45 base plus 88 from 4 Ums gives 133, though I don’t think the extra +12 res is really worth 4 Ums.
More later (the fight against D) when I have time to properly do it. I haven’t gone with my original plan of detailing this girl’s Hell travails, so I figure the least I can do is provide this little bit (and others eventually, when I have the time and inclination) of enjoyment for y’all as thanks for the advice and such.
I don’t get that, either… My paladin has 75% lightning resist and no absorb, and lightning enchanted isn’t a big problem for him (unless it’s on top of other forms of unpleasentness). All I can figure is that a lack of leech is the problem. Remember, most of your damage is elemental, which does not leech. You could improve your physical damage through points in Sacrifice and Zeal, but it’ll still be relatively low. And right now, I’d say your first priority for skill points is building towards Holy Shield (it’s suicidal to make a paladin without it, if you ask me). You might also consider looking for some other source of life, like a Prayer mercenary.
Incidentally, shield blocking only works on physical attacks (swords, claws, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, etc.), so it won’t protect against charged bolts. The amazon’s avoidance skills and the assassin’s Weapon Block, however, will work against darned near everything.
You’ve already figured out half the trick to dealing with Undead Stygian Dolls: Let your merc take them, since they do so little damage to mercs/summons (this also works agains suicide orcs, fire enchanted, and corpse explosion). The other half of the trick is to just not bother killing them. Their knives do hurt a bit, but not nearly as much as their explosions, and with Vigor or Holy Freeze aura active, you should be able to outrun them (my paladin has no speed at all, and first-level vigor is enough for him to just barely escape). But yeah, they are hugely annoying.
Come to think of it, I think we might have a Guardian Angel armor lying around somewhere, yet. This would kill several birds for you with one stone: It’d improve your blocking, it’d give you better resists, and it’s lighter than your Ornate Plate, so you could wear your Delerium. Ask Yeti or I the next time you see one of us on DII.
By the way, for crowd killers, you can also add hammerdins, and sort of bards. That is to say, bards are difficult against crowds, but no more so than they are against everything else (in fact a little less difficult, since you get better mana efficiency against crowds).
I really have to differ here. My one and only matriarch is a 1.10 Bowazon packing a Buriza. True, her gear’s bloody good, but she can handle most of Hell in the MF loadout and she almost never dies unless I make a serious misplay.
The build (at lvl85):
STR 140 (210 inc items)
DEX 265 (282 inc items)
VIT 89
ENE 21
Strafe 20
Immolation Arrow 14 (EA synergy adds more damage at this point)
Exploding Arrow 14
Frozen Arrow 9
Fire Arrow 7
Guided Arrow 6
Valkyrie 7
Most of the spare points can go where you will; I have 2 in Pierce for 100% Pierce with the Kuko Shakaku on my switch and 4 in Penetrate for AR.
GEAR
Helm: Delirium
Armour: Chains of Honour
Amulet: Highlord’s Wrath
Weapon: upgraded Buriza w/Shael
Belt: IK belt
Boots: Infernostride/IK boots
Gloves: Steelrend
Ring: Raven Frost/Nature’s Peace/Dwarf Star as required
Ring: rare 6% mana leech
Charms: +21 maxdam, 81 poison, 11% lit res
this isn’t the whole story though, i’ll reference you to my post in the old thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=4900583&postcount=1950
Hellrack, despite it’s “slowness”, still has a higher damage output (damage/second) than a Buriza, which has a higher damage output than a Windforce. The only way to make windforce worth using is to have a lot of ias, and even then it still does less than either of the other two.
So sure, you fire a lot more shots with the Eagle or WF… but you do less damage per second, so you’ll actually kill stuff more slowly.
Bowazons are, however, one of the weaker builds in 1.10, though as Evil Death has shown they are definitely viable. I took mine down mostly due to boredom, and the desire to use her gear on a Javazon.
Uh…lightning should be healing you with those resists/absorb. My guess is that you’re encountering a lot of conviction enchanted monsters.
Any response to how a dial-up works on battle.net?
Weaker builds? I must be doing something seriously wrong with all my other characters, then.
I used to think so, too, but it’s not so. Resistances are applied first, and then absorb gets to work on whatever damage is left. So 85% lightning resist and 25% lightning absorb is effectively the same as 92.5% lightning resist. You can’t ever actually heal from absorb unless you have more than 50% of it (in 1.09 or earlier; it’s now capped at 45%) or if you have the absolute absorb (20 lightning absorb, like on Thundergod’s Vigor, as opposed to 25% on Lightsabre), and then only if the damage is low enough. Which makes absorb rather a silly modifier, as far as I’m concerned: It’s just another sort of resistances that aren’t called resistances so you can get more of them.
