Aaagh! Vast hordes of em

[kandrathe]

And, I'm saying even for realm play (because {crossed finger} duping is dead) finding the right high level gear will be tough. I think beyond being able to control difficulty (/players 1-8), another upside for SP is that they are enabling the best cube formula's for Ladder and SP. But... I wonder how D2C plays now. :unsure:

[Ignatz]

Oh, I meant Anya-by-the-red-portal Anya because she shows about three times as many claws as Larzuk. :)

[Occhidiangela]

In Hell.

Her to hit, even with an ITD, for MS will boil down to 63/90 in Act V.

So, cut your damage amount by about a third for starters. (Order of magnitude wise, you are probably still in like flint, let's not fool ourselves, eh?)

Then look at shot dispersion. Even at 8/2, not every pierce hits something behind it, and not every arrow can hit unless you take some pains to "group monsters" around your tank. The problem there is the Tank surviving while you set it up. Absent a certain geometry, the 24 hits per second on 10 monsters is plausible, but the added pierce is against a theoretical target that is, as often as not, simply not there to hit. In other cases, such as the Foothills, there is stuff to soak up the misses and the piercers.

That said, with 1000 points of damage on GSE, and 10 monsters set up "just right" to get hit by your spread of arrows, the damage per second is certainly nothing to sniff at. :)

3X10X1000X(63/90) = 21000 per second. That is not shabby, and IMO a bit more realistic as an illustration. It still ignores the wasted arrows as one monster after another dies. However, there will be, at present, any number of monsters "beyond visual range" who get hit due to the range of MS.

Toss in a MIght merc, and we are up to around 63000 per second. :) Not shabby.

All else is a bonus, and sure makes the leech problem seem trivial.

[kandrathe]

Sorry, yes. I tend to shop Larzuk because I'm mostly looking for elite crafting stuff.

[Ignatz]

I never said I think it should. In fact, there's very little harm in giving the Zon a way to hold back crowds, such as knockback. I don't think it should be nerfed or interferred with at all...what should be nerfed (IMHO) are her big damage, hit-many-guys-at-once attacks. I'm happy as pie that the Assassin has Mind Blast to hold her enemies at bay. It's a great skill, but since it doesn't kill, it's not broken. Same with knockback on bows, except that that huge-damage-per-second stuff gets in the way. :)

MS, on the other hand, dishes out too much damage even still, and applies knockback and other ailments in as efficient a way as I can think of.

I haven't tried her in 1.10 yet, though, since I don't have the computer to run it. Regardless, I don't see how a glass cannon build would not work, since a good veteran Zon knows enough than to get hit. :) Then again, I haven't seen the monster speed increases that I've heard about, in action.

Afterthought:
Tell you what: You know what I think would be cool? Make some enemies "Status Ailment Immune", just like the other immunes. So, you're firing into a big mob, comforted by your lovely, shiny Cleglaws, when all of a sudden you're awoken from your dreamy mouse-button-holding by a bunch of monsters who walk straight through your rain of fire. I mean, walk right up to you! Not slowed, not chilled, not knocked backwards. Would that keep you on your toes, or what? (And of course, this is in addition to champs, uniques, etc)

[Ignatz]

Caution! Sweeping statements follow:

What it seems to come down to is that, regardless of what hits the bow skill tree is taking in 1.10, and regardless what the enemies are doing, you've got a great bottom line:

Bows have, in general, higher damage than they should and/or fire faster than they should, given the risk tradeoff.

That said, once you give the Zon a bunch of "hit lots of monsters" skills, you've opened the can, and the best you can do is hope that worms taste like chicken. At this point, the Zon pours on damage like a cement mixer, and no other character is likely to keep up by design.

I can live with that. The game is fun. 'Zons are horribly fun to play. It's just a little disappointing that every character can't be played in a similar way, if one so desires. I love the pally, but if I'm in the mood for a character who's absolutely, 100% GOT to be the center of attention at every party, then the pally is not my man. Same goes for half the other characters, and ALL of them if your benchmark is the Amazon.

PS: Amazons are a sore subject for me, since I simply love the character, yet know that she is not balanced with the other characters; in some cases it's off by an order of magnitude. And I know it's silly, but I feel a little guilty sometimes when I play one, since the game all of a sudden is much too easy: "Hm, do I use the Magnums, which are fun and effective, or do I use the AK47, which is fun and REALLY REALLY effective?"

