Freezing Arrow Zon

[norvi11erogers]

Hey, I've never made a magezon, and looking at the german damage calculator, it seems like FA can get pretty decent damage (around 1000) with just 40 skill points (20+20 synergy) investment. I've read the guide in the amazon forum and have looked through a forum at a site focused on zons which I know better than to link to and I have a couple ideas. Nonetheless, I haven't decided on gear, skills, etc, quite yet.

So I think I'd go pure magezon, which would require:

Skills:
Freezing Arrow 20
Cold Arrow 20 (or 10+)
Pierce 12+
Valk 8 (for lance - this is how it works right?)
D/E/A couple each
Splody Arrow 20
Fire arrow 10+

Could do immolation instead of exploding arrow, but the timer scares me. That comes to about 90 skills, not counting prereqs, which would have this build be finished around 80. Could also do a physical attack instead, like strafe, but that would require a different set of items, stats, etc.

Stats:
Str enough for gear
dex enough for gear
vit lots
nrg enough

Wow a build that might use a point or two in energy.

Gear is where I'm most confused...
Helm: ??? Tarn? Nice rare with fhr, resists, howltusk?
Bow: several options: Rogue's for IAS; Wizendraw for cold dmg; Doomslinger for speed, pierce, skill; Rare with +skills, cold dmg, IAS; arctic+2 items for cold duration...
Armor: Twitch (for ias?), nice rare with fhr, resists
Gloves: Clegs for kb, slow? frosties for longer cold duration?
Belt: Resists, fhr
Boot: Resists, fhr
Ammy: Eye (hopefully the eye I have has a long cold duration)
Rings: Resists, life

I probably won't be getting sojs for this build, which leads me to believe that frosties might be a good choice for gloves, especially considering the added cold duration. Right now, I'm leaning towards rogue's bow with frosties, and then either tarn or howltusk or a snazzy rare. CBF is probably pretty important, so I might use deaths. Q regarding the full arctic set: Do the 3 second duration on the bow and the 4 second duration for the full set add to give 7 sec duration? Or is it just a total of a 4 second duration?

Another question, is pierce from an item additive with pierce from the skill? ie, if i get 50% pierce from the skill and 50 from gear, is that 100% pierce, or is it only 75% pierce, like with critical/deadly strike?

[norvi11erogers]

Another question, is pierce from an item additive with pierce from the skill? ie, if i get 50% pierce from the skill and 50 from gear, is that 100% pierce, or is it only 75% pierce, like with critical/deadly strike?

I've found the answer to this question in a FAQ somewhere. For those who are interested, pierce is additive. I may test my other specific question later:


Q regarding the full arctic set: Do the 3 second duration on the bow and the 4 second duration for the full set add to give 7 sec duration? Or is it just a total of a 4 second duration?

But it would be nice if someone knew the answer. And of course, if anyone could answer my build questions, that would be awesome.

[bojddo]

i can try and help. for a bow, wizendraw might be pretty useful in adding lots of cold damage. you would probably want to use a fast bow because you won't be leeching much probably so physical damage isn't that big of a tradeoff. pierce is awesome for crowds and i dont think ar is that big of an issue either because FA doesn't miss? not too sure. i dont think you need to stack up on cold duration, you should be okay fully synergized. maybe some mana after kill or mana leech to get some back. death wrap for cannot be frozen is ideal for a belt, cold zon = dead zon.

some good equipment ideas:
irathas set is pretty sweet
howltusks for knockback

hope that helps.
and there are no +pierce items except on bows in classic

[norvi11erogers]

Yeah the AR I also had a question about, but I'm pretty that it doesn't matter for the area of effect skills. Does KB work with frozen enemies? It wouldn't really appear to be that desirable a mod for this setup, as it would seem to require actually hitting a monster with an arrow.

Re cold duration, a lvl 21 Frozen Arrow gives just 2.1 seconds cold duration with only the prereq point in Ice Arrow. Adding 19 more points to this synergy increases this only by 1.9 seconds. This is less than pretty much any item, including frosties which add 2 seconds. Thus, with one item, one can save 19 skill points. Also, keeping in mind the cold duration for hell is 1/4 across the board, and keeping in mind that cold has its effective length reduced by many if not most monsters, one can easily see the desire to have cold damage items.

