Level 28-33, Edge Stag Bow, Edge Rune Bow, 200% ED Rune Bow, +2 skills helm + amulet, 10% mana leach. Any combination of points to Magic Arrow, Guided Arrow, Strafe, Freezing Arrow. It is almost unplayable in later Act I or very early Act II. The only skill that sort of does some damage, Exploding Arrow. Or maybe I need to get a 500% ED Bow at level 30… In other words, it looks like an unbalanced and unfinished “work in progress” rather than a 20 year old, mature and streamlined skill set.
Amazon is extremely unbalanced, and this goes back to the original game. It was like that 20 years ago. She is a pain to play with, which I love because it makes for more of a challenge, adds more variety, replayability, and most importantly, makes you think more when building her.
Some classes are deliberately designed to be harder to use than others. What makes her even harder is that, as you eluded to, she is almost unplayable until Act II. Even if you know what you are doing, her skills take a lot of time to develop, and good Stag bows don’t even show up till late Act II or III.
That’s what I love about the Sorceress. For two + acts you are running for your life, but when you hit her stride, usually around the Bazaar, you all of sudden turn into a bad ass, virtually untouchable for the rest of the game.
The game has always been clunky, unbalanced and badly designed. I mean, come on, on nightmare and hell you might find yourself just passing through hordes of powerful elites with 0 effort. Oneshotting bosses without even walking away to heal once. Then you find this one elite which is alone stronger than Diablo and Baal but somehow it has the appearance of a brain dead little deformed beast and it wanders aimlessly in a mudhole instead of taking over the whole world.
And by popular demand, the game that has been brought back is EXACTLY the same. All the problems, quirks and illogicalities of the first game are back along with the positive stuff.
In my opinion, “think more” is not going to cut it. Maybe if you follow a very explicit guide, but even then, gear that drops is random and the build is heavily dependent on gear.
What you need is the ability to experiment freely, at each level, with each new item of gear that you might want to try and with any combination of skills. But alas, we do not have that. Yet.
As a partial solution to the problem of stat/skill resets, one can experiment on Single Player with Hero edited characters and gear and one could equip anything at all, and have any number of stats and skills. You want to test a 400% ED Gothic Bow at level 30 and 20 points to GA? Takes 2 minutes to set it up. You’d never be able to do this in game since Gothic Bow has 213 stat points requirement and you have something like 150. But it shows you what could be possible, and it is all downhill from there.
One can also use D2Planner to see what happens very quickly, it is an excellent tool. You can select gear, skill and mob type, and it shows your DPS, eg Edge is good against Demons and Undead but falls flat with anything else, eg Izual.
So in all experiments the Bowazon just does not work. DPS is too low, and she is mana starved after 6-7 shots. At level 28-33 a Rune bow is very heavy on stats (176), but is the best she can just afford, offensively. And even if this is not good enough then the skillset is broken.
I remember Multishot clearing the Bloody Foothills from Eldrich/Shenk all the way to town. Maybe that was before 1.09 ?
And I do NOT want to play javazon. If I had wanted to play melee I’d stick to my Barbarian…
Yes I believe it is still running the same old code in the background, maybe recompiled but the sources must be the same.