[Brista]

Her to hit, even with an ITD, for MS will boil down to 63/90 in Act V.

Small nit: mlvl is 85 tops for standard monsters. There are monsters of less than mlvl 85 even in Act 5 Hell

[Crystalion]

Second, the Zon, at least in 1.09 (and most likely 1.10) has the highest damage output of any character. This isn't my opinion, it's pretty much fact. When you can hit up to two dozen monsters at once, three times a second, you're the damage king (queen).

Damage output per second is pointless. It is not the same as Rate of Kill [RoK] which is, of course, not the same as experience or loot per second either.

Because monsters can have such high HPs and regenerate very rapidly, MS, which only achieves high rates of D/sec. because there are many monsters, might not even be killing *anything* in a given situation, where some pathetic character using some pathetic skill [by comparision to your total D/sec. that is] is making progress.

This is why Zeal/Fury, vs. weak monsters, is a delight killing multiple adjacent monsters per unit of time, and still a delight vs. tough monsters, when isolating them to get all the Fury hits on one mob.

I guess my point would be the "RoK" king/queen is a worthwhile title whereas D/sec. isn't. I rather doubt that MS wins Bowazons that title under general circumstances, despite its excellent crowd control potential.

But, to counter your claim I don't need to dwell on such details. All I need to do is consider the case where you are indeed succeeding, and monsters are dying. If it takes you more than a couple MS for things to drop dead [as opposed to, say, one MS and bang! everything dies] then the very corpses you are so helpfully generating allow the CE Necro to vastly exceed your D/sec. number.

[I didn't see the word "solo" in your post, though you may have felt that you implied it]

[Ignatz]

Oop, yeah I did mean solo. But, regardless, the argument still holds given the environment in which the skill must / can be used. That's just the problem with CE. It CAN reach unbelievable damage / second levels, but it requires a resource of uncontrollable quantity to do so: corpses. This is basically the opposite hinderance that static field suffers: the former is most effective when monsters are already dead, while the latter is most effective when they are alive and at full health.

CE itself is a fantastic skill, but it's damage / second rate is killed off by the time spent garnering those first few corpses (the critical mass number of corpses) necessary to finish everything else off with CE. You must factor in that time, since it is a part of the whole "killing things with CE" process. And once you do that, it's almost certainly less damage / second than the Zon's unending volleys of MS. (FA is still a faster killer if the mobs are tight, though.) I'll add too that CE is twice as likely to get at least half its damage through, since it's half fire and half physical, but it's also resisted twice as often to do half damage by way of immunities, and also subject to the 1.09 global 50% phys resists. Which means a fire immune monster in hell is only taking 1/4 of the normal CE damage, on top of the difficulty penalty.

I don't quite see how you're supporting the whole "rate of kill" being more important than "damage per second" as a qualifier of how effective a character is. Clearly rate of kill is the ultimate proof, but that's not quantifiable in the same way that damage per second is quantifiable. The only confounding factor to damage / sec being proportional to the kill rate is regeneration rate. So, you take all the monsters' regeneration rates, calculate how much life they're all regenerating, total, in a second, subtract that from the damage output of the character, and you've pretty much accounted for the largest discrepency between the two.

[BEEFMOTRTON]

Because monsters can have such high HPs and regenerate very rapidly, MS, which only achieves high rates of D/sec.

All it takes is a single poison damage charm to stop monster regeneration for the majority of monsters, am I right?

[Dagni]

A plague javelinghtning fury lvl 60 zon can easily reach 2000 dmg/sec per monster in the area. With a lowly +7 to jav skills, plj does like 1100 dmg/sec for 12 seconds. It is a simple matter to poison everyone, then spam 2-3 LFs per second.

Rate of Kill can be even better. If the monsters are weak enough, you can one-hit poison them to death, and just run past and hit the next group.

The way I've heard it, LF by itself can do insane damage against tight crowds with 100% pierce.

Even untwinked, one could probably easily get +12 jav skills. The gloves can be shopped for (+3), any old zon only jav can get +3, and by clvl 80+, the char probably has a solid chance of gambling the ammy and circlet.

Theoretically, you could get +24 or more jav skills, and have triple damage from the Bramble runeword. So I expect this build could challenge the better equipped MS zons as well.

I won't run the numbers right now, but I know slvl 44 plague javelin is amazing dmg/sec.

Edit: slvl 44 plague jav ~ 3400 dmg/sec (for 20 seconds).