As I understand it, the damage resolution sequence is:
Attack roll
Dodge/avoid/evade check
Weapon block check
Shield block check
Curse penalty (Weaken, Decrepefy, Taunt, or Battle Cry)
Vs. target penalty (1/2 in pvp, etc.)
Energy Shield
Damage reduced by X
Magic damage reduced by X
Bone Armor
Cyclone Armor
Resistances (including Damage reduced by X%, which is really just Physical Resist)
Reduce damage from X% absorb, save amount of damage taken
Reduce damage from +X absorb, save amount of damage taken
Heal values saved in previous two steps
Damage goes to mana
Mana burn
(skip any irrelevant steps).
As long as you aren’t playing with a fast-caster or someone with a lot of summons, it’s not that bad, though you’ll have to build your character to compensate for certain lag. I managed to get a character to level 97 partly on dialup and partly on T1, but it wasn’t always easy. I wouldn’t plan on doing any underpowered build successfully, and I especially wouldn’t make any HC chars.
Going against an PIMSLE (or at least PILE) Cow King once, a paladin I was using had TGod’s and was getting life back in not insignificant bits from his lightning. I had no other absorb. I submit to you that the damage was not low, though perhaps my decently high Ltg res helped with that:D
::: ding! ding! ding! ::::
OK, that was the Official Bell. The word from On High is that the new wossname doesn’t have a gizmo-bob that jingles the hiccougher. In non-technical language, the length of a thread is no longer a performance factor for the system.
Consequently, and as promised, I have re-opened this thread, and I have merged the “Diablo2 Refugee” thread into this one. It is viewed as desirable by all that this topic/contamination be isolated in one or two long threads, rather than dozens of short ones.
Go thou and whatever.
Thanks C K for the ruling… 
Now back to our thread…
That’s why I made the hybridzon with Perfect Upgraded Titans (+LF) and Hellrack (+FA) on the weapons switch. It’s the best of both worlds, but sometimes I have to be careful when and where I switch the weapons, because that’s when I die (rarely nowadays). I may not do enough damage to bosses, but crowd control is a job that I’m more than happy to do. I do prefer the Hellrack over the Buriza however because the dishes out 3 types of elemental damages and most of monsters have only 1, maybe 2, but rarely 3 immunities. I ignore the poison skills tree though so I’m not spread out too thin skill-wise. I can solo Baal runs now, but it’s long and arduous process plus I’m tp-ing to reload on Titan’s, Mana Potions and occasionally, bolts. If Chronos supplies his fire-sorc or his paladin, we usually run roughshod over the poor little doggies in a tiny fraction of the time.
As for the two socketed Hellrack, I think the 2 - 15%IAS/Damage jewels will push my attack speed down by a frame, but maybe a 2 cold rainbow facet jewels would deal out better damage…still haven’t decided (nor have found said jewels) on what to put in yet.
And once again for the noobs and lurkers…
I just created a new thread for account names only (so it won’t get cluttered):
Vets, go over there to post your account names once and for all (and any updated account names). Bookmark that thread for easy refrence and direct all newbies to this post (or the link to it) so they can look and add their own names, so they don’t have to go over the 2000+ posts before this one…
Quoth Evil Death, on the previous page:
I was thinking about that, and it occurs to me that, out of the twenty universal 1.10 runewords, 16 of them have mods never seen before 1.10 (cross-class skills, aura when equipped, summoning charges, etc.) (The exceptions are Chains of Honor, Famine, Gloom, and Sanctuary). However, none of the four “new” runewords has any new mods. This leads me to suspect that those runewords were actually active (had anyone discovered them) in 1.09 or earlier. And in 1.09, Wind would have been a pretty good weapon. Besides, what else were you going to do with a Sur in 1.09?
On the topic of absorb and lightning enchanted, the individual bolts of an LE boss don’t do too much damage, it’s just that there are so many of them. This is even more so of the bad old MSLEs; it’s just that the bolts were superimposed on top of each other. When you have a great many sources doing a small amount of damage each, damage reduced by X or +X absorb is going to be more valuable than resistance or absorb X%. So even if Thundergod’s would heal you, Lightsabre wouldn’t.
