01-25-2006, 10:10 PM
Heiho,
the AR issue is a difficult thing, as I've learnt here.
Let's try a different approach.
With Penetrate, your AR directly gets a decent boost. This is necessary to hit with the actual arrow. The splash of Freezing Arrow is not AR dependent, but since 1.10 the Pierce function is. You will gain essentially more damage with a good Piercing Chance and wise tactical positional play aka herding, so long as your Chance to Hit roll allows the actual arrow to hit.
Note that a successful piercing attack can dependent on missile range hit up to five enemies. Thus in best case scenario you will trigger the splash five times instead of one time. If the enemies are tightly packed, each of them will take colddamage from more than one splash cloud.
I refer more to Penetrate than to Inner Sight, just because I basically think Inner Sight is more useful in melee because of its poor range. Also it has to be casted, whereas Pene works passively. You'll loose time while waiting for the enemies to come close enough, you'll loose again time while casting, and because the casting of an amazon is somewhat tricky with weapon dependency and Action Flags in casting animation you could even loose more time because your spell is interrupted and you have to cast again.
With ranged Amazons, I always prefer Pene. It's just enough time intensive to put your Decoy onto the right place. IS is a neat effect especially in Dungeons for illuminating enemies, but I wouldn't go for it because of AR issues.
As said above, melee Amazon is another kind of peanut.
Regarding Wand with LR charges:
same thing for casting problems as above, plus you have to switch.
Personally I don't like that crossclass business much. Along with Strafe and FA there should only an occasional boss resist both attacks. Also you can forget the idea to negate immunities with that, because most cold immune monsters have cold resistance too high to be negated. For dealing out more damage to everything other than cold immunes I'd prefer positional play :-)
Because it's not mentioned already, I'd go for the 400dex mark, even with Strafe. With crappy gear 350, but that's the least amount I'd allow myself.
the AR issue is a difficult thing, as I've learnt here.
Let's try a different approach.
With Penetrate, your AR directly gets a decent boost. This is necessary to hit with the actual arrow. The splash of Freezing Arrow is not AR dependent, but since 1.10 the Pierce function is. You will gain essentially more damage with a good Piercing Chance and wise tactical positional play aka herding, so long as your Chance to Hit roll allows the actual arrow to hit.
Note that a successful piercing attack can dependent on missile range hit up to five enemies. Thus in best case scenario you will trigger the splash five times instead of one time. If the enemies are tightly packed, each of them will take colddamage from more than one splash cloud.
I refer more to Penetrate than to Inner Sight, just because I basically think Inner Sight is more useful in melee because of its poor range. Also it has to be casted, whereas Pene works passively. You'll loose time while waiting for the enemies to come close enough, you'll loose again time while casting, and because the casting of an amazon is somewhat tricky with weapon dependency and Action Flags in casting animation you could even loose more time because your spell is interrupted and you have to cast again.
With ranged Amazons, I always prefer Pene. It's just enough time intensive to put your Decoy onto the right place. IS is a neat effect especially in Dungeons for illuminating enemies, but I wouldn't go for it because of AR issues.
As said above, melee Amazon is another kind of peanut.
Regarding Wand with LR charges:
same thing for casting problems as above, plus you have to switch.
Personally I don't like that crossclass business much. Along with Strafe and FA there should only an occasional boss resist both attacks. Also you can forget the idea to negate immunities with that, because most cold immune monsters have cold resistance too high to be negated. For dealing out more damage to everything other than cold immunes I'd prefer positional play :-)
Because it's not mentioned already, I'd go for the 400dex mark, even with Strafe. With crappy gear 350, but that's the least amount I'd allow myself.