- Dagni

[Thecla]

My clvl 31 1.10 bowazon just finished normal (after going through the game on players 1), and I'm a little bemused with the patch at this point. I did, in fact, find a cleglaw's pincers and while I agree that knockback is really useful it's not a panacea for untwinked bowazons. I'm using a rare long war bow dropped by Diablo (around 4-31 da or something like that) which is the best I've seen, and it's damage rate is pretty low relative to the hps of the monsters.

It's worst against minion/champion packs who really have to be strung out. I went through close to a couple of <i>quivers</i> of arrows for each <i>one</i> of Lister's mob. They were absolutely zero threat, however, because just a lvl 2 valk (with lvl 2 decoy) is a beast who can tank 2 (or even 3) of the minions without any problems with covering knockback fire from me -- her life regeneration seems to be even faster than the monsters (and I have poison damage to stop theirs). It shouldn't be necessary (or possible) to tape down one's mouse while playing this game. Unless super-high damage weapons are fairly readily obtainable, I'm not sure where this is going, but this seems like it's precisely the wrong direction. I switched to a spear/shield set-up for Baal (as I did for Duriel and Diablo), and he didn't pose much threat either (though I suppose two high damage attacks in rapid succession could have killed me)---but I did burn through close to 30K in healing/mana potions while wearing him down. It looks much less promising on nm/hell difficulties (where Baal presumably does serious damage).

[AssA]

On that, Ghostie, we'll have to agree to disagree.&nbsp; Since there isn't a singleplayer setting, it should be made so that a single-player character can complete Hell.&nbsp; He may have to claw, scratch, and <gasp> use strategy and tactics, but he should get there.

And he will get there. My HC druid managed a hell Baal run with a friggin Aldurs Rhythm as weapon. It took a lot of retreating, parking and thinning out crowds, but he managed.

Edit: heh, there's another page. Excuse me if this sounds silly, part of me is still asleep :)

[Crystalion]

Oop, yeah I did mean solo. But [snip]

You raise so many good points I'm going to slice and dice my observations in reply...

> but it requires a resource of uncontrollable quantity to do so: corpses.

Ironic, isn't it, that you are proposing that the Bowazon is *precisely* such a generator. Ergo, team up the awesome zon and potentially awesome CE Necro and surprise, surprise, together they kill more than twice as fast as they would individually. By time you factor in play speed due to confidence in the Necro's superior crowd control and the fact that the pre-CE Amp damage will be cast well before, in order to also help the the zon [lower resist instead in special cases] the net efficiency could be quite high.

> You must factor in that time, since it is a part of the whole "killing things with CE" process.

Solo, assuredly. This would be why the "smart" xp harvesting necro would look for opportunities like the cow level to do only a few starter corpses once, for the whole level.

> CE is twice as likely to get at least half its damage through, since it's half fire and half physical, but it's also resisted twice as often to do half damage by way of immunities, and also subject to the 1.09 global 50% phys resists.

I'm more interested in the v1.10 state of affairs, in which global resists are gone but mob HPs are up [so your old damage output didn't scale, but CE got better and does] and in which Necro's can actually remove phys or elemental immunity from some mobs.

> The only confounding factor to damage / sec being proportional to the kill rate is regeneration rate.

This is an error in logic and of omission. You forget that a necro's kill rate is not proportional to a monster's total HPs [any more than Static Field was before it was capped]. In the same way, if a Necro's number and duration of revives were not capped there would also not be a proportion to the "damage/sec" of revive [a non-sensical idea in any event] as the potential growth in the Necro's army would eventually come to dominate the entire D2 universe. If you think I'm being silly, then you really ought to try a Necro in one of the HOMM games and see what happens when you emerge from every battle with half your defeated enemy raised as skeletons for you.

> So, you take all the monsters' regeneration rates, calculate ...

Yes, when one doesn't have an apples and oranges comparision problem, this works. As another poster pointed out, this calc is even simplier if you have prevent monster heal, or, vs. non-immunes, poison. Nonetheless, often in the game the mobs will not be homogenous in terms of their HPs or resists. In the innocuous case you may "quickly" kill the easy mobs and be left with the "hard" ones, which, simply by virture of there being *less* of them, will greatly reduce your damage/sec. rate [not to mention the RoK ;) ]. In a less pleasent case, a nasty boss or overlarge champions will "ignore" your probablistic crowd control method and breathe down your neck. Naturally this will not be a common occurance unless v1.10 does a much better job at mixing up monsters, density and AI than I expect. But certainly it means you should refer to "peak theoretical" or "under normal conditions" when you cite your damage/sec. calculations.

