Updated June 22 6:00 PM Eastern

So, I'm in the Battle.net Beta test for the Diablo II expansion. I played a Werewolf Druid up to level 35 or so before the gigantic nerf to Fury in patch 1.46, which left him rather less fun to play. So, I started a bowazon, built in and for the expansion, to check out my hunch that the nerfs to Multiple Shot, leeching, and the physical resistance in Hell difficulty are not, in fact, enough to prevent the bowazon from dominating and being able to solo-8 with ease.

I intended to write and post this upon completing Hell difficulty, for a full report. Indications that the beta test may end soon have compelled me to do this now, though. I'll add more pages as warranted.

I had nothing on USWest before the beta. To start Sylverbow, I gave her everything of marginal value from my druid, and traded his druid items (his weapon and helm) to a druid by the name of Ganrion for a moderately decent bow, apparently converted from classic D2: 17-72 damage, +2 skills, minor mods, and a 6% mana leech ring which is unavailable in the expansion and must have been converted from classic D2.

To level until that bow, she used a 3-socket hunter's bow gemmed with three flawed gems (formerly belonging to the druid's rogue mercenary), and then a Vicious Razor Bow of Gore 11-38 damage that someone in a game gave me.

She also had a Maiden's Circlet of Speed for an extra +1 skills, Sigon's gloves and boots for greatly increased attack speed and 10% life leech.

The first four acts I did all partied, to get the boring parts out of the way. Did get all meaningful quest rewards (skipped Countess, Summoner, and High Council.) I paused in act 4 to level her to 30 to use the bow before beginning Act 5, which is where our story begins.

Since characters in Lord of Destruction need at least two powerful types of damage to get around the many immunities in Hell difficulty, I opted to max Immolation Arrow. In the expansion, it does scary damage: 450 on impact and 450 over 3 seconds at skill level 24. This wouldn't be reached until clvl 47 and Act 5 NM, of course, but even at levels 8 to 11, it still killed most Act 5 creatures in one hit in games of 1-4 players.

With Hailstone Horn in hand, level 6+3 Multishot needed to hit two or three targets to achieve mana leechback. Ice Arrow achieved leechback on one target, and was my usual mop-up skill. Alternating Immolation with two Ices or Normals took down most bosses amazingly quickly, including the Ancients quest solo.

Baal took some running and some potions, but mostly stayed stuck to the Valkyrie and went down (solo in a 2 player game) without me dying.

First Balance Problem:
Why in the world do Ice Arrow and its cousin Fire Arrow (a piddly level ONE skill) automatically hit? Ignore Target's Defense is a rare and highly sought after modifier on melee weapons. The bowazon gets it at a cost of: a low and easily leechbacked mana expenditure, and NO skill points, considering Ice and Fire are already prerequisite skills! And no requirement on her weapon either. This is silly. Having the elemental properties of these two skills autohit is okay and certainly makes sense, but there is NO reason that the physical damage should automatically happen along with the magical portion. Why can Ice Arrow totally ignore its target's armor?

Exploding, Immolation, and Freezing Arrow should also have the same fix. The physical portion of each of these attacks NEEDS to make a traditional attack/defense/clvl/mlvl roll. The important part is not so much defense, because bowazons will have good dexterity anyway, but the clvl/mlvl difference. With Ice Arrow, I can autohit everything no matter what its level, letting the bowazon cruise through the higher difficulties with her level far behind the monster levels. Against the Act Bosses in particular this is a big balance problem, but being able to sit there and autohit any boss with easy leechback is a problem. (Guided Arrow also does that, but for higher mana cost and a higher level skill, and I don't think that should skip the level difference check either.)

With the socket an item quest in Normal, I socketed the Maiden's Circlet of Speed. I expected more than one socket, but it only got one. I dropped in a jewel of +11 max damage, figuring more leechback and damage would be great.

Big Bug:
Unfortunately, that jewel didn't in fact work! I did some testing on Zombies in the Nightmare Blood Moor as well as some PvP testing. I grabbed a 2-7 damage Hunter's Bow of Craftsmanship and removed all other damage increasers. With 140 Dex, the character screen showed 4-17 damage, as would be expected. It took an average of 26 shots (some would miss, and Critical Strike was kicking in) to kill a zombie. Add the circlet of +11 damage, character screen now shows 4-45 as expected. Zombies still took 26 shots to kill! The darn bug of +min and +max damage adders not working with bows is still present! Same results came from a +3 min damage ring.

I would say PLEASE FIX THIS, but truth is bowazons would just get unbalanced MORE if so...

My testing with that also showed that the new 75% damage modifier to Multishot also affects elemental damage, as the character screen correctly shows! Possibly counterintuitive, but definitely helpful for game balance.

