Charged Strike on a Bowazon

[Mav451]

I'm in a quandry here. Even with WF/Fort/Might merc, it seems that I still take quite a while to kill Baal. At first I thought my 9/3 strafe was a good deal until I realized that Next Delay was nerfing that like none other (only 3 arrows hit, max, per strafe).

And b/c I don't have Faith, my 9.5K AR nets a paltry 77% (or less) chance-to-hit on him, so maybe that's really only 2 hits at that. I found in the end that my lvl1 GA (7 with skills) was doing the most damage. Blah. It still takes me a while to kill him and I'm wondering just how much stronger a slightly synergized CS (with LF) would be.

I have 33 free skill points (only skill I maxed was Penetrate)...so this is plausible. I know some may say to just max GA and accept that bowazons can't boss kill, but b/c I found a Guillaume's face, I now have a source for 35% CB (with CS anyway).

My lvl1 GA is doing 351-5185 (Might aura, Fort) @ 9frames (90IAS) => 2.77arrows a second or 7667 dmg/s.

It's alright, even without the critical strike factored in...but these are the #'s I got off d2skills.com for a lvl20 CS + lvl10LF for synergy:


lvl29 CS: (+6 skills overall, and +3 from T-strokes)
Lightning Damage: 2-1174
Releases 8 charged bolts

I guess with -10WSM (T-Strokes) and my 55IAS, I would get a 10frame normal attack (for Charged Strike). So...that means I get 2.5X Charge Strikes per second.

How do I quantify the damage? Would I assume all 8 bolts hit, with an avg LI dmg of 588? (8x588 + actual dmg of the hit, no idea) = 4704 LI dmg per CS. Then there's the 1-511 dmg on the T-stroke itself. That's another 256 LI dmg per CS. So that makes a total of ~5K LI dmg per CS + physical (no idea how this calculates).

Then with 2.5 Charged Strikes per second:
2.5 x 5K LI/CS x ?physical/CS = 12,500 LI dmg + 2.5Physical per second.

So theoretically, this looks to be a good deal. Anyone wanna chime in? Are my calculations off? Am I crazy? Haha.

[crawlingdeadman]

i think it's useful, you may want to consider dedicating some of your gear to +skills and go full on hybrid. my favorite zon (http://forums.diabloii.net/showthread.php?p=5304673#post5304673) is a hybrid and one of the things i wanted to do was use cs as a boss killer.

[spOOkzz]

My Hybrid Zon works very well on bosses with her javs and lidless on switch.

No problem taking Diablo or Baal down quickly. Having the CS on switch pays off really well.


S.

[Samohtnnam]

I'm not understanding the difference between Charged Strike and Lightning Fury. CS connects lightning damage with the physical damage of your javs, while LF delivers lightning damage with a thrown jav right (bot CS and LF spreads bolts of lightning)? If these two skills are pretty similiar, shouldn't LF be better because thrown javs do more damage than using CS with the jav to melee hit?

[crawlingdeadman]

fury and cs may have the same description or nearly so but they are totally different. fury "bolts" are lengths of lightning about the size of a javelin. charged strike "bolts" are exactly the same as charged bolt on a sorc. the way they're really different are where they split off. cs is a melee ranged skill wherein when you hit a monster all the "charged bolts" eminate from the end of your non-thrown javelin. fury splits off from point of contact when thrown. if you've ever used them, you'd know exactly what i'm trying to say, but it's kind of hard to explaine in text form. try looking at the pictures on arreat summit under each skill's description, found here (http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/skills/amazon-javelin.shtml). they are pretty poor picture examples of how each skill works. i'll try and make a couple myself tonight.

the physical portion of each skill should not influence you as to which you should use. for example:
"fury and cs do about the same light damage, but the physical throwing portion is more than the melee physical portion so i'm going to use fury more" <--- dont do this
when you should use one over the other is entirely situational.

[Samohtnnam]

Thanks CDM. I have not tried CS personally yet. I love LF. I have to invest 6 points just to try CS, and I'm a bowazon hybrid using Thundergod's belt to get LF and LS. I have heavily invested in the Valk and Decoy (10) for syn + all the dodges.

When I see a topic about a skill I've never thought to try I get excited. Especially a possible skill that can help take down bosses faster (GA just doesn't cut it).

[Mav451]

^^ Heh, it's great to see I'm not alone. However, it's probably the 33 unused skill points that's been nagging at me for the past month, more than anything else. I'm thinking I may just use those points anyway (only lvl 20 CS, lvl 8 LF unfortunately) just to see if it works. If it doesn't, then I'll remake.

Regarding those +3 LF from TGod's - would those synergize with CS? Many guides mention that only hard points count towards a synergy, so I wonder how it works if it's from an item.

[crawlingdeadman]

same thing; only hard points synergize. exceptions are the non synergies of masteries (lightning, cold, summon, weapon, etc etc). getting LF from tgods is a bad idea, use razortail for the great pierce effect.