> Clearly rate of kill is the ultimate proof, but that's not quantifiable in the same way that damage per second is quantifiable.

On the contrary, damage/sec is much much harder to make a "real" number. Rate of Kill can be tracked quite easily--for example by turning on a voice recorder [or VCR on your session for later call out], noting the time, calling out kills, noting the time, doing the math. This would be an actual number. Bona Fide. D1 was nice enough to tell you how many of a particular mob you'd killed. Damage/sec. is complicated by far more factors (such as overkill--you weren't planning on counting that any more than you'd count misses, were you?).

> accounted for the largest discrepency between the two.

I would guess, up through v1.09, players=1, that the largest discrepancy is likely to be monster acquision time. As v1.10 seems to have made "progress" in making the game harder largely by increased mob HPs you may be right [certainly calculation RoK for, say, Izual, pretty much correlates with your damage output into his massive HPs].

Finally I suppose one should always check the price of charges on items that grant CE, as any class capable of killing a few mobs could potentially obliterate a mass of enemies efficiently near the same spot with a few casts. This begs the question, if charges are expensive, whether the new Rune repair recipe repairs them.

[pjnow]

Agreed, Lister and his crew were no threat in Normal. I was doing players 5 in Normal when I went down to get Baal.

After I killed the rest o his pack ( that took a while ), Lister happily head butted my Valk with no effect for close to half an hour while I chipped away very slowly at his life bar - by this time I had found precisely 1 poison charm ( this char is either having really bad luck with charms or the drop rate has been changed ) 6 poison over 3 seconds grand charm, feh. I had an emerald socketed bow on the switch to help stop Listers regen but it still took forever to kill him.

[Ignatz]

Yeah, great point. I gave the bowazon as the example, but I was thinking of the javazon, too. Isn't it great how the Zon gets to have two whole, broken builds? Heck, Hybridazons are (though, IMO a bit redundant) incredibly vicious killing machines.

In fact, this is the most powerful, flexible go-anywhere character that I can think of in 1.09:


20 GA
20 LF
1 or 20 FA
10-15 MS
10 Pierce
5-10 Crit Strike
(plus razortail, of course)

That's big phys AND lightning damage, GA for bosses and stragglers, FA for crowd control (if not a Nefed up bow and MS :P ) , LF for tight crowds, MS for leech, applying ailments, etc, and 100% pierce for maximum FA, LF, and GA abuse.

This is, what, three power-builds all rolled into one character? AND she has nice hooters? Where's the justice in that?

[Occhidiangela]

Most of the folks at Blizz North are guys. The Amazon's supremacy fits.

[Ignatz]

Hey, good discussion, Crystalion. Now for my turn! :D

> Bowazon and Necro team

Now THAT would be a big, bloody mess. Throw in the fact that they both have as many tanks between them as they'd ever need and you've got a near-perfect two-man team. Egad.

> 1.10 state of affairs

Yes, CE at 50/50 fire/physical does get more powerful without the 50% global physical resist. But the Zon and her cute little 100% physical arrows gets more powerful, too. The arrows do more damage proportionally than CE in terms of resistances, but of course the scaling of CE makes up for it because of the increased monster HPs. I think you'd have to make the call on which gets the bigger boost from monster changes by testing. Good point though.

> You forget that a necro's kill rate is not proportional to a monster's total HPs

Yeah, true, and another very good point. I was thinking more in terms of solo, single difficulty, but you're absolutely right.

>I'm being silly, then you really ought to try a Necro in one of the HOMM games

HOMM is a great series, and that's true in that game. In D2 I don't think it's possible for that to happen since after you get a dozen or two revives, you end up facing massive economies of scale, as further revives just trip over each other, slow down other would-be killers, and the fact that melee revives have a finite cap on how many can even get at an enemy. I haven't played a zoomancer in quite a while, but I don't imagine there's much functional difference in terms of kill rate between having 30 (mostly melee) summons and 300. Now FPS, that's a different matter. :blink:

>But certainly it means you should refer to "peak theoretical" or "under normal conditions" when you cite your damage/sec. calculations.