Nightmare Acts One and Two were uneventful, except that the inability to leech from skeletons proved much more annoying than limiting. Simple potion consumption made up for that when necessary. The halving of leeching didn't slow me down much at all, as my delivered physical damage was rising steadily through raising Dex and closing the clvl/mlvl differential. I was also accumulating elemental damage charms, usually having 1-100 or so lightning damage, two cold charms, and one poison charm to stop monster regeneration.

I partied for both Andariel and Duriel, no deaths or decent drops from either.

Act Three, more of the same. Except that Ormus delivered a decent ring for once!

I also partied through all of Act 3 including Mephisto (skipped the Council.) Bremm Sparkfist was his old self, rolling Lightning Enchanted and taking out half our party. The Durance made me finally notice I was rather suffering in terms of resistances: Fire at 22% thanks to a Grand Charm of 30%, Cold positive from Sigon's boots, Lightning and Poison both about zero. Donned a Prismatic Amulet of Energy that I had found, which helped some.

Stat points: I didn't plan the points, rather adding points to things when I felt it was necessary. It resulted in basically a 2:3:2 ratio for Str, Dex, and Vit, with Str and Vit reaching 100 around when Dex hit 150. No points in energy.

Skill points: By this time, I was mostly just pumping Immolation Arrow. Multishot was at 6+3, with more (as tested from skill shrines) generating more mana leechback difficulties than damage. One point in all other bow skills and everything on the passive tree, except Critical and Pierce at 5.

Second Balance Problem:
One word: Valkyrie. Any skill that makes monsters simply not attack a character is way too powerful. It isn't difficult at all to get every monster on the screen attacking the Valkyrie instead of the amazon. And the insane scaling of Valkyrie hit points in multiplayer games really should go. On a Chaos Sanctuary run with the Lurker Lounge's Bolty, we had my Valkyrie at level 4 times 5 players for over 5000 life. It would be routine to throw in four or five castings of Valk against a big group of monsters. Can you name ANY skill that will prevent TWENTY THOUSAND POINTS of damage to your character for a measly four skill points and 120 or so mana? (Okay, there is Dim Vision, which is just about as broken I think.)

Valkyrie NEEDS a tone down. Its purpose is clear, to let a ranged character attack from range, but to simply have the ranged character never get attacked is way too much. Junking the life scaling would be a great step in the right direction, but what is really needed is (besides more intelligent monsters) some way for monsters to ignore the Valk and attack the bowazon, perhaps decreasing with Valk skill levels.

Valkyrie is, though, just a band-aid covering up the real problem, which is that the amazon has no other means of personal defense. How much defense does a character get for 20 points in Iron Skin, Defiance, or Werebear? Loads. If they stay on the monster level curve with good armor (now easily available at shops, and armors go up to 1600 defense or thereabouts), they'll play the entire game with 10% be-hit and shield block on top of that. And don't forget Teleport is a formidable defensive skill with only one point.

How much defense do you get for 20 points in Dodge? A very mediocre 60%. And no shield block on top of that for bowazons and spearazons. And it doesn't work against missile attacks or while you're running. All adds up to not nearly enough to give the character any meaningful personal defense. She has to rely on never being next to the monsters, which the mega band-aid of Valkyrie provides.

Mercenaries, on the other hand, aren't useful at all to this character. Since the bowazon relies on everything else taking damage for her, mercs tend to not live very long. If a five thousand life Valkyrie is dying in monster packs, a merc isn't gonna go very far. A glacial spike merc helps in specific situations, but croaks way too fast. Tank barbarian or Defiance mercs last a little while, but still fall down way too easily against LEBs or even FEBs.

In Act 4, I finally found a Gothic Bow to try crafting, on sale at Jamella's. I did a lesser Blood craft on it, with results of ~70 damage and barf for mods.

Then I made a seemingly silly but actually fairly important discovery about the expansion. I recalled that the Imbue screen says "No socketed, magical, set, or rare items", but doesn't say anything about crafted items. So I tried imbueing the lousy crafted bow. Voila, you can imbue Crafted items as if they were white text! And Spiderdrake later discovered that this is a neat little loophole to imbue Orbs and even jewelry!

The bow came out lousy, though, so I saved it to try crafting again later.

On that Chaos Sanctuary run with Bolty, he said he found a good sorceress helm, and left me his old one which turned out to be surprisingly helpful:

So I ditched the circlet with a bugged nonfunctional jewel in favor of one with +10 resist all and 3% mana leech. Leechback was now even easier, and continued to never be a problem all through Nightmare.

I decided to try soloing Diablo in Nightmare, since I hadn't soloed any other act boss except Normal Baal. This turned out to be rather difficult, since level 3 Valkyrie tended to go poof rather quickly. I also wanted to do it without getting Diablo stuck on the north wall and cheesing him with Guided-around-the-corner.

