Amazon Melee Lightning Skills

[Rageburst]

Although lightning fury is stronger and more suited for cow runs, I find that the other two melee lightning skills are more practical for bosses and small groups. These are Charged Strike and Lightning Strike.

Here are the important skills I'm plan to max: Charged Strike, Lightning Strike, Lightning Fury.

The best boss-killing skill is Charged Strike (combined with synergy from lightning strike and lightning fury). Since the bosses tend to be chunky, they soak up all the bolts. When a chunky monster takes in all the bolts, it loses life amazingly fast (Duriel and Izual are especially attractive targets). The skill ALWAYS HITS, so having steal mana, prevent monster heal, extra elemental damage is recommended.

Lightning Strike is a bit buggy at the moment. All monsters will be hit by it at least once every time the skill is use. However, there is a bug -- the chains of lightning cannot overlap, and hence cancel each other when they target the same monster. However, it is still superior to Charged Strike at killing mobs. Whenever the monsters are also far apart from each other, this reduces the cancelling out effect, which makes the monsters lose hp faster. To avoid the cancelling effect, I recommend sometimes switching back to charged strike to let the lightning strike finish its chaining while you deal more damage.

The best benefits these two skills have over lightning fury is that they have relatively low mana cost. You need only mana pots and maybe bit of mana leech. I'm using a stick with +5 mana to each kill, and it's sufficient with mana pots.

A high block shield is a must though. I would put in enough dex for +70% block. The rest goes into life and around 100 str (use +str mods if you want better weapons).

This amazon is not really dependent on her weapon. You need only a cheapo javelin (prevent heal mod is useful, and mana leech too) and enough IAS to get a fast attack fps (best is 4 fps). Sometimes having a stick that does no damage is even better than a Titan. That way, you can pull off more lightning strikes.

At the moment, I'm only using Charged Strike and Lightning Strike (14 pts in each). Already, I find that act 5 nightmare is a breeze (although I'm level 60). If I manage to max these skills along with lightning fury, I'm sure the synergies will make them viable in Hell difficulty.

[Hammerskjold]

Hey. I'm trying one out myself in 1.1s, though my plans are slightly different than yours. (I'm guessing you're talking about the beta.)

re: Charged strike.

>The skill ALWAYS HITS, so having steal mana, prevent monster heal, extra elemental damage is recommended.

The -always hits- part is what I'm really interested in. So far I only have an -act 5 clvl 33 test Charged Striker. And I'm hoping to find out soon what other ancillary effect can CStrike deliver. Eg: Crushing blow, monster flee, open wounds etc.

What I was curious about, will the physical damage part of Charge Strike still go through. Kind of hard to tell from the Lying Character screen at the moment, my question is if I have a high physical damage spear, will Charge Strike still do damage to a Lightning Immune monster.

If it does what I'm hoping it does, I might just pump STR up to 101 for a Yari. Leave DEX at a low number, and rely on the always hit quality of CStrike. And wear some +Mana items for mana regeneration instead of leech. The rest of my points will probably go to VIT.

[Chaerophon]

That sounds like a VERY versatile build - it should even make for a decent boss killer (one of the very few weaknesses of LF zons who absolutely refuse to lower themselves to bow usage :) ) I've only ever made a spearazon in Seven Lances, but I might have to give it a try for 1.10. Thanks for mentioning the synergy; what with all the 1.10 hubbub, I've yet to even consider the old zon!

[Rageburst]

You can always try equipping life/mana leech and see if every hit lights up red/blue.

Although I think that the physical damage always hits, monsters do have blocking, which makes it hard to tell. I assume that the missed hits are due to monsters running out of melee range or from blocking.

The next time I play, I will try to find a boss and compare my normal attack and my lightning skill attack.

In any case, if I'm doing fine in act 5 nightmare on players 3 so dexterity shouldn't be too much of an issue. Even if it is an issue, a mod with ignore monster defence would solve the problem.

However, I still like to invest in dexterity for the extra blocking. A point in penetrate is needed for piercing so i take it too... not to mention that the valk gets AR bonus from it.

.... which reminds me.... Get a valk!! She's more useful than my holy freeze merc who dies so easily. A level 17 valk gets an elite pike. Anything that is lightning immune, I leave to my valk to handle the job. That's why it's easy to solo as an amazon.