I agree, incidentally, about bowazons in 1.10. Every other class got new advantages, while all the bowazon got was decreased damage on Strafe. Of the new weapons, there’s only one bow worth using (Widowmaker, the new elite unique bow, does less damage than an un-upgraded Witchwild String or Cliffkiller), and it reqires half again as much strength as a bowazon should need. The skills haven’t gained anything, other than the synergies for Freezing Arrow and Immolation Arrow (but then, most classes got more synergies than that).
Before starting, I also want to thank C K for the word on how this should be handled and for his promptness in reopening the thread once word was given.
theckhd, I saw your math but the strategy boards don’t agree. It doesn’t really matter since I just made the bowazon to make her. Maybe I’ll work on her with a WF and a Hellrack eventually to see how it work in real (sorta) life…
As punha stated about being healed by a Lightning enchanted monster… I have also. Not in 1.10 that I’ve noticed, but it did happen occasionally in 1.09… but not always. Go figure. Where Gloams/souls are concerned, according to some things posted in the dii forums, part of their lightning attack is treated as physical damage. I don’t know how they know this, nor do I know whether it is true or not… just relaying what others have said.
Nah, they would have dug it out of the code. I’m guessing 1.10 beta, in order to test server-side runewords.
Those numbers are inherently flawed, because they assume terrible IAS for a Windforce user - which just isn’t going to happen. For a bowazon, IAS is incredibly easy to get. Rerun the numbers with a WF at 9 fps, which is much more realistic.
Worse even than that; a LOT of people used GA (especially in conjunction with the Buriza), and GA was not nerfed in 1.10 so much as the bugged quality of it (it wasn’t meant to hit a target more than once) was fixed.
I made my Burizon knowing full-well that once it was fixed my girl would be fairly useless. I figured it was worth the time I’d be able to spend MFing and rushing with her. I think I was right. I haven’t tried her out since 1.10, so I can’t tell you how useless she is or isn’t. If anyone wants to (assuming the account is still active), email me. I’ll be happy to give you the account name and password.
Hell, while I’m at it, anyone who wants my (all USEast) accounts, any or all of them, is free to email me. I can’t promise all or even any of them are still active, or which characters are or aren’t still active, but whatever’s left you could probably get something from them, especially if the rune mules are still active.
Now onto the fight against D.
The first thing you should know is that getting there took a hell of a lot longer than the actual fight (which wasn’t short, per se). It probably took the better part of two hours drawing stuff out and killing it, whether with orb or hydras — or with chain lightning, which fortunately I only had to use twice (and it only worked once).
That said, getting there was really only a matter of tactics and patience. I had to be careful pretty much throughout the Chaos Sanctuary (I teleported past most of the River of Flame stuff, and managed to find an uninhabited bit from which to toss out hydras until everything that wasn’t FI was dead, and anything that was FI got Orbed to death) because, as I discovered the night before doing a tiny trial run, my merc dies to IM within about one or two hits. So half the time I was fighting an Oblivion Knight or Mage, I was TPing away so my merc couldn’t be hit — with anything. The other half of the time I had my TP on right-click just in case anything happened. I probably resurrected him a half-dozen times (at 50K gold each time, this wasn’t cheap), all but one due to IM.
I had some trouble clearing out the body of the Sanctuary. Mostly that was due to three things: taking care of myself, taking care of my merc and two FICIs. For most characters, a FICI isn’t much of an issue. However, consider this: I have fifty skill points invested in the fire tree, and the only skills in which I have more than one point (without bonuses) invested in the lightning tree are telekinesis (helps recoup mana lost from Eshield) and Eshield. My Tstorm does 81-277, my chain lightning 1-186 and my regular lightning 1-176. Nova does 49-102. So clearly I have a problem with FICIs.
The first one wasn’t that big of a problem. My merc got him and managed to live. The second one was having none of my plan, so I had to dump him way back near the entrance to the Sanctuary. I, uh, hoped I wouldn’t mistakenly run into this guy while fighting D? I wasn’t all that worried about it, but it was a very slight concern for me.
With the Sanctuary cleared but for that one stashed guy, I went on and triggered the Grand Vizier (party of ten?). They weren’t much of a problem; Orb and hydra did the trick pretty well, and I don’t recall my merc ever getting below half life. Deseis wasn’t much of an issue either, but I took things safe just to make sure and took them out individually (note to AI: don’t stray all by yourself far enough away from your pack that I have no qualms following you with Orb shooting out of me). Lord Deseis himself was CI, so I gave him some hydras to swallow and he went pretty quietly.