And yeah, the problems with wizendraw are that 1) I don't have it, 2) no one has it, 3) it's base 10 speed. If anyone on USWest ladder has one, I'll be more than willing to trade for it. Until I mf it or trade for it, I might just start with Rogues bow, the arctic bow, or even a magic/rare with cold duration, skills, and/or ias.

[norvi11erogers]

Originally posted in Warlock's thread: http://forums.diabloii.net/showthread.php?p=4716608#post4716608 but I decided not to hijack it. Here's an update:

Skills:
20 FA
20 CA
8 (with etlich) Valk
1 in D/E/A
9 (with etlich) Pierce

Stats:
25 str
35? 40 dex
140 vit
80ish nrg
and something like 100 left over. They will probably be split between vit and energy, with a little in str.

Equipment:
Wizendraw (35%)
Eye of etlich (With a high duration)
Twitch
Death's gloves
Death's sash
Frw Resist boots
Resist rings with mana
Face of Horror

I forget what exactly my resists are, but they're all over zero (though i think cold is at 1%). My life and mana are around 600 and around 300 respectively.

As you mentioned, Face is not exactly the best choice. I was using it for leveling for the +str and simply don't have a better choice at the moment.

A few notes:

1) Pierce is key. With pierce, you can hit several monsters, doing up to 5x damage to a group. Without it, you are just a zon using glacial spike.

1b) Arrange yourself to maximize the piercing.

2) CB does not transfer to the explosion. If my interpretation of various posts in the amazon forum and the forums at a well respected website dedicated and named after amazons is correct, while CB used to transfer to the explosion radius, it no longer does post 1.10. I haven't tested, but I'm pretty sure you don't want to use goblin toe.

3) Mana is an issue, and points in energy are not, in my brief experience, wasted. Even with 300 mana, I'm using quite a few potions, which can be annoying when wearing a sash. I am considering switching to frosties for a mana boost of 100-150 as well as lowering my rate of fire. A soj for at least one ring might be a good choice if you can afford it.

4) For the purposes of an effective FA, you will want items with cold duration. Eye of etlich can get up to 10 seconds in normal, but the effect is hidden, which can make trading difficult. A +skills amulet with resist and cold damage might also be an option. Frosties have a 2 second duration. Remember that there are duration penalties for nightmare and hell.

5) Wizendraw is pretty freakin cool. Pretty sure that cold resist affects freeze duration, so the -resists has the effect of increasing duration. Other weapons options would include:

+zon skills with IAS, cold damage, fast base speed (might be able to make with cube recipe)
Doomslinger

Doomslinger might be a good choice for the cold/fire variant, as it's pretty skill heavy already, and the 35% pierce and +1 skills from doomslinger could save a few points.

Paths to take in this build:
I. Low damage, high mana (mageazon):
1) FA + Passives
This is closest to what I have chosen, though I haven't invested entirely in the passives. I'm very happy with this choice so far, although being unable to complete the den of evil in hell on my own is pretty annoying. It doesn't take long to get used to decoy scouting, and with my lackluster life and resists, I'm sure decoy has saved my life countless times. I might consider beefing the crap out of my valk (sort of similar to your tankyre i suppose) and hoping she has an OUNCE of killing power. Unlikely, I know, but a man can hope.

2) FA+Fire
Now, I have no experience here, but it seems to me that exploding arrow might be better than immolation. If you go to a skill calculator (the german site has a good one), you'll notice that splody arrow with 20 in synergies does around 500, about half the damage of immolation with 20 in synergies. However, you can also fire it more than twice as fast.

I personally am not that excited about this direction. Seems without passives, the survivability would be lower, but also, there's just something incredibly lame about spending 40 points to do 500 damage using exploding arrow when a level 15 user of raven claw can do more than double that with enchant. I know i know, most the time, you're not actually enchanted, blah blah. But seriously, I use raven claw + enchant all the time, and it just seems disappointing to me.

An argument against this is that with pierce, one can expect to do more damage...


I'm very happy so far with the build. Safe and kills, at least through act 2 (minus the cold immunes ... eww). That's all for now.

[SwampBox]

i have a lvl 91 freezing arrow zon and it does 1.3k

[norvi11erogers]

i have a lvl 91 freezing arrow zon and it does 1.3k

Yes, but are you using wizendraw? All other things equal (which admittedly they might not be), Wizendraw + 1.1k > 1.3k w/o wizendraw. What breakpoint are you reaching etc?