[Hammerskjold]

>You can always try equipping life/mana leech and see if every hit lights up red/blue.

Yep, I found a Savage Pike of the Bat. So far I see the blue swirl roughly about 2\3 of the times with ChStrike.

>Although I think that the physical damage always hits, monsters do have blocking, which makes it hard to tell. I assume that the missed hits are due to monsters running out of melee range or from blocking.

You hit it right on the head. All those factors you mentioned makes it hard to see for sure. I really hope it does have auto hit\near autohit for the physical part. The AR mlvl vs clvl issue is getting a bit stale for me. Sometimes I just want to go and electripoke stuff to death.

>However, I still like to invest in dexterity for the extra blocking. A point in penetrate is needed for piercing so i take it too... not to mention that the valk gets AR bonus from it.

I don't doubt that, however currently I'm playing a mostly 2 handed Spearie. I certainly wouldn't mind having a "Rhyme" shield on weapon switch, because Cannot Be Frozen and that resist is pretty nice to have.

>which reminds me.... Get a valk!! She's more useful than my holy freeze merc who dies so easily. A level 17 valk gets an elite pike. Anything that is lightning immune, I leave to my valk to handle the job. That's why it's easy to solo as an amazon.

Yeah, I found that out with my mageazon in 1.1. The first attack she maxed out was Valk. ;) Hopefully bliz keeps this as is (It IS a lvl 30 skill), and do something to Strafe other than beat it down with a heavier stick. But I'm rambling.

Keep us updated on your findings and adventures.

[Neon Elephant]

I'm playing a similar build at the moment (albeit in the first 1.10 patch) ... on players 8. Lately it seems as though everything has sufficient life that I'm using Charged Strike as a primary killer, with Lightning Strike on large packs and to pick off stragglers (slvl 10+1 and 15+1, respectively). I usually wind up switching to either Jab or Fend to leech back mana, and so I haven't needed potions too frequently except against Gloams and boss packs (I'm still in Act IV NM).

I'm not convinced that LS is up to the task of killing in 8-player games. It looks a lot flashier than CS, and theoretically should be doing more damage, but on monsters with any number of HP I find that the regen undoes a lot of my work before I can get to the other parts of the pack. It does work wonders on flayers, demon imps, and other small and annoying low-life monsters, so perhaps I'd have better results with a slightly larger mana pool (I've got about 150 ATM).

I've found that Decoy is sometimes useful for keeping half of a monster pack at a sufficient distance for LS to work properly, although given my attack rate I still wind up using LS, switching to Jab for a couple of attacks, and then repeating. My decoy is also only slvl 2; if I were to rebuild the character from scratch I might try putting more points there (she has survivability and duration issues).

I concur about the shield and the Valkyrie; I've found both to be very useful.

[Rageburst]

Whenever the pack is too large, the monster regeneration kinda counters LS. However, whenever there are many ranged monsters (somewhat spaced out), the LS will zig zag a lot doing massive damage.

The reason why you don't see much damage sometimes is that the LS has a cancelling out effect when 2+ chain lightning targets the same monster. That's why whenever you LS two monsters, both are hit only once. I hope blizzard corrects this.... although overlapping lightning chains might be too powerful.... Imagince having a 4 fps javelin attack and activating 5 or more 21-hit LS at the same time. That's insane damage!

[wicked_tribe]

Whenever the pack is too large, the monster regeneration kinda counters LS.

Perhaps it'd be worth the 3 skill points to get plague javalin to stop the regeneration? It seems a natural enough thing to do.. I have to admit, I haven't tried out CS or LS yet. -Been concentrating on my plague javalin amazon. I love how pois jav ramps up the damage without increasing the length, now that I have plague maxxed out. Loving this build..

WT

[dizzle]

The new AR bonuses on the bowskills and jav skills reflect the fact that the skill to/hit and the attack to/hit are separate things. IIRC, the elemental effects always trigger, but the physical portion is dependant on AR and blocking. There was a discussion on the RPGNET forums about it as it relates to FA. It's known that FA always triggers, so people were wondering why it gives an AR boost.

On using CS against LI bosses, it's probably a bad idea. You might want to head to the frontpage and read that article about how monsters with over 100% resistance reduce damage of other types in mixed-damage attacks.