF games :)
 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

+1 to the wow.

That's a lot of nice information.

The one section I was curious about was the Deadly+Critical strike section.

Chance to do double damage = 100 – ((100 – DS) × (100 – CS))

DS = Total percentage chance to cause deadly strike
CS = Total percentage chance to cause critical strike


Should it be noted that when plugging those values in to a calculator to use the decimal values?
 
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Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

tl;dr.

But I'll get to it someday when I've got ~4 hours. :crazyeyes:

... Also, I'm not sure if Chilling Armor actually deflects attacks, as he is hinting at in his sorceress guide. (Also, prebuffing Chilling Armor doesn't work IIRC.)

FYI, Chilling Armor does not deflect anything (same for Shiver/Frozen Armor). Ever.

There have been numerous people that have tested it trying to reproduce any such deflection, and not a single test deflected a single attack (of any type).

What's most likely happening is a visual bug where the cold-bolt animation triggers even though a hit was never scored. I have no knowledge if this bolt would actually carry damage, which would be a bug (or if it's just a visual bug where the bolt doesn't cause damage). The speculation I've seen is usually that it's just a visual bug tying (somewhat) into lag.



 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

Putting all of this together must have been an enormous effort, great job :thumbup:
 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

Thanks everyone.

Nagi/poops: Nice spot on the Duress, got rid of that. I wasn't actually sure if Chilling Armour could deflect anything so I left it when originally putting the guide together. I've changed it to say it doesn't deflect anything now.

Ziggyzug: Thanks for spotting that. Another mistake I should've found before posting. Fixed it now though.
 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

Nice work everyone, especially col for getting it all together and doing the bulk of the writing. Heres hoping that it will give the SP PvP scene an injection of new players.

(I think you are being extremely generous for crediting me with input on the FAQ :whistling:)
 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

Nice work everyone, especially col for getting it all together and doing the bulk of the writing. Heres hoping that it will give the SP PvP scene an injection of new players.
Indeed, I'm sure at least a couple of the people working on it must've begun to think it'd never be finished, I actually had that feeling a couple of times. Hopefully they'll be some new players, perhaps it's time for a new PvP Week ;).

(I think you are being extremely generous for crediting me with input on the FAQ :whistling:)
Heh, that's left over from an earlier draft. The list of questions that Liq came up with was very comprehensive though.



 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

Everything looks great. I like that the guide is so easy to navigate, despite the size.
 
Re: It's Here at Last: Updated PvP Guide

Nicely done, but Wind druid section was apparently lost when you were posting the guide. ;)
 
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