The third boss pack wasn’t anywhere near as easy. Them guys … well, fortunately they were FI, not CI; I do less damage with cold, but I can shoot out two orbs for every one hydra, and I can aim orbs a lot better’n hydras. They were might-enchanted, which made life even more fun. My merc didn’t seem to be doing too well with a face full of fire and sword, so I figured these guys would have to be handled one by one.
I could write pages on how I dealt with these guys (tping back and forth between the front of the pack and the back), but let’s just say it took a lot of work. Merc didn’t die, but I got bloody tired of them.
Finally (the three packs took about half an hour, I guess, and the last one alone probably 15 minutes of that) I was ready for D. Well, almost.
I had been chatting with some folks and had raised the idea of using a Husaldo Evo instead of my Amned Pierre Tombale (Prevent Monster Heal vs. Deadly Strike). I figured my erc would probably bite it, so the PMH was worth a lot more to me than him hitting with twice his (nerfed; bosses take 1/10 of a merc’s damage) regular damage. I went back to town and switched polearms on the guy.
I was now back in the Sanctuary and put five hydras down in preparation for D. I TPed to the last seal remaining (I’d tripped the fourth before), tripped it with telekinesis and TPed back to the star in the middle of the room.
The hydras were gone. There’s an important lesson here for casters: anything you lay down before you trip that fifth seal is gone before D even appears. Fortunately that doesn’t happen for a few seconds, which allows you to both lay 3 hydras down and start quivering in fear.
Three hyras meant I could (though I’d rather have had five down) now put my right-click on static field. From experimentation I knew that it took four statics to get something down to exactly half-life, but that three usually was pretty decent and that if I stayed along for that fourth I risked staying around to get MY life reduced to 1/2 as well. I got a few in and TPed away before D could do anything to me.
My merc was now at half-life. D hits hard. He can hit fast, too, but mostly he hits pretty hard, especially if you’re a dim-witted merc and don’t have a shield.
The rest of the fight went pretty much as my Plan B expected. Plan A was to hide behind a corner and pelt D with hydras. Evidently Hell D is smarter than NM D (thank Og. There’s nothing to be proud of by beating stupid AI), because I actually had to be theoretically able to be hurt by him, though I don’t recall ever going even close to half my life (my mana took some hits, but my warmth is 19 and I have over 1100 mana, so I’m not too worried).
D was beaten. Probably the easiest time I’ve ever had doing D solo in any difficulty. If the ancients are this easy (which they won’t be; I’m scared of how in the world I’m going to put together a victory against them), I think I will laugh really hard, TP down to the throne and spank Baal.
Though oddly, I didn’t get notification mails for any post made after the reopening. Hopefully this will clear up now I’ve posted to the thread.
To add ontopic content: has anyone ever tried running a Zealot without a shield? My lvl72 Zealot is using a Crescent Moon Giant Thresher with level 25 Fanaticism and a lvl71 Might merc; he has positive resist all in Hell and deals around 1100-10K damage per hit. Is this likely to work better than the slower but safer Hand of Blessed Light/Shield of Zakarum combo?
I have. I haven’t played him a LOT – especially since he is pre-potless chars. He is actually pre-1.10. My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that your biggest two factors will be lack of blocking and attacking guys that stun (blunderbores etc.).
Best way to tell is to run him in NM somewhere … without any threat of iron maiden;) I’d go players 8 Baal runs with one setup, then players 8 with the other. Or players 4 or whatever. Can you be frozen? That’ll be a difference, IMO.
Well, if they’re old, they would have been exclusively server-side then, too. Do we know for a fact that there were no server-side runewords in 1.09?
My amazon didn’t use the Guided bug (didn’t have a Buriza, for starters), so I don’t know how big a deal that was. Still, though, it was known to be a bug, so one ought not to rely on it too much. Mine was primarily a Strafer, which made the nerfing all the more painful.
And I’ve never made a shieldless zealot, but I’m thinking that one of these times I might try a paladin armed with the unique Great Maul, and using Sacrifice, just for the historical reference. This hammer be the death of me, Lawd, Lawd, this hammer be the death of me.
I should note that I made the burizon in, I believe, 2001. August thereof. So it’s not like I only had her for a month. However, with the “the patch will be here soon” talk that was sometimes rampant, sometimes not as rampant on the fora at bnet and at d2.net, I wanted to get as much time in with her as possible because AT THE TIME we thought it would be within the calendar year.
Oh how little we knew:)