The thing is in real world dueling scenarios, no character can maintain a 150% slow. Impale + gear slow + doom for zon in this case. When you trying to land impale, you won't have holy freeze since that requires doom. To land an impale, you'd have to eat 2 smites since impale is slow af itself. The smiter can always tele out to reset and wait 30 seconds for impale/gear slow to wear off. Zon fcr is shit so pally can always tele away and wait out the slow. Smiter just has to rinse and repeat, trade 2 smite to 1 impale twice and win the duel.

Even necro can't maintain a 150% slow, decrepify + doom + golem but the smiter has to actually hit the golem to be at 150% so it's not consistent either

At 100% slow, a 60ias shield will improve your smite speed from 12 to 9 which is quite significant

This post was edited by losm on Jan 23 2026 08:34am

pssah my trangs necro would bop people with a blackbogs sharp + decrepify + doom + golem and hit 200% slow

if it comes down to a pally and zon bouncing off each other every 30 seconds of l8zing then the zon should be preemptively hurling bolts for slow while he's at range, then pressing w and keeping doom out when the pally is approaching, then pressing w and switching to javas after the holy freeze has set in and she can land the impale and switch back to doom. I mean, its much simpler in this scenario for the zon to just keep her javas on, throw plague javelins and sit in the clouds. At some point the actual real world limitations are the amount of swapping you have to do with CTA because BO expires in these long ass not-real-duels, and how a pally will burn through a belt full of 16 antidotes faster than he can kill a zon because plague just keeps constantly reapplying any time he's trying to approach

assuming you are able to land bolts and holy freeze hit before the smiter is on top of you, that's just 100% slow, with the 60%ias shield, he'll be at 9fpa which will still be able to trade 2 hits vs zon's impale and that's the best case scenario where your holy freeze + bolt hits him. Pally is also able to put some pts into holy freeze to have a higher lvl freeze than doom's lvl 12 freeze so the zon will also be frozen which makes her unable to impale essentially. bm vs bm zon has no chance

You could try ice mb on switch instead of cta or doom

I never bothered with the slow bm in the matchup, its just the fact a pally can't smite/stomp/charge you without being repeatedly tagged by plague and every antidote he chugs is a full juv slot in belt. And it just reapplies nonstop and often just frames after his last antidote. All the zon has to do is kite run/walk vs smite/charge. And the pally has to make sure he's swapping aura/tele because trying to stomp with fanat off while slowed could lock him into a long smite animation, that's another
Now I always played damach or osama zon and almost never put on a doom swap so a 160/60 shield would be a big liability if I ever punish the approach / reset the gap and can pelt the pally with GA since he's going to be low block/dr, whereas a normal javazon or facing max dr/block you can just disregard bowside and stick pure java and have doom swap, sure.
But 35% slow from clegs/arachs isn't much and yes its trading into smites when you impale, so that's just 85% slow and if the pally isn't stacking ias its taking the 72 (normal), 97 (stacked) 121 (super stacked) down to a respective 13/10/8 fpa, compared to 6 fpa in all cases without slow and zon probably hitting 14 fpa without slow. And thats if you tag him with doom on approach.

or to quantify it more as a table
if he has 72/97/121% eias stacking (72% is the normal build breakpoint, anything above that is stack)
without slow they are all 6 FPA
with 35% slow from lightning bolt on clegs/arachs they become 8/7/6 FPA
with 85% slow from slow % + doom they become 13/10/8 FPA
with 135% slow from slow % + doom + impale they become 32/19/13 FPA and the pally is going to have to reset because he'll never land a hit when you just move away