But I figured out a fairly interesting strategy. Diablo suffers LBOD-lock the same way players suffer Strafe and Zeal lock! This meant, if I shot an Immolation (my heavy hitter) as he was starting a LBOD, he'd sit in it and take the full damage. (And even if not, he'd take the explosion damage.) From then on, it only took two deaths, both when I got greedy and tried to sneak in an extra shot instead of running away, and about thirty town trips for mana refills. So Nightmare Diablo is quite soloable for a bowazon, although I'm not sure what I'd do without Immolation

Time for Act 5 and the interesting quests. With the Ort rune from quest 2, I tried another craft on that poor gothic bow (now it has been crafted twice and imbued once), and got a pretty good result. Also applied the socketing quest to the item.

21-98 damage bow with 8% life leech and 3% mana leech, and 164 AR which would help, with me being behind the monster level curve and only one point in Penetrate.

Although with that, Sylverbow now had no +skills from items, making Valkyrie and the defensive passives rather weak.

Since she had entered Act 5 at only level 47 or so, I decided to stop and level for a while. Here was where I really started to explore the powers and limitations of the bowazon in Diablo II: Lord of Destruction.

Fight Back! There is No Honor in Slaughter!
The Bloody Foothills is INSANELY easy leveling for a bowazon. Nothing even fights back (nobody shoots except Dac Farren's boss pack.) It was trivially easy to shoot at monsters around a Valkyrie and barbarians. I was able to get levels in under a half hour each, bouncing around between high player count games and sweeping through the Foothills.

I had been ignoring Strafe up till now, figuring to test Multi and Immolation with the character. The really really irritating teleporting demons in the Frigid Highlands and elsewhere inspired me to try it, though.

WOW, WHAT A DIFFERENCE.

Third Balance Problem:
With Strafe-lock gone, Strafe is now even more powerful than it was in classic D2! Nerf Multishot all you want and bowazons will remain overpowered. One can max Strafe for the damage boost free of worries. It also hits much harder and usually for more times per use, and thus leeches a lot more. Here in Nightmare with a very middling 98 damage bow and 12% mana steal, Strafe did better than break-even leechback against as few as two targets and sometimes even against one, while Multishot would still need at least three hits and thus around five targets, since I was running 60-70% to-hit in act 5 at this time.

Fourth Balance Problem:
Pierce. Simply put, Pierce is way too good in certain situations, very often seen in the underground areas of Act 5. In the underground areas, with monsters clustered around the Valkyrie, you can easily get three overlapping Immolation explosions and flames with one shot. If three explosions each hit the three monsters, that's NINE TIMES THE DAMAGE for Immolation. For a measly FOUR skill points in Pierce, you get NINE TIMES THE DAMAGE half the time against a group of monsters.

Multishot and Strafe also Pierce
Tested in the simplest way possible: enter the cow level, shoot, observe more blue cows than arrows fired. Having Multishot pierce means that you can easily get away with a low level in the skill (necessary to still achieve leechback in Hell difficulty) and still hit most of a screen. Strafe gets the same loopholey "three arrows each hit three monsters" effect as Immolation.

If Pierce only increased damage linearly, it's be great and nicely balanced, basically a "Bow Mastery" for amazons. That happens and is fine with Multishot. But Pierce gets to apply quadratic scaling to Strafe, Immolation, and Freezing Arrows, and there it's out of line. Also to Lightning Fury, which IMO really should be fixed to deliver usable damage on its own and not require a silly multiplier from Pierce to get anywhere.

Balance Problem #5: The Ancients Quest

Not every imbalance is in the bowazon's favor. In particular, the Ancients quest is a HUGE BRICK WALL.

No matter what I did, she didn't last more than fifteen seconds before somebody Leaps at her and smack, one hit splatter. I refused to party up to do it, as it is something that a single-player bowazon MUST do, and so something MUST be fixed in the game if she can't. 510 life should be plenty enough for a bowazon by this point; I certainly haven't been playing "dexazon". She is level 59, and I can't see any improvement additional levels would bring besides marginal increases in damage or HP and to-hit from the level differential.

In Normal difficulty, typically two Ancients would stay on to the Valkyrie taking Immolation damage while the third got in some hits on me. That worked in Normal. But in Nightmare, Valkyrie doesn't last ten seconds, and whoever is hitting me doesn't need more than two or three hits to do the job. A bowazon has ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to deal with 300+ points of PHYSICAL damage LEAPING past the Valkyrie. Dodge/Evade cannot be boosted high enough to do the job for the entire length of the fight.

I tried all the classic bow tactics. Run-and-gun Guided as if PvP dueling is the only thing that even sort of worked, but the throwing barbarian was still able to hit and stun, and once stunned, I'm dead meat for the other two.