True, but you can't talk about "sub peak theoretical" and "under weird conditions" as easily. I just assumed that everyone would assume that that's what I'm talking about. At least, I assume they'd assume what I assumed. :P

>On the contrary, damage/sec is much much harder to make a "real" number.

Well, sure, it's impossible. But dmg / second I can calculate in a couple minutes at work. Plus, it's easy repeatable and precise, unlike different people doing different "real world" kill rate checks. That, and using a voice recorder and calling out kills will give my roommates material to work with for the rest of my days. Besides, do YOU want to go into the cow level and call out to a voice recorder every time you make a beef pizza?

>such as overkill

Yes, another good point. But if you can come up with a good way to account for that, then you're a better man than I.

>This begs the question, if charges are expensive, whether the new Rune repair recipe repairs them

The AS says that it does indeed repair charges. Heck, I'll say it: I LOVE the new
Ort repair recipe. But I think they need the same recipe with, say, Hel or a mid-level rune to repair ethereal items. Now THAT would be cool.

[Archon_Wing]

Considering I found a goldstrike and similar exceptional bows mainly off hell pindle runs, I can assure you that even decent gear does not fall out of the sky, especialy when actualy playing through the game.

My experiences in classic hc didn't not make me feel the amazon was overpowered.

Also, if Blizzard can really stop duping, I expect it will be incredibly difficult to trade for decent items, because as you know as of 1.09, it's easy to trade because most of the items up for sale aren't even legit. Not to mention the general attitude of the trading crowd on b.net that makes trading a waste of time in the majority of cases.

[Thecla]

Considering I found a goldstrike and similar exceptional bows mainly off hell pindle runs, I can assure you that even decent gear does not fall out of the sky, especialy when actualy playing through the game.

My experiences in classic hc didn't not make me feel the amazon was overpowered.

Also, if Blizzard can really stop duping, I expect it will be incredibly difficult to trade for decent items, because as you know as of 1.09, it's easy to trade because most of the items up for sale aren't even legit. Not to mention the general attitude of the trading crowd on b.net that makes trading a waste of time in the majority of cases.

I absolutely agree with all of this: no doubt 'zons are very strong, verstile characters (as you would hope all mainstream characters would be) but they're not intrinsically overpowered. What broke them was the widespread availability of duped (or hacked) equipment (especially bows/xbows). In my experience, good equipment is not easy to come by on your own. In all my time playing LoD the best bows I've seen were one Goldstrike arch (off one of Brem's council members) which is what my main zon uses -- and yes it's a great end-game bow, but not overpowered IMHO -- and an Eaglehorn, which I've never used, since my hc sorc found it (off hell/meph) and I haven't made a hc 'zon since then. In fact, lvl for lvl, that hc fo/hydra sorc with rubbish for equipment was more powerful than any 'zon I've played.

Now, as far as I can see, 'zon skills haven't been changed too much in 1.10 (and a couple of bug-fixes are effectively nerfs - see below), so this may bring some of the other classes that were previously weaker than bowazons, say, closer to them in effectiveness. But with increased hitpoints etc, it doesn't look to me like 'zons will be mowing down mobs in 1.10 unless (or perhaps even if?) they really own what -- from my perpective -- looks like unobtainable uber-gear. Actually, based on what I've seen so far (which doesn't include hell) valk may be the essential crowd control skill for 'zons.

Two bug-fixes that do weaken bowzons are the ga/pierce bug-fix (and the definitive removal of extra strafe arrows for minions). This means bowazons have no high-damage attack for single targets (assuming, as I think is likely, that immo is still too weak), which was always a potential problem -- that, I guess, means they will have to rely on massively damaging weapons to kill act-end bosses etc. (I'm also talking from a solo-play perspective here), and we are back to the issue of what appears to be the overwhelming importance of itemz in 1.10. The other is the fire-arrow fix which removes their (bugged) attack against PIs (one that was very useful and one that I felt no qualms about using given the fact that my lvl 12 immo was absolutley rotten in comparision). This may well be replacable, though again there's a question of what an effective replacement for 1.10 PIs will be (maybe still a high level fire arrow, immo, freezing arrow, a javelin skill?)

The other major change I see is that the new valk is much tougher than the old one (and overpowered?) So far in nm/coldplains, a boss/6-minion mob of might-enhanced goat demosn was able to take down my lvl 2 valk, and a fast/extra strong lightning demon boss/minion mob killed her quite quickly. Apart from that, she seems almost indestructible, which seems too much.