In the end, what succeeded was the the classic tactic of dropping one point into Jab. I bought a 9-89 damage one-hand spear, newly available in the expansion, and a fairly ordinary tower shield to go with it. I had the Dex-based shield blocking formula working in my FAVOR, giving 68% block on a shield of only 49% base. It still took half a belt of rejuves and lots of Valk juggling to distract the Whirlwinder as much as possible. I also needed an easy roll on their boss abilities: at least two and perhaps all three (not sure) were Spectral Hit. I was also helped slightly by the fact that someone else entered the game while I was halfway through the fight, so I got stronger Valks from that point on, though that wouldn't have made the win-or-lose difference.

This quest does seriously need to be rethought. Some characters, especially variant builds, just CANNOT do it solo. Many offline bowazon players would not think of the one-point-in-Jab route, as it's so against the grain of bowazons. Every other quest in the game, every act boss, can be done by "dying them to death" repeatedly if needed. But not the Ancients, which absolutely MUST be done ALL the way in a SINGLE trip in single player.

Somewhere along the way (after the Ancients), picked up this nice little goodie:

restoring some significant power to the passive skills, and giving a boost to mana that proved fairly helpful, too. I was also taking shots at gambling and crafting rings and belts, hoping for some good resists; did get one of each with 28% lightning resistance.

Baal
I was expecting Baal to be pretty difficult, after the Ancients. He turned out not to be, in fact. The Appendages are actually a godsend for a bowazon, as Strafe neatly takes care of them while providing a full leechback. It was only when Baal started firing elemental attacks machine-gun-style that I took a couple deaths.

I revisited Baal several levels later (level 65), with much better resists and Valkyrie pumped up to 7. Did it easily without a death this time. For half his hitpoints in a two player game (so equivalent to a solo kill each before and after), I kept him in place with Valkyries while Guided Arrowing him from around a corner:

Even once he got loose from that cheese by teleporting, nearly all max resists and making sure to stay far enough away to not get caught by the orange magic missile made it very doable without a death.

On to Hell
To start Hell Difficulty, I jumped into a public game which quickly went to 8 players and stayed there. Perfect. Everyone else was in a higher act but the Malus and Andariel quests were available, so I bummed the waypoints from somebody (thanks) and got to work.

The going was in fact slow, racking up experience at roughly one-third the rate that I was in solo-8 Nightmare act 5. Lots of Fire Immunes made Immolation less useful. (Question: Why do monsters make ouchy noises when being hit by stuff they're immune to? That got me confused several times when using Immolation here...)

Resistances were of course abysmal with the needlessly extravagant -100% penalty, so I found a socketed armor and piled some stuff into it:

Didn't have any Ort runes for lightning resistance, so on a whim I stuck in that jewel instead.

Still, though, solo-8 Hell difficulty was perfectly doable for a bowazon. Care had to be taken to make sure Strafe and Multishot were hitting enough targets to leechback (about seven targets for Multishot, four for Strafe, skeletons didn't count). I killed the Physical Immune Smith in solo-8 with only about 40 Immolations, using only as many potions as he dropped upon death (a large mana and two full rejuves.) My mana is actually up to 228 thanks to equipment, good for ten or more Immolations per refill.

Any Physical and Fire immune boss was killable with the poison/cold/lightning charms and jewel that I had totaling to around 150 damage. Not worth the time, though.

By the time I reached Andariel, the game had emptied out to me being the only player. I killed Andariel without her killing me, but I actually did suffer a death -- to "fire"! Andie's poison has been hopped up enough that it actually does pose a threat when you've got -58% resistance, and the fire got me while I had one hit point and was trying to portal to town.

Radament was also physical immune and went down the same way as the Smith.

I partied up to beat Duriel (basically skipping Act 2 and the hordes of unleechable skeletons), but then soloed the Durance and Mephisto in a three-player game without a death. So I currently am in Act 4 Hell, able to solo-3 Hell difficulty fine and solo-8 somewhat slowly but pretty much without difficulty. Not sure how I'll solo Diablo. Jav/shield tanking did work against him in a test run in Nightmare; it should in Hell because it's easier to stay in the "LBOD ground zero" loophole.

And this is all with a very ordinary 98 damage Gothic Bow! All you need to counteract the leech and physical resist nerfs as a bowazon is bunches of leech - I'm at 12% from one ring, the perfect skulled bow, and a circlet with 3%. With still-seriously-overpowered Valkyrie (now with 2500 life in Hell difficulty), you don't take damage; all you have to do is maintain mana leechback and recast Valk when needed. Double the bow damage, easily reachable by a craft or imbue of an elite weapon, and Hell is the same cakewalk Nightmare was for me.

Oh, and you also need a poison charm. I can't overcome monster regeneration in even 3 player Hell difficulty without one.

Updates will come as I move farther through Hell difficulty.

Please share thoughts with me at erik @ dos486.com and at this thread.

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